There Is a Monster in Me (Rebroadcast)

Summary

20/20 Podcast Summary: "There Is a Monster in Me (Rebroadcast)"

Podcast Information:

• Title: 20/20
• Host/Author: ABC News
• Episode: There Is a Monster in Me (Rebroadcast)
• Release Date: July 26, 2025
• Description: Unforgettable true crime mysteries, exclusive newsmaker interviews, hard-hitting investigative reports, and in-depth coverage of high-profile stories.

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1. Introduction to the Case

The episode opens with Deborah Roberts highlighting the rarity of a violent murder in the small town of Stephenville, Texas, a community of approximately 12,000 residents. The focus is on the brutal murder of Susan Woods, a young woman whose death left the town in shock and suspicion.

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2. Susan Woods: Background and Murder

Susan Woods was portrayed as "sincere and sweet and humble," embodying the ideal young woman in Stephenville. Her life took a tragic turn in late July 1987 when she was found brutally murdered in her bathtub. Don Miller describes the horrific crime scene: “The body was draped over the tub with the chest and head submerged in water” (00:49).

Key details of the murder include:

• Signs of Struggle: Evidence pointed to a desperate fight for life (00:57, 01:01).
• Varying Methods of Assault: Susan endured assault via a pillow, an electrical cord, and finally drowning (13:30).
• Forensic Evidence: Six cigarette butts were found at the scene, belonging to an unknown male, complicating the investigation (12:42, 14:19).

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3. Initial Suspect: Michael Woods

The investigation quickly zeroed in on Michael Woods, Susan's estranged husband, due to circumstantial evidence:

• Jealous Messages and Notes: Michael left numerous threatening notes around the house, including in the microwave, kitchen drawer, coat pocket, and medicine cabinet (01:22, 32:42).
• Volatile Relationship: Their tumultuous breakup and Michael's departure in a stolen yellow Mustang fueled suspicions (31:28, 32:33).

Don Miller recounts, “I knew he had killed her. I told him, I said, he'd killed her” (01:09, 15:37), reflecting the town's consensus.

Despite strong local suspicions, Detective Donnie Hensley found no concrete evidence linking Michael to the crime (16:39). Consequently, attention shifted to alternative suspects, particularly J.C. Bowman, a bartender who had been involved with Susan prior to her murder.

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4. Shifting Investigations and New Leads

J.C. Bowman emerged as a suspect after:

• Proximity: He had been spending significant time with Susan, including in the bathtub (16:49).
• Inconclusive Alibi: His alibi during the time of the murder was weak, as he was alone at home (19:18, 19:46).

However, DNA testing at the time was not advanced enough to conclusively link him to the crime, leading to his eventual clearance.

The investigation remained stalled until new evidence surfaced decades later, primarily through advancements in DNA technology and the discovery of additional forensic clues.

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5. The Monster Unveiled: Joseph Scott Hatley

In a startling turn of events, Joseph Scott Hatley was identified as the true killer of Susan Woods:

• Fingerprint Match: Decades after the murder, fingerprints from Hatley's 1988 armed robbery arrest were matched to those found at the Susan Woods crime scene (50:25, 48:56).
• Confession Through Writings: After Hatley's death in 2021, pages of his handwritten account revealed his motivations and actions, implicating him in multiple violent crimes, including the murder of Susan Woods and the rape of Shannon Myers (73:28, 75:07).

Don Miller reflects on the discovery: “This is the same person who killed Susan Woods” (40:30), emphasizing the betrayal and hidden nature of Hatley's crimes.

Hatley's writings unveiled a history of abuse, psychological trauma, and violent fantasies, which eventually manifested in his heinous acts (73:28, 74:02).

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6. Resolution and Aftermath

Hatley's arrest brought closure to the prolonged investigation:

• Legal Proceedings: Hatley pled guilty to Susan Woods' murder without a public trial, opting for a plea deal that granted him 30 years in prison while bypassing charges related to domestic violence and Shannon Myers' rape (69:12, 69:37).
• Community Reaction: The revelation exonerated Michael Woods, who had endured decades of wrongful suspicion and ostracization. However, the confirmation of Hatley's guilt shocked the community and highlighted significant injustices within the investigative process (66:02, 71:56).

Don Miller expressed relief but also frustration over the prolonged suffering caused by misdirected suspicions: “DNA tells a story and it doesn't lie” (67:45).

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7. Impact on Individuals and the Community

The case profoundly affected several individuals:

• Michael Woods: Cleared of all charges, yet decades of mistrust and isolation left him emotionally scarred (77:22, 80:12).
• Detective Don Miller: Driven by a commitment to justice, Miller's persistence ultimately led to the truth but also exposed systemic flaws in the investigation (78:01, 81:09).
• Shannon Myers: As a survivor of Hatley's abuse, Shannon found solace and a sense of justice with the resolution of Susan Woods' case, though the scars of her trauma remained (80:03, 81:22).

The broader community grappled with the realization that the true perpetrator had been hiding in plain sight, undetected for years.

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8. Concluding Insights

The episode underscores the complexities of criminal investigations, especially in tight-knit communities where preconceived notions and biases can hinder the pursuit of justice. The eventual identification of Joseph Scott Hatley serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of tunnel vision and the importance of continual re-evaluation of evidence with advancing technologies.

Brian Burroughs, the author involved in the podcast, concludes with a reflection on the human capacity for darkness hidden beneath seemingly ordinary exteriors: “You don't realize that sometimes there are monsters that live in the hearts of other people. Right under your nose” (77:37).

The case of Susan Woods not only brought closure to a tragic event but also highlighted the resilience of victims and the relentless pursuit of truth by dedicated individuals like Detective Don Miller.

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Notable Quotes:

• David Muir: “I knew he had killed her. I told him, I said, he'd killed her.” (01:09)
• Don Miller: “Sometimes there are monsters that live in the hearts of other people.” (01:57)
• Deborah Roberts: “The cassette tapes and these little notes change everything. They take a nasty breakup...” (32:33)
• Joseph Scott Hatley (via writings): “I've become a walking demon. I was his servant, his slave. I was the devil.” (70:44)
• Don Miller: “DNA tells a story and it doesn't lie. The proof is there that, that I didn't do it...” (67:45)

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Timestamps:

• Key moments and quotes are referenced with timestamps, e.g., [00:49], [13:30], etc., correlating to specific parts of the transcript for detailed listening or review.

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the intricate narrative of Susan Woods' murder, the misdirection of initial investigations, the eventual revelation of the true perpetrator, and the profound effects on all parties involved. It serves as a testament to the enduring quest for justice and the hidden evils that can lurk within seemingly ordinary communities.

Transcript

[David Muir]

On WhatsApp, no one can see or hear your personal messages. Whether it's a voice call message or sending a password to WhatsApp, it's all just this. So whether you're sharing the streaming password in the family chat or trading those late night voice messages that could basically become a podcast, your personal messages stay between you, your friends and your family. No one else, not even us. WhatsApp message privately with everyone. A woman's murder in small town Texas.

[Deborah Roberts]

The killer's 200 page confession found years later. What it reveals in all new 2020 starts right now. It's not every day in a town of 12,000 that you get a violent murder.

[Don Miller]

The body was draped over the tub with the chest and head submerged in water.

[Brian Burroughs]

There was the sense that there was rage involved.

[Deborah Roberts]

This was a young woman who put up quite a struggle for her life.

[Don Miller]

Could it have been a fantasy game that got out of hand?

[David Muir]

I knew he had killed her. I told him, I said, he'd killed her.

[Don Miller]

She started screaming, yes, he killed her.

[David Muir]

He said he killed her. He killed her.

[Deborah Roberts]

Everybody in Stephen's Ellen was damn sure they knew who did it.

[Brian Burroughs]

And who was that man?

[David Muir]

He had left terrible notes all over the house. You'd open the microwave and there'd be one in the door. You'd open the drawer in the kitchen, another note, there'd be one in her coat pocket. Lift the lid on the toilet, there's a note. There would be one in the medicine cabinet.

[Brian Burroughs]

You said no one ever got angry at Susie. You got angry at Susie.

[Don Miller]

You know, as bad as we thought it was then, I mean, it was going to get worse.

[Deborah Roberts]

He finds something much darker and much more ominous.

[David Muir]

As soon as I got in the vehicle, I knew I made the biggest mistake of my life.

[Don Miller]

Sometimes there are monsters that live in the hearts of other people.

[David Muir]

Pat under your nose.

[Don Miller]

Today is 66 of 0 6. The day we meet the devil. Him.

[Brian Burroughs]

Deep in the heart of Texas. Decades of unanswered questions about a murder found hidden in a trailer on the outskirts of the woods. A voice from beyond the grave and a mystery that had lingered over a town for years was about to resurface.

[Don Miller]

A friend of mine called me and he said, hey, there's a guy out in Abilene who has some writings very concerned about that you might be interested in. He says it's some crazy stuff. And so he gave me all of this. Of course, I had no idea what it was and I brought it back and started reading.

[Deborah Roberts]

Remained this mystery. Nobody ever understood it. A Killing that has preoccupied so many of us for so many years. By God, I had become a monster. I was the devil. Stephenville has always called itself the cowboy capital World.

[Don Miller]

It was real big on rodeos. There were a lot of professional rodeo cowboys that started here. So that was a big thing.

[Deborah Roberts]

People wear their cowboy hats and wear their boots and it's not kitsch, it's real. This is who people are. This is an authentic and enduring way of life in rural Texas. Livestock and livestock raising is a big part of the economy.

[Brian Burroughs]

And right there on a pedestal in the town square, not a lawman or a local hero.

[Don Miller]

A cow.

[David Muir]

Oh, yeah, the moolah cow. It represented a really booming milk industry.

[Don Miller]

It's a lot of moolah.

[David Muir]

People go to church on Sundays and they go to lunch afterwards. A lot of people were born here, they were raised here and they never left. So you had generations of families who all knew each other.

[Brian Burroughs]

Author Brian Burroughs grew up in a small Texas town. He was drawn to this story of a young woman from Stephenville named Susan Jeanette Adkins.

[Deborah Roberts]

She was sincere and sweet and humble, and she was pretty much everyone's idea of an ideal young woman.

[David Muir]

Susan was a very shy, quiet person until you got to know her. She was hilarious. She didn't mind embarrassing you if she thought of something funny that would get your goat. But you couldn't stay mad at her because she was so cute.

[Brian Burroughs]

Susan was no rebel. She was raised in a churchgoing family of four and that shyness meant that she only had a few close friends. One of them had been in band.

[David Muir]

With her, Thelma and Louise. We could finish each other's sentence. We were best buddies. Yeah, she was a one in a million.

[Deborah Roberts]

Friday nights were for football, Sundays for.

[Don Miller]

Church.

[Deborah Roberts]

And on Saturday night everybody cruised. Then in Stephenville he was called Cruising the Drag.

[David Muir]

All the kids would just drive from one Dairy Queen to the other and you'd stop at the parking lots and wait for people you knew to pull in and talk to. I spent a lot of time making the drag with Susan and Cindy.

[Deborah Roberts]

When she got out of school at 18, she took a job at a sandpaper factory and her life started to change in ways that she hadn't expected.

[David Muir]

Susan was very beautiful. Every time we'd go out, the guys would go for her.

[Brian Burroughs]

How did she first get a look at Michael Woods?

[Deborah Roberts]

She was driving the drag one day and she's literally crossing the railroad tracks and she looks down and like an album cover, she sees this long haired guy coming out of the sun. And so she pulls over and they met. She fell for Michael and she fell hard.

[David Muir]

Susan had a type, and it was a kind of rough looking bad boy type. And they were older than her and very macho man type.

[Deborah Roberts]

It's easy to imagine that she found Michael just a little bit exotic. You know, the long hair, he played, the guitar, he played rock and roll. Michael was her rebellion.

[Brian Burroughs]

So in a town of crew cuts and cowboys, Michael woods was a rocker. To Susan, he looked like Bob Seger. To everyone else, he looked like trouble. But that didn't deter Susan. They had fallen in love.

[Deborah Roberts]

For a while there, every fiber of this woman's being was dedicated to this man. I mean, she was all in.

[Brian Burroughs]

Then Susan tells Michael it's time for them to get married.

[Deborah Roberts]

And Michael, with just this amount of thought is like, I'm free tomorrow between 11 and 1.

[Brian Burroughs]

At first, it was Susan and Michael against everyone, even her family. Even after they wed, Stephenville was not the place for his rock star dreams. And at home, eventually the power ballads faded out. Michael couldn't find steady work and they got to quarreling.

[David Muir]

He was a great guy until he wasn't when they broke up.

[Deborah Roberts]

And it was bad. And it of course just got worse.

[Brian Burroughs]

Are they arguing with each other at this point?

[Deborah Roberts]

By that final year, yeah, they were fighting. He began to believe that he could have had a better life without her. And then out of nowhere, he leaves. And he doesn't go with a whimper. He goes with the van.

[David Muir]

She was devastated.

[Don Miller]

And I can only imagine how that was. You get home in a cold house, all the lights are out, and you're wondering what happened.

[Brian Burroughs]

He's taken the car. He's taken her fur coat and vanished in a rage. Susan is freaked out, so Cindy stays on her sofa. Roy offers her a gun, but she gives it back instead. He comes over and he nails her window shut.

[David Muir]

She was afraid of Michael after they broke up because he did have a little bit of a jealous crazy streak. She was scared.

[Brian Burroughs]

Susan asks for a divorce from Michael, who skipped town. And later that summer, it's as if she comes out of her shell a little bit. She starts going out with a new guy, a bartender.

[David Muir]

She was really starting to become happier. A whole new chapter gonna open up for her.

[Deborah Roberts]

And then there's this night in late July that everybody involved remembers. Roy and Cindy take Susan to the carnival. And nobody enjoys themselves for whatever reason. So Roy says, let's all go back to Stephenville and go Dairy Queen.

[David Muir]

We both loved hot fudge sundaes too much And Susan done something she's never done before. She looked at me and she goes, you know, I think I'm gonna order me another one. And she really got to enjoy it.

[Deborah Roberts]

Two days later, her supervisor at the factory called her dad and said, we haven't seen Susan for a couple of days and it's totally not like Susan.

[Don Miller]

When we walked into the house, I just wasn't ready for what we were gonna see.

[Brian Burroughs]

It's late July 1987, hot and quiet in the small town of Stephenville, Texas. Joe Atkins is worried about his 30 year old daughter, Susan Woods. He'd gotten a call from her boss that she hadn't turned up for work in two days. No one had seen or heard, heard from her.

[Deborah Roberts]

He goes up to the front porch and the front door is ajar and he walks in and he finds her in the bathroom and she's dead. And when the first cruisers start showing up in a matter of minutes later, Joe's out in the front yard waiting for him in tears. It's not every day in a town of 12,000 that you get a violent murder. This is an all hands.

[Don Miller]

So it was in the late afternoon we heard on the police radio that there was a homicide. I walked in the front door and immediately I noticed there was a TV against that wall. And then across from it there was a little table. And on the table there was a bag of chips and a Coke can and a cigarette tray with ashes in it.

[Brian Burroughs]

In the bedroom there are signs of a desperate struggle.

[Don Miller]

When we walked into the house and saw the carnage in the bedroom, I just wasn't ready for what we were going to see. Looked like where the bed had been, scooted about five or six inches towards the bathroom. Like there may have been a struggle and trying to pull somebody. In the bathroom.

[Deborah Roberts]

There was a single pillow they found and upon studying, it hit them. It was makeup from Susan's face. You could see tears in the makeup. And it was the type of thing that everyone involved, well, still remembers.

[Don Miller]

This is a close up of that pillow. You can see those smudge marks right there. That is mascara from her eyes. So her head would been smashed hard into the pillow during this assault.

[Brian Burroughs]

That's like a death mask.

[Don Miller]

Exactly.

[Brian Burroughs]

The scene in the bathroom is even more disturbing. That's where Susan was found.

[Don Miller]

She was completely nude, so it looked like a sexual assault. The body was draped over the tub with the chest and head submerged in water. Her hands were tied behind her back with what looked like a tank top that had been twisted up. Her arms were Pretty high up. My initial thought was that somebody had used that as leverage to keep her under the water. And if that was the case, then there's probably going to be prints on the bathtub on either side.

[Brian Burroughs]

And sure enough, there were both fingerprints and palm prints.

[Don Miller]

But whose? So we got good prints on both sides of the body on the tub. We just had to identify who it was.

[Deborah Roberts]

It was pretty clear that the person who killed her tried to kill her three different ways with a pillow across the face, clearly with some type. It looks like an electrical cord with a ligature mark across her neck. And then by drowning her.

[Brian Burroughs]

The scene was beyond horrific. Detectives took a close look at one detail. The six cigarette butts that were in the ashtray.

[Don Miller]

You know, the question is, what is going on with six cigarette butts? I knew it was significant. Looked like somebody had been sitting there watching tv, smoking cigarettes and snacking. And she wasn't the kind that would let a person come in, especially a man. She was very introverted and cautious that way.

[Deborah Roberts]

Well, Susan did not smoke, nor did she drink caffeine. And so the thought develops early on that there was a good chance that the killer had stayed there long enough to drink that coke and smoke those cigarettes.

[Don Miller]

Now, if we've identified, who would the cigarette butts belong to? And the cokes in the other room, they say, yeah, I stopped by and, you know, we watched TV for a little bit and talked and I left. She was okay then. The way I figure it, those palm prints on each side of the body are irrefutable. The handprints beside the body on the tub, you can't explain those. So I knew if we could find the palm prints, we had to kill her. Well, there's a couple of theories going around. As far as the detectives could tell, robbery wasn't a motive. It was straight up sex. From what anybody could tell, there was.

[Brian Burroughs]

The sense that there was rage involved. Something really violent had happened.

[Deborah Roberts]

Well, for entirely different reasons, the police and the community were thinking the same thing, that this was someone she knew.

[Don Miller]

As we drove down the road, we could see strobing lots of emergency vehicles and stuff. And we got up there close to her house, and we saw the yellow tape.

[David Muir]

Yellow barrier tape, yellow police. I knew he had killed her. I told him. I said, he killed her.

[Don Miller]

She started screaming, yes, he killed her.

[David Muir]

He said he killed her. He killed her. And I was talking about her ex husband, Mike.

[Deborah Roberts]

And of course, everybody in Stephen Vellen was damn sure they knew who did it.

[Brian Burroughs]

And who was that man?

[Deborah Roberts]

Michael Woods?

[David Muir]

No doubt in our minds, all the pieces to the puzzle led straight to Michael. She would have let him in the house. He smoked, and he had a very volatile personality. So the whole world blamed Michael from the minute it happened.

[Deborah Roberts]

Let's just say as that impression and that conclusion spread around town, you didn't get a lot of pushback.

[Don Miller]

And when the police talked to us, and that's what we tell them, there.

[David Muir]

Was no other enemy.

[Don Miller]

You go from the victim and start working your way out, spiraling out. So you know, he was a rightful first suspect.

[Brian Burroughs]

But Detective Donnie Hensley, who has taken the lead on the case, he has no evidence to link Michael to the.

[Deborah Roberts]

Scene or even being back in the town or even being back in the state of Texas. And so he does what he has to do, which is he starts to look at the other possible suspects and.

[Brian Burroughs]

At one man in particular, a guy who'd been spending a lot of time with Susan after Michael had left. And some of that time in that very same bathtub, she would have a.

[Deborah Roberts]

Beer, while I'd have two or three Coca Colas.

[Don Miller]

When you're investigating a case like this, you don't want to get tunnel vision and miss the obvious. I want the person that did it and nobody else. If I was them, I would be.

[David Muir]

Looking at me, too.

[Brian Burroughs]

As Stephenville residents wake up to the news of the gruesome murder of Susan woods, local police begin to canvass the neighborhood. Turns out the man they want to talk to is someone that Susan met 30 miles from here. His name is J.C. bowman.

[David Muir]

J.C. was a bartender at a club in Granbury that I had taken Susan to, and I had introduced them, and they were casually dating.

[Deborah Roberts]

He was basically just seen as a guy who had stumbled into Susan's life at a point. It was one of the last male relationships she had before she was killed.

[Don Miller]

I was bartending at Norfolk in Granbury. This cute little lady came in one night wearing this shirt, Einstein sticking his tongue out. And I had the poster at the time, and she was wearing this.

[Deborah Roberts]

And I said, I like that shirt. That's how we broke the ice.

[Don Miller]

And the next time she came in.

[Deborah Roberts]

She gave me that shirt.

[David Muir]

I don't think it was a real hot and heavy romance, but they had fun together. It was kind of a distraction for both of them.

[Deborah Roberts]

And J.C. bowman was apparently passably cute, and he started coming by her house at night.

[Don Miller]

Neither one of us wanted a serious relationship. We just wanted friends with privileges. She would call me when she was in the mood to have company. We'd Sit there and watch the movie and snuggle and a lot of black and white.

[Deborah Roberts]

We both like Tarzan, original Johnny Wise, Melotar's End movies.

[Don Miller]

I'd drink my Coca Colas and she'd drink a beer. In the crime scene photographs there was a picture of six cigarette butts that were collected. Then there was a beer can and a Coke can.

[Brian Burroughs]

And police learned that JC had made one of those visits to Susan's house. Just days before Susan was murdered.

[Don Miller]

She and I had taken a bath in the bathtub together.

[Deborah Roberts]

My fingerprints were all over the place.

[Don Miller]

And they were already on file for possession of marijuana. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I had no alibi for where I was that night. I was at home alone watching TV by myself. Yeah, if I was them, I would be looking at me too.

[Deborah Roberts]

The lead detective, Johnny hensley, brought in J.C. bowman for a lie detector test and fingerprints.

[Don Miller]

You remember precisely what you had done on Saturday 26th July? You know I sure can. I'm not gonna lie to you.

[David Muir]

I realize you are a suspect and.

[Deborah Roberts]

You'Re gonna be a suspect until I.

[Don Miller]

Resolve the fact that you're not a suspect.

[David Muir]

Until ya.

[Don Miller]

I didn't, I couldn't do something like that. I couldn't do something like that little myself. Well that's between you and your guy. I said, am I clear now? Did the lie detector test come out positive or how did it do? He said, well it was inconclusive. He said, you're still on the list but you're not on the top of the list.

[Brian Burroughs]

Police then turned their attention to the report of a man who was seen lurking outside Susan's home around the time she was murdered.

[Deborah Roberts]

So after JC though things get a little bit interesting because first off, one of the neighbors did think that they saw a large guy in the neighborhood that night, maybe near Susan's house.

[Don Miller]

It was a red pickup truck and a guy, a large Frame man, probably 9 or 10 or 11 o' clock at night was seen leaving her house, got in that truck and they took off. So based on that, the suspect would have been a large frame big guy. That's Roy Hayes. And you know, Roy was a friend, so you know, Inslee zeroed in on him.

[Deborah Roberts]

When Susan was by herself in those days and weeks after Michael left, she feared for her safety. It was Roy who came in and nailed the windows shut. It was Roy who briefly lent her a pistol. So Roy had access to.

[Don Miller]

I got a call from the police department asking me to come in and they wanted to ask me about, you know, Susan woods death. My fingerprints were all over the house because I'd nailed all the windows shut. So I mean that pretty much a given. What was your relationship with Susan? Mainly 370, but I did know her. He sat down after a couple beers with her. She wouldn't have felt comfortable. You don't think she'd been comfortable sitting on couch with you?

[Brian Burroughs]

You drank coke.

[Don Miller]

No, I'm sure she wouldn't have.

[Deborah Roberts]

But the thing that really made him odd was that Roy played Dungeons and Dragons. You know, it's a game where you have a bunch of characters, elves and mystics and things and you know, in a bible fearing place like Stephenville, it did bear a whiff of the satanic.

[Brian Burroughs]

So back in the late 70s and early 80s, Dungeons & Dragons set off a moral panic around the country, thanks in part to shows like the 700 Club, Dungeons & Dragons creates a world of fear and death. The most thoroughly researched introduction to the occult in man's recorded history. And some critics went on to make false claims that the game caused players to take their own lives or even commit murder.

[Don Miller]

A lot of people here thought it had satanic overtures. The question was, could it have been a fantasy game that got out of hand? Cause I play Dungeons and Dragons and that maybe under my sway, or me under their sway or whatever, that we as a group had gotten together and done this.

[Deborah Roberts]

So Donnie takes Roy down to the Texas Ranger office down in Waco to give him the lie detector test.

[Don Miller]

And he asked me a whole bunch of questions. Then when I got out and got done, they came in there and finally unstrapped me.

[Deborah Roberts]

Roy gets up, takes a deep breath, and Donnie meets him at the door. And Donnie says, you did it. And Roy's like, what? You flunked? You flunked the test?

[Don Miller]

He said, you might as well go ahead and confess. You failed this test. You killed this girl.

[Deborah Roberts]

And Roy turns around with this look of horror, thinking that he's about to go to jail, when the guy, the ranger who administered it, came out and says, you passed, you're fine. It was a misunderstanding.

[Don Miller]

He accused me three times on it when he knew I'd passed the test. But I guess, you know, in his mind, anything justified his actions to try to get somebody, it didn't just put.

[Deborah Roberts]

His heart in his throat. It stayed in his throat for days, weeks, months and maybe years.

[Brian Burroughs]

Although J.C. bowman and Roy Hayes were both eventually cleared, for both of them it was a real white knuckle experience.

[Don Miller]

Well, I was worried that I'D end up being convicted and being sent to prison for a crime that I didn't commit. You know, the guy who actually did it that I felt did it was Mike Woods.

[Brian Burroughs]

And Roy wasn't the only one. Five months after Susan's murder, it's Christmas time and stephenville is convinced that no more investigation is even needed. Many didn't want to hear any other names.

[Don Miller]

At the end of the day, everybody in town thought that it was Michael.

[Brian Burroughs]

Those close to Susan know even more about the couple's breakup and angry messages Michael had left for Susan to find.

[Deborah Roberts]

The cassette tapes and these little notes change everything. He's all but threatening her. She feared Michael.

[David Muir]

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[David Muir]

So give it a [e-mail] Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to $15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network's busy taxes and fees extra. See mint mobile.com.

[Brian Burroughs]

Days after the murder of Susan Woods, Stephenville turns out to mourn the unfathomable loss of one of their own. And for investigators, it wasn't so much about who showed up, it was about who didn't. And one man's striking absence would inflame suspicions that of Susan's ex husband, Michael Woods.

[Don Miller]

A whole lot of people showed up. She had a lot of friends in the community and everything. And Mike doesn't show up at all.

[David Muir]

Police were everywhere.

[Brian Burroughs]

So it's said that suspicions about Michael woods dated back to the late 70s. Remember Stephenville was 10 gallon hats and country music to its core. Michael had long hair, he had a motorcycle and he had an anti authority chip on his shoulder, kind of like a rebel out of the 60s movie Easy Rider.

[Deborah Roberts]

Michael came to Stephenville in 78 or 79 when a family friend in El Paso was moving here and asked him could he move her things in a truck. And he stayed.

[Brian Burroughs]

More than 40 years after he first came to town, Michael woods returned to Stephenville for 2020.

[Don Miller]

It was a drastic switch. Anytime I ran into somebody new, they were like, whoa, you're kind of odd. I think people very much looked at me like an outsider because I didn't sound the same, I didn't look the same, I certainly didn't act the same.

[Brian Burroughs]

What made him stand out in this town?

[Deborah Roberts]

What didn't? Everything about Michael woods not only stood out in Stephenville, it was the anti Stephenville. But more than anything, Michael had an attitude.

[Don Miller]

I was a child of the 60s and I wasn't about to cut my hair just to get along with a bunch of stuffed shirts.

[Deborah Roberts]

He presented as a very tough front such that people were a little scared of him. When inevitably he would get insulted by somebody making a comment, he just popped him in the mouth.

[Don Miller]

So the police would pull me over and I, you know, who are you? What are you doing in our town?

[David Muir]

Michael woods, when I first met him, he was a pretty cool guy, very confident. Michael was a live wire and I think that's what Susan saw in him is there was never a dull moment.

[Don Miller]

Susan was a bit of an outsider herself. She didn't like cowboys and pickup trucks and I clung to her. I was different than them and she clung to me. We just kind of became our own unit.

[Brian Burroughs]

Michael woods brought a defiant attitude to everything he did, including when he met Susan's parents. Let's just say good first impressions were not Michael's strong suit.

[Don Miller]

When I went to Susan's house the first time, it was hot, so I was wearing a pair of cutoffs and that was all. And her, her mother answered the door and just about had a heart attack because here's this half naked man at the door asking for my daughter.

[Deborah Roberts]

I was raised in a small southern town and when you went over to meet the girl's parents, let's just say you wore something nice.

[Brian Burroughs]

He's feral on the doorstep.

[Deborah Roberts]

I would say he had a feral quality. Michael just can't stand Stevenville. Out of nowhere he tells Susan that he's got a job offer back in El Paso where he grew up an auto repair shop. And she takes a deep breath and says, sure, it's an adventure. She's never lived anyplace else. She was all in.

[David Muir]

These pictures were made the day that she left Stephenville. Her green Laguna is right there. And she was pulling a little U haul small trailer with her stuff in it. Her mom told us to do something silly. So we. We did that with the legs. We didn't know what else to do.

[Brian Burroughs]

They'd get themselves to El Paso and they'd wed there. But for Michael and Susan woods, there would be no honeymoon of any kind.

[David Muir]

When they moved to El Paso, they didn't last but a few months. They were starving to death.

[Don Miller]

It wasn't working anywhere. Towards the dream that Susan had.

[David Muir]

She was pretty miserable.

[Don Miller]

She was having to eat bacon bit.

[David Muir]

Sandwiches, bacos in a jar, sprinkled on bread.

[Don Miller]

My family grew up really poor. Susan didn't grow up poor. She just couldn't stand living like that.

[Deborah Roberts]

And before long she drew the line and said, this isn't working. I have to go back.

[Don Miller]

We're going back.

[Brian Burroughs]

They come back to Stephenville.

[Don Miller]

Yeah.

[David Muir]

She got her job back at the sandpaper factory and even working overtime. And he's at home watching tv, sunbathing. Sunbathing outside, playing his guitar.

[Brian Burroughs]

People would see you, as you remember, sort of outside sunning. And they thought, he doesn't want to work. What was the story?

[Don Miller]

Well, I wanted to work, but I couldn't find places that would hire me or keep me. And I had a bit of an attitude.

[Brian Burroughs]

What does that feel like to come back to a place where you can. You can just sense the hostility and the rejection.

[Don Miller]

I felt trapped, no way out.

[Deborah Roberts]

And then one day, Michael just ups and leaves. He vanishes. Susan was at work, but she comes back and the car is gone. The yellow Mustang. He's gone back to Indianapolis.

[David Muir]

Susan was a basket case, crying, couldn't stop crying. He had left. Taking things that belonged to her. Crystal prisms that she collected. Just what he considered his half of everything they've got.

[Brian Burroughs]

He takes the Mustang. He takes the only car they have.

[Deborah Roberts]

Yes, it's one thing to take a Mustang. We all like Mustangs. It's another thing to take the one in which the only one of them that works drives to work.

[Brian Burroughs]

Michael leaves without ever saying a word to Susan's face. And yet he gets the last word in anyway. Why? Because he tape recorded a 30 minute angry diatribe. It's laced with profanity. And he leaves the tape for Susan on her kitchen counter. The B word.

[Deborah Roberts]

A lot of bad words. He tells her that everything is her fault. The fact that they have no friends, the fact that, that he couldn't get a job, everything.

[David Muir]

And to add insult to injury, he had left terrible notes all over the house. He'd open the microwave and there'd be one in the door of the microwave.

[Don Miller]

You're a bitch. You know it's all your fault.

[David Muir]

You'd open the drawer in the kitchen, there'd be another note. You'd lift the lid on the toilet, there's a note. She found them for weeks.

[Don Miller]

There'd be one in her coat pocket.

[David Muir]

There would be one in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

[Don Miller]

You know, all these little surprise traps or minefields to destroy your self esteem.

[Deborah Roberts]

The cassette tapes and these little notes change everything. They take a nasty breakup in which one spouse took some stuff to. Oh my God, he's all but threatening her. She feared Michael.

[Brian Burroughs]

That seething rage and Michael's words to Susan person. It's not lost on police investigators.

[Deborah Roberts]

I'm sorry. Any detective in the world identifies Michael Wood as the prime suspect.

[Don Miller]

A lot of things didn't help him. He didn't fit in. Nobody liked him. He left in a huff. He has become a number one suspect. He was a suspect, a good suspect and he wouldn't cooperate. So we had to keep going after him.

[Brian Burroughs]

Now detectives would track him down to Indiana and they were about to pay him a visit. The investigation into the murder of Susan woods starts to reveal new leads. Police learn of that angry profanity laced tape and notes that Michael left for Susan before hightailing it out of town.

[Don Miller]

Michael woods had taken a Mustang that she had bought and gone to Indianapolis, Indiana. At the end of the day, everybody in town thought that it was Michael. It's what all the family thought. That's what her friends thought. They were afraid that he was going to come back and hurt her.

[Deborah Roberts]

Any detective in the world identifies Michael Wood as the prime suspect.

[Don Miller]

He's the focus right now.

[Brian Burroughs]

Stephenville investigators reach out to the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department asking them to find Michael woods and bring him in for questioning.

[Deborah Roberts]

On a Wednesday morning, the day after Susan's killed. He's in his front yard.

[Don Miller]

Police drive up and I said, well, is this about the parking dispute? Because there was a parking dispute at the house. And they said yes, if he'll come downtown, we can wrap this up.

[Deborah Roberts]

So Michael goes on downtown. He's led to a conference room and there's a bunch of cops in there.

[Don Miller]

As a matter of routine, it's necessary for us to establish an alibi for you, where you were at and so forth. I'll assist you any way I can.

[Deborah Roberts]

And as Michael tells the story, they began to accuse him, saying, we knew you did it.

[Don Miller]

They said, well, your wife's dead and we know you killed her, so you might as well confess now so you don't get the gas chamber. And that's how I found out my wife was dead. I had to take a break from that and I went to the restroom and threw up. It was such a shock. In the back of my mind was thinking they must have made a mistake. It must be somebody else.

[Brian Burroughs]

Michael also tells police that he was in Indiana when the murder was committed and that the last time he spoke with Susan was a couple of weeks before she died.

[Don Miller]

When was the last time you spoke with your wife? I spoke to her, I think a couple weeks ago. Would you say that was a friendly conversation on both ends? It was friendly, but not as friendly as I would have liked. Did she indicate she was seeing anybody? She indicated that she was seeing other men and was glad to see men that didn't have my problems. It was refreshing. At one point, the police officer wrote out a confession and asked me to sign it. And I said, no, I'm not going to sign that. I think I want a lawyer. And so they let me go and I had to walk home.

[Brian Burroughs]

Michael would say later that he took the yellow Mustang and some of the stuff in the house because he and Susan shared ownership of those things. And as for that rage filled tape and those notes he left for Susan, well, Michael says he was angry, but he never intended to threaten her. You said no one ever got angry at Susan. You got angry at Susan.

[Don Miller]

Yeah.

[Brian Burroughs]

Do you regret that now?

[Don Miller]

Of course I regret it now. If I had known something was going to happen to her, I would have never left.

[Brian Burroughs]

What do you mean by that?

[Don Miller]

After I left, I kind of felt like she got murdered because I wasn't there to take care of her. I couldn't even come to her funeral because I didn't trust the police not to shoot me.

[Brian Burroughs]

You thought you'd be gunned down as you tried to attend her funeral?

[Don Miller]

I thought they would arrest me and find some excuse for shooting me.

[Brian Burroughs]

Michael is in the crosshairs of the Stephenville police investigation. They suspect that Michael drove back to Texas, committed the murder and returned to Indianapolis. Lead investigator Donnie Hensley just needs Michael's fingerprints and palm print to connect him to the crime scene. So they get on a plane and head to Indianapolis.

[Don Miller]

Sergeant Hensley and I drove by the house where Michael Wood was staying just to get the lay of the land. Later on we came back with the surveillance van. You drive by vans like that all the time and you don't pay any attention to them. So innocuous, just sitting there.

[Deborah Roberts]

As luck would have it, they actually spy Michael and his brother in the front yard and they're starting to put out items for what looks like a yard sale. And Donnie notices a number of crystal figurines being sold in this yard sale and says, aha, those have got to be crystal figurines that he stole, took, purloined from the house. I bet you we could swoop in and get him for theft.

[Don Miller]

They used that to get a search for warrant to go grab Michael.

[Deborah Roberts]

The Indianapolis police not only saw the.

[Don Miller]

Figurines, they found some marijuana and they arrested him. And that's how they got his fingerprints and palm prints.

[Brian Burroughs]

Michael is never charged with marijuana possession. But the lawmen from Texas get what they came for.

[Deborah Roberts]

Donnie walked back to the Indianapolis airport the next day going aha. On these cars, I've got his prince. We've got the bastard.

[Don Miller]

So they're thinking, okay, we nailed him.

[Deborah Roberts]

Donnie was so confident that they had now broken the case. They're on the airplane back to Texas. He's already filing out the extradition papers for Michael to come back to Stephenville.

[Brian Burroughs]

But what happened then?

[Deborah Roberts]

They sit down and they compare those fingerprints to the fingerprints at the crime scene. And Donnie told me he has never been more surprised in his entire adult life. They find something much darker and much more ominous.

[Brian Burroughs]

No one could have imagined is that here at this secluded rest stop just off the highway, a hideous crime had taken place that would cast new light onto the murder of Susan Wood.

[David Muir]

I couldn't scream because it would make the beating worse.

[Don Miller]

This is the same person who killed Susan Woods.

[David Muir]

He told me. He goes, I've killed before and I'm not afraid to kill again.

[Deborah Roberts]

This was a young woman who put up quite a struggle for her life.

[Brian Burroughs]

It's like a death mask.

[Don Miller]

I needed the case solved and, and I owed it to Susan to find her killer. I think this might be it.

[David Muir]

As soon as I got in the vehicle, I knew I made the biggest mistake of my life.

[Deborah Roberts]

And in Shannon's telling, suddenly Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde.

[Brian Burroughs]

Why were you leaving items of clothing around the campground here?

[David Muir]

Because no one knew I was down here. He got on top of me and he pushed my head into the, into the water. He said, I've killed before and I'm not afraid to kill again. It was like hearing that beaver cleaver had killed Susan.

[Don Miller]

Nobody ever suspected him. Nobody.

[Brian Burroughs]

Once you hear Shannon's story, each one of these pictures connect somehow to what happened to Susan Woods.

[David Muir]

Susan let him in her house because she felt he was as harmless as we did.

[Deborah Roberts]

I was without any doubt evil to my entire core.

[Don Miller]

A monster if one was ever born.

[Deborah Roberts]

Gotcha.

[Brian Burroughs]

It's July 1987 and in the small town of Stephenville, Texas, 30 year old Susan woods is found brutally murdered in her bathtub.

[David Muir]

She didn't deserve what she got. That was pure torture and hell on earth.

[Brian Burroughs]

As they investigate, police zero in on her estranged husband, Michael woods, whose bad boy biker attitude had made him a town pariah and who'd had an angry bust up with Susan just weeks earlier.

[David Muir]

She was afraid of Michael. After they broke up, every window was nailed shut, every door was deadbolted. She was scared.

[Brian Burroughs]

But when detectives in Stephenville obtained Michael Wood's fingerprints and compare them to those at the crime scene, they get a Texas sized surprise.

[Don Miller]

The prints didn't match Michael woods, his prints and the prisoners palm prints did not match the ones that are lifted from the tub inside the body.

[Brian Burroughs]

No match, no murder charge. Yet Michael woods knows he's not off the hook.

[Don Miller]

They were still after me. They didn't care if the prints matched. That was a minor detail to be dealt with in court.

[Brian Burroughs]

Susan's parents learned that their murdered daughter had an $11,000 life insurance policy. And guess who's the beneficiary? Michael.

[Deborah Roberts]

When they became aware of this life insurance situation, they were just apoplectic. So they brought suit against him to eliminate the payment, but also to have him declared legally responsible for Susan's death.

[Don Miller]

Susan's parents said that I had killed her and that was a wrongful death. I had no way to fight it. I couldn't afford lawyers and they sued me for $700,000 plus interest.

[Brian Burroughs]

The court decided in favor of Susan's parents. But up in Indiana, Michael doesn't have $700,000 or anything like it.

[Deborah Roberts]

So long as he didn't go back to Texas, which he was never going to do. They could not, you know, seize any of his meager assets.

[Brian Burroughs]

But that cloud of suspicion over Michael's head never goes away. And it's not just Susan's parents. Even complete strangers seem to believe that Michael had killed her.

[Don Miller]

Everybody in town thought that it was Michael at an actual performance. While we were on break, I had a guy came up and say, hey man, didn't you kill your wife? It's like, no, I didn't kill My wife. Why are you asking me this? I tried to put it out of my mind as much as possible, but it weighed heavy on my mind.

[Brian Burroughs]

Can anybody who hasn't gone through what you went through understand what you felt like in those days when I should.

[Don Miller]

Have been grieving for my wife, I was trying to fight for my freedom, you know, I had to constantly watch over my shoulder. My life just fell apart. I guess the music was the only thing I had left.

[Brian Burroughs]

Meanwhile, the criminal investigation into Susan's murder is at a standstill.

[David Muir]

And the years went by, 88, 89, 90, all the way through the year 2000. And everyone knew it would never be sudden solved. We'd learn to live with that.

[Brian Burroughs]

After a gig in 2005, Michael pours out his heart to a friend about Susan, about her murder, and about his life in the shadow of suspicion.

[Don Miller]

It was around the time of year that Susan had died and I just kind of broke down after we played.

[Brian Burroughs]

That single conversation changes everything. His friend emails the Stephenville police and begs them to help. Michael says he's been really suffering about all this.

[Don Miller]

I thought, well, this is interesting. So I called her and I said, okay, have Michael call me because if he'll cooperate with the police, then we'll reopen the case. I didn't hear anything for six months.

[Brian Burroughs]

Still, Detective Miller sees an opportunity thanks to DNA testing, which was not available when Susan's murder was first investigated. Remember those six cigarette butts from the crime scene? They had a male's DNA on them, but whose?

[Don Miller]

Don Miller wanted to get my DNA and I was pretty weary of cops. And at first he said yes, and then he called back and said, no, don't come. Someone up there? Anyway.

[Deborah Roberts]

Suddenly, after 19 years, Michael woods is face to face with a Stephenville police officer.

[Brian Burroughs]

What did he say that caused you to open the door? You could have shut that door and never seen him again.

[Don Miller]

I needed the case solved and he was at the door. And I owed it to Susan to find her killer. We stood out on the porch while him and his partner got my DNA. The DNA came back. It's not his DNA, so 100% now there's no question in my mind. Michael woods is cleared and I call him. He just started crying and he said thank you and he hung up.

[Brian Burroughs]

I don't think any of us can know what it's like to get the phone call you got that you had been cleared in the murder of the woman you loved. What does that feel like?

[Don Miller]

I couldn't think clearly for a few days. It's like it's finally over, you know, they're not going to put me in jail, I'm not going to die in prison.

[Deborah Roberts]

All this kind of put Don Miller in a tough position, you know. Good news for Michael woods that you're not a murder suspect. But bad news for Don Miller. He's just freed up his only suspect.

[Brian Burroughs]

That leaves Don Miller with almost no remaining leads except for those original fingerprints from the crime scene.

[Don Miller]

I take them to DPS and Austin. I asked them to run these fingerprints through automatic fingerprint identification system.

[Deborah Roberts]

So a few days later, there's a call from a trooper down in Austin. He says, got a match on those prints for you. When don reads the DA's file, he finds something much darker and much more ominous.

[David Muir]

He told me, I've killed before and I'm not afraid to kill again.

[Brian Burroughs]

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[Don Miller]

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[Brian Burroughs]

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[Don Miller]

Your burger is served.

[Brian Burroughs]

And this is our finest Pepsi. Zero sugar.

[Deborah Roberts]

Its sweet profile perfectly balances the savory notes of your burger.

[David Muir]

That is one perfect combination. Burgers deserve Pepsi.

[Brian Burroughs]

It's 2006 now and Stephenville Detective Don Miller is back to square one after finally clearing Michael woods in the murder of his wife Susan. So he takes the existing fingerprints, you know, from the crime scene and he runs them in an FBI database system, one that did not exist back in 1987. And finally, after all this time, there is a match. The fingerprints belong to a man named Joseph Scott Hatley. He was arrested for armed robbery in 1988 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

[Deborah Roberts]

So he calls the district attorney and says, do we know a Joseph Scott Halley? And he says, we sure do. Wanna come read the file?

[Don Miller]

And so I opened the file and I started reading this report about a 16 year old girl who had been sexually assaulted.

[Brian Burroughs]

She is Shannon myers. And in 1988, one year after Susan Wood's murder, Shannon told police that she'd been sexually assaulted by Scott Hatley. So what's Hatley's story? He comes from a well known family in town. He'd gone to Stephenville High and his sister Regina Lived next door to Shannon.

[David Muir]

In 1987, I met Scott Hatley when I was over there visiting Regina, and.

[Deborah Roberts]

He began to ask her questions and express an interest.

[David Muir]

One night I was over at Regina's and Scott and I had already been heavy flirting, and he reached over and kissed me. We started, you know, having sex. I was a teenager and I just wanted to have fun. I'd go out, party with my friends, come home and meet up with Scott.

[Brian Burroughs]

But Shannon says 20 year old Scott grew increasingly testy and aggressive.

[David Muir]

He became very controlling. He wanted to know exactly who I was with, where we were going, how long we were going to stay there. Anytime he and I would have intercourse, it was always by water. It was always in the bathroom.

[Brian Burroughs]

One night, Shannon recalls, Scott demanded sex. She said no.

[Deborah Roberts]

And in Shannon's telling, no. Stop. Suddenly, Dr. Jekyll turned into Mr. Hyde.

[David Muir]

And he pulled out a knife and he held the knife to my throat and he raped me.

[Brian Burroughs]

After the assault, Shannon and her mother go to the police. But Hatley is never charged, and Shannon ends the relationship. Ten months later, Hatley asks her to meet to explain himself.

[David Muir]

I wanted to know why did he betray the trust that I instilled in him? As soon as I got in the vehicle, I knew I made the biggest mistake of my life.

[Deborah Roberts]

And ultimately, he pulls up in this roadside park in the middle of nowhere about three miles south of town.

[David Muir]

It was like a little bitty picnic area park, and it was pitch black.

[Deborah Roberts]

And she knew she was in trouble.

[Brian Burroughs]

So did you come over here? Is that what happened? You walked?

[David Muir]

We got out of the vehicle, we came over here and sat down. He kissed me passionately. And he wanted to have sex immediately. And I told him no. And then that's when he released his rage on me. As the car is going by, I'm thinking, help, somebody help me. And I couldn't scream. I was screaming inside, but I couldn't. I couldn't scream because it would make the rape worse, it would make the beating worse. I always had to stay naked. I couldn't put my clothes back on. And he would drink and he would smoke a cigarette. And then the cycle of abuse would happen again.

[Deborah Roberts]

They were out there all night long. And the violence nearly really let up. At some point, she got up and ran.

[Brian Burroughs]

Go ahead and show us if you'd like.

[Don Miller]

Okay.

[David Muir]

I ran this way and I got right along where the creek was at, and that's when he caught me. He got on top of me and he pushed my head into the. Into the. Into the water. He said, I've killed before and I'm not afraid to kill again. When Scott said I've killed before, I really thought that I was going to be his next victim. I started leaving pieces of me behind clues. I left my bra behind, my hair clip.

[Brian Burroughs]

Why were you leaving items of clothing around the campground here?

[David Muir]

Because no one knew I was down here. I ended up. I stopped fighting him. I started manipulating him.

[Brian Burroughs]

What sort of things did you say to him then?

[David Muir]

That I loved him. That I want a future together. That still, it just sends shivers through my spine even seeing it today. It was probably around 2 to 3 in the morning when we started getting into the vehicle. Then Scott turned on the light. And I believed what saved me was because I did like this. And I hid my face. He really could not see the bruises. And he goes, okay, I'm gonna take you back home. He goes, don't you tell or I'll come back and I'll finish. And I believed him. As soon as I got home, my stepfather walked out of the bedroom and I fell into his arms. And I said, scott did this.

[Brian Burroughs]

Her parents take her to the hospital and once again, Shannon reports a sexual assault at the hands of Scott Hatley to the police. And with photos of her injuries and rape test kits designed support her account, Shannon is convinced that this time Hatley will be charged with rape. Hatley is so sure he'll be arrested that he flees to Vegas. And there he gets picked up for armed robbery where those crucial fingerprints are taken.

[David Muir]

The case went to grand jury and that went on deaf ears. The grand jury didn't indict Scott because of lack of evidence.

[Deborah Roberts]

This was back in the day in the state of Texas where if you can show a young woman was promiscuous, you could undercut a rape charge. That's exactly what happened.

[David Muir]

I'm still mind blown by that. You had pictures of bruises of him choking me. You had the rape kit, you had everything to me. The justice system that day raped me. It was a lot worth a 16 year old me to take.

[Brian Burroughs]

For Detective Miller, Shannon's story is a road map that leads directly to Susan Wood's killer. Now time to put the heat on Scott Hatman.

[Don Miller]

I'm just gonna straight up ask you, did you kill?

[Deborah Roberts]

So Don is going down into the reports and there in Shannon's report she talks about being raped violently. And Hadley said, you mind me because if you don't, I'm going to kill you. And then Don read the words that changed everything. This Hatley said, I've killed before. And Don leaned back, he thought, gotcha.

[Brian Burroughs]

So to make it clear, this all took place in 1988, and you're looking at these pictures in 2006, isn't that correct?

[Don Miller]

Yes.

[Brian Burroughs]

Once you hear Shannon's story, each one of these pictures connect somehow to what happened to Susan Woods.

[Don Miller]

My mind is going back to Susan woods crime scene because everything is matching now up to and including the cigarette butts. Just the sheer violence, the manner in which she was sexually assaulted, the fact of he would, you know, beat her senseless and she'd come back around and he'd do it again, and in the meantime be smoking and drinking. That explained why I had six cigarette butts in the ashtray.

[Brian Burroughs]

Here's another shot of that creek you were talking about. And this is an important moment in Shannon's narrative, isn't it?

[Don Miller]

Very important in Shannon's narrative when she said, there's the indention of my body, there's the creek that my head was held under as I was being assaulted. Then I knew that this crime scene is the same as Susan Wood's crime.

[Brian Burroughs]

Scene, because that's exactly what happened.

[Don Miller]

That's exactly what happened to Susan. Yes, sir.

[Brian Burroughs]

Shannon's assault took place in 1988, a year after Susan woods murder. No one thought about connecting the two cases back then. And had Hatley's fingerprints from his arrest in Vegas been available on a database, detectives might have put the pieces together.

[Don Miller]

I mean, Shannon was the key all along, you know.

[Deborah Roberts]

So at this point, things begin to move really fast. Hatley turns out not to be hard to find at all. He's in the phone book down in Round Rock, Texas, just outside Austin, where he worked as a supervisor at a warehouse.

[Don Miller]

So my partner and I, Russell Ford, we get in the car, and as we're headed down to Round Rock, Texas, I looked at Russell and I said, today is 66 of 0 6, the day we meet the devil himself. And we did.

[Deborah Roberts]

So the Round Rock police have brought him in for questioning, and Don is absolutely convinced that he's the guy.

[Don Miller]

Did the police ever interview you back then?

[Brian Burroughs]

No, they didn't back then.

[Don Miller]

Okay. In my mind, it's not alleged. It's not a matter of. I wonder if Hatley really did this murder. He did it. Can you think of any reason why someone would. Would say that you were responsible for this? Somebody's saying I'm responsible. Well, I just want to know if.

[Deborah Roberts]

You can think of any reason why.

[Don Miller]

Somebody would say that you. That you killed Susan Knight. Certainly wouldn't There would be no reason I would. He's calm, cool and collected. You know, I mean, an innocent person would be pinging off the walls. He knows why we're there. Stephenville pd. And I know that he knows. How do you feel about being interviewed about this? Well, it's just 25 years too late, probably, but, I mean, personally, I had.

[David Muir]

Nothing to do with it.

[Don Miller]

What I'm hoping for is him to say I was never in the house. But unfortunately, that's not what we got. Did you ever go into the house yet? A bunch. Or. I don't know, a bunch. You know, it was a place we'd party sometimes. Did you ever have sex with Susan Anytime?

[Brian Burroughs]

No.

[Don Miller]

So there wouldn't be any reason why your DNA would be anywhere around her body? I wouldn't think so. Okay, so I've got palm prints on either side of a dead body that I know is gonna be Hatley's. In my mind, it was a formality. Would you mind if we took a sample of your DNA today? I don't know. I should talk to an attorney.

[Brian Burroughs]

Then Detective Miller cuts to the chase.

[Don Miller]

I'm just going to straight up ask you. Did you kill her? I didn't kill her.

[Brian Burroughs]

But then Hatley starts to change his story. He backtracks a little bit and reveals that he knew Susan a little more than he first let on, all while keeping his cool.

[Don Miller]

Okay. Did you have sex with her? You know, I. Like I said, a lot of the time it's just a mirror, and we all hung out. Do you think you might have had sex with her? It's possible. I had sex with a lot of people. Yeah, I would say we might have fooled around, but it wasn't nothing heavy. It was usually too high ground to.

[David Muir]

Be anything real heavy.

[Brian Burroughs]

So at the same time Hatlee is being interrogated, there's this startling new development. Round Rock police are simultaneously interviewing Hatley's wife, and she's alleging a harrowing story of domestic abuse.

[Don Miller]

She describes an event that happened on Christmas Eve of 05, where she was physically assaulted.

[Brian Burroughs]

Hatley's spouse, who is disabled and uses a wheelchair, says he pulled her hands behind her back and sexually assaulted her. It's a vicious attack, and she even notes it on her calendar for that night. It reads, scott beat the hell out of me. Nosebleed, black eye, could barely breathe. And she claims he did this on a number of occasions.

[Don Miller]

All right, sir, we'll have a go ahead and come with us.

[Brian Burroughs]

Back at the Round Rock police station, Atlee consents to giving a DNA sample. And he's sent home. So will those DNA test results finally confirm the identity of Susan's killer? Or will Scott Hatley walk away again?

[David Muir]

It was very, very hard to take that the evidence was.

[Brian Burroughs]

18 years after the town of Stephenville, Texas, was rocked with the news of the brutal death of Susan Woods. Her murder has remained unsolved. Susan's family, they'd started to lose hope that they would ever get justice. Then, a dramatic development. While Joseph Scott Hatley and his family are out to dinner.

[Don Miller]

They went to eat supper. And when they left the restaurant, the SWAT team arrested Hatley.

[Brian Burroughs]

Hatley was arrested for domestic violence charges tied to his wife's graphic allegations of abuse. And that gave Detective Don Miller time to run Hatley's DNA for the murder of Susan Woods. The DNA from the cigarette butts are a match for Joseph Scott Hatley. The first person Detective Don Miller tells is Susan Wood's father, Joe atkins.

[Don Miller]

I said, Mr. Atkins, the guy who murdered your daughter has been arrested. And he said, well, I'm glad you finally got old, Michael. I thought he was going to get away with it. And I said, no, sir, Mr. Atkins is a guy named Joseph Scott Hatley. He looked at me and he said, well, I don't believe it.

[David Muir]

To hear that Scott Hatch Hadley was who had killed Susan was like hearing that Beaver Cleaver had killed Susan.

[Brian Burroughs]

For Susan's friends, Cindy and Roy, the news is even more shocking. They know Scott Hadley. They're related to him.

[Don Miller]

My initial reaction was, oh, boy, there's no way he did.

[David Muir]

He was my first cousin that I was raised with. He was like a brother to me. It was very, very hard to take, but the evidence was there. And I did believe Don. I did believe him.

[Don Miller]

Hatley was a chameleon. Nobody ever suspected him. Nobody.

[Brian Burroughs]

It gets even worse. Hatley would talk with Susan's unsuspecting friends about her murder. He even attended a birthday party with Susan's friends just weeks after her death.

[David Muir]

Susan was the main topic of conversation at this birthday party. It's all anyone talked about, including Scott wanted to discuss it. He did have a fascination with the case, but we all did at that time.

[Brian Burroughs]

Michael woods, he'd spent decades as an outcast, scorned, under constant suspicion for his wife's murder. Now her real life, real killer had been found.

[Don Miller]

I was shocked. It was her best friend's cousin. A monster if one was ever born.

[David Muir]

And I can't imagine what Michael went through all those years knowing that everybody blamed him for something. He didn't do. There was a lot of hatred toward him.

[Don Miller]

DNA tells a story and it doesn't lie. The proof is there that, that I didn't do it and I would have never hurt Susan for anything. When they arrested Hadley, I felt like, you know, he's going to go to jail for what he's done now and that Susan's going to be able to rest a little easier in her grave.

[Deborah Roberts]

Everybody saw that. They got Scott Hatman. Cool, great, Go justice. But there was no concurrent announcement that Michael woods is free and that we wronged him. There is no concurrent announcement that, by the way, that crazy 16 year old girl. That, by the way. Oh, she was right too. Sorry. I get a little angry about it.

[David Muir]

In retrospect, just like Michael, she was a total victim. Everyone rallied around Scott while this poor girl suffered. There was a lot of injustice in this case.

[Brian Burroughs]

After Scott Hadley was charged with the murder of Susan Woods, Shannon says she was looking forward to facing her attacker in court. But Susan's parents, they don't want a public trial. So instead, Joseph Scott Hadley pled guilty to murder.

[David Muir]

I was hoping to go to trial and to stand before him and say, look at me now and to show him that I don't fear you anymore.

[Brian Burroughs]

Scott Hadley never actually goes on trial.

[Deborah Roberts]

I think there are a lot of people that followed this story that would like to have seen justice disclosed.

[Brian Burroughs]

Hatley is sentenced to 30 years in prison.

[Deborah Roberts]

And the deal was only for the murder. He was never prosecuted for the domestic charges in Round Rock or the rapes of Shannon Meyers. The reason he let Shannon live is he knew no one would believe her. He knew the town. If Susan talked, she was a Stephenville girl. People would listen. They would know Shannon is only alive today because Scott Hatley knew no one would believe her. And the awful truth is he was right.

[Brian Burroughs]

Stephenville was a town that kept its secrets well hidden. But there was one more shock still to come to light. A discovery that would shed light on how Hatley became a monster.

[David Muir]

Susan let him in her house because she felt he was as harmless as we did. There's no he could be dangerous secrets.

[Brian Burroughs]

Revealed in Joseph Scott Hatley's own words.

[Deborah Roberts]

I had become a walking demon. I was his servant, his slave. I was the devil.

[Brian Burroughs]

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[David Muir]

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[Don Miller]

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[David Muir]

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[Brian Burroughs]

Joseph Scott Hatley's evil deeds, he only spent 11 years in prison.

[David Muir]

When I found out he was being released for killing my best friend, I'm thinking, gosh, drug dealers get more prison time than that.

[Deborah Roberts]

He moved into a trailer near his daughter outside of Abilene, Texas, was diagnosed with cancer, and in December of 2021, his landlord found him on the floor of his trailer, dead.

[David Muir]

There is a God. Thank you Lord Jesus.

[Brian Burroughs]

Unknown to all, in that trailer on the outskirts of the woods where he'd spent his final days, there were answers to the mystery of his depravity just waiting to be found.

[Deborah Roberts]

So not long after Hatley was found dead, Detective Don Miller gets his call. Somebody had just bought the trailer where Hatley died and while cleaning it out, had found all sorts of disturbing stuff that really creeped me him out.

[Brian Burroughs]

Pages and pages of a handwritten account of a life of crime and murder. He shares those surprising findings with writer.

[Deborah Roberts]

Brian Burrow, the Killer in his own words. It answers all the things that nobody ever knew, the whys and the hows and the insight into the mind of Joseph Scott Hatley.

[David Muir]

Scotty was just a goofy kind of chubby kid that didn't quite fit in at school. He seemed utterly harmless.

[Deborah Roberts]

There's another story of Scott Hatley, though. It's a story of a kid who was able to keep those violent fantasies at bay with the help of booze and pornography until he couldn't anymore.

[Brian Burroughs]

His violent fantasies kicked in as early as age 8, he writes. He thinks about how cool it would be to shoot up his school, but how he'd have to kill his parents first. You know what I was struck by in this was his description of what he said his mother did to him.

[Don Miller]

His mom would hit him upside the head and it would make his ears ring. And every time that he got mad, his ears would ring.

[Deborah Roberts]

He writes, I grab my mom, wrapped my hands around her throat and whispered to her, I would kill her. I saw it in her eyes. Fear. I had found a new drug. Fear.

[Brian Burroughs]

That slap of his mother's and what it triggered in him. It would reverberate for years after we graduated.

[Don Miller]

I didn't see him until he had kind of got out of the Air Force and come back. And he was drinking a whole lot.

[Deborah Roberts]

He writes, smoking and drinking beer out on the drag. Man, I felt like a rock star.

[Brian Burroughs]

He writes about how from the age of 13 onward, he craved the feeling of being intoxicated. But it was with a cold, clear mind that he began to plot his hideous crimes.

[Don Miller]

He said, everything that I ever did, I thought about doing when I was sober.

[Brian Burroughs]

Attlee writes that it was at a weekly roundtable gathering of friends organized by his sister Regina, that he got his first look at Susan Woods. He'd come to drink and play cards that summer night. In his drunken state, he thought Susan would was flirting with him. A week later, he was still thinking about her.

[Deborah Roberts]

You must understand, I did not set out that night to hunt anyone. I was lonely, drunk, high and looking for a good time.

[David Muir]

There was no reason for him to go to her house. She probably let him in because of me, because she knew he was my cousin. That's it.

[Deborah Roberts]

She let him drink a Coke and they talked. At one point. At one point I overstepped my bounds and Susan slapped me. What happened next is a blur. By the time I came out of the fog, I had brutalized her. She was alive. I could have stopped, but I didn't. She said she would not tell anyone if I just let her go. I found it interesting that she thought any of that mattered. I asked her if she believed in God. She said she did. I told her, then you need to pray he actually writes. By God, I had become a monster.

[Brian Burroughs]

Given the state Susan's body had been found in, police were never able to discern exactly how Susan had been killed. But Scott Hatley knew, and he wrote.

[Deborah Roberts]

About was not death by drowning in the bathtub, but suffocation by a pillow that would tell the tale of murder.

[Brian Burroughs]

Immediately after killing Susan and leaving her house, Hatley drives past the police department and he claims in his writings, thinks about turning himself in. What he actually did, days later, was go to Susan's funeral, sign the guest book, and silently taunt the police as they watched the crowd.

[Deborah Roberts]

I did not cry. I did not Grieve. I was without any doubt, evil to my entire core. And then he finishes. I wish with all my heart that I could tell you I've mourned for what I'd done. But that would be a lie.

[Brian Burroughs]

No one suspects him. And Hatley writes that when he sees his crimes in the paper, he experienced an unbelievable thrill.

[Deborah Roberts]

My sister had a round oak table in her kitchen that for years our group would sit around, drink and talk the nights away. We spent many hours discussing Susan's murder. My cousin's boyfriend was a suspect, so she had inside information.

[Don Miller]

Scott. We'd sit at the table. We would bail them in.

[Deborah Roberts]

Scott had no serious concern that they were any longer going to get him because they were so fixated on Michael woods, who Hatley actually calls my other victim.

[Don Miller]

He was right there. Nobody ever suspected him. Nobody.

[Deborah Roberts]

How could they know that? The answer should sat right across the table.

[Don Miller]

You don't realize that sometimes there are monsters that live in the hearts of other people.

[David Muir]

Right under your nose. Right under your nose.

[Brian Burroughs]

Towards the end, Hatley sums up his life with another final, chilling realization.

[Deborah Roberts]

I've spent hundreds of pages writing about my two sides. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Those men in the mirror, are they still there? Can I see them? To say I don't would be a lie. They have always been there and always will.

[Brian Burroughs]

But what about Shannon? What words did Hatley have for her from beyond the grave? And what was her message back when Joseph Scott Hatley's handwritten autobiography was revealed after his death, the murder of Susan woods was not the only thing he wrote about. He also wrote about Shannon.

[Deborah Roberts]

Shannon had no idea who I was, what I was. I told her I would give her something to file charges on once I was done humiliating her. I drove her back to her neighborhood. I had become a walking demon.

[David Muir]

I know Scott knew that he was guilty. I know Scott knew that what he did to me was terribly wrong.

[Brian Burroughs]

That night in the park has haunted Shannon for 35 years.

[Don Miller]

When I first met her, her eyes were sunken. Anytime a pickup pulled up next to her with loud pipe, she'd have a panic attack. Anytime she took a shower, she'd have a panic attack. Anytime any water got around her, she had a panic attack.

[David Muir]

The fear. Fear ended. One day while I was at work, I get this phone call from Donnie.

[Brian Burroughs]

When Don Miller told Shannon that Scott Hatley had died, the news changed everything for her.

[David Muir]

I felt happiness that I could, you know, that I could live again. I had to learn how to live again without fear. We were more.

[Deborah Roberts]

Up.

[Brian Burroughs]

In this way, Shannon felt compelled to face her demons and to revisit that park decades later. Could you ever imagine that you would survive this and stand here today as someone who had endured and prevailed what was done to you?

[David Muir]

Never. I never thought that I could be strong enough to stand here today and tell my story.

[Brian Burroughs]

You're a hero.

[Deborah Roberts]

Shit.

[David Muir]

I don't see myself as a hero. I also don't see myself as a victim. I do feel a connection with Susan because she lost her life and I'm here. I still feel like, you know, we're bonded by that. Strangely.

[Brian Burroughs]

Michael woods, he's still writing and performing his music today, but he remains haunted by his memories of Susan.

[Don Miller]

I love Susan. I love her to this day. I think about times with her driving around, laughing and having a good time. She had quite the sense of humor. I just miss her.

[David Muir]

I miss her every day. I do. But she did come to me in a dream. She was walking along the road.

[Brian Burroughs]

And.

[David Muir]

I put my hand on the glass, and she put her hand on the other side of the glass and she looked at me and she had the most angelic smile on her face. I never will forget it. But I'm gonna see her one day. I will see her, hopefully. Even with Susan woods case closed, Detective Don Miller thinks that Joseph Hatley likely had other victims based on his writings.

[Deborah Roberts]

In fact, Miller now plans to look at other unsolved cases with similarities to Susan Woods. In the meantime, that is our program for tonight. Thanks for watching.

[David Muir]

I'm David Muir. And I'm Deborah Roberts. From all of us here at 2020 and ABC News, good night.

[Deborah Roberts]

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. It's Brad Milke, host of ABC's Daily News podcast.

[David Muir]

Start here.

[Deborah Roberts]

Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.