The Washington Post
Sunday, August 10, 1997

After Hadden's plea, Fallin faced TV cameras and said, 'I feel as strongly about him doing Michele Dorr as I did about him doing Laura Houghteling. We just don't have a fingerprint, and no physical evidence at this time.'

Michele Dorr

Twice in January 1993, with Hadden awaiting trial and Laura missing for three months, homicide/sex detectives traveled to Wellfleet -- his "special place." Among Hadden's belongings, they had found a hand-drawn map of a cemetery where the family had a plot.

At the plot, they noticed a patch of disturbed earth. Maintenance workers said they were certain the ground hadn't looked like that on October 14 or 15, when they pruned a tree overhanging the graves of Hadden's father and paternal grandparents. Then a local cop spoke with witnesses who'd seen Hadden in town in late October, shortly after Laura disappeared. And the detectives came across a granite marker near the family plot that had been knocked over and scratched. They had it shipped back to Maryland, where specialists matched the scrapes to damage on the undercarriage of Hadden's pickup.

A dog trained to detect the minutest trace of an unembalmed body took a whiff of the disturbed ground and "reacted." The police dug. But they found nothing.

The detectives theorized that after Laura disappeared on October 18, Hadden had buried a body at that site, then removed it before they arrested him on November 6. Either that or he'd traveled to the graveyard in late October to remove the remains of someone he'd buried there long before.

With Hadden silent, there was no way to know.

In the meantime, Hadden's attorney agreed with the detectives that they had enough evidence against him in the Houghteling case to convict him of at least second-degree murder. Prosecutors also were confident of securing a guilty verdict on that charge, but weren't at all hopeful about first-degree murder because proving the key element of that crime, premeditation, would be difficult. So they bargained.

On June 14, 1993, Hadden pleaded guilty to the second-degree offense. Before he was sentenced to 30 years, he pointed the detectives to Laura's body, buried in woods not far from her home. His attorney explained that Hadden had viewed Penny Houghteling as a mother figure and perceived Laura as a threat to the relationship.

So he'd killed her.

Just snapped off and did it.

After the plea, Fallin faced TV news cameras and declared: "Sergeant Phillips and myself, Detective Garvey, Detective Tarney, have looked over the whole Michele Dorr file, and from what I've read and from what I've dug up, I feel as strongly about him doing Michele Dorr as I did about him doing Laura Houghteling.

"We just don't have a fingerprint, and no physical evidence at this time."

In other words, they still had no case.

Fallin and Tarney then reread the entire Dorr case file -- hundreds of pages of reports and statements -- and Carl's statement of June 13, 1986, stuck in Fallin's throat. If Carl had seen his daughter alive at "approximately 2:10 p.m.," Hadden could not have taken her. Fallin assumed that Carl had lied -- that he'd probably last seen Michele at noon, or 12:30, and was too scared or ashamed to admit he'd let so much time go by without checking on her. So he reinterviewed Carl, and Carl readily agreed: It could have been much earlier than 2:10 when Michele went out with the towel.

"He admitted he lied," Fallin says now. But Carl says he didn't lie -- he simply isn't sure when he last saw her, and he never has been.

The detectives kept working.

They canvassed Sudbury Road and surrounding streets, looking for a child other than Michele who in '86 matched the description of the girl whom the gardener reported seeing with Hadden in Geoff's house. Fallin says they found no one.

In August 1994, about a year after he entered Maryland's prison system, Hadden underwent a six-month evaluation at the Patuxent Institution, a prison that provides intensive psychological therapy to eligible inmates. While he was there, a fellow inmate coaxed him into talking about Michele Dorr, according to Fallin and other law enforcement sources, who say the inmate was carrying a hidden tape recorder. And they say the inmate gave them a tape they consider highly incriminating.

Hadden says now that the inmate was "nagging" him about Michele, so he told him "something off the wall."

Dorothy, Michele's mother, says Tarney "told me that Hadden had talked about what he'd done to her, and where -- details about what he'd done to her, but not about where she was buried." She felt an odd mix of horror and relief -- relief at finding out. She knew Hadden had cut Laura's throat. "So I asked Ed -- I asked him, I said, `Did he cut her throat? Did he cut Michele's throat?' . . . And there was a long pause. And he said, `I'm not going to lie to you. Yes.' "

The tape sent the detectives back to Silver Spring and Cape Cod.

In mid-September 1995, police searched not only the Wellfleet cemetery, but also the eight acres of woods and fields once owned by Silas Clark. The search employed ground-penetrating radar and other sensing gear supplied by the FBI, and went on for several days. Cadaver-sniffing dogs "reacted" not only at the Clark cemetery plot -- in the same area as before -- but at a spot in the woods near Silas's old house. The police dug. Again they found nothing.

At the same time, investigators descended on Geoff Clark's house on Sudbury Road and, with Geoff's consent, examined the bedroom his daughter had used during her visits in 1986. Geoff recalls that they went directly to one corner of the room and pulled up floorboards. Later, lab technicians found widespread traces of human blood on them. The blood had been there for a long time.

The technicians concluded that someone had bled heavily in that corner of the room -- so heavily, the blood seeped through the cracks in the floor. The rest of it had been cleaned.

Detectives tracked down previous owners of Geoff's house, back to the late 1960s, and asked if they could recall anyone bleeding heavily in that room -- and none could. In February 1996, six months after the first search, technicians returned and pulled up more floorboards, as well as hallway carpeting. Detectives say more than 80 human blood samples were sent to a laboratory for DNA analysis. But the blood was too old. It was impossible to say for sure whom it had come from.

That fall and winter, the detectives put Geoff to work on his brother. Three times, he visited Hadden at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup -- each time wearing a hidden microphone, while Tarney and another detective waited in the prison parking lot. During each visit, Geoff says, he steered the conversation toward the subject of Michele Dorr, trying to elicit an incriminating admission from his brother. He got nothing.

The detectives saw two similar crimes: Dorr and Houghteling, two female victims, each within reach of Hadden Clark, each made to disappear. In each case there was evidence of cut throats, heavy bleeding and well-cleaned crime scenes. In each case, Hadden fell apart when questioned.

Yet the case against him in Michele's abduction isn't strong enough, as the state's attorney's office sees it.

Prosecutors have made it clear that the inmate's tape of Hadden would be inadmissible in court. Had the inmate been acting as an agent of the police, it would have been permissible for him to tape Hadden secretly, under Maryland law. But the prisoner had been acting on his own -- one citizen secretly tape recording another. In Maryland, that's a felony.

The inmate, of course, could testify about what he'd allegedly heard Hadden say. And the detectives had spoken with other inmates who also were willing to testify that Hadden had made incriminating statements about Michele's abduction. But criminals have built-in credibility problems as witnesses. And besides, there is still the Carl Dorr problem: Kathleen Toolan, the prosecutor handling the case, declined to comment, but numerous law enforcement sources familiar with her thinking say she's mindful that Carl is a defense attorney's best friend.

"Almost every trial has a straw man," says one senior Montgomery prosecutor, who asked not to be identified. "The defense will throw some alternative suspect in front of the jury and hope it raises doubt." In most cases, the straw man is a phantom. But Carl Dorr is reasonable doubt personified. He allegedly threatened to commit the crime. He had opportunity and, arguably, motive. He confessed, however irrationally. And his statement ("approximately 2:10 p.m.") bolsters Hadden's alibi.

The case "is strong enough to go forward," says one detective, echoing a sentiment popular among his colleagues. But Toolan wants a confession, says Fallin -- "that last nail in the coffin" -- before she will proceed. Another detective -- stressing that investigators respect Toolan's professional judgment -- nevertheless says, "It's time to step up to the plate and take a swing." Absent a confession, "there's not much chance it's going to get any better."

So it's an "open murder," as Garvey says. For the principals -- Carl, Dorothy, even Hadden -- the lack of resolution has become defining.

Carl: After his stay in Prince George's General, he began rebuilding his life. He's a self-employed real estate appraiser now, and has been for six years. He has remarried. He and his wife have no children.

On a wall in the living room of their Kensington home hangs a portrait of Michele, a jumbo-size photograph made to look like an oil painting, in a heavy frame. "I think about her every hour," Carl says, though guilt -- the memory of having let Michele out of his sight for so long -- no longer torments him. "I came to realize that if somebody wants your child, there's not a whole lot you can do," he says. "If these predators want somebody's child, they can take one -- in two seconds."

He still distrusts the police, he says, and probably always will.

And Dorothy: She lives in dull despair, far from where it happened, alone in a rented room in a house on a bluff above a bay.

A few months after Michele vanished, Dorothy overdosed on Xanax, a tranquilizer prescribed for her anxiety. She called a TV station to announce that she'd swallowed the pills -- said she wanted to die. Her psychiatrist called it a "suicidal gesture" -- she wanted the reporters to pay attention again to her daughter's absence.

She's 45 now, an LPN still. She remarried, like Carl, but it didn't work out. In a closet she keeps a box, and in the box she keeps a few of her daughter's things -- kindergarten papers, a pair of plastic sandals. She also keeps wondering: Where is Michele? What did he do to her?

It wasn't Carl -- she's convinced of that now. It was Hadden, she believes.

"What happens to Hadden Clark, I really don't care anymore," Dorothy says. What she wants is something of Michele to bury, to lay to rest. "You've got to have it, to put your life back together."

And Hadden: "I don't talk about that," he says, in the visiting room of the Roxbury Correctional Institution.

He means M.D. -- he doesn't talk about that.

Except sometimes he does.

Sharon Weidenfeld, a private investigator in Prince George's County, saw Dorothy on the TV news a few years ago. She decided she'd try to crack the Dorr case herself, by tricking Hadden into telling her where Michele's body was. With the help of an inmate she knew, who often played chess with Hadden, she pretended to be the inmate's girlfriend and started writing to Hadden. He began writing back in April 1996. They corresponded for months. Finally, last December, in a typed letter that ran almost two single-spaced pages, Weidenfeld brought up Michele for the first time.

"You could give me the information any way that you want," she implored, "and I could give it to the police or a State's Attorney or a lawyer or a priest or a rabbi, anyone."

Hadden replied that a lawyer had advised him not to discuss Michele. "I know I have done a terrible thing and I'm sorry for doing it," he wrote. "Maybe down the road from now we can talk about these things, but as of now I'm taking the advice of my lawyer." Weidenfeld gave the letter to the police.

"I meant the other," Hadden says now of the letter. A terrible thing -- he meant Laura, not M.D.

But Weidenfeld in her letter had said nothing about Laura -- hadn't mentioned Laura's name -- had asked only about Michele.

So what about Michele?

Did he snap off and kill M.D.?

His expression -- stony.

"No," says Hadden Clark.

Paul Duggan is an editor on The Post's Metro staff.