The Washington Post
Sunday, August 10, 1997

Dorothy and Carl Dorr had been in divorce court for more than a year when their daughter disappeared from the back yard of his rented house.

Hadden Clark: From gardener to killer to inmate.

"I've never in 11 years lost touch with this," he says. Today he's head of the department's major crimes division, which long ago inherited the case. His daughter will be a high school senior this fall.

He's circumspect in discussing the Dorr matter -- "It's an open murder," he points out -- and doesn't want his detectives talking about it publicly.

While dozens of police officers and volunteers searched for miles around Sudbury Road late that Saturday and throughout Sunday, Garvey and other Silver Spring detectives began to look hard at the missing girl's father. Eliminating family members as suspects, Garvey says now, "is page one in the handbook." But the more the detectives learned about Carl, the more their suspicions hardened.

Sunday afternoon, he took a lie detector test, given by the only polygraph examiner on the county payroll who was available that day -- the fire marshal. With Carl's consent, detectives searched his home. They turned up nothing of interest, but the fire marshal reported that in his opinion, the polygraph results suggested that Carl knew more about what had happened to Michele than he was letting on. About 9 that night, detectives Wayne Farrell and Thomas Leonard ushered Carl into a small room upstairs in the Silver Spring police station.

"Good cop, bad cop," Carl says now. "Farrell was the bad cop. And I mean he was right in my face, telling me I failed the polygraph test; how it's been 24 hours and they know she's dead. And he says: `We're going to find her! We're going to find her body!' And he says, `When we find her, I'm coming to get you!' . . . He said he'd talked to Dorothy and he knew what I was about."

What Carl was about: At 5-foot-5, he was a compact 140 pounds back then, with a mane of wavy brown hair. In the '70s, he had earned bachelor's degrees in economics and psychology. He was studying for his third bachelor's, in management, when an ex-classmate introduced him to Dorothy McDowell.

Dorothy had been down some bad road by then. She had quit high school, had married and divorced, and in 1977 was living in her home town of Hampton, Va., getting by as a grocery clerk and raising a 4-year-old daughter. At 27, she was a year older than Carl when they married on September 30, 1978, in Kensington, where Carl had grown up.

Around the time Michele was born, on October 12, 1979, Carl took a job at Reed Brothers Dodge in Rockville. He stayed for almost seven years, becoming body shop manager. He and Dorothy and the girls moved from a trailer home to the Montgomery Village town house, a brick-front on Chadburn Place. Although the marriage lasted nine years on paper, it was a disaster almost from the start.

In a divorce deposition taken not long before Michele disappeared, Dorothy described herself as a victim of physical and mental abuse for years: She said there had been occasions when she summoned the police because Carl was slapping her in front of the kids, and she recalled a winter night when he pushed her to the ice-covered ground outside the town house and Michele came running, crying, "Mommy!"

Carl and Dorothy separated twice before their final break in 1985. In the tumult that year, Michele missed four months of school. When she began stammering and grinding her teeth in her sleep, her pediatrician diagnosed stress.

She was repeating kindergarten when her parents had their last bruising encounter, in early '86. Carl had moved to Silver Spring, and Dorothy, who had gone back to school and become a licensed practical nurse, was living on Chadburn Place with her daughters. On February 13, she sought a court order to keep Carl away from her and the children, writing in a sworn statement that Carl had manhandled her in the town house the night before and had threatened to "meet our daughter, age 6, @ the bus stop to abduct her. He also stated that he could end all of this by making a phone call that would end my life . . . I could not go to work because of the stress he created & for fear he would abduct our daughter."

When Michele disappeared a little over three months later, it didn't look good for Carl.

Before interrogating Carl, Farrell had reached Dorothy in southern Virginia, where she had gone with her other daughter to visit relatives for the weekend. Dorothy says now that when she learned of Michele's disappearance, her first thought was, "Carl did it" -- and she blurted those words to Farrell. Then she began pouring out details of their marriage, echoing her divorce testimony. She added that Carl was so hostile toward her that in recent months he had purposely lost jobs to undercut her bid for a court-ordered increase in child-support payments.

Very neat: As the detectives saw it, Carl had a violent enough temper to have harmed Michele. He had ample opportunity. And now here was motive, both personal (his enmity for Dorothy) and financial: Three weeks before their daughter vanished, Dorothy had prevailed in the court skirmish over child support, forcing Carl to pay $400 a month instead of $250.

No child, no child support. Neat -- except the detectives had found no witnesses or physical evidence to support their suspicions. Yet they still could close the case if Carl confessed.

So Farrell and Leonard kept after Carl that Sunday night, using what they'd learned from Dorothy as leverage, but to no avail.

Carl says now that most of Dorothy's abuse allegations were false, the rest exaggerated, and that he "absolutely did not" threaten to end Dorothy's life or abduct Michele. "I told the police that," he says.

He also says he never lost a job intentionally. In early '86, he was fired by Reed Brothers and then by another auto body shop because the divorce case was distracting him and he "couldn't keep up with the work flow." By May, he had landed a job as a car painter. And while he did accuse Dorothy of being unreasonable in seeking more child support, he says, his monthly obligation was not a financial drain.

Plus, he told the detectives, "I loved my daughter."

By the time Farrell and Leonard finished questioning him and a detective drove him home, it was 11:30 p.m. Carl hadn't slept much in 36 hours, yet he agreed to be available the next day for another polygraph test -- this time with a police department examiner. But when a detective showed up at his home that Monday morning, Carl balked.

He had just spoken by phone with his divorce lawyer, who had advised him not to take the test unless it was given by an independent examiner -- a condition the police refused to accept. The lawyer, David Goldberg, also had cautioned Carl that because the police were treating him as a suspect, he should no longer answer their questions without an attorney present.

When Carl told the Silver Spring detectives that he planned to take Goldberg's advice, they were highly annoyed.

"On 6/02/86 a covert surveillance was initiated on Carl DORR and his residence," Garvey later wrote in a long internal report detailing the investigation of Carl. The detectives interviewed dozens of people who knew him. "In addition a dialed number recorder was covertly installed on Carl DORR 's home telephone." The device would remain connected to a phone line outside Carl's home for 49 days, printing out every local number dialed from the house -- a record the C&P Telephone Co. didn't keep. The detectives also began studying records of his toll calls.

That Wednesday, June 4, they handed Carl and Charles Dorr each a subpoena, ordering them to appear before a grand jury the next day. Charles's testimony "produced no new leads," according to Garvey's report. Carl's appearance produced only more annoyance: Goldberg had advised him to invoke his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination and decline to answer questions, and Carl nervously did so.

Against Goldberg's advice, though, Carl sat for a polygraph test with an examiner at police headquarters, on Saturday, June 7. In the examiner's opinion, he was "truthful in his statements" when he denied having harmed Michele. But the examiner's report tempered the detectives' suspicions only slightly.

In 1986, Carl signed a statement saying he last saw Michele at 2:10 p.m. that day, but he says it could have been earlier.

At the same time, Carl wasn't their only suspect. Not long after Michele vanished, a gardener who'd been working in the neighborhood told detectives that early on the afternoon of May 31, a man had let him into Geoff Clark's house to use the phone. The gardener said he'd seen a small girl in the kitchen with the man. His description of the girl -- though not highly detailed -- matched Michele's.

The man, detectives learned, was Hadden Clark, who until recently had been living with his brother Geoff. Hadden's name already had surfaced, borne on neighbors' whispers soon after Michele disappeared. People considered him strange.

Detectives got hold of Hadden's military record and learned that he'd been discharged from the Navy for psychiatric reasons. "Page two of the handbook," says Garvey now, "is eliminating the neighborhood oddball."

When detectives first spoke with Hadden, according to police affidavits, he denied having seen Michele on May 31. He said he had been busy that day moving the last of his belongings out of Geoff's house and into a room he'd rented in Wheaton. Geoff and his kids had gone out, so Hadden had been alone in the house. After moving his stuff, he said, he had bicycled to his job in the kitchen of a country club.

Detectives checked his time card. They saw that Hadden had punched in at 2:46 p.m. They also learned that he'd arrived at work with a bandage on one of his hands. Hadden told them he'd banged into a tree while riding to work.

On June 8, they tried to interview him at length. "Clark gets upset," an investigator's notes read. "Cries, vomits and makes statements that he may have blacked out and did something he doesn't remember . . . Interview is terminated after Clark calls his psychologist & attorney."

To gauge Hadden as a suspect, the detectives had to know what time Michele had last been seen.

What time had Carl seen her go out?

He kept telling them he didn't know.

Saturday night I started hallucinating," Carl says. He's talking about June 7. ". . . I just couldn't take the pressure. I hadn't been able to sleep in a week. I hadn't been able to eat in a week. My brain was soup."

In the seven days since Michele disappeared, he had been grilled, subpoenaed and polygraphed twice. His name was in the newspapers every morning and on the air. Carl sensed a tone of rabid anticipation to the stories -- the reporters seemed to be saying (without actually saying it) that his days as a free man were numbered. He was watching a TV show at home that Saturday night. "I thought the people on the show were talking about me. I got up and started looking behind the television -- I'm thinking, `The police have wired my TV!' "

Sunday he drove to his father's grave in Prince George's County. He spoke to the headstone, and the headstone spoke back. "I believed that if I could just find Michele, I could bring her back to life," he says. "And because I was able to do that, I must be Jesus."

That night he drove to Chadburn Place to tell Dorothy he was Jesus. At the town house, he found not only his estranged wife, but also a "nonprofit" missing-child investigator who'd insinuated himself into the case, soliciting a donation from Dorothy's family. When Carl said what he'd come to the town house to say, the investigator "just threw me out."

Which led Carl to another revelation: The investigator was Satan; he had killed Michele; he had hidden her corpse in the basement crawl space beneath Carl's bedroom.

Monday morning, sleep-deprived but full of adrenaline, he returned to the town house to share his revelation with Dorothy. After Carl had finished babbling to Dorothy about Satan and the crawl space, and after Dorothy and the civilian investigator had reported his babbling to the police, a search warrant application was prepared by one of Garvey's bosses, Det. Lt. James Lee. At some point, though, the message had become confused. Lee's affidavit reads: "Carl Dorr, father of the missing Michele Lee Dorr, stated . . . that he, Carl Dorr, had in fact murdered his child Michele Lee, and buried the child under the residence at 9129 Sudbury Road."

The police found nothing in the crawl space, and Carl spent the next 72 hours under involuntary psychiatric observation at Washington Adventist Hospital. A psychiatrist told the detectives that they shouldn't give credence to any admission by Carl -- he'd suffered an "acute psychotic episode" brought on by fatigue, stress and his profound guilt at having let Michele out of his sight for so long.

The detectives studied his hospital file, Garvey wrote, but "no new leads were obtained." The case, almost two weeks old, was beginning to gather frost. (continued in Part Three)