Hadden Clark

Last updated
Hadden Clark
Born
Hadden Irving Clark

(1952-07-31) July 31, 1952 (age 72)
Troy, New York, U.S.
Other namesThe Cross Dressing Cannibal
The Rockville Rocket
Conviction(s) Murder,
Robbery
Criminal penalty70 years in prison
Details
Victims2+
Span of crimes
1986–1992
CountryUnited States
State(s) Maryland
Date apprehended
November 6, 1992
Imprisoned at Eastern Correctional Institution, Westover, Maryland, U.S.

Hadden Irving Clark (born July 31, 1952) [1] is an American murderer and suspected serial killer currently serving two 30-year sentences for the murders of 6-year-old Michele Lee Dorr in 1986, and 23-year-old Laura Houghteling in 1992. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] He was also given a 10-year sentence for robbery after stealing from a former landlord. [3]

Contents

Family

Clark is the second of four children, and was born and raised in Troy, New York. [3] His brother, Bradfield Clark, strangled a woman in California before eating several body parts. [7] [8] [9] [10]

Clark's parents were both alcoholics and often fought with each other in front of their children. Clark's mother dressed him in girls' clothes when drunk and called him "Kristen". [11] His father eventually committed suicide.[ citation needed ] As a teenager, Clark tortured and killed animals owned by children who bullied him.[ citation needed ]

Clark trained as a chef and served in the United States Navy until he was discharged after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Over the years, he held a number of menial jobs but was mostly homeless. Clark was arrested multiple times for theft and retaliation. He was arrested for robbery after he vandalized a former landlord's property and committed several thefts. [11]

Murders

On May 31, 1986, Clark was ordered by his brother to move out of the latter's home in Silver Spring, Maryland. Michele Dorr, a six-year-old friend of his niece, came over looking for her. Clark took Michele to an upstairs room and slashed her throat with a chef knife. Clark then attempted to sexually assault her corpse, drank some of her blood, ate a piece of her flesh, and stuffed her in a duffel bag. He buried her in a park 12 miles away. [11] [12]

On October 18, 1992, he killed 23-year-old Laura Houghteling in Bethesda, Maryland. Clark was working as a gardener for Laura's mother Penny when she accused Clark of stealing tools from her backyard shed. Clark entered the house through the back door and stabbed Laura to death in her bedroom with a kitchen knife and suffocated her with a pillow. He carried her body in a bedsheet through a wooded area and buried her a half-mile away. He left behind a pillowcase with his fingerprint as he moved the body. He later returned and dressed up in a wig and women's clothes and left through the front door to make people think Laura left the house alive to buy time to clean the scene. Police soon discovered the bloody pillow and linked the print on it to Clark. Clark confessed and led police to Laura's body eight months after the murder. Police began looking at him for Dorr's murder after discovering he lived two houses down from Dorr's father at the time she disappeared. Police later tested his brother's old house for blood and found Dorr's blood in the wooden floorboards of an upstairs bedroom. Clark later led police to her body in January 2000. [13] [14]

Alleged murders

Clark has confessed to murdering dozens of people starting as a teenager. In 2004, he sent a letter claiming he had killed a then-unidentified woman on Cape Cod, Massachusetts in 1974 known as "Lady of the Dunes". Clark explained that he had buried evidence from the crime in his grandfather's garden and that he knew the woman's identity but was not going to tell authorities because he claimed they mistreated him. As he has paranoid schizophrenia, police doubt the accuracy of the confession. [15] The decedent was identified in 2022 as Ruth Marie Terry, who was married at the time of her death to Guy Rockwall Muldavin, who was identified as her killer on August 28th, 2023. [16] Clark led police on December 15, 2000, to his grandparents' former property where they discovered a plastic bucket with more than 200 pieces of jewelry. Among the items were Laura Houghteling's high school class ring. He claimed the items were "trophies" he took from his victims. [13] [14] [17]

Media

Books

Television

Podcasts

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dennis Rader</span> American serial killer (born 1945)

Dennis Lynn Rader, also known as BTK, is an American serial killer who murdered at least ten people in Wichita and Park City, Kansas, between 1974 and 1991. Although Rader occasionally killed or attempted to kill men and children, he typically targeted women. His victims were often bound, sometimes with objects from their homes, and either suffocated with a plastic bag or manually strangled with a ligature.

Colin Ireland was a British serial killer known as the Gay Slayer, because his victims were gay. Criminologist David Wilson believes that Ireland was a psychopath.

<i>Forensic Investigators</i> 2004-06 Australian television series

Forensic Investigators: Australia's True Crimes is an Australian television show hosted by Lisa McCune which aired on the Seven Network. It aired for three seasons from 2004 to 2006.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Charles Albright</span> American killer from Dallas, Texas

Charles Frederick Albright was an American murderer and suspected serial killer who was convicted of murdering Shirley Williams, a sex worker whose body was found on a road in Dallas, Texas, in March 1991. Her body had been found with the eyes removed, leading to the media dubbing Albright the Eyeball Killer. Albright was also charged with the murders of three other women whose bodies were found in the Dallas area between 1988 and 1991. Charges were later dropped due to lack of evidence, although he is still considered the prime suspect. Albright was incarcerated in the John Montford Psychiatric Unit in Lubbock, Texas, until his death in 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Denyer</span> Australian serial killer

Paul Charles Denyer is an Australian serial killer currently serving three consecutive sentences of life imprisonment with a non-parole period of 30 years for the murders of three young women in Melbourne, in 1993. Denyer became known in the media as the Frankston Serial Killer as his crimes occurred in the neighbouring suburbs of Frankston.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maury Travis</span> American serial killer (1965–2002)

Maury Troy Travis was an American serial killer. Travis was named in a federal criminal complaint for the murders of two women. At the time of the murders, he was a hotel waiter, and on parole for a 1989 robbery. While Travis claimed in a letter to have murdered 17 women, some authorities were doubtful; others thought he may have murdered up to 20 women. He died by suicide by hanging in custody in St. Louis County, Missouri, after being arrested for murder.

Beverley Gail Allitt is an English serial killer who was convicted of murdering four infants, attempting to murder three others, and causing grievous bodily harm to a further six at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital, Lincolnshire, between February and April 1991. She committed the murders as a State Enrolled Nurse on the hospital's children's ward.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Thomas Dillon</span> American serial killer

Thomas Lee Dillon was an American serial killer who shot and killed at least five men in southeastern Ohio, beginning April 1, 1989 and continuing until April 1992. He was nicknamed "Killer" for boasting about shooting hundreds of animals.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Keith Hunter Jesperson</span> Canadian-American serial killer (born 1955)

Keith Hunter Jesperson is a Canadian-American serial killer who murdered at least eight women in the United States during the early 1990s. He was known as the "Happy Face Killer" because he drew smiley faces on his many letters to the media and authorities. Many of his victims were sex workers and transients who had no connection to him. Strangulation was Jesperson's preferred method of murdering, the same method he often used to kill animals as a child.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wayne Adam Ford</span> American serial killer on death row

Wayne Adam Ford is an American serial killer. Ford, a former long-haul truck driver, murdered four women from 1997 to 1998. He strangled them and dismembered three of his four victims. He turned himself in with a woman's breast in a bag in his coat pocket.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David and Catherine Birnie</span> Australian couple convicted of four murders

David John Birnie and Catherine Margaret Birnie were an Australian couple from Perth who murdered four women at their home in 1986, also attempting to murder a fifth. These crimes were referred to in the press as the Moorhouse murders, after the Birnies' address at 3 Moorhouse Street in Willagee, a suburb of Perth.

Adrian Havill is an American author and journalist. Havill has written numerous newspaper and magazine articles, as well as eleven books, many of which are available as recorded audio discs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Derrick Todd Lee</span> American serial killer (1968–2016)

Derrick Todd Lee, also known as The Baton Rouge Serial Killer, was an American serial killer who, from 1998 to 2003, terrorized the areas surrounding Baton Rouge and Lafayette, Louisiana, by committing the murders of at least seven women.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Timothy Wilson Spencer</span> American serial killer (1962–1994)

Timothy Wilson Spencer, also known as The Southside Strangler, was an American serial killer who committed three rapes and murders in Richmond, Virginia, and one in Arlington, Virginia, in the fall of 1987. In addition, he is believed to have committed at least one previous murder, in 1984, for which a different man, David Vasquez, was wrongfully convicted. He was known to police as a prolific home burglar.

<i>Crime Investigation Australia</i> Television series

Crime Investigation Australia is an Australian true-crime series that first premiered on pay TV Foxtel's Crime & Investigation Network in August 2005. The series was also rebroadcast on the free to air Nine Network, and made its debut there on 14 August 2007. The original host of the series was Steve Liebmann and is currently on Channel 7 with host Matt Doran.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sean Vincent Gillis</span> American serial killer, rapist, cannibal, stalker and kidnapper

Sean Vincent Gillis is an American serial killer and sex offender who murdered eight women in and around Baton Rouge, Louisiana, from 1994 until his arrest in April 2004. In his initial arrest, he was charged with three counts of first degree murder and three counts of ritualistic acts in the murders of 29-year-old Katherine Hall, 45-year-old Johnnie Mae Williams and 43-year-old Donna Bennett Johnston. Gillis confessed to the murders with little coercion and then informed investigators about five other women whom he had murdered.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Ruth Marie Terry</span> Formerly unidentified murder victim

Ruth Marie Terry, also known as Lady of the Dunes, was a formerly unidentified murder victim found on July 26, 1974, in the Race Point Dunes in Provincetown, Massachusetts, United States. Her body was exhumed in 1980, 2000, and 2013 in efforts to identify her. On October 31, 2022, the FBI field office in Boston announced that Terry had been officially identified. Her husband, Guy Muldavin, was officially named as her killer on August 28, 2023.

Born to Kill? is a British true crime television series, made by Twofour Productions. Each episode is an in-depth look at the childhood, and formative years of serial killers in an attempt to find out whether the individuals were born killers, or created by the environments they found themselves in.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">2014 Colchester murders</span> Serial killings of two people in Colchester, United Kingdom

On 29 March 2014, 33-year-old James Attfield, who had a brain injury, was stabbed to death in Colchester, Essex. Three months later, on 17 June, Nahid Almanea, a 31-year-old Saudi student of the University of Essex, was also stabbed and killed. Teenager James Fairweather was apprehended while planning a third murder in May 2015, and in January 2016 he pleaded responsible for both deaths. In April 2016, he was found guilty of both murders and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum term of 27 years.

Chris Clark is a British amateur crime writer who writes chiefly about serial killers and their supposed links to unsolved crimes. He is a retired police intelligence officer who worked in the King's Lynn area for Norfolk Police, although his career was somewhat unsuccessful and he had three applications to join the new National Criminal Intelligence Service rejected in 1993, with the commanding officers unimpressed by his record and applications. In 2022, his book Yorkshire Ripper: The Secret Murders, which was jointly written with journalist Tim Tate and alleged links between Peter Sutcliffe and unsolved murders, was made into an ITV prime-time documentary series of the same name.

References

  1. ↑ "Hadden Clark Prison Record". Maryland Department of Corrections. Archived from the original on August 28, 2022. Retrieved February 20, 2014.
  2. ↑ Van Olsen, Cora (20 November 2012). "Serial Killer Spotlight: Hadden Clark". Archived from the original on February 10, 2015. Retrieved 9 April 2014.
  3. 1 2 3 Havill, Adrian. "Hadden Clark". Crime Library. Archived from the original on October 23, 2013. Retrieved April 3, 2013.
  4. ↑ Curreri, Frank (March 17, 1999). "Judge views tape of accused killer's interrogation". www.gazette.net. Archived from the original on 2 February 2017. Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  5. ↑ O'Brien, Dennis (September 24, 1998). "Suspect charged in 1986 slaying of 6-year-old". The Baltimore Sun . Retrieved January 25, 2017.
  6. ↑ Shaver, Katherine; Duggan, Paul (24 September 1998). "Murder Charge Is Filed In '86 Case of Missing Girl". www.washingtonpost.com. Retrieved January 25, 2017.
  7. ↑ Jennings, Veronica T. (November 15, 1993). "Murder Suspect's 'Lifestyle Is Getting Even'". The Washington Post . Retrieved May 2, 2013.
  8. ↑ Haworth, Jessica (November 28, 2016). "Cannibal killer and his sick brother who killed girl, 6, and drank her blood". Daily Mirror . Retrieved January 25, 2017.
  9. ↑ "Search turns to Clark's past". AmeriCast.Com. November 14, 1992. Retrieved January 25, 2017. Bradfield Clark pleaded guilty in June 1985 to one count of second-degree murder and one count of mutilation of human remains in the July 23, 1984
  10. ↑ West, Dan; Jack, Pippa (June 9, 2011). "Bones found are not human remains". Block Island Times. Retrieved 25 January 2017.
  11. 1 2 3 Bovsun, Maria (November 26, 2016). "Jailed 'Cross Dressing Cannibal Serial Killer' tops brother's violent history, claims he slayed at least 12 women". The New York Daily News . Retrieved May 23, 2022.
  12. ↑ Mike Aamodt. "Hadden Clark – Radford University" (PDF). Retrieved April 6, 2024.
  13. 1 2 3 "Crime Stories: Dark Secrets: Hadden Clark". imdb.com. 2002. Retrieved October 29, 2017.
  14. 1 2 3 Limited, GipsyMedia. "Dark Secrets - Hadden Clark - Crime Stories". digiguide.tv. Retrieved October 29, 2017.{{cite web}}: |last1= has generic name (help)
  15. ↑ "Lady in the Dunes - COLD CASE". Archived from the original on March 4, 2016. Retrieved March 12, 2014.
  16. ↑ "Guy Muldavin". AncientFaces. 1960. Retrieved 2022-11-03.
  17. ↑ "Born Evil: The Serial Killer and the Savior".
  18. ↑ Havill, Adrian (2001). Born Evil . New York City: St. Martin's Paperbacks. ISBN   9780312978907 . Retrieved October 29, 2017.
  19. ↑ "Book Titles by Adrian Havill". crimelibrary.com. Archived from the original on February 20, 2007. Retrieved October 29, 2017.
  20. ↑ Robert Keller (March 24, 2013). "Serial Killers: Hadden Clark". robertkellerauthor.com. Amazon Digital Services LLC. Retrieved October 29, 2017.
  21. ↑ Keller, Robert (March 24, 2013). True Crime: American Monsters Vol. 3: 12 Horrific American Serial Killers. Amazon Digital Services LLC. ASIN   B00C11HCH0 . Retrieved October 29, 2017. Hadden Clark: a cross-dressing cannibal who was convicted of two murders, but had a trophy stash that suggested many more
  22. ↑ "Born To Kill - Channel 5". Channel 5. Channel 5 Broadcasting Ltd. August 24, 2016. Retrieved October 29, 2017. The Cross Dressing Cannibal S3 E6 : Profile of American serial killer Hadden Clark.
  23. ↑ "Born to Kill: The Cross-Dressing Cannibal". TVGuide.com. CBS Interactive Inc. Retrieved October 29, 2017. A cross-dresser is accused of two murders in Maryland.
  24. ↑ "Evil, I: Dressed to Kill". investigation.discovery.com. Discovery Communications, LLC. Archived from the original on August 2, 2012. Retrieved October 29, 2017. When 23-year-old Laura Houghteling goes missing police suspect the family gardener, an eccentric man with a history of cross-dressing.
  25. ↑ "Evil, I: Dressed to Kill". TVGuide.com. CBS Interactive Inc. August 3, 2012. Retrieved October 29, 2017.
  26. ↑ "Mugshots: Portrait of a Serial Killer: Hadden Clark". imdb.com. Court TV. June 1, 2002. Retrieved October 29, 2017.
  27. ↑ "The Investigators". TVGuide.com. Retrieved October 29, 2017.
  28. ↑ "The Investigators (US) Season 3 Episode 17 - Hadden Clark: Dark Secrets - Watch Series". ewatchseries.ac. Retrieved October 29, 2017.
  29. ↑ "The Investigators: Dark Secrets". TV.com. CBS Interactive Inc. September 9, 2002. Archived from the original on October 29, 2017. Retrieved October 29, 2017.
  30. ↑ "Forensic Files - Season 03 (1998)". crimedocumentary.com. Retrieved October 29, 2017.
  31. ↑ "Born Evil: The Serial Killer and the Savior (TV Series 2024– )". IMDb. Retrieved September 16, 2024.
  32. ↑ Episode 398 Hadden Clark Part I- Mommy's Basement Bakery Archived 2020-07-26 at the Wayback Machine , lpotl.libsyn.com; accessed July 26, 2020.
  33. ↑ Hadden Clark Part II- Women's Panties Archived 2020-07-26 at the Wayback Machine , lpotl.libsyn.com; accessed July 26, 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.