Latest / Murder Files Unsealed / The Crossdressing Cannibal - Serial Killer Hadden Clark
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: The unusual scene of a forty seven year old man
- 0:03in handcuffs, flanked by police officers as he traversed the
- 0:07woods while donning a woman's wig likely left many residents
- 0:11of Cape cod bewildered. On the morning of April ninth,
- 0:15two thousand, the individual in question, Hadden Clark, a convicted
- 0:21cannibalistic murderer known for cross dressing, had been found guilty
- 0:25in Maryland for the murders of two women. He was
- 0:29reportedly searching for the burial sites of these women, which
- 0:33he claimed to have interred nearly twenty years prior. The
- 0:37wooded area, situated in Wellfleet, was part of a seven
- 0:41point three acre estate that once belonged to his grandfather,
- 0:45Silas Clark. Although Clark was raised in Pennsylvania, he spent
- 0:50his summers in Wellfleet, where he was employed in various restaurants. Additionally,
- 0:56Clark had conferred with law enforcement in Merria and Connecticut,
- 1:01asserting that he had buried another victim around nineteen eighty
- 1:05on a family property owned by his maternal grandfather, Maynard Scranton.
- 1:11According to officials from Maryland's prison system, Clark confided in
- 1:15a fellow inmate whom he believes to be Jesus Christ,
- 1:19that he had murdered as many as a dozen women
- 1:21and girls along the Eastern Sea Board from the mid
- 1:25nineteen seventies until his arrest in nineteen ninety three. Investigators
- 1:31from Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania are currently working
- 1:37to ascertain the veracity of his claims, which may be
- 1:40products of his unstable mental state. It has not been
- 1:44an easy task, remarked Michael O'Keefe, the Assistant District Attorney
- 1:49for Cape and Islands. More than twenty years have elapsed
- 1:54since the alleged murders, the landscape has altered, and Clark
- 1:58is a person with numerous challenges who has frequently cycled
- 2:03through various institutions. Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in nineteen eighty
- 2:09five after his discharge from the Navy, where he served
- 2:12as a cook, Clarke's behavior has been inconsistent. His reliability fluctuates,
- 2:19stated an officer involved in the search, as reported by
- 2:22The Washington Post. At times he is honest, at other
- 2:26times he leads you on fruitless pursuits. Earlier this year,
- 2:32Clark undertook a three day trip to Cape Cod to
- 2:35facilitate another search of the well Fleet site. However, severe
- 2:40weather conditions, including a snowstorm, necessitated a postponement of the investigation.
- 2:47Authorities indicated that they likely would have disregarded Clarke's recent
- 2:51confession regarding his imprisonment had he not directed them to
- 2:55the remains of Michelle d'are, who had been missing since
- 2:59nineteen eighty. In October of the previous year, after seven
- 3:04years of denying any connection to her disappearance, Clark admitted
- 3:08guilt to her murder following a request from a fellow
- 3:12inmate who urged him to confess. The skeletal remains, which
- 3:18law enforcement had previously sought in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and
- 3:22across Maryland, were discovered in a shallow grave concealed by
- 3:28an abandoned mattress, located just five minutes from her residence
- 3:33in Silver Spring. In nineteen ninety three, Clark was found
- 3:38guilty of murdering Laura Hoteling, a Harvard graduate who vanished
- 3:43from her Bethesda home in October nineteen ninety two. He
- 3:48emerged as a person of interest when investigators learned of
- 3:52his mental health issues and his occasional gardening work for her. Family.
- 3:57Clark was apprehended a month after Laura's disapate appearance when
- 4:01police uncovered his bloody fingerprint on one of her pillow cases.
- 4:06In an effort to locate her body, authorities conducted several
- 4:10unsuccessful searches in central New Jersey after Clark hinted that
- 4:15he had buried them in a state where he had
- 4:18spent his childhood. By June nineteen ninety three, Clarke pleaded
- 4:23guilty to second degree murder in Laura's case, and subsequently
- 4:28led police to her remains, which were found in a
- 4:31shallow grave not far from the site of her abduction.
- 4:35Due to remarks made while in custody for Laura's murder,
- 4:39Clark also became the primary suspect in the case of
- 4:43Michelle d'au's disappearance. Little Michelle was last seen on May
- 4:48thirty first, nineteen eighty six, leaving her father's kitchen in
- 4:53a pink ruffled bathing suit, heading towards a turtle shaped
- 4:57plastic pool in their backyard. At that time, Clarke was
- 5:02residing in the basement of his brother's house, just two
- 5:06doors away from Michelle's father's home. Following the disappearance, of Michelle.
- 5:11Her father, Carl Dare, succumbed to police pressure and admitted
- 5:16to the murder. He later retracted his confession, stating that
- 5:20he was experiencing a tumultuous divorce from Michelle's mother and
- 5:25suffered a nervous breakdown when his daughter went missing. Despite this,
- 5:30he remained the primary suspect in the investigation until Clark
- 5:35was charged with the murder of Laura Hoteling. By nineteen
- 5:39ninety nine, authorities successfully linked Michelle's death to Clark through
- 5:45a mitochondrial DNA test, a method originally developed by the
- 5:49military to identify the remains of missing soldiers from Southeast Asia.
- 5:55This type of DNA is inherited solely from mothers. Although
- 6:00considered less definitive than nuclear DNA testing, it is employed
- 6:04when nuclear DNA is either scarce or degraded.