At eight in the morning, while Sarah [not her real name] was waiting with her son for the school bus to arrive, a young woman rushed out of her neighbour’s house. She was Laura, the Houghtelings’ college daughter. However, around the corner, she got into a van and drove to a nearby church. When she arrived, she took off her wig and fell asleep next to the corpse of the real Laura.
It was Hadden Clark, a dangerous murderer, chef and gardener, who drank the blood of his victims as if he were a cannibal and fled the crime scene disguised as a woman. His hairpieces and feminine garments managed to fool potential witnesses like Sarah.
Hadden Irving Clark was born on July 31, 1952 in Troy (New York), into a dysfunctional family, of violent, alcoholic and abusive parents, and with an older brother -he was the second of four siblings-, guilty of murder, dismemberment and eat his girlfriend. The young man was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Due to the job instability of the head of the family, the Clarks did not stay in the same place for long: they wandered through Connecticut and New Jersey, among other places. And everywhere they went, the father mistreated Hadden, while the mother dressed him in girl’s clothes, and even called him Kristen when she was drunk. There our protagonist began to feel a certain pleasure in putting on feminine clothes.
Hadden’s perversions began with the mistreatment, torture, and killing of animals by beheading. He enjoyed capturing the pets of his neighbors to do all kinds of misdeeds until he took their lives. Some acts that his parents were unaware of and that instilled real terror among those close to him. Everyone feared the boy’s reaction if he was confronted in public because he often responded with punches, threats and insults.
After graduating, he enrolled in the prestigious Cooking Institute of America where he discovered his skill with a knife, not without also starring in numerous incidents as an insurgent. On one occasion, for example, he even urinated into jars of tomato sauce.
Between 1974 and 1983, the chef tried to put into practice what he had learned in his cooking course, but he was always fired. Dozens of restaurants looked horrified at his strange behavior, such as drinking the blood from raw meat or talking about alleged murders with bait to fish.
For this reason, he ended up enlisting as a cook in the United States Navy. However, he was once again despised by his classmates. This time upon discovering that he was wearing women’s underwear under his uniform, which made him the center of all the mockery, as well as the victim of beatings and physical assaults. One of the most brutal ended in concussion after being struck against the deck.
When the army medical service analyzed Hadden’s case, mainly from a psychological point of view, he was given a permanent discharge for paranoid schizophrenia “manifested by grandiose and persecutory disappointments.” In addition to considering him “potentially dangerous to himself due to his poor judgment and self-defensive behavior.”
After his forced departure from the armed forces in 1985, Hadden turned to his brother Geoff for help, and he rented him a room in his home in Silver Spring, Maryland.
But the coexistence was never entirely good, especially when Geoff caught his brother masturbating in front of his young children, which caused him to throw him out of the house ipso facto. This happened a few months after he was arrested for stealing women’s lingerie from a store for his own consumption.
On the afternoon of May 31, 1986, Hadden was loading boxes into his van to leave his brother’s home after the sexual incident with his nephews when suddenly little Michele Dorr, a friend of his niece, approached him in swimsuit. He wanted to know where Eliza was. The man indicated that he was in her room. But it was a lie, there was no one home. They were alone.
Hadden motioned the six-year-old up the stairs to the bedroom, at which point he pulled out a twelve-inch knife and stabbed her several times. First down her back, then down her throat and chest.
Hadden then tried to rape Michele, but seeing blood dripping down the steps, Hadden ran to his vehicle to grab garbage bags, old rags, and a navy tarp: he had to clean up the crime scene quickly and get rid of the body
Afterwards, he put both the body and the garbage bags with the remains of blood in his van and drove to the country club where he worked. He couldn’t miss. Shortly after fleeing there, Michele’s father raised the alarm: he asked neighbors and friends, and even reported his daughter missing to the police. But nothing, no trace.
So, the authorities focused their suspicions on the father and not on a stranger. It is what the manual said: many cases of disappearance occur at the hands of the parents. However, the man tried by all means to defend himself with statements to the press. “I didn’t kill her,” he insisted.
At the same time, Hadden had time to finish his shift, go to the hospital to have a cut on his hand treated, and drive with Michele’s body still in the trunk to a wooded area of ??Baltimore.
Immediately afterwards, he loaded the corpse on his back, went down a ravine and began to dissect his victim. After cutting several pieces, he swallowed one of them and drank some of its blood. Then he covered the body with parts of an old mattress and some sheets.
When he finished, he got into his truck and drove back to his newly rented house, five miles from his brother, without arousing any suspicion. The girl’s body would be found more than a decade later.
Over the next five years, Hadden’s mental health worsened considerably, causing him to have problems with his acquaintances. Among them, the owners of the rooms he rented. One in particular went as far as hiding fish heads in the fireplace, piano, and stove, setting booby traps around the property, and killing his two cats. He put one on the doormat at the entrance and the other in the fridge. “He looked crazy and wicked,” Hadden’s landlord stated.
The police arrested the murderer on charges of destruction of property, and he was found guilty. He was also arrested for speeding and for illegal possession of weapons. He was running in 1988. But both convictions did not keep him behind bars.
The following year, they arrested him again accused of fifteen unusual thefts: Hadden went to local churches dressed in women’s clothing and, during choir classes, he entered the women’s locker room where he stole the bags and coats of the parishioners. On the day of his arrest, the police seized dozens of clothes and bags. He was in prison for forty-five days.
In 1992, psychotherapist Penny Houghteling hired Hadden Clark, a homeless man who slept at the local church in Bethesda, Maryland, as a gardener, whom she wanted to help. For several months, the protagonist was disciplined and helpful to the lady. However, he began to develop an unhealthy fixation on her: he thought she was her mother.
So when Houghteling daughter Laura returned home after graduating that summer, Hadden saw her as a rival: he had to share Penny’s attentions. That pathological jealousy led to a need for revenge, which she materialized on October 17, taking advantage of her mother’s absence for conferences outside the city.
Around midnight, Hadden parked his van down the street from the Houghtelings’ house and dressed as a woman: he put on Penny’s underwear, over feminine clothes (a pair of pants and a blouse), a wig, and picked up a black bag. Finally, under her raincoat she hid a 22 caliber rifle.
The gardener tiptoed into Laura’s room and pointed the gun at her. The young woman woke with a start, not knowing what to do, and though she tried to resist, Hadden managed to beat her to the ground. After subjecting her to a purification ritual in the bathtub and tying her upside down on the bed, the student died of suffocation. She had covered her nose and mouth too much.
The killer tried to remove the tape with scissors, but accidentally pierced his neck. Seeing the blood, Hadden became extremely excited, thus initiating a bloody dismemberment ceremony. When it was finished, he wrapped the body in a large sheet and put it in the van.
Later, he returned to the house to clean up all the evidence, including the sheet, duvet, and pillowcase, and stole various items from the deceased as trophies. Among them, a crystal unicorn and class ring.
After the process was finished, Hadden lay down on the bed and fell asleep. The next morning, around eight o’clock, he hastily fled dressed as a woman. That was the scene seen by the witness who was waiting at the school bus stop.
From there, the gardener drove to a point on Interstate 270, crossed the road, and looked for a place to dig a shallow trench in which to bury the body, which he covered with dirt and leaves. Then he headed north, put the bloody clothes in a rented storage room, and returned to Bethesda.
At the same time, Laura’s boss, concerned that she could not locate the young woman, called the relatives who began the search and informed the authorities. In fact, Penny mentioned who other than family had access to the property. The name of her gardener and her physical description came up.
As soon as the police verified Hadden’s identity, they realized that the man was related to another disappearance, that of little Michele Dorr a few kilometers from there.
They called him to go to the police station to testify and, on the way, the murderer got rid of several of the victim’s bloody clothes, in addition to the pillowcase. All of them he abandoned next to the nearest church to the Houghteling house.
During his statement, Hadden explained to officers the details of his alibi, but it did not hold up for the stretch of the night that Laura disappeared. At the same time, a dog from the police canine unit, which was searching the neighborhood, almost immediately located Laura’s pillowcase and clothing next to some trees, next to the church. On the pillowcase was a single bloody footprint.
Investigators confronted Hadden: they needed him to confess, although they still couldn’t verify who the print belonged to. The pressure got the better of the murderer, who ended up collapsing and blaming himself for Laura’s crime. Soon after, the lab confirmed that the bloody print was Hadden’s.
In 1993, a court sentenced Hadden Clark to thirty years in prison for the second-degree murder of Laura Houghtelling, whose body was rescued before trial at the prisoner’s instructions. However, the chef and gardener would receive a new thirty-year sentence after confessing to his cellmate the crime of Michele Dorr.
In January 2000, the transvestite cannibal, a name he earned for his modus operandi, led the authorities to the forest where he had buried the little girl’s body. Almost 14 years had passed since the terrible murder.
In the last two decades, FBI agents specializing in serial killers have interviewed Hadden Clark in response to a series of claims: he claimed to have killed twenty young girls before being arrested.
The investigators accepted his statements as valid, and even went so far as to excavate remote places in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey and Pennsylvania while the prisoner led them. However, the searches were unsuccessful. They never found any more victims. But that does not mean that there are not, say the experts, but rather that the passage of time and the fauna and flora of the place could have made them disappear.