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before Michele’s disappearance, Carl Dorr had turned up at his estranged wife’s house and refused to leave. If she tried to divorce him, he said he would lie under oath, saying she was an adulteress and an unfit mother to prevent her having custody of the child. If he lost the custody battle, he would kidnap Michele from the school bus. Then, Dorothy told the police, he hurled her against the wall and slapped her around, leaving her with bruises and cuts. She was sure that he was responsible for the disappearance of Michele, she told the cops. At the time, he was trying to get out of paying $400 a month child support.
    After separating from his wife, Carl Dorr had taken lodgings two doors down from Geoffrey Clark in Sudbury Road. On the evening of Friday, 30 May 1986, he picked Michele up from her mother. He bought her a toy in a 7-Eleven. They ate in McDonald’s, then went home with a kid’s movie from the video store.
    The following morning, it was hot – over 90°F (32°C). He filled a small plastic pool in the garden for her and, after promising to take her to a full-sized pool in the neighbourhood, he went inside to watch the Indianapolis 500 on television. During the race, he looked out of the window a couple of times. He could not see Michele and there were no ripples on the pool, but he was not worried. Silver Spring was a safe suburban area and, no doubt, Michele had gone down the street to play with her new friend Eliza Clark, Geoffrey’s daughter.
    It was not until 5.30 p.m. that Dorr went over to Clark’s house. Geoffrey was barbecuing in the back garden. Eliza and the other two children from his first marriage were there, along with Geoffrey’s new girlfriend. They had been out all day. There was no sign of Michele and they had not seen her. Dorr walked to the end of the street, then began knocking on doors. Making no progress, he went to the police and reported her missing. They soon arrived and he quickly became their prime suspect. After all, he was the last person to see her; he had been battling over her custody for years and had threatened to abduct her earlier that year.
    Dorr agreed to take a polygraph test, but the examiner told the police that he might know more about the disappearance of his daughter than he let on. Indeed, Carl Dorr did have a guilty secret. Not wishing to appear a negligent parent, he had told the cops that the last time he had seen Michele was 2.10 p.m. In fact, he had not seen her since noon.
    The police interviewed him for twenty-four hours, playing good cop, bad cop. His daughter was dead, they said, and he had failed a lie-detector test.
    “We’re going to find her,” the cops told him. “When we do, we’re coming to get you.”
    Dorr took another polygraph exam and passed easily. He submitted to hypnosis and took the “truth serum” sodium pentothal. Nothing convinced the cops.
    Under the pressure he cracked and became psychotic. Hallucinating, he was taken into hospital for psychiatric observation. In this state, he even told a psychiatrist that he had abducted and killed his daughter. When he was released, the police took him in again for further questioning. The evidence that would have exonerated him was all there on the crime scene, if they had looked. But they had not even located the crime scene yet.
    Briefly, there was another suspect in the case. The day after Michele Dorr went missing, Detective Wayne Farrell was driving down Sudbury Road when he saw Hadden Clark tinkering with his truck in the driveway of his brother’s house. Thinking he might have found a valuable witness, Farrell asked Hadden whether he had been there yesterday.
    Hadden said he had “for about two or three minutes”.
    Farrell told Mike Garvey, who discovered that Hadden Clark was the neighbourhood oddball. They called him in for questioning. He had punched in at the time clock in the nearby Chevy Chase country club where he worked as a chef at 2.46 p.m. on the afternoon Michele