The Washington Post
Sunday, August 10, 1997

As detectives saw it, Carl had ample opportunity to have harmed Michele. And he had a motive. They had no witnesses or physical evidence to support their suspicions. Yet they could close the case if Carl confessed.

Dorothy and Carl Dorr

The detectives, still trying to piece together a minute-by-minute time line of Carl's movements on May 31, prodded him to recount virtually every step he'd taken. When they were done, they believed they had finally pinned him down on the time he last saw his daughter. Summarizing Carl's signed statement, Garvey wrote: "At approximately 2:10 p.m., Michele came in and obtained a towel, then went back outside after inquiring if they were still going to the pool in Montgomery Village."

Hadden had punched in at 2:46. That meant he would have had 36 minutes to abduct the girl, drive to Wheaton, bike to work and punch in -- an impossibly short time, in the detectives' view.

As for Hadden, "what can you do?" says a detective who worked the case, on the condition that he not be identified. "I mean, you can't follow the guy around for the rest of his life."

As for Carl, he says now that if he settled on 2:10 p.m. during the interview, it was because 2:10 p.m. "sounded like it could be right." He also says it could just as easily have been wrong. "I'd been through a lot," he says. "How could I remember everything exactly that I did two weeks ago, which is what they wanted me to do? . . . I did my best."

As for when he last saw her: "I can't say specifically. Somewhere between about 12:15 and 2 is the best I can remember."

But his statement ("approximately 2:10 p.m.") went into the voluminous DORR, MICHELE LEE file, and no matter what Carl says now, the statement, bearing his signature, remains there, indelible.

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.

"Produced no new leads," is how Garvey summed up Carl's June 13 statement. He could feel the case going cold.

The investigation didn't end; it simply lost momentum. The reporters and TV crews decamped from Sudbury Road. The police dropped their surveillance of Carl and his house and disconnected the dialed-number recorder. Garvey started picking up new cases.

On August 1, Carl submitted to hypnosis, according to Garvey's report. "No new information or investigative leads were developed."

On October 1, he "submitted to an injection of Sodium Amytal," a so-called truth serum -- and "reiterated his original version of the disappearance."

Cold. Cold. Cold.

"I've never in 11 years lost touch with this," says Michael Garvey, the detective who received the initial report of Michele's disappearance.

In the fall of 1987, Carl says, he became delusional again, believing "that if I could just find Michele, I could bring her back to life." He showed up at the Silver Spring police station one night and announced that he had the power of resurrection.

"Garvey started working on me," Carl says, "and at some point he started telling me, `Well, we know you did it. We have the towel.' And I said, `What do you mean, you've got the towel?' And he said, `The towel -- you left the towel behind when you killed her.' "

The detectives hadn't found Michele's towel; it was ruse, and an indication of how far they were from closing the case.

"And I said, `What do you mean? I didn't kill her,' " Carl recalls. "And Garvey said, `Well, we mean when she drowned in the pool. We know she drowned in the pool. We know it wasn't your fault. She just drowned in the pool, right? Where did you take her body?' "

It went on that way for a while, with the detectives "just playing mind games with me," Carl recalls. "At one point Garvey says, `Well, you didn't mean to kill her. You just smothered her. You put your hand over her face, and it just happened, right?'

"And I guess after a couple of hours they had me brainwashed, thinking I killed her. They put these thoughts in my head. And then they got Dorothy on the phone, and they said, `Here, talk to Dorothy.' " In Garvey's presence, Carl spoke with Dorothy -- he told her he'd smothered Michele, and that her remains could be found in the back of his '75 Chevy van.

"I remember it like it was yesterday," Dorothy says now. "I remember saying, `NO! NO!' Because I believed him."

The police found no remains in Carl's van. When he showed up at the station again that night to remind the detectives of his power of resurrection, they had him physically removed.

He spent the next 10 days in the psychiatric unit at Prince George's General Hospital.

Cold. Cold. Cold.

And it stayed that way.

For years.

Just past midnight on Wednesday, October 21, 1992, the phone rang in the Montgomery police department's homicide/sex section, part of the major crimes division at headquarters in Rockville. Det. Richard Fallin picked it up. The section had been created a few years before to investigate killings and sex crimes countywide. The caller, a detective from the Bethesda investigative section, was working a missing-person case that he thought could be a murder.

The Bethesda detective said the subject was a white female, 23, dependable, in good health. She hadn't shown up for work on Monday, though she'd sounded fine Sunday night on the phone with a co-worker. Laura Houghteling was the name. Address on Julliard Drive, lived with her mother, who'd been out of town. The subject's brother and two friends went looking for her Monday night but came up empty. They did have a strange encounter with another subject, though: a guy who did gardening at the house for the mother. The brother saw him in his pickup and flagged him down, wanted to ask him about Laura. The guy stopped, the brother went to open the passenger-side door, the guy hit the gas, took off.

A guy named Hadden Clark.

An alarm sounded in Fallin's head. He remembered the Dorr abduction. The file boxes had been shipped to homicide/sex from Silver Spring in '89. But no one in the section had made any progress on the case.

In the half-dozen years since Michele disappeared, Hadden had remained an itinerant kitchen worker, renting a room or bunking in the camper of his '83 Datsun pickup. One odd or unsettling crime had followed another.

Detective Richard Fallin was on the case from the time it regained momentum in 1992 until he retired in 1995.

After being evicted from a rented room in Bethesda, he left fish heads in plastic bags stashed around the house to rot. In Rhode Island, he assaulted his mother. One Christmas, alone in his truck in Rockville, he was arrested for allegedly carrying a pistol illegally. And he was convicted of stealing women's purses from a Bethesda church while the ladies were busy with choir practice. Hadden, a cross-dresser for years, had entered the church disguised as a woman.

The gun charge was dropped and he got probation for each of the other offenses. "I think I have a split personality," he told a Department of Veterans Affairs psychiatrist in July 1989. "I don't like to hurt people, but I do things I'm not aware of."

Though detectives in the Dorr case had no way of monitoring his every step through the years, they never ceased to be interested in what Hadden was up to. When word reached them that he'd been arrested, they would inspect whatever possessions he had with him (in his pockets, in his truck), hoping to discover some link to Michele's abduction. But they'd found nothing.

By the early '90s, Hadden was showing up regularly at church-sponsored lunches for the homeless in Bethesda despite having banked his Navy disability payments and accumulated more than $40,000 in savings. He made it known among lunch volunteers that he was available to do yard work, and someone suggested him to Laura's mother, Penny Houghteling, a psychiatric social worker. She found Hadden odd, certainly, but also childlike -- eager to please.

Now Penny's daughter was missing -- and Fallin immediately sensed a huge break in the Dorr case.

He got off the phone with the Bethesda detective and called his supervisor, Det. Sgt. Robert Phillips, at home -- woke him up. In '86, Phillips had been a supervisor in the Silver Spring investigative section -- and like Garvey and the others, he had been living with the little girl's ghost. "Well, Bob -- he gets worked up anyhow -- but he was just really, really excited," recalls Fallin, who retired in 1995 and comments openly about the case. He says Phillips barked, "Hadden Clark! Absolutely! Let's go!"

If there was a specific moment when Carl Dorr ceased being the chief suspect in his daughter's abduction, this was it. Fallin and his partner in homicide/sex, Det. Edward Tarney, soon took charge not only of the Houghteling investigation but of the Dorr case as well.

"Let's get on him right now!" Fallin recalls Phillips telling him on the phone that morning. "The son of a bitch got away from us once." (continued in Part Four)