The Mammoth Book of New Csi (5 page)

After he arrived, he searched the house. Then he decided to walk the route Laura took to the bus stop. Along the way, he saw Hadden driving down the street in his pickup and tried to wave him down. Hadden stopped. As Warren walked over to his pick-up to ask Clark whether he knew anything about Laura’s whereabouts, the gardener suddenly drove off at high speed. This struck Warren as strange, but he still did not call the police until that night. They told him not to worry.

When the police finally got on the case, they decided they wanted to speak to Hadden Clark. Both Warren and Penny Houghteling gave them a description. But Penny Houghteling dismissed the idea that Hadden had anything to do with the disappearance of her daughter.

“Hadden wouldn’t hurt anyone,” she said. “He’s just a gardener.”

In the higher echelons of the Montgomery County Police Department, bells began ringing. Clark had briefly been a suspect in the disappearance of Michele Dorr.

When six-year-old Michele disappeared on 31 May 1986, her father Carl Dorr had been the prime suspect.

“It’s page one in the handbook,” said Detective Mike Garvey, the first cop to interview Dorr. In 90 per cent of cases where a child disappears, the parent or carer knows what has happened – and Dorr certainly looked like their man.

Although he had degrees in psychology and economics, the economic downturn meant that he could only find employment in menial jobs. By the mid-1980s, he was doing casual work, spraying cars. He had married in 1978, but soon after Michele was born the marriage had descended into domestic warfare. Carl would beat his wife Dorothy in front of the child, who developed a stutter and ground her teeth when she slept.

“She had seen too much for a six-year-old,” Dorothy later told the
Washington Post
. She also had damning evidence to give to the police.

Three months before Michele’s disappearance, Carl Dorr had turned up at his estranged wife’s house and refused to leave. If she tried to divorce him, he said he would lie under oath, saying she was an adulteress and an unfit mother to prevent her having custody of the child. If he lost the custody battle, he would kidnap Michele from the school bus. Then, Dorothy told the police, he hurled her against the wall and slapped her around, leaving her with bruises and cuts. She was sure that he was responsible for the disappearance of Michele, she told the cops. At the time, he was trying to get out of paying $400 a month child support.

After separating from his wife, Carl Dorr had taken lodgings two doors down from Geoffrey Clark in Sudbury Road. On the evening of Friday, 30 May 1986, he picked Michele up from her mother. He bought her a toy in a 7-Eleven. They ate in McDonald’s, then went home with a kid’s movie from the video store.

The following morning, it was hot – over 90°F (32°C). He filled a small plastic pool in the garden for her and, after promising to take her to a full-sized pool in the neighbourhood, he went inside to watch the Indianapolis 500 on television. During the race, he looked out of the window a couple of times. He could not see Michele and there were no ripples on the pool, but he was not worried. Silver Spring was a safe suburban area and, no doubt, Michele had gone down the street to play with her new friend Eliza Clark, Geoffrey’s daughter.

It was not until 5.30 p.m. that Dorr went over to Clark’s house. Geoffrey was barbecuing in the back garden. Eliza and the other two children from his first marriage were there, along with Geoffrey’s new girlfriend. They had been out all day. There was no sign of Michele and they had not seen her. Dorr walked to the end of the street, then began knocking on doors. Making no progress, he went to the police and reported her missing. They soon arrived and he quickly became their prime suspect. After all, he was the last person to see her; he had been battling over her custody for years and had threatened to abduct her earlier that year.

Dorr agreed to take a polygraph test, but the examiner told the police that he might know more about the disappearance of his daughter than he let on. Indeed, Carl Dorr did have a guilty secret. Not wishing to appear a negligent parent, he had told the cops that the last time he had seen Michele was 2.10 p.m. In fact, he had not seen her since noon.

The police interviewed him for twenty-four hours, playing good cop, bad cop. His daughter was dead, they said, and he had failed a lie-detector test.

“We’re going to find her,” the cops told him. “When we do, we’re coming to get you.”

Dorr took another polygraph exam and passed easily. He submitted to hypnosis and took the “truth serum” sodium pentothal. Nothing convinced the cops.

Under the pressure he cracked and became psychotic. Hallucinating, he was taken into hospital for psychiatric observation. In this state, he even told a psychiatrist that he had abducted and killed his daughter. When he was released, the police took him in again for further questioning. The evidence that would have exonerated him was all there on the crime scene, if they had looked. But they had not even located the crime scene yet.

Briefly, there was another suspect in the case. The day after Michele Dorr went missing, Detective Wayne Farrell was driving down Sudbury Road when he saw Hadden Clark tinkering with his truck in the driveway of his brother’s house. Thinking he might have found a valuable witness, Farrell asked Hadden whether he had been there yesterday.

Hadden said he had “for about two or three minutes”.

Farrell told Mike Garvey, who discovered that Hadden Clark was the neighbourhood oddball. They called him in for questioning. He had punched in at the time clock in the nearby Chevy Chase country club where he worked as a chef at 2.46 p.m. on the afternoon Michele disappeared. Garvey and Farrell had already worked out that it would have been practically impossible for Clark to have abducted and murdered the child, hidden the body and driven the 10 miles (16 km) to the country club in the thirty-six minutes between 2.10 p.m., when Dorr said he had last seen his daughter, and the time Clark arrived at work. But they questioned him anyway.

After going softly on him at first, they began to ask him about the local children and Hadden almost gave himself away. The relationship was antagonistic. One boy had kicked him in the testicles, then he admitted to pinning one little girl to the ground.

“Is that what you did with Michele?” asked Garvey.

The cops produced a photo of her. Hadden refused to look at it. Tears welled in his eyes and he rocked back and forth in his chair.

“Is that what you did with Michele?” asked Garvey again.

“I feel sick,” said Clark. “Do you have a bathroom?”

In the washroom, the police could hear Clark vomiting in a cubicle. But they did not let up.

“What did you do?” Garvey shouted. “The parents need to know. Tell me what happened. They need to bury their child. Was it an accident? Let’s talk about it.”

He even pushed the photo of Michele under the cubicle door.

Clark admitted to having blackouts. He did things, he said, that he did not remember. But he had been at work that day. It would still have been nearly impossible for Clark to have murdered Michele after 2.10 p.m. and been at work at 2.46 p.m. Besides, the police were convinced that the murder had been committed by Carl Dorr, who had unwittingly given his daughter’s real killer an unshakeable alibi.

After the Michele Dorr enquiry, Clark came to the attention of the police on several occasions. Visiting his mother, who was then living in Rhode Island, in September 1988, he began stealing from her. When she confronted him, he knocked her down and kicked her, then tried to run her over with his truck. She charged him with assault and battery and he got a year’s probation. Afterwards she wrote to him, saying that unless he sought help from a veterans’ hospital, as far as she was concerned he was dead.

He did seek help from a local veterans’ hospital. He was treated with the anti-psychotic drug Haldol, but left after a few days to return to the woods. It was clear, both to the doctors and to Clark, that he was a danger to others and to himself.

Stopped for speeding in Rhode Island, he was found to be carrying a .38-calibre handgun under his seat. Then there was a conviction for the destruction of property later that year.

In February 1989, he was arrested on fifteen counts of theft. Dressed as a woman, he would visit churches while choir practice was going on, slip into the cloakroom and steal women’s possessions. One day, the police found him tinkering with his car on the shoulder of the road. Inside his truck, they found women’s coats and handbags. Hadden claimed they were his.

“I am a woman,” he said.

He stayed in jail for six weeks before he posted bail. It was February and no time to be sleeping in the woods. Most of the charges were dropped when he agreed to plead guilty on two counts. Again he was sentenced to probation. The judge recognized that Clark had serious mental problems. The public defender was also sympathetic. He wrote Clark a note to hand to the police office the next time he was arrested. It read:

TO ANY POLICE OFFICER:

I want the help of my lawyer, Donald P. Salzman, and I want my lawyer to be present before I answer any questions about my case or any other matters.

I do not wish to speak to anyone concerning any criminal charges pending against me or anyone else, or any criminal investigation regardless of whether I am charged.

I do not want to be in any line-up, or give any handwriting samples, or give any blood, hair, urine, or any other samples unless my lawyer is present.

My lawyer’s address and phone number are:
Donald P. Salzman
Assistant Public Defender
Office of the Public Defender
27 Courthouse Square
Rockville, Maryland 20850
(301) 279-1372

To prove that I have read this statement to you or that you have read it, please sign here . . .

Hadden Clark viewed this as a “get out of jail free” card. But when Laura Houghteling went missing it did not work. When Garvey asked Robert Phillips, his boss, whether he should bring in Clark, Phillips exploded.

“Hadden Clark! Absolutely! Let’s go!” he yelled. “Let’s get him! That son of a bitch got away once!”

The cops called Clark, and got his voicemail, but he called back almost immediately. He said he would come into the police station the following day. Right then he was tired and wanted to go to sleep.

When he turned up, he was accompanied by Sue Snyder, head of the local help-the-homeless group. The night Laura had gone missing, Clark had been asleep in his truck, he said. No one could corroborate this, but there was little evidence against him, so they had to let him go. On their way out of the station Sue Snyder noticed that Hadden was crying and asked him why.

“I feel so bad for Penny and Warren,” he said.

With no sign of Laura, the police began a search of the area. A sniffer dog led them to a wood near the Houghteling house that also bordered the church where Clark’s truck had been parked the day before. There, the dog found one of Penny Houghteling’s bras, a woman’s blouse, a high-heeled shoe and a pillowcase from Laura’s bed with a single fingerprint in blood on it. An initial test showed that the blood was the same type as that of Laura.

Clark was hauled in again. He complained of harassment.

“I’m just a homeless man,” he said. “I don’t have any friends. I’ll be jobless after this.”

But the police were adamant. Michele Dorr’s killer still had not been found. They had been easy on Clark the last time. They were not going to make the same mistake again.

“We found the pillowcase in the woods,” they told him. “It had a fingerprint on it. The print was yours.”

It was a bluff. The fingerprint had not been identified yet. Again tears filled his eyes and he pulled his woollen hat down to hide them.

“What did you do with Laura Houghteling?” he was asked.

His pathetic answer was: “I don’t remember.”

But they still did not have enough to hold him. They found his campsite and searched it. They examined his bank records and found the cheque that he used in the hardware store with the name “Laura” on it. Then the lab finally identified the bloody fingerprint on the pillowcase as that of Clark. That night they found him asleep in the back of his truck with his arm around a one-eyed teddy bear.

Faced with overwhelming evidence, Clark confessed to second-degree murder and the full horrific tale came out. Around midnight on Sunday, 18 October, Clark had turned up at the Houghteling’s house. He was in full drag. Wearing a woman’s wig and a trench coat, he could feel Penny Houghteling’s lingerie against his skin. Over it, he wore a blouse and slacks.

He went into the garden shed where a spare house key was kept. With it, he opened the door and moved silently towards Laura’s bedroom. Once there, he pulled a .22-calibre rifle from under his trench coat and nudged Laura awake with it.

“Why are you in my bed?” he asked. “What are you doing in my bed?”

The startled Laura did not know how to reply.

“Why are you wearing my clothes?” he asked.

She began to cry.

“Tell me I’m Laura,” he insisted.

“You’re Laura,” she said. “Please don’t hurt me.”

At gunpoint, he forced her to swear on the Bible that he was Laura. Then he made her undress and take a bath. His plan was, he said, to take her to the woods where he would introduce her to Hadden. He made her lie down again while he bound her wrists and ankles with duct tape. He covered her mouth with tape. This excited him so much that he covered her nose and eyes too. Soon after, Laura suffocated.

In an attempt to keep her alive, he tried to cut off the tape, but the scissors slipped and he gashed her neck, covering the sheets and pillowcase with blood. Next, he decided that he wanted her earrings. But he had trouble removing one, so he simply snipped off her earlobe with the scissors. More blood flowed. Then he sat quietly beside her bed, contemplating her naked body for about an hour. He admitted that he stroked her breasts, but did not attempt to rape her corpse or cannibalize it.

It was about three o’clock when he roused himself to wrap her body in the bloody sheet and carry her out to his truck over his shoulder. He went back into the house to gather up any other bloodstained bedding and some of her possessions that he wanted as personal souvenirs. Then he lay down on her bed and slept.