Editor’s note: In March 1994, Washingtonian published “What Happened to Laura,” a deep dive into the disappearance of Laura Houghteling, a young woman who grew up in Bethesda and was murdered by serial killer Hadden Clark. Clark’s troubled life and heinous crimes—including Houghteling’s killing—are the subject of “Born Evil: The Serial Killer and the Savior,” a five-part docuseries that premiers September 2 on ID and also is available to stream on Max.
Laura Houghteling failed to show up for work at 9 AM on Monday morning, October 19, 1992. By 11 o’clock, Diana Holman, the president of Holman Communications, a DC public-relations firm that had hired Laura a month earlier, was worried. It was out of character for Laura to be late. Mrs. Holman telephoned her daughter, Hilary, to ask if she had any idea where Laura was. Perhaps, she suggested, the two young women—friends at the National Cathedral School, from which both had graduated in 1987—had been out partying on Sunday night? “Not this time, Mom,” Hilary said.
Another hour went by. Diana Holman was afraid that Laura was ill, so Hilary left her job and drove to Penny Houghteling’s house. Laura’s car was parked outside. Hilary peered inside: nothing unusual. Penny’s car was not there—Hilary knew that on Saturday she had driven out of town for a week. A newspaper was on the lawn. The mailbox next to the front door was full.
Hilary rang the doorbell and knocked. No answer. She walked around the split-level house, tried the sliding glass door that led to the garden, found it open, and went in. The house was still. She went through the dining room and living room, looking for Laura’s black leather Coach briefcase. Then she walked up a few stairs and entered Laura’s bedroom.
The bed wasn’t made as neatly as Laura usually made it—the comforter hadn’t been pulled up properly—but otherwise the room appeared tidy. Maybe Laura had been in a hurry: Penny Houghteling usually drove her daughter to the Metro, but during her absence Laura had planned to walk to the Grosvenor Metro station, a mile away.
Hilary looked in Penny’s bedroom, in the room that had been Laura’s older brother Warren’s, and in the two bathrooms on the upper level, calling Laura’s name. She walked downstairs to the basement—where Penny, a psychotherapist, had her office—and played the answering-machine tape. There was a message for Laura from a college roommate and the many messages Hilary had left during the hour she had been trying to reach her.
After a while, Hilary locked the sliding door from the inside and walked out the front door. From her job she called Warren Houghteling’s home—he is a teacher at Thornton Friends School in Silver Spring, and she didn’t want to get him out of the classroom. She left a message on his answering machine.
Warren Houghteling reached his house around 5 PM. At 6 PM he telephoned our younger daughter, Catherine, at her apartment in Newton, Massachusetts. Catherine, a first-year student at Boston College Law School, was Laura’s closest friend. Warren thought she might have heard from Laura on Monday. She hadn’t.
Catherine had called Laura on Sunday afternoon, and they had chatted for almost an hour. Warren and his housemate, Rob, had been there at the time, watching a football game. Like Catherine, Warren and Rob judged Laura to be in good spirits.
Warren next called a couple of Laura’s other friends and drove to his mother’s house with Rob. He noticed that the fluorescent light over the kitchen sink was off. Penny Houghteling kept the light on 24 hours a day: It served as a night-light and as a deterrent to burglars. Warren searched the house—even the basement crawl space—and saw nothing else out of the ordinary. Fearing something had happened to Laura on her way to the Metro, he and Rob took flashlights and set off on foot for the Grosvenor station.
From Penny’s house, on the corner of Julliard Drive and Ashburton Lane, they walked along Ashburton to Lone Oak Drive in the direction of Old Georgetown Road. As they approached North Bethesda United Methodist Church, they saw a white Nissan pickup truck heading toward them. Warren recognized it as belonging to Hadden Clark, who did gardening for his mother. Clark slowed down and pulled over. Just as Warren was reaching to open the door—he wanted to ask Hadden if he had seen Laura on Monday—Clark sped off, made a U-turn that brought him back past the young men, and turned onto Old Georgetown Road.
Warren thought that perhaps Hadden hadn’t recognized him in the dark, although it is hard not to recognize Warren, who is 6-foot-7 and very thin. He and Rob continued following the route Laura was apt to have taken to the Metro. They didn’t spot Laura’s briefcase or any other trace of her on their hour-and-a-half walk to and from the station.
Back at the Houghteling house, Warren telephoned more of Laura’s relatives and friends—none had heard from her on Monday. The last person to have spoken to Laura around 10:30 on Sunday night, was a colleague at work. Laura’s final words to her were: “See you in the morning.”
After midnight, Warren telephoned the Bethesda police. Officer David Shupp took the call and drove over. He inspected the premises, including the garden shed in the backyard, but saw nothing alarming. Shupp wrote down a description of Laura—she was 23 years old, 6 feet tall, weighed 145 pounds, had shoulder-length blonde hair, brown eyes, and was in excellent physical and mental condition—and offered Warren reassurance: Well over 90 percent of people reported missing show up soon, unharmed.
Warren telephoned Penny from work the next morning. She was in North Carolina at a Journey Into Wholeness conference, studying Jungian psychology and Christian spirituality. She said she would fly home at once.
On Tuesday Evening, October 20, 1992, Detective Ed Golian met with some of Laura’s friends at the Houghteling house. Laura, he was told, had gone with office acquaintances to the Gold Cup races in Virginia on Saturday afternoon. That night, she had gone out with a young man she was dating casually. Most of Sunday she had spent lazily at home.
Warren, who had fetched Penny at National Airport, told Golian about Hadden Clark’s failure to stop his truck. When Golian expressed interest in Clark, Warren volunteered to call him. Clark lived in his truck but had a voicemail number on which Penny left messages about gardening appointments. Warren told the voice mail that Laura had disappeared. He also identified himself as the person who had approached the truck on Monday. When Clark returned Warren’s call, he said he hadn’t stopped because he was afraid of a carjacking.
The young people spent hours on Tuesday telephoning local hospitals to ask if they had a patient named Laura Houghteling or a Jane Doe fitting Laura’s description. Her friend Susanna Monroney called department stores and credit-card companies to ask if Laura had charged anything identifying herself as Laura in order to obtain the information. Nothing.
Laura’s friends also called one of the local television stations; someone in the audience might have spotted her getting into a car or boarding an airplane. A report and camera crew showed up promptly—Laura had graduated from Harvard University in January 1992, and a missing Harvard graduate was a good story. When Warren was asked on the 11 o’clock news what he would say to Laura if she were watching, he replied, “I would tell her to please call, because we are really worried.”
Penny Houghteling sipped tea and said that Laura’s father, Fred Houghteling, had suffered from depression and used to disappear from time to time. The Houghtelings had divorced in 1977. Fred Houghteling had died in 1986.
The houses on Julliard Drive are close together, but there are open spaces and woods nearby. Late Tuesday evening, two police officers with a dog searched the woods near the Houghteling house.
Golian returned to the Bethesda District Station and, after midnight, sent out two teletypes. One, dispatched to law-enforcement agencies throughout the East, described Laura and added that Golian was attempting to locate Hadden Clark, who lived in his truck in the Bethesda area. Hadden Clark’s explanation to Warren of their near-encounter had aroused Golian’s suspicions: If you fear a carjacker, you step on the gas and keep going; you don’t make a U-turn. Golian also alerted other stations of the Montgomery County police.
When Golian mentioned Clark to Laura’s mother, she said, “Hadden wouldn’t hurt anyone—he’s just the gardener.” Forty-five minutes later an officer in the county heard Golian’s radio dispatch and contacted him. “If you’ll recall, Hadden Clark was a suspect in the Michele Dorr case,” he said.
On May 31, 1986, 6-year-old Michele Dorr had vanished from her father’s home in Silver Spring. No trace of her body had ever been discovered. Golian had access to the information on the computers of the Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration and to the state’s criminal records. Clark had a prior arrest record. Additional teletypes were sent out, describing the truck and Clark (6-foot-2, 160 pounds, 40 years old) and saying he was wanted for questioning.
At 2 AM, Golian telephoned Richard Fallin, a detective assigned to the Homicide/Sex Section of the Montgomery County police, which assumes jurisdiction over cases once foul play is suspected.
On Wednesday morning, Golian and Jim Hennessy, supervising sergeant of the Bethesda Investigative Section, went through Laura’s bedroom looking for signs of a struggle and observed none. They checked Laura’s bookshelf, bureau drawers, and a plastic file cabinet for notes, relevant correspondence, photographs, bills, and notebooks; Laura’s private papers yielded no clues about her disappearance. Her clothes hamper was filled with lingerie, none of it bloodstained. They asked Penny if any of Laura’s clothes or a suitcase were missing; she didn’t know.
On Wednesday afternoon, Hennessy and Golian looked through Penny Houghteling’s shed, trash cans, and back yard, and walked from there to the Grosvenor Metro, searching—by daylight—for evidence of a struggle: a shoe, a key, a wallet, torn clothing, fibers on a fence post. They went around houses that displayed “For Sale” signs to see if they could detect signs of a break-in—a body or clothes might be concealed in a vacant home. Penny said that Laura might have taken an alternate route to the Metro, so they walked two routes, finding not even a button.
That afternoon they took with them everything that had been on Laura’s bed, including a blue-and-white comforter, a white blanket, a white sheet, a white pillowcase, a multicolored pillow, and a light-brown pillowcase. After Hennessy and Golian left, Penny expressed concern that Laura’s bed had been without a mattress pad and bottom sheet. Penny was also convinced that there were too many pillows on the bed. She later mentioned to friends that the pillow covered with the brown case was one Laura despised. Its
customary place was in Warren’s old bedroom.
Both the Houghtelings and their friends and Hennessy and Golian spent more hours on the phone Wednesday evening. No one had heard from Laura.
My husband, Neil, and I were often on the telephone with Catherine. We also talked to Penny and Warren on Tuesday and Wednesday. Neil proposed telephoning the FBI—whatever had happened to Laura might have happened between Maryland and the District, giving the FBI interstate jurisdiction—but said no. If Laura had felt the need to go off alone, Penny didn’t want her frightened by pursuers.
Hadden Clark had not been located by the Montgomery County police or other law-enforcement agencies, so Golian telephoned Clark’s voice-mail number on Wednesday evening and left a message. Clark returned with his call within a half-hour. He declined to see Golian that evening—he was getting ready to “bed down” in his truck at a destination he declined to reveal—but he asked if Penny, for whom he had last worked on October 12, was back in town and if Laura had been found. He agrees to meet Golian at the Bethesda district station on Thursday afternoon.
Hadden Clark arrived at the station at 2:30, accompanied by friend, Susan Snyder, the president of Bethesda Cars, an organization that assists the homeless. Golian asked Clark to account for his activities on Sunday and Monday, October 18 and 19.
He said he had spent Sunday evening drinking coffee and watching the World Series at the Dancing Crab Restaurant, a DC bar. By 11 o’clock he was at North Bethesda united Methodist Church, where he parked his truck in its customary spot under a tree at the back of the parking lot and stayed all night. He got up on the morning of the 19th between 9 and 10 o’clock, drove to a nearby Giant supermarket, and bought some food. He tried to keep an appointment with “the Scotts,” for whom he was to do some gardening, but they were not at home.
Clark went on to enumerate his subsequent activities on that Monday: He went to Bethesda Cares twice; called on “John,” a homeless man; and stopped at a skate shop. An ardent Roller-blader, Clark wore the sakes to distribute fliers for local businesses, calling himself “the Rockville Rocket.”
He did his wash at Keith’s Laundromat in Takoma Park and took a shower at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda; he is a former sailor and had a locker there. He went to Sue Snyder’s house and was on his way to North Bethesda United Methodist Church to park for the night when he saw Warren Houghteling. After evading Warren, he parked his truck at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church and spent the night there, working on his Christmas cards.
After Clark left the station house with Sue Snyder on Thursday, he started crying. Snyder later said he was crying because he felt “so bad for Penny and Warren.” On the 22nd Clark mailed them a sympathy card. To the printed message he added a handwritten note: “Just please give me a call when your ready to do some gardening again. And I can also bring you bagels on Friday too.” Clark worked as a part-time bagel-roller at Whatsa Bagel in Cleveland Park.
A friend had taken photographs of Laura at the Gold Cup races on Saturday. A color photocopy of one of them was put on a poster and duplicated. Hilary Holman and Susanna Monroney spent much of Thursday taping and stapling Laura’s likeness and description to telephone poles between the Houghteling home and the Metro, and to maps and advertisements at the Grosvenor station. The two young women had appeared on a television news show on Wednesday evening and another on Thursday. Newscasters needed new footage to keep the story in the minds of viewers, who might have seen Laura.
On Friday, October 23, Sergeant Hennessy walked the area around the Houghteling residence again with an officer from the county’s police canine unit and the officer’s dog, which was trained to detect fresh human scent. They proceeded to a wooded area between Wildwood Baptist Church and North Bethesda United Methodist Church, where Clark had parked on Sunday night. The parking spot is about 300 yards from the Houghteling house.
The officer entered the woods from one side, Hennessy from the other. Two minutes later the officer called out, “Jim, I got something.” He had found a pillow in a pillowcase at the base of a tree. The pillowcase appeared to be covered with dried blood or a blood-like substance, and its lace border was torn. The pillow itself, also stained, was not infested by insects and appeared to have been in the woods only a short time. The pillowcase looked familiar to Hennessy: It seemed to match one he had seen in Laura’s room on Wednesday.
The men continued their search. Twenty minutes later, Hennessy found seven items of female clothing: a pair of Sears pantyhose, an Olga bra, a gray silk blouse, a shoe, and more lingerie. He did not believe the items were involved in the disappearance of Laura, because they appeared to have been in the woods for a prolonged period of time.
Hennessy contacted Detective Fallin, who drove over and took the pillow and pillowcase to Montgomery County’s Crime Laboratory in Rockville, where Susan Ballou, a forensic serologist, gave them a quick test for blood. The test cannot differentiate between human and animal blood but did show that the stains were blood.
By Friday evening, Golian, Fallin, Ballou, and other police officers and evidence technicians were at the Houghteling house. Laura’s top sheet matched the bloody pillowcase that had been under the tree in the woods.
A close examination of the mattress revealed the presence of small spots of fresh blood. After dark, a solution containing a chemical compound called luminol was sprayed on the mattress. Luminol reacts with the hemoglobin component in blood and is used when there is reason to believe that blood may be present but not visible to the human eye. When luminol contacts blood, there is a brilliant luminescence. A considerable section of the mattress luminesced.
Bob Phillips, supervising sergeant of the Homicide/Sex Section, felt a chill when, during the last luminol application, he saw the appearance of luminescent fingers sliding off the end of the mattress. He knew that Laura was dead. A technician quickly took photographs of the mattress with high-speed film: The luminescent reaction fades in less than a minute. Ballou’s laboratory tests of the mattress the next day confirmed that the blood was human, and shortly afterwards, that the blood type was the same as Laura’s.
Earlier, technicians had collected all the hair and fibers they could see in Laura’s bedroom. Now they used a Luma-Lite, portable unit that generates light in a wavelength range that causes physiological fluids and trace evidence, such as fibers, visible to the eye, to fluoresce various colors. This aided the recovery of additional hairs and stains from the bedroom.
Television cameras outside the Houghteling house on Friday night caught the blue glow of the Luma-Lite through Laura’s bedroom window. Penny called us that evening to say Laura had been murdered. I telephoned Catherine to tell her the news as gently as I knew how. She flew home the next morning to help plan a memorial service.
Not long after the blue glow from Laura’s bedroom window faded from Washington’s television screens, Hadden Clark was spotted driving on East-West Highway in Bethesda. Fallin and another detective from the Homicide/Sex Section, Ed Tarney, approached Clark, who agreed to talk to them. Tarney told Clark he needed his help to find Laura. “I’m so scared,” Clark said and started crying. He got to his knees and said, “Oh, God, I just want to die.”
When a television crew that had been tracking the detectives pulled up, Clark started to rant and rave about how the Rockville Rocket would soon be jobless, but he calmed down again after the TV crew left, and he agreed to go to headquarters. There he gave an account of his movements on October 18 and 19 similar to the one he had given Golian, and he responded to the questions about Laura.
Did he think she was pretty? He had never paid much attention to her. Fallin then told Clark, “We found the pillow in the woods.” Clark looked frightened and his eyes filled with tears. When Fallin continued to talk about Laura, Clark said, “I don’t remember.” Asked what he had done to Laura, Clark admitted that he liked to dress in women’s clothing. He asked to leave and did.
Sue Ballou had seen what appeared to be a fingerprint on the pillowcase when she examined it at the Crime Lab. Two weeks later, on November 6, technicians identified the print as that of Hadden Clark.
At 10:17 PM, police found Clark’s truck in the parking lot of Bethesda First Baptist Church. When an arrest team of eight officers approached the truck, they saw Clark asleep inside the cab, covered with a quilt and holding a teddy bear. One officer rapped on the window on the driver’s side with his flashlight and asked Clark to get out. Once Clark was outside the truck, the officer said, “You’re under arrest for the murder of Laura Houghteling.”
“Okay,” Clark replied.
A SKEWED SENSE OF REALITY
Hadden Irving Clark was born on July 31, 1952, in Troy, New York. He was slow. Long after most children spoke in complete sentences, he wasn’t talking. When he should have been able to walk steadily, he fell over the pattern on the rug. When he was 4, his mother, Flavia Clark, took him to the Yale Child Study Center to be evaluated. She was told he had a mild case of cerebral palsy and mild brain damage. His father, also named Hadden, preferred to call him “learning-disabled.”
A physical chemist, the senior Hadden Clark kept his résumé up to date and liked to move on. Young Hadden grew up in a series of affluent suburbs: Darien and New Canaan, Connecticut; Warren Township, New Jersey; Yardley, Pennsylvania; and Chagrin Falls, Ohio. Summers, the Clarks vacationed at Block Island, where Flavia’s parents had a summer cottage, and at Wellfleet, Massachusetts, where the senior Hadden’s parents had retired.
All the homes were unhappy. Hadden’s older brother, Bradfield, and his younger brother, Geoggrey, resented the extra attention Hadden received from his mother. His father felt burdened by the costs of Hadden’s twice-weekly visits to psychologists. No matter how much money he earned—and he earned a great deal—Clark could never save a penny. Sometimes he drank to excess and hit his wife.
As the children grew, problems arose. Brad stole to pay for drugs. Alison, Hadden’s younger sister, ran away from home and was placed in a psychiatric institution. Flavia and Hadden Clark separated in the 1970s and divorced in 1982. He died of cancer in September 1986. Before his death, Clark told Geoffrey that he suffered from manic depression. Geoff realized that he, too, was a manic depressive. He controls his condition with lithium.
By the time his father died, Brad Clark was confined to a California state prison. In July 1984, Brad, who lacked only a dissertation for his doctorate in social psychology, had invited a couple he knew from work to his apartment in Los Gatos for dinner. At the last minute, the husband canceled and the woman came alone. Brad killed her, chopped up her body, put her remains into three trash bags, and carried the bags to the trunk of his car.
After attempting suicide, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder to spare his parents the ordeal of a trial. He received a sentence of 15 years (plus 3 additional years for the mutilation) to life in prison.
“I was abusing alcohol back then,” Brad says. “I don’t remember anything about the crime.”
Hadden was born different and Hadden was born mean. He got meaner as he grew older. Brad observed that the animals in Hadden’s menagerie—hamsters, opossums, skunks, raccoons, and squirrels—died with suspicious frequency. Once, Hadden and Geoff were out learning to ride their bicycles with no hands. Hadden suddenly pedaled in front of Geoff, who lost his balance, fell, and landed on his head. When Geoff told his brother to get help, Haden rode home and told his parents, “Don’t worry, Geoff’s bike is okay.” “Hadden’s sense of reality has always been askew,” Geoffrey Clark says.
Hadden didn’t thrive in regular schools. He was left back twice. His behavior caused his classmates to tease him or avoid him. In 1962 he attended a school for special children. The family moved the next year, and he boarded nearby at a school for the learning-disabled. Where he stayed for three years and made progress. In 1967 another attempt was made to mainstream him. He entered a public junior-high school, and despite social problems, he coped.
In 1968, a neighbor for whom Hadden was doing yard work returned to find him in her bedroom, dressed in a nightgown. A year later, his parents caught him cross-dressing. Alison’s dolls were discovered missing, and both Flavia and Alison “lost” undergarments. Hadden’s psychologists advised Flavia against confronting him. “If you’re paying people all this money, you listen,” Flavia says.
Hadden finished secondary school dividing his classes between a regular high school and technical one. His ambition was to become a chef. He was accepted by the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde park, New York, and received an associate in occupational studies degree in January 1974. It was his proudest achievement. The entire family came to his graduation.
For the next few years Hadden held a succession of jobs at restaurants on Cape Cod and in half-a-dozen other places. He was proficient—he could carve ice sculptures and spin sugar swans—but he never kept a job for more than a few months.
In the late 1970s, Hadden Clark went to work for the Norwegian Cruise Line. He was a cook on cruise ships to the Caribbean and sailed the Atlantic on the S.S. Norway. “He had a blast in the Caribbean until he was let go,” Geoffrey says.
Hadden’s pattern was to return to his mother’s home when he was in trouble. After he lost his job in Colorado in January 1982, he showed up in Meriden, Connecticut, where Flavia had moved to care for her widowed father. On March 31, he kicked his mother and beat her up. She charged him with assault and battery, not only because she was frightened, but because she wanted Hadden to receive psychiatric help she felt he needed. She had recommended such treatment in the past, in vain.
Hadden was not prosecuted. In the summer of 1982, he enlisted in the Navy in a seaman-apprenticeship program and eventually was assigned to an aircraft carrier. His cards and letters varied between happy descriptions of his ports of call and complaints.
Towards the end of 1984, after a period of problems aboard ship, he claims that several crewmates waited for him in the dark and beat him severely. They “smashed my head against the deck,” he told a Navy psychiatrist. In subsequent years he insisted that the beating was “the beginning of all my troubles.”
Following medical evaluation aboard ship, he was referred for emergency psychiatric evaluation. Prior to his admission to a naval hospital in Virginia in March 1985, he was apprehended twice—once at an airport, once at a department store—for exhibiting bizarre behavior. X-rays taken of his skull were negative, but his hospital-admission diagnosis was acute psychotic episode. In June 1985, he received an honorable discharge from the Navy for medical reasons with 50-percent disability. This time his diagnosis was schizophrenia, paranoid type. Hadden’s account of a beating cannot be confirmed, but Flavia and Geoffrey Clark agree that whatever happened in the Navy, Hadden was in worse shape in 1985 than he had been in 1982.
When Hadden got out of the Navy, Geoffrey, who was divorced with joint custody of his three children, was living in a rented house he was about to purchase in Silver Spring. Geoff let Hadden live in his basement. Hadden did chores around the house and held jobs in one kitchen after another—at a country club, a bakery, a restaurant, and a bagel shop.
Geoffrey’s children, then running in age from 5 to 8, were fond of Uncle Hadden. “Here was this 6-foot-2-inch-tall man who was their emotional age,” Geoff remembers. “He was a playmate, but a playmate who could drive a truck to the park and choose the biggest swing. A playmate with money to buy them treats, and to teach them how to kill, skin butcher, and cook rabbits he raised in a back-yard pen.”
Within a few months the playmate was causing trouble. Hadden had lent Geoffrey money for his house and demanded a change in the repayment schedule. He was arrested for shoplifting women’s lingerie; Geoffrey had to bail him out of jail. And he was exhibiting bizarre sexual behavior at home.
When Geoffrey asked Hadden to move out early in May 1986, he told him he could remove the remainder of his belongings on Memorial Day. Geoff arranged to be out of his house on May 31—he was dating the woman who would become his second wife and didn’t want Hadden to become part of her life. That afternoon, Michele Dorr disappeared from her father’s house, two doors away.
Michele often played with Geoffrey’s daughter when she visited her father, Carl Dorr, who was separated from her mother. Hadden had been seen at Dorr’s house that afternoon and was questioned by the police, but he seemed to have an alibi. Carl Dorr, who had left Michele outdoors while he watched the Indianapolis 500 on TV, felt guilty, broke down under police questioning, and said he was involved in his daughter’s death. By the time the police realized Carl Dorr had not harmed his daughter, Hadden Clark was no longer an active suspect.
In 1987, Geoffrey Clark’s home was burglarized. Among the stolen objects was a Block Island landscape his maternal grandmother had painted and given him as a high-school graduation gift. He was certain Hadden had taken it. A couple of years later, the air was let out of the tires of Geoff’s van while he saw a movie in a neighborhood theater. A friend tried to help Geoff pump up the tires. The next week Hadden smashed the windshield of the friend’s car. Geoff had no further contact with Hadden.
Hadden continued to change jobs and landlords with frequency. In the summer of 1988 he was asked to leave the home of a Bethesda couple because he seemed to them “crazy and evil.” Before Clark moved out, he stole pictures, tapes, records, expensive tools, and rare books from the couple, killed their cat and left it on the lawn, and hid dead fish wrapped in plastic around the house. The landlord filed charges.
Despite a court order to stay away from the Bethesda house, Clark returned and stole a shop vacuum cleaner: He had boasted to the landlord about taking revenge on people whom he felt had done him wrong. Clark was found guilty of malicious destruction of property and was put on probation.
In November 1988, Clark had come to Block Island, where Flavia was by then living year-round. She saw him in the dark, emerging from her cellar, carrying things. “What are you going to do now, steal from me like you did from your brother?” she called out. Hadden kicked her hard.
She heard his truck motor start and feared that he was going to run over her, but he drove off. She again accused him of assault and battery. He pleaded no contest and was put on probation for a year.
This time Flavia typed Hadden a letter, in which she said she would pretend he had died and requested that he not enter her life again unless he got the help that awaited him at the Veterans Hospital. “Always remember that your mother and father loved you,” were her closing words.
Three years before Laura Houghteling disappeared, Mary Carlin, of the Montgomery County Park Police, was patrolling Bethesda on a Sunday afternoon when she saw a white Nissan pickup truck parked on the shoulder of the road. The driver—it was Hadden Clark—was leaning over the passenger side of the seat, moving a green coat around. When Carlin saw an empty black-nylon holster hanging from the seatbelt by the window, she stopped and told Clark to walk away from the truck.
While her partner patted Clark down, Carlin looked through the green coat. She did not find a weapon in it, but a purse fell out. She asked Clark to whom the purse belonged. Clark said it was his. “It’s yours?” she asked, and Clark replied, “Yes, I’m a woman.” Carlin expressed disbelief. She opened the purse and found two wallets containing credit cards and driver’s licenses with pictures of women on them. A further search of the truck revealed additional wallets with female identification, a batch of $1 to $20 bills, a hypodermic syringe, and a woman’s dress, wig, and glasses. Carlin radioed in the names listed on the items of identification.
Most of the items had come from choir-robing rooms of two churches—Woodside United Methodist Church in Silver Spring, which Clark robbed that morning dressed as a woman, and Chevy Chase United Methodist Church, which he had robbed five weeks earlier.
On February 21, a psychiatrist examined Clark on behalf of Maryland’ Forensic Screening Program and pronounced him legally competent to stand trial. Clark was represented by a public defender. He pleaded guilty to one count of theft over $300 and one under $300.
On September 26, 1989, Judge Irma S. Raker sentenced him to the Montgomery County Department of Correction and Rehabilitation for 18 months; she suspended all but 45 days of the sentence—the time he had served in jail before being released on bail. She also placed Clark on three years of supervised probation.
According to Maryland’s guidelines, Raker could have sentenced Clark to jail for three months to two years. Her reason for giving him on-half of the low ended: “Defendant has serious mental problems and is now addressing them in the community.” Clark went off probation in September in 1992, a month before Laura Houghteling disappeared.
BUILDING THE CASE
Arresting Hadden Clark for the murder of Laura Houghteling had been the easy part of the job for Montgomery County police. The hard part was amassing the evidence to make the charge stick, especially if Laura’s body could not be found.
On October 5, 1992, almost two weeks before Clark’s arrest, Detective Richard Fallin, the primary investigator assigned to the case, had seized Clark’s truck. The police offered him a motel room, but he declined and went to Sue Snyder’s house.
On the 26th, officers from the Technical Services Section took three bedsheets from the back of the truck—a balled-up pink sheet, a floral-print sheet that covered Clark’s narrow mattress, and a white one that was on top of the floral-print sheet. They also seized several hair samples from the front of the truck, as well as personal papers, including a checkbook register, receipts, pay stubs from Whatsa Bagel, an expense log, and a mileage log for the truck.
One entry in the checkbook register showed that Clark had paid to rent a storage unit in Warwick, Rhode Island, until 1994. His mileage log revealed that on October 20 and 21, he had driven more than 1,000 miles. The records of E-Z Mini Self-Storage in Warwick revealed that Clark had been there on the morning of October 21.
In Clark’s papers there was also a paid receipt for a lease on a unit at American Self Service Storage in Kensington, a receipt for a gym locker at the Bethesda Naval Hospital, another for a safe-deposit box at a bank in Rockville, and the number and addresses of five post-office boxes in suburban Maryland.
The records of American Self Storage indicated that Clark entered his storage unit once almost everyday. On Monday, October 19, he entered it twice—at 9:41 AM and 4:32 PM. He had omitted these visits when he gave the detailed account of that day’s activities to Detective Golian. A checkbook entry showed that on the 19th, Clark had also gone to Sears to buy a sheet—another alibi omission.
When Fallin and his partner, Detective Ed Tarney, went to American Self Service Storage on October 26, they were looking for anything that would link Laura to Hadden—her Coach briefcase, her house keys. They found nothing that appeared to be hers, but they took two shovels (they suspected Hadden had killed Laura and dug a grave for her), personal papers, a photograph album, and a woman’s blue suit jacket and full slip. Like the clothes found in the woods near the bloody pillow on the 23rd, the suit jacket and slip belonged to Penny Houghteling.
That evening, a former baker at Whatsa Bagel called and went to talk to the detectives in Rockville. Before he and Clark had fallen out, he told police, Clark had confided to him that he had a campsite in the Bethesda-Rockville area. Photographs of it in the album from the storage locker helped determine its likely location.
On October 27, Sergeant Bob Phillips located the campsite from a state-police helicopter, on a 19-acre tract of land in the area of the exit ramp from Old Georgetown Road to north-bound Interstate 270. Phillips and detectives searched the campsite and seized some items. Phillips, three detectives, and two dogs and their handlers also searched the area for Laura’s body; they didn’t find it.
On October 29, Phillips and a smaller search party went through a 54-acre piece of thickly wooded land across I-270 near the southbound lanes. They were looking for depressions in the ground and spots in the dense undergrowth that appeared to have been disturbed. Clark’s co-worker at Whatsa Bagel said he had spoken of root cellars. An old stone mansion on the tract appeared to have root cellars behind it, so the men concentrated on the nearby terrain with cadaver dogs they had borrowed from a volunteer search-and-rescue organization, Mid-Atlantic D.O.G.S. Inc.
Other people who had seen pictures of Laura Houghteling on television called the police to offer information. On October 29, a homeowner who lived near Julliard Drive telephoned to say that her Spanish-speaking housekeeper had seen a person she believed was Laura leaving her house by the front door on October 19 at about 8:20 AM.
The housekeeper had been waiting with her employer’s son for the school bus. She was accustomed to seeing the two Houghteling women leave together and was surprised to see the younger woman leave alone. The woman she assumed was Laura—a tall blonde with shoulder-length hair—was wearing khaki-colored long pants, a full-length khaki-colored London Fog-style trench coat, white socks, and slip-on shoes, and carried a black handbag. The detectives learned from Penny and Laura’s friends that Laura always wore a skirt or dress to work. She would never wear white socks with black flats, they insisted, and she didn’t own a trench coat.
The detectives recalled seeing clothes matching those described by the house-keeper, as well as wigs, in Clark’s Kensington storage locker. They returned there and seized khaki pants, a khaki trench coat, women’s flats in size 12 (Laura wore size 8), and wigs—including a shoulder-length Paula Young wig.
On November 19, nurse-practitioner Christine Bevacqua told a man in her apartment complex that she had just given Hadden Clark a routine physical examination at the Montgomery County Detention Center, where he had been brought after his arrest on November 6. Clark had initiated a conversation with her, saying he was not giving out autographs. She said she didn’t know what he meant. “Haven’t you seen me on TV?”’ Clark asked. She said she had. Clark said he watched TV every day to see what they were saying about him. He then said, “You know, they’re not going to find a thing.”
Bevacqua had no idea that the man she told this to was a police officer. He got in touch with Homicide/Sex.
Monday, October 12, was the last day Hadden Clark had gardened for Penny Houghteling. Penny had told him she would be away from the 17th to the 25th; therefore another of Hadden’s checkbook entries worried the detectives. On October 14, he had made a purchase of $21.13 at Hechinger—for “Laura.” From Hechinger, the detectives obtained a copy of the register tape listing Clark’s purchase. He had bought two rolls of duct tape, a coil of braided rope, and three packages of mason line. The items made the detectives doubly uneasy. They had not seen new rope, twine, or duct tape in Clark’s truck or storage locker, or in any of the other places they later searched—his Naval Hospital locker, a toolbox he kept at Whatsa Bagel, his Rhode Island storage locker, his post-office boxes, his safe-deposit box, or three plastic bags stored at Sue Snyder’s residence.
The detectives verified the purchase of the sheet at Sears on October 19. Clark had paid $12.59 for the white, queen-size bottom sheet that was already in their possession. The white sheet on the mattress in Clark’s truck, covering the flowered sheet, had not originally seemed strange. When they looked again, they saw that he had tied the 60-inch-wide sheet to a cot-size camping mattress. The rest of Clark’s bedding fit the mattress better but was worn.
On October 25, the day Clark’s truck was seized, Sue Snyder had arranged for Clark to spend the night at the home of Gary Kunz, a member of the diaconate of Bethesda First Baptist Church. That morning, Clark had placed a note in the offering plate of the church, indicating he was considering suicide.
Clark’s truck was returned to him the following morning, and he spent the next two nights with another church couple who had known him for several years and felt sorry for “this poor homeless man, despite his exasperating tendencies.” On the evening of the 28th Clark went to see the movie Of Mice and Men.
The police attempted to keep Clark under surveillance, but he soon evaded them. They later learned that he had entered his storage facility in Rhode Island on October 31, and they speculated that he had done so to remove items put there during his prior trip on the 21st. When the detectives went to the E-Z Mini Self-Storage in late November with a search warrant, Flavia Clark and her daughter, Alison, accompanied them. Among the items in the storage facility, Flavia recognized the landscape painting Geoffrey had received as a high-school graduation present, which had been stolen from his house. On the back, she read the words “To Hadden, From Grandma.” The handwriting was Hadden’s.
All the while they were searching for evidence to show that Hadden Clark had murdered Laura Houghteling, the police continued to pursue their second mission: finding Laura’s body.
On December 21 and 22, they returned to the wooded area between the two churches, used a leaf blower to clear the ground, and scraped away the topsoil with a large mechanized shovel. A few objects were found, including a black shoe that had been taken from Penny Houghteling.
The bloody pillow found on October 23 had drawn the police back to those woods. So had the behavior of Sherlock, a state-police bloodhound. On the 24th, Sherlock had been brought to the woods and was given several pieces of Laura’s clothing to establish her scent. The dog indicated the presence of Laura’s scent in the woods but otherwise showed no interest there. Instead, Sherlock pulled its handler out of the woods, across a grassy area, across the North Bethesda United Methodist Church parking lot toward a large tree—the tree where Clark’s truck had been parked on the night of October 18—and then, at a fast trot, straight to Penny Houghteling’s backyard. Neither the dog nor the handler had ever been in that part of Bethesda.
When he was interrogated on the night of November 6, Clark hinted that he had buried someone in Warren Township, New Jersey. It seemed plausible—both Geoff and Brad recalled good times playing in a treehouse built near the home they had lived in from 1957 to 1962. Police with dogs searched the area near the former Clark home but found nothing.
In January 1993, the police drove to Wellfleet, Massachusetts, because they had found a hand-drawn map in Clark’s truck and a diary entry with references to Route 6, the road that led to the cemetery where Clark’s father was buried. At the cemetery they found freshly turned dirt close to the father’s grave. They dug up a four-by-five-foot section in front of the grave to a depth of six feet. A cadaver-sniffing dog immediately turned away from the empty hole to the mound of dirt taken out of it. The detectives couldn’t help thinking that Hadden Clark had buried something there before he knew he was a murder suspect and had returned to unbury it afterwards.
In April, police searched in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Clark had once worked and where a witness had come forward to say he had seen someone carrying what looked like a body. The search was again fruitless.
On December 4, 1992, Kathleen M. Toolan, a senior assistant state’s attorney assigned to prosecute Hadden Clark, asked a judge to give county prosecutors an additional two weeks to prepare their murder case. Toolan said the police had seized “massive amounts” of items from Clark and were still sorting through them for possible evidence, such as hair and fiber samples.
Benjamin S. Vaughan, one of Clark’s two attorneys, objected to Toolan’s request and urged the judge “to keep the continuance to a minimum.” Sue Snyder had telephoned Vaughan’s partner, John Monahan, on Monday, October 26, and had brought Clark to see them. They referred him to the office of the public defender, but the police soon discovered that Clark was worth more than $40,000. At the end of November, Clark retained Monahan and Vaughan. Their practice is 15 to 20 percent criminal, some malpractice, and, in Vaughan’s words, “the rest is crapola.”
The extension was granted. On December 17, a Montgomery County grand jury deliberated briefly before indicting Clark for first-degree murder.
Hadden Clark made a mistake when he dropped the bloody pillow and case with his fingerprint in the woods. DNA tests had indicated that Penny Houghteling was the biological mother and Warren the biological sibling of whoever’s blood was on both the pillow and the mattress. Laura was the only person who fit that description. It was hair, though, that ultimately would build the case against Clark.
Other tests had determined that a head-hair fragment found on a sheet in Clark’s truck was consistent with Laura’s head hair, and that a head hair found in Laura’s room on the white top sheet had most of the characteristics of Clark’s head hair. While examining Laura’s hairbrushes, forensic serologist Susa Ballou also found a wig fiber that closely resembled the fibers of Clark’s Paula Young wig. Neither Laura, Penny, nor any of Laura’s friends owned a wig.
Such “agency,” or connecting evidence, would be hard for the defense attorneys to explain away, Toolan thought. She was also heartened by the results of the motions hearings, which began June 1. Judge Raker had denied a number of motions made by Clark’s lawyers, including one to throw out the testimony of nurse Christine Bevacqua on the grounds that she was an agent of the state and had failed to read Clark his Miranda rights.
Clark himself had taken the stand on that motion and proven a poor witness. Toolan suspected the defense felt he would also be a poor witness at the trial, which was scheduled to begin June 14. It never did.
On Sunday, June 13, Kathleen Toolan drove to Penny Houghteling’s house to tell her that in all likelihood there would be no trial. The state’s attorney had offered Hadden Clark the opportunity to plead guilty to second-degree murder, and he had accepted.
Toolan believed the plea was a sound one. It was “straight up”—the only thing the state had agreed to do was to ask Raker to recommend that Clark serve his time at Patuxent Institution, one of two prisons in the Maryland correctional system that are also psychiatric hospitals. Toolan explained that even if she could persuade a jury to convict Clark of first-degree murder, she was almost certain that such a conviction would be appealed, and there was no guarantee of what an appeals court would do. Jurors can be emotionally swayed by the shocking circumstances of a crime, whereas appellate judges look at the law and the sufficiency of the evidence. This case was different from most other cases because it was a “no body” case: Toolan would have to prove not only who caused the death but that the death had occurred.
Penny Houghteling realized that a plea would spare her a trial expected to last two to four weeks and a long period of appeals, and would probably achieve the same result. She was cautioned that Hadden might change his mind at the last minute.
The next day, Monday June 14, Kathleen Toolan rose to her feet in Courtroom 13 of the Montgomery County Circuit Court in Rockville and told Judge Raker that the state understood Hadden Clark wished to plead guilty to second-degree murder.
Raker proceeded to ask Clark more than 20 questions.
“Do you understand the crime of second-degree murder?”
“Yeah, I understand what I did.”
She went on to test whether he fully comprehended the day’s proceedings and to ask if he understood that the recommendation of the state for Patuxent was not binding on the count and that even if she recommended it, her recommendation was not binding on Patuxent: Admission to Patuxent was “up to them.” Clark said he understood.
“All right,” Raker replied, “I’ll listen to the state’s attorney.”
Kathleen Toolan was on her feet again. She alternately stood behind the prosecution table and walked to the bench to hand the judge 8-by-10-inch photographs—of the bloody pillow, of the mattress, of Clark’s truck.
“Your honor,” she began, “if the state had proceeded to trial, the state would have established that Laura Houghteling, who would have been 24 in April of this year, was murdered in her residence.” For the next half-hour Toolan discussed the events preceding Laura’s “disappearance.” She concentrated on eliminating the possibility that Laura was missing. Most missing persons leave a trail, but since October 18 there had not been a trace of Laura Houghteling. Her passport was at home; the State Department said she had not applied for a new one. Social Security had been repeatedly contacted—there were no post-October 18 earnings. None of the friends with whom she kept in constant touch had heard from her.
Toolan spoke of the bloody pillow and the mattress that luminesced in the dark bedroom. She described a good deal of the other police work done between October and June, enumerated the fruits of the search warrants, alluded to the testimony of some of the witnesses she had planned to call, and reviewed the forensic evidence—the fingerprint, the DNA, the hairs, and the wig fiber.
She then reported that an additional call had come into the state’s attorney’s office the previous week from an inmate who had been transferred to a detention-center unit that shared recreation with Clark’s. A game of volleyball had been underway. The inmate was playing; Clark was sitting on the bench. The ball went out of bounds, and the inmate asked Clark to throw it back. Clark didn’t respond. He sat with his head in his hands, crying. “’I shouldn’t have done it,” he said. The inmate asked him what he meant. Clark replied, “I shouldn’t have killed her.”
When Clark’s lawyers offered no additions, corrections, or exceptions, Judge Raker said she accepted the plea and entered a finding of guilty. Hadden Clark then stood and read a brief statement:
“During the early morning hours of October 19, 1992, I entered the home of Laura and Penny Houghteling. I found Laura alone in her bedroom. I killed her by means of suffocation while she lay there in bed. I moved her from the home and buried her. I was not assisted by any other person and suffered no delusions at the time of this crime. I committed the crime of my own free will. I profoundly regret my actions and wish to extend my deepest sorrow and regrets to the family of Laura Houghteling with all my heart. I am pleading guilty because I am guilty and for no other reason.” At first Clark read at a rapid clip; towards the end he slowed down.
His lawyers asked the court to consider deferring sentencing. When Toolan did not object, Raker set sentencing for June 25 at 10 o’clock.
The day after the guilty plea, Hadden Clark revealed the location of Laura Houghteling’s body to his lawyers. He had buried her in the 54-acre tract of land across I-270 from his campsite, about 15 feet from the road. On the afternoon of June 15, Kathleen Toolan, John Monahan, and Benjamin Vaughan drove in two cars to the site.
The shallow grave, dug only 200 yards from the campsite, was easy to find; animals had partially uncovered it. Toward dusk, Toolan returned to the grave with police officers. One detective realized he had walked right over the grave. Clark had covered it with brush; falling leaves had covered the brush.
As Laura’s remains were being dug up and put in a white body bag, a helicopter with a TV crew hovered overhead. A cameraman got a shot of the body bag being put in the hearse that took remains to the office of the medical examiner in Baltimore.
Toolan telephoned Penny Houghteling to say she had news for her. When she got to the Houghteling house, still dressed in blue jeans, she told Penny that Laura’s remains had been found. The bones displayed no evidence of mutilation. The hyoid bone was intact, a sign that Laura had probably not been strangled. There was a piece of duct tape in her hair. There was serious decomposition. Toolan advised Penny Houghteling against seeing the body—advice that was followed.
Penny took the news calmly, perhaps because she had already experienced so much sadness.
Her younger brother had been killed at age 2 in an auto accident in her native South Carolina. Soon afterwards her father, who had been driving the car, lost his house and land. When he died of natural causes a few years later, Penny was sent to live with a maiden aunt in Richmond, Virginia, while her mother and younger sister stayed in South Carolina with relatives.
Penny married for the first time in 1952, after obtaining her master’s degree in social work from Smith College. Her first husband committed suicide in 1954. Her second marriage, to Frederic Delano Houghteling—whose mother, Laura, was a first cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s—lasted from 1964 until the two divorced in 1977. In between the marriages, in 1960, Penny’s mother killed herself.
Penny’s profession might also explain the stoicism she presents to the world. She is accustomed to offering her patients strength. After the mattress was tested with luminol, she was able to say, firmly, that she believed Laura was no longer living in her body. Penny does not cry in public. She cries and screams—often—when she is alone at home.
In addition to the “searing pain” of losing Laura, she has “horrible” guilt feelings. After hiring Hadden Clark as a part-time gardener on the recommendation of Sue Snyder and a woman from a church she was then attending, Penny says she overlooked “too many signs that Hadden was ominous.”
One time she had seen him leaving Laura’s empty bedroom when he was supposed to be working. Another time, in July 1992, she had noticed that a strand of 24 graduated pearls—the most valuable and sentimental possession she owned—was missing. She kept a house key in her shed, giving Clark easy access, but he had always been kind and helpful, and no one she trusted had ever stolen from her.
October 12, 1992, was the only time Clark had displayed any anger toward her, blowing up when she remarked that some of her tools had a way of disappearing and reappearing. She later said that at about the same time she had felt depressed and experienced pain in her hip and back. “I think the depression was related to what was going to happen,” she said. “But I didn’t know on any level that this danger was lurking in my life.”
RETRIBUTION AND REMEMBERING
A large crowd was expected for the sentencing of Hadden Clark on June 25, so the proceedings were held in the Circuit Court’s largest room, Number 1. Penny Houghteling, a tall, slim woman with short, black-gray hair, was seated in the first row of benches on the right side of the room. She wore a pale-blue silk blouse, a long white skirt, white sandals, and a silver necklace and earrings. Warren, with Penny’s sister, a friend of Penny’s, and three of Laura’s friends, sat with her. Three rows behind them was Flavia Clark, whose hair was wavy and reddish. She was dressed in a flowered suit and deep-green blouse. Detective Edward Tamey and his wife sat on one side of Flavia; Geoffrey Clark, who wears his hair in a ponytail, and his wife were on her other side. Flavia Clark had cooperated with the detectives—she wanted to see justice done and was willing, if necessary, to testify for the prosecution. The defense attorneys had tried to dissuade her from attending the proceedings, but she was not to be dissuaded. Carl Dorr, Michele’s father, was also there.
The defense attorneys had two issues to address. John Monahan gave his reasons for believing that Hadden Clark could be better rehabilitated at Patuxent than elsewhere. “Hadden has said to us, ‘I want help.’ He doesn’t want to be released until he is well, until he is cured. That’s what he has told us and would say if he stood up now.”
Monahan then offered his client’s “reason for this terrible event.” In Hadden’s “crazy, mixed-up world,” he said, Penny Houghteling “became a replacement for his mother… When Laura came home there was a reason, obviously misguided, that he discerned her as a threat to this relationship… Quickly said, this explanation may cause two mothers in this courtroom to start to blame themselves. He doesn’t want this, and we certainly don’t. The guilt for what happened to Laura Houghteling is with Hadden Clark, not with Penny Houghteling and not with Mrs. Clark. It would be awful for them to continue to blame themselves for what he did.”
Both mothers were infuriated by Monahan’s explanation of Clark’s motive. People familiar with Hadden Clark believe that he steals, assaults, and kills when he is angry, to get even. He stole from his landlord and killed the cat after he was asked to leave. He assaulted his mother when she said something that enraged him. He killed Laura after quarreling with Penny. He stole from Geoffrey after Geoffrey asked him to move out. The police are convinced—although they cannot prove it—that on May 31, 1986, the day Geoff told Hadden he could fetch the rest of his belongings, he killed Michele Dorr when he chanced to find her alone.
Clark’s other attorney, Benjamin Vaughan, called his client’s voluntary disclosure of the location of Laura’s grave “a very meaningful act of remorse” and asked for a sentence within the 10-to-21-year sentencing guidelines for second-degree murder.
“With regard to the actual sentencing, the maximum potential penalty in this case is 30 years,” Kathleen Toolan said to Judge Raker after Vaughan had finished. “The state is asking that you impose every day of the maximum that you are allowed.”
On this hot summer day, Toolan’s customary forbearance left her as she said that she had had more than enough of listening to Hadden Clark’s “problems” for the past hour. “I would suggest, your honor, that there’s another person who is not here, Laura Houghteling, to say what she went through.” Toolan spoke of the eight months of hell that Laura’s family and friends had endured because they did not know where Laura’s body lay.
She addressed the extensive planning that had gone into the concealment of the crime. Just as Clark had originally sought to divert attention from the Houghteling house by leaving dressed as Laura, so he had sought to divert attention from the gravesite—suggesting that Laura was buried in New Jersey. He had disposed of the bloody mattress pad and bottom sheet and Laura’s briefcase—they were not found with her body—and had probably subsequently disposed of a camera, a crystal unicorn, and other jewelry missing from Laura’s room, including her high school graduation ring.
Clark had told his lawyers about two post-mortem injuries that he had inflicted to Laura’s head area. Laura had pierced ears, and a pair of her large earrings was missing. Clark said he used scissors to cut off one of her earlobes—an attempt to avoid identification by jewelry—and said he accidentally caused a gash while cutting off duct tape he had previously wrapped around her head. The medical examiner had found a one-and-a-half-inch “defect” on the neck area near the left jaw, which was consistent with Clark’s statement and with the location and amount of blood found on the pillowcase in the woods. When Sue Ballou took a post-plea look at the pillowcase, she saw a clear outline of a pair of three-inch-long scissor blades
Toolan had talked to Penny and Warren, and to many of Laura’s friends, and had read the letters they had written to Judge Raker. Now she spoke eloquently of Laura’s many virtues—her humor, her intelligence, her compassion for the less fortunate. The letters had asked Raker to make the sentence fit a senseless crime. The only remorse Hadden Clark felt, Toolan told the court, was remorse that he had been caught.
When Toolan finished, Ben Vaughan got up and said that his client was in court to be sentenced not for concealing the crime, but for having committed it. “In most cases of this magnitude, concealing is common,” he said. “This defendant was more successful at it.” He then said that Clark wanted to address the court very briefly.
Hadden Clark wore a green-and-blue-striped shirt with a cowl collar. Until Vaughan said he wanted to speak, he had been pouring water from a pitcher and sipping it, chewing gum, and nonchalantly fiddling with some pens on the table. He got up and said:
“I’m sorry for all the pain and suffering I’ve caused Penny, Warren, family, and friends. I have hurt a lot of people by taking a life they can never replace, someone they love very very much and they will never see again, and I’m sorry for hurting Penny, Warren, family, and friends’ feelings and putting them through all this grief, shock, and insecurity. And especially I apologize to Laura Houghteling.
“I apologize for not releasing the body sooner and for prolonging the anguish to Penny, Warren, family, and friends, and making Penny, Warren, family, and friends suffer and not knowing if they would ever recover Laura’s body again. I’m sorry for putting Penny, Warren, family, and friends and the community through this horror and shocking experience and making them feel they are unsafe in their homes and neighborhood.
“I deeply regret my wrongdoings to Penny, Warren, family, and friends for killing Laura Houghteling and taking her life away from Penny, Warren, family, and friends, people who love her very much, people who will never see her again. It is something that can never be replaced.”
The words “Penny, Warren, family, and friends” were recited in a monotone, as if they were a cluster of five words, unseparated by commas. Clark spoke like a robot, a robot with eerily intense pale-blue eyes who even in apologizing caused “Penny Warren family and friends” still more pain by repeating “will never see her again.”
Now it was Judge Raker’s tum to address Hadden Clark. “You have taken Laura Houghteling’s life in the cruelest way,” she said. “You pose the gravest danger… Having considered all the previous extensive psychiatric treatment and their inability to really help you… I will not refer you to Patuxent Institution for evaluation. Under the law you may petition on your own… It is the sentence of this court that you be sentenced to the Department of Corrections in a maximum-security facility for 30 years. It is the hope of this court that you serve every day of the 30 years.”
At Monahan and Vaughan’s request, a three-judge panel reviewed Raker’s 30-year sentence. On September 3, the sentence was upheld, and Hadden Clark was sent to Eastern Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison on the Eastern Shore. By regulation, Clark will be reviewed for parole after serving one-quarter of his sentence, in November 2000. He is not likely to make parole the first time. A person who murders a wife or mother-in-law is considered less of a danger to society than someone who murders a virtual stranger for no logical reason: Clark had seen Laura perhaps five times in a year and a half. One authority on Maryland sentencing procedures says that if Clark behaves himself in prison, he will serve between 15 and 20 years.
In the meantime, Clark has adjusted to life at Eastern Correctional. He writes to Flavia and to other relatives about the activities there, including Bible classes and reading. He doesn’t want any of his “ladies clothing” gotten rid of: “You might as well face it. I like women’s clothing. I don’t know why but I just like it. Maybe I’ll get rid of it when I get out of jail.”
In early August he wrote to his mother that some day, “more like a few months down the road,” he would let people know his side of the story. “What made Hadden do what Hadden did. But right now you’ll have to wait.”
Two weeks before the three-judge panel upheld the 30-year sentence that Hadden Clark apparently will not have to serve, Laura was laid to rest in a cemetery in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, a few miles from the Houghteling family’s beach house. Her remains had been cremated in Maryland, and when Catherine and I drove from Boston to the beach house, Penny handed me a black-plastic box. It had a utilitarian look. “Those are Laura’s ashes, but they’re coarser, more like bone chips,” she said. “And they are heavy, aren’t they?”
Together with Susanna Monroney and about 30 of Laura’s relatives, we drove to Riverside Cemetery in Fairhaven. The Delanos had given the land to the town of Fairhaven in the mid-19th century with one condition: that family members could be buried there on a hillside known as the Delano Knoll. In close proximity to Fred Houghteling’s grave, a large hole had been dug. Next to the hole was a high mound of dirt, and in the mound a shovel. We formed a circle on the hillside.
Prayers were said, relatives and friends recalled Laura, a cousin played “I Will Never Leave You” on her flute.We walked, single-file, to the mound, and as day darkened into dusk on August 21, 1993, each of us shoveled dirt over the black box.
The burial on that beautiful August day—the sort of warm, end-of-summer day Laura loved best—was among the last of many ceremonies held in her honor. On November 1, 1992, less than two weeks after Hadden Clark had stolen Laura’s future, there had been a memorial service at St. Alban’s Church, near the grounds of the National Cathedral. Last spring, an exhibition of Laura’s photographs was shown in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A weeping birch was planted in the courtyard of Leverett House, her Harvard dormitory. Adjacent to the birch is a teak bench with a plaque inscribed with Laura’s name and the dates of her birth and death. The Laura Bettis Houghteling Memorial Fund also was established to aid Harvard students committed to elementary-school teaching.
On April 24, 1993, a number of us gathered for what would have been Laura’s 24th birthday. It was a sad occasion. Penny had put four eight-inch Sara Lee chocolate cakes together and handed me 25 candles to distribute on the square. “One to grow on,” she explained.
When I think of my favorite memories of Laura, they are of her presence in our house when she and Catherine were 15 years old. Before they got their driver’s licenses, it was convenient for Laura to spend weekday nights with us: Our house is a short walk to National Cathedral School, and Bethesda is a drive. The girls had the same extracurricular activities—drama, swim team, Government Club—and I always hoped that Catherine, who until law school despised homework, might find Laura’s diligence contagious. When I saw a light on in their bedroom at 2 in the morning, I knocked softly and entered. Catherine was always asleep. Laura was usually awake, reading in bed or at Catherine’s desk, and would give me a cheerful smile. Her grades reflected her diligence.
I often re-read the essays Laura wrote while applying to college and a paper she wrote for a religion class when she was 17. Both her father and a classmate, Lauren Hester, had died the previous summer, and she was trying to come to terms with their deaths. “Sometimes I just wish that we could be together one more time,” she wrote of her father and Lauren in the last paragraph of her paper. “I’ve just got to hope that someday we can. And I’m still angry at people, and at things, and sometimes even at God, which doesn’t really make sense, but I’ve just begun to realize that maybe it’s all right to feel this way. After all, it can only get better, and every now and then I feel it, that somehow, somewhere, they’re with God and they’re laughing.”
On the gray, chill day of Laura’s memorial service at St. Alban’s Church, Catherine was the final speaker. She had been up all night writing her In Memoriam. Her eyes were red. She spoke of Laura’s outstanding qualities and of their long friendship. “There was never any doubt that we would be friends forever,” Catherine said. “I did not expect forever to come so soon.”
As she fought back tears, she said that Laura would want us to face this day and all the difficult ones that would follow with the same courage, the same honesty, and the same determination that she had displayed. “For us to simply say that what happened to Laura was senseless would be the easy way out, and that is not what Laura did in her life,” Catherine said. “So we must confront her death. Not just the magnitude of the loss of so much beauty and friendship and love and kindness, but also the fear and the loss of trust in others.”
Catherine ended by saying, “I will let Laura help me. I will draw on her optimism and her faith and her love. When she searched for an answer, she found faith that her father and Lauren are together and laughing. I will believe that Laura is with both of them, and she is also laughing.”
This article originally appeared in the March 1994 issue of Washingtonian.
