Born to Kill - Hadden Clark (HD)

in the 80s and 90s the leafy suburbs of Maryland on America's East Coast was struck by crimes with a truth far stranger than fiction it was one of the biggest manhunts in this County's Police Department history the man responsible was Hadden Clark a cross-dressing killer with an appetite for revenge the wrong person crosses his path or does something to him somebody's gonna die even as a child Clark's behavior would disturb others I just remember anytime he was close to me it was just a visceral reaction and the bizarre story would not end with his arrest he's the parter on the quay so was had an urban Clark born to kill his mother she said he's evil he's gonna kill somebody if he's not in jail [Applause] [Music] [Music] April the 10th in the year 2000 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 he was brought up to try to identify areas where he said that he had buried bodies but this was a search party with a difference they let him wear women's underwear he would not go out they'll fee head on ladies bra and panties we bought him for him the man leading the hunt for the remains of victims he claimed to have left buried here decades ago he's dressed in a wig and wearing women's underwear under his prison uniform 14 years earlier in 1986 and hundreds of miles away this extraordinary story would begin in the leafy suburban town of Silver Spring it was a sunny afternoon in late May and six-year-old Michelle Dorr was visiting her father for the weekend she had brown hair and blue eyes and freckles across the nose and she had a tooth missing may 31st 1986 Memorial Day weekend her mother and father were going through a bitter divorce there was a child custody issues she had been to her father's house quite a few times before and had a little friend there her age and her name was Elizabeth Clark and she lived two doors down Michelle and I were gonna be together for the weekend I think that temperature air was went over 90 degrees as I recall I pulled a plastic swimming pool out from behind the garage and was filling that with water and I let her let her play in the pool for a while he let her in the backyard as a father would and his attention was diverted to the to this race the Indianapolis 500 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 he heard some kids in the Clark backyard he went down there asked Jeff Clark if Michelle was there she have to explain to him they'd been away all day and that Michelle was not there I was in shock gun practically I couldn't believe that she wasn't at the Clark house maybe five or six o'clock he finally went through called the police reported her missing and that's that wood started the huge search for her when Michelle drone went missing it was very big news and the idea that she gives the little girl could just walk away from a house where her father was seemed incredible to people I remember the neighborhood being searched neighbors being interviewed and I remember very well caryl her father after Kyle reported his daughter missing he quickly became the prime suspect 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 come and get you however despite the authorities suspicions they were unable to find the body it was one of the biggest manhunts in this County's Police Department history horseback motorcycle foot we searched the entire neighborhood and they talked to neighbors and she just vanished the only other person on the authorities radar was a man by the name of Hadden Clark Patton was living with his brother Jeff just two houses down from Carl and Michelle 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 Patton's strange behavior had been evidence since childhood he had some rings in Wellfleet Massachusetts some Cape Cod it was his grandfather's home so it was fairly privileged Andrea Slade who shared rides to school but the Clark family has vivid memories of her encounters with Hatton even as a little girl there was the low point of my day to get into that car with them they were really odd and at the kindergarten I just remember being uh you know upset any time he was close to me it was just a visceral reaction I mean just a big old knot in my stomach I don't know if he was threatening me or just had that look in his eye or something Alec Wilkinson recalls Clark's misfit behavior from his time spent on Cape Cod the memory that I have is of Hadden in my swimming class at the public beach at Cal Poly I just a member 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 fairly seriously and hadn't had gone back to his parents house and reported his brother was hurt but it's fine that the bike is is intact the product of a troubled home life hadn't soon found an outlet for his eccentricities 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 like a woman a neighbor came home and walked in his house and found Patton dressed in his wife's clothing and hadn't of course ran out of the house wearing these clothes you know all upset most individuals who are transvestites do that because they find it is a release of tension it often starts in childhood rural try on either their sister's underwear or perhaps their mother's underwear and it just escalates from that in 1992 aged 31 Clark would enroll in the Navy where his peculiar habits would continue to mark him out all I know about his time in the Navy is that he was a cook on a ship and that apparently he was harassed 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 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 you could see how somebody like Clark who is teased made fun of bullied 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 a year after his discharge from the military Clarke's oddball reputation would lead him to become a suspect in the disappearance of Michelle Dorr one of the officers from youth division saw patent clerk at the Clarks home Clark just said he never saw Michelle but he did become a person of interest at that time the authorities interest in Clark would soon be elevated after a routine interrogation took a dramatic turn in 1986 six-year-old Michelle Dorr mysteriously disappeared from the suburbs of Maryland her father Carl would become the prime suspect however 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 [Music] they requesting him about in the michelle dorr and that's when he became very annoyed and irritated he broke down was physically sick he had epithet of diarrhea he made a statement that he might have done something that he doesn't remember however despite Clark's apparent confession he had been at work that afternoon and had a ready-made alibi based on Karl's version of events when they followed up on head and Clark they found that he had punched his timecard 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 in the absence of any solid evidence to link him to Michelle Hadden was released from custody hadn't disappeared off the radar screen [Music] despite investigators best efforts there was still no body Michelle that appeared had vanished without trace and this investigation went on for years and years and nothing ever ever the role 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 Dorr Hadden Clark continued to have run-ins with the law [Music] 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 releases up it's time to go he retaliated by killing their cat he rigged a bucket of oil so it would fall on him when they opened the door 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 wreak havoc one time he dressed up as a woman and went in a church and stole a bunch of purses a lot of purses wigs eyeglasses eyeglass cases Park police caught him in his truck in the park going through the purses and he was arrested for that having served his 45-day sentence Clark was released in 1989 and soon began to attend a local Bible study group I would say even that he looked to Christianity for some sort of solace and consolation maybe even Redemption however despite the seeming attempts to reform his character his unsettling behavior continued 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 out of and it scared me and I jumped back and I opened the window and I said Haddon don't ever do that I never sensed that he was a dangerous person I'll put it that way I sensed that there was something definitely wrong hadn't held down several jobs including one as a rollerblade courier branding himself the Rockville rocket in 1992 Hatton's work with a community church organization introduced him to local good samaritan penny Houghteling penny had hired Hadden Clark as her gardener she knew he was a very odd the Hotaling home in Bethesda was little more than ten miles from Silver Spring where Michelle Dorr had disappeared some six years earlier Patton took to his role with relish quickly earning the trust of penny despite his eccentricities he had a relationship with the mother in terms of feeling as if penny holing 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 and he felt very close to her they had developed a a friendship and at one point may have even given him a key to access the house when she wasn't there to do to do the work however in the summer of 1992 Penny's daughter would return home from university and domestic bliss would be transformed into an unthinkable nightmare 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 she's well-liked she was popular she was ambitious and was evidently the light of her families I the only daughter of penny and very close to her brother hadn't grew increasingly jealous of Laura it was frequently unsettled by the gardener's curious behavior Laura was very much afraid of Clark she didn't want him around she didn't want anything to do with him Clark just kind of creeped her out penny had caught had in the house a couple of times up near Laura's bedroom she didn't feel comfortable it was Hadden and it there came a point when mrs. Holden asked Hadden to leave events would come to a haunting climax in October when penny announced she would be going away to a conference for the weekend round about October 19th Penny holding have left for the weekend to go down to Virginia Laura who was always reliable and punctual failed to turn up at her job the following Monday morning it was very odd and they started calling around they called it brother Warren and Warren came over the police and family searched and searched and searched for this young woman I was told to go by there the next day go down and meet with the detective see if they needed any help we looked around the room didn't see any evidence of struggle or any we didn't see any blood detectives worked around the clock to build a case and soon uncovered some chilling evidence I went down and met with the detectives they were doing a search of the wooded areas around laura houghteling's home and they had found women's shoes and then there was a pillow case it had what looked like blood we contacted our forensic scientist she sprayed luminol on Laura's bed you give it just a couple minutes and then turn on black lights and you see if there's any hemoglobin and the whole bed lit up [Music] we were shocked I mean it was like oh my god something happened here so at that time we knew that an all probability Laura had been murdered with Laura presumed dead detectives would receive an inexplicable eyewitness report claiming that she'd been spotted in the neighborhood when they did the neighborhood they talked to a Hispanic woman who takes care of children in the area and she said that on that day she saw Laura the truth behind this apparent sighting would later reveal a harrowing insight into the mind of her killer we talked to the family about anyone that might be suspicious the brother had mentioned their gardener and the gardener Hadden Clark 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 Dorr made him a likely suspect we ended up taking him in however not everyone was convinced that the police had the right man 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 doesn't that's not the man that I knew well so I thought it was prejudicial Hadden was typically evasive during questioning yet as detectives delved into his past they uncovered a shocking history of violence Hadden grew up in a family with two brothers a sister in 1984 Brant field talked the oldest of Hadden's brothers had committed a crime of unspeakable brutality his brother in California had a party he had invited a couple over for dinner the husband couldn't make it so the wife went anyway they had a lot to drink things got dicey and he killed 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 officers found evidence at the scene to indicate that Clarke had cannibalized a portion of his victim hadn't was pretty shocked by that whether it influenced him or not I don't know [Music] with the disappearance of Laura Houghteling 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 Dorr investigation determined history would not be allowed to repeat itself edie tarney and his team would redouble their efforts in the search for Laura Houghteling the search of Clark's truck would uncover fresh clues that would point detectives in an ominous new direction [Music] in the late eighties six-year-old michelle dorr 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 23 year old Laura Houghteling had disappeared without trace and Clark who worked as the family's gardener was the prime suspect as detectives built a case against happen new evidence would lead them north to Cape Cod where the investigation would gather pace the way he acted because of reasonable suspicion we were able to get a search warrant first truck we found some pictures of a cemetery that he had up on Cape Cod 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 tasked with heading up the search for laura houghteling's body soon uncovered some compelling clues I drove up to the family plot the earth at the foot of Clarke's father's grave look to have been recently disturbed 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 disturbance looked like something had been dug up [Music] we actually thought that this area had would contain the body of Lara Hotaling eventually we we dug the area of disturbance up we found nothing we were kind of shocked because we felt that we were gonna find the body of Lara wholly 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 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 Hatton's deviance as the focus of the investigation into laura houghteling's death moved back to Bethesda at last there would be a break in the case about that time the chemist was able to develop a fingerprint from that bloody pillowcase and that's at the head of clerks 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 baling twine and duct tape there was a notation at the bottom of it said Laura and now it's Warren time detectives moved quickly to detain Clark yet not everyone was convinced that they had the right man 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 his mother came into town usually the mother comes in and you know they want to know why you're picking on their love child and why you you know harassing him she sat there 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 scared to death of him he's evil he's he's gonna kill somebody else if he's not in jail for Carl Dorr the murder of Laura Houghteling had haunting echoes of his own daughter's disappearance when Laura Helene was killed in 1992 there was a body missing and and there arrested 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 he had done something with Michelle despite the fact that Laura's body had still not been found in June of 1993 Hadden Clark would plead guilty to second-degree murder receiving a 30-year sentence extremely painful for me in 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 the day following his sentencing Clark would lead investigators to a shallow grave where Laura's body would be uncovered the terrifying details of her final moments would also become clear I [Music] surmise that he went in the back door and she was in bed sleeping I personally think that he had just jumped on and suffocated her her earlobes had been cut off cut her throat in some fashion cleaned up the scene he took her body out and he took her across the street from old Georgetown Road to another empty field and buried her the mysterious sightings of Laura on the morning after her death would also be explained it was later determined that hadn't I had dressed like Laura in an attempt to throw off any type of investigation of authorities so that Laura would appear missing from maybe the metro or maybe work but not home because somebody saw her walking to work and what in fact it wasn't Laura but it was head and dressed as Laura Patton it seemed had taken the ultimate revenge against Laura when the daughter Laura would come home he felt jealous like displaced and he wanted to get her out of there so 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 with one case closed the focus of the investigation would switch back to the mystery of Michelle Dorr ultimately knowing what I knew then about Hadden Clark that was capable of murder I went back through the entire case file and so Hadden came back on the radar screen and the investigation began anew detectives began working closely with Karl to reevaluate the details of Michelle's last-known movements Karl knew that he wasn't sure about the time that he had given back in 1986 of when he last saw on the shell I think once he came to terms with that the timeframe expanded and there was ample opportunity for Hadden with a new timeline of Michelle's final moments now established Hadden Clark no longer had an alibi Hadden Irving Clark the truth you talk about God you talk about Jesus and the Lord and your mother and your father you don't think they're looking down here on you right now yeah they are they're saying head do what's right even in the face of prolonged questioning Clark would not come clean he's the party on the quay 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 Dorr there was enough to be able to charge Hadden with Michelle's murder without the body in 1999 patent Clark would be found guilty receiving a 30 year sentence for a crime he had committed some 13 years previously over a decade since her disappearance the details of Michelle Dorr's untimely death would finally be revealed she had grown bored at Interpol by herself so her playmate Elizabeth Clark two doors up she went up there looking for her Hadden 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 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 investigators concluded that eviction from his brother's house had been the catalyst that sparked his murderous fury that in in in our opinion was what what started Hadden's rage Michelle evidently came over he sliced her throat and that was the end of that 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 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 psycho sexually sufficient they have to go beyond the killing and engage in cannibalism this is arousing to them well then Michelle Dorr's killer had been dealt justice Clark still kept the location of her body close to his chest well after the trial there still was no body more than anything Carl Dorr 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 I was just standing about 20 yards from and I looked down and I saw look like a twig at first focused in on her it was a spring [Music] called Clark over [Music] he shuffles his way around and he looked at it and started clawing at the ground and said this is it [Music] he got very excited and animated and as if you know he had solved solve this puzzle a puzzle that he had made and after digging for a bit pink piece of fabric it popped right out of the ground [Music] we knew we had found michelle dorr [Music] everyone weeped after almost 14 years michelle dorr could finally be laid to rest [Music] everybody deserves to be remembered appropriately and to to have some final place to rest and it shouldn't be under a mattress in a park it was good to have a place to finally marry Michelle there's a cemetery over and outside of Washington DC it has my grandfather and basically Michelle was now four generations of that family in that one cemetery and it's nice to have a that's together in that way I would say 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 1986 and 1992 the suburbs 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 Houghteling and Michelle Dorr earning a combined sentence of 60 years however even after his detention the story of Hadden Clark would continue to intrigue or thora tease we have Michelle's body back and we have Clark talking and Clark is telling us about stuff that he did up and Cape 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 2000 Clark would lead an FBI team on a bizarre tour through the sand dunes of Wellfleet when we took him up to Cape Cod he would not go out now he had on him lady's bra and panties so we bought him for him and he put him on he put on a wig - then he had the undergarments underneath he put a wig on and you know that they put him in and a woman shirt in an attempt to try to you know get him to cooperate a little more although the dunes yielded no bodies hadn't would guide investigators to the rear of his grandfather's house where a macabre discovery would be made that would answer the riddle of what had been buried at the Clark family plot this property particular building is called by the clock family the wiki cut right about here there was a about a three-foot by maybe three or four foot old trail a kind of a tag along that you'd hook onto the back of your yad tractor and underneath was just sin trooper barrett had a metal prongs stick and she kind of moved along the perimeter and you could hear that 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 bar and put it down into the earth and we heard this boom made the hair stand up on the back of everybody's neck [Music] and we knew that that there was definitely something there [Music] so we were able to dig down in unearthed that and it was a plastic five-gallon bucket we weren't quite sure what we were gonna find what perhaps some type of body parts and we really didn't know after taking the top of that off we observed a number of pieces of jewelry that hadn't 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 wholly according to Hatton he had moved his trophies which numbered in excess of 200 and the body of an unidentified third victim from their previous burial location at the foot of his father's grave the information was that at some point hadn't had gone to the cemetery and had unearthed both a young girl's body and a bucket of jewelry 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 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 the jewelry came from and this is very arousing to them they're able then to recall in a great deal of detail what they had actually done I think the idea of laura houghteling's had a trophy in that bucket there's reason to believe that some of those others if not all were attached to actually human beings the FBI behavioral science estimated that he had perhaps killed somewhere between 12 and 22 people and part of the reason that they were able to conclude that was because he was so comfortable around death the fell onus 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 we give a lot of credence to his claims of having killed more people because when you can kill Michelle Dorr you could kill anybody could he have killed dozens of people absolutely he's a serial murderer through a throat but what had compelled this most complex of characters to kill was he motivated by vengeance or did Hadden Clark have murder running through his veins 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 he never showed any remorse I think the only remorse that he had was the fact that he got caught he never never really showed any emotion 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 abuse from somewhere for a person to be able to act out in that kind of violent way and I would assume both were true of Hadden Hadden Clark's brother also was involved in a sexual murder as well as cannibalism that is very very unique 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 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 a rousing game this is very very stimulating to him 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 gonna die I think he was a born killer [Music] however no explanation can bring back those that the families of Hadden Clark's victims have lost Laura Houghteling the Harvard graduate with so much to give the world was on the verge of fulfilling her dreams she was obviously a very intelligent woman she graduated from Harvard she's beautiful you know I'm sure her her death is still felt by the family to this day well Michelle Dorr just six years old was taken before she even had a chance and para garden they had a ax yeah what they called a superstar day and she explained how how happy she was and everything and how much she wanted to be a superstar and she said she wanted to be a teacher when she grew up and she never got that chance [Music] [Music] [Music]

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Views: 81,688

Rating: 4.7837839 out of 5

Keywords: Born to Kill, Hadden Clark, serial killer

Id: -990EmqfDCI

Length: 44min 58sec (2698 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 24 2020