Death Comes to Corpsewood Manor
Updated: Aug 28
The tragic tale of Dr. Charles Scudder and Joseph Odom began in Chicago in the 1960s. Dr. Scudder was a pharmacologist at Loyola University. Charles and Joseph met shortly after Charles' arrival in Chicago around 1960. When they met, he was living in a mansion on Chicago's West Side with his wife. Joseph became his housekeeper. Not long after his kids were grown, Charles and his wife divorced. Joseph and Charles became romantically involved and Charles became increasingly disillusioned by the urban and intellectual decay he saw at college and in his neighborhood. Charles decided to live his dream life with his partner. He resigned from the university on his 50th birthday in 1976 and purchased 40 acres on Taylor's Ridge, in Chattooga County, Georgia.
In 1981, Dr. Scudder wrote the following about why he decided to live in isolation in the April/May edition of Mother Earth News,
"After some soul-searching conversations with Joe, I decided that we really needed to find some place (sic) in hilly country, with the glamour of four seasons but without super-cold winters, with a good supply of pure water and wood for heating and cooking, and–most important–with a measure of isolation. (After years of enduring the sensory overload of city life, I desperately wanted to be situated where I could neither see nor hear my neighbors.)"
And true to his ambitions, he accomplished just that. In two years, he and Joe had erected 45,000 bricks to build their manor in the woods. They also built a brick gazebo, a three-story chicken coop, a chemical outhouse, a brick house for the 160-foot deep well, a lake, an orchard, and a garden. They decided to live off the grid before it became fashionable.
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Charles had non-mainstream views about religion, sexuality, and life in general. A lot of this was expressed in his architecture and design plans as well as in his lifestyle choices.
Above the brick gazebo, he placed a giant pink gargoyle. (The gargoyle had once spit water at his former property) There was a connecting drawbridge that spanned the gulf between the house and the gazebo. They would frequently have tea there while taking pictures of their surroundings.
He owned books on the occult, a black and gold statue of Mephistopheles (the demon from German folklore popularized by Faust), a couple of human skulls, and stained glass works of Baphomet and Medusa. Each of the four chimneys of the manor was decorated with a pentacle (a downward-pointing pentagram in a circle). It should be noted that Charles was a member of the Church of Satan, but that the CoS aren't devil worshipers. Atheists? Yes. Satanists? No.
His personal art reflected a dark side too. Flanking each side of the entrance to the second floor were two paintings. One of a baby coming out of the womb and the other of a skeleton baby. Perhaps his most disturbing piece of art was a portrait of himself bound, bleeding, and with a series of bullet wounds to the head. (see portrait above)
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Fascinating!!
Thanks so much for summarizing this for those who wanted to hear the story of what happened. I appreciate your empathy for the victims.
Good read!