On July 29, 1982, eleven-year-old Michelle Steele was reported missing in St. Joseph, Missouri. The next day her uncle found her body, naked, on a bank of the Missouri River; she had been beaten and strangled. The following day Charles Ray Hatcher, fifty-two, walked into the St. Joseph State Hospital and tried to have himself admitted. He was arrested there. Over the months that followed he confessed to fifteen more killings going back to 1969, and one of them, the murder of a four-year-old boy in the same town in 1978, was a crime for which another man was already serving a life sentence.
Hatcher was born on July 16, 1929, in Mound City, Missouri, thirty-four miles north of St. Joseph, the youngest of four children of Jesse James Hatcher, a bootlegger, ex-convict and violent drunk, and Lula Hatcher. In 1936 his oldest brother, Arthur, was electrocuted when a length of copper wire the boys were playing with touched a power line. From 1947, when he stole a logging truck from an employer of two weeks, his life ran through car thefts, a forged ten-dollar check, escapes and attempted escapes, and six prison terms by 1959. That June he threatened a sixteen-year-old newspaper boy, Steven Pellham, with a butcher knife in an attempted abduction. In 1961 a twenty-six-year-old inmate, Jerry Tharrington, was found raped and stabbed to death on the kitchen loading dock of the Missouri State Penitentiary, and Hatcher was the only man missing from the kitchen crew. There was not enough evidence to charge him.
On August 27, 1969, by his own later account, he told twelve-year-old William Freeman to come with him in Antioch, California, took him to a creek and strangled him. Two days later, in San Francisco, he lured six-year-old Gilbert Martinez away with the promise of ice cream and was beating and sexually assaulting him when a man walking his dog came upon them. The boy survived. Hatcher, arrested under the name Albert Ralph Price, spent the next three years moving between courts and hospitals, hearing voices, faking delusions and suicide attempts, diagnosed and rediagnosed; staff believed he was exaggerating. He was convicted of the Martinez abduction in December 1972, escaped and was caught, was called a manipulative institutionalized sociopath by one psychologist and a paranoid schizophrenic by another, and in 1976 impressed the California parole board. A new law crediting time spent in jails and hospitals moved his release forward, and on May 20, 1977, he walked out to a halfway house in San Francisco.
On May 26, 1978, four-year-old Eric Christgen disappeared from downtown St. Joseph. His body was found along the Missouri River; he had been sexually abused and suffocated. The police questioned more than a hundred men. One of them was Melvin Reynolds, twenty-five, a man of limited intelligence who had been sexually abused as a child. He cooperated through months of questioning, two polygraphs, an interrogation under hypnosis and, in December 1978, one under amobarbital, then thought to be a truth serum, where he made an ambiguous remark. In February 1979 the police held him for fourteen hours of questions, promises and threats until he said, "I'll say so if you want me to." Over the next weeks the confession filled with details that had been fed to him. A jury convicted him of second-degree murder and he was sentenced to life.
Hatcher had by then moved on. Arrested as Richard Clark in Omaha in September 1978 for sexually assaulting a sixteen-year-old boy, he was sent to a mental hospital and released in January 1979. In May 1979 he tried to stab seven-year-old Thomas Morton, the charges were dropped and he went to another institution; he escaped in 1980, was arrested in Lincoln for an attempted assault on a seventeen-year-old, was released after twenty-one days, and in 1981 was picked up after a knife fight in Des Moines and released to a Salvation Army shelter in Davenport, Iowa.
After his 1982 arrest he confessed to an FBI agent, and three of his confessions included Eric Christgen's murder. He drew a rough map that led searchers to the body of James Churchill, twenty-eight, buried on the grounds of the Rock Island Arsenal near Davenport. Melvin Reynolds, four years into his life sentence, was released. In October 1983 Hatcher was convicted of Eric's murder and sentenced to life with no parole for at least fifty years. At his second trial, for Michelle Steele, he asked for death. The jury refused and on December 3, 1984, recommended life. Four days later he was found in his solitary cell at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, hanged with a piece of electrical wire. He was fifty-five.