Speaker 1: This story contains adult content and language, along with references
Speaker 1: to sexual assault. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2: It starts praying that God take care of us, fix
Speaker 2: this for me, and after a period of time, God
Speaker 2: has it fixed it. So you said, well, if God's
Speaker 2: not going to help me, I'm going to reach out
Speaker 2: to say.
Speaker 1: I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
Speaker 1: in Austin, Texas. I'm also the host of the historical
Speaker 1: true crime podcast tenfold More Wicked and the co host
Speaker 1: of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right. I've traveled
Speaker 1: around the world interviewing people for the show and they
Speaker 1: are all excellent writers. They've had so many great true
Speaker 1: crime stories, and now we want to tell you those
Speaker 1: stories with details that have never been published. Tenfold More
Speaker 1: Wicked presents Wicked Words is about the choices that writers make,
Speaker 1: good and bad. It's a deep dive into the stories
Speaker 1: behind the stories. Best Selling author and my buddy Brian
Speaker 1: Burrow returns to his small town, Texas roots in the
Speaker 1: podcast by Texas Monthly called Stephenville. This season, he explores
Speaker 1: a murder case that went cold for nearly two decades
Speaker 1: to tell this amazing story. Brian is armed with the
Speaker 1: newly discovered diary of the killer himself. A trigger warning
Speaker 1: here we do talk about a serial rapist and killer.
Speaker 1: Let's dip into how you came across with the story,
Speaker 1: and then we can move from there.
Speaker 2: I had all but retired from any type of magazine journalism.
Speaker 2: The economics of it aren't as compelling as they used
Speaker 2: to be. I'm sixty one and not looking for as
Speaker 2: much work outside books as I used to be. But
Speaker 2: I got an email from a TV producer on Forensic File.
Speaker 2: We did a show on a cold case killing in Stephenville,
Speaker 2: Texas a few years back, and the lead detective found
Speaker 2: something new. Found that the bad guy left behind a
Speaker 2: two hundred page autobiographical essay that for the first time,
Speaker 2: told the story of fairly well known events from his
Speaker 2: point of view. He had spent his entire life denying
Speaker 2: it all, and this was a fairly run of the
Speaker 2: mill bad guy who wrote kind of an extraordinary document
Speaker 2: that traced the development of his internal angers, passions, sexual
Speaker 2: proclivities from the age of eight through early teen, through
Speaker 2: his twenties into adulthood, as well as dealing with the
Speaker 2: stories of the crimes that he committed. So I thought, gosh,
Speaker 2: we've got a very different take on the story.
Speaker 1: So set the scene. Where are we when this story starts.
Speaker 2: Well, it starts with a murder, and that's kind of
Speaker 2: the best way to introduce the cat characters. In July
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty seven, in Stephenville, Texas, which is southwest seventy
Speaker 2: miles southwest of Fort Worth, supervisor at a sandpaper called
Speaker 2: a man in town and says, your daughter has not
Speaker 2: showed up for work two days in a row. And
Speaker 2: his name was Joe Atkins. And Joe went on over
Speaker 2: to his daughter's little white bungalow, a little rendered white
Speaker 2: bungalow there in the Old Air area of Stephenville, walked
Speaker 2: up to the front door, found at a jar, went
Speaker 2: in and found his daughter, Susan Woods, naked on the
Speaker 2: floor of the bathroom with her upper body plunged into
Speaker 2: a tub full of black water.
Speaker 1: How long had she been in the bathtub?
Speaker 2: Two days? Last scene on Sunday night. They found on
Speaker 2: a Tuesday night, Susan Woods in the summer of nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty seven was a very quiet young woman, a factory
Speaker 2: worker who had grown up in Stephenville. Quiet as a child,
Speaker 2: didn't date close to her parents. Everybody said, you know,
Speaker 2: she was just the sweetest thing, just nice to everybody,
Speaker 2: a little trusting, a little naive. Graduated from Stephenville High
Speaker 2: with honors, and within a year or two, having at
Speaker 2: that point going to work for a nursing home, she
Speaker 2: met a young man, a newcomer to town named Michael Woods.
Speaker 2: And Michael came from El Paso. This was the late seventies.
Speaker 2: You know, Susan was five to seven, long brown hair.
Speaker 2: Michael was a little shorter, but very attractive, certainly to Susan.
Speaker 2: And the most notable thing about Michael was at a
Speaker 2: time when rural Texas was not only as conservative as
Speaker 2: it may be today, but it was kind of pushing
Speaker 2: back against the excesses of the sixties. Michael had long hair,
Speaker 2: and he was a musician. He stood out in town Stephenville.
Speaker 2: Keep in mind, is bills itself as the cowboy capital
Speaker 2: of the world. It is a town then and now
Speaker 2: where you know cowboy hats, ffa jackets, close crop hair
Speaker 2: are most common, and Michael Woods stood out. Michael was
Speaker 2: actually just visiting, kind of hanging around unemployed as he
Speaker 2: tended to be most of the time, wanted to be
Speaker 2: a position, but nobody in Stevenville wanted to hear rock
Speaker 2: and roll. Let me tell you, they might listen to
Speaker 2: Johnny Cash back in the days. And Michael stayed to
Speaker 2: be with Susan, and he hated. He had a bit
Speaker 2: of an attitude because, especially when he grew a beard,
Speaker 2: you know, he got picked on. People would call him
Speaker 2: fur face and stuff. And Michael did not look like
Speaker 2: anybody else in town. He wore a leather jacket, engineer boots,
Speaker 2: and he drove Harley. Michael was also not one to
Speaker 2: suffer any type of abuse. If you said something insulting
Speaker 2: to Michael, he would pop in the mouth. He was
Speaker 2: repeatedly in fights, rarely in a job. He worked at
Speaker 2: a sonic, he worked in a cornfield, I mean all
Speaker 2: sorts of jobs that just never really took. And after
Speaker 2: about a year or two of this, around nineteen eighty,
Speaker 2: he said, I can't take it anymore. I've got a
Speaker 2: job offered from an uncle. I think he ran an
Speaker 2: auto repara shot back in l Passo. Come with me
Speaker 2: to l Passol, was trying to make a go up there.
Speaker 2: Susan had never been outside Stephenville, but she thought it
Speaker 2: sounded like a grand adventure, right, So they go to Steveville,
Speaker 2: and for whatever reason, the job fell through, and within
Speaker 2: a matter of weeks they are living in what Susan
Speaker 2: famously said in wonder her letters home on bacon bit sandwiches.
Speaker 2: They're not quite living out of the car, as one
Speaker 2: report had it, but Michael said they were living in
Speaker 2: an apartment with no furniture. When they couldn't make that happen,
Speaker 2: they moved in with his mother and that didn't go
Speaker 2: real well either, and they ended up coming back. So
Speaker 2: by let's say early eighty one, they're back in Stephenville.
Speaker 2: Michael continues to act out. I've got police reports of
Speaker 2: fights he got into. He was not happy there. He
Speaker 2: had family in Indianapolis, brother, and at least once, and
Speaker 2: it sounds like twice, he moved up to Indianapolis and
Speaker 2: she came with him. And then Susan was just never
Speaker 2: happy away from Stephenville for whatever reason, maybe being far
Speaker 2: away from family or just smalltown Texas. It has it's
Speaker 2: a lure. She went up to Indianapolis, stayed with him
Speaker 2: a time or two, and came back and Michael says,
Speaker 2: you know, during their about roughly five years of marriage,
Speaker 2: he was gone about half the time. By the summer
Speaker 2: of eighty six, they had moved into this little white
Speaker 2: bungalow by downtown and they were trying to make a
Speaker 2: last go of it. As Michael tells that, the final
Speaker 2: straw was he had had some success flipping cars, buying
Speaker 2: a used car, fixing it up and reselling it. He
Speaker 2: wanted to do this with Holmes. Apparently his brother was
Speaker 2: doing that in Napolis, and he thought he could do
Speaker 2: it too. Unfortunately, Michael had no money, and Susan, who
Speaker 2: is by now working in sandpaper factory, didn't really want
Speaker 2: to invest her money in Michael's new venture. Michael accused
Speaker 2: her of emasculating him and taking away his only livelihood,
Speaker 2: and so he left. There was a series of letters
Speaker 2: between them. It was heartbreaking because they were not angry
Speaker 2: at each other. They loved each other. They both said
Speaker 2: they want to be with each other, but she couldn't
Speaker 2: live outside at Stephenville and Michael couldn't make it work
Speaker 2: in Stephenville. He came back one last time in February
Speaker 2: of eighty seven, and this would be now four months
Speaker 2: before her murder, and it didn't take and he didn't stay.
Speaker 2: There's a letter in the DA's files in which one
Speaker 2: of her co workers said, basically, he gave her an ultimatum,
Speaker 2: me or Texas. She chose Texas.
Speaker 1: Did you get a sense that Michael was physically abusive
Speaker 1: emotionally abusive?
Speaker 2: I talked extensively with Susan's three closest friend, her best girlfriend,
Speaker 2: the girlfriend's husband, and another young woman. Who were the
Speaker 2: three people who went through all this with him, And
Speaker 2: they said no, Michael was always kind to her. Did
Speaker 2: they have arguments, yes, but no, nothing unpleasant until the end,
Speaker 2: until February eighty seven. In februaryy seven, when Michael came
Speaker 2: back for their final attempt at or Approchemont, he left.
Speaker 2: He took a bunch of her things, and most important
Speaker 2: thing was he took their yellow Mustang. And so for
Speaker 2: the next four months after he left, she worked six
Speaker 2: days a week to trying to raise money to get
Speaker 2: a new car. She was having to have friends take
Speaker 2: her to work. But when Michael left, he left behind
Speaker 2: two things. He left behind a series of folded up
Speaker 2: little paper notes that he put in cabinets. He put
Speaker 2: in shirt pockets you put in her underwear drawer, and
Speaker 2: they were just all about what a sea word she was,
Speaker 2: what an awful person, how this was all her fault.
Speaker 2: Her parents hated him from the word go. Michael tells
Speaker 2: these stories of the father threatening with a gun and
Speaker 2: things like this. But even worse, Michael left behind a
Speaker 2: thirty minute cassette tape in which he excoriated Susan in
Speaker 2: the most unpleasant way for breaking up the marriage, for
Speaker 2: not allowing him to be a man. And at one
Speaker 2: point Susan was so shaken she called in the three friends, Roy,
Speaker 2: Cindy her best friend, and Gloria. It said, I've got
Speaker 2: to go to work. Can y'all listen to this and
Speaker 2: just tell me if I'm crazy because that this scares me?
Speaker 2: And they were all deeply shaken. And by that night
Speaker 2: Roy Hayes wonderful guys still alive, came over, nailed all
Speaker 2: her windows shut, gave her a gun, and Cindy for
Speaker 2: about the next month slept on her couch. Look. Nobody
Speaker 2: knew Michael to be violent. The fights that he would
Speaker 2: get in always seemed to be some guy would insult
Speaker 2: in me. It was like Michael was out picking fights
Speaker 2: with people. So despite the fist fights he'd gotten, and
Speaker 2: nobody really thought of him as a violent guy. But
Speaker 2: the fact, does they anyone to find out if he
Speaker 2: had that in it?
Speaker 1: Was there contact between the two of them between February
Speaker 1: when this escalates in July when her father finds her dead.
Speaker 2: No physical contact. We believed that there might have been
Speaker 2: a phone call or too. I think Michael dimly remembers
Speaker 2: a phone call in the letter, but nothing really of significance.
Speaker 2: Once Michael left, she went to a divorce attorney and
Speaker 2: filed the horse papers and so between Februar of eighty
Speaker 2: seven when he left, over the next three or four months,
Speaker 2: it was a pretty dark time for Susan. Initially, she's
Speaker 2: working six days a week, trying to get a car.
Speaker 2: I mean, this is just basic stuff. She's thirty years old,
Speaker 2: she's never really lived on her own. She either lived
Speaker 2: with her parents or then with Michael, off and on,
Speaker 2: and it's a tough time for her. She doesn't really
Speaker 2: have time to socialize. And then after about out three months,
Speaker 2: say in the maytime frame, things begin to light. She
Speaker 2: realizes her life is probably not at risk from Michael.
Speaker 2: He hasn't showed up to Killer. She goes out one
Speaker 2: night with a group of work friends to the nearby
Speaker 2: town of Granbury. Stephenville was dry at the time and
Speaker 2: flirted with a bartender, and he started coming over a
Speaker 2: couple of three Friday nights, watched TV on the couch.
Speaker 2: On the fourth one they had sex, and the next
Speaker 2: day or so, after a day, Susan calls up another
Speaker 2: girlfriend and said, oh my god, you've got to come
Speaker 2: down here. She was hysterical, and she came down and
Speaker 2: Susan had dark marks all over her neck. JC apparently
Speaker 2: had gotten a little carried away and given her a
Speaker 2: series of hickeys. And it's a measure of Susan's modesty
Speaker 2: and Stephenville's modesty. She was paralyzed with fear of going
Speaker 2: out in town and having people see this and think
Speaker 2: she was that type of girl. By the end of May,
Speaker 2: you know, she was able to get a new car.
Speaker 2: Roy and Cindy, who are now married all these years later,
Speaker 2: thirty five years later, noticed that she was brightening a little.
Speaker 2: There came a night in late July when they said, hey,
Speaker 2: we're going We're taking one of Cindy's young cousins over
Speaker 2: to a carnival in a nearby town called Hiko. Why
Speaker 2: don't you come on with us, it'd be good for
Speaker 2: you to get out, And so she went on over
Speaker 2: there and they didn't have much fun for whatever reason.
Speaker 2: So they came on back and Roy said, tay, what,
Speaker 2: I'll make it better. Let's all go to Dairy Queen.
Speaker 2: So they went to Dairy Queen and Susan, who was demure,
Speaker 2: careful about her physical appearance, had a hot fudge Sunday
Speaker 2: and then she did something Cindy said she'd never seen
Speaker 2: or done in her entire life, and these kids had
Speaker 2: been best friends from like twelve thirteen. She had another
Speaker 2: hot fish Sunday and smiled, and Cindy doesn't remember the
Speaker 2: exact words, but it was very clear that she was
Speaker 2: turning a corner. She could see a path forward for
Speaker 2: herself and her life, and four nights later she was
Speaker 2: found dead.
Speaker 1: So her father finds her submerged partially in this bathtub.
Speaker 1: She's been sexually assaulted. It's summer of eighty seven. He
Speaker 1: calls the police. I have to assume is that the
Speaker 1: first thing that happens.
Speaker 2: He steps into the living room, calls him on the
Speaker 2: house phone and then steps out into the yard which
Speaker 2: is pitch dark, and pretty much the whole Stephenville Police
Speaker 2: force shows up. You know. There was clearly pretty nasty
Speaker 2: struggle in the bedroom. The bedroom was topsy turvy. The
Speaker 2: mattress was off the box springs and the pillows were
Speaker 2: strown everywhere, and the beding was strown everywhere, and there
Speaker 2: was an electrical cord that it was laying across the
Speaker 2: bed with the plug in on the floor. When they
Speaker 2: squatted down the side her and lifted her head, they
Speaker 2: saw a red ligature mark. He was suspected that perhaps
Speaker 2: the cord had been used on her. As they studied
Speaker 2: the crime scene, the one thing that stood out was
Speaker 2: there's no sign of forced entry in a house with
Speaker 2: a you know, everything nailed shut. It looked from all
Speaker 2: angles as if Susan had invited her murder into the house.
Speaker 2: And on the living room table there were six cigarette
Speaker 2: buts in an ash tray and an open cann of coke,
Speaker 2: suggesting that perhaps she had sat and had some cigarettes
Speaker 2: with whoever it was. But that was it. You know.
Speaker 2: They canvassed the neighborhood. They went up and down the street,
Speaker 2: nobody had seen anything strange. It was Sunday night. It
Speaker 2: was a quiet Sunday night in Stephenville, Texas.
Speaker 1: So what happens next? The investigators, we would assume, would
Speaker 1: look at her inner circle first and find out she
Speaker 1: has an ex husband.
Speaker 2: Funny thing happened the next morning. There was a lieutenant
Speaker 2: on the force who announced to the gathering the next
Speaker 2: morning in the police department that nobody else needed to
Speaker 2: work the case. He was going to take it on himself.
Speaker 2: And I talked with an officer who was in the
Speaker 2: room that day, I said, what was that about? He said,
Speaker 2: the guy just wanted to be a hero. He knew
Speaker 2: we don't have a lot of cases like that, and
Speaker 2: he was looking to move up. This guy's name was
Speaker 2: Ken Maltby, and I'm sure he was otherwise a terribly
Speaker 2: effective policeman. Early on, from all indications, Lieutenant Maltby focused
Speaker 2: on Michael Woods. The Atkins family, Susan's maiden name was Atkins.
Speaker 2: Was absolutely I mean, it was just obvious Michael Woods
Speaker 2: has done this. I mean she was living with the
Speaker 2: guy in town, right obviously. Hello. He somehow came back
Speaker 2: and Maltby and a Texas Ranger went up to Indianapolis.
Speaker 2: Within forty eight hours of the killing. They had reached
Speaker 2: out to Indianapolis PD to interview him, and they had
Speaker 2: there had been some interviewing, but he denied everything and
Speaker 2: didn't seem to want to be cooperative. They confronted him
Speaker 2: in his front yard and he declined to go back
Speaker 2: to Texas, and so Lieutenant Wontby and the Ranger came
Speaker 2: back to Texas and about a month later, Lieutenant Maltby
Speaker 2: was transferred onto a narcotic squad to supervisor narcotic squad.
Speaker 2: And you know, by the first week of October, and
Speaker 2: this is two and a half months after the killing,
Speaker 2: it's orphaned. There's nobody assigned to take this over. So
Speaker 2: what happened is one of the original officers, the guy
Speaker 2: who canvassed the bedroom, Donny Hensley, said well, I'll take
Speaker 2: it on in a spare time, and he went to
Speaker 2: look for Maltby's notes or to debrief, and he couldn't
Speaker 2: get Maltby to talk with him, and he couldn't find
Speaker 2: any notes, and Donny said, I don't know what's tell you.
Speaker 2: I'd start over from scratch, and he pretty much did.
Speaker 2: For the next couple of months, you know. He does
Speaker 2: his best to widen the focus of the investigation. He
Speaker 2: discovers the bartender in Granberry. By the way, I didn't
Speaker 2: mention they've got prince in the bathroom and on the
Speaker 2: coke can. He goes and fingerprints and gives light of
Speaker 2: detector tests to the bartender. He passes. He then brings
Speaker 2: in Roy Hayes, the best girlfriend's husband, the guy who
Speaker 2: nailed the windows shut. And Roy was a little iffy
Speaker 2: in the eyes of Stephenville because he played dungeons and dragon,
Speaker 2: which back in those days carried the faint whiff of
Speaker 2: the Satanic. Now Roy's a big old boy, nice kid.
Speaker 2: Roy says, okay, I'll take your light detector test. Sure,
Speaker 2: So they take him down to Waco to a ranger
Speaker 2: station for a light detector test. Does that for about
Speaker 2: an hour, walks out and Donnie says, you did it.
Speaker 2: You did not pass, And Roy's like, I did not
Speaker 2: I did anything to do this. He said, These machines
Speaker 2: do not make a mistake. Roy, I know you did it.
Speaker 2: This is just the way it is. About that moment,
Speaker 2: the door opens behind him and the ranger who took
Speaker 2: the test comes out. And says, congratulations, mister Hayes, you passed.
Speaker 2: To this day, nobody knows what the mix up was.
Speaker 2: At that point, Donny Hensley doesn't have a bunch of suspects,
Speaker 2: and you know, everybody in town is saying Roy Hayes,
Speaker 2: what he nuts? Everybody knows. Everybody knows it's Michael Woods.
Speaker 2: And so Donnie rededicates himself to hounding Michael Woods, who
Speaker 2: remains out of state outside in Indianapolis. He shows his
Speaker 2: picture picture of the yellow Mustang to every service station
Speaker 2: in the county that rings no belts with anyone. Finally
Speaker 2: he realizes he's got to take the case to Indianapolis,
Speaker 2: so he goes up there and the Indianapolis PD gives
Speaker 2: him a fancy surveillance van that actually has one of
Speaker 2: these like a submarine periscope out the top, so you
Speaker 2: can sit in the back of this van. And after
Speaker 2: a week or two of surveilling, they see Michael and
Speaker 2: his brother set out a bunch of stuff for garage sale,
Speaker 2: and they see some items that they believe they can
Speaker 2: argue we're stolen from Susan. A figure, a fur coat,
Speaker 2: this type of thing. So they swoop in the next
Speaker 2: day with an arrest warm and arrest them all because
Speaker 2: they found a roach, a marijuana roach, right you know.
Speaker 2: It led to no charges, but it gotten the one
Speaker 2: thing that Donny didn't have, which was Michael's fingerprints. They
Speaker 2: needed Michael's fingerprints. Now to this day, Michael will tell
Speaker 2: you he volunteered to give him the Prince and anything
Speaker 2: else they wanted on the proviso that it'd be done in.
Speaker 2: In the end, he wasn't going. He didn't trust Texas Comms,
Speaker 2: was not going back to rural Texas where an entire
Speaker 2: town was convinced he was the murder. He just wasn't going.
Speaker 2: For whatever reason. The Texas police wouldn't go up there
Speaker 2: and do it with him, so they felt they had
Speaker 2: to go up and get the fingerprints, which they did.
Speaker 2: They came back. Donnie on the flight back from Indianapolis
Speaker 2: with the fingerprints, he is filling out the extradition papers
Speaker 2: to bring Michael back. He's so sure that the Prince
Speaker 2: will match. Now of course I've given away they don't match,
Speaker 2: and Don's like, there's no way Michael Woods did this.
Speaker 2: How is this happening? Pretty much by the summer of
Speaker 2: eighty eight, by the time Donnie came back from Indianapolis
Speaker 2: with those prints. The investigation was over.
Speaker 1: What happens next? This case goes cold.
Speaker 2: Well, actually, what did happen was the family sued Michael Woods.
Speaker 2: He was the beneficiary on Susan's life inschurch. He was
Speaker 2: doing something like eleven thousand dollars. I think they sued him,
Speaker 2: and Michael would not go back. A judge hit him
Speaker 2: with a judgment finding hum responsible for his death and
Speaker 2: saying that he had to pay get this seven hundred
Speaker 2: thousand dollars anyway, It was never paid, obviously in part
Speaker 2: because Michael didn't come back anywhere near where they could
Speaker 2: serve him, and then the case was slowly forgotten, not
Speaker 2: by the family, not by our friends Roy and Cindy,
Speaker 2: but by the rest of the town. Stephen Villain's important
Speaker 2: note just in terms of context, it is not your
Speaker 2: classic conservative small town. It's actually a college town in
Speaker 2: the middle of farm country. Charlton State is there, and
Speaker 2: during those years following the murder, during the nineties, it
Speaker 2: saw an influx of people, but nothing happened in Susan's case.
Speaker 2: Years went by, and finally in two thousand and five,
Speaker 2: eighteen years later, Michael Woods kind of came to a
Speaker 2: breaking point. Michael never got over this. He wanted to
Speaker 2: be a musician, and he tried to His lawyer says,
Speaker 2: you can't leave this town. They'll get you. They'll get
Speaker 2: you if you leave Indianapolis. So he and his brother
Speaker 2: start doing Skinnered and Charlie Daniels around town for thirty
Speaker 2: five dollars a pop. But even that became hard after
Speaker 2: the Indianapolis newspaper ran two articles saying that he was
Speaker 2: the focus of murder investigation from Stephenville Well. Michael tried
Speaker 2: to install home alarms. He tried to do this. He
Speaker 2: tried to do that. He didn't keep a lot of jobs.
Speaker 2: What he was good at was drinking and taking every
Speaker 2: drug that anybody ever handed it. And he slowly went
Speaker 2: to a spiral. He tried therapy that didn't work. Finally,
Speaker 2: he says, by the early two thousands, after about fourteen
Speaker 2: or fifteen years, he tried to kill himself. He said
Speaker 2: he took three handfuls of tranquilizers and in a rare
Speaker 2: bit of levity from Michael's side of the story, he said,
Speaker 2: all it did was put me to sleep for three days,
Speaker 2: and I woke up still depressed. In two thousand and five,
Speaker 2: he was playing a birthday party, a friend's birthday party
Speaker 2: with his brother, and afterwards it was just about the
Speaker 2: anniversary of Susan's death, and he walked out in the backyard.
Speaker 2: He was crying, and the host, who was just an acquaintance,
Speaker 2: walked out and said, Michael, what's wrong. And he explained
Speaker 2: that it was the anniversary of his wife's death and
Speaker 2: he can't go back to a graver and thin because
Speaker 2: the whole town thinks he did it. And this woman
Speaker 2: whose name was Barbara Gary, who has the briefest of
Speaker 2: cameos in this, says, well, that's just awful. And she
Speaker 2: she goes in the next morning and gets on her
Speaker 2: computer and she fires off an email to the Stephenville
Speaker 2: Police saying, I really wish you'd figure out this for
Speaker 2: cocta case, because this poor man is falling, falling apart
Speaker 2: because you have it solved and found the actual killer.
Speaker 2: What had happened by then was a new sergeant named
Speaker 2: Don Miller had taken over looking at a handful of
Speaker 2: cold cases that they had in Stephenville, and he knew
Speaker 2: that the fingerprints didn't matage Michael had never been told.
Speaker 2: He never understood what happened. Once they took his fingerprints.
Speaker 2: Don looked at that and said, this God didn't do it.
Speaker 2: And I bet you if I'm ever going to solve it,
Speaker 2: I need him to help me solve it. Don Miller
Speaker 2: calls and Michael said, I don't want to talk to you.
Speaker 2: Don says, I understand that, but I'm your only hope
Speaker 2: of ever ending this. And so Michael says, okay, what
Speaker 2: do you want? He said, I need to come up
Speaker 2: and there's this new thing called DNA, and I need
Speaker 2: to come up and get some DNA from you. And
Speaker 2: if you didn't do it, Michael, I can clear you.
Speaker 2: You'll be able to get on with your life.
Speaker 1: What had they collected sperm samples? I'm assuming saliva.
Speaker 2: There was DNA off the coke can.
Speaker 1: And cigarettes, right, Yeah, so they had done a good job.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's one thing you can point. They did a
Speaker 2: good job. And Don said, well, I want to come
Speaker 2: up there, and Michael said yes, and then Michael said no.
Speaker 2: Don had already gotten plane tickets, so he and his
Speaker 2: buddy just went on. Anyway, they get up there and
Speaker 2: it's like January or February. You know, it's twenty five
Speaker 2: degrees in Indianapolis, and they're wearing these texts lightweight Texas
Speaker 2: sports jackets. They're freezing. When they finally found their way
Speaker 2: to a fairly modest home where Michael and his brother
Speaker 2: were living, and they get up there on the on
Speaker 2: the front porch and knock knock, and Michael actually opens
Speaker 2: the door, and Don says who he is? And Michael's like,
Speaker 2: I told you I Michael talked to you. Why are
Speaker 2: you here? Don just keeps talking. It's just the load
Speaker 2: of just Michael. We need your DNA. This is your
Speaker 2: only hopelah blah blah blah blah bah blah. And after
Speaker 2: I don't know ten fifteen minutes its Michael's like, okay, fine,
Speaker 2: take the DNA and get off the caddian porch. And
Speaker 2: Dona turns to his partner and says, okay, let's do
Speaker 2: the DNA. The problem was neither one of them had
Speaker 2: ever used DNA kit before, and the partner says, I
Speaker 2: don't really know how to do this, and Don says,
Speaker 2: are their instructions. So they read the instructions and took
Speaker 2: a cheap swab send it down to Ranger station in Waco,
Speaker 2: and it came back clear the DNA and the fingerprints
Speaker 2: didn't match. DNA didn't match, and Don was able to
Speaker 2: call Michael and say, Michael, and you're cleared, and Michael
Speaker 2: began to cry and hung up. Great news for Michael, right,
Speaker 2: Not so great news for Donald Miller. He now has
Speaker 2: no suspects. However, what he has that they didn't have
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty seven is the FBI now has a
Speaker 2: fingerprint database. Don wanted to go to take their fingerprint
Speaker 2: card to Washington. His chief said, uh, uh, I'm not
Speaker 2: paying for you to go to Washington. Then he found
Speaker 2: out that the Rangers had access to it, so he
Speaker 2: just took the fingerprints down to Austin and gave gave
Speaker 2: him the original card and a few days later he
Speaker 2: gets a call back and he says, you got to
Speaker 2: you know, you got a penning pencil on. Don says, uh, sure.
Speaker 2: The fingerprints come back to Joseph Scott Hatley. Don writes
Speaker 2: his name down and Don asked the guy who's that
Speaker 2: and the guy says, I don't know, but it's from
Speaker 2: an arm robbery in Las Vegas, Nevada in nineteen eighty eight.
Speaker 2: This is three states away. If this Joseph Scott Hatley
Speaker 2: has any tide Stephenville. He calls the DA and says,
Speaker 2: do we know a Joseph Scott Hatley? And the DA says,
Speaker 2: you bet we do, and then Don says what he says,
Speaker 2: great case. In eighty eight he went for a grand
Speaker 2: jury and nobilly and he was long gone. No, we
Speaker 2: didn't know who he was, but his mother and I
Speaker 2: believe sister still lived in town. I wouldn't say a prominent,
Speaker 2: but they are a well known Stephenville family. His late
Speaker 2: father had owned several businesses, including a Texico station. Several
Speaker 2: of them had worked, including a sister had worked for
Speaker 2: the city. And so now Don realized I have a suspect.
Speaker 1: What is nobil?
Speaker 2: Nobil means that they took the case to a grand
Speaker 2: jury and the grand jury declined to indict.
Speaker 1: So what's the next step with Joseph Scott Hatley? What
Speaker 1: do we know about what he's doing when this is
Speaker 1: all happening.
Speaker 2: You know, he was everybody considered him just a normal kid.
Speaker 2: Beaver Cleaver born in nineteen sixty five, so it was
Speaker 2: four years younger than me. I grew up a few
Speaker 2: counties away was possessed of a burning anger incite him
Speaker 2: that he was never able to explain. He says that
Speaker 2: as early as the age of ten or eleven, he
Speaker 2: was planning a school, a Columbine style school massacre. You know,
Speaker 2: he developed thoughts of sexual and other types of vible.
Speaker 2: What really changed for him was when he was twelve thirteen, fourteen,
Speaker 2: he discovered two things that kind of became the great
Speaker 2: loves of his life. Beer, which soon became vodka. He
Speaker 2: became the type of drinker that, at least on weekends
Speaker 2: when he wasn't working, would start drinking vodka when he
Speaker 2: woke up in the morning and would still be drinking
Speaker 2: at night. In pornography. He had a stashup born in.
Speaker 2: I talked to a couple of experts and who just said,
Speaker 2: this is really really typical of somebody who acts out
Speaker 2: sexual violence. You know, nobody really saw him as anything
Speaker 2: other than a pretty normal kid. By senior year of
Speaker 2: high school, Scott had lost some of his baby fit
Speaker 2: at least learn how to talk to girls, and decided
Speaker 2: for a career he was going to go for the
Speaker 2: Air Force, a weapon specialist at basis around Texas. Then
Speaker 2: upon a high school graduation, he goes off to an
Speaker 2: Air Force training base of some type at Fort Lewis.
Speaker 2: I think it is outside Denver, And what matters for
Speaker 2: our story is that it's there that he meets his
Speaker 2: first girl. She's a quiet, serious, dark haired young woman
Speaker 2: that we never named. They both drank heavily, and Scott
Speaker 2: said it was love at first sight. And they're very young,
Speaker 2: they're very inexperienced, and on a whim they got married,
Speaker 2: and their parents and their commanding officers were pretty horrified,
Speaker 2: but they were married. She decides to join up full time.
Speaker 2: He decides not to, but they agree he'll follow her.
Speaker 2: So she gets assigned to the island of the Pacific
Speaker 2: Ocean island of Guam, and so he follows her out
Speaker 2: to Guam, and you know, they're apart full It's set
Speaker 2: couple of months. The moment they reunited, he realized the
Speaker 2: fire was, if not out, it was flickering. He says,
Speaker 2: there was a story in her eyes I couldn't read.
Speaker 2: He begins drinking even more heavily. The drinking turns to fights.
Speaker 2: She starts going out by herself, and the turning point
Speaker 2: comes one night when she came back after partying. She
Speaker 2: came back alone, and he had very strong sense, based
Speaker 2: on his read of the situation, that she'd been unfaithful
Speaker 2: and to him, it was as if his entire life
Speaker 2: had exploded and she betrayed him. In his mind, he
Speaker 2: had been raised very religious, the at least with the
Speaker 2: type of family that debated scripture at the dinner table,
Speaker 2: and so he starts praying that God take care of this,
Speaker 2: fix this for me. And after a period of time,
Speaker 2: God hasn't fixed it. So he said, well, if God's
Speaker 2: not gonna help me, I'm going to reach out to Satan.
Speaker 2: Problem was, she didn't exactly know how to reach out
Speaker 2: to Satan. He remembers that from every movie he's ever seen,
Speaker 2: it seems to always involve a lot of candles. So
Speaker 2: he gets up every candle in the house and lights
Speaker 2: them all over the living room one night while his
Speaker 2: wife is out, and prays to Satan that he will
Speaker 2: take his wife's life so that he will get her
Speaker 2: life insurance policy and he can go back to Texas. Well,
Speaker 2: that doesn't really much work. The praying to Satan seems
Speaker 2: to be pretty much a one off thing. But I
Speaker 2: will say that in the manifesto. It's something he loops
Speaker 2: back to several times, wondering if the pact that he
Speaker 2: offers satany if that explained the things that he did
Speaker 2: or in life. So he calls his mom. His mom says,
Speaker 2: come on home. He does. They divorce, and you know
Speaker 2: barely what. A couple of years after leaving home, Scott
Speaker 2: finds himself living with his parents, going back to work
Speaker 2: for his dad, driving the back roads around Stephenville, brooding
Speaker 2: in the brown pickup that his parents bought him for graduation,
Speaker 2: listening to his eight tracks of Motley Crue with no
Speaker 2: sense really of where he's going to go. The one
Speaker 2: thing I can say he tried to do too. He
Speaker 2: did two things that were kind of new. One he
Speaker 2: started asking people he wanted to reinvent himself, obviously, so
Speaker 2: he started asking people if they'd call him Joseph instead
Speaker 2: of Scott. I don't think anybody actually did that. And
Speaker 2: he invented what became his favorite drink, the thing that
Speaker 2: he would drink every evening and pretty much all day.
Speaker 2: He called it v syrup, and it was vodka, koffserup
Speaker 2: and pepsi, which he put in a forty ounce foam
Speaker 2: sonic cup, and if you're from Texas, we all know
Speaker 2: sonic cups. And he would drink this morning, noon, or night.
Speaker 2: About his only social outlet was at his sister, Regina's home.
Speaker 2: She was married at a few years older. They'd always
Speaker 2: been close. He would go over there and most nights,
Speaker 2: certainly on the weekend, Regina would convene a group of
Speaker 2: people around the round table in her kitchen. They started
Speaker 2: calling themselves members of the round Table. And it was Roy,
Speaker 2: and it was Cindy, and it was some other friends.
Speaker 2: And they would sit there and drink and play cards,
Speaker 2: because that's pretty much all there was to do in Stephenville, Texas,
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty eight. And you know, they all saw that
Speaker 2: he was drinking a lot, that he was in some distress,
Speaker 2: but they figured, you know, he'd grow out of it
Speaker 2: once his divorce went through. And that is basically the
Speaker 2: story of Scott Hatley until fateful night the middle of
Speaker 2: July nineteen eighty eight, when a new face appears at
Speaker 2: the round table in Regina's kitchen, and it's Susan Woods
Speaker 2: who showed up for one night. And in his manifesto,
Speaker 2: Scott Hatley says that they engaged in some drunken flirting
Speaker 2: both ruins and they were like, that's just crazy. He
Speaker 2: was hot, he was just drunk, but that was enough.
Speaker 2: That was the hook, the flicker, the moment that ended
Speaker 2: Susan Woods's life. About a week or ten days later,
Speaker 2: no doubt, after a long night driving around in his
Speaker 2: brown pickup drinking his v syrup, he shows up unannounced
Speaker 2: on Sunday night at Susan's home and she lets him.
Speaker 1: In what happens with Don Miller. Next he gets this
Speaker 1: hit on the fingerprint database and Joseph Scott Hatlee is
Speaker 1: just floating about right now.
Speaker 2: Right after the murder, he raped a girl and after
Speaker 2: that he had flat down thinking that he was going
Speaker 2: to be arrested for the rape, and he went to
Speaker 2: Las Vegas and ended up robbing a shoe store and
Speaker 2: they arrested him. He did about one hundred and twenty
Speaker 2: days in a youth offender program. He kept thinking, well,
Speaker 2: they're gonna come. Stephenville is gonna come in any moment
Speaker 2: and rest me for the rape, and no doubt they're
Speaker 2: going to now make the connection to the murder. They
Speaker 2: never did. He came back to Stephenville and the paranoia.
Speaker 2: Lived pretty close to the police station. He could see
Speaker 2: him coming out at six am and six pm and
Speaker 2: the cruisers. He just thought it was a matter of time.
Speaker 2: So his older brother was a long distance truck driver,
Speaker 2: and Scott moved to Nashville and became a truck driver.
Speaker 2: Apparently he did that for about five years. Says he
Speaker 2: was pretty good at it. Unfortunately, as some truck drivers do,
Speaker 2: he started taking amphetamines and ran into another truck. Lost
Speaker 2: that job, ended up as a supervisor in a grocery warehouse.
Speaker 2: You know, he started to build a life. The years
Speaker 2: went by since the murder. Five ten years, he married,
Speaker 2: he had two kids, and around nearly two thousands, he
Speaker 2: was doing well enough in his job that they offered
Speaker 2: him a transfer to be a supervisor. Apparently this was
Speaker 2: a promotion to a warehouse in round Rock, Texas, which
Speaker 2: is a suburb north of Austin. By two thousand and six,
Speaker 2: when Don matched up the fingerprints, he was a supervisor
Speaker 2: down in round Rock. You know, he worked nights and
Speaker 2: so and he slept days, and that's what he was
Speaker 2: doing that day in June two thousand and six, when
Speaker 2: Don Miller asked the round Rock police to bring him
Speaker 2: in for questioning.
Speaker 1: Is this an open and shutcase for Don Miller?
Speaker 2: Yep?
Speaker 1: Does he confess?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, initially Don didn't know what to make
Speaker 2: of this about Joe's Scott Hatley, and he got there
Speaker 2: the rape file from the DA and he's going through it.
Speaker 2: And I've looked at this report. It's like a four
Speaker 2: paid single space report and down deep in the middle
Speaker 2: of it the girl who he was raping and it
Speaker 2: lasted sixty eight hours in a local park out on
Speaker 2: the edge of town. She ran from him. At one
Speaker 2: point he chased her and fell on top of her
Speaker 2: and he says, you mind me or I'll kill you.
Speaker 2: And I've done it before. And when Don saw that,
Speaker 2: he realized that's the guy. So when Don shows up
Speaker 2: and round rock, he has no doubt that Joseph Scott
Speaker 2: Hatley is the guy. He gets DNA, he talks to him.
Speaker 2: Hatlee is very blase, Oh, my dad's sex Withether, I
Speaker 2: don't know. And as Don told me, if that's a
Speaker 2: red flag right there, if you're accused of murder, you're
Speaker 2: denying it up and down. You're not you know, you're
Speaker 2: not being blase about it. So Hatlee went home last
Speaker 2: that night. As he writes in his manifesto, he knew
Speaker 2: what was going to happen the next day, and this
Speaker 2: was his last time to make a run for it.
Speaker 2: He says, you know, was I stupid for going back
Speaker 2: in the next day? No, I was tired. He went
Speaker 2: back in the next day. There was a lot more
Speaker 2: questioning in that night, and when they let him go,
Speaker 2: he was out in an eye hoop with his family
Speaker 2: of four. They'd stepped into parking lot and everybody else
Speaker 2: got into a van and he stood there and lit
Speaker 2: a cigar And when he let the scar of the
Speaker 2: the round Rock cops came out and they rested him
Speaker 2: on domestic abuse case for his wife. But while he
Speaker 2: was being held on that, Don filed on him for
Speaker 2: the murder. Brought him back to Stephenville, and you know,
Speaker 2: it was at that moment that the town kind of
Speaker 2: had to come to grips with what had happened. You know,
Speaker 2: there was a different town that it had been. But
Speaker 2: you know, when Don sat down with people like Susan's
Speaker 2: father and his friends, you know, they just didn't want
Speaker 2: to believe it. They're like, well, you're just wrong. It's
Speaker 2: Michael Woods. Why haven't you gotten Michael Woods. Well, it
Speaker 2: doesn't match. It's that Joseph Scott Halley. We don't know Joseph. Well,
Speaker 2: it's Sydney Hollmark's cousin wall He's a good boy. He
Speaker 2: didn't do it. But in the end there was as
Speaker 2: we were saying in the article, there was no dramatic
Speaker 2: purple walk. There's no tiary confessions. He cut a deal
Speaker 2: for thirty years. Could have been longer, but Susan's family
Speaker 2: didn't want the attention to try.
Speaker 1: How old was he when all this happened In two
Speaker 1: thousand and six.
Speaker 2: When he was arrested, he was forty, went off to Huntsville,
Speaker 2: came down with bladder cancer, which went into a mission.
Speaker 2: They let him out after I want to say, eleven years. What. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he came out and went to Halfway House in Midland.
Speaker 2: He was serfacing trucks at the beginning of the pandemic.
Speaker 2: He was laid off and he went to live in
Speaker 2: an RV by his daughter outside Abilene, and the cancer
Speaker 2: came back and he died and a fellow bought the
Speaker 2: RV where he died, and as he was going through
Speaker 2: it found all these pictures of Don and Susan, and
Speaker 2: he found the manifesto and he gave it to Don,
Speaker 2: and Don ultimately got it to me. You know, this
Speaker 2: was not a news story. It had been on forensic files,
Speaker 2: but the manifesto. Having the manifesto, I I mean, I
Speaker 2: could actually now tell the full story. It only took
Speaker 2: me about three months to do it. I mean, it's
Speaker 2: a fairly small cast of characters, maybe eight people. And
Speaker 2: after I turned it into Texas Monthly, after a month
Speaker 2: or two after that, we started making it into a podcast.
Speaker 1: Do you believe everything in that manifesto? Do you think
Speaker 1: that this was really Joseph Scott Hatlee on a page
Speaker 1: for you?
Speaker 2: I actually kind of believe he was being honest with himself.
Speaker 2: What I have a hard time believing is that a
Speaker 2: lot of the things that he was making excuses. You know,
Speaker 2: he was an unhappy kid. Maybe his mom was mean
Speaker 2: to him a time or two, and so suddenly he
Speaker 2: blames her for an unhappy childhood, and nobody saw any
Speaker 2: of that. I did talk to one expert that said,
Speaker 2: the facts of it don't matter. What matters what he thought,
Speaker 2: what he believed. So many people who do things like
Speaker 2: this are reacting to some type of childhood powerlessness, and
Speaker 2: for whatever reason, he clearly felt that I believe the booze.
Speaker 2: I believe, I believe the porn, I believe the stuff
Speaker 2: about the marriage, and the said yeah, I believe. I
Speaker 2: believe most of this. I have to say. Running this
Speaker 2: behind all the people who were closest to him in life,
Speaker 2: you know, there was nothing to argue with factually. Now,
Speaker 2: how honest is he being about his internal landscape? That
Speaker 2: is for a reader or in this case, a listener
Speaker 2: to decide. But let's say we understood sixty or seventy
Speaker 2: percent of the facts before his manifesto. I think with
Speaker 2: the manifesto you get up to about ninety eight percent
Speaker 2: of the facts. It completed what was already a compelling
Speaker 2: story for me.
Speaker 1: Did Joe Atkins and the Atkins family finally accept that
Speaker 1: Joseph Scott Hatley was the killer and not Michael Woods,
Speaker 1: the jerk ex husband.
Speaker 2: I don't know they've passed, but I'm told they reluctantly
Speaker 2: had to. Nobody ever came back and apologized to Michael Woods.
Speaker 1: Has he turned out to be okay? Since this has happened, ish.
Speaker 2: I've reported stuff around the World for The Wall Street Journal,
Speaker 2: for Randy Fair. I've met my share of people who've
Speaker 2: been in pow camps and abuse and torture, and you know,
Speaker 2: there is that sense when you're sitting in front of
Speaker 2: someone cave that someone's been through a trauma. There was
Speaker 2: a sense when Michael that he'd been through a trauma.
Speaker 2: This was a guy who had a rough life, and
Speaker 2: so I was I wondered, how lucid is this guy
Speaker 2: going to be? And he was one hundred percent. He'd
Speaker 2: given them a lot of thought.
Speaker 1: You and I come from the same world of print.
Speaker 1: You write these stories and you have all these words
Speaker 1: where you're describing the victim, you're describing the killer, you're
Speaker 1: describing emotions. You're trying to get that across to the reader.
Speaker 1: And now we're in this audio format where you don't
Speaker 1: have to do as much explaining. You can just hear it.
Speaker 1: You can hear the laughter and the joy, you can
Speaker 1: hear the sorrow and someone's voices. It's very, I think
Speaker 1: liberating in a lot of ways.
Speaker 2: It is there's no substitute for the immediacy of hearing
Speaker 2: that person's voice in your ear. And I got very,
Speaker 2: very lucky, Kate. I got very, very lucky. You know.
Speaker 1: On this show and all the shows I do, we
Speaker 1: talk a lot about the importance of focusing in on
Speaker 1: the victim, and I know that you have been able
Speaker 1: to do both. Who do we meet in the podcast?
Speaker 1: Who can illuminate Susan's character? Is it Roy and Cindy?
Speaker 2: Roy and Sindy. You're great because in their telling of
Speaker 2: Susan's life, it's not defined by what happened at the end.
Speaker 2: They prefer to remember the young woman who brought a
Speaker 2: smile on their face and their laughter, and the joy
Speaker 2: that they have of sharing with you and bringing her
Speaker 2: back to life for people who would never know her
Speaker 2: is so infectious. And the producer, at one point, the
Speaker 2: wonderful producer, Brian stanfordson, are you at all concerned that
Speaker 2: we're telling this fairly dark story and these people are
Speaker 2: in hysterics laughing about, you know, sneaking beer. I said, no,
Speaker 2: this can't be dirge and funereal. We must allow that.
Speaker 2: So I think they do the best job of illuminating
Speaker 2: the character of Susan. And then Michael, he would tell
Speaker 2: you probably that she was the only one we hear her.
Speaker 3: Love If you love historical true crime stories, check out
Speaker 3: the audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All
Speaker 3: That Is Wicked and American Sherlock. This has been an
Speaker 3: exactly right production. Our senior producer is a Lexi Amirosi.
Speaker 3: Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
Speaker 3: by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Speaker 3: Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and
Speaker 3: Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at
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