Original subtitles

So I was working evenings in headquarters, and that's when

one of the detectives from major crimes came up

and asked if I was busy.

My name's Elizabeth Cornett.

I was a Montgomery County police officer.

The detective said to me, "Liz, we're gonna be arresting

Hadden Clark, and we want you to help do the interview."

And I was caught very much off guard.

[Edward] We were trying to figure out a strategy,

how to approach him.

So Lieutenant Thieman decided to get two female detectives

to go home and put on some

provocative dress, something --

something sexy to try to get his attention.

It was an opportunity for me to shed that uniform

and put on my nice clothes and dress nice.

I felt very put together.

I don't want to sound like I'm being like, "Oh, they thought

I was good-looking." It wasn't that, OK?

No, I would never answer that question.

I thought I was [bleep] amazing-looking.

No, no.

I felt that I was put together fitting what the FBI had asked

of me, so...

[Richard] This guy is a serial murderer.

[echoing] Serial murderer.

-[Jack] I think he's insane. -[echoing] Insane.

He thought I was Jesus for real.

[echoing] 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."

[man] He is just evil incarnate.

[echoing] Incarnate.

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

-We're gonna kill him. -[echoing] We're gonna kill him.

We never saw any remorse for Laura or Michele.

[Richard] Before we go in, the state's attorney

and our captain get Ed Tarney and I and say to us,

"Get him to talk."

We don't give a damn if you violate his rights.

Do whatever.

Get him to talk.

We need to find out where the body is.

[Elizabeth] And then we were put in the room with him

while the detectives were outside watching

and monitoring and recording this.

He's maybe a buck 40 ["140 pounds"] soaking wet.

He's kind of effeminate.

So we thought if something was to happen,

we would be fine containing him.

That night, he asked for a lawyer...

...numerous times.

He asked for an attorney maybe 200 times.

Do you consider Penny your friend, Hadden?

I want an attorney. I want an attorney.

And we just kept saying, no.

[Edward] We just ignored his pleas for a lawyer.

We knew if he said anything incriminating,

we couldn't use it in court.

But if he gave us some indication where Laura

might be,

It would have been well worth it.

I've been around a lot of criminals, a lot of

people with some really interesting backgrounds.

Sitting in there with him and watching his behavior,

I expected his head to spin around.

Oh, my God, is he, like, possessed?

Like, why isn't he talking?

What is he... what's he thinking?

He was just creepy.

He was not anyone that you'd want to be in a room with

alone on the outside world.

And they handed me a teddy bear.

And this teddy bear had on a bathing suit that was

a replica of what Michele Dorr had on.

And they said, "Take it in there.

"Do not let him touch it.

"But I want you to hold it in your lap.

"And I want you to make the little arms move.

And I want to see what his reaction is."

His eyes got huge, and he just smiled from ear to ear

and just smirked.

It was just at that point, I really felt like,

he's not gonna say anything.

We rotated detectives in and out of the interview room

to try to get a different persona in there.

Any time we asked him something about Laura Houghteling

or something specific, he would just smile.

And it wasn't a smile of acknowledging he did it.

It was just a smile. He just smiled.

It was hard to read why.

We interrogated Hadden Clark

approximately three and a half hours.

So we really were just trying to find that one key that

would open him up and have him talking.

[Elizabeth] I knew Hadden Clark liked women's underwear,

so I wore a Christian Dior silk slip that was really pretty

and very detailed -- I felt confident.

I looked like a woman. I was dressed like a woman.

And I felt like if they wanted two policewomen to come in

there that were more effeminate-looking,

more female, that Paula and I could do that.

I felt I looked professional.

I felt like I represented women well.

I actually raised my skirt, and I showed him this slip,

and his eyes got really big.

[Elizabeth] And he just focused in on it.

He had no interest in girls at all.

We were hoping he'd -- he had an interest and maybe

that's why he took Laura, but that apparently

wasn't the reason.

And after we exhausted everything we could,

Detective Fallin and I went in and tried.

He didn't like to be touched.

[Richard] So I'd reach over and rub my finger on his side.

OK?

And he'd pull away from me, and I'd just kind of

tickle him a little bit.

And it just -- it really messed his head up.

Trying to get him to get mad and say something or just say,

"All right, I'll talk to you." Anything.

The dynamics were quite interesting to see how

they were trying to get him to talk.

We tried several different ways to get him

to open up to us.

I would say we wanted to break him.

[laughter]

[Edward] And we knew anything he said,

we couldn't use against him in court,

but we wanted to be sure that Laura was dead.

So we just took the moral high road and kept at him.

We got a lot of criticism for it.

But, you know, what are you gonna do?

We thought we were getting to him, and he just --

he was smarter than you think he is.

He knew what we were doing.

He wasn't gonna say a word, so...

Finally, it was going nowhere, and I sent him to

the detention center.

He's not stupid. He's just manipulative.

A couple of days after we had arrested Hadden Clark,

I was sitting at my desk, and the phone rang.

I picked it up, and I was told that Hadden's mother was

at the front desk.

Oh, [bleep], he's told her we were mean to him

and all this stuff.

And now we got to listen to her run her mouth.

And OK, bring her in.

She's an older lady, probably in her 70s.

She comes into the interview room.

We sit down with her, expecting to get

our butts chewed.

And she looked at us and said, "I'll do anything I can to help

"you to keep him in jail.

"He has tried to kill me several times, and I am

absolutely scared to death of him."

Then she went on to explain to us what

had happened with Bradfield.

[Geoff] Brad was my oldest brother.

He was born in 1950. Hadden was born in 1952.

I was born in 1955.

He was brilliant -- beyond brilliant.

I'm hoping to helpfully help them understand

why bad [bleep] happens. -Bad [bleep]. Yeah.

What, are you in charge of understanding

why bad [bleep] happens?

No, bad [bleep] happened to me, so...

Oh, what?

-Are you gonna tell me? -I haven't ever told you

that I have two brothers in jail for murder?

Midnight patrol is probably one of the better shifts for

young cops to work.

That's when the crooks are always out.

My name's Tim Morgan.

I started as a reserve police officer with Las Gatos

in 1979.

We were told that Union City was looking for a missing

person that was supposed to be headed to meet someone.

She never arrived. Her name was Patricia Mak.

And at about 6:15 in the morning,

I received a dispatch call to respond to 135 Riviera Drive,

apartment 241,

on a attempt suicide.

-As I got there, -[pounding noises]

I thought I heard somebody say, "Come in."

And the door handle was unlocked.

I saw a large amount of what appeared to be blood.

I could see the victim of this attempted suicide.

[indistinct radio chatter]

There was wounds on his wrists, on his neck.

[indistinct radio chatter]

There was one knife.

He had stabbed himself in the stomach right around

the belly button.

He said his name was Bradfield Clark.

Paramedics arrived, and they went up to give

advanced first aid to this person.

I step out into the kitchen -- the other officer had arrived --

and he shows me -- points to a Union City

Police Department card on the kitchen counter.

Of course, we knew that Union City

was looking for a missing person

that was supposed to be headed toward Los Gatos.

When I ask him where she's at, he makes the comment,

"She's in the trunk of my car,"

which was a red Datsun with a Massachusetts plate.

And Detective Yorks responded to the scene.

I'm Michael Yorks.

I was a homicide detective for the town of Los Gatos in 1984.

We walked over together. I see dry blood on the bumper.

In the trunk of the car, there were two large, black

garbage bags.

I remember one of the officers saying, "Oh my God,

she's in pieces."

[Michael] There was arms and legs inside the bags.

We see a Styrofoam cooler

opened at the top, and there was her eyes.

They're bright blue. They look right at me.

[Edward] We went to visit Hadden one time.

He had pieces of hot dog taped to the ceiling,

saying he was curing the meat,

and he would leave it up there for weeks.

He'd put liver up to his window.

It started to have a little fuzz.

[straining noises]

[Edward] It was just disgusting.

And then he'd pull them down and eat them.

[laughs quietly]

Everything he did was disgusting.

Oh, he had no problem telling them about how he ate

body parts.

And then later on, we found out about Brad.

[echoing] Found out about Brad.

And then paramedics are getting Brad out of the apartment.

I asked, "How do you know Patricia?"

He'd moved to Tymshare, and that Patricia used to

work there.

It was a tech company in Cupertino.

He was characterized as a computer geek.

[Tim] He was quitting Tymshare.

He had told Patricia that he was going to be going back

to the East Coast and said, "Hey, you and your husband want

to come over for dinner?"

The husband couldn't go for one reason or another.

My understanding, they had done some heavy

petting in the past. -[female laughter]

I think Brad was hoping to have another liaison.

They were having some drinks,

and Brad began to flirt with Patricia.

And he says he made some lewd comments that

angered Patricia.

He says, "I slapped her back,

"and then she tried to hit me with a closed fist.

I hit her in the chest with a closed fist."

[short yell]

And she started to scream, so he began to choke her,

until she wasn't moving any longer.

He dragged her to the bathtub. He had to get rid of the body.

That's when he decided that he was gonna dismember her.

I started thinking, you can't cut through bone

with a knife.

So I said, "How'd you cut her up?"

He says, "Oh, haven't you ever butchered deer before?

You don't cut through bone, you cut through joint."

He said, "I would cut some, and then I would twist,

"and then I would cut more, and I'd twist until I got

"through the tendons and everything else, and then

the piece would come off."

And he kind of chuckled about it.

He laughed. It was like,

uh, wow, gosh, you didn't know that?

He moved her to his closet.

I later learned that Patricia was reported missing by

her husband the next day.

So Union City Police Department came over.

They searched for her to see if she was in the apartment.

And she was, but they didn't find her.

She was inside the closet.

[indistinct radio chatter]

But what cop would ever think that she's dismembered

and sitting in the closet?

That would never have occurred to me, never.

And after the Union City police had come,

they left a business card in case he heard anything from her.

[Tim] I don't think it was a true suicide attempt.

He is very meticulous, so he knew

exactly where to cut.

So if he cut himself in the neck, didn't go deep

enough to hit the arteries, and cut himself in the wrist,

not deep enough to hit the arteries, he wasn't really

looking at trying to kill himself.

I think he knew he was going to get caught when

the Union City Police Department came over.

I think it was to gain

that portion of sympathy that he says, "I just can't live

with myself after doing this."

And that's what he wants people to believe.

But in my opinion, that's not the case.

The autopsy was done at the coroner's office,

and one of the detectives there said that there was

a nipple missing from the victim.

They found out there was one nipple missing.

There was a bite mark on her chest directly where

the nipple was taken from.

Brad told us later on that he had

bit Patricia on the breast.

And while he was dismembering her, had to remove that piece

of breast so that they couldn't identify him

from teeth marks.

We went in search for the nipple,

[indistinct radio chatter]

but we couldn't find it -- we never did find that nipple.

So what do you do with it? Where'd it go?

Wasn't in the bags.

We don't know what happened to it.

He would not answer that question about the nipples.

So we assumed that he ate it.

[Jack] He did tell me he buried a bucket

in Massachusetts.

And he had told me, he said, "All my souvenirs are

in that bucket."

I think maybe that might be worth looking at.

[Tim] We never found the piece of breast.

We don't know what happened to it.

There's some speculation that it was eaten.

What I read was he killed her, cut her breasts off,

put it on a barbecue grill, cut other parts of her off,

and he ate them.

People that commit these types of crimes, that's the ultimate

way of taking power from somebody is by

cannibalizing them.

Now, is there evidence supporting that?

No, we didn't pump his stomach,

but that's a speculation -- he is a womanizer.

That power, that manipulation, that control, I think that's

what part of what Brad was looking for.

It was unusual to cut up a person and mutilate them.

So I felt that maybe he had other murders that he'd been

responsible for.

So I did further investigation.

Bradfield Clark was a trainer for the company in Cupertino,

so he traveled the country.

So I sent teletypes to those counties and to those police

departments, asking if they had similar homicide with

a person that had been cut up in pieces.

And I found that there were six other victims throughout

the country, but they'd never been solved.

I don't think DNA was big back then, so they didn't have

anything to tie Bradfield Clark into

the other homicides.

So I attempted to interview Bradfield Clark, but he had

his lawyer present.

And as soon as I posed the question,

"Are you responsible for other murders?"

He evoked his right not to talk.

So I never was able to get anything out of

Bradfield Clark.

But I think he could have been responsible for

more than one murder than Patricia Mak.

[Tim] Brad pled guilty to second-degree murder,

which gave him 15 years to life,

and three years for the corpse mutilation.

[Jim] In my experience, I don't remember any other family

where siblings were engaged in completely

unrelated homicides.

Sometimes there might be an event where two brothers

are there for a single homicide, but to have a guy on

the West Coast engaging in kind of

a Hannibal Lecter-style murder out there...

...and a guy on the East Coast engaged in at least a couple

of murders,

there's some psychotic stuff going on in this household.

When I found out about Brad, I thought to myself,

what is wrong with this family?

I don't care if they did come over on the Mayflower

or wherever they came from.

The stuff that him and his brother went through,

I think Geoffrey was probably the only normal one out

of the brothers.

Ooh, you want some chicken, yeah?

Ready for dinner?

Yeah, here we go.

I have the privilege of living with my three dogs.

Blessings on our meal.

All done. Good boy, yeah.

Good boy.

Even though they aren't officially support animals,

they are all indeed support animals.

I'm fairly certain without them,

I wouldn't be here anymore.

Of course, the initial reaction upon the reality of my brothers

and the situation I find myself in is to hide it,

hide, hide, hide.

And I realized that that didn't work.

So I do not hide from the fact that I have had this horrible

past that I have to deal with.

It was very clear from a young age that there was something

very not right with Hadden and his perception

of the world.

Hadden did not enter the birthing canal in

the proper manner.

The standard procedure at the time was to use forceps.

So they reached in and grabbed his head with these forceps

and kind of yanked him out.

It was one of these two things, either through

the lack of oxygen to his brain during the process

or the actual physical damage caused by the clamping of

the head to move him out.

And pathways that work

in one way in a quote-unquote normal,

undamaged brain,

get screwed up.

And so he did not understand that his action could cause

feelings in other people in the same way things happened

to him -- that was a disconnect for him.

And one of the best examples of that is

we're out riding our bikes.

I am 9 years old, he's 11 or 12.

I'm on the cusp, cusp of being able to ride no-handed.

This is going to be such an incredible thing because

today it's gonna click, I can tell.

And we're riding around, he's behind me, and I get it.

And I'm going along, and I'm like,

"Hadden, it's happening!"

He races up,

cuts me off.

[groaning] Ow!

[Geoff] Blood everywhere.

A lady from across the street happened to see this.

She had to yell at Hadden and instruct him to go home

and get my parents, because he was busy checking

out the bike to make sure the bike didn't get hurt.

So my mother was a typical homemaker who had

a few outside activities, but she had all

the characteristics of an alcoholic.

She hid her liquor.

She'd pour it into her orange juice early in the morning

and be drunk before noon.

My father

was diagnosed with a level of manic-depressive

and he was on lithium.

I believe that anger management was a theme

throughout his life.

I remember one time when my dad got home...

Boys! Your mother told you to be prepared!

...and he took us three boys upstairs,

and we got belted.

He beat the [bleep] out of us.

But for every time there was that, physical stuff, there were

20 or 30 or 50 times where it was just the screaming,

horrible, abusive treatment of a child.

[Edward] I was talking to Flavia Clark, Hadden's mother.

She was telling me about her husband, who would get up

in the middle of the night and go eat raw hamburger,

which, struck us as odd.

Hadden told me that he learned everything from his dad by

sneaking around and watching.

I said, "What do you mean by that?"

He said, "I came home one time when they thought I was

"in school, and I watched him,

and he murdered this girl."

Hadden told me how he had walked in

and saw his father,

[choking noises]

murder this girl,

and I said, "What did you do?"

He said, "I watched for a little bit, and then I crept

out of the room."

I guess in his twisted mind, if it was OK for dad to do it,

I've had these feelings, so why am I not doing it?

I can see that he would say my dad was violent.

I could see that he would say my dad had taught him

things about

hunting or things like that.

[Geoff] But this is a person who can say a lie to themselves

a few times, and it becomes the truth.

Hadden is a master of that.

He's structuring the story with

his own little pieces of reality

so it's not his fault.

It can't be his fault.

It's always somebody else's fault.

Always somebody else's problem.

It's never because he did the things.

[voices overlapping]

[overlapping voices intensify]

[executive producer speaking]

[Hadden speaking]

[echoing] Am really a nice person

[Desiree] I know Hadden's a murderer,

I know his brother Brad's a murderer,

but I don't have any information whatsoever

whether the father was a murderer or anything other

than an upstanding citizen.

[Geoff] With Brad, I truly believe what happened was

an aberration that would not be likely to recur.

Whereas with Hadden, there was a true evil in him.

[Geoff] After Hadden, I realized

I had to separate myself from them.

So I haven't talked to either of them

in well over a decade -- I don't know if they're alive.

I don't know what prison they're in.

I don't know anything, but I can't care about them.

What I do do is I routinely cry for their victims.

And I don't ever know when it's gonna happen.

[reporter] A bond hearing is set for today for the man accused of

murdering 23-year-old Laura Houghteling of Bethesda.

Over the weekend, Montgomery County Police

arrested Hadden Erving Clark, a 40-year-old homeless man.

[Richard] We had no body.

So you can charge somebody, and you can be convicted

without a body in Maryland.

But it was certainly a lot better to have the body.

-[gun cocking noise] -[mimics gun cocking noise]

[Edward] We learned there had been

a plea agreement struck where

Clark would give up the location of Laura's body

for a plea to second-degree murder.

[Richard] Hadden Clark and his attorney would take one of

the assistant state's attorneys out and show them

where Laura Houghteling was buried.

[Jim] The arrangement in the plea

was for him to plead guilty to

second-degree murder, face as much as 30 years of

imprisonment for that.

[Catherine] I understood why they took

the plea that they took.

Jurors are unpredictable.

And without a body, it can be very difficult to

get a conviction.

The fact that it led to Laura's body was a really good

thing for her mother, her brother,

and the rest of us.

[reporter] A Harvard graduate's body was found last night,

buried in a shallow grave in North Bethesda.

I remember thinking I'm glad that her mother can bury her,

but nothing felt good about it.

I never felt any relief from anything.

His actions have just created ripples through so many

people's lives.

Think about Michele Dorr's father, who was ruined.

Geoffrey Clark, who's ruined.

He did so much to help put my life in a downward spiral.

And I don't know how to forgive that.

And it can damage you into your core person.

And I'm trying very hard to get past that break

from knowing that...

I don't have to be tied to the family I was born into.

Hadden told me, "My brother Geoffrey made me very angry."

I said, "Do you think it's right for you to get

"angry at your brother?

Your brother your brother hasn't done anything to you."

And he was like,

"Yeah, but he put me out."

Hadden told me that if he ever

got out that the first person

he's gonna kill is Geoffrey.

And I said, "Man,

"you're thinking about killing your own brother?

You know that's not the way to get to heaven."

[Richard] Hadden Clark had proven to us that he was not

some sort of opportunistic murderer.

He, in fact, could fit the definition of

being a serial killer.