As of August 2024, Hadden Clark was serving two consecutive 30-year sentences in Maryland for the second-degree murders of two young people from Montgomery County, outside Washington. The first was Michele Dorr, a six-year-old who vanished from her father's backyard in Silver Spring on May 31, 1986. The second was Laura Houghteling, a 23-year-old Harvard graduate who disappeared from her mother's home in Bethesda in October 1992. Clark had worked as the family's gardener.
The two cases were solved in reverse order. Detectives linked Clark to Laura Houghteling within weeks through a bloody pillowcase that carried his fingerprint, and he pleaded guilty in June 1993. Michele Dorr's case took 13 years. Prosecutors charged Clark in 1998 and won a conviction in October 1999 although her body had never been found. In January 2000, cooperating with police after the verdict, he showed them where he had buried her. He has since described other killings to investigators in several states, but searches turned up no remains, and no other charge has been brought.
Hadden Irving Clark was born on July 31, 1952, in Troy, New York, according to a 1994 account by the writer Susan Sheehan in Washingtonian magazine. His father, also named Hadden, was a physical chemist whose work moved the family often; a 2024 Military.com preview of a documentary series about the case adds that his father was a Korean War veteran. His mother was a homemaker. He had two brothers and a sister.
Sheehan reported that Clark developed slowly and that at four he was diagnosed with mild cerebral palsy and mild brain damage. He repeated grades twice, went to schools for children with special needs, and divided his high school years between a regular and a technical program. The household was unhappy, by her account. His parents separated in the 1970s and divorced in 1982, and his father died in 1986. Another brother killed a woman in California in 1984 and went to prison. Sheehan wrote that Clark's parents found him wearing women's clothing as a teenager and that family undergarments went missing.
The achievement Clark was proudest of, Sheehan wrote, was an associate degree from the Culinary Institute of America, which he earned in January 1974. Military.com reported that he went through 14 jobs between 1974 and 1982. He cooked in restaurants on Cape Cod and elsewhere and, in the late 1970s, on cruise ships.
Clark enlisted in the Navy in the summer of 1982 and served as a cook, assigned to an aircraft carrier. He later said that crewmates beat him in late 1984. After a period of erratic behavior he was admitted to a naval hospital in Virginia in March 1985, and in June 1985 he received a medical discharge with a 50 percent disability rating. The diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia, according to Sheehan. Military.com quoted the Navy's description of the illness as "manifested by persecutory and grandiose delusions."
His family troubles did not stop at home. Sheehan reported that in March 1982 he kicked and beat his mother, who pressed charges that were not prosecuted, and that in November 1988 he kicked her again on Block Island, Rhode Island, pleaded no contest and received a year of probation. In 1987 and 1988 a Bethesda couple accused him of damaging their property, and he was convicted of malicious destruction of property and placed on probation.
After his discharge Clark lived in the basement of his brother's house in Silver Spring. His brother's family included a daughter about Michele Dorr's age, and the two girls often played together, the Court of Special Appeals later recounted. Michele's father rented the house one door away. Clark was working as a chef at a country club in the area.
By the spring of 1986 his brother had asked him to leave. May 31, 1986, a Saturday, was the day he was to move out, according to the appeals court and Capital News Service.
Michele Lee Dorr was six years old. Her parents had divorced, and she was spending the weekend with her father. That afternoon she was playing in a plastic wading pool in his backyard, wearing a pink and white polka-dot bathing suit. Her father told police he last saw her there; his estimates of the time varied, and he first put it around 1 p.m. He reported her missing shortly after 4 p.m., the appeals court said.
Police believed she had walked next door to play with her friend, Clark's niece. Neighbors said that between about 11:30 a.m. and 12:20 p.m. they saw Clark loading a duffel bag and a trunk into his white pickup. A man working for those neighbors went to the Clark house that afternoon to use the telephone. In an interview with police on June 9, 1986, he said a man let him in and that a small girl was with the man, though, according to the detective's notes, not Michele. Club records showed that Clark clocked in at work at 2:46 p.m. The house was about ten minutes' drive from the club.
The disappearance set off a large search and heavy news coverage. Clark was interviewed. On June 5 a detective saw him loading his truck at his brother's house, and Clark said he had only stopped by for a couple of minutes to feed rabbits. On June 8 detectives questioned him more closely. He now said he had been at the house from about 1:30 to 1:45 that afternoon and had let a man in to use the phone. When the questions turned to Michele, he cried and was sick in the bathroom. "I may have blacked out. I may have done something," he told the officers, according to the court. He then asked to speak to his psychiatrist and was allowed to leave.
Clark was not the main suspect. The lead investigator, Lieutenant Michael Garvey, later acknowledged that he had been "[e]xtremely aggressive" in questioning Michele's father, who was in a bitter divorce. Her father had breakdowns under the pressure, made statements that seemed to incriminate him, and at one point said he had buried her near his own father's grave, the appeals court recorded. Sheehan wrote that he confessed under questioning and was later cleared. In May 1988 Michele's mother appeared on the television program America's Most Wanted and said she believed he had killed their daughter.
He was never charged. A jury would later convict Clark.
After he left his brother's house, Clark had no fixed home. Sheehan reported that he lived in his white pickup, moving among church parking lots, storage units and the homes of acquaintances, and took cooking and gardening work. In 1989 Montgomery County park police found him in his truck with women's purses and identification, wigs, a syringe and clothing taken from the choir robing rooms of two churches. He pleaded guilty to theft, and on September 26, 1989, Judge Irma Raker sentenced him to 18 months, suspending all but the 45 days he had already served, and placed him on three years' probation. The probation ended in September 1992, a month before Laura Houghteling disappeared, Sheehan wrote.
Laura Bettis Houghteling grew up in Bethesda. She graduated from the National Cathedral School in 1987 and from Harvard in January 1992. At school she took part in drama, the swim team and the government club, and she took photographs; after her death an exhibition of her pictures was shown in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her father died in 1986, and she had written about grieving for him. In the fall of 1992 she was living at her mother's house and had been working for about a month at a public relations firm in Washington. She was 23.
Her mother had hired Clark as a part-time gardener on the recommendation of acquaintances, including a woman from her church. A house key was kept in the garden shed. Her mother later told Sheehan she had overlooked "too many signs": she had once seen him coming out of Laura's bedroom when he was supposed to be working outside, and in July 1992 a strand of pearls went missing. His last day in her garden was October 12, 1992, when he grew angry after she mentioned that tools had been disappearing and reappearing.
Laura's mother left on October 17 for a week out of town. On Monday, October 19, Laura did not arrive at work. A friend from the office went to the house and found the sliding door open and the bed made less neatly than usual. Her car was outside. Laura's brother and a housemate spotted Clark's pickup near a church a short distance away; when her brother approached, Clark drove off. He later told her brother on the phone that he had not stopped because he was afraid of a carjacking. Her brother called police after midnight.
A neighbor's housekeeper told police she had seen a person she took to be Laura leave the house at about 8:20 that morning, dressed in khaki pants, a khaki trench coat and white socks. Investigators came to believe the person she saw was Clark. Detective Ed Golian took the missing person case, and Detective Richard Fallin of the county's homicide and sex crimes section was called in. Clark agreed to talk and, on October 22, gave detectives a detailed account of his movements that left out his visits to storage units. The same day he mailed a sympathy card to the family.
On October 23 a police dog found a bloody pillow in a pillowcase at the foot of a tree in woods near where Clark had parked, about 300 yards from the house. It matched a case seen in Laura's room. Testing with the chemical luminol that evening showed blood on her mattress, which was later found to be human and of her blood type. Fallin and another detective located Clark and questioned him at headquarters, where he became emotional. Police questioned him again on October 24, the appeals court said, and by late October he was the prime suspect in both Laura's disappearance and Michele Dorr's.
The police then pieced together his movements. They seized his truck on October 25. In a storage unit in Kensington they found two shovels, a jacket and an item of clothing belonging to Laura's mother, and later wigs, khaki pants, a trench coat and flat shoes. A former co-worker mentioned a campsite, and a police helicopter found it on a wooded tract near the interstate. Cadaver dogs searched there and on land nearby without finding Laura. Hair and fiber evidence tied Clark to her bed linens, and a synthetic wig fiber was found in her hairbrushes, according to Sheehan. Storage records showed that he had driven to Rhode Island, where he kept another unit, and had covered about 1,000 miles on October 20 and 21.
On October 31, Halloween, Clark arrived without warning at his sister's home in Rhode Island. She described him as "very disheveled and very nervous," the appeals court said. From there he went to the Clark family plot in a cemetery in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, and camped there overnight.
On November 6, 1992, technicians identified Clark's fingerprint on the bloody pillowcase. That night eight officers arrested him as he slept in his truck in Bethesda, a teddy bear beside him. Told he was under arrest for Laura's murder, he said, "Okay," according to Sheehan.
The interrogation that followed was later condemned by the courts. Clark was questioned at length, kept from sleep and refused a lawyer each time he asked for one, and the appeals court said he was physically abused. The state conceded that the interrogation had been improper. Judge Paul Weinstein of the Montgomery County court, who heard the later pretrial motions in the Dorr case, called it "the worst I have ever seen." Clark first said he could not remember what he had done to Laura. He hinted that he had buried someone in Warren Township, New Jersey; police searched there and found nothing, Sheehan reported.
In his truck police found an eyeglass case packed with dirt and a map of the Wellfleet cemetery. A grand jury indicted Clark for first-degree murder on December 17, 1992.
On January 3, 1993, a Massachusetts state police sergeant examined the Clark family plot in Wellfleet and found the topsoil disturbed near a spot marked with an asterisk on the map taken from the truck. The cemetery caretaker said the plot had been undisturbed on October 14, 1992. An FBI soil examiner later found that soil from the underside of Clark's truck matched rust marks on a nearby marker and that the disturbed ground was the likely source of the dirt in the eyeglass case. Two cadaver dogs alerted in the plot, one at the disturbed soil and one behind his grandfather's grave. No body was found there. Police later came to believe that Michele Dorr had been buried in Wellfleet for a time and moved, and the appeals court noted that when her body was finally found in Maryland, one of the same dogs alerted at the spot.
On June 14, 1993, Clark pleaded guilty to the second-degree murder of Laura Houghteling. In a statement he said he had suffocated her in her bed and buried her, and that he was pleading guilty "because I am guilty and for no other reason," according to Sheehan. He then disclosed where her body was, and it was recovered on June 15 from a shallow grave across the interstate from his campsite.
At sentencing on June 25, 1993, Clark said he was sorry for the pain he had caused and apologized to Laura. The prosecutor, Kathleen Toolan, told the court that the only remorse he had shown was "remorse that he had been caught." Judge Irma Raker, who had sentenced him for the church thefts four years earlier, gave him 30 years and declined to send him to the Patuxent Institution, Maryland's treatment prison. A three-judge review panel upheld the sentence on September 3, 1993. A separate sentence for an unrelated theft brought his total to 40 years, Capital News Service later reported.
Laura's family buried her ashes on August 21, 1993, on a hillside in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, where relatives are buried. A weeping birch was planted at her Harvard house, and a memorial fund was set up to help Harvard students who plan to teach in elementary schools, Sheehan wrote.
From prison, Clark stayed the main suspect in Michele Dorr's disappearance. In August 1994 two fellow inmates told investigators that Clark had admitted killing her; their accounts described a killing in his brother's house, the cleaning of the room afterward, the moving of the body in his truck and a bicycle ride to work. In 1995 and 1996, at the prison in Hagerstown, a third inmate said Clark had told him he killed her and, asked why, replied, "I didn't mean to do it." That inmate later wrote to Detectives Garvey and Phillips after reading about the case.
Police went back to the Silver Spring house. Spraying the floor of the niece's bedroom with luminol, they found signs of blood, and the hardwood floor was taken up in its entirety for testing. An FBI examiner, Robert Spalding, found evidence of blood in 85 places. The DNA results were less helpful to the prosecution. A defense expert, Megan Clement, later concluded from mitochondrial DNA tests that the blood had not come from Clark, from Michele or from any other child of Michele's mother; some samples were too small to test.
On September 23, 1998, detectives brought Clark from the Hagerstown prison to police headquarters in Rockville. He agreed to talk ("I will talk to you. I don't want a lawyer," he said on videotape, according to the appeals court) and denied telling other inmates anything about Michele. He acknowledged knowing her and said, "I might have seen [Michelle] while she was alive in the house." He said he had ridden his bicycle to work that day and that the ride took about an hour. That day he was charged with first-degree murder. The Baltimore Sun reported that State's Attorney Robert Dean had decided to go ahead after receiving the results of a DNA test, though police and prosecutors would not discuss the evidence.
A prison caseworker, Thomas Sheasley, also had conversations with Clark that became evidence. In one, Clark told him, "[O]ne of the lies is that I was not living with my brother at the time she was killed." When Sheasley asked who had ever said she was killed, Clark gave him "a cold hard stare," Sheasley testified.
The trial in Montgomery County Circuit Court lasted 18 days. There was no body. The state's case was circumstantial: the neighbors' sighting of Clark loading a duffel bag and trunk, the worker's 1986 statement about a child in the house, Clark's own words in 1986 and 1998, the inmates and the caseworker, the blood in the bedroom floor, and the soil and dog evidence from Wellfleet. Michele's father testified about the last time he saw her; before trial he had been hypnotized, and his estimate of the time had shifted from about 1 p.m. to a range of 12:30 to 1 p.m.
In October 1999 the jury convicted Clark of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to 30 years, to begin after the 40 years he was already serving, Capital News Service reported.
After the verdict Clark chose to cooperate with Montgomery County authorities, the appeals court said. On January 7, 2000, he led police to a wooded ravine in Silver Spring, and they found Michele's grave there, more than 13 years after she disappeared. Police believed he had first buried her in a duffel bag in the Massachusetts cemetery and later dug her up and reburied her in Maryland, Capital News Service reported. He also led police to a bucket of women's jewelry on family land in Wellfleet in December 1999, some of which had belonged to Laura Houghteling, according to the Associated Press.
Clark's appeal reached the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland, and Judge James P. Salmon wrote the opinion for a three-judge panel, filed September 26, 2001. Clark did not argue that the evidence was insufficient. He raised 11 issues, and the court rejected each.
The court held that the indictment did not have to be dismissed even though a DNA analyst had told the grand jury that tests on the floor were inconclusive, while a later test that excluded both Michele and Clark had not been disclosed to the grand jury. The trial judge had found the omission inadvertent, Maryland courts do not dismiss indictments over flawed grand jury evidence, and the withheld result "clearly would not have negated guilt," the court wrote. Nine prospective jurors whom Clark wanted struck for cause had been kept off the jury with peremptory challenges, and he had used only 19 of his 20, so there was no reversible error.
One inmate's answer was hearsay, the court agreed, but harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. The detective's notes of the 1986 interview with the worker were properly admitted. The caseworker's testimony did not come from custodial interrogation. The cadaver dog handlers had testified properly as experts, and the court noted that the first dog's alert "did not stand alone." The September 1998 statement was voluntary and was not tainted by the 1992 interrogation, the court held; it rejected the opinion of Dr. Neal Blumberg, a forensic psychiatrist who testified that Clark had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia since about 1994 and that his decision to talk was not voluntary. On Clark's argument that the police had ignored his 1992 request for a lawyer, the court held that the more than five years he had spent in prison was a break in custody, an exception to that rule.
The court found that the hypnosis of Michele's father "did not result in any material change" in his testimony, since he had been uncertain about the time both before and after. It upheld limits on cross-examining him about drug use. A complaint about the search of the eyeglass case was immaterial, the court said, because neither the case nor its soil was admitted at trial. The judgment was affirmed.
Speaking afterward, Judge Salmon told Capital News Service that a plea of not guilty does not mean a defendant claims innocence. "They're just saying, 'State, prove it,'" he said. He added that Clark could still ask the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, to hear the case. No later ruling was reported.
In January 2000 Clark traveled with investigators to Cape Cod and Connecticut. The Associated Press reported that he spent a morning in Wellfleet pointing out possible grave sites on a 7.4-acre parcel that had belonged to his grandfather, and drew maps of other places on the Cape. He wore women's clothing during the search, which he had asked Massachusetts investigators to buy for him. A state police sergeant, James Plath, said Clark had given them information that made them want to return to certain places in Wellfleet.
Clark told Massachusetts police that in the 1980s he had picked up two women in Vermont and buried them on the Cape. In Connecticut he took state police to a wooded area where he said he had left a woman's body. They found nothing, and Lieutenant Ralph Carpenter said investigators could not connect his statements to any particular crime. Shown photographs of missing women and girls, he did not pick out a Massachusetts girl who had vanished in 1985. Investigators from Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Vermont wanted to question him about as many as 11 other killings, all of women, the AP reported.
What courts have found is limited to two killings: Laura Houghteling in 1992, by Clark's guilty plea, and Michele Dorr in 1986, by a jury's verdict. Everything else rests on his own statements.
Clark has described other killings to police in at least three states. The 1992 hint about a burial in Warren Township, New Jersey, led to a search that found nothing. The two women he said he brought from Vermont to Cape Cod were not identified in the reports, and the Wellfleet searches of December 1999 and January 2000 found jewelry but no human remains. The Connecticut site he showed police in January 2000 held nothing. In September 2001 Judge Salmon said police suspected Clark of other murders in Massachusetts but had not been able to prove them. No charge has followed in any other state.
In 2024 Fox News reported that Clark has said an alter ego he calls Kristen Bluefin was responsible for the killings.
When Sheehan wrote in 1994, Clark was at the Eastern Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison, and was due for a first parole review in November 2000. He was later held in Hagerstown, where he was charged in the Dorr case in 1998. His 1999 conviction added 30 years to the 40 he was already serving.
In 2024 Investigation Discovery broadcast Born Evil: The Serial Killer and the Savior, a five-part series produced by Michael Bay, who interviewed Clark for many hours in a Maryland prison. It premiered on September 2, 2024. The series featured a former cellmate whom Clark had come to believe was Jesus; the cellmate called police after hearing Clark's admissions, and his information sent investigators back to cold cases, Fox News reported. Lou Luciano, a retired FBI agent who worked on the case in the 1990s, told Fox News that interviewing Clark was "like sitting with Satan."
As of August 2024, Clark, then 72, was serving two 30-year sentences in Maryland, according to Fox News.
July 31, 1952: Hadden Irving Clark born in Troy, New York.
January 1974: Associate degree from the Culinary Institute of America.
Summer 1982: Enlists in the Navy.
June 1985: Medical discharge with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia; moves into his brother's basement in Silver Spring.
May 31, 1986: Michele Dorr, 6, disappears from her father's backyard in Silver Spring.
June 8, 1986: Clark, questioned, tells detectives, "I may have blacked out. I may have done something."
May 1988: Michele's mother appears on America's Most Wanted.
September 26, 1989: Sentenced for theft from church robing rooms; three years' probation.
September 1992: Probation ends.
October 12, 1992: Last day working in the Houghteling garden.
October 19, 1992: Laura Houghteling fails to arrive at work; reported missing.
October 23, 1992: Bloody pillowcase found in woods near the house.
October 31, 1992: Clark visits his sister in Rhode Island and camps at the family plot in Wellfleet.
November 6, 1992: Fingerprint identified; Clark arrested.
December 17, 1992: Indicted for first-degree murder of Laura Houghteling.
January 3, 1993: Disturbed soil found in the Wellfleet plot.
June 14, 1993: Pleads guilty to second-degree murder of Laura Houghteling.
June 15, 1993: Her body recovered.
June 25, 1993: Sentenced to 30 years.
September 3, 1993: Review panel upholds the sentence.
August 1994: Two inmates tell investigators Clark admitted killing Michele.
September 23, 1998: Charged with first-degree murder of Michele Dorr.
October 1999: Convicted of second-degree murder after an 18-day trial; 30 more years.
December 1999: Bucket of jewelry found in Wellfleet.
January 7, 2000: Leads police to Michele's grave in Silver Spring.
January 2000: Searches in Wellfleet and Connecticut find no remains.
September 26, 2001: Court of Special Appeals affirms the Dorr conviction.
September 2, 2024: Born Evil: The Serial Killer and the Savior premieres; Clark, 72, in a Maryland prison.