Author Talk: Amy Petulla

In December of 1982, the peaceful forest on Taylor’s Ridge in Chattooga County, Georgia, was the setting for a grisly double murder. The shooting deaths of former Loyola University pharmacology professor Charles Scudder and his partner Joey Odom would come to be known as the Corpsewood Murders, named for the couple’s castle-like residence that was later destroyed by vandals. The two men had constructed the home themselves out of brick after they gave up city life for rural homesteading. On the property, sheriff’s deputies found expensive antiques and thousands of doses of LSD, as well as evidence that suggested that suggested Scudder and Odom were Satanists. The trail of the killers looked as cold as the chill in the winter air, until investigators got an unexpected break—an eyewitness account of what happened the night the two men died.

In December of 1982, the peaceful forest on Taylor’s Ridge in Chattooga County, Georgia, was the setting for a grisly double murder. The shooting deaths of former Loyola University pharmacology professor Charles Scudder and his partner Joey Odom would come to be known as the Corpsewood Murders, named for the couple’s castle-like residence that was later destroyed by vandals. The two men had constructed the home themselves out of brick after they gave up city life for rural homesteading. On the property, sheriff’s deputies found expensive antiques and thousands of doses of LSD, as well as evidence that suggested that suggested Scudder and Odom were Satanists. The trail of the killers looked as cold as the chill in the winter air, until investigators got an unexpected break—an eyewitness account of what happened the night the two men died.


Amy Petulla, the author of The Corpsewood Manor Murders in North Georgia, will speak at the Moon Lake Library on Monday, October 21, at 6 p.m. Petulla is a former assistant district attorney with the Lookout Mountain Judicial Circuit, the office that prosecuted the killers. A trial lawyer for 20 years, she is now the owner of Chattanooga Ghost Tours. Copies of the book will be available for sale, and Amy will be glad to autograph them.
Join us at the library for an informative discussion about one of the region’s most infamous—and haunting—true crimes.