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off the interstate highway. But his general condition and behaviour were not quite bad enough to have him committed.
    Penny Houghteling had no trouble with him. She trusted him and allowed him to make himself coffee in the kitchen and use the bathroom without permission. She may have been too trusting. Things began to go missing. First, it was a string of pearls, then it was her underwear, one piece at a time. She said nothing. But when some tools disappeared, she confronted him. He blew up and she backed down, believing that perhaps she had been too hard on him.
    For Hadden, things got worse after Laura graduated from Harvard in the summer of 1992 and returned home. Viewing Penny as the mother he never had, he saw Laura as a rival for her affections. Understandably, Penny was closer to Laura than to Hadden. In Hadden’s mind, something had to be done. Then an opportunity presented itself. Penny Houghteling told Hadden that she was going away for a conference from 17 to 25 October. The following day, he went to a hardware store and bought rope and two rolls of duct tape. In the left-corner of the cheque he used for the purchases, where there is a box for a “memo”, he wrote the word “Laura”.
    On Saturday, 17 October, Laura was seen at a horse meet in nearby Middleburg, Virginia. There was a gala dinner afterwards. The following morning, she slept in. Then she went to watch a football game with her older brother, Warren, and his housemate. Laura had taken a temporary job in Washington, DC, while she made up her mind whether to train as a teacher or a lawyer. A big project was starting the following day, so she was in bed just after ten o’clock.
    Around eight o’clock the next morning, a housekeeper with a child waiting for the school bus saw a woman she took to be Laura leaving the house. But she did not arrive at work. Her employer phoned the house. There was no reply. Knowing Laura to be a conscientious worker, she was worried and sent a young woman, a personal friend of Laura, around to the house. But no one answered the door and she called Warren.
    After he arrived, he searched the house. Then he decided to walk the route Laura took to the bus stop. Along the way, he saw Hadden driving down the street in his pickup and tried to wave him down. Hadden stopped. As Warren walked over to his pick-up to ask Clark whether he knew anything about Laura’s whereabouts, the gardener suddenly drove off at high speed. This struck Warren as strange, but he still did not call the police until that night. They told him not to worry.
    When the police finally got on the case, they decided they wanted to speak to Hadden Clark. Both Warren and Penny Houghteling gave them a description. But Penny Houghteling dismissed the idea that Hadden had anything to do with the disappearance of her daughter.
    “Hadden wouldn’t hurt anyone,” she said. “He’s just a gardener.”
    In the higher echelons of the Montgomery County Police Department, bells began ringing. Clark had briefly been a suspect in the disappearance of Michele Dorr.
    When six-year-old Michele disappeared on 31 May 1986, her father Carl Dorr had been the prime suspect.
    “It’s page one in the handbook,” said Detective Mike Garvey, the first cop to interview Dorr. In 90 per cent of cases where a child disappears, the parent or carer knows what has happened – and Dorr certainly looked like their man.
    Although he had degrees in psychology and economics, the economic downturn meant that he could only find employment in menial jobs. By the mid-1980s, he was doing casual work, spraying cars. He had married in 1978, but soon after Michele was born the marriage had descended into domestic warfare. Carl would beat his wife Dorothy in front of the child, who developed a stutter and ground her teeth when she slept.
    “She had seen too much for a six-year-old,” Dorothy later told the
Washington Post
. She also had damning evidence to give to the police.
    Three months