The After Show: There Is a Monster in Me

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Based on unit sales data. Hi there, 2020 viewers and listeners.
I'm Deborah Roberts here with this episode of 2020, The After Show. And today we are talking about a program out of Texas led by ABC News contributor Chris Connolly, one of my buddies.
This episode was called There is a Monster in Me and it investigates the murder of Susan Woods. Her tightly knit community was quick to place the blame on Michael Woods, who was her estranged husband.
But when fingerprints at the scene didn't match Woods, the case came to a halt. There was still some suspicion, but 20 years later, a different detective took a fresh look at the evidence and was able to find a match for those fingerprints.
Michael Woods was cleared, and a jury ultimately convicted another man by the name of Scott Hatley, a local man with a violent history. You learned all about those twists and turns during the episode.
Let's dive into this story with Chris, who knows all the details. And Chris, I got to tell you, you and I get to talk about a lot of different things, but it's rare we get a chance to talk about our 2020 stories.
Welcome. That's true.
Thank you very much. It's an honor and a privilege to work with the amazing team that there is at 2020 on these stories.
As you know, they're incredible. And this was a very powerful tale to be involved with as well.
Yeah, well, you're such a great storyteller, Chris. And a lot of our listeners will know you from, you know, from all kinds of stories that you've told.
And they see you on Good Morning America a lot. I mean, you've covered icons and newsmakers, entertainment, and of course, you know, tragedy when it comes to these kinds of stories, which are consistent themes for us at 2020.
But telling stories is something that you just excel at. And this was no exception.
I mean, you're kind of a masterclass researcher and writer. I'm just laying it on thick here, man.
What was it about this one that really attracted you, the Susan Woods murder case? Well, you know, our team had done an amazing job researching it and finding the story in the first place. And then Brian Burrow had written this remarkable story for Texas Monthly about this murder.
And we were lucky to get him on our team as well. And he was an amazing guide and Sherpa.
I'm an old magazine journalist journalist and he was you know one of the best from the days that I was at Premier magazine in the 1990s so getting to talk to him about this was also pretty special but this is a powerful story because this was a man that an entire town had decided had done something. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that Michael Woods had murdered his estranged wife, Susan.
And everybody was just waiting for the law enforcement to catch up and arrest him and him to be convicted. And they could not ever make the case.
And he insisted on his innocence. And so for the story to turn in just the way you described is a remarkable thing.
And a look at kind of what happens or can happen in a small town where everybody assumes one thing and something very different happens. So that was a powerful undercurrent to this story as well.
Well, also, too, because there was so much reason there to believe that he could have been responsible, right? I mean, there was a tape recording. There were angry, nasty notes that he had left her.
And so, of course, people sort of thought, and you and I cover these stories, they often look at the spouse. And you had a chance to talk to Michael Woods about the anguish that he felt and the fact that people looked at him.
Talk about that, if you would, because he had actually left a trail of anger and vitriol, even though his fingerprints didn't match. Yeah, so much of what you're saying is spot on.
And I think that was always the challenge. Michael Woods had harbored life under this penumbra of suspicion for decades.
He had not murdered Susan Woods. He had not been a great husband at a number of key moments.
And certainly the last acts of his time as her husband cast him under great suspicion. He had left in the middle of the night, essentially.
He had taken their car. He had taken her fur coat.
He had left cassette tape full of vitriol against her. He left notes, as you saw, that were found all over the house by Susan for months later, just excoriating her.
So these were not great moments for Michael Woods, and we had to ask him about those. Why was he so angry? Why was he saying these things about this woman that he loved? And as a result, of course, he found himself very much under suspicion.
But Michael Woods had been under suspicion in Stephenville from the moment he'd set foot in Stephenville. And that was a story we needed to tell also.
Yeah. You know, what was interesting, Chris, is that you kind of saw a different side of this guy.
You know, we hear about these angry notes and the way he had conducted himself, but then he's playing the guitar. I mean, you know, only Chris Connelly could sort of like get that kind of, you know, other side of a story to us.
But tell us a little bit about that and about meeting him and how that actually came to be. I'm not going to lie, Deborah.
We did have a guitar for him to play. And I was kind of hoping there was a second guitar so that I could play along with him.
And he could because he had worked with his brother in Indianapolis as the Hamilton Brothers. And I looked up their advertisements from back in the 90s in Indianapolis papers when they were performing in bars.
And I think it was two brothers, two guitars and one commitment to the soft rock hits of the 1970s. Well, I know the soft rock hits of the 1970s.
So while we were trying to get, you know, Michael sort of comfortable and situated, the two of us actually wound up singing together. Singing together.
Yeah. By Zager and Evans, a one hit wonder called In the Year 2525, which is this sort of dystopic futuristic single that inexplicably went to number one.
So you know how we do just about anything to get our subjects comfortable with us, Deborah? Yeah. I'm not saying my singing voice helped at all, but that's kind of how we broke the ice with Michael Wood.
That's interesting. And that is a big part of what we have to do when we're doing these stories.
Oftentimes we get there and they're very nervous and we have to break the ice. I can't say that I've ever played a guitar.
I don't play guitar or sing with anybody. Oh, yeah.
I don't advise it. It just seemed to be the method at hand.
But you're right, he was traumatized, I think, just by coming back to town. It was revisiting a lot of tough things that had happened to him.
As our story indicated, from the moment he was there, he was rock and roll in a town of country music. He was long hair in a town of crew cuts.
And the stigma that was placed on him had never sort of gone away. People saw him as a, you know, we would call later a slacker, a guy who like would lie out outside his house and suntan and play the guitar while his wife was working in the sandpaper factory.
And so he was excoriated for being this, you know, this layabout, I guess, by people in town. But he saw himself as a rebel.
He saw himself as a guy who, if he got the opportunity, could really make a go of it in music somehow. And, you know, he heard and saw the way that the town reacted to him.
He pushed back on a number of occasions. So to come back after all these years, I think, was the real thing for him.
More than 40 years after he first came to town, Michael Woods returned to Stephenville for 2020. It was a drastic switch.
Anytime I ran into somebody new, they were like, well, you're kind of odd. I think people very much looked at me like an outsider because I didn't sound the same.
I didn't look the same. I certainly didn't act the same.
What made him stand out in this town? What didn't? Everything about Michael Woods not only stood out in Stephenville, he was the anti-Stevenville. But more than anything, Michael had an attitude.
I was a child of the 60s, and I wasn't about to cut my hair just to get along with a bunch of stuffed shirts. People would see you as you remember sort of outside sunning and they thought he doesn't want to work.
What was the story? Well I wanted to work but I couldn't find places that would hire me or keep me and I had a bit of an attitude. What does that feel like to come back to a place where you can just sense the hostility and the rejection? I felt trapped.
No way out. And then he kind of unburdened himself.
But like you say, in addition to talking about what his own emotional journey was with Susan and afterwards, he had to be held to account a little bit for those notes and those messages and the conflicts he'd had with his wife. Yeah, which you did so brilliantly.
Well, we're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to share more behind the scenes and how Chris and the team brought all kinds of creative touches to this episode.
So stay with us. Hello, Nigel here.
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Tax Extra. I'm back now with ABC News contributor Chris Connolly.
We love giving you a peek behind the scenes of how we put these stories together. And, you know, Chris, you had to go to Stephenville, Texas to report this story.
And, you know, I'm from small town Georgia. I mean, you're a California guy or you're an East Coast guy? I grew up at 36 in Lexington in Manhattan.
I thought so. You're a New Yorker.
But going to these small towns sometimes can pose a little bit of a challenge trying to get in and get people to trust us and so forth. And tell us a little bit about Stephenville, Texas.
Well, first thing, you know, as I mentioned, I grew up in Manhattan. And so even though I moved out to California in 1990, I never got a driver's license.
So for like 30 plus years out here, I did not have a driver's license. And during the pandemic, my wife taught me how to drive and I got a driver's license.
You're kidding. So this was my first chance.
I've done a lot of stories in Texas. This is my first chance to be in Texas behind the wheel.
And I was thrilled for the opportunity to go to a small town in Texas as a guy doing what everybody else does, driving. It's like an hour and change outside DFW, I think, and so I savored every moment.
I stopped next to the world's biggest rocking chair, took a picture, all the rest of it. Small town Texas has always fascinated me, and so Stephenville was a great experience.
It's a very different town now than it was during the time of our story, because there's been a big university that's really expanded. And so the town is much smaller and much more of a small town during the period of time that we were focusing on.
which is the late 1980s. You and the team, you know, you had to immerse yourself in this town to tell this story of what happened to Susan Woods.

The episode was called There Is a Monster in Me,

and you all were digging deep to find out about the mystery of the case of the murder of this woman. And there was another woman who eventually became intertwined with Susan Woods' story, Shannon Myers Barriento's survival story.
It was deeply emotional. A woman who was very resilient and smart and really brave to talk about her assault.
And her story figured prominently here. Tell us about meeting her and obviously being sensitive enough to share her story after, you know, years of her dealing with the trauma.
Everyone would agree that Shannon is this story's hero. Shannon is this story's hero for telling her story and for never backing down from her story.
She endured a horrific assault at the hands of the man who would later be found guilty of killing Susan Woods. But Shannon's willingness to come forward, you know, in the face of rejection, but to tell her story was enormously powerful, I think, for her and for everybody who listened to it.
And it played a key role in finding the killer. So it was, you know, as you know, when you talk to heroes like Shannon, you really want to honor their story.
You want to make sure that you're listening as they tell you their story. You know, it's you can have questions in your lap or questions in your head, but the most important thing is to be listening, I think, to the story that somebody's telling you.
Yeah, and she definitely had a very difficult story to share. Tell us about her connection to Scott Hatley, because she was pivotal in solving this case.
He had attacked her. He said something to her about how he had killed before.
And you spoke with Lieutenant Don Miller about making the connections between her case and Susan's way back in the 80s. Tell us about that connection and that aha moment that brought these two cases together.
Yeah, Shannon had been brutally attacked by Scott Hatley at a campsite just off, you know, some sort of highway road there. And so she took us back to the site where these terrible things had happened.
And the things she tried to do while she was being attacked that would help people someday identify her or if in case she did not survive or identify her attacker. And so after this horrific night, doing whatever she needed to do just to stay alive, she went to the police, you know, and she she told her full story she went to the hospital and then there was no indictment pressed against scott hatley and so it was a horrifying moment for her but what's fascinating is in the long term her willingness to go to police despite scott hatley's you know vows i'll get you if you go to police he was so sure he would get into trouble that he like went off his head a little bit and drove to las vegas and got into trouble and he got arrested in las vegas when he got arrested in las vegas they took his fingerprints if it hadn't been for the fact that her going to cops had essentially driven scott hatley out of town he would never have gotten arrested they would gotten his fingerprints, and they would not have been able to match those fingerprints years and years later with the fingerprints at the site of Susan Wood's murder.
Shannon, like, drives the thing that gets Scott Hatley nailed for the murder of Susan Wood. So years later, authorities finally crack this case, DNA.
And we report so often about how DNA made such a significant difference in stories. How did police finally, you know, the fingerprints are one thing.
What about DNA? As I recall, fingerprints really sealed it. Like, you know, there were these fingerprints that, you know, that Don Miller knew were on the bathtub where Susan Woods had died.
This is obviously the fingerprints of the killer. And so when they matched with Scott Hatley, that mattered a lot.
There are also a number of cigarette butts, I think, that were left at the scene that were smoked by the killer, just as Scott Hatley had smoked one cigarette after the other following, during his assault of Shannon. And so matching those, I think, as well was significant.
Ultimately, the outcome, Scott Hatley was arrested in 2006 for Susan Woods' murder. And while behind bars, he took a plea deal.
He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. He refused to say why he killed her.
There was never really any clarification there. We learned, though, later that he died.
And so this case just, you know, in a way just sort of had this ending that probably nobody would have expected. But when Shannon learned of Hatley's death, she was obviously relieved.
I mean, after all these years, but the man who was never convicted in her case, but had died, she felt a certain amount of relief. I think a lot of things had happened with Shannon.
You know, she was hoping, I think, for a trial in the case of Susan Woods.

I think she was ready to get some sort of uh you know justice in that even though it wasn't about her case so when at the urgings i think of susan wood's parents the case was settled and hatley went to prison and took a plea as you said i don't know if it was that easy for for for Shannon. And then that Hadley was later released from prison.
And in a strange way, that was not the end of Scott Hadley's story, because he wound up speaking from the grave, more or less, and telling the most chilling story imaginable. Yeah.
Yeah. You talked about that in the piece, kind of a rare window into a killer's mind, more than 260 pages of writings that were found in a trailer and where police believe that he died.
And as you said earlier, you spoke with the editor at large for Texas Monthly, and he had written about these particular writings. And it just all led to so many twists and turns in this story, moments in those pages that even shocked him, right? I mean, the writings were really something else.
It was just a window into the twisted mind of someone who could do these awful things, hiding in plain sight, Deborah, in this small town, like just Beaver Cleaver, just the kid in town. No one ever suspected him.
He was even in groups, as we disclosed during the show, he was in groups of friends that were talking about who might have killed Susan Woods. You know, he was part of those conversations and he was the guy who did it.
So Scott Hatley is convicted of the murder of Susan Woods and goes to prison, but he's paroled eventually for that murder and is released and is back among society. For all of Joseph Scott Hatley's evil deeds, he only spent 11 years in prison.
When I found out he was being released for killing my best friend. We were angry.
And I'm thinking, gosh, drug dealers get more prison time than that. But Lieutenant Miller had told us that the Texas prison system was overcrowded.
He moved into a trailer near his daughter outside of Abilene, Texas. He was diagnosed with cancer, and in December of 2021, his landlord found him on the floor of his trailer dead.
There is a God. Thank you, Lord Jesus.
Unknown to all, in that trailer on the outskirts of the woods where he'd spent his final days, there were answers to the mystery of his depravity just waiting to be found. So not long after Hatley was found dead, Detective Don Miller gets this call.
Somebody had just bought the trailer where Hatley died.

And while cleaning it out, had found all sorts of disturbing stuff that really creeped him out. Pages and pages of a handwritten account of a life of crime and murder.
He shares those surprising findings with writer Brian Burrow. The killer, in his own words, I did not cry.
I did not grieve. I was, without any doubt, evil to my entire core.
And then he finishes, I wish with all my heart that I could tell you I've mourned for what I'd done, but that would be a lie. It was clear that he had, like, been, you know, bent in this direction literally from, you know, his teen years.
his teen years. He had been a figure of kind of constant depravity and these dark thoughts right from the beginning.
You know, it was fascinating. So for people like Brian Burrow and myself and our team, this was kind of a roadmap into the mind of a killer.
Why something like this happens and what other things might have taken place. You asked Donnie Miller, the officer who was responsible for the conviction of Scott Hadley.
So what did you think when you read all those things that Scott Hadley had written? I didn't read that garbage. I didn't want to read one word of that garbage, I think is what he said.
So he was focused on the Scott Hadley that he put in prison. The rest of us are left to be horrified by the motives and the methods of this man who went undetected for decades in this small town.
Yeah, yeah. And the title of our program, There's a Monster in Me, was actually taken from those writings.
Chris, it was just fascinating. Your reporting is always just mesmerizing.
You have a way of sort of bringing it all home, all the turns in this case, and terrific job on it. Thanks so much for being with us and giving us a little insight into how you put it together.
Thank you, Deborah. It's great to be able to talk about our wonderful work together, isn't it? Absolutely.
Absolutely. The 2020 After Show is produced by Amira Williams and Sasha Oslanian with Joseph Rhee, Chris Connolly, Karen Shipman, Amanda Carr, Brian Mazurski, and Alex Berenfeld of 2020.

Theme music by Evan Viola.

Janice Johnston is the executive producer of 2020.

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Michelle Margulis is the operations director.

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