The morning started like any other for the father who would soon find his daughter dead. He was at home when the phone rang, and on the other end was the manager of the local sandpaper factory where his daughter worked. The manager told him that she had not shown up for work in two days, and that his attempts to reach her had failed. The father knew immediately that something was wrong.

His daughter was dependable, not the type to miss a shift without calling. He tried to reach her himself, and when no one answered, he got into his car and drove to her house. When he reached the front door, he could hear the television playing somewhere inside, but no one came to the door when he knocked. He tried the door, and it opened easily.

It was unlocked. He stepped inside and began calling his daughter’s name, but the only sound that answered him was the television from the living room. When he entered her bedroom, he noticed at once that something was off. The bed had clearly been moved from its place.

The mattress was hanging partially off the frame, and torn bed sheets were scattered across the room, mixed with clothes thrown on the floor. Panic began to set in. He was about to leave the room when something else caught his attention. The bathroom door was slightly ajar, and he went to look inside.

What he saw stopped him cold. His daughter lay at the edge of the bathtub. She was not wearing clothes, and her hands were tied behind her back with a shirt. Even as his mind tried to deny what he was seeing, he realized almost at once that she was gone.

There was nothing he could do to save her. He ran out of the bathroom and called the police. Susan Atkins was born on April 6, 1957, in Texas. She grew up in a religious family, and the church was a big part of her life from the start.

Her father was a deacon at their local church, so Susan and her brother spent much of their childhood there. The family later moved to Stephenville, a small town not far from Dallas. Susan was quiet and somewhat shy. She was not the type to enjoy being the center of attention, and she did not usually surround herself with large, loud groups of friends.

But the people she allowed into her life meant everything to her. Once Susan grew close to someone, she treated them like family. After graduating from high school with honors, Susan started working at a local sandpaper factory. A few years later, she met a man named Mike, and they married in 1980.

Shortly after the wedding, Mike decided he wanted to leave Stephenville and live in a bigger city. Susan was not excited about the idea. She was close to her parents and had never lived far from home. But Mike insisted, and she eventually agreed to go with him.

The couple moved to El Paso, about eight hours away, and Susan quickly realized it was not the place she wanted to live. She and Mike returned to Stephenville. A few years later, their marriage began to fall apart. Mike left town, and Susan stayed in Stephenville, trying to get through her divorce on her own.

It was a hard time for her. She became more withdrawn and depressed, and for a while, her only comfort came from the people who still made an effort to support her. They checked on her, spent time with her, and gave her at least some hope during a difficult period. By July 1987, Susan was thirty years old, still going through the divorce proceedings, and still working at the factory.

On July 28, her father received the call from her manager, and his life changed forever. In a small town like Stephenville, murders were extremely rare, so police and every available officer went to Susan’s house. One of the investigators who arrived at the scene saw Susan’s father standing outside. He knew the man well, and at first he did not understand why he was there.

Then he remembered that the man had a daughter, and he realized the victim was probably her. The police began examining the crime scene, and from the moment they walked in, it was clear that Susan’s killer had used a level of violence none of them had ever seen. The bathtub, where her body had been found, was filled almost to the brim, and the water had turned nearly black from blood. Looking at the scene, the investigators believed the killer might have held Susan underwater until she died.

But that was not all. There was a mark around Susan’s neck that seemed to have been caused by some kind of rope or cord, and investigators found a rope lying on her bed. They also noticed clear makeup stains on her pillow. Looking at all of this, it seemed as though the killer might have first tried to strangle her with the rope and the pillow, then dragged her to the bathroom and held her underwater.

Because Susan’s clothes had been removed, the investigators also believed she might have been sexually assaulted. The attack was so brutal that the investigators found it hard to consider it random. This was not a simple burglary that ended tragically. It seemed to them that someone had entered Susan’s house carrying anger and hatred in their heart, and a strong personal motive to harm her.

Susan’s body was taken to the coroner while police continued searching the house. In the living room, they noticed an ashtray on a small table near the couch, and it was full of cigarette butts. They also found some snacks and a can of Coke. Susan’s father told investigators that she did not smoke and rarely drank Coke, so police began to suspect the killer had left these things behind.

Based on the number of cigarettes, it seemed he might have spent several hours in the house. From there, investigators began to form a possible picture of what had happened. Perhaps Susan knew this man and let him into the house, then brought him snacks and a drink and allowed him to smoke in her living room. As they continued searching the house, investigators noticed something strange.

All the window frames were nailed shut, making it impossible to open them. It seemed Susan was afraid of someone trying to break into her home. At the same time, crime scene technicians found recent marks on the front door that might indicate an attempted break-in. But police doubted this theory, because the scene in the living room suggested Susan might have let the killer in voluntarily.

Still, they could not rule out the possibility that the killer attacked Susan first, then sat in the living room, smoked cigarettes, and ate the snacks. Soon after, forensic technicians found one of the most important pieces of evidence in the house: a clear palm print and fingerprints on the water faucet in the bedroom. Based on the location of the print, it seemed the killer might have braced his hand on the faucet while holding Susan’s head underwater. The problem was that investigators could not simply enter the print into a database and wait for a match.

At that time, they had to compare it manually with potential suspects. And DNA analysis was even more difficult. Investigators realized the cigarette butts might contain the killer’s saliva, but DNA testing was not available the way it is today. So, for now, the fingerprints became their strongest evidence.

Police also spoke with Susan’s neighbors, and one of them provided investigators with an interesting piece of information. Someone had seen a large man outside Susan’s house. They did not remember much about him, but investigators considered the information important. When the coroner finished examining Susan’s body, the report confirmed that she had been sexually assaulted.

But because of the condition of her body, experts could not determine the exact cause of death. They noted signs that Susan had been strangled with a rope and suffocated with a pillow. They also noted evidence that she had been submerged underwater. But they could not determine which of these acts had caused her death.

It was also difficult to determine the exact time of death. All experts could say was that Susan had likely been attacked sometime in the evening, about two days before her body was found. After speaking with Susan’s family and friends, police learned that they had not heard from her for two days. Her close friend Cindy said she had last seen Susan four days before her body was found.

On July 24, Cindy and her boyfriend Ray were going to a carnival in a neighboring town, and Cindy decided to invite Susan to join them. According to Cindy, the divorce had been weighing on Susan for months, and Cindy was trying to help her gradually rejoin the social world. Cindy noticed that when Susan was around other people, when she had somewhere to go, someone to talk to, and something to distract her from everything, she seemed closer to her old self. So, whenever she got the chance, Cindy tried to include her.

She hosted her friends at her house often, and lately she had started inviting Susan too. Slowly but surely, it seemed to be helping. Susan was not fully recovered yet, but she was beginning to look like someone who might finally get past the divorce and find herself again. Then Cindy told police something else.

She said she had no doubt that Susan’s husband, Mike, was behind the murder. Investigators soon discovered that almost everyone close to Susan felt the same way, including her father. Investigators learned that Susan and Mike’s marriage had been troubled from almost the start. When they met, Susan was a quiet, shy woman from a religious family.

Mike, on the other hand, was more rebellious and withdrawn. He played guitar, dreamed of becoming a famous rock musician, and could barely hold down a job. He was always getting into fights, and in general, his personality was the kind that made many people stay away. When Susan started dating him, her friends and parents tried to talk her out of it.

But Susan had fallen in love with Mike, and they eventually married. Over the next several years, Susan was the one who basically ran the household. She worked at the factory, often taking extra shifts, while Mike spent his time playing guitar, drinking beer, and lifting weights in the yard. He would occasionally try to get a job, but he never lasted long because he kept getting fired.

After seven years of marriage, a few months before Susan’s death, Mike received a job offer in Indiana, but Susan did not want to move to another state. So Mike simply left without telling her, and he did not leave empty-handed. He took her car, her jacket, and even the porcelain figurines they had collected together for years. But Mike did not stop there.

Before he disappeared, he recorded a thirty-minute video on a tape and left it for Susan. In the video, he blamed her for the collapse of the marriage and talked at length about her being a bad wife. Then Susan began finding notes hidden around the house. Mike had left them in various places, and each one was filled with insults, accusations, and cruel messages that seemed designed to hurt her.

All of this truly frightened Susan, and she told her friends that she was afraid of Mike. What scared her most was that he might come back one day, enter her house, and hurt her. That was why she asked Cindy’s friend Ray to nail her windows shut, so no one could open them from the outside. Ray even offered to lend her a gun, but Susan refused.

Cindy also told police that Susan had recently filed for divorce, and that she and Mike were still legally married at the time of her death. Based on all of this, investigators began looking into Mike as the primary suspect. But there was an obvious problem. He was living in Indianapolis, about fifteen hours away by car.

Police needed to find out whether Mike had returned to Texas around the time of Susan’s murder. So they contacted officers in Indiana. They spoke with him, but Mike denied any connection to Susan’s death. He also claimed he had an alibi for the night of the crime, and investigators in Texas were informed of this information.

Still, the theory involving Susan’s husband began to seem less likely, and investigators started looking for other potential suspects. They learned from Susan’s friend Cindy that Susan had briefly dated a man named J. C. before her death.

He worked as a bartender, and they had gone out several times. But according to Cindy, the relationship ended as quickly as it started. Susan told her that J. C.

was pressuring her to have sex at a faster pace than she was comfortable with, and that was why she decided to end things. The two lead investigators went to the bar where J. C. worked to speak with him in person, and they soon noticed something strange about him.

J. C. was tall and heavyset, which matched the general description of the man witnesses had seen outside Susan’s house. During their conversation, the investigator noticed something else.

J. C. was smoking and drinking Coke from a can, just like the person who seemed to have spent time in Susan’s living room. That alone proved nothing, but it made the investigator pay more attention.

J. C. also seemed nervous, and when asked where he was the night of the murder, he said he could not remember. There was another problem too.

J. C. ’s story did not match what Susan had told her close friend. He denied pressuring Susan to have sex, insisting he had not done so.

Instead, he claimed they had actually had sex, which contradicted what Susan had told Cindy. But then J. C. said something that increased the investigators’ suspicion.

According to him, he and Susan had been intimate in her bedroom. It seemed to the investigators that J. C. might be trying to justify the presence of his fingerprints or DNA in that room.

Nevertheless, J. C. agreed to take a polygraph test and voluntarily provided his fingerprints. The test results were inconclusive, and the examiner could not confirm whether he was telling the truth.

The fingerprints posed another problem, as investigators had to send them to a lab in another city for experts to compare manually. Given the backlog of cases, it could take months before they got an answer. At that time, the investigator had some doubts about J. C.

’s involvement, partly because of his willingness to hand over his fingerprints so easily. While they waited, investigators continued looking for other people. Soon, their attention turned to Ray, one of Susan’s close friends. Susan knew Ray well, which meant she would have no trouble letting him into her house.

He was also tall and heavyset, matching the general description witnesses had given. Other than that, there was not much pointing to him. At first, the investigator did not seriously believe Ray was involved. But once they started talking, his opinion began to change.

From the very first minute of the interview, Ray was acting suspicious. He told the investigator that since the crime, he had not stopped thinking about how the killer could have gotten into Susan’s house. Because Ray was the one who had nailed her windows shut, he began talking about the different weaknesses in the house and suggesting possible ways someone could have gotten in. Then the investigator asked Ray whether he had an alibi for the night of the murder.

Ray said he had been at a friend’s house playing a game called Dungeons & Dragons. This detail caught the investigator’s attention immediately, because Dungeons & Dragons had a very bad reputation at the time. The game was often linked in the media to black magic and Satan worship, and even serious newspapers published reports making such claims. So, at that time, people who played games like this were sometimes viewed with suspicion, and some believed they might be involved in something dark or dangerous.

Given the level of violence in Susan’s murder, the investigators wondered whether there was some kind of connection. But Ray also agreed to give his fingerprints without hesitation. Because of that, his potential involvement became less clear. While the investigator waited for the lab results on the fingerprints, he continued looking for other suspects.

But none of those leads produced anything. All the while, he kept returning to one question. Was it possible that Susan’s husband had committed the murder somehow, and yet managed to fabricate an alibi? So the investigator called the officers in Indianapolis again and asked them to recheck Mike’s alibi to make sure it was valid.

But he was surprised when they told him it had never been verified at all. The officers had spoken with Mike, and he told them he had spent that night with several people who could confirm his story. He also promised to come to the police station and give them a list of names, but he never did. This meant Mike did not have a confirmed alibi.

As soon as the investigator realized this, he immediately bought a plane ticket to Indianapolis and began thinking about his next move. He could not force Mike to give his fingerprints, and he did not want to simply ask for them and risk alerting him. Mike was not tied to a specific place, and if he realized police were closing in, he could easily disappear. So the investigator devised a plan.

He and another officer decided to put Mike under surveillance and wait for him to do something that would legally justify an arrest. If they could arrest him on another charge, they could take his fingerprints without needing his consent, and Mike might never realize it had anything to do with Susan’s murder. The two officers parked a van near the house where Mike was living with his brother, and they began watching him. For several days, nothing happened.

But then the investigator noticed something interesting. Mike and his brother were holding a yard sale, displaying various items in front of the house. When the investigator looked through his binoculars, he saw porcelain figurines among the items for sale. As we remember, Susan had told her friend that Mike had taken this exact type of figurine from her house when he left.

This gave the investigator exactly what he needed. If the figurines had indeed been stolen from Susan’s house, he could treat them as stolen property, and that was enough to justify an arrest. He called the local police department, and officers arrested Mike. Once he was in custody, his fingerprints were taken and sent to the lab.

All the investigators could do now was wait. At that time, the lab had fingerprints from Ray, J. C. , and Mike.

And Mike was still, in the investigators’ eyes, the most likely person to have killed Susan. A few days later, the results finally came back. But instead of giving the investigators the answer they had expected, the results brought an unexpected twist. The fingerprints found in Susan’s bathroom did not belong to Ray, J.

C. , or Mike. The results came as a real shock to the lead investigator. By that time, he had already started preparing the paperwork to extradite Mike to Texas.

But now, he had no choice but to back off. He tried for a while to disprove Mike’s alibi, but he found no evidence that Mike had returned to Texas at the time of the murder. So, in the end, almost nothing was left for the investigator. Still, he continued to believe Mike was the most likely person responsible.

Susan’s loved ones felt the same way. When Susan’s family realized police could not prove Mike’s involvement, they filed a civil lawsuit against him. One reason was that Susan had a life insurance policy worth $11,000, and Mike was the person who would receive the money. Mike did not participate in the case because he did not have enough money to hire a lawyer, and eventually the judge ruled in favor of Susan’s family, ordering Mike to pay $700,000.

But there were two main problems. Mike had no money and no valuable property, and as long as he lived in another state, there was almost nothing the court could collect from him. After that, Mike continued to live under a cloud of suspicion. For years, people believed he had killed Susan.

When he started playing with his band, strangers would sometimes approach him after shows and ask him directly whether he had actually killed his wife. In 2005, after one of those shows, Mike was talking with a friend when the conversation turned to Susan’s murder. He told her that even after eighteen years, people still thought he was a killer, and that carrying this burden for so long had affected him deeply. His friend thought it was unfair, and she began to wonder whether there was anything she could do to help him.

Eventually, she found an email address for the police department that had handled Susan’s case, and she sent them a message explaining what had been happening to Mike all these years. That email caught the attention of an investigator named Don Miller, who became interested in the case. By that time, Susan’s murder had remained in limbo for years without significant progress. But when Miller began examining the evidence, he saw that the six cigarette butts believed to have been left by the killer were still in storage.

He sent them to the lab, and technicians were able to extract DNA from an unknown man. That DNA was not in the FBI database. So Miller took the most obvious step. He went to see Mike and asked him to provide a DNA sample, and Mike agreed.

After a while, the lab results came back. The killer’s DNA did not match the DNA of Susan’s husband. For the first time in eighteen years, investigators were finally able to rule out the man almost everyone had believed was guilty. When Miller called Mike and told him the results, Mike broke down in tears.

He said the accusations had completely destroyed his life. Miller then began thinking about how to identify the real killer, and he noticed something important. After all those years, the fingerprints from Susan’s bathroom had never been run through the system. He sent them to specialists, who entered them into an electronic fingerprint database, and almost immediately, they got a match.

The fingerprints belonged to a man named Joseph Hatley. Hatley’s fingerprints had been taken in 1988, about a year after Susan’s murder. At that time, he had been arrested for armed robbery in Las Vegas. But investigators in Texas had never known about any of this, because no one had ever looked at Hatley as a suspect.

Investigator Miller began searching for Hatley and confirmed that his name did not appear anywhere in the case file. But while trying to find a connection between Hatley and Susan, Miller discovered something that stunned him. Hatley was Cindy’s cousin, the close friend of Susan. And that was not the only connection.

Miller also learned that Susan probably knew Hatley well. He had spent time with her at Cindy’s house, among the same group of friends. This made the scene in Susan’s living room more logical. Perhaps she had let him into the house because she considered him a good friend.

While Miller continued looking into Hatley’s background, he found something else. About a year after Susan’s murder, Hatley’s girlfriend had gone to the police and accused him of sexual assault. She was twenty years old at the time. According to the woman, he had attacked her and threatened her with a knife.

She also said he had told her he had killed before and would not hesitate to do it again. But despite all of that, no charges were ever filed against Hatley, and no one in the police department connected that incident to Susan’s murder. After gathering all this information, Investigator Miller went to speak with Hatley in person and asked him for a DNA sample. At that time, Hatley was living near Austin and working as a warehouse manager.

He agreed to meet with the investigators at the police station, and he almost immediately admitted that he had been at Susan’s house shortly before her death. He claimed they had been drinking alcohol and using drugs, but he insisted they had not had sex and that he had not killed her. The investigators knew Hatley was lying, because Susan’s blood showed no signs of alcohol or drugs. Nevertheless, he agreed to voluntarily give a DNA sample.

Police let him go and waited for the results. The process took several days. While the investigators were waiting, something unexpected happened. Officers spoke separately with Hatley’s wife, who also happened to be named Susan.

She told them that he had been beating and sexually assaulting her for years. She admitted she was terrified of him, and that she believed he might kill her or hurt her daughter and son. But police promised her they would not allow him to hurt anyone else. Investigator Miller decided to use these accusations to arrest Hatley while the lab was still comparing the DNA samples.

Hatley was arrested, and shortly afterward, investigators got the results they had been waiting for. The DNA found on the cigarette butts in Susan’s house matched Hatley’s DNA. At that point, police had both his DNA and his fingerprints linking him to the crime scene, which left Hatley virtually no realistic way to deny his involvement in Susan’s murder. When Investigator Miller called Susan’s father and told him that the killer had finally been identified, her father was sure he was talking about Mike.

So when Miller mentioned a different name, he was shocked. The same was true for almost everyone who loved Susan, especially Cindy. She could not even imagine that Susan’s killer was her own cousin, the man she had a close relationship with and considered like a brother. Hatley’s trial was scheduled to begin in October 2007, twenty years after Susan’s murder.

But her family did not want to sit through a long public trial, listening to his lawyers attack Susan and try to convince the jury that Hatley was innocent. So when prosecutors offered a plea deal that would sentence Hatley to thirty years in prison in exchange for a guilty plea, Susan’s family agreed to support it, and Hatley accepted the deal. He admitted that he had gone to Susan’s house that night and killed her, but he insisted he remembered almost nothing about it. According to Hatley, he had been extremely drunk and everything was blurry.

So he claimed he could barely recall any details. Nevertheless, the confession was enough, and Hatley was sent to prison. But then, Susan’s family faced another painful reality. Because of his sentence under old laws, he was eligible for early release.

In 2018, after serving only eleven years, he was released for good behavior. It was hard for Susan’s loved ones to accept after everything he had done. Eleven years seemed far too short. But there was nothing they could do to change it.

After his release, Hatley moved to Abilene, Texas, and settled into a mobile home near his daughter’s house. Three years later, in 2021, he gave an interview with NBC in which he revealed more details about what had happened that night. Or at least, he told his version of events. According to Hatley, he had not gone to Susan’s house intending to kill her.

He said he was drunk and lonely, and was just looking for company. Susan let him in, brought him a soft drink and some snacks, and they talked and laughed for a while. At some point, Hatley tried to kiss her, and Susan slapped him. After that, according to his account, something inside his mind broke and he lost control.

Hatley claimed he killed Susan with the pillow, and that everything he did afterward, including holding her underwater in the bathtub, was for two reasons. First, he wanted to make sure she was really dead. Second, he wanted to make the scene look more horrific. On the same program, reporters also spoke with Mike, who described how being accused of Susan’s murder had destroyed his life.

Less than a year after that interview aired in December 2021, Hatley was diagnosed with cancer, and he was supposed to begin chemotherapy. But on December 9, he was found dead inside his trailer. Still, the story did not quite end there. After a while, Hatley’s trailer and everything in it was sold to a new owner, who began sorting through the things Hatley had left behind.

While going through the trailer, the man found a pile of handwritten pages and began reading them. To his surprise, the pages appeared to be an autobiography that Hatley had written shortly before his death. What he found in them disturbed him greatly, prompting him to contact Investigator Miller. He gave him the papers, and Miller began reading them.

In those pages, Hatley wrote about his difficult childhood, claiming he had been beaten by his mother. He also admitted that violent thoughts had begun to appear in him from a young age, and that these thoughts had become harder to control over the years. He also wrote about the influence of alcohol and violent pornography, which he said had intensified his tendencies. Hatley also wrote about Susan’s murder.

According to him, when they were spending time together at Cindy’s house, he had convinced himself that Susan was flirting with him. That was why, when he went to her house that night, he tried to kiss her. But when Susan slapped him, he claimed everything became blurry. By the time he regained consciousness, he had beaten her severely.

Even in his version of events, Susan was still alive at that point. And Hatley admitted that he could have stopped there, but he chose not to. Susan promised him she would not tell anyone what had happened if he let her live, but Hatley had no intention of stopping. He asked her whether she believed in God.

When she answered yes, he told her, “Start praying. ”

After the crime, Hatley drove his car past the police station and thought about turning himself in. But he did not have the courage to do it. In the days that followed, he talked with his friends and relatives about Susan’s murder.

He admitted that those conversations excited him. He also considered Mike his second victim, because Mike immediately became the main suspect and spent years suffering under public suspicion. In the handwritten pages, Hatley also wrote about the assault on his girlfriend, the one she had reported to police years earlier. He admitted he had been deliberately violent enough to give her a reason to report him.

He wanted someone to stop him, but he could not force himself to turn himself in. In the end, Hatley tried to justify everything by saying he had always had two faces, and that one of those faces was like the devil. He claimed he had spent his entire life fighting that side of himself. But even in those pages, there was no true remorse for killing Susan or for the people he had hurt.

After reading all of it, Investigator Miller began to wonder whether there were other victims in Hatley’s life. He had spent years working as a truck driver, and his handwritten confession looked like a typical profile of a serial killer. Miller tried to search for other potential victims, but his search has not led to anything concrete so far. And so, in the end, the long and complicated case was finally solved, but it left bitterness in everyone involved.

Susan’s family felt deep frustration that her killer was not discovered for nearly two decades, even though another victim had tried to bring him to justice for assault and sexual violence. She had even told officers that Hatley claimed he had killed before. But despite that, her words were not taken seriously. And even after the case was solved, Hatley served only eleven years behind bars.

Susan’s family felt a profound injustice, especially given the brutality he had inflicted on her.