Sword and Scale contains adult themes and violence, and is not intended for all audiences.
Listener discretion is advice. Gary is in the no, he is in the And I said, what.
Are you ready for some murder?
Is that a yes?
I can't hear you speak? Up Here we go. On July fifth, twenty eighteen, in Cherokee County, Georgia, a family goes looking for their missing dad. The addresses twenty five to fifty five per cll Lane, a dead end gravel road off a two lane highway north of Atlanta, but a long way from the city. The expansive house sits on ten fenced an acres back from the road, past pasture and trees, the kind of semi rural property that could be a small farm, or just a place to
be left alone. Out here, it would be easier to disappear into your own routine, into something worse. The faire's property isn't a commercial operation so much as it is a hobby farm with a pasture, a pond, a barn, apartment, and a small collection of animals a few horses, a few little milk goats, and some chickens. Essentially, this is Melody's dream life. The kind of charmed Southern life she had always envisioned for herself, the kind they sell in magazines,
lots of kids, animals in an outdoor space. Her husband, Gary Ferris, is a prominent attorney in the Atlanta area, a partner level lawyer whose practice and income are centered in the city, not on the land. By this time, their children have all married, some divorced, and grandchildren often come to stay. Known to the grandchildren as Big Daddy. Fifty eight year old Gary Ferris hasn't answered calls or texts for at least a day, and no one knows
his whereabouts. His truck is still in the driveway. His seapap machine, the one who uses religiously every night, is still inside. His wallet and other personal things are in the house. Nothing about it, says, I left on my own. Gary's four children are grown, including his son Scott, But Scott just happens to live on the property, working as a farm head. When his mother Melody asks him, have you seen your daddy? In her southern drawl, the answer
is no. This wasn't entirely unusual. The property is huge, and Gary tends to mind his own business. Besides, Scott has mostly been away for the previous few days, but his son Scott, goes out to the property with Melody to look for The kids are half playing outside, half looking. Melody and Scott separate. They check the house, the barn, the pasture. They call his name. Just as soon as he releases aloud, Dad, he hears his own name. It's his mother, urging him to come back and check out
the burn pile. Scott walks to the back of the property to a spot where his dad sometimes burns trash and brush. It's obvious Gary has been out here. Scott sees a large burn pile there and for a few seconds, the smoke burns his eyes. The burn pile is blackened, still warm, with chunks of debris fused into the ash. It's early July in Georgia. The air is thick and damp,
and the heat radiates off the ground. Melody and Scott both stand at the perimeter of the large pile, and Melody points out something odd to her son.
Hi, when the goats on there for something? You know, maybe one died, you know, because we have.
Several of them. I said, you saw a.
Goat on there or something?
Because it was just something.
That just looked.
It was like, wouldn't be ball of just you know in all I said, you saw a goat on there or something?
And he went over there.
And looked, and you didn't.
He said, well no, but that didn't mean daddy, you know it didn't.
Then he really looked.
Scott stepped closer and looked down. At first, it was just shapes in the ash, charred would metal, bone colored fragments. Then his brain caught up to what he was seeing. One of those shapes wasn't just bone colored, it was bone. He realized he was looking at what appeared to be a human skull. He backed away and yelled for the others to get the kids out of there. Whatever this was,
they didn't need to see it. Melody still wondered out loud if maybe it was an animal, a dead goat or something, but Scott was sure it was the skull of a human being. They called nine one one, and I will say he.
Actually took a stick and picked up he could.
Do over the business.
It was a you know that, you.
Say that thought, you love it.
And as he tell me that that's a goat or a coat or an aising, I mean, you know, yeah, he took off an calumn, not only one.
Now the skull Scott uncovered was human, and when he poked at it, the remains of a face stared up at him.
This was no goat kind of that one the pace of emergency.
Here one uh here one fa pap or so boyant uh. My father has come up missing. And we just searched the properties a small farm and I just sails something near a phone that doesn't it was he was burning brush and I was just stall from the ball that.
It could be him.
I don't know, but if anyone would know whether this was a human or animal, it would be Scott Ferris.
Now I'm calling you to say that I just I've we been walking around looking for him, and I went with the fires still smaller. I max the military. I was deployed to Iraq as and what burned the body looked like and this looks like big body.
Okay, said your father?
Yes, said I.
He just n uh me.
Gary wasn't without health problems, even though most would consider fifty eight to be relatively young. He'd been having what his wife called spells, but was refusing to follow through with his doctor visits.
He's had these spells for years, and he talks, he is a very slurred speech.
His motor coordin issue gets very off these stumbles.
He his dad had Parkinson's, and I.
Had kind of wondered is maybe he had Parkinson's as they did. I never did personally talk to the cardiologists, but I did talk to his physicians assistant, and because Amanda and I went with Amanda to go look at a wedding venue and so we lived before the actual cardiologist came in.
But they found that he had a leaking a worry about and a leaking tra.
Cusband about, and they wanted him to go back to the cardiologist on Friday. He got out of late Wednesday, and wanted him to go back to the cardiologist on Friday to.
Be hooked up to a heart monitor.
Or length for time to see you know, what all was going on wrong with.
His heart, and he.
Refused to go.
Of course, this beg the question did Scott have a spell, stumble and fall into the fire pit? According to Melody, Gary loved burning fires, but she did not and for good reason.
Well, Tuesday.
He started to be burned.
Late Tuesday started to be burned this week, yes, and gosh, where all the time about him.
He had set the house on fire two years ago, the end.
Of the end of the August.
And I got so scared of the fire after that he had shot it in his office.
We think what he did.
Wasn't get a nice training. May I don't know, you know that's what started starting nice guy.
We're here.
Ind so much damage and so since then, I think it's so just scared of fire around here. Just ways Gary that he is all the time he has the thing.
It was starting fires.
He set one in my other house in the woods behind my house.
We would do the sub division.
We had called from the neighbor when the morning it so o'clock in the morning and our.
Department was there. He had started it like the week before, and it.
Had been smoldered and had gotten out of control.
Sounds like Gary might have been a little bit of a pyromaniac, not saying he actually was. I mean, that's a real mental disorder, and it's not the same thing as being an arsonist. Pyromania is an impulse controlled disorder. A person feels drawn to setting fires, fascinated by them, and sometimes even relieved by them, like a coping mechanism. A vice the way some people reach for alcohol or cigarettes. It's man and honestly, Gary had reasons to need advice.
It was a high powered attorney with health issues and a big family. You didn't get out much, wasn't a partier and mostly kept to himself. His family described him as a social introvert, and he didn't really drink so pyromaniac maybe, or maybe Melody's fire incidents were just isolated moments, nothing more either way. His real daily habit wasn't liquor. It was a twelve pack of mountain dew. Yeah, twelve. He drank twelve mountain dews daily. That's got to be worse than alcohol.
Right, So he you know, and.
Maybe six months or so since your mind it before.
The spurn ball here, Yeah.
Means it has been saying it had.
We had pulled up when we did the fire put down here, We had an excavator here, and then he pulled up the minch tree stops and that kind of stuff and put on the burn pile.
So I had a lot of fixing and.
Stuff on him, and he said something not long ago.
But burns, please do not burn it.
It's too dry, it's too undius to you know, we always go in.
These keys don't burn well.
Scott came home.
I don't know what time it was when he got hit.
Because I called him and I I was chasing horses.
Gary had started the burn pile on Tuesday, the evening of July third. He forgot to close the gate and the horses got out. Melody remembered chasing the horses and calling for her son, Scott to help. She was worried about the fire getting out of control because it was going to burn for a long time. The next day, she says, Scott came up to the house for a credit card and remarked that the fire was still going. Right before Melody left the property, she saw Gary gathering
up even more wood to put on the fire. She begged him not to make it any bigger, but he didn't listen. Not only was Melody worried about the fire and the property, she was also worried about his mental health. According to her, he had tried to commit suicide twice before they were married. Keep in mind they had been married for thirty eight years, but still he had a family history of all kinds of mental and physical problems.
Melody didn't just say. Gary was struggling. She told investigators his whole family tree was steeped in mental and physical problems, his sister with both bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, in and out of psych hospitals, his mother on antidepressants and antipsychotic meds, eventually being placed in a memory care facility with what she calls really bad Alzheimer sir dementia, and his father, who had mental illnesses of his own, later dying from
Parkinson's disease. Melody claimed Gary would say things like I think I'm getting like my parents, yet they shrugged as a couple through the good and bad times.
And then somebody asked me, said, why do you say.
Unless in her mind she wasn't the unhappy wife looking for a way out. She was the one holding the line while everything around them got harder to manage. The more Melody spoke to officers, the more what she had to say seemed like low key versions of Yellowstone, not with the shootouts and land wars, but in the way she painted the whole family as locked in constant drama. Everything revolved around Big Daddy in the farm, growing kids, coming and going, relying on handouts from a weary patriarch.
Then there was the constant tug of war between who's helping, who's taking, and who's just tired of the whole thing. You might have had some conversations in your family that sound pretty similar.
I told one of the.
Other debuties that was here.
I said, we've been having trouble with him taking.
Money, read over nine hundred dollars a month.
He's got to check in to him routing them.
And I said, Gary refuses to talk to him, refuses to I said, he sends emails and text messages and that's all he does.
She went on to allege that her oldest son, Chris, was unkind, bordering on abusive to his kids, who often stayed at the farm.
And I agree, is I'm going to stop you from taking money in some way, somehow, some mean.
You've got to get help.
You cannot treat them two girls like this, You cannot treat in the inna.
And you know, I said, I they you know, get help.
Melody talked about all the expensive trips her son planned a bachelor party in Panama, a trip out west because friend's dad died, and he had another leisure trip he was planning before all this happened, but Chris wasn't the only one taking advantage of Gary. According to Melody, Gary was just like, you know.
It's not like I can't you know he can say, well, I can't afford to do and said Gary does not at the point, I mean this spot that lives witheth, I larn.
He hasn't marked since he came back from Iraq for a very short time.
And I can't make it Mark, I can't make it an Gary in the yearly thirty.
Five Saturday, and as Garry he needs to work.
He said, well you don't work, Gary.
We imagine this place is a whole time job, full time job.
I mean it is.
You know, it's Scott. I mean adult in Scott is good hail. But I mean like this last week.
I mean he's played golf three days, He's gone to the lake stone on the.
He is just like, come home, man.
This is.
So he's just enjoying life. He's enjoying life to.
The bullst Melody gave details of a family under strain, a big property, lots of animals and not enough help. But she said she was working son up to sundown while her son Scott drifted in and out instead of helping consistently, and Gary's health was getting worse. All of the grown children were mooching off their generous dad, and Melody was trying to rein it all in and hold it all together while Gary was trying to keep the peace.
In a setup like that, it isn't hard to imagine his heart finally giving out, or him having one of his spells at the wrong time near an open fire. And for a little while, that's exactly what this looked like. A tragic accident on a hobby farm with a burned body where a husband and father used to be. But when what's left of Gary was finally boxed up and sent to the medical examiner, detectives started digging into the
burn itself and the digital trail it left behind. What they found in the ashes and in the timeline didn't fit the idea that this was just an accident. Soon the family would dissolve into bickering and finger pointing and blaming each other for Big Daddy's death. In Cherokee County, Georgia, Melody and Gary Ferris have spent the last five years of their lives on a ten acre hobby farm. Melody's dreamscape.
Gary worked hard as an attorney, and Melody worked on the farm and managed the family four grown children with children of their own, including Scott, who lived on the property. The last time Melody saw her husband was on Tuesday evening July third, after he'd set a bonfire or burn pile. Melody said he came upstairs that evening asked if she was making dinner, and she pointed him to the food in the fridge. After that, he went back down to the basement bedroom, where he slept alone with a seapap
on July fourth. Both Melody and Scott said they never laid eyes on Gary, and Melody told investigators this wasn't unusual. He kept to himself even on July fourth. It wasn't until the next morning on fifth, that two of his grandkids wanted to ride the RTV with Big Daddy, but couldn't find them. Their daughter Amanda was already there. Their oldest son, Chris, showed up soon after, and the adults
started searching the house and the property. Scott walked down to the burn pile, looked into the ashes and saw a part of Dad's skull, so he called nine one one while detectives and medical examiners were sifting through the bones, and the days that followed, detectives continued processing the situation with the family. This is Chris.
What I want to think is he just had one of his spells and something happened, had a heart attack and fell in there.
Just I don't know, man, something seems something seems weird.
Well, I will tell you what we do is we handle try to handle it as if it's the worst possible scenario, because.
Obviously, if you approach it like that, then when it turns out to me that he had a heart attack in film the fire, you've done everything you could.
Yes, what we do is we investigate something like this. We followed the evidence, and we gather evidence and we try to get to.
The evidence is going to lead us to some sort of complaire in terms of what happened. So you know, he will go your father's remains will go to an autopsy.
So that is you know, essentially the next step we're going to you know, be documenting outside the inside of the house. That's why it's secured because because this is
the house, it's not far from the house. You have to you know, look at everything and make sure we're not missing anything, and do a good job of documenting so that nobody can come and say, you know, if it does turn out that he did fall in the fire, nobody can and he just had a heart attack, nobody can say we didn't do a good job and we missed the fact.
That someone did something bad to him. I just want to know what happened to what we're gonna look at.
I hope to God that it's just an accident.
I just I understand, but we'll do everything we can to get all meats or something, because you know, we all loved him very.
Much, but someone obviously did not love Gary very much, because what the autopsy revealed after putting all of Gary's burned pieces back together was a bullet lodged in his rib cage. Unless it was suicide. But if that were the case, then why would you be hearing this story on Sword and Scale. Once the medical examiner confirmed he'd been shot, detectives took that news back to the family. One of the first calls was to their son Chris.
Well, I'm gonna tell you something, and I just want to make sure you're ready, and then I'm at I just want you to tell me what to think when I say it, Okay, okay, the evidence we have obtained and on the scene.
Suggest to us that your father was shot.
Wow.
Wow, that's a lot oh man for shure, and.
There are some other people that are aware.
I can't believe it, man, I know what I.
Told you.
I suspect you, but I just wanted not to.
Be everything in my soul's.
Not right with it.
That would be accurate.
Whatever.
When the medical examiner opens the bags from the burn pit, there's no body in the usual sense. Gary has been reduced to charred pieces of bone and scraps of tissue, divided into almost fifty bags labeled by quadrant. Gary was six foot five inches and more than three hundred pounds. The bones are blackened, brittle, and cracked from heat, with fragments of pelvis, leg bones, and skull mixed in with
the ash. The soft tissue left is moldy and wet after sitting in its own liquid collected in the bottom of the backs. The only way to be sure it's Gary is by matching the teeth to all his dental records, and there's no guarantee that this bullet killed him. Investigators quickly rule out an intruder. There's no broken glass, no kicked in door, no drawers pulled out or valuables missing. This isn't a burglary gone bad. It's a dead man on his own land at a house that sits by
itself at the end of a gravel road. Whoever did this was extremely close to Gary.
So like the night of the third and the day of the fourth, you were just never even in Cherokee County, Okay. Can you if I asked you if there's anyone who would want to hurt your dad, what would you say?
Would Scott ever want to hurt your dad? Did they get along pretty well?
Yeah?
I mean, you know they lived in the same place and they bickered back.
And forth on the time, of course. But you know, let's be honest, like Scott has a pretty good life.
He's got his apartment, he's got I mean, my dad does a lot for him. And who would stand to gain it? Who would stand to gain anything of something happened.
To your dad?
Honestly, I mean.
As far as.
Money goes, far as anything, probably money wise, I don't know.
While the kids are still clinging to the hope that this might somehow be a horrible accident. Investigators sent Melody back down and tell her what the medical examiner has actually found.
They've been sifted through the remains in the axes, and they have found a projectile in some bones.
Does not occur to be self inflicted, okay.
Some of them, I mean.
What kind or what?
The circle was already pretty small Gary, his wife, and his grown kids who came and went, but it was growing even smaller. You know how it all comes down to motive and opportunity. The motive seems simple money there you go. Once you rule out a stranger, what you're left with is the ugliest kind of murder. Someone inside the family did it, and the rest of them were trying to decide how much they really want to say
out loud. The only two family members who were at or around the property at the time of Gary's murder were Melody and Scott. Once detectives found the projectile in Gary's remains, the search was on for the gun that fired it. On ten acre farms and rural Georgia, guns
are pretty much part of the landscape. There are long guns, but twenty two and according to Scott, about two weeks before Gary's death, he saw a small pistol in the basement close to where Gary slept when he was looking for a remote because AT and T was there at the house trying to repair the internet.
That's what when I found on that thirty eight special. That's not where the hell did that come from? And the only reason why I didn't continue.
To, you know, to ask him about it and everything was I have to at and T and I didn't want to pull the nuncker out and you know, start the crap out of him.
I shut the drawer back and I was like, you playing on asking My mom and dad were coming from it.
It just slipped my mind, and it was sitting right there in Yeah, it was like this level leather, crappy looking pulster and you know, I just you know, I saw it and just kind of pulled it out and he told it's just a thirty eight special.
Small. Did it look I don't know how to.
Say this.
Old her black more modern revolver? It did did not look brand new. It looked like an age on it.
Now there's a pattern investigators can't ignore. Two weeks before Gary's death, Scott sees a thirty eight in a drawer in a basement bedroom. After Gary disappears, that gun is gone in the basement room. They later find a second bullet on the floor. When the lab compares that round to the one taken from Gary's ribs, they say both
bullets were fired from the same gun. One shot in the house, one shot that ends up lodged in Gary's bones, and the gun that ties them both together used to sit in a drawer beside his bed and it's not there anymore.
Huh.
At this point, detectives know two things for sure. Gary was shot and whoever pulled the trigger was close enough to know. They're way around the house. The pool of suspects is basically just the people who live on that land and move through that basement, So they don't just look for bullets and phones. They listen to how the family talks about each other, and when they ask Melody about Scott, she doesn't describe a calm, steady son.
Does he have any PTSD or anything from.
He's always been very hot headed, ever since he was a little boy.
I mean, you look going that, I.
Mean anyway nine to one when he was born, and he was just handful.
You're not protecting in of your sons that you know of, and we're not gonna find any evidence to prove otherwise.
Can you shed any light on any of this? Yeah, I mean I would like to. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, like I said, Scott is very hot tempered. I mean, and he and Gary I.
Have seen them get into the point that I was just like, okay, y'all just.
Take it down a notch.
I mean, I'd really like to believe that it's Scott shot on your property or inside your house, and then the body was the stones.
Over in your firepit.
You wouldn't probably know about it or find some evidence of it yourself or help clean up or Yeah.
Now, like I said, I wouldn't know.
You were there.
Well, I mean I was, but I left and I just saw it smoldering.
The thing is in Okay, it's not blazing, it's not whatever.
We're good, you know, don't they?
You know.
That.
I kept thinking last night, why did's God coming here and get so angry.
Last night?
But that's not all that unusual either for him to just blow.
Up s God insists he's not a hot head. He admits he gets angry like anyone, and he admits loud bangs still make him jump, but he pushes bat on the idea that he's some kind of ticking bomb.
My version of PTSD is if I hear allow bang or something, then I'm just not prepared for my Drilline just goes through the roof my heart about pounding it at my chest, and I've learned to start taking deep breaths and calms me down. But gunfire doesn't bother me. I can still be around that, and nightmares have ended, and they ended a long time ago. Other than that, no, I don't get violent with anybody.
I'm just like my dad, who you know, I make friends everywhere I go.
By all accounts, Scott and his dad were really likable guys who made friends everywhere they went, and they got along well together. When his dad wasn't able to keep up with the farm anymore, Scott was a huge help. It was more Gary and Melody who didn't get along so well. And Melody had her own habit of making friends wherever she went. If you didn't know what I mean, what I mean is that Melody didn't just collect friends.
She collected other women's partners, starting with a guy named Ted who'd spent more than twenty years as the boyfriend of Gary's sister. So yeah, Melody's brother in law. Melody was fucking her brother in law. The truth is that Melody and Scott had been together for decades until something pulled them apart, and that's something the family would later say was melody. This was Chris's take on it.
You know, my parents don't get along, they don't honestly don't really like each other, and so the communication with clog.
They do not like each other. This has been going, It's nothing new.
My grandmother about series of three months, my grandmother had open heart surgery that went really wrong. She survived, but it put her intability. At around a month or two after that, my ex wife told me she was leaving me. Then, through that whole situation, my mother had to be in Alabama because my mom's my grandmother's house because she could no longer function on her own, so my mom had to go up there and get her house, deal with the affairs.
This was a bit of a double entent. Melanie had to deal with the affairs of grandma and her house, but also had her own affairs.
So during that period my mom started.
The affairs affairs started withdrawing a lot of money out of my father's account. I remember him calling me and say, your mother just took fifty thousand dollars out of my account that I had set aside to pay taxes with.
So I'm scrambling with that. What I'm gonna do? She spent a lot of money.
Everybody was spending oh, big Daddy's hard earned money, and nobody seemed to be bringing in any of their own. According to Melody, Scott was constantly taking the debit card for cash, but Scott would say his dad knew about every penny and it was considered compensation for helping on the farm. Melody would say that Chris was abusive to his kids and constantly took vacations at the expense of Gary big Daddy, but Chris would answer that his dad didn't have a problem with it.
In fact, he was going to go with.
Chris on vacation shortly before he died, and Melody wasn't happy about it.
The last thing that Chris had done was booked a vacation to the beach that they're supposed to be leaving saturday this Saturday, and Gary had said, I'm going to.
Go with you instad just taking the money like what.
He usually does.
I will go with him.
And he said, are you going to go?
And I said, no, I'm not going this very few keys taking. I mean this serious money.
I mean it's like.
Serious money.
I mean, like I said, it's anywhere.
From eight nine hundred dollars worth, plus the girls.
Airline tickets to hear Melody tell it, even plane tickets for her granddaughters were one more example of everyone spending Gary's money. But the truth was that trips with the kids weren't exactly what had nearly blown this marriage up years earlier.
I mean I told him he needed to find somebody else, you know, because.
She talks so bad about him to everyone to make him out to be such an offer person. And now, granted she does that to a lot of people too, my mother has issues. Basically, he's in a tough situation. He didn't want to break the whole family up. You're a very conservative, traditional person, you know, and I don't know the ins and Allison, when you're a kid, you don't want to hear that kind of stuff about your parents,
no matter how old you are. But there was definitely a lot of a lot of problems, A lot of issues.
And a lot of problems.
Okay, have you ever known there to be any domestic violence or anything?
Is there any substance abuse going on, any anything other than her cheating and money issues.
Do you know any names of anyone she had an affair with or you just know she had.
Fed and then some guy named Rusty. I think it's nice names Barton, and I don't know that that was an affair that actually happened. That's just something we suspected because she would tell my daughters things, big day is just said and down. Then she would have badmouth then, but she'd be on the she would have like always on her phone, always talking to somebody, ends up getting
a tattooed right here that says XO. And my daughter said, well that's who when she calls people, that's it's his XO XO on her phone and the and like my brother, so many days he's like, yeah, she's had a whole nother cellphone.
According to Chris, Gary tried his best to avoid divorce for a while. They even moved away and tried to hit the reset button. When that didn't work, Gary bought Melody's dream phone, where he ultimately died.
He thought buying this would to fix everything. He did for a while, and then things started happening again. So it's been an on and off thing.
And then has anybody ever actually filed for a divorce?
You know, I think my dad filed me.
He withdrew it, okay, because I remember him calling me and telling him he was gonna take her back, and I told him, you know, I mean, I told him.
Not to buy this place because it's not going to fix it.
I mean, I told him he needed to find somebody else.
Scott backed up chris statements about his parents' marriage in a separate interview.
Why do you think they'd reconcile when the never divorced? Why don't you think your dad it's all too My dad loved her.
He didn't like conflict, he didn't like to argue. He you know, he always tried to find the easiest way out of.
Any kind of conflict.
And that's part why need I knew he loved loved her. He was the one. I mean, I think at one point he said something to either Chris or somebody. I just heard that he tried to get her to go to the marriage counseling, and she wouldn't do it.
By the time detectives were done listening to everyone, Melody, the two sons, and the two daughters, Emily and Amanda, they'd heard every angle on this family, the affairs, the money, the move, the dream farm get bought to try to hold it all together. Emily and Chris were pretty clear they think their mother is capable of this. Amanda, the youngest, was still defending Melody while planning her wedding with her. Scott also thought his mother might be capable of it,
but he was a person of interest too. He was the son who lived on the farm and stood to game the property if Gary were to be gone. None of this told them who actually pulled the trigger. Though on paper it looked bad for Melody, but Scott, with his temper, his time on the farm, and his proximity to the missing gun, still seemed like the most dangerous
wild card. So detectives stopped asking about feelings and went back to the three days that mattered most July, third, fourth, and fifth, to see what evidence said about who was there when Gary died. At first, the family wanted to believe this was an accident. Gary had one of his dizzy spells, maybe a heart attack, and fell into the fire. Poof burned quickly and gone just like that. But finding
the bullet immediately rules that out. And the body burning quickly in the fire, well, that's just not how it works.
Kids.
Bodies don't burn like that. You don't burn on bodies. He's just don't throw them on a burn pile. That's unusual.
The amount of effort needed to burn a body of significant.
I mean that was just I know that he burned one.
Okay, I'm telling you, bodies just don't burn and fires or they just don't go away. Water incinerators are designed to burn for a very long time in an exceedingly high heat that has not reached a regular bonfire.
That's not reaching a brushfire, it's barely reaching. It's not even really reaching.
A house fire.
House fires were houses collapse on people. We still find more of those people than we did of your husband.
Okay, then how did you.
Learn it was outside your duderom window.
I was hoping maybe you get said.
Somewhere on that Yeah, all I saw this of you know, I'd never went down there, but someone did, because someone would have needed to make sure the body itself kept burning until the job was done, and Melody was on the property all day long.
On July fourth, the fifth is when they all went searching for Gary and found what Melody claimed to be a goat.
I mean when we were all down there the other day, I mean everybody, Me and Man and Scott and Chris, even you know, Patison and Camera and I think we were all circling around Scott actually when when we were discussing that by the goade, I said, do we have a goat to die?
Did you put one on the burn?
How?
And you did your daddy put one on? You know whatever?
Because all I saw was two legs what I thought was two legs digging up.
Melody wasn't just playing along, so that fire it.
Had to be tendency for a while.
I just told you, I see, you got to keep in all.
Someone had to go back.
Repeatedly and do what did keep it burning?
I did not do it.
I did not do that.
I mean when not changing that fire was massive. It was massive, and he had a bunch of Like I said, there was fencing and boards and.
All kinds of wolfully insufficient for the type of heat and the amount of the burn and everything else about it.
Woefully insufficient, woefully insufficient. It sounds like feedback on a failed science project. But what he's really saying is her version wouldn't come close to doing this. A fire like the one she describes doesn't erase a three hundred pound man. Someone had to stay with it and continue feeding the fire.
That's all on it.
That is all on it.
That's all I know that was on it.
An here, she can't tell me about the blood in that.
Well?
Can you tell me about the blood he found?
I don't.
I didn't know that it was any I mean, how much lore we go?
We found blood? Do you know anything about the blood? I didn't know anything about the blood.
Nothing, And the entire time you were there because this is where and see if this makes sense to you, and I'll let you try to explain how this could happen.
Something happened to him?
How did he die?
I didn't move.
You were told, you were told how he died. Weren't you what happened?
Well, we just assumed when Scott said this, this is human remains on this fire.
But you know what they say about assumptions, right, it's an old Benny hill joke.
Have you been told how he how he died?
What we found?
He told me that there was a.
Shot or whatever slow in the rim?
Okay, so what does that indicate to you?
The gunshot?
Woand okay?
I mean it's like I mean, I told Amanda lest I mean, we told Colon last night here.
And that's when I found out that it was when we came here.
And it was like, how do you hear of your hand around this? I mean, I'm thinking he just got.
Caught of the fire.
That's what we have is gunshot wound.
Turned on body.
On which took a long period of time. And you were the only person in the house. So that's why I was hoping.
I know, you keep saying you didn't you don't know anything and you didn't do it, and you keep saying that, But the problem is is there's almost no way in this world that you didn't see something, hear something, or know something, and someone is shot.
Moved and burned and burned and burned and burned thirty feet from your bedroom window.
Of course, Melody knew how he died. It was absurd for her to sit there and claim she didn't or she forgot or whatever. But this wasn't the detective's first radio in Cherokee County, Georgia, and Melody's role in Gary's death was becoming more and more suspicious or sus as the kids say.
These days, I don't know anything. Does not make sense. It doesn't jib, it doesn't match the evidence, and it just doesn't work.
I don't know the count I mean, I know who not sel you.
You realize though this makes no sense?
I did you realize that I have had hundreds of conversations with people that have lost loved ones, people who have had loved ones shot and we didn't know who did it, people that have had loved ones who they have done something bad to. I have had these conversations with people on both ends of both sides of the spectrum.
I've had the countless ones. People tend to act certain ways, whether they want to or not.
But honestly, hearing you don't know.
And the problem is is that just doesn't fit. It's absolutely impossible that you don't know. I'm not saying I'm saying it is averity evidence we have. It is absolutely impossible.
By now, detectives had made it clear her I don't know act doesn't match what they're seeing. A body burned to fragments, bullets in the bones, blood inside the house, a fire that, in their words, would be woefully insufficient unless somebody kept coming back to feed it. They've pointed these things out to Melody, but she doesn't know yet that they've tret Gary's cell phone moving back and forth between the house and the burn pile on the very
day Melody said she never saw him. To add to this, Scott says he searched for his dad's wallet the day they found the body. He always kept it on him or in his room, never in the car. Scott searched the car twice over and found nothing. Yet later that day it was in Melody's hands. When he asked her where she found it. She said the car detectives were
onto melodies lies, so they changed tact. At this point, if she won't talk about the night he died, maybe she'll say more than she means to about how she really felt about him.
Didn't anybody know I like him?
I like him.
I loved him really like.
I mean, That's what I've always said.
I love him.
How do you feel about him?
Oh?
I love him?
Today?
I don't NeSSI really liked you.
I did not like the person that he had to come.
Did you catch at she said she loved him to death? Huh figure a speech. During the investigation, Chris and Scott both found themselves going back over the little things they'd brushed off at the time, The meals she made for Gary, the way he'd get sick afterwards, the spells everyone talked about and nobody really named. They started to ask themselves not did she really love him to death? But was death the version of him that she preferred.
My daughter when she landed, called my mother and asked, can we have that?
Remember the sleepover? Can we have a sleepover? They wanted to do it the third and she said tonight would not be a good night. That's what I know for a fact. Other than that, other facts, I'll tell you what else I know, And I don't know. When I was in when my dad was in the hospital was April. I came in there, you know, I walk in and I was like, what's the deal with my dad? He's like, oh, I'm okay, I'm okay.
I'm like, no, you're not okay.
What's the deal?
He said, Well, you know, I'll just keep having these spells, and I was like, well, what's going on?
He said, well, your mama says my blood sugar because she has this test kit blah blah blah.
And I was like, okay. I go to the doctor and I say, what's up with this blood sugar?
She tells me she's like I reme mar thumbs and your dad is better blood sugar than I do, so don't say anything.
Let me finish. So I was like, oh, okay, and now she could this like number one, can you like this whole blood sugar thing? Where did that come from?
You know?
And why does Melodie Ferris have a blood sugar test kit?
And how can she?
And then I asked the doctor that she tells me that.
So then my dad, I'm sitting there and she goes, He goes, well, about a week ago, I was sitting in the theater and your mother comes down and hands me a tray of freshly.
Big cookies and he said, I ate them, And he said.
I probably shouldn't have it because she doesn't even have the time to even talk to me, and when she does talk to me, she's yelling at me and screaming at me.
But I was like, well, they look good.
So I ate him and he said, they started burning my mouth and burning in my throat. And he said, then I started feeling bad after them. So I called my sister and I called my best friend and I told him that, and so I said, and he was just like, oh, I think she's trying to poison me or something.
And just laughing it off.
And I thought, oh my god, you know, like nah, I mean, come on, you know, maybe, But he said, well, then a few weeks before that, she brought home a pasta dish and the same thing happened.
I said, So I just went to the doctor and I said, look, I said, they have a farm.
They have a lot of stuff going on out there with pesticides and Everything's like, maybe y'all should have run a talk psychology thing on him.
That might not be a bad idea. Just try not to be like, holy shit, he just told me that he thinks my mom might trying to poison him.
You know, I didn't.
You don't want to just tell the doctor that and set off something that doesn't need to be set off. But now thinking back on it, I wish I would have said something.
A little bit more.
One of Melody's final acts of hospitality towards Gary was caught on tape. It appeared Gary knew that he was being poisoned, but maybe nobody believed him. This is the voice of Gary after he's discovered a shattered plate right outside his bedroom just hours before his disappearance.
That's what happens when you leave a plate forget to take it upstairs. A minor temper tantrum. Of course, I hadn't supper tonight and it was sixed for me, so I'm sure I'll be feeling poorly here in minutes, but we'll see.
When the two brothers were interviewed together for hours, their memories became clearer and clearer.
Well within this past year, the fighting between the two of them just got, you know, worse and worse. And the comments my mother. My dad never talked said anything negative to me about my mother except for just like her going out and spending so much money.
On stuff like that and all.
But he never, you know, you know, said anything other than.
That negative way. But my mother, on the other hand, man.
I can't tell you how many times I've heard her say, I can't wait till today.
I don't have to live with him.
I wish he would just have a.
Heart attack and die.
And yeah, she would definitely.
Try to turn all of us only to each other. She has said stuff about him, she has said stuff about Emily. She's just trying to, you know, basically stir the pot up with us. She's been doing that ever since all this happened. She's been trying to get me to turn against him and my sister Emily. And I guess she's been, you know, vice versa with Amanda. I mean, trying to get Amanda turned on all of us. And and that's not really mean, that's that's kind of crap
my mother would do. I mean, yeah, she loved drawing.
So it's been always really were and my mom would treat like strangers and people she recently.
Knew, or or even like her heads a lot better than her family.
It wasn't that Melody couldn't show emotion. It's that every emotion began and ended with her, And the only thing she ever seemed to feel for Gary was resentment. Resentment that he'd seen through her hedonistic version of marriage. She didn't just want to have her cake and eat it too, She wanted to eat hers, take his and still complain that there wasn't enough frosting family.
Members of you know passed away. She did more upset. But when I, you know, when I discovered.
His body, his remains and even with paramedic so she has those are human remains.
She had zero emotion, no, no, probably nothing, but yeah, when Rebel the horse put a couple months after you find hill, she followed.
The more the brothers spoke about their mother, the more they realized they just may have been raised by a sociopath. On July fifth, twenty eighteen, on the Farris family's ten acre farm off Purcell Lane in Cherokee County, Georgia, Gary Ferris, a fifty eight year old Atlanta attorney, is missing. His truck is there, and his seapop and personal items are inside. Also inside her blood droplets leading from the kitchen to
Gary's basement room. His wallet ends up in the hands of Melody, who says she's founded in Gary's car, the same car Scott had already checked twice. The timeline matters. Gary's last confirmed day is July third, when he's been working around a burn pile behind the house. Melody claims she last saw him that night and never checked on
him the next day. That next day is July fourth, and Scott isn't on the property, but Melody is, and by the morning of July fifth, the family searches until Scott is called to the burn pile and recognizes human remains. He calls nine one one. At first it looks like a terrible accident. Then the autopsy destroys that Gary was shot with a bullet lodged in his remains. Investigators say a burn pile would have been woefully insufficient to destroy a body of that size unless someone kept tending it.
Gary's cell phone pings from the house to the burn pile and back to the house, But investigators know that Gary has already been shot and set a blaze, So the case collapses to the people with access and time, and the spotlight lands where it's been sitting all along the house, the burn pile, and Melody. Only a few missing pieces were left in this puzzle. One of these was the missing pistol that Scott had seen in the
basement before Gary's death. Another one was the question of how Gary's body was moved from the house to the burn pile.
I didn't we found other things in the basement. Things in the basement that are significant. We know how long it took to We know lengths of time things took.
We know that.
Moving somebody that's three hundred pounds and six four that's bigger than I am.
And that is a significant feat.
We are putting layer on pund layer pun layer on layer on this picture. And right now, the only thing you're saying, Compare with me for a second. The only thing you were saying.
Is that you don't know anything about anything about anything that does not And you know what.
That I will tell you that does not make sense to me from a very just simply based on the information that I know.
That does just simply not make logical sense in any way.
Shape or form, regardless of how the body was moved or where the pistol was. This case was prosecutable. Melody was arrested on June eighteenth, twenty nineteen, nearly one year after Gary's death. During this time, she continued to have her affair with Rusty, remember ted the first guy she had an affair with, the guy who had been her sister in law's lover for twenty years. Well, Rusty followed a similar pattern. Melody liked to keep it in the family.
I guess Rusty was the stepson of Melody's cousin, Martha Jane.
Gross.
Yeah, this rusty guy, he just came in the picture when Martha Jane.
He knew.
I had some suspicions about it before my sister's.
Playing, because Emily called me a few months before and said, Melody shown up in Nashville, this rusty guy driving Daddy's Mercedes or Daddy's whatever car I don't.
Remember what car ahead of the time, and just you know, acting really funny.
And then she invited him to my sister's wedding in Franklin, Tennessee, and was dancing with him and acting extremely too friendly.
Rusty took a while to come forward with crucial information, but fortunately he had a conscience. What Melody told him left no doubt and would be used in the trial.
Also, I wanted to let you know what I told you, Laryer, that.
I'm putting my name online too, because that's how confident I am and you and about what you're going to tell us.
Okay, that would be an interest us, not the time.
Or anything about what I think. There was only one conversation, that is what you're looking forward, okay, okay, okay.
It was the last conversation, okay, And it would be safe to say it wasn't much talking after that.
No, that was the end of the conversation.
And said, the last time you fucking with her?
No, no, talk to her.
I talked to her every still, I talk to her every day. But again, every day was just every day.
So when that, let's talk about that conversation.
That that probably the last minute of the last conversation. She said, Gary is in the burn pile. No, she said, he is in the burn pile. And I said what And she said, he's in the burn pile. And I said, do not say another word, and do not tell me anything.
I do not need to know, okay. And that is everything. If I'm going to give an ounce I'm going to give a pain. That was all of it. That was everything that she said that had anything to do with what happened. That's pretty I mean.
And I don't you got again, Yeah, I don't know when happened. And here's the thing. At the time that that segment was made, you got to remember he wasn't even reported his missing.
By the time the trial took place in October of twenty twenty four, Melody's defense tried to shove the spotlight back onto Scott. The sun on the property the hothead with supposed PTSD, the one they argued had access and opportunity. More importantly, they pulled a statement of Chris saying he preferred thirty eight caliber ammunition, which they located on his premises. But that narrative contradicted the very finding that changed everything.
Scott had never owned a thirty eight caliber pistol or revolver. He had only seen one in the basement. In a twist, a woman came forward to say her gun matching the murder weapon, had come up missing in the weeks prior to Gary's murder. It was Melody's cousin, the stepmother of Melody's lover, Rusty, and turned out Melody had spent a few weeks at her house helping to take care of her. One last question lingered in the minds of the jury.
How did tiny Melody move big Daddy's body. The answer was a tractor, a tractor with a big bucket attached. Melody knew how to drive the tractor, and Scott knew this because he had taught her The tractor was moved on Tuesday night, and the RTV was moved in the middle of the night.
Because the reason why I remember that tractor being theressed because there was a cat that soon before him was sitting right there on the on that implement on the back of the tractor.
And that's when I walked out and saw the cat or whatever his house.
Around, you know, So I knew the tractor was all the third after that, at.
Don't until the fifth when you fishedly walked down there and saw it. Yam where I mean to even to look.
So the only way I knew that it was down here because I went leaking for my dad and saw it was parked there, and that's when I walked down there and put my hand on the decade.
It was so worn.
When detectives cornered Melody on this, all she had were flimsy excuses in a panicked voice.
And on that property when you were there, something that did not happen in the blink of an eye, something that took time, something that took people, something that took them moving.
The tractor was moved from Tuesday night and Gary could not have done it. The r TV was moved in the middle of the night, and Gary could not have done it. Things were done, Things happened. You said you parked it in one spot and worked up in Now was.
During the day.
That was, and that was the next But the the tractor wasn't. And here's the thing. Even at the end of the day, we're out too. I just assumed that Scott can come up.
And I'm telling you that we can't find evidence to prove that that is not how it went down, and that is.
Not what happened. I don't I don't know.
I mean I was with a man in jail and.
Garon okay, but the night of the third the only person there until eleven thirty, Yes, and then after that you.
Were still there.
His body was burned in that fire pit was unquestionable. You saw it with garon two eyes eleven thirty.
That fire is still.
Going, yeah, I mean that time frame. You don't have came through the woods and was sitting there tending to this fire for the time that Scott was on that property.
At that point, at.
Scott found his father in the burn pile and called nine one one. Melody watched that and later tried to make him out to be a murderer. It's one thing to lie to the police, and it's quite another thing entirely to hand your own child to the wolves and call it self defense.
What a bitch.
I was like, gloves are off, I mean you threw your You try to throw your own child over to the bus. IM straight up blocks in the police and I fronted her about it. So she's like, I never said that might is in.
The place report.
By the time Melody Ferris's trial wrapped up in late twenty twenty four, the prosecution had presented a eighteen day case, calling dozens of witnesses and more than a thousand pieces of physical, digital, and forensic evidence. On November fourth, twenty twenty four, a Cherokee County jury found her guilty on all five charges malice murder, felony murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, concealing the death of another, and making
false statements. The verdict came after several days of deliberation. Following closing arguments at her sentencing hearing. The next day, the Superior Court judge sentenced Ferris to life in prison with the possibility of parole after thirty years. For the murder conviction and an additional five year term for related charges to run concurrently. The judge also barred from contact with certain family members as part of the court order. The prosecutor read a letter from Gary's daughter Emily as
part of the victim impact statement. She said that since Gary was taken, their family was living inside a unbearable void. Not sometimes every day they'd lost the laughter, the warmth, the steady presence that held them all together, and now even the happy moments felt contaminated because he wasn't there to share them. But the worst part wasn't only that he was gone, but it was who did it.
The betrayal of.
Realizing the suffering came from the person who should have cared for them the most, their own mother. And as the prosecutor read her words, Chris sat in the background, breaking down openly, sobbing, wiping tears from his face. Scott conveyed an expression of hurt so deep it was impossible to ignore, while Melody just sat there, resolved to finish
what she started one way or another. In the moments that preceded her statement, she spoke to the judge in a calm and steady voice, but the second she began reading, she suddenly and dramatically, uncontrollably became tearful.
And she wasn't.
Eighteen six years, five months go to day again. The worst nightmare that I could have ever imagined. Not only my world, but my family's world was absolutely destroyed at the hands of one person.
I've had six bless years of being told not to talk, don't say that, take legal advice.
I could walk out of this courtroom today.
And drop over dead.
I want to make sure that my children, my grandchildren, and Gary's family, and to be honest, at this point in time, the entire world who his beauty is. I have waited for years to make this statement to everyone.
I want the world to know who did this.
I have always heard that the courtroom is the last place you're going to get the truth, and has that ever been proven.
To be the truth in this case?
Not only.
Who did.
I know Scott killed his father?
Melody's sentencing statement wasn't the defense. It was a mirror reflecting exactly who she was all along. Melody wanted her dream life, the farm, the family, the image, oh and you know, all the lovers. But it was all powered by Gary. How inconvenient for her, and the moment that he stopped fitting the role she needed, she treated him like an obstacle, just like all narcissists do when confronted with the consequences. She never once showed empathy, accountability, or
concern for what her children had already lost. She minimized, argued, lied, and blamed when the case threatened her. She didn't protect her family. She used them first as cover, then as human shields. A normal person hearing her daughter's grief and seeing her son sobbing like this would stop the charade. They'd realize all the hurt they'd caused, all the people
around them that loved them, that they supposedly loved. It would be an awakening, ah moment that would define their lives, suddenly realizing what they had done and accepting the responsibility and asking for forgiveness. Melody didn't do that put it that way. Even in the end, with nothing left to win, She chose the move that hurt her family the most because protecting herself mattered way more than taking responsibility for
her own actions. Well, hope you enjoyed that. I'd tell you to go on over to our website or download our app to get more, but then some asshole will say I'm begging, So just do whatever the fuck you want. I really really don't care. Stay safe,