Marcel Brand was a talented artist, but his talent…
Marcel Brand was a talented artist, but his talent served his morbid imagination. The first pages dated back to 2010.
They depicted attempts to fit small animals, squirrels, birds into natural wood grain. But then the author’s ambitions grew.
The drawings became more complex. On a page dated August 2011, the police saw a sketch that made their blood run cold.
It was a detailed diagram of a human body standing upright inside the hollow trunk of a sequoia tree.
The drawing was called symbiosis. The author had calculated everything. The angle of the body, the position of the arms, even the drilling points for injecting preservatives.
Notes were made in the margins in small handwriting. Reaction temperature is critical. Cooling is required.
The subject must be alive to preserve the natural expression of the facial muscles. This explained why Allen was poured alive.
Brand wanted to capture the moment of life, not death. On the next page, there was a sketch called specimen number one.
The face in the drawing bore a striking resemblance to Alan Mayer. The same cheekbones, the same shape of the chin.
Brand apparently observed his victim before the abduction or made a sketch while preparing the installation.
The caption under the drawing read, “Silence achieved, Eternal Sleep in the Heart of a Giant.”
But the worst thing was that the album did not end with Allen. Next came sketches titled Sample Number Two and Sample Number Three.
They were less detailed. Some were just sketches of locations in the park marked with crosses.
This indicated that Marcel Brand had no plans to stop. He saw the forest as his personal gallery and people as material for creating what he considered to be perfect art.
In addition to the album, forensic experts found in the studio the remains of the same yellow epoxy resin produced by Marin clear cast and empty cans of ochre pigment.
On the floor near the workbench was an old map of Humbult Redwoods Park. On it, a red marker circled the area of the Shadow Bowl, exactly where Allan disappeared.
Marcel Bran’s workshop was the place where his madness took shape. Here he planned his crimes.
Here he dreamed of creating an eternal forest of people. But the guardian himself was not here.
The house looked abandoned. Things were covered in dust. The investigators had to find out where the man who considered himself the savior of human beauty had gone and whether he had managed to create other exhibits that the world had not yet known about.
The discovery of the sketches turned the investigation into a race against time because the paper had other dates on it later than 2011.
On December 5th, 2021, the investigative team led by Detective Richardson returned to the office, the walls of which were now covered with photocopies of pages from the found Marcel Brand sketchbook.
What had initially seemed like the ravings of a mad artist now took on a clear, terrifying logic.
Analyzing the sketches titled sample number two and sample number three, forensic scientists concluded that Alan Mayer was only part of a much larger plan.
Marcel Brand was not just burying bodies. He was creating an exhibition. In his notes, he referred to the forest as a gallery and the old redwoods burnt from the inside as natural molds for eternal casting.
According to a profile compiled by Federal Bureau of Investigation Behaviorists, Brand operated exclusively during the dead season, late fall or winter when hiking trails were closed due to rain and the threat of landslides.
This gave him weeks and sometimes months of absolute solitude in the Bull Creek sector.
He searched for specific trees, the so-called goose pens. These are giant redwoods whose core burned out during forest fires centuries ago, forming natural caves protected by thick bark.
For Brand, these were ready-made sarcophagy. All he had to do was place the object inside and fill the entrance with polymer.
On December 7th, at 7:00 in the morning, a combined group of 20 officers reinforced by engineers with ground penetrating radar left for the Shadow Bowl area.
The task was unprecedented to check every tree with signs of a cavity within a onem radius of where Allen was found.
Ground penetrating radar, which is typically used to find underground utilities or archaeological sites in the ground, had to be adapted to scan trunks vertically.
The operators set up the devices to look for density anomalies that would differ from the structure of living or rotten wood.
The work progressed slowly. The forest, which in summer seemed like a majestic temple of nature, looked threatening in the December fog.
Every tree seemed suspicious. The operators put sensors to the bark, peering at the monitors, but the first 4 hours of searching yielded only false results.
The devices recorded accumulations of water, rodent nests, or stones embedded in the roots. The radar did not provide a 100% guarantee as the thick wet bark of the sequoia trees shielded the signal creating significant interference.
The risk of missing another body was extremely high. So each suspicious area was additionally inspected visually looking for signs of artificial intervention, a natural resin buildup or drilling marks.
At about 2:30 p.m., the group reached the eastern slope marked on one of Bran’s sketches with an unsigned cross.
Here, among the dense ferns, stood a majestic sequoia, 15 ft in diameter at the base.
The tree looked perfectly healthy, its crown lost in the fog at an altitude of 300 ft.
However, on the northern side, hidden from the trail by shrubbery, the trunk bore a distinctive fire scar.
A narrow slit that appeared to be overgrown with moss and spiderw webs. The GPR operator moved the sensor along this crevice.
A clear, geometrically correct spot appeared on the screen of the device. The signal showed that inside the tree, behind a 4-in thick layer of bark and wood, there was a material with a uniform ultra high density that did not allow radio waves to pass through.
It was not an empty hollow. It was a monolith. The density readings perfectly matched those obtained during the scan of Alan Mayer’s sarcophagus.
The head of the operation ordered an invasive test. The technician took out a cordless drill with a long wood drill bit.
The sound of the tool biting into the bark broke the silence of the forest, causing birds to fly off the branches.
For the first 2 in, the drill went easily, throwing out red bark chips. Then the resistance changed dramatically.
The tool began to make a higher pitched sound, typical of drilling hard plastic. When the technician pulled the drill back out, everyone present froze.
Instead of dark wood or rot, a thin translucent yellowish spiral was wrapped around the tool’s spiral.
It was the same modified epoxy polymer, Marin clear cast. One of the detectives illuminated the drilled hole with a powerful tactical flashlight.
The beam of light, once inside, broke in the muddy thickness, and the depths of the wood momentarily shown with a dim amber light.
There was no doubt. This tree was also filled. It had stood there for years.
Thousands of tourists had passed by. Rangers had led tours, not even suspecting that another victim was hidden behind the layer of bark in the heart of a living organism.
Marcel Brand really created his museum right under the nose of the authorities. He used centuries old trees as the safest safes in the world, turning the forest into a cemetery where the gravestones continued to grow and breathe.
The discovery confirmed the serial nature of the crimes. Now, the police knew that the sketches in the album were not fantasies, but an inventory list.
The only question was how many more of these exhibits Humbult Park was hiding, and whether all the points on Bran’s map had already been realized.
The sun began to set behind the ridges, plunging the forest into darkness. And in this twilight, the majestic silhouettes of the Seoas no longer aroused admiration.
They looked like mute guards of a terrible secret. The operation was suspended until morning, but the place was surrounded by tape.
Realizing that tomorrow they would have to open another time capsule. On December 8th, 2021, the automated fingerprint identification system, AFIS, gave a match that finally closed the circle in the investigation of the Shadow Bowl case.
The prints taken from chemical cans in an abandoned workshop in Ferndale matched perfectly with the fingerprint of a patient who was listed in the database of missing and unidentified persons under the code name John Doe number 64.
It turned out that Marcel Brand had neither died nor fled to another country. For the past 5 years, he had been in the Napa State Psychiatric Hospital, a closed facility for people with severe mental disorders located just 200 miles south of the crime scene.
According to medical records, on February 12, 2016, patrol officers found him on the median of Highway 101.
He was walking, wearing dirty clothes, dehydrated, and in a deep catatonic stouper. He had old chemical burns on his hands.
Since the man did not respond to questions and did not have any documents, he was admitted to the clinic as an unknown person.
For 5 years, he did not say a single word. On December 10th, 2021, Detective Richardson, accompanied by the clinic’s leading psychiatrist, Dr.
Elisa Wong, entered the high security ward. Marcel Brand, who was already 55 years old at the time, was sitting in a chair by the barred window.
He looked much older than his age, gray hair, sunken cheeks, and a completely empty gaze directed at a single point on the white wall.
Attempts to establish verbal contact were feudal. Brand ignored questions about his name, the workshop, and the forest.
Then the detective pulled out a photo from a folder that had been taken by forensic experts at the site of the Candalabra Sequoia fall.
The photo showed a close-up of Alan Mayer’s face frozen in the yellow polymer, illuminated by the sun.
Richardson silently placed the photograph on the table in front of the patient. The reaction was instantaneous.
Bran’s pupils dilated and his breathing became ragged. He reached out with a trembling hand and ran his finger over the glossy surface of the photo as if trying to feel the texture.
Dr. Wong noted in her report that this was the first time the patient had shown emotion during the entire observation.
His lips moved and he uttered his first sentence in a quiet voice from the long silence.
It was not a confession of murder. “Why are you looking at this with horror?”
He asked, not looking up at the detective. You see death and I see salvation.
When the detective asked why he did this, Marcel responded with a monologue that was later included in the court case as evidence of his complete loss of contact with reality.
People are weak. They live for a moment and then rot in the damp earth.
They are eaten by worms. They turn into dirt. It’s disgusting. I gave them a chance for eternity.
Now they are part of the giants. They will stand for a thousand years as long as the forest is alive.
Isn’t that what he wanted? That guy with the microphone. He was looking for absolute silence.
I gave him the purest silence in the world. He became the heart of the tree.
He can now hear the roots growing. These words confirmed the investigator’s guess. Bran did not just track down the victims.
He listened to them, studied their desires, and distorted them through the prism of his sick philosophy.
For him, it was not a murder, but an act of symbiosis, a term he used to sign his sketches.
After this monologue, Marcel Brand fell silent again and returned to a state of catatonia from which doctors were unable to bring him out.
Meanwhile, the fate of Alan Mayor’s body was being decided at the Humboldt County Morg.
Pathologists and chemists conducted a series of experiments on polymer samples trying to find a solvent that could destroy the epoxy without damaging biological tissue.
The conclusion was disappointing. The industrial compound marine clear cast had penetrated so deeply into the pores of the skin and the structure of the clothing over 10 years that it had become one with the body.
Mechanical removal of the resin would have meant the actual destruction of the remains. Allen’s family, including his brother Eric, faced a terrible choice.
Cremate the block with the polymer, which would require a special industrial oven due to the toxicity of burning epoxy or bury it in the condition in which it was found.
After difficult consultations, the family decided to keep Allen intact. The funeral took place on January 20th, 2022 at the cemetery in Kulma, a suburb of San Francisco.
It was a private ceremony. The coffin had to be ordered according to individual drawings.
It was wider and deeper than the standard one to accommodate the trunk fragment along with the body.
The total weight of the structure exceeded 400 lb, so a special lifting mechanism was needed to lower it into the grave rather than ordinary straps.
Eric Mayer stood by the open pit holding his brother’s old tape recorder, the one that had been cut out of the sarcophagus.
He did not turn it on. The silence in the cemetery, broken only by the sound of the wind from the ocean, seemed like an ominous mockery of Allen’s dream.
His search for zero noise was successful, but the price for this piece was absolute.
Humbult Redwoods Park gradually returned to normal. Hiking trails were opened in the spring of 2022.
However, the Shadow Bowl sector was removed from all guide books and the trails to it were closed under the pretext of ecosystem restoration.
The rangers know the truth. There are still giant trees with scars on their bark deep in the forest.
They were checked with GPR and those containing exhibits were marked with special beacons, but not cut down.
The removal of the bodies was recognized as technically impossible and ethically controversial. The forest remained a gallery and Marcel Brand locked in a white room in the hospital still believes that he is the only one who has understood the true essence of eternity.
Day.
