Authors: Daniel Diehl
When Hadden arrived at his brother’s house on Sudley Road his entire life consisted of a few clothes, his prized collection of chef ’s knives and tools – which he kept securely locked in a metal toolbox – and the old Datsun pickup truck he was driving. Still, he settled in and tried to get on with Geoff, Marcia and their three kids. He even got a good job at an exclusive country club in nearby Chevy Chase, Maryland. But true to his established pattern, things did not remain calm for long.
This time, however, the problems were not at work, but at home. On one occasion Hadden was picked up for shoplifting ladies’ underwear at a local department store and the incident did nothing to endear him to his brother and sister-in-law who had tried their best to ignore his transvestism. But because he was so ‘different’, his nieces and nephews would not leave their Uncle Hadden alone. They thought he was ‘weird’ and six-year-old Eliza called him ‘retarded’ just as his father had done all those years ago. Hadden developed a seething hatred for the children and all their obnoxious little friends. He got his revenge on the little wretches by masturbating in front of them. Obviously, they told their parents. It was the last straw. Geoff told Hadden he had to go. Furious, Hadden found a new place to live and began moving his things out of Geoff ’s house. He dragged out the process just to be infuriating, taking a few pieces at a time when he left for work, dropping them off at his new place in nearby Bethesda and then repeating the process the next day. By 31 May 1986 he only had one box still to be picked up.
It was not even an hour past noon but it was already hot – the kind of itchy, sultry hot that makes people short tempered – and when Hadden got to Geoff ’s house to find everyone out he was furious. The door was unlocked so he could get his belongings, but no one was there to say goodbye. As
he stood in the driveway fuming, he saw a little girl in a pink bathing suit walking across the lawn towards him. He recognised her. Her name was Michele Dorr, the kid with the stutter. She lived two houses away with her divorced father, Carl, but only came to stay with him at weekends and then she and Hadden’s niece Eliza hung out together almost constantly.
Michele had been playing outside in her plastic turtle-shaped swimming pool while her dad was inside watching television. Like all children, she got bored and decided to wander down to see if Eliza was at home. ‘Is Eliza here?’ she asked, staring up at Hadden.
In a flash Hadden knew how he would get even with his brother’s snotty-nosed kids. He told Michele that Eliza was up in her room playing and it would be OK if she went up. As she skipped towards the door, Hadden walked to the back of his Datsun and raised the lid on the cap. Opening the toolbox, he stared at the collection of knives. There were boning knives, butcher’s knives, fleshing knives, carving knives, filleting knives and meat cleavers – all sharpened to a razor edge. He selected a knife with a 12-inch blade, looked at it for a minute, and walked into the house and up the stairs towards his niece’s bedroom.
Michele must have been surprised when he walked in on her, but he moved too quickly for her to react. He threw her on to the floor and slashed twice across her tiny chest, opening up a horrid V-shaped wound. When he thought she was going to scream, Hadden jammed one hand across her mouth. Imagine his surprise when she bit down on the fleshy part of his palm. How dare she? In blind fury he plunged the knife into her throat and blood began spurting everywhere. Hadden was suddenly confused. Which should he do first – rape the tiny, dying child, or clean up the mess? He decided on rape but, frustratingly, couldn’t get an erection. Clean up the blood.
From his truck he gathered all the rags he could find and his old Navy duffle bag. On his way back through the house he
stopped in the kitchen long enough to grab several large black garbage bags. He crammed Michele’s limp body into a trash bag and then into the duffle bag, mopped the blood from the floor and jammed the rags, along with everything else that was bloodstained, into a second bag. When the room looked as normal as he could make it, he checked his watch. In twenty minutes he was due at work, and he had to hurry. This was not the day to be late. He stuffed the child-laden duffle into the back of the Datsun and roared off.
After work he drove to a nearby naval hospital to have a cut on his hand looked at and bandaged. Had it happened at work, or earlier at his brother’s house? He couldn’t remember. By the time he finished in casualty it was almost midnight, just time to take care of one last piece of business before going home. He drove in the direction of Baltimore until he came to a wooded area. There he stopped, pulled the duffle bag, a shovel and an electric torch from the back of the truck, walked a few feet into the undergrowth and started digging a hole. He was about to throw the body in and cover it up, when he paused. Killing the child had been a means to get revenge on Eliza – but didn’t he owe himself some pleasure, too? He went back to the Datsun, selected one of his fleshing knives and sliced off a nice, choice, juicy cut of Michele Dorr. Then he buried the body, covering the freshly turned earth with a discarded mattress he found lying a few feet away. Finally, Hadden picked up the piece of meat he was going to cook for dinner, got into his truck and drove home to his new apartment.
While Hadden Clark was calmly cooking up meals at the country club, Carl Dorr had been looking for his daughter. At first he was not particularly worried when she was not in her little swimming pool; he assumed, correctly, that she had wandered over to Eliza’s to play. But when she didn’t come home for supper he decided he had better look for her. His first stop was Geoff Clark’s house. The family were all together having a
barbecue and none of them, including six-year-old Eliza, had seen her all day. Dorr scoured the neighbourhood before his rising anxiety sent him to the police station. He said he had last seen his daughter around 2.10 in the afternoon and that she had disappeared sometime between then and 5pm. The police would carry out a full investigation but were instantly convinced that Carl Dorr had done away with his own daughter. Tragically, the assumption was a lot more than police stupidity. In the vast majority of missing children cases a parent is ultimately found to be responsible. In consequence, while some of the officers grilled Carl Dorr, others spent the next day in a door-to-door search of the area around the Dorr home. One of the people they questioned was Hadden Clark.
Hadden was back at Geoff ’s house working on his truck when Officer Wayne Farrell called in. The police had already heard about Geoff Clark’s weird brother and he seemed to be someone that should be questioned, so Farrell took him in to the station. Hadden was calm at first and said that he had been at Geoff ’s for a few minutes the previous day but had been at work about a quarter to three. Later, his time card at the country club confirmed that he had arrived at 2.46. The police thought it would have been nearly impossible for anyone to have done away with the child, ditched the body and driven from Sudley Road to the Chevy Chase Country Club between 2.10 and 2.46. But just to make certain Hadden was telling the truth they continued to question him. When they showed him a photo of Michele he broke down in tears, bolted out of the examination room, ran to the toilet and began throwing up violently. The cops were hot on his heels. While Hadden was still retching into the bowl they fired one question after another at him – shouting into the toilet cubicle. They pressed Michele’s photo in front of his face. Had he seen her? What had he done with her? Hadden insisted he could not remember. Maybe he had done something to her. He just didn’t know.
After hammering away at Clark for hours they finally gave up. There was little doubt the guy was crazy as a loon, but even Superman could not have committed murder, hidden the body and made it to the country club in forty-one minutes. So they turned their attention back to Carl Dorr.
The police inquiry turned up a lot of circumstantial evidence that made Carl look guilty. He and his wife had had a turbulent marriage; on more than one occasion he had beaten her and threatened that if she left him he would kidnap Michele. Recently he had been in court with his ex-wife about overdue child support payments. Carl voluntarily took a polygraph test, was hypnotised and given sodium pentothal (truth serum) and passed every test, but it made no impression on the Silver Spring Police Department. Already shattered by his divorce and the disappearance of his daughter, under the pressure of the incessant, day-after-day questioning, Carl Dorr slowly became irrational.
Medieval torture-masters learned long ago that a person subjected to enough pain – either physical or emotional – would eventually say anything. This is exactly what happened to Carl Dorr. He never confessed to hurting Michele, but he did lose all grip on reality. He hallucinated; he thought the people on television were talking about him; he even believed that if he found his daughter – even if she were dead – he could bring her back to life. Finally, he was committed to a psychiatric ward for a seventy-two hour observation. The minute he was released the police picked him up and started the harassment all over again. In all truth, there was something Carl Dorr was not telling the police. The last time he had looked in on Michele had been noon, not 2.10 as he claimed. He was simply ashamed that he had neglected her for so long. That tiny lie had given Hadden Clark the extra time needed to appear innocent.
For Hadden, things were now going downhill fast. He lost his job at the country club and was thrown out of his apartment in
Bethesda, vandalising it before he left. Separating himself from human company entirely, he lived in the woods in the back of his Datsun. Sometimes he picked up odd jobs, mostly gardening, through a local homeless shelter; otherwise he kept to himself. More than once he checked himself into a mental hospital long enough to get a prescription for Halidol, and then scurried back to the woods. During one of his psychiatric evaluations, the examining doctor wrote: ‘He is a potential danger to himself through poor judgement and self-defeating behaviour.’ The danger was far greater to others than to Hadden, who even told one of his doctors ‘I think I have a split personality.’
In 1989 he was arrested for having walked into a church during choir practice – dressed in women’s clothes – and having stolen fifteen women’s handbags and coats from the cloakroom. Most of the charges were dropped in exchange for a guilty plea. He should have received a three-months to two-year sentence but, instead, a sympathetic judge and public defender let him off with probation, despite the fact that he was already on probation in two states. The public defender, Donald Salzman, even wrote a letter for Hadden to give to any policeman who might arrest him in future. It was, in essence, a request that he should not be held responsible for his actions because he had serious mental problems. Of all the things that might have been done for, or to, Hadden Clark, this was the worst possible scenario for society at large, and it didn’t take Hadden long to prove it.
The people at the homeless centre soon got him a job gardening for Penny Houghteling, a psychotherapist who lived in Bethesda. Penny believed she should ‘practise what she preached’ and as a professional who dealt with people with mental and emotional problems that meant giving them a little work when possible. Hadden worked hard at her lawn and garden and she was nice to him – in no time at all he fixated on her as a substitute mother. This did not mean he hesitated to steal from her, particularly small items of her clothing. When Penny
suspected Hadden of the thefts she confronted him. In response he lashed out at her verbally. His reaction should have set off alarm bells in her mind but, as on so many earlier occasions, Hadden got away with a shrug and a slap on the wrist. In spite of the occasional bump in their relationship, everything moved along relatively smoothly until the day Penny’s daughter, Lisa, came home after graduating from Harvard.
Twenty-three-year-old Lisa Houghteling was not only exceptionally bright, she was a stunning 6-foot tall beauty who had everything in the world going for her. Hadden was immediately, insanely jealous. Why had this stranger come between him and Penny? As he had done six years earlier when he taught Eliza a lesson by killing Michele, he would teach Penny a lesson by getting rid of Lisa. On Sunday night, 18 October – while Penny was away at a conference – Hadden drove to the Houghteling house, took the spare key from its hiding place in the garden shed and let himself in. He was wearing women’s clothes, most of them Penny’s. Under his woman’s raincoat he carried a .22 calibre rifle.
Creeping up to Lisa’s room, he prodded her awake with the rifle and proceeded to terrorise her, insisting that he was really Lisa and she was an impostor. To show her what lying would get her, he was going to take her out to the woods where she could meet his friend Hadden. He covered her mouth with duct tape, but in his frenzy he covered her nose as well. When she passed out from lack of oxygen, he grabbed a pair of scissors and began hacking away at the tape, severing an artery in her neck. Within minutes Lisa Houghteling bled to death. Heaving the body into the back of his trusty Datsun, Hadden took Lisa to his hideaway in the woods where he buried her.
When Penny telephoned the police and told them her daughter was missing she mentioned the name of her gardener. The name was familiar: it was the same man who had been
hauled in for questioning in connection with the Michele Dorr case eight years earlier. It took a month before the police had irrefutable evidence connecting Clark with Lisa’s death but a faint fingerprint on a bloodstained pillowcase matched one of Hadden’s. Although the body had not been found, in the spring of 1993 Hadden Clark was sentenced to thirty years in prison for the second-degree murder of Lisa Houghteling. Only after he was in prison did Hadden reveal the location of Lisa’s grave. Had he told the court where she was buried any earlier he would have been convicted of murder in the first degree.
Once safely inside prison walls, Hadden seemed anxious to unburden himself of, or brag about, his crimes. His chosen confessor was another prisoner who bore a striking likeness to popular paintings of Jesus Christ. Believing his fellow inmate to be the Son of God, Hadden told him what he had done with Michele Dorr and the whereabouts of her body. Jesus, whose name has been withheld by prison authorities, repeated Hadden’s confession to the warden. The information was accepted as validation of little Michele’s death, but by that time police forensics experts were ahead of them. In 1999 mitochondrial DNA testing had matched a sample of blood found lingering in Clark’s last apartment to a sample taken from Michele’s mother. The proof was conclusive. Hadden Clark’s cannibal dinner had finally caught up with him. That same year he was tried for Michele’s death and given a life sentence for first-degree murder. In January 2000 he led police to the site where he had buried Michele’s remains. After fourteen years, Carl Dorr was no longer the chief suspect in his daughter’s disappearance.