The Corpsewood Manor Murders

Dr. Charles Scudder was a rich man who had a “good job” by definition as a pharmacology professor at Loyola University in Chicago. Known for being “brilliant,” “polished,” and “soft-spoken, but confident,” Scudder eventually became tired of the city and left his beautiful Chicago property in 1976 to live a more modest life.

Scudder expressed his wish to escape from “taxes, light bills, gas bills, water bills, heating bills, and the sense of helplessness that came with witnessing my former neighborhood turn into an urban ghetto.” So, the fifty-year-old decided to start afresh in a remote area of the north Georgian forests.

He moved to the South with his boyfriend, Joe Odom, and left behind the most of his personal belongings. They built a new home by hand in the middle of the forest. “Within two short years we were living in an elegant mini-castle,” as Scudder put it.

Because of the eerie autumn trees that covered the surrounding area, they named it Corpsewood Manor.

The couple built a three-story “chicken house” to finish their country castle. The couple’s “pink room,” also referred to as their “pleasure chamber,” was located on the third level, while the first floor stored their food.

However, Scudder had been hiding more than just his homosexual relationship; he was known to be a member of the Church of Satan.

Inside the Corpsewood Manor

Yes, there was a lot more to the polite, secretly Satanist physician than first appeared.

Even at Loyola, Scudder’s work was different from the usual academic’s. He did government-funded research using hallucinogenics like LSD. He kept a pet monkey and colored his hair purple. Also, he brought a few souvenirs from Loyola to Corpsewood Manor, including two human skulls and around 12,000 LSD doses.

With his souvenirs in hand, Scudder could now freely display his Satanism within Corpsewood Manor.

Naturally, Scudder and Odom also furnished Corpsewood Manor with a variety of Gothic items, such as the skulls that Scudder had taken and a pink gargoyle he brought from his previous home. Corpsewood Manor was “more like a mausoleum, a tomb requiring care, cleaning, and endless costly repairs,” according to Scudder.

Scudder created a stained-glass display that featured an important character in the Church of Satan, the prophet Baphomet. Scudder did not worship Satan, despite the fact that he took his Satanism seriously. Rather, he was a devoted atheist who decided to revel in the simple, earthly pleasures that he and other churchgoers believed the other Abrahamic religions denied them.

They did celebrate such pleasures. In the “pink room,” which was furnished with mattresses, candles, whips, chains, and even a logbook recording visitors’ sexual activities, Scudder and Odom enjoyed hosting wild sex parties for their guests.

Though the events were reportedly consensual, Corpsewood Manor became a grisly murder scene on December 12, 1982, because of the pink room parties.

The Gory Truth About The Murders in Corpsewood

Things were inevitably going to blow up, even if maybe nobody realized how brutal the ending would be, with Scudder and Odom pushing all of their guests to indulge in their every desire in a trance of drugs and sex.

Kenneth Avery Brock, 17, and Samuel Tony West, 30, were two of the locals with whom Scudder and Odom became friends with.

Some reports suggest that Brock had just obtained permission from Scudder and Odom to hunt on their land, and that he became friends with them on their big estate and mistakenly thought they were more richer than they actually were. However, a bond of sorts was established between Scudder and Odom and Brock and West.

Though Brock could have accepted it, West strongly objected to any form of sexual intercourse with the older couple. It’s possible that he convinced Brock that Scudder was taking advantage of him. Once more, it’s uncertain if Brock had truly been taken advantage of. Still, Brock and West made the decision to go back to Corpsewood and rob Odom and Scudder.

On December 12, 1982, Brock and West drove to Corpsewood Manor with weapons. Accompanying them were two teens, Joey Wells and Teresa Hudgins.

The four visitors first pretended to be there only to hang out and accepted Scudder’s offer of homemade wine, paint thinner, varnish, and other strong drugs.

During this drug-induced daze, Brock eventually got down to business, grabbing a weapon from the car and shooting Odom and both dogs. After that, Brock and West made all they could to get Scudder to give up every penny he had.

Brock and West were unaware that there were no valuables of any sort in the home. And when they finally came to terms with it, they gathered what few belongings were left, shot Scudder five times in the head, and ran from the scene.

After making their way all the way to Mississippi, Brock and West killed a guy by the name of Kirby Phelps on December 15, that year, during an attempted robbery gone wrong. After that, maybe feeling guilty, on December 20, Brock went back to Georgia and turned himself in. On the 25th, West followed suit in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In the end, Brock entered a guilty plea and was given three consecutive life sentences, while West was found guilty of two counts of murder and given the death penalty. The bizarre and graphic story of the Corpsewood Manor killings came to a close with that, but many mysteries still remained.

In court, West and Brock described the violent events of that night. They stated that the professor ominously muttered, “I asked for this,” before he was killed. Surprisingly, the professor had a self-portrait painted months before the tragedy, in which he appears shot in the head and gagged.

Thank you for reading!

If you find this piece interesting, please leave a heart, comment, or even subscribe! Your support means a lot to me as a writer!