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Apparent Bloodstains Found 9 Years After Girl's Disappearance

Just as the nine-year search for Michele Dorr appeared to be hopelessly stalled, Montgomery County police have found apparent blood splatters in the Silver Spring home where convicted murderer Hadden I. Clark was staying when the 6-year-old disappeared.

Homicide detectives using a chemical that reacts with blood pigment searched the Silver Spring home of Clark's brother, Geoffrey, late Wednesday and discovered what appeared to be blood in a bedroom, according to a source familiar with the case.

The Clark home is two doors from the house where Michele was visiting her father when she disappeared on Memorial Day, 1986. No one has been charged in the abduction.

Detectives discovered the blood a few hours after two Montgomery detectives assisted by a host of New England police investigators located what they think might be a burial site on land in Cape Cod once owned by Clark's grandparents. Five dogs trained to locate buried and decomposed bodies led their handlers to the same site, a source said, fueling hopes that the long and frustrating search for the Silver Spring girl could end soon.

Agents from the FBI Academy in Quantico traveled to Massachusetts with sonar and imaging equipment that detected two underground objects. A police source said detectives expect to begin digging in the area this morning.

Meanwhile, a police source said homicide detectives in Massachusetts are looking at Clark, 43, as a suspect in the disappearance of two girls in their jurisdiction.

After so many years without resolution, the Dorr case appeared to be at a dead end when Police Chief Carol A. Mehrling gave detectives Peter Picariello and Edward Tarney permission to travel to the Cape Cod community of Wellfleet, Mass., to search for possible burial sites, a police source said. If their mission failed, the source said, the case would be considered lost.

In October, police in Warwick, R.I., conducted a search of a storage locker rented to Clark in hopes of linking him to Michele's disappearance. It was their second visit to the locker.

According to court documents, they seized bathing suits, a multicolored towel and two other items possibly spattered with blood. Michele was wearing a bathing suit and carrying a multicolored towel when she was last seen outside her father's home.

The items were shown to Michele's father, Carl Dorr, but he was unable to identify any as items that belonged to Michele. Warwick police also said they found photographs of children, one of whom strongly resembles the girl.

After receiving word Wednesday of the possible break in Massachusetts, Montgomery homicide detectives and evidence technicians searched the Sudbury Road home of Clark's brother. Though they had searched the home in the past, this time they used Luminol, a chemical that glows yellow-green when it comes in contact with blood molecules.

Floorboards from the home were pried loose and sent to a lab where samples will be taken for DNA testing.

Police cannot yet say with certainty whether the stains they found are blood because Luminol also reacts to cleaning chemicals, a police source said.

Because police do not have a sample of Michele's blood or DNA, they must take samples from her parents and are hoping to find similarities in the apparent bloodstains and any remains they might recover in Massachusetts.

Luminol was used to find traces of blood where Clark killed Laura Houghteling, 23, and then meticulously cleaned up evidence of the crime in October 1992.

Police investigators considered using Luminol at Geoffrey Clark's home a short time later, according to a police source, but officials could not say yesterday why the test was not tried until now.

Clark pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the Houghteling slaying and is serving a 30-year prison term, the maximum allowable term under Maryland law.

Police searched for Houghteling's body in three states over an eight-month period before Clark led them to a shallow grave along Old Georgetown Road near her home.