Who is Hadden Clark, the serial killer who confessed his crimes to a man he thought was Jesus?

Content warning: This article contains graphic descriptions of murder. Please take care while reading.

In the mid-1990s, Hadden Clark was serving time in prison for the gruesome murder of 23-year-old Laura Houghteling when he made a shocking confession to his cellmate, Jack Truitt. Hadden told Truitt that he’d also slain a young child named Michele Dorr — and it’s likely she wasn’t Clark’s only other victim. Clark confessed what he’d done, he said, because he thought Truitt’s long hair made him look like Jesus.

About six years before Houghteling died in 1992, Clark — a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic — was living near 6-year-old Michele Dorr’s father, when the little girl left the house one day to play in a pool in the backyard and never returned. Dorr’s father was amid a bitter divorce, and at first, he was a primary suspect in the case. But Dorr’s body was never found, and her murder remained unsolved until her remains were finally recovered 13 years later, according to Investigation Discovery’s new docuseries, Born Evil: The Serial Killer and the Savior, from producer Michael Bay.

By the point Michele’s body was recovered, Clark had been sentenced to 30 years in prison for Houghteling’s murder. Clark worked as a gardener for Houghteling’s mother when Laura returned home from college at Harvard that year and disappeared. Blood evidence linked Clark to the crime, and he confessed he murdered Laura, leading police to where he left her body in a shallow grave.

While Clark was in prison in the late 1990s, now-retired FBI special agent Lou Luciano interviewed Clark, who told him his alter-ego “Kristen Bluefin” was responsible. Clark had multiple personalities, all women, according to Luciano, who appears in the ID docuseries, and Clark would often wear wigs and women’s clothes when he committed crimes. “He’s a killer. He’s a soulless individual. Behind those eyes, there is nothing,” Luciano told Rolling Stone.

Clark’s Truitt confession

Around the same Lou Luciano interviewed Hadden Clark in prison, Clark told his cellmate Jack Truitt that he killed young Michele Dorr, with gruesome details including slitting the 6-year-old’s throat, drinking her blood, and eating some of her flesh. Truitt did the right thing and informed prison authorities that Clark had confessed and in 1999, Clark led the police to Dorr’s remains, still in the bathing suit she wore the day she vanished. Clark was convicted and an additional 30 years were added to Clark’s sentence, with another 10 years added for an unrelated robbery.

“When Hadden started confessing to Jack because he thought he was Jesus, Jack was like, ‘Man, this guy’s talking about killing, gutting and cannibalizing little kids and cutting the throats of women,'” Luciano said in Bay’s series. “Jack did this at great risk… being locked up in a correctional institution. Calling the police can make a very bad entry to your health record while you’re behind bars. But Jack picked up the phone and made that call,” Luciano said.

As Bay’s docuseries explains, Clark had a traumatic childhood, including a birth injury involving forceps, and an abusive mother who would dress Clark in girl’s clothes as a form of punishment. Hadden isn’t the only murderer in the Clark family, either. In 1985, Clark’s brother, Bradfield Clark, was convicted of murder for killing and eating his co-worker’s flesh.

Today, Dorr and Houghteling are still the only two victims whose murders Clark has been convicted of. Based on what Clark told Truitt, as well as many drawings he’s made behind bars, most of which involved women, authorities think there may be more victims, and that Clark may have started killing girls as a teenager when he also killed and dismembered animals. Clark, 72, is eligible for parole.