Dressed To Kill

He's still working on me.

An unemployed gardener with a history of mental illness was a vital witness in the case of a missing six-year-old girl.

He's still working on me.

Between songs, he provided details about events which took place more than a decade earlier.

Investigators weren't sure the man could be trusted and left it up to forensic science to determine the truth.

Memorial Day weekend, 1986.

In Silver Spring, Maryland, it was so hot, six-year-old Michelle Dore asked her father if she could play in the small pool in their backyard.

She was showing me how she could blow bubbles in the water and that sort of thing.

Michelle was spending the weekend with her father.

Her parents were going through a bitter divorce, and custody arrangements for Michelle, their only child, were still being worked out.

Michelle's mother, Dee Dee, wanted full custody of her daughter.

I got an exparte order saying that I was a threat to Michelle and a threat to her, and I was physically abusive, and she needed court-ordered custody right then.

But those problems were put aside for what Carl believed would be a pleasant weekend with his daughter.

After Carl made lunch, he went back outside to check on Michelle, but she wasn't there.

So he walked to his neighbor's home, the Clark family, to see if Michelle was there visiting her friend Elizabeth, but they hadn't seen her.

I couldn't believe what Jeff was saying.

I just didn't register at first.

And at that point, I realized that, you know, she's never gone any further than the Clark House.

Something's wrong.

Carl Dorr immediately contacted police.

She was not a little girl who would roam off indiscriminately.

She was not a little girl who would roam off and wander away and take up with strangers.

I mean, the Clark House was 50 feet away.

So I

never had to worry about her crossing the street.

or going, wandering off.

If I wanted to find her, I knew where to find her.

When police contacted Michelle's mother, Dee Dee, she told them she knew what had happened to Michelle.

She point-blank told them that I did it.

I did something with Michelle.

Michelle's mother told the police he had threatened to harm his own daughter.

He had threatened in the heat of anger, in the heat of a very horrible divorce, to take the daughter, take Michelle away so that her mother couldn't have her anymore.

You have to take it in the context that she's a mother who is in this very

nasty divorce, separation, custody battle, and also somebody who her daughter has just disappeared.

So you have to take it in that context.

Carl Dorr was outraged by his ex-wife's accusation and demanded to be given a polygraph test.

He failed.

He's trying to tell me that I didn't pass the polygraph test.

That's an impossibility.

I didn't have anything to do with Michelle disappearing.

Don't tell me.

I failed the polygraph test.

That didn't happen.

Carl Dorr was now the prime suspect.

And soon he would tell police of the role he'd played in his daughter's disappearance.

My very last words to her were, I love you.

And not a lot of parents ever get to say that, you know.

In 2010, Aubrey Sacco vanished while hiking in the Himalayas.

Now, after 15 years of searching, her parents share what they've uncovered in a three-episode special of Status Untraced.

Dads are supposed to find their daughters when they're in trouble.

Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In the days after Michelle Dorr's disappearance, missing posters were placed throughout the area.

But there was no sign of the little six-year-old girl.

Investigators were convinced her father, Carl, had either kidnapped or killed her.

Carl Dorr had failed the polygraph test, and the detective on the case was pressuring him to confess.

Kept insisting, you know, you've done something.

I know you've done something with Michelle, and we're going to find her body.

And when we find her body, I'm coming to get you.

is what he told me point blank, finger in the face, you know, in my face, screaming, yelling.

You know, you need to confess.

Just a few days later, Carl Dorr confessed.

On three different occasions, he told the police he had killed his daughter and told the police where they could go and find her body.

And one of them was underneath the,

I guess, the crawl space of his house.

Another was in his father's own grave in a cemetery in D.C.

Police checked the crawl space of the home and found nothing.

They also checked the local cemetery where his father was buried, but nothing was found.

He felt a lot of pressure, and the police put a lot of pressure on him.

And as a result of that pressure and the guilt and the shame that he felt about his daughter's disappearance, he cracked.

There's no doubt about that.

He cracked.

I couldn't deal with what they were telling me that we're not going to find Michelle alive.

I just was trying to go into some sort of denial about that.

He then checked himself into a local hospital.

He thought the television was talking to him and that he had the power to find Michelle and bring her back to life.

I was starting to lose it.

I mean, in a psychiatric sense.

I mean, I was having a nervous breakdown.

I was hallucinating.

I was seeing things that weren't there.

I was hearing people that weren't there.

After three days of much needed rest and sedation, Carl was released from the hospital and told the press that he had never confessed.

He said his statements were twisted into an admission of guilt.

To prove his point, he asked to take a second polygraph examination.

This time, he passed.

Investigators now began to wonder, was it possible that someone else had taken Michelle Dore?

In my experience, in a case where somebody confesses or where the police have the wrong suspect, they seem to

try to make all the facts fit around that person.

So they're so busy doing that, and they have the tunnel vision that we have the right suspect, this is who it is, that they forget about looking at any other options.

Months went by and then years with no sign of Michelle.

The investigation came to a dead end.

In the minds of police, Carl Dorr remained remained a suspect, but they had no evidence to charge him.

Then, six years later, there was a new development.

10 days after 24-year-old Laura Hoetling disappeared from her Bethesda home, her family tells reporters they believe they know what happened to her.

In what seemed to be an unrelated case, a Harvard graduate, Laura Hoteling, was reported missing.

She lived a few miles away from Michelle and Carl Dorr.

Laura Hoteling had been stabbed to death in her bedroom while asleep.

Her killer left behind few clues.

He had done an unusually thorough job of cleaning up the crime scene.

Normally, he would have found blood splatter elsewhere in the room or some indications of a fight or

something,

but that area, that bedroom, the crime scene itself had been cleaned up and cleaned up very good.

But he made one mistake.

In Laura Hoteling's hairbrush was one foreign hair.

It wasn't human, it was from a wig.

The Hoteling's gardener, 30-year-old Haddon Clark, was a known cross-dresser.

He had mental problems.

We also discovered that he was a cross-dresser.

He would dress in women's clothing.

The wig hair in Laura Hoteling's hairbrush matched the wig found in Haddon Clark's possession.

Investigators believe that after killing Laura Hoteling, Haddon Clark dressed in women's clothing, put on the wig, and left the scene of the crime in broad daylight without creating any suspicion.

Hadden Clark was convicted of Laura Hoteling's murder.

Then, police made a startling discovery.

The police say to to themselves, hey, wait, we've heard this name before.

This was a guy that we were looking at who lived in the house where Michelle Dore was last supposed to have been seen or have gone.

And so at that point, they started really pressing Haddon on the Michelle Dore case and looking at him as a very serious suspect.

Hadden Clark lived just two houses away from Michelle Dore at the time of her disappearance.

His niece, Elizabeth, was Michelle's playmate.

When Michelle first disappeared, Hadden Clark was questioned about his whereabouts that day.

And something unusual happened during his interrogation that should have aroused police suspicions.

Hadden Clark confessed to the murder of 23-year-old Laura Hoteling, but he denied having anything to do with the disappearance of Michelle Dorr.

But on the day Michelle disappeared, police discovered that Clark was alone in his brother's home just two doors away from Michelle's home.

He was packing his things since his brother had kicked him out because of what he called inappropriate behavior with the children.

What happened that day back in 1986 was that Haddon was very angry.

His brother, his brother's wife, and his children had left the home in order to give Haddon an opportunity to get his things and get out.

and they had given him a deadline to get out.

That same day, police questioned Haddon Clark and asked him if he knew anything about Michelle's disappearance.

He was answering questions and was cooperative.

When the nature of the interview changed and Michelle Dorr's name was mentioned, Haddon's entire demeanor changed.

He began to shake violently.

He began to rock back and forth in his chair.

He actually became physically sick and had to leave the room at the mere mention of Michelle's name.

Although police knew his behavior was unusual, it was discounted once Carl Dorr allegedly confessed.

There was no evidence to suggest that Haddon Clark had killed Michelle Dorr other than his own quirky, bizarre behavior, which could be attributed to a number of things, one of which being his own mental illness.

So that's why the police stepped away from Haddon Clark and focused on Carl Dorr for months and years after Michelle's disappearance.

How can you not suspect this guy if you even spend an afternoon with him?

You know, you don't have to go to Kmart to figure out he's crazy.

Once in prison for Laura Hoteling's murder, Clark refused to answer questions about Michelle Dorr.

I'm not talking about nothing, because my lawyer told me not to.

I told you, honestly,

I answered some of your questions, whatever you want to ask,

but some questions I'm not going to answer.

This is Jim Beckett.

At one time, he was incarcerated with Haddon Clark in the same prison cell block.

He had more luck getting Haddon to talk about his crimes than the police.

I just wanted to find out the truth of it, so I got in real close to him, and I sort of thought it was a wind of opportunity

to find out the truth through him.

Rather than intimidating him, I became a good friend.

One day, while Beckett and Clark were in the prison cafeteria, Beckett asked Haddon about Michelle Dorr.

He was saying she was such a lovely young girl and all, and I could see it was bothering him.

I looked at him and I said, Haddon, I said, why did you do it?

And when I said it like that, he worded it out.

He says, I didn't mean to do it.

You know, he didn't repeat it, but he says, I didn't mean to do it.

And it was like he knew what was being said.

And he knew he had just confessed to me that he had killed her.

Beckett then told police that Clark confessed to killing Michelle Dore in a small bedroom in his brother's home.

But police had no physical or forensic evidence to charge Clark.

But then they remembered how expertly Clark cleaned the crime scene after Laura Hoteling's murder.

The police put two and two together and realized that he had been able to clean, meticulously clean, a crime scene where there was a lot of bloodshed.

He was able to remove evidence from a crime scene to the point where family members had no idea that a murder had taken place there.

It had been 10 years since Michelle's disappearance, and Haddon Clark's brother had sold the home, and a number of families had occupied it since.

Police wondered whether any forensic evidence remained.

Hadden Clark's prison roommate told police that Clark admitted killing Michelle Dore in a bedroom in his brother's home.

But 10 years had passed, and the home had been owned by a number of families since.

The bedroom was only 7 by 10 feet.

It had no rugs or carpet, but it did have the original oak wood floor.

Unfortunately, it had been sanded and refinished with polyurethane at least once, possibly more, which might have destroyed any evidence that existed.

To find out, police used luminol, a chemical which glows when it comes into contact with the iron component in blood.

After spraying the floor, investigators noticed a faint glow along the seams of the oak paneling.

What actually appeared was long luminescence lines along the slats of the floorboards, not on the surface of the floor, but deeply embedded in the actual slats themselves.

The entire floor was taken apart for further tests.

Investigators wanted to know if the blood between the floorboards was human, and if it was, whose blood was it?

Forensic scientist Susan Ballou used Q-tips to swab the side of each each seam of every floorboard.

The Q-tips were rinsed with phenolphthalein, then with hydrogen peroxide.

Only two tiny areas turned purple, a positive presumptive test for blood.

Unfortunately, it wasn't a large enough sample for DNA testing.

So scientists decided to try a mitochondrial DNA test.

Mitochondria exists outside of the cell's nucleus and are passed on genetically from a mother to her children.

It's not as precise as nuclear DNA testing, but it still can be used for identification.

The mitochondrial DNA from blood between the floorboards matched the mitochondrial DNA profile of Michelle's mother.

In other words, somebody from their family

left blood at that location.

Since Michelle had been inside the home and not her mother, the blood was believed to be Michelle's.

Prosecutors believe that after Carl Dore went inside to make lunch, Michelle left the pool to look for her friend Elizabeth.

In a freak, tragic coincidence, when Michelle knocked on Elizabeth's door, no one was home except Haddon, who was packing his things since his brother had ordered him to move out.

We believe that he saw Michelle.

He saw her as an opportunity to vent his rage.

We also believe that he saw it as an opportunity to get revenge on his brother.

Police believe Hatton killed Michelle in the upstairs bedroom,

then cleaned the blood from the floor.

He probably removed Michelle's body in one of the duffel bags neighbors saw him carrying when moving out later that day.

I don't believe he has an ounce of remorse for what he's done to Michelle.

And

he doesn't deserve, he doesn't even deserve to live as far as I'm concerned.

Fortunately, the sanding, polyurethane, and 10 years' worth of detergents hadn't destroyed the mitochondrial DNA evidence.

Haden Clark was convicted of Michelle Dorr's murder and was sentenced to a second life term in prison.

Shortly after his conviction, Haddon Clark directed police to the shallow grave where he had buried Michelle's body.

It was just 12 miles from her home.

I believe when Haddon asked the police, or told the police that he would show them where Michelle Dore's body was, he asked to be able to dress as a woman.

The police went and got him women's clothes and a wig.

Hadden Clark now claims his female persona, whom he refers to as Kristen Bluefin, is the real killer.

He dresses as this woman, he writes letters as this woman, he speaks as this woman, and it is the woman that commits the crimes.

Psychologists say that Clark, here apparently unaware of being videotaped before his police interrogation, is a paranoid schizophrenic who cannot control his compulsion to kill.

Everyone who knows him is convinced he would kill again if given the chance.

He's intelligent.

I think he was able to get away with crimes for a long time.

And I think that

he knows what he's doing.

He's good at his job.

He is a definite skilled criminal in making sure that the crime scene is cleaned up.

All little loose ends are tied up.

However, there's always been some small bit of evidence that we have found to still pinpoint that crime to Hatton Clark.