The Mammoth Book of New Csi (6 page)

At eight in the morning, he left the house, still in full drag. It was Clark in women’s clothing that the housekeeper had mistaken for Laura leaving for work. He then drove to the parking lot of the church where he went to sleep again, this time beside Laura’s dead body.

When he awoke, he drove back towards the house to take some more of Laura’s personal possessions, but on the way he was seen by Warren. He stopped, but then had second thoughts and sped off. Frightened, Clark decided that he would have to dispose of Laura’s body. He had already picked out a spot, just across Highway 270 from his latest campsite. Her body was heavy. He carried it just 20 ft (6 m) from the road, where he dug a shallow grave. Bundling her into it, he covered her with dirt and leaves. It was not enough to protect her from the animals in the wood that would pick up her scent.

He then drove to Rhode Island where he hid the bloody bedding and the mementos he had stolen in a storage locker that he rented. He held on to the pillowcase so that he could bury his face in it to relive the events of the past night. Later, if he wanted a bigger thrill, he could return for the sheets. Then he went back to Maryland and parked in the church’s parking lot.

When he received a call from the police, he dumped the bloody pillowcase at the base of a tree nearby. It was this that finally trapped him.

Hadden Clark was sentenced to thirty years for Laura Houghteling’s murder in 1993. A few days later, he took the police to recover her body. Her legs and arms had appeared above the surface, forced out of the ground by heavy rain. And her body had been found by scavengers.

In jail, Clark began to boast that he had killed other people. Then he made the mistake of speaking about the murder of Michele Dorr. The story was chilling. Geoffrey’s daughter Eliza had called him a “retard”, just as his father had done. He was determined to have his revenge, so he returned to his brother’s house on the hot afternoon of 31 March only to find everyone was out. He waited in the searing heat. Then along came Michele. Clark did not know her name, but he had seen her around several times and knew that she was a friend of his niece.

“Where’s Eliza?” she asked.

“She’s in the house,” he said. “Upstairs in her room playing with dolls. You can go inside if you like.”

He still had a key as he had yet to return to pick up the last boxes of his stuff. Letting Michele into the empty house, he heard her climb the stairs. Then he went back to his pickup where he kept a case of his chef’s knives. Selecting a 12 in. (30 cm) blade that had been honed to an edge, he went back inside the house. Upstairs, he threw the little girl on the floor so fast that she had no time to scream. Then he slashed her across the chest in a Z shape. She fell back in shock, but she was not dead yet. When he put his hand over her mouth, she bit him. This was the final straw and he plunged the 12 in. blade through her throat.

Blood gushed all over the floor. Clark then tried to have sex with the six-year-old. When that failed, he wrapped her body in some plastic trash sacks and stuffed it in his old navy bag. Then he began mopping up the blood with rags. Everything with blood on it was stuffed into more trash sacks. Although none of the family spotted any signs of blood when they returned later, the forensic evidence was there to find if the police had ever examined the crime scene.

All the incriminating items were stuffed in the back of his truck and he drove off to work at the country club, which was over twenty minutes away. It was imperative that he was not late that day.

When he finished his shift, Clark drove to the nearby Bethesda Naval Hospital to get the wound on his hand dressed. He was an ex-serviceman, so got free medical help. Leaving at around midnight, he drove towards Baltimore along Old Columbia Pike. When he saw some woods, he pulled over – if the police came by, he would simply say that he was desperate for a pee. Taking a torch, the navy bag and a shovel, he climbed over the guard rail and down a ravine. At the foot of a tree he dug a deep grave and dropped her body in. But before he covered her over, he was overwhelmed with the urge to taste her flesh. That done, he shovelled the soil back into the hole and covered the gravesite with leaves and an old mattress he had found. Then he climbed back up to the road and drove home to the new room he had rented.

Prisoners do not like child killers. Several inmates turned him into the authorities and testified against him at his trial for the murder of Michele Dorr. He was given another thirty years. A further conviction for theft ensured that he would spend the rest of his life in prison.

In January 2000, he led the police to the spot in the woods where he had buried six-year-old Michele Dorr fourteen years before. He then confessed to up to a dozen more murders. On visits to prospective gravesites in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, he was allowed to wear female clothing and a wig, and was accompanied by his fellow prisoner “Jesus”, who bore a striking resemblance to Renaissance portraits of the Messiah.

Twenty years earlier, he told the police, he had killed a young woman on Cape Cod. He had buried her naked body in the sand dunes after first cutting off her hands to hamper identification. But over the years, the dunes have moved and the area has been developed. It is easy to dismiss Clark’s claim of killing more hapless victims as the empty boasts of a man who will be confined to prison for the rest of his life. But he had evidence to back his story. A large bucket was recovered from his grandfather’s estate. It contained some two hundred pieces of jewellery, taken, he said, from his victims. Some of them belonged to Laura Houghteling. One of them was a silver pin of a wood nymph taken, he said, from his first victim. Hadden Clark claims he was wearing it, pinned to Penny Houghteling’s clothing, the night he murdered her daughter Laura.

T
HE PROBLEM WITH
cases brought on CSI evidence is that they often rely on the expert witnesses and sometimes the experts can be wrong. One of the experts who has proved very wrong indeed is Professor Sir Samuel Roy Meadow, a British paediatrician whose misinterpretation of the evidence led to a series of miscarriages of justice.

Roy Meadow came to fame when he coined the term “Münchausen syndrome by proxy” in 1977. Sufferers, Meadows maintained in the British medical journal the
Lancet
, harmed those in their care – usually their children – or faked symptoms to get the attention and sympathy of medical staff. He based this theory on two cases: one where a mother, he claimed, had poisoned her child with an excessive amount of salt; another when a mother introduced her own blood into her child’s urine sample.

In 1993, he appeared at the trial of Beverly Allitt, a psychiatric nurse who was accused of killing a number of patients in her care. When Allitt was found guilty, Meadow’s theory seemed to have been vindicated. He went on to testify as an expert witness at a number of trials involving “cot death”, or sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). Meadow was convinced that in a number of these cases the child had actually been killed by its parents in an extreme example of Münchausen syndrome by proxy.

“There is no evidence that cot death runs in families,” he said, “but there is plenty of evidence that child abuse does.”

In his 1997 book,
The ABC of Child Abuse
, he went further, endorsing the dictum “one sudden infant death is a tragedy, two is suspicious and three is murder, until proved otherwise”. This became known as “Meadow’s Law”, and a number of entirely innocent women fell foul of it.

In 1999, solicitor Sally Clark was convicted of murdering two of her sons, largely on the evidence of Professor Meadow. Her first son, Christopher, had been born on 22 September 1996. Although seemingly healthy, the child died suddenly at eleven weeks. His death was attributed to a respiratory infection and certified as “natural causes”. It was only thought suspicious when Sally’s second son, Harry, died after eight weeks. He had been born on 29 November 1997, three weeks premature. He was found dead with his head slumped forward. On both occasions Mrs Clark was at home alone with the child and, in both cases, there was evidence of trauma, which could have been caused by efforts to resuscitate the boys.

Both Mrs Clark and her husband Steve were arrested on 23 February 1998 on suspicion of having murdered their children. On the advice of her lawyer, Mrs Clark remained silent, only denying that she had killed the children. Her husband, who was also a solicitor, supported her throughout and she gave birth to a third son in 1999.

At her trial in Chester Crown Court, evidence was presented that Christopher had a slight cut on the lip and blood in the lungs, indicating that he might have been smothered, and had a bruise on his leg. Harry had injuries to the retina, indicating that he might have been shaken violently, and slight hypoxia – oxygen deficiency in the tissue – caused by suffocation. He also had a fractured rib.

Professor Meadow claimed that he had come across eighty-one cases of cot death that were, in fact, murder, though he had destroyed the data. He also said that the chances of two children suffering a cot death in a well-to-do, non-smoking family was one in seventy-three million. He arrived at the figure simply by multiplying the statistic for a single cot death – one in 8,500 – by itself. It was, he said, like backing an eighty-to-one outsider in the Grand National four years running and winning each time. She was convicted by a ten-to-two majority verdict on 9 November 1999 and sentenced to a mandatory life imprisonment.

Sent to Style women’s prison in Wiltshire, then Bullwood Hall in Essex, she was given a hard time by fellow inmates, both as a child killer and because her father had been a senior police officer.

Meadow’s double cot-death odds of seventy-three million to one was regularly quoted in the press to justify Clark’s incarceration. However, the Royal Statistical Society issued a statement saying there was no mathematical basis for the figure. It was, they said, an example of “a medical expert witness making a serious statistical error”. The society’s president even wrote to the Lord Chancellor, Britain’s leading law officer, expressing his concern.

The figure quoted essentially assumed guilt, rather than weighing the possibility of murder against that of a natural death. It also assumed that the two cot deaths were independent events, excluding the possibility that there may be a cot-death gene, or that the conditions that caused the first cot death might also produce a second. Taking into consideration genetic and environmental factors, it was estimated that the chance of a second cot death occurring in a family that has suffered a first was closer to 200 to one.

However, at the Court of Appeal in 2000, the judge dismissed the argument over statistics as a “sideshow”, saying that the odds Meadow had quoted had no significant effect on the jury’s decision and Clark’s appeal was dismissed. Meadow had been vindicated again and responded to his critics in an article in the
British Medical Journal
, repeating his claim that “both children showed signs of both recent and past abuse”.

It then came to light that microbiological tests done on the second child, Harry, had revealed a large population of
staphylococcus aureus
, the bacteria commonly responsible for food poisoning and other infections. This was known to the Home Office pathologist, Dr Alan Williams, but not to the defence, and was only discovered after Steve Clark combed through a thousand pages of medical records that were only handed to the defence team two years after Sally Clark was convicted. These medical records had been unearthed by campaigning lawyer Marilyn Stowe, who had offered her help to Steve Cark for free after she came to believe that Sally was innocent. Steve Clark discovered that a blood test had been performed on Harry that had not been produced at the trial. Stowe forced the records out of the local hospital, then passed them on to forensic experts who concluded that the blood test report proved conclusively that Harry was suffering from a form of meningitis.

Concerns about the statistics also persisted and the Criminal Cases Review Commission referred the case back to the Court of Appeal. Evidence was given by ambulance crew, nurses and hospital doctors that there were not any marks on either baby when they arrived at hospital. Christopher’s cut lip could have been caused by attempts to resuscitate him. The blood in his lungs could have been caused by the respiratory infection originally thought to have been the cause of death, or even by a nosebleed he had suffered a week before his death. And the bruise on his leg was caused after death.

Harry’s retinal injuries were also found to have been inflicted post-mortem. His broken rib was unexplained, but it was not unknown in young babies and was healing well. And the hypoxia, thought to have been evidence of smothering, was present in all cot deaths to some degree and is part of the dying process.

The motive that the prosecution had given – that Sally Clark was a career woman uncomfortable with the burdens of motherhood – was also called into question. Midwives, health visitors, neighbours, the nanny and Sally’s husband all testified that there was a strong bond of love between Mrs Clark and her children. Dr Williams’s pathology report was also found to be riddled with inconsistencies.

Sally Clark’s second appeal succeeded and she was released in January 2003 having served more than three years. However, the ordeal and the loss of two of her children had taken a heavy toll. She succumbed to alcoholism and died in March 2007.

Despite doubts about Meadow’s hypotheses concerning cot death, his testimony helped convict Angela Cannings of the murder of her seven-week-old son, Jason, who died in 1991, and of her eighteen-week-old son, Matthew, who died in 1999. Her first child, Gemma, had also suffered a cot death at the age of thirteen weeks in 1989, though no charges were brought.

No physical evidence of abuse was presented at her trial in 2001. The prosecution rested on what it called the “suspicious behaviour” of Mrs Cannings and Meadow’s assertion that she suffered from Münchausen syndrome by proxy. He told the jury that the boys could not have been genuine cot-death victims because they were fit and healthy right up until the time of death. However, other experts maintain that this is typical of SIDS cases. The prosecution had also rejected any genetic explanation, saying that there was no family history of cot death. Meadow again asserted that a double cot death was extremely unlikely, though this time he did not quote figures. The jury convicted Mrs Cannings after nine hours of deliberation.