0:06

Texas Monthly.

0:18

Back at the roadside park south of Stephenville,

0:21

Don Miller has shown me the scene where Scott Hatley

0:23

attacks Shannon Myers. The

0:26

ditch where Hatley pushed Shannon's face

0:28

into the mud is still there, though it's

0:30

deeper today. The

0:32

picnic tables where they sat are still

0:34

there under an old metal roof with

0:37

fresh graffiti on the paint. Ninety-nine

0:40

out of a hundred people who visit the park

0:42

today will only ever see this much.

0:45

Don and I, of course, see something very

0:48

different.

0:48

Thirty-five

0:50

years have passed since that pitch black night

0:52

in 1988, and it's been seventeen years

0:55

since Don first identified Hatley's fingerprints

0:58

in Susan Woods' bathroom. A lot

1:01

has happened since then, and I'll tell you about

1:03

all that in a bit. But the best way

1:05

to begin to tell you the whole story is

1:07

with something that just happened at Christmas time

1:09

in 2021. Don

1:12

had just retired from the Stephenville Police

1:14

Force. That's when he got that phone

1:16

call. A man in Abilene said his

1:18

neighbor had just died, and this man had bought

1:20

the trailer where his neighbor had been living. And

1:24

as he was cleaning out the RV in

1:26

some cubbyholes, he found

1:30

some pictures

1:30

of myself.

1:33

Of you? Of me. He found pictures

1:35

of me and of Shannon

1:38

from newspaper articles. You know, there were clippings

1:40

about the case, about us, and

1:43

then he found some writings.

1:47

The man who made this discovery had no idea

1:49

what to make of it, but he was scared. The

1:52

whole collection had a menacing feel to

1:54

it. This man and his family had

1:56

been living close by. He just wanted

1:59

someone to come take it away.

1:59

So Don went, and

2:02

that's how we came to possess what the man had

2:04

found. Scott Hadley's handwritten

2:07

life story, almost 200 pages, in

2:10

slanted neatly printed capital letters. It

2:13

was very dense and very long, but

2:15

it told a story no one had known.

2:17

Don reached out to me through a friend thinking

2:20

I might want to write about it. I had

2:22

to read through it two or three times to begin

2:24

to grasp how extraordinary it was. I

2:27

brought along a copy and asked Don to flip

2:29

through it again. Alright,

2:30

so first, just

2:33

initial reaction, these first few pages, which

2:35

are about his childhood. Well,

2:38

this is a man who obviously, in my

2:41

mind, was very proud of what he did. He

2:44

wanted notoriety of it. I've

2:47

since learned that it's not uncommon

2:51

for this type of personality to write

2:53

manifestos.

3:00

When I read through what Hadley had written,

3:02

I was struck by its candor, its wrenching

3:05

self-awareness in places. By how

3:07

this 50-year-old adult, looking

3:09

back on his life and where it went so horribly

3:11

wrong, could be so clear-eyed about

3:14

the little steps that led him to commit

3:16

such violence against two women in Stephenville

3:19

all those years ago. He writes

3:21

about the intense anger he'd felt since

3:23

he was at least eight years old. How

3:26

he had wanted to commit a Columbine-style

3:28

school massacre years

3:30

before Columbine itself. How

3:32

he amassed a set of secret habits that

3:34

kept his violent fantasies in check for a time.

3:38

And how his descent into violence turned

3:40

him into something else. He wrote,

3:42

My God, I had become a monster.

3:46

Yes, Scott Hadley was a murderer

3:48

and a rapist, and I have no sympathy

3:50

for him. The what he'd written

3:52

provided an unusual glimpse of what

3:55

remained of his humanity, while at

3:57

the same time conjuring the self-portrait of

3:59

a man who was a man of a man.

3:59

He was aware enough to look inside himself for

4:02

answers,

4:03

but still couldn't find them.

4:06

But Don, after more than 40 years

4:08

of police work, is a tough old cop,

4:11

the kind who still calls criminals maggots.

4:14

And he found this line of inquiry a little less

4:16

engaging.

4:18

Okay, yeah, so we all have our baggage.

4:21

We all have things that we wish, you know, we

4:23

didn't have to go through as kids. I

4:26

feel like that little

4:29

boys who don't like their mommies are

4:31

not well-adjusted adults. That

4:33

screams at me. He,

4:38

you know, he writes to try

4:40

to be normal, but he knows

4:43

that he's not a normal person. He knows that.

4:46

Even if, to everyone else, that's

4:48

exactly how he seemed. Yeah,

4:51

and you know, you say nobody knew

4:53

about him. I don't know. I don't know what his parents

4:55

knew. I don't know what his sister knew. You know, I

4:57

had no idea what his immediate

4:59

people knew. Surely somebody had

5:01

known something that they didn't talk about.

5:08

From Texas Monthly, this is Stephenville.

5:11

I'm your host, Brian Burra. This

5:14

is episode five.

5:16

Scott. The unpublished autobiography of Joseph

5:19

Scott Hatley is

5:22

laid out like a screenplay, much

5:25

of it told in flashbacks after his arrest. It

5:27

opens cinematically with a scene inside a jail. He

5:31

opens his eyes and hears a voice telling

5:34

him a Texas Ranger was there to see

5:36

him. He makes a

5:37

few wisecracks to the jailer and then to the Ranger. Why

5:40

didn't they send Walker? Well, he's

5:43

a real guy. And then

5:45

to the Ranger. Why didn't they send Walker?

5:47

Was Chuck Norris busy today? The

5:50

other men laugh.

5:51

He's pushed into the back of the Ranger's

5:53

car for a long drive to transport

5:56

him to another jail, a routine transfer.

5:59

closes his eyes, leans

6:01

back into his seat, and starts asking

6:03

himself questions. He wonders,

6:06

how in the world he ended up here?

6:08

What happened to his life?

6:10

And then, the flashbacks. Hatley

6:15

came from a fairly well-known Stephenville

6:18

family. He was born in 1965,

6:21

the youngest of three children.

6:23

He tells the whole story. His

6:25

mother, Celia Hallmark, grew

6:27

up poor in the country, picking cotton

6:29

when she was a kid.

6:31

His father, Levi Hatley Jr.,

6:33

was raised on a dairy farm. In

6:35

the mornings, Hatley writes, young Levi

6:38

would ride a bull across the field to meet the school

6:40

bus. Celia was

6:42

a homemaker, and by the time Scott

6:44

was growing up, his father, Levi, owned

6:47

a Texaco station in town. As

6:49

a little kid, Scott would help make popcorn

6:52

or grease up the trucks in the mechanic shop.

6:55

On the face of it, this was standard

6:57

small-town Texas life, long

6:59

work days, orderly home, doting

7:02

grandparents, church on Sundays. It's

7:05

a different childhood than I had in the central

7:07

Texas town of Temple. I grew up

7:09

there as a bit of an outsider. My

7:11

father was a bank president. We were new

7:14

to town, and we weren't terribly religious,

7:16

nor did we have family nearby.

7:19

But I knew lots of kids like Scott Hatley.

7:21

Their lives revolved around family and the church,

7:24

maybe football too or farming. A

7:27

lot of them were on the quiet side and

7:29

didn't act out that much, at least until they

7:31

were teenagers.

7:32

It was strange reading Hatley's

7:35

manifesto. I realized how much

7:37

I'd judge so many of those kids without

7:39

ever truly knowing them.

7:41

Reading Hatley's memories, I

7:43

realized I probably hadn't known them at all. In

7:46

the 70s, when we were both growing up,

7:49

Hatley was, like me, a blind

7:51

preteen with an awful bowl haircut. He

7:54

was a Cub Scout. He played baseball,

7:56

basketball, and football and worshiped Roger

7:58

Staubach. Check. check and check,

8:00

I thought, you could have said much the same thing

8:03

about 70% of the kids in small town

8:05

Texas. He writes that

8:07

his older brother was the wild child,

8:10

his sister Regina was the smart one, and

8:12

that he was somewhere in between,

8:14

smart enough to get by without trying too

8:16

hard. What was he like at

8:18

the age of 12 or 13? Just typical.

8:21

He worked clever. He was

8:23

just a nerdly little guy,

8:26

kind of chubby and didn't look like he

8:28

was particularly popular in school.

8:31

That's Gloria Martin, who you've heard before.

8:34

She was friends with Susan Woods, and she

8:36

knew Scott Hatley as a kid.

8:38

When I was 13, I started making

8:40

the drag, which is riding up and down the street,

8:43

you know, with

8:45

his older sister, who was two years older

8:47

than me. And we made the drag and made

8:49

the drag and made the drag, and sometimes

8:51

Scott would end up being stuck with us. And

8:55

it wasn't fun, and we didn't want a 12

8:57

or 13-year-old boy in the back

8:59

seat. Though she was eight years older,

9:02

Susan Woods and Scott Hatley did have

9:04

a few mutual friends. Those

9:06

connections became significant later,

9:08

of course, but to the police, they meant nothing

9:11

because they'd never suspected Scott.

9:13

As first cousin, can

9:17

you help me understand your

9:20

view of who he was as a boy?

9:23

As a young boy? You

9:26

know, five to 15. Another

9:28

voice you've heard before, Susan's best

9:30

friend, who went by Cindy Hallmark

9:32

in those days before she married Roy

9:34

Hayes.

9:35

That would be a very good question, probably for

9:38

him, because they went to school together. I went

9:40

to school with him since first grade. I

9:43

was dyslexic, diagnosed,

9:46

so I repeated first grade, and that's where I met Scott

9:48

Hatley. He had a speech impediment, and we went

9:50

to speech together. I mean, a lot of people

9:52

had trouble understanding his mother was the only one who could really

9:55

understand him. But, yeah,

9:57

we spent

9:58

years together.

9:59

and going once a day to speech,

10:02

and we were friends. And probably

10:05

first and second, third grade, we were really good friends.

10:07

I went over to his house and

10:09

he came over to mine. And

10:12

everything was okay. I mean, he was

10:14

a good kid, or at least I thought he was.

10:19

It can

10:19

be a little too easy for someone like me

10:22

to try and explore a murderer's childhood

10:24

for warning signs, especially when

10:26

they weren't obvious. But in his autobiography,

10:29

Hatley spends a good deal of time doing

10:32

exactly that. He knows he ended

10:34

up somehow broken, and he's trying

10:36

to understand why.

10:38

From an early age, he writes, he

10:40

was consumed by a burning anger he

10:42

can't fully explain. He

10:44

claims his mother was abusive and slapped

10:46

him often, though years later, both

10:48

his mother and sister strongly denied

10:51

this. The way he tells it, the

10:53

abuse enraged him, but he kept

10:55

it inside.

10:56

He says he was bullied at school, mostly

10:59

about his weight. He and his sister were

11:01

both on the heavy side, and by age

11:03

eight, Hatley says, he'd begun to

11:05

conjure violent fantasies of revenge.

11:09

And there was the church.

11:11

His family was religious. They were

11:13

the kind of people who debated scripture at the dinner

11:15

table. And in early age, Scott

11:17

learned that there were powerful forces at play

11:19

in the world around him. To him, God

11:22

and Satan were tangible beings who could

11:24

influence lives.

11:26

His favorite part of going to church was

11:28

the leader of the youth choir, who he

11:31

says was fun and popular with the kids.

11:33

But when Scott was 12 or so, the

11:36

choir leader was suddenly fired. Scott

11:39

was incensed. He decided he was

11:41

done with organized religion. He

11:43

was still looking for answers, but convinced

11:46

he wouldn't find them in a church pew.

11:48

Okay, so reading this thing, he

11:52

clearly wants

11:54

you to believe, and I don't have any reason not to,

11:56

that he had a certain anger inside him

11:59

from a young.

11:59

age. And he thought he was smarter than everybody

12:02

else, too. Really? How did

12:04

that manifest itself? Just an attitude?

12:06

Yeah, you know, an attitude. I mean, he

12:08

would act around in family reunions and stuff

12:10

as we got older and me and Cindy Mann starting

12:12

out. You know,

12:15

he thought he was smarter than everybody else. He was older than him,

12:17

and he thought they were just codgers and

12:20

basically just plotters, you know, people plotting

12:22

long in life. By the time

12:24

he turned 13 or 14, there's

12:26

a sense that Hatley is developing three

12:28

very different personas. In school,

12:31

he was mostly quiet,

12:32

not a ton of friends, especially girls. Then

12:35

that louder, pushier side he displayed

12:37

around his family. And then there

12:39

was a third, darker side that

12:42

few ever saw.

12:43

When me and Cindy first started dating, they

12:46

knew I read books. And they

12:49

said, well, hey, you and Scott would be great together. He

12:51

loves to read books, too. And we sat

12:53

down and we talked, and he loved true crime. We

12:56

love reading all about true crime and,

12:59

you know, Son of Sam

13:01

and stuff like that, which we talked and I was

13:03

like, it will never work.

13:04

We'll never share a book. Because in my books,

13:06

you know, the hero always has to

13:08

win. And I guess I'd be good

13:11

for gun smoke or something

13:14

like that. But that's just the world

13:16

I choose to live in. That, you know, right wins the

13:18

day.

13:19

In his writings, Hatley says that

13:21

from the outside, my youth seemed like a normal,

13:24

healthy and happy time, but

13:26

that on the inside it was confusion,

13:29

violent thoughts and hate. He

13:31

describes daydreams about orchestrating

13:33

a school shooting 20 years before

13:36

Columbine.

13:37

He says, I loved my parents,

13:39

but knew I would have to kill them before I went

13:41

to the school. This was my youth.

13:44

They said I was such a good boy.

13:47

I heard them talking about how they were so

13:50

out of the blue that it was Scott.

13:53

He did do one thing when I was about 15

13:56

that really kind of, in retrospect,

13:59

was creepy. I was

14:01

riding around with Regina and I had bought myself

14:04

a bottle of Everclear and I

14:06

mixed it with a can of Big Red and went riding

14:08

around with someone who will remain nameless

14:10

that I would have never been seen with. I

14:13

had got really tanked up. I

14:16

remember the guy was riding with, he

14:18

drove me to Regina's house and I slid

14:20

down the wall of her brick house and

14:22

passed out. They were about to

14:24

call the cops couldn't find me and then

14:27

Regina saw my feet sticking out of the flower

14:29

bed. So she

14:31

gets Scotty and they both carry

14:34

me in the house and she's trying to put me to

14:36

bed and Scotty was

14:37

totally fixated on the fact that I

14:39

was unconscious and didn't want to

14:41

leave the room. And Regina finally

14:43

said you're not gonna be in here when I get her undressed,

14:46

Scotty. You just get that you know get out of here

14:48

and he really really wanted to stay.

14:55

When I talked to Gloria, I asked

14:57

her when Susan first came on her radar.

15:00

Well because of Regina, Scott's sister,

15:03

we'd be riding around me and Regina drinking

15:05

beer and sneaking

15:08

cigarettes and then we'd see

15:10

Susan and Cindy. We'd be like, oh my gosh hide the beer,

15:12

hide the beer, there's straight arrows, there's

15:14

straight arrows. And it turned out at the same time

15:16

they were going hide the beer, there's the straight arrows. But

15:19

that's how we became friends.

15:24

This kind of teenage drinking, sneaking

15:26

around, begging strangers to buy you beer

15:29

at the 7-Eleven was common in

15:31

small-town Texas in those days as

15:33

I suspect it was everywhere. I snuck

15:35

my share of beer and like Scott Hately,

15:38

I had a hard time handling it.

15:39

But like most people, I ended up learning

15:42

how to drink without it damaging my life.

15:44

Hately though, never did. In his

15:47

manuscript he writes that he was about 13

15:50

when his sister or one of her friends handed

15:52

him his first beer. By the time he

15:54

finished it, he realized even then his

15:57

life had changed forever.

15:59

he writes with an exclamation point,

16:02

from the first buzz I knew that alcohol

16:04

is what I craved, what I needed, what I

16:06

had to have. Pretty quickly he

16:09

graduated to vodka.

16:10

His second great love, again discovered

16:13

in his early teenage years, was pornography,

16:16

which in those days meant dirty magazines.

16:19

You could shoplift them or ask an adult

16:21

to buy them at many convenience stores. Scott

16:24

Hatley wasn't the first 15 year old with

16:26

a secret stash of porn mags. He

16:28

seems to have kept a stash of vodka as well.

16:31

They became reliable in a way that people,

16:34

especially girls, sell them war.

16:36

He says, I would lie to myself

16:39

and say that I have my booze and porn, so

16:41

I don't really need a girl.

16:45

So Scott writes in there about discovering

16:48

alcohol, discovering porn, getting,

16:52

having violent fantasies. All

16:54

of this would come as news to y'all. Never

16:57

knew anything about it. We did know the alcohol.

16:59

All this was pretty much a

17:01

secret. At Stephenville High,

17:03

Hatley seemed like a normal teenager, finally

17:06

shedding his baby fat and learning how to at least

17:08

talk a little with girls.

17:10

He spent much of his free time working for his

17:12

father. Like Susan Woods, he

17:14

was curious about the world outside Stephenville,

17:17

but like Susan, he had a hard time navigating

17:20

it. During his senior year, he joined

17:22

the Air Force Reserves and trained

17:24

to be a munitions specialist at bases

17:26

in Texas. After graduation,

17:28

he went on to an Air Force technical school

17:31

at a base in Colorado, outside Denver.

17:34

It was at a dormitory there that he met

17:36

his first girlfriend.

17:37

She was a young, serious, dark-haired

17:39

woman from Ohio.

17:41

We're not naming her here for privacy reasons.

17:44

Scott was very much a virgin. He'd never

17:46

even kissed a girl. He writes

17:49

that it was love at first sight.

17:51

After hours, they slow danced to

17:53

Prince's purple rain. On

17:55

weekends, they made love in a cheap hotel.

17:58

Scott writes that it was the happiest... time

18:00

of his life. They were both young,

18:02

they were both inexperienced, and

18:04

on an impulse they got married.

18:06

No one, not their parents, not

18:09

their commanding officers, was terribly happy

18:11

about this.

18:12

His new wife went ahead and joined the Air

18:14

Force. Scott actually decided not

18:17

to enlist, but when she was assigned

18:19

to a base on the island of Guam, 7,000 miles away

18:22

in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Scott

18:25

joined her there. He stepped off

18:27

the plane and into a strange new

18:29

world of blue ocean, white

18:31

beaches, and deep green jungle.

18:34

But from the moment the newlyweds reunited,

18:37

he knew something was wrong.

18:39

He writes that the fire between them had

18:41

cooled just a bit, and that, quote,

18:43

there was a story in her eyes I could not

18:46

read.

18:47

They had a small apartment in a village

18:49

off base. Scott got a job

18:52

at an insurance agency, and they passed the

18:54

time drinking and having little adventures.

18:57

When his wife went skydiving with her new

18:59

friends, Scott was waiting on the ground.

19:02

When they missed the landing spot, he slashed

19:04

through the jungle with machete to find them.

19:06

But between the two of them, Scott writes

19:09

the magic was gone. They grew

19:11

distant. The drinking turned to arguing

19:14

almost every day. Scott found

19:16

himself missing his family,

19:18

missing Texas. And

19:20

this is when, he says, that something began

19:22

to shift inside him, the darkness

19:24

he had known since childhood returned.

19:27

Their love life deteriorated.

19:30

Once, when his wife remained half asleep,

19:32

Scott discovered he enjoyed having sex

19:34

that way, being in total control

19:37

of a woman.

19:38

His drinking took a toll at work, too.

19:40

His sales commissions were shrinking. He

19:43

began using an office copy machine to

19:45

forge company checks. This

19:47

is when he started praying again for

19:49

the first time in years. He fell

19:52

back on what he learned around the dining room

19:54

table, the epic struggle between good

19:56

and evil.

19:57

And when praying to God didn't seem to help,

20:00

he decided he would pledge his life to Satan.

20:03

The problem was he had no clear sense how

20:05

to summon the devil. But in the movies

20:07

he knew, it always seemed to involve a whole

20:09

lot of candles. So one evening

20:11

when his wife was out, he gathered up every

20:14

candle in the house and lit them.

20:16

Then he kneeled and asked Satan for help.

20:19

He wanted his wife dead so he

20:21

could get her life insurance payout and move

20:23

back to Texas.

20:24

In return, he offered up his soul.

20:27

As ominous as all this sounds,

20:30

conjuring the devil seems to have been a one-time

20:32

thing. But this memory plagued Hatley

20:35

for years.

20:36

Over and over again in his writings, he

20:38

returns to this incident. He

20:40

wonders if the deal he made with Satan

20:43

explained the things he would later do. Meanwhile,

20:46

his wife began going out alone. One

20:49

night she came home late and Hatley

20:51

was struck with a strong sense that she'd been

20:53

unfaithful. He was overwhelmed

20:56

with a sense of his life falling apart. He

20:59

writes that this was the night that changed everything.

21:02

He says she'd given him the quote, fuel

21:04

that I would use to destroy my life.

21:07

He acknowledges that he didn't have the maturity

21:09

or the experience to overcome this. And

21:12

that quote, my inner demons were

21:14

unleashed.

21:18

This is the story Scott Hatley tells. And

21:21

of course it's imperfect. There is probably

21:23

some self-mythologizing going on here

21:25

and certainly some blame shifting.

21:28

He was an angry kid. For this

21:30

he all but blames his mother.

21:32

He was a scorned and vengeful husband.

21:34

He says that was his wife's fault.

21:36

So for me the question becomes,

21:39

is he concocting these feelings after

21:41

the fact to absolve himself of responsibility

21:44

for the crimes he committed or were

21:46

these feelings truly what drove his behavior?

21:49

This struck me as something for an expert.

21:52

So I called one. Good morning,

21:54

can you hear us? I can hear you. Oh,

21:56

fabulous. Welcome

21:59

aboard. I can't

22:01

thank you enough for doing this. Dr. Katherine

22:04

Ramsland is one of the nation's foremost

22:06

experts on the criminal mind. She

22:08

teaches at DeSales University in

22:10

the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania.

22:12

So I teach forensic

22:15

psychology at the graduate and undergraduate

22:17

level, and I spent a lot of

22:19

my days researching extreme

22:22

offenders, typically mass,

22:25

spree, and serial killers, sometimes

22:28

also one-off type

22:30

killers. But for the most part, I'm

22:33

immersed in violent

22:35

minds.

22:36

We talked over Zoom. Behind

22:39

her I could see what looked like the living room wall

22:41

of an old house, wood paneling,

22:43

a metal handrail on the stairs to a second

22:46

floor. But it's not her home. It's

22:48

more like part of her office. The

22:51

setting I'm in is a house we have

22:53

on campus where we use

22:55

as a crime scene lab

22:58

experience, and

23:00

we lay out various scenarios

23:03

for our students to come

23:05

and learn investigation.

23:07

Katherine keyed in right away to those lines

23:10

Hatley wrote about his mother, that

23:12

she'd slap him regularly, a time

23:14

when he was 15 when he claimed

23:16

he walked in on his mom beating his sister

23:19

and threatened to kill her if she did it again.

23:21

He doesn't dwell on this, but the moments are

23:23

there.

23:24

Neither his mother, Celia Hatley,

23:27

nor his sister Regina, I should point out, are alive

23:29

today. But years ago, both denied

23:31

all of this.

23:33

I didn't know what to make of what he

23:35

said about his mother because I also

23:38

have testimony in a grand jury from both

23:40

the mother and the sister denying anything like

23:42

this. So I thought,

23:44

I don't want to portray

23:46

this woman as something she violently says she's

23:48

not. But based on what he does

23:51

say,

23:51

what do you think the most likely scenario is

23:54

for how he became what he became? Do

23:57

you see evidence that he was a powerless

23:59

youth?

24:00

I see evidence that he was a powerless youth.

24:03

Now it's not necessarily about what's reality,

24:05

it's about what's perception. So

24:09

he could exaggerate, let's

24:11

say his mother took

24:14

the wooden spoon to

24:16

spank the sister and he exaggerates

24:19

that in his imagination to being

24:21

a far more

24:23

violent beating than it really

24:26

was. It's always about

24:28

how the children perceive and process

24:31

the information and then it

24:33

becomes part of the fantasy life.

24:35

Katherine told me this explains a lot

24:37

of his attitude toward women he meets later.

24:40

Whatever he can find to make

24:42

the female in the relationship look

24:44

bad certainly does go back to

24:47

these childhood fantasies

24:49

that he said he had about

24:52

feeling powerless

24:54

to a woman, to his mother. He didn't talk about

24:57

his father in this way. Would you look

24:59

at the path that he lays

25:01

out toward the

25:04

young adult that he became?

25:06

Heavy drinking, the vodka,

25:09

porn,

25:10

little

25:14

to no interaction with girls, no

25:16

dating. Do

25:19

you read that just going yeah, yeah, yeah, read

25:21

that a million times or is there anything unusual

25:24

about that path?

25:25

That seemed to me a very typical

25:27

kind of a way to absolve

25:30

himself of responsibility for

25:32

his own life, for his own sense

25:34

of things. When he wants

25:36

to he'll use Satan, he'll use God.

25:39

God didn't answer my prayer. If only he would

25:41

have done so, everything would have been different.

25:44

The question that seems to be driving Hadley

25:46

throughout his life story is why

25:49

am I like this? And he never quite

25:51

answers it.

25:52

But he pinpoints that moment in Guam,

25:54

believing that his wife had been unfaithful as

25:57

the moment when everything changed.

25:59

He says his demons were unleashed

26:03

when he kind of began to snap Well,

26:06

there's not really any such thing as snapping.

26:08

I know that's a popular idea that that

26:11

there's a tipping point but

26:13

it usually is accumulation of things

26:16

as well as you know that how

26:19

One's personality and temperament come

26:21

into it. So his inability

26:23

to really deal with How

26:26

his decisions have gotten him into certain

26:28

situations? His

26:31

tendency to drink it away

26:33

or or get high To

26:35

not really see his own

26:37

hand and what he's done That's

26:41

that's who he is. That's how he set his life

26:43

up and that's how he continues to live for

26:45

most of his life

26:48

The way Hatley tells it the demons

26:50

that emerged in Guam didn't surface

26:52

overnight First he called his mother

26:55

she told him to come home and

26:57

he did leaving his wife and eventually

26:59

divorcing in Dallas he stumbled

27:02

off the plane. He says so drunk

27:04

I could barely walk

27:07

Stephenville was exactly the same

27:09

as he'd left it, but he realized

27:11

that he wasn't this was 1986 he

27:14

was 21 years old back living

27:17

with his parents, which was bad enough But

27:20

to add insult to injury his

27:22

old boss at the insurance company had discovered

27:24

that he'd been printing fake checks Scott

27:27

had to ask his dad for help paying

27:29

back the money

27:31

He made a stab at reinvention asking

27:33

people to call him Joseph his first name

27:36

instead of Scott But his primary

27:38

accomplishment around this time was the

27:40

invention of something he called V syrup

27:43

Which was a cocktail of vodka with

27:45

a bottle of cough syrup. He drank

27:47

it from a large foam cup Sometimes

27:50

mixed with Pepsi often while driving

27:52

in the brown pickup his parents bought him for graduation

27:56

He'd cruise the roads around Stephenville

27:58

for hours rooting, cranking

28:01

up motley crew on the radio and

28:03

hashing through the mess he'd made of his life. He

28:06

was pretty much aimless, living

28:09

in his parents' house and working for his dad,

28:11

just like he'd done as a teenager,

28:13

drinking at his sister's house with her

28:15

and her friends. My opinion, anyway,

28:17

I think Cindy agrees. We

28:20

thought he was drowning his sorrows because

28:22

of his divorce. And we thought

28:24

eventually he'll

28:26

snap out of it when he's vented

28:29

enough. And

28:31

we thought that we'd go there and we'd talk

28:33

to him and listen to him talk about what

28:36

a blank she was, how things

28:39

were and everything.

28:43

We'd play cards because I cannot

28:45

talk without playing cards normally. So

28:48

this is the group that he, this was at

28:50

his sister's house? Yes. The

28:53

round table. Y'all were members of the round table? I

28:55

guess so, yeah. I guess so. I

28:57

guess so.

28:58

Hatley writes about these nights they spent

29:01

gathered at the round table in Regina's

29:03

kitchen. How many people typically

29:05

would we be talking? There really

29:07

wasn't that many. There was normally Cindy and myself.

29:10

There was Scott. There was Regina. Sometimes

29:13

Sherry would drop by. Melissa would often

29:15

drop by. Troy always sat

29:17

in the living room watching TV.

29:20

Then there was the two kids and they

29:23

were small children. But that was it pretty

29:25

much, wasn't it? Yeah.

29:27

Sometimes there might be another person every

29:29

once in a while. It wasn't like a huge party. No. I

29:32

told you. It wasn't. But

29:35

on a fateful night in July 1987,

29:36

a new face appeared at the round table.

29:39

Susan Woods. I

29:41

remember one time. She said, I don't remember that.

29:43

Yeah, he don't remember it, but I do. She

29:46

did come one night because she

29:48

always worked second shift. And so she was

29:50

always working when we were over there because

29:52

it was usually Friday night, Saturday

29:54

night or

29:55

whatever, you know. I

29:57

didn't even know they knew each other. I really.

30:00

I told her, I said, it's done because I didn't even think Scott

30:03

and Susan knew each other. Hatley

30:05

writes that he'd known Susan for years

30:08

since she was his cousin Cindy's best friend.

30:11

That night, he insists, the two of them

30:13

engaged in a little drunken flirting. Uh-uh.

30:16

Nope. She wouldn't have flirted with him. She

30:18

wouldn't have touched him with a 10-foot pole because

30:22

Susan had a tipe

30:24

and

30:24

being overweight was

30:27

not her tipe. She also had a thing

30:29

about younger men. Scott

30:31

was about six

30:34

months younger than me even. She

30:37

was one of these women of that

30:39

age who believed the man had to be older.

30:42

I don't believe for a second that she was flirting.

30:44

What I believe is that Scott was

30:46

very drunk and very high and he seems to

30:49

have pretty much stayed that way.

30:51

I mean, she would be nice to him. She

30:53

was going to be nice, but she was nice to everybody.

30:55

It was on a Sunday night,

30:58

a week or so later, he writes, almost

31:00

certainly after a long drive in his pickup

31:03

sipping his V-surb, that he

31:05

drove to Susan's house unannounced. He

31:08

says his plan was to see if she wanted to

31:10

smoke a couple of joints before he went home,

31:12

nothing more. She let him

31:15

in.

31:15

He says they listened to some albums and

31:18

smoked together.

31:19

From the evidence, it appears they were cigarettes.

31:22

Then at some point he writes, he quote, overstepped

31:25

his bounds and she slapped him. What

31:28

happened next, Hatley writes, was

31:31

a blur.

31:32

And then comes his confession,

31:34

the point where he admits he murdered Susan

31:37

Woods. But he doesn't describe it.

31:39

Instead, he just says he came out of a fog

31:42

and realized that he had brutalized her.

31:45

That's the word he uses.

31:46

He says he felt he was quote, controlled

31:49

by an outside source. He

31:51

does remember one exchange during

31:53

the attack. She promised not

31:55

to tell anyone what he'd done if he'd only

31:58

let her go. He writes, that

32:00

he, quote, found it interesting that

32:02

she thought any of that mattered. He

32:04

says he asked if she believed in God,

32:07

and when she said yes,

32:09

he told her that she needed to pray.

32:12

There's so much that isn't here,

32:14

anything that would illuminate the brutality

32:17

evident in the scene police found later.

32:19

Hatley says he left out those details out

32:21

of a sense of propriety and respect

32:24

for his and Susan's families. Now

32:26

I've written about my share of murderers, and

32:29

I had a sense of what was going on here.

32:31

I put the question to Catherine.

32:34

I suspect that he's hiding something, and that

32:36

is that,

32:38

you know, for a lot of killers, and I see the

32:41

clues to this throughout

32:42

what he's written, they are

32:45

preoccupied, if not obsessed, with violent sexual

32:47

fantasies. And I think that's what he was

32:49

acting out when he did this, and

32:51

yet I find little

32:54

to no indication that he wants to go there. Would

32:57

you buy that?

32:58

Well, I think they're obsessed with

33:00

control. That's the first thing, and

33:02

that

33:03

need for control typically comes

33:05

from a feeling of powerlessness as

33:07

children. And so especially

33:10

control over women, and

33:12

control over their ability to humiliate

33:15

him or make him feel

33:17

powerless, so he wants that. And so

33:19

the violent sexual fantasies

33:22

come out of that initial

33:24

need, even before he's becoming

33:26

a sexual person. The

33:28

fantasies are there because he needs

33:31

that control.

33:31

So when he writes something

33:33

like, that night I took the life of a kind,

33:36

sweet, loving woman who never did

33:38

anything to me but show me kindness. My

33:40

God, I'd become a monster. You basically

33:42

think that this is a form of virtue signaling.

33:45

I don't think it's virtue signaling.

33:47

I think it's just he knows what to say. In

33:49

fact, later on in his document, he does

33:51

talk about, why don't I really feel anything

33:53

about this? It is monstrous,

33:56

and yet it doesn't really affect me. And

33:58

I think that's why he... He's able

34:00

to put the right words to

34:02

it because he knows what people will expect.

34:05

He's certainly been raised in a religious household

34:08

with realities of God and

34:10

the devil and basic

34:13

Texas family values. So

34:15

he knows what to say. I just don't think he feels

34:18

it very much and I don't think he really believes it.

34:21

Even when he admits

34:23

he's a monster, he

34:25

does not want to talk about what that means.

34:27

He's not willing to do that. I just

34:30

didn't see him being that insightful

34:32

or wanting to explore where

34:34

did this come from. He might say that,

34:37

but he never actually does it.

34:39

So there's a big gap between

34:42

his

34:42

narrative and his behavior.

34:46

Maybe you've picked up on the fact that with

34:48

a career spent analyzing the most violent

34:51

and antisocial people in our society,

34:53

Catherine is not terribly impressed by Scott

34:56

Hadley.

34:57

It was something we got out of the way at the start

34:59

of our conversation. Is there

35:01

anything unusual about Joseph

35:03

Scott Hadley's violent mind

35:06

or is he just

35:08

in the universe of

35:11

violent people, is he just one

35:13

more shmo? I

35:16

would say he's one more shmo who

35:18

has found ways to justify

35:21

and minimize his violence and

35:23

blame everything

35:25

he can find to blame so that he

35:27

does not have to take responsibility. He's

35:30

very average in that respect.

35:33

But if he was in fact no criminal

35:35

mastermind, well you can see

35:38

where he might get the wrong idea about himself

35:40

given what happened next.

35:42

He writes that he left Susan's house

35:44

and immediately started coming to terms with

35:46

the punishment he was sure awaited him.

35:49

The police station was on his way home that night.

35:52

He paused at the stop sign and thought

35:54

of turning into the parking lot.

35:56

Of course he didn't. A few days

35:58

later he went to Susan's funeral.

35:59

He says he felt nothing. There

36:02

were police all around. No one seemed

36:04

the least bit suspicious of him, as in fact

36:07

they weren't.

36:08

He read the story about her murder

36:10

in the newspaper. In his manifesto,

36:13

he says, I wish with all my heart

36:15

that I could tell you that I mourn for what I

36:17

had done. But that would be a lie.

36:21

Instead, he says what he felt

36:23

was a new kind of thrill. One

36:26

day after the next, he went about

36:28

his life knowing he was

36:30

getting away with murder. Next

36:34

time on the final episode of

36:36

Stephenville.

36:38

The first time I talked to Hadley, you

36:41

have to understand, I already know what

36:43

he is. I already know what he did. But

36:46

he comes in and he acts, tries

36:48

to act calm, cool, collective,

36:53

nonchalant, which to

36:55

me is a big red flag anyway.

36:58

If I were to call you into my

37:00

office and say, I think you killed somebody,

37:03

you would immediately, immediately

37:06

start denying it. And hard denying

37:08

it. That's not what he did.

37:13

Stephenville is a Texas monthly production.

37:15

Executive producer is Megan Crite.

37:18

The show is produced and edited by Patrick

37:21

Michaels and produced and engineered

37:23

by Brian Standifer, who also wrote

37:25

the music. Additional production

37:27

is by Jackie Ibarra. Story

37:29

editing by J.K. Nickel. Paul

37:32

Knight is our fact checker. Additional

37:34

field recording in this episode by Christine

37:36

Fennessy and Zorik Sia. Artwork

37:39

is by Emily Kimbrough and Victoria Milner.

37:42

I'm your host

37:43

and writer, Brian Burra.

37:45

See you all next week.