The Washington Post
Sunday, August 10, 1997

'I guess after a couple of hours they had me brainwashed, thinking I killed her,' Carl says. 'They put these thoughts in my head. And then they got Dorothy on the phone, and they said, "Here, talk to Dorothy."'

Detectives Richard Fallin, left, and Michael Garvey

With a doctorate in chemistry, Hadden's father, also named Hadden, made a better-than-comfortable living as an industrial executive, providing his kids and their stay-at-home mom with a succession of fine houses in well-off communities: Warren Township, N.J.; Darien and New Canaan, Conn.; Yardley, Pa. But the father was an impatient man. He kept job-jumping from one company to another, seeking a level of affluence he couldn't attain, and he let out his frustration at home. After a couple of drinks, he'd sometimes get angry, and sometimes after pouring a few more, he'd grab his wife, Flavia, and give her a whack or two. And if the kids were watching, too bad.

Hadden the father was manic-depressive; Flavia was hyperactive and often drank heavily in order to sleep. They were functioning alcoholics, their son Geoff says now. They eventually divorced and both are dead. Geoff, a biologist for the Food and Drug Administration, says he also is manic-depressive, and controls his illness with medication. His eldest brother, Bradfield, is serving 18 years-to-life in prison. With a master's degree in business, Brad took a job with a California computer company, and in 1984 he murdered a co-worker, dismembering her body in his apartment before attempting suicide. It was his first offense.

As for Hadden the younger, it appears he was doomed from the start.

"His birth was accomplished with forceps, which produced a head injury," one of his lawyers wrote in a memo filed in court. The lawyer based the memo on a conversation with Flavia Clark. Hadden's "difficulties in walking caused him to fall repeatedly, striking his head." When he was 4, physicians at the Yale Child Study Center diagnosed cerebral palsy. Despite expensive therapy, Hadden "continued to fall so much that his mother had his head taped to try to prevent further injury."

He started public kindergarten a few years late and "was teased and tormented by other children." His parents put him in expensive residential schools for the learning-disabled, and he made progress. But after they mainstreamed him, at age 14, the progress stopped.

The Clarks were living in Yardley then. Hadden was a sullen loner, unable to relate to other kids in public school, his brother Geoff recalls. His mother and sister noticed undergarments missing -- and more than once, Flavia told the police, she'd caught Hadden wearing them. And she said a neighbor who'd hired Hadden to do yard work discovered him in her bedroom, dressed in one of her nightgowns.

His favorite escape -- from the strictures of private schools, from the taunts of other children, from strife at home -- was summer vacation in Wellfleet, Mass., an idyllic town on Cape Cod.

"It was the most wonderful time of Hadden's life," Geoff recalls. "It was for all of us." Their grandfather Silas Clark had been a pillar of Westchester County, N.Y., an influential lawyer, civic leader and finally mayor of White Plains in the late '40s. In retirement, he and his wife welcomed the grandkids to the house and eight acres they'd bought high on a Cape Cod hill. Summer after summer, they returned for seemingly endless days and weeks of romping in the woods and surf. "I mean, you talk about freedom," says Geoff. "You talk about fun."

Long after the grandparents had died and the house and acreage had been sold out of the family, Geoff says, Hadden still thought of Wellfleet as his "special place."

Back home, he muddled through high school, finishing in 1972, a month before he turned 20, then enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, N.Y., and graduated two years later.

Geoff noticed two things about Hadden early in life that he says never changed: Though emotionally childlike, Hadden was exceptionally clever in a calculating way -- he was a highly skilled chess player, for example, and still is. And he tended to overreact to criticism, often taking minor corrections or suggestions as personal affronts. He'd decide that the people making them were out to get him, and he'd lash back -- "snap off," as Hadden puts it -- often in irrational, self-destructive ways. In eight years, beginning in 1974, he quit or was fired from more than a dozen kitchen jobs.

Despite his history of mental impairment, he was accepted into the Navy in the summer of 1982 and became a cook, eventually on the amphibious-assault vessel USS Iwo Jima. When the ship was in Portsmouth, Va., in early '85, he was detained at an airport "after exhibiting bizarre activity," according to a Navy report. Then he was arrested for "destroying property . . . and acting in a bizarre manner" at a local store. He told a Navy psychiatrist that he couldn't remember what had happened in the store -- he'd "blacked out." He said his mental problems had begun only recently, after several of his shipmates had attacked him and beaten him unconscious. The shipmates, Hadden said, were jealous of his superior ability as a cook.

"SCHIZOPHRENIA, PARANOID TYPE . . . manifested by persecutory and grandiose delusions," wrote the psychiatrist in his diagnosis. Three months later, on June 22, 1985, Hadden was discharged.

Fallin got off the phone with the Bethesda detective and called his supervisor at home - woke him up - to give him the news. 'Hadden Clark!' he remembers the sergeant saying. 'Absolutely! Let's go!'

And a few days after that, he showed up at Geoff's house -- 9125 Sudbury Rd., Silver Spring.

Geoff was living alone in the house then, except for the weekends his children visited. He let Hadden move into the basement. "As bad as he was before the Navy," Geoff recalls, "he was a lot worse when he got out."

That September, after Hadden was charged with shoplifting panties and bras, Geoff arranged for bail. The charge was dropped. Then for months, he watched Hadden job-hop from kitchen to kitchen and listened to him carry on rambling, sometimes angry conversations with himself.

The behavior unnerved Geoff and scared his girlfriend and future wife, Stephanie. So in early May 1986, Geoff says, he told Hadden politely that he wanted him out by the end of the month. Hadden quietly fumed, but Geoff was adamant:

Out -- by Saturday, May 31.

By mid-May, Hadden had rented a room in Wheaton and moved some of his belongings. He told Geoff he'd be back for the rest on the 31st.

Geoff, whose children were visiting, thought it would be best to leave Hadden alone that day. In the morning, before Hadden arrived, Stephanie came by the house, and she, Geoff and the kids went to a park. It was early afternoon when they got home, Geoff says, though he doesn't recall the exact time. Hadden was loading the last of his luggage and boxes into his pickup. After he finished, he didn't say much. He just climbed into his truck and drove away.

They were having a cookout -- Geoff, the kids and Stephanie -- when Carl Dorr showed up about 5:30, asking for his daughter.

A while later, as police cars starting arriving and word of Michele's disappearance got around, Geoff was among the first to mention Hadden's name to the detectives.

Shortly after Laura Houghteling was reported missing in 1992, a detective suggested Hadden to her mother as a possible culprit -- and Penny Houghteling's first reaction was that it simply could not be.

"It's painful for me to review this," she says now. As a mental health professional, she might have detected some hint of violence within Hadden. ". . . He has a capacity to deceive -- to deceive, to distort and to present himself as the opposite of what he is."

When detectives first spoke with him about Laura's disappearance, Hadden offered an alibi -- just as he had in '86, when initially questioned about Michele. But when they tried to follow up on Laura, Hadden had almost the same reaction he'd had in '86: According to a detective's report, he cried, "got on his knees and stated, `Oh God, I just want to die,' " and said he may have "blacked out" and done something horrible.

As days passed, detectives amassed a wealth of evidence that convinced them Hadden had killed Laura in her bedroom -- had cut her, badly -- and had carried her body from the house to be hidden. Though no blood was visible in the room, technicians found abundant traces of it on her mattress by spraying Luminol, a chemical that reacts with iron in blood to give off an eerie, pulsating glow.

Quite a lot had been spilled. The bedroom, after the crime, had been well cleaned.

A pillowcase from Laura's bed was discovered in woods a few hundred yards from the house. A technician turned up a bloody thumbprint on it: Laura's blood, Hadden's print.

On November 6, he was in handcuffs.

And Laura was still missing.

Though the detectives were almost certain she was dead, they also thought it was remotely possible that Hadden was holding her somewhere. Fallin says he and other homicide/sex detectives were convinced that the evidence they'd collected was strong enough to convict Hadden in the Houghteling case without a confession. Yet if Laura was still alive, it was vital that Hadden tell them where. So they decided to conduct a marathon -- and blatantly unconstitutional -- interrogation. "If he asked for a lawyer, too bad," Fallin recalls. "He ain't going to get one."

They planned to point out to Hadden that nothing he said during the interrogation could be used against him in court, inasmuch as they were going to violate his rights egregiously. Maybe he'd tell them where Laura was -- dead or alive.

And maybe, while he was at it, he'd tell them about Michele.

They worked on him for 71/2 hours.

They started shortly after his arrest on Friday night, November 6, and kept at it until after dawn. At headquarters in Rockville, the detectives dragged a couch into the homicide/sex interrogation room, hung a soft-hued picture on one of its bare walls, and removed a gray metal table -- a hopeless attempt to give the stark room a touch of warmth. They wanted Hadden to relax.

Then, at 10:45, they went at him, in shifts.

"We put two female detectives in there first -- nice-looking, short dresses, real nice -- because we knew he had a hard time dealing with women," Fallin recalls. But they got nowhere.

Another, older female detective went in alone. "And she does the momma deal on him -- just nice and sweet," Fallin recalls. He and other detectives, awaiting their turns with Hadden, watched the interrogation on closed-circuit video across the hall. But Momma made no progress. So the first two women went back in. And they got nowhere again.

Except for requesting a lawyer -- he would ask for one more than 100 times during the interrogation -- Hadden had almost nothing intelligible to say. "Well, then Mike Garvey went in," Fallin says. It was 2:52 a.m. "And he tried his damnedest to break him down. All Mike was talking about was Michele Dorr. And he took the mean attack."

Garvey, a supervisor in the department's narcotics unit then, had jumped back into the Dorr case after Hadden emerged as a suspect in Laura's disappearance. Garvey, who declined to be interviewed about the interrogation, "kept telling Hadden that he knew he'd killed Michele -- he knew it!" says Fallin. He says Garvey baited Hadden, handing him a pink-and-white bathing suit identical to the one Michele had been wearing. But Hadden said nothing understandable. Finally, after 40 minutes, Garvey stuffed an old Michele Dorr missing-child flier in Hadden's shirt pocket, glared at him, then walked out of the room.

It went on that way until 6:10. Hadden at times lapsed into a woman's voice, saying his name was "Hadeen," and at times he babbled like an infant. Fallin and Tarney took the last turn -- and by then Hadden was so tired, they had to prop him up.

In the end, he offered only a hint that he'd buried "them" in New Jersey.

"At least it was something," Fallin says now -- though precious little, considering the criticism rained on the department after the legal community learned of the interrogation. (continued in Part Five)