November 6, 2023 • 40 mins
Best-selling author Bryan Burrough returns to his small-town Texas roots in the podcast, by Texas Monthly, called “Stephenville.” This season he explores a murder case that went cold for nearly two decades. To tell this amazing story, Bryan is armed with the newly discovered diary of the killer himself.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
It starts praying that God take care of us, fix
this for me, and after a period of time, God
has it fixed it. So you said, well, if God's
not going to help me, I'm going to reach out
to say.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:50):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. Best Selling author and my buddy Brian
Burrow returns to his small town, Texas roots in the
(01:13):
podcast by Texas Monthly called Stephenville. This season, he explores
a murder case that went cold for nearly two decades
to tell this amazing story. Brian is armed with the
newly discovered diary of the killer himself. A trigger warning
here we do talk about a serial rapist and killer.
(01:36):
Let's dip into how you came across with the story,
and then we can move from there.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I had all but retired from any type of magazine journalism.
The economics of it aren't as compelling as they used
to be. I'm sixty one and not looking for as
much work outside books as I used to be. But
I got an email from a TV producer on Forensic File.
We did a show on a cold case killing in Stephenville,
(02:04):
Texas a few years back, and the lead detective found
something new. Found that the bad guy left behind a
two hundred page autobiographical essay that for the first time,
told the story of fairly well known events from his
point of view. He had spent his entire life denying
it all, and this was a fairly run of the
(02:26):
mill bad guy who wrote kind of an extraordinary document
that traced the development of his internal angers, passions, sexual
proclivities from the age of eight through early teen, through
his twenties into adulthood, as well as dealing with the
stories of the crimes that he committed. So I thought, gosh,
(02:47):
we've got a very different take on the story.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
So set the scene. Where are we when this story starts.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Well, it starts with a murder, and that's kind of
the best way to introduce the cat characters. In July
nineteen eighty seven, in Stephenville, Texas, which is southwest seventy
miles southwest of Fort Worth, supervisor at a sandpaper called
a man in town and says, your daughter has not
showed up for work two days in a row. And
his name was Joe Atkins. And Joe went on over
(03:17):
to his daughter's little white bungalow, a little rendered white
bungalow there in the Old Air area of Stephenville, walked
up to the front door, found at a jar, went
in and found his daughter, Susan Woods, naked on the
floor of the bathroom with her upper body plunged into
a tub full of black water.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
How long had she been in the bathtub?
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Two days? Last scene on Sunday night. They found on
a Tuesday night, Susan Woods in the summer of nineteen
eighty seven was a very quiet young woman, a factory
worker who had grown up in Stephenville. Quiet as a child,
didn't date close to her parents. Everybody said, you know,
she was just the sweetest thing, just nice to everybody,
(03:56):
a little trusting, a little naive. Graduated from Stephenville High
with honors, and within a year or two, having at
that point going to work for a nursing home, she
met a young man, a newcomer to town named Michael Woods.
And Michael came from El Paso. This was the late seventies.
You know, Susan was five to seven, long brown hair.
(04:17):
Michael was a little shorter, but very attractive, certainly to Susan.
And the most notable thing about Michael was at a
time when rural Texas was not only as conservative as
it may be today, but it was kind of pushing
back against the excesses of the sixties. Michael had long hair,
and he was a musician. He stood out in town Stephenville.
(04:39):
Keep in mind, is bills itself as the cowboy capital
of the world. It is a town then and now
where you know cowboy hats, ffa jackets, close crop hair
are most common, and Michael Woods stood out. Michael was
actually just visiting, kind of hanging around unemployed as he
tended to be most of the time, wanted to be
(04:59):
a position, but nobody in Stevenville wanted to hear rock
and roll. Let me tell you, they might listen to
Johnny Cash back in the days. And Michael stayed to
be with Susan, and he hated. He had a bit
of an attitude because, especially when he grew a beard,
you know, he got picked on. People would call him
fur face and stuff. And Michael did not look like
anybody else in town. He wore a leather jacket, engineer boots,
(05:22):
and he drove Harley. Michael was also not one to
suffer any type of abuse. If you said something insulting
to Michael, he would pop in the mouth. He was
repeatedly in fights, rarely in a job. He worked at
a sonic, he worked in a cornfield, I mean all
sorts of jobs that just never really took. And after
about a year or two of this, around nineteen eighty,
(05:44):
he said, I can't take it anymore. I've got a
job offered from an uncle. I think he ran an
auto repara shot back in l Passo. Come with me
to l Passol, was trying to make a go up there.
Susan had never been outside Stephenville, but she thought it
sounded like a grand adventure, right, So they go to Steveville,
and for whatever reason, the job fell through, and within
(06:04):
a matter of weeks they are living in what Susan
famously said in wonder her letters home on bacon bit sandwiches.
They're not quite living out of the car, as one
report had it, but Michael said they were living in
an apartment with no furniture. When they couldn't make that happen,
they moved in with his mother and that didn't go
real well either, and they ended up coming back. So
(06:27):
by let's say early eighty one, they're back in Stephenville.
Michael continues to act out. I've got police reports of
fights he got into. He was not happy there. He
had family in Indianapolis, brother, and at least once, and
it sounds like twice, he moved up to Indianapolis and
she came with him. And then Susan was just never
(06:47):
happy away from Stephenville for whatever reason, maybe being far
away from family or just smalltown Texas. It has it's
a lure. She went up to Indianapolis, stayed with him
a time or two, and came back and Michael says,
you know, during their about roughly five years of marriage,
he was gone about half the time. By the summer
of eighty six, they had moved into this little white
(07:09):
bungalow by downtown and they were trying to make a
last go of it. As Michael tells that, the final
straw was he had had some success flipping cars, buying
a used car, fixing it up and reselling it. He
wanted to do this with Holmes. Apparently his brother was
doing that in Napolis, and he thought he could do
it too. Unfortunately, Michael had no money, and Susan, who
(07:30):
is by now working in sandpaper factory, didn't really want
to invest her money in Michael's new venture. Michael accused
her of emasculating him and taking away his only livelihood,
and so he left. There was a series of letters
between them. It was heartbreaking because they were not angry
at each other. They loved each other. They both said
(07:50):
they want to be with each other, but she couldn't
live outside at Stephenville and Michael couldn't make it work
in Stephenville. He came back one last time in February
of eighty seven, and this would be now four months
before her murder, and it didn't take and he didn't stay.
There's a letter in the DA's files in which one
of her co workers said, basically, he gave her an ultimatum,
(08:11):
me or Texas. She chose Texas.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Did you get a sense that Michael was physically abusive
emotionally abusive?
Speaker 2 (08:20):
I talked extensively with Susan's three closest friend, her best girlfriend,
the girlfriend's husband, and another young woman. Who were the
three people who went through all this with him, And
they said no, Michael was always kind to her. Did
they have arguments, yes, but no, nothing unpleasant until the end,
until February eighty seven. In februaryy seven, when Michael came
(08:42):
back for their final attempt at or Approchemont, he left.
He took a bunch of her things, and most important
thing was he took their yellow Mustang. And so for
the next four months after he left, she worked six
days a week to trying to raise money to get
a new car. She was having to have friends take
her to work. But when Michael left, he left behind
two things. He left behind a series of folded up
little paper notes that he put in cabinets. He put
(09:06):
in shirt pockets you put in her underwear drawer, and
they were just all about what a sea word she was,
what an awful person, how this was all her fault.
Her parents hated him from the word go. Michael tells
these stories of the father threatening with a gun and
things like this. But even worse, Michael left behind a
thirty minute cassette tape in which he excoriated Susan in
(09:28):
the most unpleasant way for breaking up the marriage, for
not allowing him to be a man. And at one
point Susan was so shaken she called in the three friends, Roy,
Cindy her best friend, and Gloria. It said, I've got
to go to work. Can y'all listen to this and
just tell me if I'm crazy because that this scares me?
And they were all deeply shaken. And by that night
Roy Hayes wonderful guys still alive, came over, nailed all
(09:51):
her windows shut, gave her a gun, and Cindy for
about the next month slept on her couch. Look. Nobody
knew Michael to be violent. The fights that he would
get in always seemed to be some guy would insult
in me. It was like Michael was out picking fights
with people. So despite the fist fights he'd gotten, and
nobody really thought of him as a violent guy. But
(10:14):
the fact, does they anyone to find out if he
had that in it?
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Was there contact between the two of them between February
when this escalates in July when her father finds her dead.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
No physical contact. We believed that there might have been
a phone call or too. I think Michael dimly remembers
a phone call in the letter, but nothing really of significance.
Once Michael left, she went to a divorce attorney and
filed the horse papers and so between Februar of eighty
seven when he left, over the next three or four months,
it was a pretty dark time for Susan. Initially, she's
working six days a week, trying to get a car.
(10:46):
I mean, this is just basic stuff. She's thirty years old,
she's never really lived on her own. She either lived
with her parents or then with Michael, off and on,
and it's a tough time for her. She doesn't really
have time to socialize. And then after about out three months,
say in the maytime frame, things begin to light. She
realizes her life is probably not at risk from Michael.
(11:08):
He hasn't showed up to Killer. She goes out one
night with a group of work friends to the nearby
town of Granbury. Stephenville was dry at the time and
flirted with a bartender, and he started coming over a
couple of three Friday nights, watched TV on the couch.
On the fourth one they had sex, and the next
day or so, after a day, Susan calls up another
(11:29):
girlfriend and said, oh my god, you've got to come
down here. She was hysterical, and she came down and
Susan had dark marks all over her neck. JC apparently
had gotten a little carried away and given her a
series of hickeys. And it's a measure of Susan's modesty
and Stephenville's modesty. She was paralyzed with fear of going
out in town and having people see this and think
(11:50):
she was that type of girl. By the end of May,
you know, she was able to get a new car.
Roy and Cindy, who are now married all these years later,
thirty five years later, noticed that she was brightening a little.
There came a night in late July when they said, hey,
we're going We're taking one of Cindy's young cousins over
to a carnival in a nearby town called Hiko. Why
(12:11):
don't you come on with us, it'd be good for
you to get out, And so she went on over
there and they didn't have much fun for whatever reason.
So they came on back and Roy said, tay, what,
I'll make it better. Let's all go to Dairy Queen.
So they went to Dairy Queen and Susan, who was demure,
careful about her physical appearance, had a hot fudge Sunday
and then she did something Cindy said she'd never seen
(12:33):
or done in her entire life, and these kids had
been best friends from like twelve thirteen. She had another
hot fish Sunday and smiled, and Cindy doesn't remember the
exact words, but it was very clear that she was
turning a corner. She could see a path forward for
herself and her life, and four nights later she was
found dead.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
So her father finds her submerged partially in this bathtub.
She's been sexually assaulted. It's summer of eighty seven. He
calls the police. I have to assume is that the
first thing that happens.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
He steps into the living room, calls him on the
house phone and then steps out into the yard which
is pitch dark, and pretty much the whole Stephenville Police
force shows up. You know. There was clearly pretty nasty
struggle in the bedroom. The bedroom was topsy turvy. The
mattress was off the box springs and the pillows were
strown everywhere, and the beding was strown everywhere, and there
was an electrical cord that it was laying across the
(13:27):
bed with the plug in on the floor. When they
squatted down the side her and lifted her head, they
saw a red ligature mark. He was suspected that perhaps
the cord had been used on her. As they studied
the crime scene, the one thing that stood out was
there's no sign of forced entry in a house with
a you know, everything nailed shut. It looked from all
angles as if Susan had invited her murder into the house.
(13:52):
And on the living room table there were six cigarette
buts in an ash tray and an open cann of coke,
suggesting that perhaps she had sat and had some cigarettes
with whoever it was. But that was it. You know.
They canvassed the neighborhood. They went up and down the street,
nobody had seen anything strange. It was Sunday night. It
(14:13):
was a quiet Sunday night in Stephenville, Texas.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
So what happens next? The investigators, we would assume, would
look at her inner circle first and find out she
has an ex husband.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Funny thing happened the next morning. There was a lieutenant
on the force who announced to the gathering the next
morning in the police department that nobody else needed to
work the case. He was going to take it on himself.
And I talked with an officer who was in the
room that day, I said, what was that about? He said,
the guy just wanted to be a hero. He knew
we don't have a lot of cases like that, and
he was looking to move up. This guy's name was
Ken Maltby, and I'm sure he was otherwise a terribly
(14:46):
effective policeman. Early on, from all indications, Lieutenant Maltby focused
on Michael Woods. The Atkins family, Susan's maiden name was Atkins.
Was absolutely I mean, it was just obvious Michael Woods
has done this. I mean she was living with the
guy in town, right obviously. Hello. He somehow came back
and Maltby and a Texas Ranger went up to Indianapolis.
(15:08):
Within forty eight hours of the killing. They had reached
out to Indianapolis PD to interview him, and they had
there had been some interviewing, but he denied everything and
didn't seem to want to be cooperative. They confronted him
in his front yard and he declined to go back
to Texas, and so Lieutenant Wontby and the Ranger came
back to Texas and about a month later, Lieutenant Maltby
(15:33):
was transferred onto a narcotic squad to supervisor narcotic squad.
And you know, by the first week of October, and
this is two and a half months after the killing,
it's orphaned. There's nobody assigned to take this over. So
what happened is one of the original officers, the guy
who canvassed the bedroom, Donny Hensley, said well, I'll take
it on in a spare time, and he went to
look for Maltby's notes or to debrief, and he couldn't
(15:55):
get Maltby to talk with him, and he couldn't find
any notes, and Donny said, I don't know what's tell you.
I'd start over from scratch, and he pretty much did.
For the next couple of months, you know. He does
his best to widen the focus of the investigation. He
discovers the bartender in Granberry. By the way, I didn't
mention they've got prince in the bathroom and on the
coke can. He goes and fingerprints and gives light of
(16:18):
detector tests to the bartender. He passes. He then brings
in Roy Hayes, the best girlfriend's husband, the guy who
nailed the windows shut. And Roy was a little iffy
in the eyes of Stephenville because he played dungeons and dragon,
which back in those days carried the faint whiff of
the Satanic. Now Roy's a big old boy, nice kid.
(16:40):
Roy says, okay, I'll take your light detector test. Sure,
So they take him down to Waco to a ranger
station for a light detector test. Does that for about
an hour, walks out and Donnie says, you did it.
You did not pass, And Roy's like, I did not
I did anything to do this. He said, These machines
do not make a mistake. Roy, I know you did it.
This is just the way it is. About that moment,
the door opens behind him and the ranger who took
(17:03):
the test comes out. And says, congratulations, mister Hayes, you passed.
To this day, nobody knows what the mix up was.
At that point, Donny Hensley doesn't have a bunch of suspects,
and you know, everybody in town is saying Roy Hayes,
what he nuts? Everybody knows. Everybody knows it's Michael Woods.
And so Donnie rededicates himself to hounding Michael Woods, who
(17:24):
remains out of state outside in Indianapolis. He shows his
picture picture of the yellow Mustang to every service station
in the county that rings no belts with anyone. Finally
he realizes he's got to take the case to Indianapolis,
so he goes up there and the Indianapolis PD gives
him a fancy surveillance van that actually has one of
these like a submarine periscope out the top, so you
(17:47):
can sit in the back of this van. And after
a week or two of surveilling, they see Michael and
his brother set out a bunch of stuff for garage sale,
and they see some items that they believe they can
argue we're stolen from Susan. A figure, a fur coat,
this type of thing. So they swoop in the next
day with an arrest warm and arrest them all because
they found a roach, a marijuana roach, right you know.
(18:09):
It led to no charges, but it gotten the one
thing that Donny didn't have, which was Michael's fingerprints. They
needed Michael's fingerprints. Now to this day, Michael will tell
you he volunteered to give him the Prince and anything
else they wanted on the proviso that it'd be done in.
In the end, he wasn't going. He didn't trust Texas Comms,
was not going back to rural Texas where an entire
town was convinced he was the murder. He just wasn't going.
(18:31):
For whatever reason. The Texas police wouldn't go up there
and do it with him, so they felt they had
to go up and get the fingerprints, which they did.
They came back. Donnie on the flight back from Indianapolis
with the fingerprints, he is filling out the extradition papers
to bring Michael back. He's so sure that the Prince
will match. Now of course I've given away they don't match,
and Don's like, there's no way Michael Woods did this.
(18:54):
How is this happening? Pretty much by the summer of
eighty eight, by the time Donnie came back from Indianapolis
with those prints. The investigation was over.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
What happens next? This case goes cold.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Well, actually, what did happen was the family sued Michael Woods.
He was the beneficiary on Susan's life inschurch. He was
doing something like eleven thousand dollars. I think they sued him,
and Michael would not go back. A judge hit him
with a judgment finding hum responsible for his death and
saying that he had to pay get this seven hundred
thousand dollars anyway, It was never paid, obviously in part
(19:29):
because Michael didn't come back anywhere near where they could
serve him, and then the case was slowly forgotten, not
by the family, not by our friends Roy and Cindy,
but by the rest of the town. Stephen Villain's important
note just in terms of context, it is not your
classic conservative small town. It's actually a college town in
the middle of farm country. Charlton State is there, and
(19:49):
during those years following the murder, during the nineties, it
saw an influx of people, but nothing happened in Susan's case.
Years went by, and finally in two thousand and five,
eighteen years later, Michael Woods kind of came to a
breaking point. Michael never got over this. He wanted to
be a musician, and he tried to His lawyer says,
(20:10):
you can't leave this town. They'll get you. They'll get
you if you leave Indianapolis. So he and his brother
start doing Skinnered and Charlie Daniels around town for thirty
five dollars a pop. But even that became hard after
the Indianapolis newspaper ran two articles saying that he was
the focus of murder investigation from Stephenville Well. Michael tried
to install home alarms. He tried to do this. He
(20:31):
tried to do that. He didn't keep a lot of jobs.
What he was good at was drinking and taking every
drug that anybody ever handed it. And he slowly went
to a spiral. He tried therapy that didn't work. Finally,
he says, by the early two thousands, after about fourteen
or fifteen years, he tried to kill himself. He said
he took three handfuls of tranquilizers and in a rare
(20:53):
bit of levity from Michael's side of the story, he said,
all it did was put me to sleep for three days,
and I woke up still depressed. In two thousand and five,
he was playing a birthday party, a friend's birthday party
with his brother, and afterwards it was just about the
anniversary of Susan's death, and he walked out in the backyard.
He was crying, and the host, who was just an acquaintance,
walked out and said, Michael, what's wrong. And he explained
(21:15):
that it was the anniversary of his wife's death and
he can't go back to a graver and thin because
the whole town thinks he did it. And this woman
whose name was Barbara Gary, who has the briefest of
cameos in this, says, well, that's just awful. And she
she goes in the next morning and gets on her
computer and she fires off an email to the Stephenville
Police saying, I really wish you'd figure out this for
(21:37):
cocta case, because this poor man is falling, falling apart
because you have it solved and found the actual killer.
What had happened by then was a new sergeant named
Don Miller had taken over looking at a handful of
cold cases that they had in Stephenville, and he knew
that the fingerprints didn't matage Michael had never been told.
(21:57):
He never understood what happened. Once they took his fingerprints.
Don looked at that and said, this God didn't do it.
And I bet you if I'm ever going to solve it,
I need him to help me solve it. Don Miller
calls and Michael said, I don't want to talk to you.
Don says, I understand that, but I'm your only hope
of ever ending this. And so Michael says, okay, what
do you want? He said, I need to come up
and there's this new thing called DNA, and I need
(22:20):
to come up and get some DNA from you. And
if you didn't do it, Michael, I can clear you.
You'll be able to get on with your life.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
What had they collected sperm samples? I'm assuming saliva.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
There was DNA off the coke can.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
And cigarettes, right, Yeah, so they had done a good job.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yes, that's one thing you can point. They did a
good job. And Don said, well, I want to come
up there, and Michael said yes, and then Michael said no.
Don had already gotten plane tickets, so he and his
buddy just went on. Anyway, they get up there and
it's like January or February. You know, it's twenty five
degrees in Indianapolis, and they're wearing these texts lightweight Texas
sports jackets. They're freezing. When they finally found their way
(22:55):
to a fairly modest home where Michael and his brother
were living, and they get up there on the on
the front porch and knock knock, and Michael actually opens
the door, and Don says who he is? And Michael's like,
I told you I Michael talked to you. Why are
you here? Don just keeps talking. It's just the load
of just Michael. We need your DNA. This is your
only hopelah blah blah blah blah bah blah. And after
I don't know ten fifteen minutes its Michael's like, okay, fine,
(23:16):
take the DNA and get off the caddian porch. And
Dona turns to his partner and says, okay, let's do
the DNA. The problem was neither one of them had
ever used DNA kit before, and the partner says, I
don't really know how to do this, and Don says,
are their instructions. So they read the instructions and took
a cheap swab send it down to Ranger station in Waco,
(23:36):
and it came back clear the DNA and the fingerprints
didn't match. DNA didn't match, and Don was able to
call Michael and say, Michael, and you're cleared, and Michael
began to cry and hung up. Great news for Michael, right,
(24:02):
Not so great news for Donald Miller. He now has
no suspects. However, what he has that they didn't have
in nineteen eighty seven is the FBI now has a
fingerprint database. Don wanted to go to take their fingerprint
card to Washington. His chief said, uh, uh, I'm not
paying for you to go to Washington. Then he found
out that the Rangers had access to it, so he
(24:23):
just took the fingerprints down to Austin and gave gave
him the original card and a few days later he
gets a call back and he says, you got to
you know, you got a penning pencil on. Don says, uh, sure.
The fingerprints come back to Joseph Scott Hatley. Don writes
his name down and Don asked the guy who's that
and the guy says, I don't know, but it's from
an arm robbery in Las Vegas, Nevada in nineteen eighty eight.
(24:46):
This is three states away. If this Joseph Scott Hatley
has any tide Stephenville. He calls the DA and says,
do we know a Joseph Scott Hatley? And the DA says,
you bet we do, and then Don says what he says,
great case. In eighty eight he went for a grand
jury and nobilly and he was long gone. No, we
didn't know who he was, but his mother and I
(25:07):
believe sister still lived in town. I wouldn't say a prominent,
but they are a well known Stephenville family. His late
father had owned several businesses, including a Texico station. Several
of them had worked, including a sister had worked for
the city. And so now Don realized I have a suspect.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
What is nobil?
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Nobil means that they took the case to a grand
jury and the grand jury declined to indict.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
So what's the next step with Joseph Scott Hatley? What
do we know about what he's doing when this is
all happening.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
You know, he was everybody considered him just a normal kid.
Beaver Cleaver born in nineteen sixty five, so it was
four years younger than me. I grew up a few
counties away was possessed of a burning anger incite him
that he was never able to explain. He says that
as early as the age of ten or eleven, he
was planning a school, a Columbine style school massacre. You know,
(25:57):
he developed thoughts of sexual and other types of vible.
What really changed for him was when he was twelve thirteen, fourteen,
he discovered two things that kind of became the great
loves of his life. Beer, which soon became vodka. He
became the type of drinker that, at least on weekends
when he wasn't working, would start drinking vodka when he
woke up in the morning and would still be drinking
at night. In pornography. He had a stashup born in.
(26:21):
I talked to a couple of experts and who just said,
this is really really typical of somebody who acts out
sexual violence. You know, nobody really saw him as anything
other than a pretty normal kid. By senior year of
high school, Scott had lost some of his baby fit
at least learn how to talk to girls, and decided
for a career he was going to go for the
(26:42):
Air Force, a weapon specialist at basis around Texas. Then
upon a high school graduation, he goes off to an
Air Force training base of some type at Fort Lewis.
I think it is outside Denver, And what matters for
our story is that it's there that he meets his
first girl. She's a quiet, serious, dark haired young woman
(27:02):
that we never named. They both drank heavily, and Scott
said it was love at first sight. And they're very young,
they're very inexperienced, and on a whim they got married,
and their parents and their commanding officers were pretty horrified,
but they were married. She decides to join up full time.
He decides not to, but they agree he'll follow her.
(27:24):
So she gets assigned to the island of the Pacific
Ocean island of Guam, and so he follows her out
to Guam, and you know, they're apart full It's set
couple of months. The moment they reunited, he realized the
fire was, if not out, it was flickering. He says,
there was a story in her eyes I couldn't read.
He begins drinking even more heavily. The drinking turns to fights.
(27:46):
She starts going out by herself, and the turning point
comes one night when she came back after partying. She
came back alone, and he had very strong sense, based
on his read of the situation, that she'd been unfaithful
and to him, it was as if his entire life
had exploded and she betrayed him. In his mind, he
had been raised very religious, the at least with the
(28:07):
type of family that debated scripture at the dinner table,
and so he starts praying that God take care of this,
fix this for me. And after a period of time,
God hasn't fixed it. So he said, well, if God's
not gonna help me, I'm going to reach out to Satan.
Problem was, she didn't exactly know how to reach out
to Satan. He remembers that from every movie he's ever seen,
(28:27):
it seems to always involve a lot of candles. So
he gets up every candle in the house and lights
them all over the living room one night while his
wife is out, and prays to Satan that he will
take his wife's life so that he will get her
life insurance policy and he can go back to Texas. Well,
that doesn't really much work. The praying to Satan seems
(28:47):
to be pretty much a one off thing. But I
will say that in the manifesto. It's something he loops
back to several times, wondering if the pact that he
offers satany if that explained the things that he did
or in life. So he calls his mom. His mom says,
come on home. He does. They divorce, and you know
barely what. A couple of years after leaving home, Scott
(29:08):
finds himself living with his parents, going back to work
for his dad, driving the back roads around Stephenville, brooding
in the brown pickup that his parents bought him for graduation,
listening to his eight tracks of Motley Crue with no
sense really of where he's going to go. The one
thing I can say he tried to do too. He
did two things that were kind of new. One he
(29:30):
started asking people he wanted to reinvent himself, obviously, so
he started asking people if they'd call him Joseph instead
of Scott. I don't think anybody actually did that. And
he invented what became his favorite drink, the thing that
he would drink every evening and pretty much all day.
He called it v syrup, and it was vodka, koffserup
and pepsi, which he put in a forty ounce foam
(29:50):
sonic cup, and if you're from Texas, we all know
sonic cups. And he would drink this morning, noon, or night.
About his only social outlet was at his sister, Regina's home.
She was married at a few years older. They'd always
been close. He would go over there and most nights,
certainly on the weekend, Regina would convene a group of
people around the round table in her kitchen. They started
(30:12):
calling themselves members of the round Table. And it was Roy,
and it was Cindy, and it was some other friends.
And they would sit there and drink and play cards,
because that's pretty much all there was to do in Stephenville, Texas,
nineteen eighty eight. And you know, they all saw that
he was drinking a lot, that he was in some distress,
but they figured, you know, he'd grow out of it
once his divorce went through. And that is basically the
story of Scott Hatley until fateful night the middle of
(30:35):
July nineteen eighty eight, when a new face appears at
the round table in Regina's kitchen, and it's Susan Woods
who showed up for one night. And in his manifesto,
Scott Hatley says that they engaged in some drunken flirting
both ruins and they were like, that's just crazy. He
was hot, he was just drunk, but that was enough.
That was the hook, the flicker, the moment that ended
(30:57):
Susan Woods's life. About a week or ten days later,
no doubt, after a long night driving around in his
brown pickup drinking his v syrup, he shows up unannounced
on Sunday night at Susan's home and she lets him.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
In what happens with Don Miller. Next he gets this
hit on the fingerprint database and Joseph Scott Hatlee is
just floating about right now.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Right after the murder, he raped a girl and after
that he had flat down thinking that he was going
to be arrested for the rape, and he went to
Las Vegas and ended up robbing a shoe store and
they arrested him. He did about one hundred and twenty
days in a youth offender program. He kept thinking, well,
they're gonna come. Stephenville is gonna come in any moment
and rest me for the rape, and no doubt they're
going to now make the connection to the murder. They
(31:43):
never did. He came back to Stephenville and the paranoia.
Lived pretty close to the police station. He could see
him coming out at six am and six pm and
the cruisers. He just thought it was a matter of time.
So his older brother was a long distance truck driver,
and Scott moved to Nashville and became a truck driver.
Apparently he did that for about five years. Says he
was pretty good at it. Unfortunately, as some truck drivers do,
(32:05):
he started taking amphetamines and ran into another truck. Lost
that job, ended up as a supervisor in a grocery warehouse.
You know, he started to build a life. The years
went by since the murder. Five ten years, he married,
he had two kids, and around nearly two thousands, he
was doing well enough in his job that they offered
(32:25):
him a transfer to be a supervisor. Apparently this was
a promotion to a warehouse in round Rock, Texas, which
is a suburb north of Austin. By two thousand and six,
when Don matched up the fingerprints, he was a supervisor
down in round Rock. You know, he worked nights and
so and he slept days, and that's what he was
(32:45):
doing that day in June two thousand and six, when
Don Miller asked the round Rock police to bring him
in for questioning.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Is this an open and shutcase for Don Miller?
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Yep?
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Does he confess?
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Well, you know, initially Don didn't know what to make
of this about Joe's Scott Hatley, and he got there
the rape file from the DA and he's going through it.
And I've looked at this report. It's like a four
paid single space report and down deep in the middle
of it the girl who he was raping and it
lasted sixty eight hours in a local park out on
(33:15):
the edge of town. She ran from him. At one
point he chased her and fell on top of her
and he says, you mind me or I'll kill you.
And I've done it before. And when Don saw that,
he realized that's the guy. So when Don shows up
and round rock, he has no doubt that Joseph Scott
Hatley is the guy. He gets DNA, he talks to him.
Hatlee is very blase, Oh, my dad's sex Withether, I
(33:37):
don't know. And as Don told me, if that's a
red flag right there, if you're accused of murder, you're
denying it up and down. You're not you know, you're
not being blase about it. So Hatlee went home last
that night. As he writes in his manifesto, he knew
what was going to happen the next day, and this
was his last time to make a run for it.
He says, you know, was I stupid for going back
(33:57):
in the next day? No, I was tired. He went
back in the next day. There was a lot more
questioning in that night, and when they let him go,
he was out in an eye hoop with his family
of four. They'd stepped into parking lot and everybody else
got into a van and he stood there and lit
a cigar And when he let the scar of the
the round Rock cops came out and they rested him
on domestic abuse case for his wife. But while he
(34:20):
was being held on that, Don filed on him for
the murder. Brought him back to Stephenville, and you know,
it was at that moment that the town kind of
had to come to grips with what had happened. You know,
there was a different town that it had been. But
you know, when Don sat down with people like Susan's
father and his friends, you know, they just didn't want
to believe it. They're like, well, you're just wrong. It's
(34:40):
Michael Woods. Why haven't you gotten Michael Woods. Well, it
doesn't match. It's that Joseph Scott Halley. We don't know Joseph. Well,
it's Sydney Hollmark's cousin wall He's a good boy. He
didn't do it. But in the end there was as
we were saying in the article, there was no dramatic
purple walk. There's no tiary confessions. He cut a deal
for thirty years. Could have been longer, but Susan's family
(35:01):
didn't want the attention to try.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
How old was he when all this happened In two
thousand and six.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
When he was arrested, he was forty, went off to Huntsville,
came down with bladder cancer, which went into a mission.
They let him out after I want to say, eleven years. What. Yeah,
he came out and went to Halfway House in Midland.
He was serfacing trucks at the beginning of the pandemic.
He was laid off and he went to live in
an RV by his daughter outside Abilene, and the cancer
came back and he died and a fellow bought the
(35:28):
RV where he died, and as he was going through
it found all these pictures of Don and Susan, and
he found the manifesto and he gave it to Don,
and Don ultimately got it to me. You know, this
was not a news story. It had been on forensic files,
but the manifesto. Having the manifesto, I I mean, I
could actually now tell the full story. It only took
me about three months to do it. I mean, it's
(35:50):
a fairly small cast of characters, maybe eight people. And
after I turned it into Texas Monthly, after a month
or two after that, we started making it into a podcast.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Do you believe everything in that manifesto? Do you think
that this was really Joseph Scott Hatlee on a page
for you?
Speaker 2 (36:10):
I actually kind of believe he was being honest with himself.
What I have a hard time believing is that a
lot of the things that he was making excuses. You know,
he was an unhappy kid. Maybe his mom was mean
to him a time or two, and so suddenly he
blames her for an unhappy childhood, and nobody saw any
of that. I did talk to one expert that said,
(36:32):
the facts of it don't matter. What matters what he thought,
what he believed. So many people who do things like
this are reacting to some type of childhood powerlessness, and
for whatever reason, he clearly felt that I believe the booze.
I believe, I believe the porn, I believe the stuff
about the marriage, and the said yeah, I believe. I
believe most of this. I have to say. Running this
behind all the people who were closest to him in life,
(36:54):
you know, there was nothing to argue with factually. Now,
how honest is he being about his internal landscape? That
is for a reader or in this case, a listener
to decide. But let's say we understood sixty or seventy
percent of the facts before his manifesto. I think with
the manifesto you get up to about ninety eight percent
of the facts. It completed what was already a compelling
(37:15):
story for me.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Did Joe Atkins and the Atkins family finally accept that
Joseph Scott Hatley was the killer and not Michael Woods,
the jerk ex husband.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
I don't know they've passed, but I'm told they reluctantly
had to. Nobody ever came back and apologized to Michael Woods.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Has he turned out to be okay? Since this has happened, ish.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
I've reported stuff around the World for The Wall Street Journal,
for Randy Fair. I've met my share of people who've
been in pow camps and abuse and torture, and you know,
there is that sense when you're sitting in front of
someone cave that someone's been through a trauma. There was
a sense when Michael that he'd been through a trauma.
This was a guy who had a rough life, and
so I was I wondered, how lucid is this guy
(37:58):
going to be? And he was one hundred percent. He'd
given them a lot of thought.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
You and I come from the same world of print.
You write these stories and you have all these words
where you're describing the victim, you're describing the killer, you're
describing emotions. You're trying to get that across to the reader.
And now we're in this audio format where you don't
have to do as much explaining. You can just hear it.
You can hear the laughter and the joy, you can
(38:23):
hear the sorrow and someone's voices. It's very, I think
liberating in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
It is there's no substitute for the immediacy of hearing
that person's voice in your ear. And I got very,
very lucky, Kate. I got very, very lucky. You know.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
On this show and all the shows I do, we
talk a lot about the importance of focusing in on
the victim, and I know that you have been able
to do both. Who do we meet in the podcast?
Who can illuminate Susan's character? Is it Roy and Cindy?
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Roy and Sindy. You're great because in their telling of
Susan's life, it's not defined by what happened at the end.
They prefer to remember the young woman who brought a
smile on their face and their laughter, and the joy
that they have of sharing with you and bringing her
back to life for people who would never know her
is so infectious. And the producer, at one point, the
(39:14):
wonderful producer, Brian stanfordson, are you at all concerned that
we're telling this fairly dark story and these people are
in hysterics laughing about, you know, sneaking beer. I said, no,
this can't be dirge and funereal. We must allow that.
So I think they do the best job of illuminating
the character of Susan. And then Michael, he would tell
(39:34):
you probably that she was the only one we hear her.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Love If you love historical true crime stories, check out
the audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All
That Is Wicked and American Sherlock. This has been an
(39:56):
exactly right production. Our senior producer is a Lexi Amirosi.
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at
(40:18):
tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold More. And
if you know of a historical crime that could use
some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email
us at info at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take
your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words
This story contains adult content and language, along with references
to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
It starts praying that God take care of us, fix
this for me, and after a period of time, God
has it fixed it. So you said, well, if God's
not going to help me, I'm going to reach out
to say.
Speaker 1 (00:29):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
true crime podcast tenfold More Wicked and the co host
of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
around the world interviewing people for the show and they
are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
(00:50):
crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
behind the stories. Best Selling author and my buddy Brian
Burrow returns to his small town, Texas roots in the
(01:13):
podcast by Texas Monthly called Stephenville. This season, he explores
a murder case that went cold for nearly two decades
to tell this amazing story. Brian is armed with the
newly discovered diary of the killer himself. A trigger warning
here we do talk about a serial rapist and killer.
(01:36):
Let's dip into how you came across with the story,
and then we can move from there.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
I had all but retired from any type of magazine journalism.
The economics of it aren't as compelling as they used
to be. I'm sixty one and not looking for as
much work outside books as I used to be. But
I got an email from a TV producer on Forensic File.
We did a show on a cold case killing in Stephenville,
(02:04):
Texas a few years back, and the lead detective found
something new. Found that the bad guy left behind a
two hundred page autobiographical essay that for the first time,
told the story of fairly well known events from his
point of view. He had spent his entire life denying
it all, and this was a fairly run of the
(02:26):
mill bad guy who wrote kind of an extraordinary document
that traced the development of his internal angers, passions, sexual
proclivities from the age of eight through early teen, through
his twenties into adulthood, as well as dealing with the
stories of the crimes that he committed. So I thought, gosh,
(02:47):
we've got a very different take on the story.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
So set the scene. Where are we when this story starts.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Well, it starts with a murder, and that's kind of
the best way to introduce the cat characters. In July
nineteen eighty seven, in Stephenville, Texas, which is southwest seventy
miles southwest of Fort Worth, supervisor at a sandpaper called
a man in town and says, your daughter has not
showed up for work two days in a row. And
his name was Joe Atkins. And Joe went on over
(03:17):
to his daughter's little white bungalow, a little rendered white
bungalow there in the Old Air area of Stephenville, walked
up to the front door, found at a jar, went
in and found his daughter, Susan Woods, naked on the
floor of the bathroom with her upper body plunged into
a tub full of black water.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
How long had she been in the bathtub?
Speaker 2 (03:36):
Two days? Last scene on Sunday night. They found on
a Tuesday night, Susan Woods in the summer of nineteen
eighty seven was a very quiet young woman, a factory
worker who had grown up in Stephenville. Quiet as a child,
didn't date close to her parents. Everybody said, you know,
she was just the sweetest thing, just nice to everybody,
(03:56):
a little trusting, a little naive. Graduated from Stephenville High
with honors, and within a year or two, having at
that point going to work for a nursing home, she
met a young man, a newcomer to town named Michael Woods.
And Michael came from El Paso. This was the late seventies.
You know, Susan was five to seven, long brown hair.
(04:17):
Michael was a little shorter, but very attractive, certainly to Susan.
And the most notable thing about Michael was at a
time when rural Texas was not only as conservative as
it may be today, but it was kind of pushing
back against the excesses of the sixties. Michael had long hair,
and he was a musician. He stood out in town Stephenville.
(04:39):
Keep in mind, is bills itself as the cowboy capital
of the world. It is a town then and now
where you know cowboy hats, ffa jackets, close crop hair
are most common, and Michael Woods stood out. Michael was
actually just visiting, kind of hanging around unemployed as he
tended to be most of the time, wanted to be
(04:59):
a position, but nobody in Stevenville wanted to hear rock
and roll. Let me tell you, they might listen to
Johnny Cash back in the days. And Michael stayed to
be with Susan, and he hated. He had a bit
of an attitude because, especially when he grew a beard,
you know, he got picked on. People would call him
fur face and stuff. And Michael did not look like
anybody else in town. He wore a leather jacket, engineer boots,
(05:22):
and he drove Harley. Michael was also not one to
suffer any type of abuse. If you said something insulting
to Michael, he would pop in the mouth. He was
repeatedly in fights, rarely in a job. He worked at
a sonic, he worked in a cornfield, I mean all
sorts of jobs that just never really took. And after
about a year or two of this, around nineteen eighty,
(05:44):
he said, I can't take it anymore. I've got a
job offered from an uncle. I think he ran an
auto repara shot back in l Passo. Come with me
to l Passol, was trying to make a go up there.
Susan had never been outside Stephenville, but she thought it
sounded like a grand adventure, right, So they go to Steveville,
and for whatever reason, the job fell through, and within
(06:04):
a matter of weeks they are living in what Susan
famously said in wonder her letters home on bacon bit sandwiches.
They're not quite living out of the car, as one
report had it, but Michael said they were living in
an apartment with no furniture. When they couldn't make that happen,
they moved in with his mother and that didn't go
real well either, and they ended up coming back. So
(06:27):
by let's say early eighty one, they're back in Stephenville.
Michael continues to act out. I've got police reports of
fights he got into. He was not happy there. He
had family in Indianapolis, brother, and at least once, and
it sounds like twice, he moved up to Indianapolis and
she came with him. And then Susan was just never
(06:47):
happy away from Stephenville for whatever reason, maybe being far
away from family or just smalltown Texas. It has it's
a lure. She went up to Indianapolis, stayed with him
a time or two, and came back and Michael says,
you know, during their about roughly five years of marriage,
he was gone about half the time. By the summer
of eighty six, they had moved into this little white
(07:09):
bungalow by downtown and they were trying to make a
last go of it. As Michael tells that, the final
straw was he had had some success flipping cars, buying
a used car, fixing it up and reselling it. He
wanted to do this with Holmes. Apparently his brother was
doing that in Napolis, and he thought he could do
it too. Unfortunately, Michael had no money, and Susan, who
(07:30):
is by now working in sandpaper factory, didn't really want
to invest her money in Michael's new venture. Michael accused
her of emasculating him and taking away his only livelihood,
and so he left. There was a series of letters
between them. It was heartbreaking because they were not angry
at each other. They loved each other. They both said
(07:50):
they want to be with each other, but she couldn't
live outside at Stephenville and Michael couldn't make it work
in Stephenville. He came back one last time in February
of eighty seven, and this would be now four months
before her murder, and it didn't take and he didn't stay.
There's a letter in the DA's files in which one
of her co workers said, basically, he gave her an ultimatum,
(08:11):
me or Texas. She chose Texas.
Speaker 1 (08:15):
Did you get a sense that Michael was physically abusive
emotionally abusive?
Speaker 2 (08:20):
I talked extensively with Susan's three closest friend, her best girlfriend,
the girlfriend's husband, and another young woman. Who were the
three people who went through all this with him, And
they said no, Michael was always kind to her. Did
they have arguments, yes, but no, nothing unpleasant until the end,
until February eighty seven. In februaryy seven, when Michael came
(08:42):
back for their final attempt at or Approchemont, he left.
He took a bunch of her things, and most important
thing was he took their yellow Mustang. And so for
the next four months after he left, she worked six
days a week to trying to raise money to get
a new car. She was having to have friends take
her to work. But when Michael left, he left behind
two things. He left behind a series of folded up
little paper notes that he put in cabinets. He put
(09:06):
in shirt pockets you put in her underwear drawer, and
they were just all about what a sea word she was,
what an awful person, how this was all her fault.
Her parents hated him from the word go. Michael tells
these stories of the father threatening with a gun and
things like this. But even worse, Michael left behind a
thirty minute cassette tape in which he excoriated Susan in
(09:28):
the most unpleasant way for breaking up the marriage, for
not allowing him to be a man. And at one
point Susan was so shaken she called in the three friends, Roy,
Cindy her best friend, and Gloria. It said, I've got
to go to work. Can y'all listen to this and
just tell me if I'm crazy because that this scares me?
And they were all deeply shaken. And by that night
Roy Hayes wonderful guys still alive, came over, nailed all
(09:51):
her windows shut, gave her a gun, and Cindy for
about the next month slept on her couch. Look. Nobody
knew Michael to be violent. The fights that he would
get in always seemed to be some guy would insult
in me. It was like Michael was out picking fights
with people. So despite the fist fights he'd gotten, and
nobody really thought of him as a violent guy. But
(10:14):
the fact, does they anyone to find out if he
had that in it?
Speaker 1 (10:17):
Was there contact between the two of them between February
when this escalates in July when her father finds her dead.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
No physical contact. We believed that there might have been
a phone call or too. I think Michael dimly remembers
a phone call in the letter, but nothing really of significance.
Once Michael left, she went to a divorce attorney and
filed the horse papers and so between Februar of eighty
seven when he left, over the next three or four months,
it was a pretty dark time for Susan. Initially, she's
working six days a week, trying to get a car.
(10:46):
I mean, this is just basic stuff. She's thirty years old,
she's never really lived on her own. She either lived
with her parents or then with Michael, off and on,
and it's a tough time for her. She doesn't really
have time to socialize. And then after about out three months,
say in the maytime frame, things begin to light. She
realizes her life is probably not at risk from Michael.
(11:08):
He hasn't showed up to Killer. She goes out one
night with a group of work friends to the nearby
town of Granbury. Stephenville was dry at the time and
flirted with a bartender, and he started coming over a
couple of three Friday nights, watched TV on the couch.
On the fourth one they had sex, and the next
day or so, after a day, Susan calls up another
(11:29):
girlfriend and said, oh my god, you've got to come
down here. She was hysterical, and she came down and
Susan had dark marks all over her neck. JC apparently
had gotten a little carried away and given her a
series of hickeys. And it's a measure of Susan's modesty
and Stephenville's modesty. She was paralyzed with fear of going
out in town and having people see this and think
(11:50):
she was that type of girl. By the end of May,
you know, she was able to get a new car.
Roy and Cindy, who are now married all these years later,
thirty five years later, noticed that she was brightening a little.
There came a night in late July when they said, hey,
we're going We're taking one of Cindy's young cousins over
to a carnival in a nearby town called Hiko. Why
(12:11):
don't you come on with us, it'd be good for
you to get out, And so she went on over
there and they didn't have much fun for whatever reason.
So they came on back and Roy said, tay, what,
I'll make it better. Let's all go to Dairy Queen.
So they went to Dairy Queen and Susan, who was demure,
careful about her physical appearance, had a hot fudge Sunday
and then she did something Cindy said she'd never seen
(12:33):
or done in her entire life, and these kids had
been best friends from like twelve thirteen. She had another
hot fish Sunday and smiled, and Cindy doesn't remember the
exact words, but it was very clear that she was
turning a corner. She could see a path forward for
herself and her life, and four nights later she was
found dead.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
So her father finds her submerged partially in this bathtub.
She's been sexually assaulted. It's summer of eighty seven. He
calls the police. I have to assume is that the
first thing that happens.
Speaker 2 (13:05):
He steps into the living room, calls him on the
house phone and then steps out into the yard which
is pitch dark, and pretty much the whole Stephenville Police
force shows up. You know. There was clearly pretty nasty
struggle in the bedroom. The bedroom was topsy turvy. The
mattress was off the box springs and the pillows were
strown everywhere, and the beding was strown everywhere, and there
was an electrical cord that it was laying across the
(13:27):
bed with the plug in on the floor. When they
squatted down the side her and lifted her head, they
saw a red ligature mark. He was suspected that perhaps
the cord had been used on her. As they studied
the crime scene, the one thing that stood out was
there's no sign of forced entry in a house with
a you know, everything nailed shut. It looked from all
angles as if Susan had invited her murder into the house.
(13:52):
And on the living room table there were six cigarette
buts in an ash tray and an open cann of coke,
suggesting that perhaps she had sat and had some cigarettes
with whoever it was. But that was it. You know.
They canvassed the neighborhood. They went up and down the street,
nobody had seen anything strange. It was Sunday night. It
(14:13):
was a quiet Sunday night in Stephenville, Texas.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
So what happens next? The investigators, we would assume, would
look at her inner circle first and find out she
has an ex husband.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
Funny thing happened the next morning. There was a lieutenant
on the force who announced to the gathering the next
morning in the police department that nobody else needed to
work the case. He was going to take it on himself.
And I talked with an officer who was in the
room that day, I said, what was that about? He said,
the guy just wanted to be a hero. He knew
we don't have a lot of cases like that, and
he was looking to move up. This guy's name was
Ken Maltby, and I'm sure he was otherwise a terribly
(14:46):
effective policeman. Early on, from all indications, Lieutenant Maltby focused
on Michael Woods. The Atkins family, Susan's maiden name was Atkins.
Was absolutely I mean, it was just obvious Michael Woods
has done this. I mean she was living with the
guy in town, right obviously. Hello. He somehow came back
and Maltby and a Texas Ranger went up to Indianapolis.
(15:08):
Within forty eight hours of the killing. They had reached
out to Indianapolis PD to interview him, and they had
there had been some interviewing, but he denied everything and
didn't seem to want to be cooperative. They confronted him
in his front yard and he declined to go back
to Texas, and so Lieutenant Wontby and the Ranger came
back to Texas and about a month later, Lieutenant Maltby
(15:33):
was transferred onto a narcotic squad to supervisor narcotic squad.
And you know, by the first week of October, and
this is two and a half months after the killing,
it's orphaned. There's nobody assigned to take this over. So
what happened is one of the original officers, the guy
who canvassed the bedroom, Donny Hensley, said well, I'll take
it on in a spare time, and he went to
look for Maltby's notes or to debrief, and he couldn't
(15:55):
get Maltby to talk with him, and he couldn't find
any notes, and Donny said, I don't know what's tell you.
I'd start over from scratch, and he pretty much did.
For the next couple of months, you know. He does
his best to widen the focus of the investigation. He
discovers the bartender in Granberry. By the way, I didn't
mention they've got prince in the bathroom and on the
coke can. He goes and fingerprints and gives light of
(16:18):
detector tests to the bartender. He passes. He then brings
in Roy Hayes, the best girlfriend's husband, the guy who
nailed the windows shut. And Roy was a little iffy
in the eyes of Stephenville because he played dungeons and dragon,
which back in those days carried the faint whiff of
the Satanic. Now Roy's a big old boy, nice kid.
(16:40):
Roy says, okay, I'll take your light detector test. Sure,
So they take him down to Waco to a ranger
station for a light detector test. Does that for about
an hour, walks out and Donnie says, you did it.
You did not pass, And Roy's like, I did not
I did anything to do this. He said, These machines
do not make a mistake. Roy, I know you did it.
This is just the way it is. About that moment,
the door opens behind him and the ranger who took
(17:03):
the test comes out. And says, congratulations, mister Hayes, you passed.
To this day, nobody knows what the mix up was.
At that point, Donny Hensley doesn't have a bunch of suspects,
and you know, everybody in town is saying Roy Hayes,
what he nuts? Everybody knows. Everybody knows it's Michael Woods.
And so Donnie rededicates himself to hounding Michael Woods, who
(17:24):
remains out of state outside in Indianapolis. He shows his
picture picture of the yellow Mustang to every service station
in the county that rings no belts with anyone. Finally
he realizes he's got to take the case to Indianapolis,
so he goes up there and the Indianapolis PD gives
him a fancy surveillance van that actually has one of
these like a submarine periscope out the top, so you
(17:47):
can sit in the back of this van. And after
a week or two of surveilling, they see Michael and
his brother set out a bunch of stuff for garage sale,
and they see some items that they believe they can
argue we're stolen from Susan. A figure, a fur coat,
this type of thing. So they swoop in the next
day with an arrest warm and arrest them all because
they found a roach, a marijuana roach, right you know.
(18:09):
It led to no charges, but it gotten the one
thing that Donny didn't have, which was Michael's fingerprints. They
needed Michael's fingerprints. Now to this day, Michael will tell
you he volunteered to give him the Prince and anything
else they wanted on the proviso that it'd be done in.
In the end, he wasn't going. He didn't trust Texas Comms,
was not going back to rural Texas where an entire
town was convinced he was the murder. He just wasn't going.
(18:31):
For whatever reason. The Texas police wouldn't go up there
and do it with him, so they felt they had
to go up and get the fingerprints, which they did.
They came back. Donnie on the flight back from Indianapolis
with the fingerprints, he is filling out the extradition papers
to bring Michael back. He's so sure that the Prince
will match. Now of course I've given away they don't match,
and Don's like, there's no way Michael Woods did this.
(18:54):
How is this happening? Pretty much by the summer of
eighty eight, by the time Donnie came back from Indianapolis
with those prints. The investigation was over.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
What happens next? This case goes cold.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
Well, actually, what did happen was the family sued Michael Woods.
He was the beneficiary on Susan's life inschurch. He was
doing something like eleven thousand dollars. I think they sued him,
and Michael would not go back. A judge hit him
with a judgment finding hum responsible for his death and
saying that he had to pay get this seven hundred
thousand dollars anyway, It was never paid, obviously in part
(19:29):
because Michael didn't come back anywhere near where they could
serve him, and then the case was slowly forgotten, not
by the family, not by our friends Roy and Cindy,
but by the rest of the town. Stephen Villain's important
note just in terms of context, it is not your
classic conservative small town. It's actually a college town in
the middle of farm country. Charlton State is there, and
(19:49):
during those years following the murder, during the nineties, it
saw an influx of people, but nothing happened in Susan's case.
Years went by, and finally in two thousand and five,
eighteen years later, Michael Woods kind of came to a
breaking point. Michael never got over this. He wanted to
be a musician, and he tried to His lawyer says,
(20:10):
you can't leave this town. They'll get you. They'll get
you if you leave Indianapolis. So he and his brother
start doing Skinnered and Charlie Daniels around town for thirty
five dollars a pop. But even that became hard after
the Indianapolis newspaper ran two articles saying that he was
the focus of murder investigation from Stephenville Well. Michael tried
to install home alarms. He tried to do this. He
(20:31):
tried to do that. He didn't keep a lot of jobs.
What he was good at was drinking and taking every
drug that anybody ever handed it. And he slowly went
to a spiral. He tried therapy that didn't work. Finally,
he says, by the early two thousands, after about fourteen
or fifteen years, he tried to kill himself. He said
he took three handfuls of tranquilizers and in a rare
(20:53):
bit of levity from Michael's side of the story, he said,
all it did was put me to sleep for three days,
and I woke up still depressed. In two thousand and five,
he was playing a birthday party, a friend's birthday party
with his brother, and afterwards it was just about the
anniversary of Susan's death, and he walked out in the backyard.
He was crying, and the host, who was just an acquaintance,
walked out and said, Michael, what's wrong. And he explained
(21:15):
that it was the anniversary of his wife's death and
he can't go back to a graver and thin because
the whole town thinks he did it. And this woman
whose name was Barbara Gary, who has the briefest of
cameos in this, says, well, that's just awful. And she
she goes in the next morning and gets on her
computer and she fires off an email to the Stephenville
Police saying, I really wish you'd figure out this for
(21:37):
cocta case, because this poor man is falling, falling apart
because you have it solved and found the actual killer.
What had happened by then was a new sergeant named
Don Miller had taken over looking at a handful of
cold cases that they had in Stephenville, and he knew
that the fingerprints didn't matage Michael had never been told.
(21:57):
He never understood what happened. Once they took his fingerprints.
Don looked at that and said, this God didn't do it.
And I bet you if I'm ever going to solve it,
I need him to help me solve it. Don Miller
calls and Michael said, I don't want to talk to you.
Don says, I understand that, but I'm your only hope
of ever ending this. And so Michael says, okay, what
do you want? He said, I need to come up
and there's this new thing called DNA, and I need
(22:20):
to come up and get some DNA from you. And
if you didn't do it, Michael, I can clear you.
You'll be able to get on with your life.
Speaker 1 (22:26):
What had they collected sperm samples? I'm assuming saliva.
Speaker 2 (22:29):
There was DNA off the coke can.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
And cigarettes, right, Yeah, so they had done a good job.
Speaker 2 (22:34):
Yes, that's one thing you can point. They did a
good job. And Don said, well, I want to come
up there, and Michael said yes, and then Michael said no.
Don had already gotten plane tickets, so he and his
buddy just went on. Anyway, they get up there and
it's like January or February. You know, it's twenty five
degrees in Indianapolis, and they're wearing these texts lightweight Texas
sports jackets. They're freezing. When they finally found their way
(22:55):
to a fairly modest home where Michael and his brother
were living, and they get up there on the on
the front porch and knock knock, and Michael actually opens
the door, and Don says who he is? And Michael's like,
I told you I Michael talked to you. Why are
you here? Don just keeps talking. It's just the load
of just Michael. We need your DNA. This is your
only hopelah blah blah blah blah bah blah. And after
I don't know ten fifteen minutes its Michael's like, okay, fine,
(23:16):
take the DNA and get off the caddian porch. And
Dona turns to his partner and says, okay, let's do
the DNA. The problem was neither one of them had
ever used DNA kit before, and the partner says, I
don't really know how to do this, and Don says,
are their instructions. So they read the instructions and took
a cheap swab send it down to Ranger station in Waco,
(23:36):
and it came back clear the DNA and the fingerprints
didn't match. DNA didn't match, and Don was able to
call Michael and say, Michael, and you're cleared, and Michael
began to cry and hung up. Great news for Michael, right,
(24:02):
Not so great news for Donald Miller. He now has
no suspects. However, what he has that they didn't have
in nineteen eighty seven is the FBI now has a
fingerprint database. Don wanted to go to take their fingerprint
card to Washington. His chief said, uh, uh, I'm not
paying for you to go to Washington. Then he found
out that the Rangers had access to it, so he
(24:23):
just took the fingerprints down to Austin and gave gave
him the original card and a few days later he
gets a call back and he says, you got to
you know, you got a penning pencil on. Don says, uh, sure.
The fingerprints come back to Joseph Scott Hatley. Don writes
his name down and Don asked the guy who's that
and the guy says, I don't know, but it's from
an arm robbery in Las Vegas, Nevada in nineteen eighty eight.
(24:46):
This is three states away. If this Joseph Scott Hatley
has any tide Stephenville. He calls the DA and says,
do we know a Joseph Scott Hatley? And the DA says,
you bet we do, and then Don says what he says,
great case. In eighty eight he went for a grand
jury and nobilly and he was long gone. No, we
didn't know who he was, but his mother and I
(25:07):
believe sister still lived in town. I wouldn't say a prominent,
but they are a well known Stephenville family. His late
father had owned several businesses, including a Texico station. Several
of them had worked, including a sister had worked for
the city. And so now Don realized I have a suspect.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
What is nobil?
Speaker 2 (25:25):
Nobil means that they took the case to a grand
jury and the grand jury declined to indict.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
So what's the next step with Joseph Scott Hatley? What
do we know about what he's doing when this is
all happening.
Speaker 2 (25:36):
You know, he was everybody considered him just a normal kid.
Beaver Cleaver born in nineteen sixty five, so it was
four years younger than me. I grew up a few
counties away was possessed of a burning anger incite him
that he was never able to explain. He says that
as early as the age of ten or eleven, he
was planning a school, a Columbine style school massacre. You know,
(25:57):
he developed thoughts of sexual and other types of vible.
What really changed for him was when he was twelve thirteen, fourteen,
he discovered two things that kind of became the great
loves of his life. Beer, which soon became vodka. He
became the type of drinker that, at least on weekends
when he wasn't working, would start drinking vodka when he
woke up in the morning and would still be drinking
at night. In pornography. He had a stashup born in.
(26:21):
I talked to a couple of experts and who just said,
this is really really typical of somebody who acts out
sexual violence. You know, nobody really saw him as anything
other than a pretty normal kid. By senior year of
high school, Scott had lost some of his baby fit
at least learn how to talk to girls, and decided
for a career he was going to go for the
(26:42):
Air Force, a weapon specialist at basis around Texas. Then
upon a high school graduation, he goes off to an
Air Force training base of some type at Fort Lewis.
I think it is outside Denver, And what matters for
our story is that it's there that he meets his
first girl. She's a quiet, serious, dark haired young woman
(27:02):
that we never named. They both drank heavily, and Scott
said it was love at first sight. And they're very young,
they're very inexperienced, and on a whim they got married,
and their parents and their commanding officers were pretty horrified,
but they were married. She decides to join up full time.
He decides not to, but they agree he'll follow her.
(27:24):
So she gets assigned to the island of the Pacific
Ocean island of Guam, and so he follows her out
to Guam, and you know, they're apart full It's set
couple of months. The moment they reunited, he realized the
fire was, if not out, it was flickering. He says,
there was a story in her eyes I couldn't read.
He begins drinking even more heavily. The drinking turns to fights.
(27:46):
She starts going out by herself, and the turning point
comes one night when she came back after partying. She
came back alone, and he had very strong sense, based
on his read of the situation, that she'd been unfaithful
and to him, it was as if his entire life
had exploded and she betrayed him. In his mind, he
had been raised very religious, the at least with the
(28:07):
type of family that debated scripture at the dinner table,
and so he starts praying that God take care of this,
fix this for me. And after a period of time,
God hasn't fixed it. So he said, well, if God's
not gonna help me, I'm going to reach out to Satan.
Problem was, she didn't exactly know how to reach out
to Satan. He remembers that from every movie he's ever seen,
(28:27):
it seems to always involve a lot of candles. So
he gets up every candle in the house and lights
them all over the living room one night while his
wife is out, and prays to Satan that he will
take his wife's life so that he will get her
life insurance policy and he can go back to Texas. Well,
that doesn't really much work. The praying to Satan seems
(28:47):
to be pretty much a one off thing. But I
will say that in the manifesto. It's something he loops
back to several times, wondering if the pact that he
offers satany if that explained the things that he did
or in life. So he calls his mom. His mom says,
come on home. He does. They divorce, and you know
barely what. A couple of years after leaving home, Scott
(29:08):
finds himself living with his parents, going back to work
for his dad, driving the back roads around Stephenville, brooding
in the brown pickup that his parents bought him for graduation,
listening to his eight tracks of Motley Crue with no
sense really of where he's going to go. The one
thing I can say he tried to do too. He
did two things that were kind of new. One he
(29:30):
started asking people he wanted to reinvent himself, obviously, so
he started asking people if they'd call him Joseph instead
of Scott. I don't think anybody actually did that. And
he invented what became his favorite drink, the thing that
he would drink every evening and pretty much all day.
He called it v syrup, and it was vodka, koffserup
and pepsi, which he put in a forty ounce foam
(29:50):
sonic cup, and if you're from Texas, we all know
sonic cups. And he would drink this morning, noon, or night.
About his only social outlet was at his sister, Regina's home.
She was married at a few years older. They'd always
been close. He would go over there and most nights,
certainly on the weekend, Regina would convene a group of
people around the round table in her kitchen. They started
(30:12):
calling themselves members of the round Table. And it was Roy,
and it was Cindy, and it was some other friends.
And they would sit there and drink and play cards,
because that's pretty much all there was to do in Stephenville, Texas,
nineteen eighty eight. And you know, they all saw that
he was drinking a lot, that he was in some distress,
but they figured, you know, he'd grow out of it
once his divorce went through. And that is basically the
story of Scott Hatley until fateful night the middle of
(30:35):
July nineteen eighty eight, when a new face appears at
the round table in Regina's kitchen, and it's Susan Woods
who showed up for one night. And in his manifesto,
Scott Hatley says that they engaged in some drunken flirting
both ruins and they were like, that's just crazy. He
was hot, he was just drunk, but that was enough.
That was the hook, the flicker, the moment that ended
(30:57):
Susan Woods's life. About a week or ten days later,
no doubt, after a long night driving around in his
brown pickup drinking his v syrup, he shows up unannounced
on Sunday night at Susan's home and she lets him.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
In what happens with Don Miller. Next he gets this
hit on the fingerprint database and Joseph Scott Hatlee is
just floating about right now.
Speaker 2 (31:21):
Right after the murder, he raped a girl and after
that he had flat down thinking that he was going
to be arrested for the rape, and he went to
Las Vegas and ended up robbing a shoe store and
they arrested him. He did about one hundred and twenty
days in a youth offender program. He kept thinking, well,
they're gonna come. Stephenville is gonna come in any moment
and rest me for the rape, and no doubt they're
going to now make the connection to the murder. They
(31:43):
never did. He came back to Stephenville and the paranoia.
Lived pretty close to the police station. He could see
him coming out at six am and six pm and
the cruisers. He just thought it was a matter of time.
So his older brother was a long distance truck driver,
and Scott moved to Nashville and became a truck driver.
Apparently he did that for about five years. Says he
was pretty good at it. Unfortunately, as some truck drivers do,
(32:05):
he started taking amphetamines and ran into another truck. Lost
that job, ended up as a supervisor in a grocery warehouse.
You know, he started to build a life. The years
went by since the murder. Five ten years, he married,
he had two kids, and around nearly two thousands, he
was doing well enough in his job that they offered
(32:25):
him a transfer to be a supervisor. Apparently this was
a promotion to a warehouse in round Rock, Texas, which
is a suburb north of Austin. By two thousand and six,
when Don matched up the fingerprints, he was a supervisor
down in round Rock. You know, he worked nights and
so and he slept days, and that's what he was
(32:45):
doing that day in June two thousand and six, when
Don Miller asked the round Rock police to bring him
in for questioning.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
Is this an open and shutcase for Don Miller?
Speaker 2 (32:53):
Yep?
Speaker 1 (32:53):
Does he confess?
Speaker 2 (32:54):
Well, you know, initially Don didn't know what to make
of this about Joe's Scott Hatley, and he got there
the rape file from the DA and he's going through it.
And I've looked at this report. It's like a four
paid single space report and down deep in the middle
of it the girl who he was raping and it
lasted sixty eight hours in a local park out on
(33:15):
the edge of town. She ran from him. At one
point he chased her and fell on top of her
and he says, you mind me or I'll kill you.
And I've done it before. And when Don saw that,
he realized that's the guy. So when Don shows up
and round rock, he has no doubt that Joseph Scott
Hatley is the guy. He gets DNA, he talks to him.
Hatlee is very blase, Oh, my dad's sex Withether, I
(33:37):
don't know. And as Don told me, if that's a
red flag right there, if you're accused of murder, you're
denying it up and down. You're not you know, you're
not being blase about it. So Hatlee went home last
that night. As he writes in his manifesto, he knew
what was going to happen the next day, and this
was his last time to make a run for it.
He says, you know, was I stupid for going back
(33:57):
in the next day? No, I was tired. He went
back in the next day. There was a lot more
questioning in that night, and when they let him go,
he was out in an eye hoop with his family
of four. They'd stepped into parking lot and everybody else
got into a van and he stood there and lit
a cigar And when he let the scar of the
the round Rock cops came out and they rested him
on domestic abuse case for his wife. But while he
(34:20):
was being held on that, Don filed on him for
the murder. Brought him back to Stephenville, and you know,
it was at that moment that the town kind of
had to come to grips with what had happened. You know,
there was a different town that it had been. But
you know, when Don sat down with people like Susan's
father and his friends, you know, they just didn't want
to believe it. They're like, well, you're just wrong. It's
(34:40):
Michael Woods. Why haven't you gotten Michael Woods. Well, it
doesn't match. It's that Joseph Scott Halley. We don't know Joseph. Well,
it's Sydney Hollmark's cousin wall He's a good boy. He
didn't do it. But in the end there was as
we were saying in the article, there was no dramatic
purple walk. There's no tiary confessions. He cut a deal
for thirty years. Could have been longer, but Susan's family
(35:01):
didn't want the attention to try.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
How old was he when all this happened In two
thousand and six.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
When he was arrested, he was forty, went off to Huntsville,
came down with bladder cancer, which went into a mission.
They let him out after I want to say, eleven years. What. Yeah,
he came out and went to Halfway House in Midland.
He was serfacing trucks at the beginning of the pandemic.
He was laid off and he went to live in
an RV by his daughter outside Abilene, and the cancer
came back and he died and a fellow bought the
(35:28):
RV where he died, and as he was going through
it found all these pictures of Don and Susan, and
he found the manifesto and he gave it to Don,
and Don ultimately got it to me. You know, this
was not a news story. It had been on forensic files,
but the manifesto. Having the manifesto, I I mean, I
could actually now tell the full story. It only took
me about three months to do it. I mean, it's
(35:50):
a fairly small cast of characters, maybe eight people. And
after I turned it into Texas Monthly, after a month
or two after that, we started making it into a podcast.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Do you believe everything in that manifesto? Do you think
that this was really Joseph Scott Hatlee on a page
for you?
Speaker 2 (36:10):
I actually kind of believe he was being honest with himself.
What I have a hard time believing is that a
lot of the things that he was making excuses. You know,
he was an unhappy kid. Maybe his mom was mean
to him a time or two, and so suddenly he
blames her for an unhappy childhood, and nobody saw any
of that. I did talk to one expert that said,
(36:32):
the facts of it don't matter. What matters what he thought,
what he believed. So many people who do things like
this are reacting to some type of childhood powerlessness, and
for whatever reason, he clearly felt that I believe the booze.
I believe, I believe the porn, I believe the stuff
about the marriage, and the said yeah, I believe. I
believe most of this. I have to say. Running this
behind all the people who were closest to him in life,
(36:54):
you know, there was nothing to argue with factually. Now,
how honest is he being about his internal landscape? That
is for a reader or in this case, a listener
to decide. But let's say we understood sixty or seventy
percent of the facts before his manifesto. I think with
the manifesto you get up to about ninety eight percent
of the facts. It completed what was already a compelling
(37:15):
story for me.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Did Joe Atkins and the Atkins family finally accept that
Joseph Scott Hatley was the killer and not Michael Woods,
the jerk ex husband.
Speaker 2 (37:26):
I don't know they've passed, but I'm told they reluctantly
had to. Nobody ever came back and apologized to Michael Woods.
Speaker 1 (37:33):
Has he turned out to be okay? Since this has happened, ish.
Speaker 2 (37:38):
I've reported stuff around the World for The Wall Street Journal,
for Randy Fair. I've met my share of people who've
been in pow camps and abuse and torture, and you know,
there is that sense when you're sitting in front of
someone cave that someone's been through a trauma. There was
a sense when Michael that he'd been through a trauma.
This was a guy who had a rough life, and
so I was I wondered, how lucid is this guy
(37:58):
going to be? And he was one hundred percent. He'd
given them a lot of thought.
Speaker 1 (38:02):
You and I come from the same world of print.
You write these stories and you have all these words
where you're describing the victim, you're describing the killer, you're
describing emotions. You're trying to get that across to the reader.
And now we're in this audio format where you don't
have to do as much explaining. You can just hear it.
You can hear the laughter and the joy, you can
(38:23):
hear the sorrow and someone's voices. It's very, I think
liberating in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
It is there's no substitute for the immediacy of hearing
that person's voice in your ear. And I got very,
very lucky, Kate. I got very, very lucky. You know.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
On this show and all the shows I do, we
talk a lot about the importance of focusing in on
the victim, and I know that you have been able
to do both. Who do we meet in the podcast?
Who can illuminate Susan's character? Is it Roy and Cindy?
Speaker 2 (38:51):
Roy and Sindy. You're great because in their telling of
Susan's life, it's not defined by what happened at the end.
They prefer to remember the young woman who brought a
smile on their face and their laughter, and the joy
that they have of sharing with you and bringing her
back to life for people who would never know her
is so infectious. And the producer, at one point, the
(39:14):
wonderful producer, Brian stanfordson, are you at all concerned that
we're telling this fairly dark story and these people are
in hysterics laughing about, you know, sneaking beer. I said, no,
this can't be dirge and funereal. We must allow that.
So I think they do the best job of illuminating
the character of Susan. And then Michael, he would tell
(39:34):
you probably that she was the only one we hear her.
Speaker 3 (39:36):
Love If you love historical true crime stories, check out
the audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All
That Is Wicked and American Sherlock. This has been an
(39:56):
exactly right production. Our senior producer is a Lexi Amirosi.
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at
(40:18):
tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold More. And
if you know of a historical crime that could use
some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email
us at info at tenfoldmorewicked dot com. We'll also take
your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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