Original subtitles

Hadden Clark, he's a really, really strange person.

I lived with him, and I heard a lot of different stuff

from him.

After the commissioner found out that

he was actually my cell buddy,

he came down, knocked on my window,

and said, "You're moving across the hall."

I said, "Why?" He said,

"He might wake up one day and think you're the devil.

We can't take that chance."

I said, "But the thing of it is he only kills kids and women,

so I'm not worried about it."

[investigator] This guy is a serial murderer.

[Jack] I think he's insane.

He thought I was Jesus for real.

I said, "Why did you do this to these people?"

He said, "I saw my father do it."

[investigator] He is just evil incarnate.

[Richard] We have to put him in the ground.

We're going to kill him.

[Joe] I traveled to Western Correctional Institute

January of 2000 to interview Jack.

Jack told me that Hadden had murdered Michele Dorr

and buried her in a park in Montgomery County, Maryland.

I asked him if he would lead us to her body.

He said he would.

So we showed up the next morning, got Hadden out,

and I said something to the effect of,

"Okay, you ready?"

And he said, "I'm not going."

So I told one of the correctional officers

to go get Jesus.

So they went and got Jack Truitt out of his cell.

He talked to Hadden in the hallway in front of me

for a minute and then asked if he could use this side office.

So when he went in, I pulled the door shut

from the outside. So they were in there alone.

[Jack] He told me straight up, "I'm not going."

And I said, "Look, you're going one way or another."

Pushed him up against the wall.

And I said, "You don't want to disappoint me."

That's when he made the comment,

"You're supposed to be peaceful."

Batter up.

I said, "I am peaceful.

"I'm using the power of the Lord to help get this

evilness out of you."

[screaming]

And he ate that [bleep] up, man.

[Joe] I don't know what took place behind that door,

but when he came out, Hadden was ready to go.

And then Jack told me, I've got to go, too.

Oh, he wasn't going nowhere without me.

So we loaded up.

Jack's sitting up front, and Hadden's in the back with

the two detectives on each side of him.

Now, I thought Jack was laid back and somewhat cool for

a prisoner, but he's also a convicted murderer.

Now I've got two convicted murderers driving

down the road.

I had this thought in the back of my mind.

It's like, OK, is this some type of escape plan?

So I'm going a little fast, and I look over at Jack,

and I see his eyes are kind of like bugging out of his head.

He looks sick almost. I said, "Are you all right?"

Going 90 miles an hour,

that really freaked me out.

I said, I haven't been in a vehicle in 30-some years.

I was like, can you slow down a little bit?

God, please let him slow down.

We're taking Hadden and Jack to right off of Route 29

in Montgomery County, Maryland,

near the White Oak neighborhood.

That area was like a dumping ground.

There were bed springs, mattresses, just all kinds of

junk in that area.

When we took him out of the car, Hadden seemed

a little disoriented, almost a little confused.

And then he said something to the effect of, well,

it's been a while. These trees weren't this big.

He was excited, because he wanted to travel

all around through the woods.

[Joe] After hours of walking, there was no obvious location

for the exact spot that he had buried Michele.

I heard some talk by some other detectives.

Yeah, maybe he didn't bury her here.

Maybe this is just like a wild goose chase kind of thing.

And I was just standing there wondering,

what are we going to do now?

Then I remember Ed,

with his foot, kind of rubbing the dirt.

Felt unique under his foot, I guess.

[Edward] And I looked down,

and there's a rusted wire, looked just like a twig,

sticking out of the ground.

I reached down, and I pulled on that.

And I kept pulling, and up comes a small

bed spring.

And I said, "Hadden, come over here."

Hadden comes over and gets down on the ground.

He says, "This is it", and starts clawing

at the ground.

He's trying to dig.

That's when we decided to dig. That was the spot.

Peeling the dirt back, they found

the pink bathing suit.

I remember we have a picture of the pink bathing suit

coming up,

mostly just bones.

Pink bathing suit and the bones.

It was a miracle.

That's all I got to say.

I mean, it was like,

it was almost like she wanted to be found.

It was a bittersweet ending. I mean, we finally --

finally got the body back.

I called Carl, and I mean, he didn't have much to say.

I mean, the guy's still in shock.

Without Jack Truitt's assistance,

the body of Michele Dorr would not have been recovered.

He received information. He had courage,

and he's given his situation in prison

to bring that to the police.

It's just so horrible...

to do that to a human being,

especially somebody that's just so innocent and going

swimming in a pool and not bothering nobody.

There's no reason for stuff like that.

Just the way that he buried her, this is a person

and a mind that has done this before.

There was no doubt in my mind

that there were other victims out there

that Hadden Clark was responsible for

killing and burying.

♪♪

On October 20th, I was at the bar in Olney

with several other investigators

from our shift and our sergeant.

Part of Laura's two-mile walk to...

[Richard] They had a television on in the bar,

and all of a sudden there was a headline that

a Harvard graduate was missing from her Bethesda home.

Sergeant looked at me and said,

"Contact the district detectives

and talk to them and see if they need any help."

Laura Houghteling was a young lady

that graduated from Harvard

and had returned home to live with her mom.

She had been missing for several days.

If you know anything about the disappearance of

Laura Bettis Houghteling, please call

Montgomery County Police.

She's six feet tall, 145 pounds, with brown eyes

and shoulder-length blonde hair.

[Susanna] There's her house.

I wonder if the people who live here know what happened.

My name is Susanna Quinn and Laura Houghteling

was one of my best friends.

I met Laura in the seventh grade and it was my first day

in a new school and I walked up the ramp and she was

sitting with a group of girls, which was rather intimidating

and she had this Dorothy Hamill haircut...

and this giant smile, and I looked at her and I said

"You should grow your hair it would look so much better,"

and she laughed, and we were best friends from that day on.

[Catherine] After she graduated, she didn't really know yet

what her career path would be.

So that's why she moved back and was living with her mom.

My name is Catherine Sheehan Bruno, and Laura Houghteling

was one of my best friends.

[Richard] She had just started this new job down in D.C.

On the 19th, Laura didn't show up for work.

[Catherine] It was very uncharacteristic of Laura

to not show up for work.

[Richard] So one of her co-workers called her brother

and said, "Hey, where's Laura?"

And he said, "I have no idea. She should be at work."

And he said, "No. She never showed up."

Warren Houghteling was Laura's brother,

and they were incredibly close.

[Richard] He went by the house. Laura's car was there.

And he went in the house.

Everything looked fine, with nothing disturbed.

Apparently, the house was secure.

So I went into a room. It was cold.

So I picked up her Harvard sweatshirt, and I put it on.

And I flopped on the bed.

I said, you know, there's her file cabinet.

Let me call her credit card company and pretend

that I'm her and ask where it was last used,

because maybe she bought a train ticket.

She had last used the credit card when

we bought shoes on Thursday.

I don't know, there was just a heavy

feeling of sadness in the air.

That...bad news was ahead.

[Catherine] Monday, we can't find her.

On Tuesday, Penny got back home,

and it became clearer and clearer

that something was truly wrong.

[Richard] Penny was an intelligent woman,

but Penny was a hard-headed woman.

I don't want to even say it on camera.

I thought it would --

I thought, I mean, I thought she was difficult.

I thought she was a difficult person.

[Richard] Penny didn't want to believe that anything

had happened to her daughter

and thought it would not be unusual for her to just...

hook up with some rich guy

and take off to the islands somewhere.

"I'm sure she's fine.

"You know, she's run off with some friends.

"She's just being a little spoiled brat

and not telling us."

It didn't seem plausible by her brother.

Her brother said "No."

[Susanna] Warren was worried. Warren was really concerned.

You know, when you grow up in sort of

a dysfunctional family,

I think you tend to bond with your siblings.

You know, they were asking Penny sort of

who has been around you and Laura

and who are the boyfriends,

who works in the house, those things.

[Richard] When we talked to Warren,

he mentioned that his mother had hired a gardener.

And the first night that Laura was missing,

Warren looks and here comes his truck.

His mom's gardener, he happened to be driving by

and Warren attempted to stop him to talk to him,

but instead of stopping, the gardener drove off fast.

He couldn't understand why he would do that.

That seemed very unusual.

The next morning, I come in,

and my sergeant's sitting in there.

So I filled him in on what happened,

And he said, "Well, who was the gardener?"

And I said, "It's Hadden Clark."

Penny was not aware of the Dorr investigation.

I don't believe she had any idea that he was

a suspect when she hired him.

[Catherine] Penny really loved to garden.

And she needed help with all the kinds of things

that go along with gardening,

and Hadden was available.

[Jim] From everything we could tell,

after Hadden was kicked out

of his brother's house, he was living out of his truck.

And he had erected his own little campsite with

a canvas tent and tools

and other things that he would keep around.

[Jim] My understanding is Penny Houghteling

had a very charitable attitude towards people.

She recognized Hadden Clark as somebody who was troubled,

and she had a lot of faith and trust in rehabilitating

this young man, giving him something to do.

[Edward] That's when we started in depth with Penny,

more about Hadden being the gardener, and she went

into more detail about how odd he was.

She would give him tasks to do in the backyard,

such as digging a flower bed.

And he would dig and dig and dig,

didn't know when to stop.

Hadden Clark did a variety of kind of odd jobs.

[Richard] Hadden was working at a bagel store.

May have been right inside the DC line called

What's a Bagel.

And he was actually a little bit of a well-known figure

because he had a courier service where he called

himself the Rockville Rocket.

He'd wear a Washington Capitals hockey jersey sometimes.

He'd roller skate, he'd bike.

If you're going up and down Rockville Pike, one of

the main thoroughfares,

you might see this guy.

[Richard] But looking in his background,

we found so many unusual things.

[Richard] So when he came out, he got a civilian job

with Navy Med in one of their cafeterias.

They had raw chicken out and they were going to

cook it.

And he put the raw chicken on the platter and put it on

the stove and then picked up the platter and drank

the chicken blood.

And his co-workers were like aghast, and they reported

it to the supervisor, and he was relieved of his job.

We knew that he was a suspect in Michele Dorr, but we wanted

to look and see what else has he done.

He was renting a room in Bethesda from a family.

Their daughter had been traveling abroad for a long

period of time.

They let Hadden rent out the basement, and they came to

him and they said, our daughter's finally coming

home from China, we're going to have to have you move out.

Hadden's reaction to that was crazy.

He dug into the drywall of her bedroom and put fish heads

into it before resealing it.

And so this family soon started to have this horrific

smell from the bedroom, which they couldn't figure out

for a long time until somebody came in and checked the walls

and found all of this destruction.

And once you check him out and find out what he's done

in the past, you become aware that there's something wrong.

We go back and talk to Penny.

[Edward] He had access to the shed,

and she kept the key to the house in the shed.

That was kind of suspicious, to say the least.

[Richard] When Penny found out that we were looking into him,

she was furious.

There's no way he would hurt her.

Leave him alone.

I had three jobs, sanitation, laundry,

and I was the lights man.

I kept walking by Hadden's cell and I'm like,

"What in the hell is that smell?"

So I went to his door, I said, "What are you doing in there?"

I opened his locker,

and there was 15 cartons of milk.

He would save them. It's hot.

He just let them swell up.

It just was rancid, man.

I said, "Why would you do that?"

He said, "It just reminds me of decayed bodies."

You know, we were fresh out of college.

We were at the start of our lives.

My brain just didn't go to, oh, something horrible

has happened.

You know, I almost thought of it as like, well, this is

a mystery, we're just gonna figure it out.

So the police said the best way for us to find her

is to figure out when she was last seen.

If you have a picture of her, you need to do flyers.

You want to get this on the news.

Warren and I started this sort of, like, sleuthing.

Yeah, we were trying to Scooby-Doo it,

making the phone calls,

-[phone ringing] -Hello?

walking the streets looking for evidence.

Like, we'll figure this out.

We had no idea the terror

and the evil that was in front of us.

Quite often, if there's a homicide, you will send

patrol out to interview people,

And that's when they talked to this Hispanic woman.

She told the police officer that she had seen Laura on

the morning that she disappeared.

And she said, Laura came out of the house, and we're waving

to her, and she ignores us.

You know, I thought that was odd.

Then we said, look, can you describe her for us?

And said, yeah, she had on slacks and a long jacket.

You know, that was interesting and had to be followed up on.

The investigation hit the news, and I got a call

from some psychic in Virginia.

The psychic said, "I don't know anything about this case.

"I don't know what's going on, but I have this feeling

you need to search this wooded area between two churches."

Well, it just so happened, there were two churches with

wooded area very close to where Laura was living.

I contacted the investigator who was working the case down

in Bethesda,

and I said, "Hey can you check this area?"

I came up here to check with the police officers that were

doing the search in these woods.

When I got here, I asked them how they were doing.

They told me that they found some women's shoes,

women's clothing and that they found also a pillowcase.

They believed that it would been here a long time because

they had stains on it, probably from leaves.

You've found things in the woods, and they have these

stains on them as the leaves deteriorate.

I said, really? Let me see the pillowcase.

Soon as he showed it to me, I knew it was not stained

by leaves.

That staining was blood.

The pillowcase was a very high quality pillowcase,

and it had a very unusual fringe on the end.

We went down to talk to mom.

I said, okay, can we check her bedroom?

Mom said, the bedroom was fine.

Absolutely fine. Look at it.

And she was somewhat irritated, went in and pulls

back the bedspread and said,

"Wait a minute, these aren't her sheets,

and this isn't her pillowcase."

[Edward] They were different, and it was a puzzle.

She did not know where they came from.

[Richard] And then she ripped back the sheet and said,

"The mattress pad is gone."

She said, "We always have a mattress pad

on our mattresses."

"Somebody has changed these sheets."

And that's when I asked about the pillowcase.

And I had a picture of it and showed her.

And I said, they're the same. She says, "Well, let me check.

She always loved those, so I have two sets."

Pulls it out, it was the identical

pillowcase with the fringe.

I contacted my sergeant and said, "Look, I need you to

"get the crime scene people down here.

And we're going to have to check this room."

When the crime scene people got there,

they used a chemical commonly referred to as luminol.

And they spray it on the mattress.

Luminol fluoresces when it's under a black light.

So we had to make sure the room was totally dark.

It was getting dark.

And they did the mixture and sprayed the luminol.

And then hit the lights, and...

all of a sudden, it luminesced.

It was like, "Oh my god."

[Edward] It was covered with blood,

and you could see where a hand was...

...pulled off the bed.

You knew that this girl was dead.

♪♪

[light clicks]

After we saw the illumination

from the luminol on the mattress,

there was enough blood to suspect the worst.

So at that point, of course, we said,

hey, this is a homicide.

And then we took...

like, a lamp, we took hairbrushes,

different things that belonged to her.

So that was all taken and analyzed.

They mentioned to us that the hairbrush had

Laura Houghteling's hair in there,

but also found a synthetic hair

and didn't think anything of it.

We went out and notified Penny and Warren

that we believed that it was a good possibility

that Laura was murdered in that room.

Warren just broke down. He just totally lost it.

And I remember Penny just, she just looked at us

and said, "Uh-huh"...

which we were kind of shocked at her reaction.

[Susanna] I came home, I walked in the door, and there were,

like, 17 messages on the answering machine.

[answering machine beeps]

As I was playing the first one, which was a friend of

mine saying, "Call me, don't call anyone else,

call me first."

The phone rang, and it was Penny.

And she said to me, "Susanna, We know that Laura

is no longer living in her body -- she's dead."

I hung up the phone and, you know, years of watching

soap operas and watching TV where people freak out

and throw themselves, you know, downstairs

and at walls in grief, I thought,

you know, that's so ridiculous.

You know, that's not gonna be me.

And I, for probably the first and last time in my life,

went bananas, you know?

I just kept saying, "First my mother, now Laura,

why is this happening?"

In one minute,

all security, stability, safety that I felt

in the world, my community, with my friends

was completely shattered.

Our best friend, we are 22-year-old,

23-year-old young people, and our best friend has just

been ripped out of our life.

All that promise and all that beauty

and all that love is gone.

I had chills.

For years, I thought, 24 hours after she was killed, I lay

there on the mattress soaked with her blood.

After that, we decided we had to find Hadden.

Every police district has what they call a SAT unit.

It's a special assignment team.

And we notified them that we needed to find

Hadden Clark.

[dog barking]

And they did on East West Highway in Silver Spring.

And they stopped him and notified us that they had

him down there.

So we responded down there right away.

[siren wailing]

That was my first encounter with Hadden Clark,

and something I'll never forget.

[camera clicking]

It was a small Datsun pickup truck, and the back of it was

a mattress, and it was just full of stuff.

And I walked up to talk to Hadden.

And I told Hadden, I said, "Laura is missing,

"and Penny is really concerned,

and we need your help to try to find her."

It was at that point Hadden goes...

"Oh, my god. I just wanna die."

And he went down on one knee.

We ended up taking him in, and that's where

we told him about the bloody pillowcase.

And he had tears in his eyes.

[Edward] We tried talking to him for hours.

And he...

didn't give us any concrete information at all.

We didn't have enough probable cause to arrest him,

so we allowed him to leave.

Detective Fallin got a search warrant for his truck.

[Richard] In the pickup truck, he keeps a journal,

and the journal would have the date and the time when

he would buy $10 worth of gas, and then when he would buy $4

worth of power bars.

He kept track of every dime that he spent.

We secured a search warrant for a storage bin

in Kensington, Maryland.

And went in, and Hadden Clark is meticulous.

He's neat.

He's obsessed with having everything, you know,

lined up.

We found his checkbook, and we found a receipt

that was to a hardware store.

And he had bought duct tape, bailing twine,

and he had in the notation section in the checkbook,

he had the name Laura.

We felt we had reasonable suspicion, but we didn't have

any probable cause to arrest him at that point.

[Richard] We're sitting there, we're trying to build the case

against him, but we don't have evidence that he did anything.

And I just wanted to rattle him and to get him upset that

maybe he would do something to lead us to where she was.

So Hadden had a voicemail.

People could leave messages for him.

It's a shot in the dark.

Just sitting at my desk, probably midnight,

I picked up the phone and dialed the number.

As soon as it went to voicemail,

[machine beeps]

I said,

[whispering] Hadden. Hadden...

This is Laura.

Hadden, I need your help.

I need you to help me.

Hadden, you can't just leave me out here.

I need to be buried.

I need to be buried, Hadden.

Please, I need you to tell them.

I can't be at peace without you doing that.

Hadden, please do this for me.

Hadden.

[Richard] When you're hitting a dead end

in the investigation, you go back

and review everything in the file

to see what you've missed.

And lo and behold, there was this Hispanic lady

that saw Laura leaving the house

on the day Laura would have ended up missing.

And when you look at that and you're starting to piece

timeline together, it doesn't fit.

She was already dead.

And everybody's thinking, well, the woman doesn't know

what the hell she's talking about.

We call Penny and say, look, we're trying

to confirm something here.

We wanted to see if her slacks were still in

her closet and is her trench coat still there?

She said, "Laura's 6 foot 1. She don't wear slacks."

"She's tall. She wears dresses.

She does not own any slacks."

Is the trench coat still there?

"She doesn't own a trench coat.

"A tall woman's not going to wear a long trench coat.

"You're going to wear a shorter coat.

"You want to look shorter.

So, I'll tell you right now, that was not her..."

That's Hadden.

Never, never happened, never happened.

I don't know about anybody making him,

but he was caught several times

taking intimate articles from my mom's dresser.

I mean, playing dress up is just a thing.

It doesn't mean anything necessarily.

So we went back and did searches in the storage

facility, and we found all of these high heels.

And he had bras and falsies.

Found out that he did have slacks, a whole bunch of

ladies slacks that would match.

And he had a bunch of wigs.

He had red wigs, black wigs, brown wigs.

And he had a blonde wig.

So we took the blonde wig.

And when they examined the wig,

it matched

the synthetic hair that was found in Laura's brush

in her bedroom.

So then you go, okay, here we are.

[chuckles]

This is Hadden leaving the house.

So why would he do that?

He's already murdered her, he's already carried

her out of there.

Well, he had to go back to house

to clean up the mess, make the bed.

Then, to cover his tracks.

he leaves at the time he knows she would normally leave.

But he wears slacks and a trench coat and a wig.

But still, it's not enough to arrest him.

This guy was seen walking out of Laura's house

dressed like her?

Come on, man.

Is he evil?

He's not only evil, he's very cunning.

He talked about growing up, but it was, like,

really, really weird.

He would say they dressed him in women's clothes

from the time he was little.

"They treated me like a girl."

"They even told me, if you have to go to the bathroom,

you sit down, because only boys stand up."

And if it's true, that had to be a lot on one kid.

We felt we had reasonable suspicion,

but we didn't have any

probable cause to arrest him at that point.

Sue Ballou, the chemist, was still dealing

with the pillowcase

[camera clicks]

in our lab upstairs.

When Sue was examining the pillowcase,

she takes out, like,

a little piece of the blood to test it.

And she mentions,

"I think there's a fingerprint in the blood."

I look at it and say, that looks like a toe print.

So then we packed it up.

We take it down to the regional lab that

examines fingerprints.

A short time later, I got a call from the lab.

They said, "Hey, this is a thumbprint."

And so they then ran it through the system,

and it comes back as Hadden Clark's thumbprint.

It was the kind of fingerprint that his fingers would have

been in that blood.

So now we've got probable cause to arrest him.

[Edward] They found him sleeping in his truck

at the Mormon temple

in Silver Spring in the parking lot.

When he was arrested, he was sleeping with

a teddy bear.

And that's where we took him into custody.