On January 7, 2000, Hadden Clark led Montgomery County police to a wooded ravine near Route 29 in Silver Spring, Maryland, and showed them where Michele Dorr was buried. She had been six years old when she disappeared, more than thirteen years earlier. Three months before, a jury had convicted him of her murder without a body, and he had appealed. He did not withdraw the appeal after taking detectives to the grave, and when the Court of Special Appeals of Maryland ruled on it in September 2001 he did not argue that the state had failed to prove he killed her. He argued that the way it had been proved was unfair.
Michele was last seen on Saturday, May 31, 1986, playing in a wading pool in her father's backyard in Silver Spring. Police believed she walked to the house of her friend, Clark's niece, where Clark was staying; he was being made to move out of his brother's home that day. The police account is that he killed her there with a twelve-inch butcher knife, buried her body in a duffel bag in a cemetery in Massachusetts, and later dug it up and reburied it in Maryland. For years suspicion fell elsewhere. Her parents were divorced, and her father, Carl Dorr, was himself suspected; at one point, after a television program, he went to his former wife's house demanding to be let in and saying he knew where Michele was and that the truth would burn a hole in her soul.
Laura Houghteling, twenty-three, a Harvard graduate, disappeared from her mother's house in Bethesda in October 1992. Clark had worked there as a handyman and gardener. A neighbor saw what looked like a woman leaving the house the next morning, and investigators came to believe it was Clark in disguise; a synthetic hair from a wig was found in her hairbrush, and a pillowcase bearing her blood and his fingerprint was recovered. By late October he was the prime suspect in both her disappearance and Michele's. He was arrested on November 6, 1992. The following year he led police to Laura's body, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to thirty years, with a further ten for an unrelated theft from a former landlord.
The Dorr case took six more years. Clark was tried in Montgomery County Circuit Court before Judge Michael D. Mason and convicted of second-degree murder in October 1999, and he received a thirty-year sentence to be served after the forty years he already had. The evidence included testimony from an inmate at Hagerstown who said Clark had confessed to him, a detective's notes of an interview with a witness who said he had seen a little girl at the Clark house the day Michele vanished, and testimony from Carl Dorr that had been refreshed under hypnosis. There was also blood from the bedroom. One DNA expert told the grand jury that tests on it were inconclusive and could fit Clark or Michele; prosecutors did not tell the grand jury that another laboratory's tests had excluded both of them as the source.
Clark raised eleven issues on appeal, among them the withheld DNA result, the hearsay, the hypnotically induced testimony, evidence he said was seized illegally, and nine prospective jurors who had known he was a suspect in the Houghteling case. The court, in an opinion by Judge James P. Salmon issued September 26, 2001, rejected every one. On the jurors, it noted that the defense had twenty peremptory challenges, used nineteen, and kept all nine off the jury. A grand jury, the court said, decides whether to accuse, not whether the accused is guilty.
Clark worked with police afterward on searches for bodies said to be buried in Connecticut and Massachusetts, and several northeastern states sought to question him about other killings. Judge Salmon said at the time that police suspected him of other murders in Massachusetts but had not been able to prove them. None has been charged. Accounts that call him a cannibal rest on his own statements and on secondary writing; no court made any such finding. He was denied parole in 2019.