The Unhinged Serial Killer, Cannibal, Thief, And More

The Unhinged Serial Killer, Cannibal, Thief, And More

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
In the eighties and nineties, the leafy suburbs of Maryland,
on America's East Coast was struck by crimes with a
truth far stranger than fiction.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
It was one of the biggest man hunts in this
county's police department history.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
The man responsible was Hadden Clark, a cross dressing killer
with an appetite for revenge.

Speaker 3 (00:24):
The wrong person crosses his path or does something to him,
Somebody's going to die.

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Even as a child, Clark's behavior would disturb others.

Speaker 4 (00:34):
I just remember anytime he was close to me. It
was just a visceral action.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
And the bizarre story would not end with his arrest.

Speaker 5 (00:43):
He's the part on the clay.

Speaker 1 (00:46):
So was Hadden Irving Clark born to kill his mother.

Speaker 6 (00:52):
She said he's evil. He's going to kill somebody if
he's not in jail.

Speaker 1 (01:27):
April the tenth in the year two thousand was a
day like no other. In the sleepy seaside town of Wellfleet,
Cape Cod, on America's northeast coast. Authorities were on a
search for bodies.

Speaker 7 (01:46):
He was brought up to try to identify areas where
he said that he had buried bodies.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
But this was a search party. With a difference.

Speaker 8 (01:56):
They let them wear women's underwear.

Speaker 9 (02:00):
He would not go out and else he had on
a lady's brown panties. So we bottom for him.

Speaker 1 (02:06):
The man leading the hunt for the remains of victims
he claimed to have left buried here decades ago, is
dressed in a week and wearing women's underwear under his
prison uniform. Fourteen years earlier, in nineteen eighty six, and
hundreds of miles away, this extraordinary story would begin in
the leafy suburban town of Silver Spring. It was a

(02:30):
sunny afternoon in late May, and six year old Michelle
d'aure was visiting her father for the weekend.

Speaker 5 (02:38):
She had brown hair and blue eyes, and freckles across
the nose, and she had a toothlessen.

Speaker 9 (02:49):
May thirty one, nineteen eighty six, Memorial Day weekend, her
mother and father were going through a bitter divorce and
there was a child custody issue shoes. She had been
to her father's house quite a few times before and

(03:09):
had a little friend there her age. Her name was
Elizabeth Clark, and she lived two doors down.

Speaker 5 (03:23):
Michelle and I were going to be together for the weekend,
and I think the temperature are over ninety degrees. As
I recall, I had pulled a plastic swimming pool out
from behind the garage and I was filling that with water,

(03:45):
and I let her. I let her play in the
pool for a while.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
He let her in the backyard as a father would,
and his attention was diverted to the to this race
the Indianapolis five hundred.

Speaker 1 (04:04):
When he went to check on Michelle, she was nowhere
to be seen. Assuming she must have gone to play
with her neighborhood friend, Carl, wandered down the street in
search of his daughter.

Speaker 9 (04:15):
He heard some kids in the Clerk backyard. He went
down there asked Jeff Clark if Michelle was there. Jeff
explained to him they'd been away all day and that
Michelle was not there.

Speaker 5 (04:31):
I was in shock, practically, I couldn't believe that she
wasn't at the clarkhouse.

Speaker 9 (04:39):
Maybe five or six o'clock, he finally went for the call.
The police reported her missing, and that's that what started
the huge search for her.

Speaker 10 (04:53):
When Michelle drew missing, it was very big news, and
the idea that she, the little girl, could just walk
away from a house where her father was seemed incredible
to people.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
I remember the neighborhood being searched, neighbors being interviewed, and
I remember very well.

Speaker 6 (05:17):
Carl, her father.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
After Karl reported his daughter missing, he quickly became the
prime suspect.

Speaker 5 (05:26):
The day after she disappeared, you know, they accused me
point blank of having killed Michelle. You know, they told
me there's no chance she's gonna be found alive, and
when we find her, you know, we're gonna go and
get you.

Speaker 1 (05:39):
However, despite the authority suspicions, they were unable to find
the body.

Speaker 2 (05:46):
It was one of the biggest man hunts in this
county's police department history. Horseback, motorcycle, foot.

Speaker 9 (05:56):
They started the entire neighborhood and they talked to neighbors.
She just bareished.

Speaker 1 (06:04):
The only other person on the authority's radar was a
man by the name of Hadden. Clark Hadden was living
with his brother Jeff, just two houses down from Carl
and Michelle.

Speaker 9 (06:18):
Hadden was doing some very bizarre things. He was scaring
the neighborhood kids. I think he butchered a rabbit in
front of one of them.

Speaker 1 (06:29):
Hatten's strange behavior had been evident since childhood.

Speaker 2 (06:33):
He had summarings in Wellfleet, Massachusetts some Cape Cod. It
was his grandfather's home, so it was fairly privileged.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
Andrea Slade, who shared rights to school with the Clark family,
has vivid memories of her encounters with Hadden.

Speaker 4 (06:51):
Even as a little girl. It was the low point
of my day to get into that car with them.
They were really odd the kindergarten. I just remember being
upset anytime he was close to me. It was just
a visceral reaction. I mean, just a big old not
in my stomach. I don't know if he was threatening

(07:12):
me or just had that look in his eye or something.

Speaker 1 (07:18):
Alec Wilkinson recalls Clark's misfit behavior from his time spent
on Cape Cod.

Speaker 11 (07:24):
The memory that I have is of had in my
swimming class at the public beach a goal ponde. I
just remember an awkward, shy, scrawny little boy he had.
There was a noteworthy incident when he was riding his
bicycle with his brother and something had gone wrong and
the brother had fallen off his bicycle and been hurt

(07:47):
fairly seriously, and hadn't had gone back to his parents'
house and reported.

Speaker 9 (07:54):
His brother was hurt.

Speaker 11 (07:55):
But it's fine that the bike is intact.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
The product of a troubled home life, hadn't soon found
an outlet for his eccentricities.

Speaker 9 (08:06):
He was caught dressing in his mother's clothing. His father
always wished that he was a girl, so maybe that
was carried over into him wanting to dress up as
a woman.

Speaker 6 (08:20):
A neighbor came home and walked in his house and
found Haddenen dressed in his wife's clothing, and Hadden't of course,
ran out of the house wearing these clothes in all upset.

Speaker 8 (08:35):
Most individuals who are transvestites do that because they find
it as a release of tension. It often starts in
childhood where they'll try on either their sister's underwear or
perhaps their mother's underwear, and it just escalates from that.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
In nineteen eighty two, aged thirty one, Clark would enroll
in the Navy, where his peculiar habits would continue to
mark him out.

Speaker 6 (09:00):
All I know about his time in the navy is
that he was a cook on a ship and that
apparently he was harassed.

Speaker 8 (09:09):
He couldn't get along with anybody in the military, and
wearing women's underwear in the military is certainly one way
to arouse the animosity of your colleagues.

Speaker 2 (09:18):
He was a target of ridicule, and he was beaten
aboard one of the ships that he was stationed, suffered
some head trauma, and was released from the Navy.

Speaker 8 (09:31):
You could see how somebody like Clark, who was teased,
made fun of, bully humiliated on a daily or weekly basis,
how that can result in an enormous amount of inner
anger that's just suppressed throughout his life.

Speaker 1 (09:48):
A year after his discharge from the military, Clark's odd
bull reputation would lead him to become a suspect in
the disappearance of Michelle d'are one.

Speaker 9 (09:56):
Of the authors from You. The division had Clark at
the Clark's home. Clark just said that he never saw Michelle,
but he did become a person of interest at that time.

Speaker 1 (10:09):
The authority's interest in Clark would soon be elevated after
a routine interrogation took a dramatic turn. In nineteen eighty six,
six year old Michelle d'aure mysteriously disappeared from the suburbs
of Maryland. Her father, Carl, would become the prime suspect. However,

(10:32):
the bizarre behavior of a man named Hadden Clark began
to draw the interest of the authorities. When police questioned Clark,
what had started as a routine interrogation quickly took an
ominous turn.

Speaker 9 (10:49):
They requesting him about Michelle d'Or and that's when he
became very annoyed and irritated.

Speaker 2 (10:55):
He broke down. He was physically sick.

Speaker 9 (10:59):
He had an epiferred diarrhea. He made a statement that
he might have done something that he doesn't remember.

Speaker 1 (11:08):
However, despite Clark's apparent confession, he had been at work
that afternoon and had already made alibi based on Carl's
version of events.

Speaker 9 (11:18):
When they followed up on Hayden Clark, they found that
he had punched his time card in and there was
not enough time from the last time Carl saw Michelle
to commit this and clean the scene up and everything.
So Carl gave him an alibi.

Speaker 1 (11:37):
In the absence of any solid evidence to link him
to Michelle, Hadden was released from custody.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
Hadden disappeared off the radar screen.

Speaker 1 (11:52):
Despite investigator's best efforts, there was still nobody Michelle, it appeared,
had vanished without trace, And.

Speaker 9 (12:02):
This investigation went on for years and years and nothing. Ever, every.

Speaker 1 (12:09):
Few would have guessed that the mystery of her disappearance
would go unsolved for over a decade. In the years
following his questioning in relation to the disappearance of Michelle
d'aure Hadden, Clark continued to have run ins with the law.

Speaker 2 (12:31):
He had rented a room from a family in Bethesda.
Hadn't engaged in a series of destructive acts to seek
revenge on this couple who told him your leases up,
it's time to go.

Speaker 9 (12:44):
He retaliated by killing their cat. He rigged a bucket
of oil so it would fall on them when they
opened the door.

Speaker 2 (12:55):
He took fish and he wrapped them in newspaper and
hid them around the house so that the fish would
eventually rot and decay and recavic.

Speaker 9 (13:05):
One time, he dressed up as a woman and went
in a church and stole a bunch of purses.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
A lot of purses, wigs, eyeglasses, eyeglass cases.

Speaker 9 (13:17):
Park police caught him in his truck in the park
going through the purses, and he was arrested for that.

Speaker 1 (13:24):
Having served his forty five day sentence, Clark was released
in nineteen eighty nine and soon began to attend the
local Bible study group.

Speaker 12 (13:35):
I would say even that he looked at Christianity for
some sort of solace and consolation, maybe even redemption.

Speaker 1 (13:45):
However, despite the seeming attempts to reform his character, his
unsettling behavior continued.

Speaker 12 (13:51):
One time, I was washing dishes at my house and
I had a window that looked out on my backyard,
and all of a sudden, his head just came up.
I always tell people it was like Marlon Brando in
Apocalypse Now. He came up out of and it scared me.
And I jumped back and I opened the window, and
I said, Hadden, don't ever do that. I never since

(14:15):
that he was a dangerous person. I'll put it that way.
I sensed that there was something definitely wrong.

Speaker 1 (14:23):
Hadden held down several jobs, including one as a rollerblade courier,
granding himself the Rockville Rocket In nineteen ninety two. Hadden's
work with a community church organization introduced him to local
good Samaritan Penny Hoteling.

Speaker 9 (14:44):
Penny had hired Hadden Clark as her gardener, and she
knew he was very odd.

Speaker 1 (14:51):
The Hoteling home in Bethesda was little more than ten
miles from Silver Spring, where Michelle d'aor had disappeared. Some
six years earlier, took to his role with Relish, quickly
earning the trust of Penny. Despite his eccentricities, He.

Speaker 3 (15:06):
Had a relationship with the mother in terms of feeling
as if Penny holding the mother was kind of his mother.
She was very nurturing, she was giving him work to do,
she was trusting him with things, and he felt very
close to her.

Speaker 2 (15:22):
They had developed a friendship and at one point may
have even given him a key to access the house
when she wasn't there to do the work.

Speaker 1 (15:37):
However, in the summer of nineteen ninety two, Penny's daughter
would return home from university, and domestic bliss would be
transformed into an unthinkable nightmare.

Speaker 6 (15:52):
She's tall girl, almost six feet tall, slender, good looking,
young lady got a job down in DC, and she
was very happy about getting the job.

Speaker 4 (16:04):
She was well liked, she.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
Was popular, she was ambitious, and was evidently the light
of her family's eye. The only daughter of Penny and
very close to her.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
Brother, Hadden grew increasingly jealous of Laura, who was frequently
unsettled by the gardener's curious behavior.

Speaker 9 (16:24):
Laura was very much afraid of Clark. She didn't want
him around. She didn't want anything to do anything. Clark
just kind of creeped her ound. Penny had caught had
in the half a couple times up near Laura's bedroom.

Speaker 2 (16:40):
She didn't feel comfortable with Hadden' and there came a
point when Missus Holing asked Hadden to leave.

Speaker 1 (16:47):
Events would come to a haunting climax in October when
Penny announced she would be going away to a conference
for the weekend.

Speaker 9 (16:55):
Round about October nineteenth, Penny Holding had left for the
weekend to go down to Virginia.

Speaker 1 (17:05):
Laura, who was always reliable and punctual, failed to turn
up at her job the following Monday morning.

Speaker 9 (17:11):
It was very odd and they started calling around. They
called her brother, Warren, and Warren came over.

Speaker 2 (17:17):
The police and family searched and searched and searched for
this young woman.

Speaker 6 (17:22):
I was told to go buy there the next day,
go down and meet with the detective see if they
needed any help.

Speaker 9 (17:29):
We looked around the room, didn't see any evidence of
struggle or any We didn't see any blood.

Speaker 1 (17:36):
Detectives worked around the clock to build a case and
soon uncovered some chilling evidence.

Speaker 6 (17:42):
I went down and met with the detectives. They were
doing a search of the wooded areas around Laura Holdeling's
home and they had found women's shoes and then there
was a pillowcase that had what looked like blood.

Speaker 9 (18:01):
We contacted our forensic scientist. She'd prayed luminol on Laura's bed.

Speaker 6 (18:10):
You give it just a couple of minutes, and then
you turn on black lights and you see if there's
any hemoglobe, and.

Speaker 9 (18:17):
The whole bed lit up.

Speaker 8 (18:23):
We were shocked.

Speaker 6 (18:24):
I mean it was like, oh my God, something happened here.

Speaker 9 (18:33):
So at that time we knew that an all probability
Laura had been murdered.

Speaker 1 (18:40):
With Laura presumed dead, detectives would receive an inexplicable eyewitness
report claiming that she'd been spotted in the neighborhood.

Speaker 6 (18:49):
When they did the neighborhood, they talked to a Hispanic
woman who takes care of children in the area and
she's said that on that day she saw Laura.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
The truth behind this apparent sighting would later reveal a
harrowing insight into the mind of her killer.

Speaker 6 (19:10):
We talked to the family about anyone that might be suspicious.
The brother had mentioned the gardener and the gardener hadden't Clark.

Speaker 1 (19:23):
As investigators examined the facts of the case, the name
of Hadden Clark immediately sparked their interest. Clark's connection to
the murder of Michelle d'aure made him a likely suspect.

Speaker 6 (19:38):
We ended up taking him in.

Speaker 1 (19:43):
However, not everyone was convinced that the police had the
right man.

Speaker 12 (19:49):
I have to be honest to say, I thought this
is extremely unlikely. I thought his weirdness has got them
to think he's done something that he's not really capable of.
That's not the man that I knew well, so I
thought it was prejudicial.

Speaker 1 (20:03):
Hadden was typically evasive during questioning, yet has detectives delved
into his past, they uncovered a shocking history of violence.

Speaker 9 (20:15):
Hadden grew up in a family with two brothers a sister.

Speaker 1 (20:20):
In nineteen eighty four, Bradfield Clark, the oldest of Hadden's brothers,
had committed a crime of unspeakable brutality.

Speaker 9 (20:28):
His brother in California had a party.

Speaker 3 (20:32):
He had invited a couple of them for dinner. The
husband couldn't make it, so the wife went anyway. They
had a lot of drink, Things got dicey, and he killed.

Speaker 6 (20:43):
Her please go there, and when they walk in, one
of the detectives goes out and have found her cut
up body in the trunk of his car.

Speaker 1 (20:53):
Officers found evidence at the scene to indicate that Clark
had cannibalized a portion of his victim.

Speaker 9 (21:00):
Hadden was pretty shocked by that. Whether it influenced him
or not, I don't know.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
With the disappearance of Laura Hoteling still shrouded in mystery,
the evidence mounting against Hadden Clark seemed damning. Frustratingly for detectives,
they were forced to let Clark go, just as they
had been six years earlier during the Michelle d'Or investigation.
Determined history would not be allowed to repeat itself, ed

(21:30):
Tarney and his team would redouble their efforts in the
search for Laura Hoteling. A search of Clark's truck would
uncover fresh clues that would point detectives in an ominous
new direction. In the late eighties, six year old Michelle

(21:52):
d'Or would vanish from outside her father's suburban home, leaving
investigators puzzled and unable to find a body. Lurking at
the periphery of the story was Hadden Clark, who six
years on from Michelle's disappearance, now found himself at the
center of a second mystery. Twenty three year old Laura
Hoteling had disappeared without trace, and Clark, who worked as

(22:16):
the family's gardener, was the prime suspect. As detectives built
a case against Hadden, new evidence would lead them north
to Cape Cod, where the investigation would gather pace.

Speaker 6 (22:29):
Because of the way he acted because of reasonable suspicion,
we were able to get a search warant first truck.

Speaker 9 (22:36):
We found some pictures of a cemetery that he had
up on Cape Cod.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
Clark, who spent his childhood summers at his grandfather's house
in Wellfleet, had close connections to the cape on the
edge of the North Atlantic. Detective Arthur Parker, who was
asked with heading up the search for Laura Hoteling's body,
soon uncovered some compelling clues.

Speaker 7 (23:07):
I drove up to the family plot.

Speaker 1 (23:12):
The earth at the foot of Clark's father's grave looked
to have been recently disturbed.

Speaker 7 (23:19):
And it was right in front of the three flat
headstones that depict Hadden Clark's father as well as his
grandmother and grandfather, And that area of disturbance looked like
something had been dug up. We actually thought that this

(23:43):
area would contain the body of Laura Hodling. Eventually we
dug the area of disturbance up, we found nothing. We
were kind of shocked because we felt that we were

(24:05):
going to find the body of Laura Hoding, and then
we had to kind of switch our thought process on
it and said that, you know, perhaps that something was
there and that he removed it.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
Although the search of Cape Cod failed to unearth any bodies,
the mystery of what had been removed from the graveyard
would later reveal the depth of Hadden's deviance. As the
focus of the investigation into Laura Hoteling's death moved back
to Bethesda, at last, there would be a break in
the case.

Speaker 9 (24:35):
About that time, the chemist was able to develop a
fingerprint from that bloody pillowcase and match that they hadn't
Clerk's print. Another significant piece of evidence was we found
this check that he wrote to a local hardware store,
probably a little bit before Laura was missing. He had

(24:56):
bailing twine and duct tape. Notation at the bottom of
it said Laura, now it's warrant Hime.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
Detectives moved quickly to detain Clark, yet not everyone was
convinced that they had the right man.

Speaker 12 (25:20):
So even after he was arrested and I would go
visit him in jail and we would talk, I still
wasn't convinced that he had done it.

Speaker 6 (25:30):
His mother came into town. Usually the mother comes in
and you know, they want to know why you're picking
on their little child and why you're, you know, harassing him.
She sat there and she looked at us and said, look,
I want to know what can I do to help
you keep him in jail. And she said, I am

(25:52):
scared to death of him. He's evil, He's he's going
to kill somebody else if he's not in jail.

Speaker 1 (26:03):
For Carl Dare, the murder of Laura Hoteling had haunting
echoes of his own daughter's disappearance.

Speaker 5 (26:10):
When Laura Holding was killed in nineteen ninety two, there
was a body missing, and there was you know, and
he was in the vicinity in the same way that
he had been with Michelle. I just knew it was
pretty obvious to me anyway that he had done something
with Michelle.

Speaker 1 (26:32):
Despite the fact that Laura's body had still not been found.
In June of nineteen ninety three, Haddon Clark would plead
guilty to second degree murder, receiving a thirty year sentence
extremely painful.

Speaker 12 (26:45):
For me, and that I thought I should have picked
up on this, or I should have asked more questions
before the crime. It just was so far off my radar.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
The day following his sentencing, Clark would lead investigators to
shallow grave where Laura's body would be uncovered. The terrifying
details of her final moments would also become clear.

Speaker 9 (27:12):
I surmised that he went in the back door when
she was in bed sleeping. I personally think that he
had just jumped on her and suffocated her.

Speaker 6 (27:29):
Her ear lobes had been cut off.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
Cut her throat in some fashion, cleaned up the scene,
He took her body out, and he took her across
the street from Old Georgetownwood to another empty field and
buried her.

Speaker 1 (27:47):
The mysterious sightings of Laura on the morning after her
death would also be explained.

Speaker 7 (27:53):
It was later determined that Hadn't I had dressed like
Laura in an attempt to throw off at any type
of investigation authority, so that Laura would appear missing from
maybe the metro or maybe work, but not home because
somebody saw her walking to work and when in fact
it wasn't Laura, but it hadn't dressed as Laura.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
Hadden, it seemed, had taken the ultimate revenge against Laura.

Speaker 3 (28:18):
When the daughter Laura would come home, he felt jealous,
like displaced, and he wanted to get her out of there.
So in his mind, she really had to go. He
really didn't like her, he wanted to be her. Laura
really needed to be punished for just being Laura.

Speaker 1 (28:39):
With one case closed, the focus of the investigation would
switch back to the mystery of Michelle d'aure.

Speaker 9 (28:48):
Ultimately, knowing what I knew then about Hadden Clark, he
was capable of murder, I went back through the entire case.

Speaker 2 (28:56):
File, and so Hadden came back on the radar screen
and the investigation began.

Speaker 9 (29:04):
A new.

Speaker 1 (29:07):
Detectives began working closely with Carl to reevaluate the details
of Michelle's last known movements.

Speaker 2 (29:15):
Carl knew that he wasn't sure about the time that
he had given back in nineteen eighty six of when
he last saw Michelle. I think once he came to
terms with that, the time frame expanded and there was
ample opportunity for.

Speaker 13 (29:32):
Haden't los pos in Jesus is Key.

Speaker 1 (29:44):
With a new timeline of Michelle's final moments now established,
Hadden Clark no longer had an alibi.

Speaker 5 (29:50):
Hadn't irving Clark the truth.

Speaker 13 (29:53):
You talk about God, you talk about Jesus.

Speaker 5 (29:57):
And the Lord, and your mother and your father.

Speaker 12 (29:59):
You don't think walking down here on you right now.

Speaker 5 (30:05):
Here they are.

Speaker 6 (30:08):
Nursing and Hadden do what's right.

Speaker 1 (30:11):
Even in the face of prolonged questioning, Clark would not
come clean.

Speaker 3 (30:16):
He's the partner on the clay.

Speaker 1 (30:20):
However, he would soon let slip the information investigators craved.
Whilst in prison, Clark would confess to his cellmate, laying
bare the details of the murder of Michelle d'aure.

Speaker 7 (30:34):
There was enough to be able to charge Hadden with
Michelle's murder without the body.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
In nineteen ninety nine, Hadden Clark would be found guilty,
receiving a thirty year sentence for a crime he had
committed some thirteen years previously. Over a decade since her disappearance,
the details of Michelle Dau's untimely death would finally be revealed.

Speaker 9 (31:09):
She had grown bored in her pool by herself, so
her playmate Elizabeth Clark two doors up. She went up
there looking for her, hadn't Clark lured her in by
telling her that Elizabeth was upstairs in her bedroom. That's
when he went up there, and that's where he killed her.

(31:30):
He took her downstairs after that, and he told me
he drained her blood into the basement, drain put her
in a garbage bag, and from there he went to work.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
Investigators concluded the eviction from his brother's house had been
the catalyst that sparked his murderous fury.

Speaker 2 (31:53):
That, in our opinion, was what started. Hadge Michelle evidently
came over, he sliced her throat, and that was the
end of that.

Speaker 1 (32:09):
Clark would later claim that before burying Michelle's remains, he
cannibalized some of her flesh in a barbaric act that
draws comparisons with the crimes of his elder brother.

Speaker 8 (32:20):
Cannibalism is best understood in a case like this as
another aspect of his sexual arousal pattern. They do that
because killing alone is not psychosexually sufficient. They have to
go beyond the killing and engage in cannibalism. This is
arousing to them.

Speaker 1 (32:40):
Although Michelle Dare's killer had been dealt justice. Clark still
kept the location of her body close to his chest.

Speaker 5 (32:48):
Well after the trial, there still was nobody.

Speaker 1 (32:52):
More than anything, Kyl Dare wanted to be able to
finally bring his little girl home. In January of the
following year, an increasingly crazed Clark would lead investigators to
the woods on the outskirts of Silver Spring. Hadn't had
told of covering the young girl's grave with a mattress.

Speaker 9 (33:14):
I was just standing about twenty yards from them, and
I looked down and I saw looked like a twig.
At first focused in on it. It was a spring
called Clark over.

Speaker 2 (33:33):
He shuffles his way around.

Speaker 9 (33:38):
And he looked at it and started clawing at the
ground and said, this is it.

Speaker 10 (33:45):
He got very excited and animated, and as if you know,
he saw this puzzle, a puzzle that he had made.

Speaker 2 (34:00):
And after digging for a bit pink piece of fabric
that popped right out of the ground.

Speaker 10 (34:12):
We knew we had found Michelle door.

Speaker 2 (34:17):
Everyone weeped.

Speaker 1 (34:23):
After almost fourteen years, Michelle d'Or could finally be laid
to rest.

Speaker 2 (34:31):
Everybody deserves to be remembered appropriately and to have some
final place to rest. And it shouldn't be under a
mattress in a park.

Speaker 5 (34:49):
It was good to have a place to Finally, Mary Michelle, I.

Speaker 9 (34:54):
Mean, there's a.

Speaker 5 (34:56):
Cemetery over outside of washing in DC. It has my
grandfather and basically Michelle was now four generations of that
family in that one cemeterian. It's nice to have together
in that way, I would say.

Speaker 1 (35:15):
Yet, with a picture now firmly established of hadden Clark
as a ruthless revenge killer, the question of how many
more victims he may have claimed began to loom large.
Between nineteen eighty six and nineteen ninety two, the suburbs

(35:37):
of Maryland would play host to an astonishing drama. Hadden Clark,
a homeless man with a taste for vengeance, would be
convicted of the murder of both Laura Hoteling and Michelle d'aure,
earning a combined sentence of sixty years. However, even after
his detention, the story of hadden Clark would continue to

(35:58):
intrigue authority.

Speaker 9 (36:03):
We have Michelle's body back, and we have Clark talking,
and Clark is telling us about stuff that he did
up in Cape.

Speaker 1 (36:15):
Cod The FBI began to take an interest in the
cross dressing killer who now made claims on more than
a dozen murders. In April of the year two thousand,
Clark would lead an FBI team on a bizarre tour
through the sand dunes of Willfleet.

Speaker 9 (36:33):
When we took him up the Cape cod he would
not go out. And else he had on a lady's
bronze panti, so we bought them for him and he
put him on. He put on a wig too, and
then he had the undergarments underneath.

Speaker 7 (36:48):
He put a wig on, and you know that they
put him in a woman's shirt in an attempt to
try to, you know, get him to cooperate a little more.

Speaker 1 (36:58):
Although the dunes yielded no bodies, Haddon would guide investigators
to the rear of his grandfather's house, where a macarbre
discovery would be made that would answer the riddle of
what had been buried at the Clark family plot.

Speaker 7 (37:17):
This property, particular building is called by the Clock family
the Wiki Hut. Right about here there was about a
three foot by maybe three or four foot old trailer,
kind of a tag alonge that you'd hook onto the
back of your yard tractor, and underneath was just saying

(37:40):
Trooper Barrett had a metal prod almost like a big
long stick, and she kind of moved along the perimeter
and you could hear the where that bar would go
into the sand, and obviously wasn't hitting anything, just moving
along the boundary of that sand. And she took that

(38:05):
bar and put it down into the earth, and we
heard this bump, made the hair stand up on the
back of everybody's neck, and we knew that there was
definitely something there. So we were able to dig down

(38:29):
and unearth that, and it was a plastic five gallon bucket.
We weren't quite sure what we were going to find,
what perhaps some type of body pots. I mean, we
really didn't know. After taking the top of that off,
we observed a number of pieces of jewelry that hadn't

(38:52):
said were trophies from different people that he had murdered
over the course of his life. Several of the pieces
of jewelry were identified as belonging to his most recent
victim at that time, Laura Horling.

Speaker 1 (39:05):
According to Hatton, he had moved his trophies, which numbered
an excess of two hundred and the body of an
unidentified third victim from their previous burial location at the
foot of his father's grave.

Speaker 7 (39:17):
The information was that at some point hadden't had gone
to the cemetery and had unearthed both a young girl's
body and a bucket of jewelry.

Speaker 1 (39:33):
Clark claimed to have dumped the body at the local
waste disposal facility and reburied his bucket of trophies in
the woods at the rear of his grandfather's property.

Speaker 8 (39:45):
They do it as a fantasy stimulant when they're no
longer there. It has a lot of emotional attachment to
these individuals. They know where their jewelry came from, and
this is very arousing to them. They're able vent to
recall and a great deal of detail what they had
actually done.

Speaker 10 (40:09):
I think the idea of Laura Hodelings had a trophy
in that bucket. There's reason to believe that some of
those others, if not all, were attached to actual human beings.

Speaker 7 (40:22):
The FBI behavioral science estimated that he had perhaps killed
some way between twelve and twenty two people, and part
of the reason that they were able to conclude that
was because he was so comfortable around death. The thoroughness
of him cleaning these crime scenes. He was comfortable with death,
and that's not something that usually happens with somebody their
first time out.

Speaker 10 (40:44):
We give a lot credence to his claims of having
killed more people, because when you can kill Michelle d'Or,
you could kill anybody. Could he have killed dozens of people?

Speaker 9 (40:56):
Absolutely?

Speaker 10 (40:57):
He's a serial murderer through and through.

Speaker 1 (41:00):
But what has compelled this most complex of characters to kill?
Was he motivated by vengeance? Or did hadden Clark have
murder running through his veins?

Speaker 5 (41:15):
He is the person he is not because he was
born that way, because he chooses to be that way.
It may have been an impulse when Michelle wandered into
his presence, but that is a choice like hadden Clark made,
so I don't buy this born business.

Speaker 9 (41:37):
He never showed any remorse. I think the only remorse
that he had was the fact that he got caught.
He never really showed any emotion.

Speaker 12 (41:48):
He processed information differently than most people, and you could
almost see the wheels of his brain turning at times,
which I think that's more genetic than learned behavior. I
also think it takes a youth from somewhere for a
person to be able to act out in that kind
of violent way, And I would affemed both were true
of hadden.

Speaker 8 (42:10):
Hadn Clark's brother also was involved in a sexual murder
as well as cannibalism. That is very, very unique.

Speaker 3 (42:18):
My sense is that if you have two brothers in
the same family who commit murder and who then eat
body parts, something else was happening in both of their
development for that to be something they think about doing.

Speaker 8 (42:31):
This is a good example of a serial sexual murderer.
And many times in a case like this there is
no actual sexual penetration. The violence takes the place of it,
and this is arousing to him. This is very, very
stimulating to him.

Speaker 3 (42:47):
I think hadden Clark was a born killer. And the
reason I think he was a born killer is he
had no inhibitions. He had a very strong sense of
anger and punishing people. The wrong person crosses his path
or does something to him, somebody's going to die. I
think he was a born killer.

Speaker 1 (43:08):
However, no explanation can bring back those that the families
of hadden Clark's victims have lost. Laura Hoteling, the Harvard
graduate with so much to give the world, was on
the verge of fulfilling her dreams.

Speaker 2 (43:24):
She was obviously a very intelligent woman. She graduated from Harvard.
She's beautiful, you know. I'm sure her death is still
felt by the family to this day.

Speaker 1 (43:38):
While Michelle d'are just six years old, was taken before
she even had a chance.

Speaker 5 (43:45):
In Kernergarten what they called a superstar day, and she
explained how happy she was and everything and how much
she wanted to be a superstar. And she said she
wanted to be a teacher up when she grew up,
and she never got that chance.