When a woman from a small Texas town suddenly stopped showing up for work, her family knew right away that something was wrong. But once police started looking into it, the story only became more confusing. There were multiple suspects and unsettling clues, but investigators still could not figure out what had really happened.

 For almost 20 years, the truth stayed buried until one unexpected break changed everything. Susan Atkins was born on April 6, 1957 in Texas. She grew up in a religious family and church was a big part of her life from the very beginning. Her father was a deacon at their local church, so Susan and her brother spent a lot of time there when they were growing up.

Later, the family moved to Stephenville, a small town not far from Dallas. Susan was always quiet and a little shy. She wasn’t someone who wanted to be the center of attention, and she didn’t usually surround herself with big, loud groups of friends. But the people she did let into her life meant everything to her.

 And once Susan grew close to someone, she treated them almost like family. After graduating high school with honors, Susan started working at a local sandpaper factory. A few years later, she met a man named Mike, and in 1980, they got married. Not long after the wedding, Mike decided he wanted to leave Stephenville and try living in a bigger city.

 Susan was not exactly excited about the idea. She was close to her parents, and up to that point, she had never really lived far from home. But Mike kept pushing, and eventually she agreed to go with him. So, the couple moved to El Paso, about 8 hours away. And almost right away, Susan knew it was not where she wanted to be.

 So, eventually, she and Mike moved back to Stephenville. A few years later, the marriage started to fall apart. Mike left town, and Susan was left behind in Stephenville trying to get through the divorce on her own. It was a painful time for her. She became more withdrawn, more depressed, and for a while, the only real comfort she had came from the people who still made an effort to be there for her.

 They checked in on her, spent time with her, and gave her at least some light during a very difficult time. By July 1987, Susan was 30 years old, still going through the divorce, and working at the factory. On July 28th, Susan’s father received a call from her boss. He told him Susan had not shown up for work for the past 2 days, and that he had been trying to reach her, but could not get an answer.

Her father immediately knew something was wrong. Susan took her job seriously, and she was not the kind of person who would simply miss a shift without warning anyone. He tried calling her, but when no one picked up, he got in his car and drove to her house. When he walked up to the front door, he could hear the TV playing somewhere inside, but no one came to the door when he knocked.

Then, he tried the handle, and realized the door was unlocked. So, he stepped inside and started calling out for his daughter, but the only sound he heard back was the TV coming from the living room. When Susan’s father walked into her bedroom, he immediately saw that something was wrong.

 The bed had clearly been moved out of place. The mattress was partly hanging off the frame, and torn bedding was scattered around the room, mixed in with clothing on the floor. By then, he was starting to panic. He was about to leave the bedroom when something else caught his eye. The bathroom door was slightly open, so he walked over and looked inside.

To his horror, he saw Susan. Her body was draped over the edge of the bathtub. She had no clothes on, and her hands had been tied behind her back with a t-shirt. Even through the shock, with his mind trying to reject what he was seeing, Susan’s father understood almost immediately that his daughter was gone.

There was nothing he could do to save her, so he ran out of the bathroom and called police. In a small town like Stephenville, murders were extremely rare, so police sent every available officer to Susan’s house. One of the investigators who arrived at the scene noticed Susan’s father standing outside.

 He knew the man well, and at first, he could not understand why he was there. Until he remembered that he had a daughter and realized that the victim was almost certainly her. Police began processing the scene, and from the moment they stepped inside, it was clear that whoever had killed Susan had used a level of violence none of them had seen before.

The bathtub where her body was found had been filled almost to the top, and the water had turned nearly black from the blood. Looking at the scene, detectives believed the killer may have held Susan under the water until she died. But that wasn’t all. There was a mark around Susan’s neck that looked like it may have been left by some kind of cord or rope, and investigators found a cord lying on her bed.

They also noticed clear makeup stains on her pillow. Taken together, it looked as if the killer may have first tried to strangle her with a cord and a pillow, then dragged her into the bathroom and held her under the water. And because Susan’s clothing had been removed, detectives also believed she may have been sexually assaulted.

 The attack was so brutal that investigators had a hard time seeing it as random. This did not feel like a simple break-in gone wrong. To them, it looked more like someone had come into Susan’s house carrying anger, hatred, and some very personal reason to hurt her. Susan’s body was sent to the medical examiner while police continued searching the house.

 In the living room, they noticed an ashtray on a small table near the couch, and it was packed with cigarette butts. There were also snacks lying around along with a can of Coke. Susan’s father told investigators that she did not smoke and almost never drank Coke. So, police began to suspect those things had been left behind by the killer.

 Judging by the number of cigarettes, it looked like he may have spent several hours in the house. And from that, investigators started forming a possible picture of what had happened. Susan may have known this man and let him inside, then brought him snacks and a drink and allowed him to smoke in her living room. As they kept going through the house, detectives noticed something strange.

All of the window frames had been nailed shut, making it impossible to open them. That made it look as though Susan had been afraid someone might try to get into her house. At the same time, crime scene technicians found fresh marks on the front door that could have pointed to an attempted break-in. But police were skeptical of that theory because the scene in the living room suggested Susan may have let the killer in willingly.

Still, they could not completely rule out the possibility that the killer had attacked Susan first and only afterwards sat in the living room, smoked cigarettes, and ate the snacks. Before long, forensic technicians found one of the most important pieces of evidence in the house, a clear palm print and fingerprints on the faucet in the bedroom.

 Based on where the print was located, it looked as if the killer may have braced his hand against the faucet while holding Susan’s head under the water. The problem was that investigators could not simply run the print through a database and wait for a match. At that time, they would have to compare it manually against possible suspects.

 DNA was even more difficult. Detectives understood that the cigarette butts may have contained the killer’s saliva, but DNA testing was not available to them in the way it would be today. So, for the moment, the fingerprints became their strongest evidence. Police also spoke with Susan’s neighbors, and one of them gave detectives an interesting lead.

Someone had seen a very large man outside Susan’s house. They had not been able to remember much else about him, but investigators still considered the information important. When the medical examiner 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 could see signs that Susan had been strangled with a cord and smothered with a pillow, and they could also see evidence that she had been held under water. But, they could not say which one of those acts had actually killed her.

The exact time of death was also hard to pin down. All experts could say was that Susan had likely been attacked sometime in the evening, about 2 days before her body was found. After speaking with Susan’s family and friends, police learned that none of them had actually heard from her for the past 2 days.

 Her best friend Cindy said she had last seen Susan 4 days before the body was found. On July 24th, Cindy and her boyfriend Ray were going to a carnival in a nearby town, and Cindy decided to invite Susan along. According to Cindy, the divorce had been weighing on Susan for months, and Cindy had been trying to pull her back into the world a little.

 She had noticed that when Susan was around other people, when she had somewhere to go, someone to talk to, something to take her mind off everything, she seemed a little more like herself. So, whenever Cindy had the chance, she tried to include her. She often had friends over at her house, and lately she had been inviting Susan, too.

 Slowly, it seemed to help. Susan still was not fully okay, but she was starting to look like someone who might finally get through the divorce and find herself again. Then, Cindy told police something else. She said she had no doubt that Susan’s husband, Mike, was the person behind the murder. And before long, detectives learned that almost everyone close to Susan felt the same way, including her father.

Investigators found out that Susan and Mike’s marriage had been troubled almost from the beginning. When they met, Susan was a quiet, shy woman from a religious family. Mike, on the other hand, was more of a rebellious outsider. He played guitar, dreamed of becoming a famous rock musician, and barely held down a job.

 He constantly got into fights, and in general, he had the kind of personality that made many people keep their distance. When Susan started seeing him, her friends and parents all tried to talk her out of it. But Susan had fallen in love with Mike, and the two eventually got married. Over the next several years, Susan was basically the one keeping the household together.

She worked at the factory, often picking up extra shifts, while Mike spent his time playing guitar, drinking beer, and lifting weights in the yard. Every now and then, he would try to get a job, but he never lasted long because he kept getting fired. Seven years into the marriage, just a few months before Susan’s death, Mike got a job offer in Indiana.

 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 the two of them had been collecting together for years. But Mike did not stop there. Before he disappeared, he recorded a 30-minute video on a tape and left it behind for Susan.

 In it, he blamed her for the marriage falling apart and went on about what a terrible wife she had been. Then, Susan started finding notes hidden around the house. Mike had left them in different places, and each one was filled with insults, accusations, and cruel little messages that seemed designed to hurt her. All of this genuinely frightened Susan, and she told her friends she was afraid of Mike.

 What scared her most was that one day he might come back, walk into her house, and hurt her. That was why she asked Cindy’s boyfriend, 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 only recently filed for divorce, and at the time of her death, she and Mike were still legally married.

Based on all of this, detectives began looking at Mike as their main suspect. But there was one obvious problem. He was living in Indianapolis, about a 15-hour drive away. Police needed to know if Mike had made his way back to Texas around the time Susan was killed, so they reached out to officers in Indiana.

 They spoke with him, but Mike denied having anything to do with Susan’s death. He also claimed he had an alibi for the night of the murder, and that information was passed back to detectives in Texas. With that, the theory that Susan’s husband had been involved started to look less likely, and detectives began looking at other possible suspects.

 From Susan’s friend Sandy, they learned that not long before her death, Susan had started seeing a man named J.C. He worked as a bartender, and the two had gone out a few times. But according to Cindy, the relationship ended almost as quickly as it began. Susan had told her that J.C. was pushing for sex much faster than she was comfortable with, and that was why she decided to stop seeing him.

 The lead detectives went to the bar where J.C. worked to speak with him in person. And, almost right away, something about him felt off. J.C. was tall and heavy-set, which fit the general description of the man witnesses had seen outside Susan’s house. And as they talked, the detective 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 did not prove anything, but it made the detective pay closer attention. J.C. also seemed nervous, and when he was asked where he had been on the night Susan was killed, he said he could not remember.

 There was another problem, too. J.C.’s story did not line up with what Susan had told her best friend. He denied pressuring Susan to have sex with him, and insisted he had not pushed her in that way. In fact, he claimed the two of them had already had sex, which directly contradicted what Susan had told Cindy. But then, JC said something that made the detectives even more suspicious.

According to him, he and Susan had been intimate in her bedroom. To the detective, that sounded like JC might be trying to explain in advance why his fingerprints or DNA could turn up in that room. Still, JC agreed to take a polygraph and voluntarily gave his fingerprints. The polygraph results were inconclusive, and the examiner could not say with any certainty whether he had been telling the truth.

 The fingerprints were another problem. Detectives had to send them to a lab in another city, where experts would compare them by hand. And because there was already a long backlog, it could take months before they got an answer. At the time, the detective already had some doubts about JC’s involvement, partly because he had been willing to hand over his fingerprints so easily.

 While they were waiting, investigators kept looking at other people. And before long, they turned their attention to Ray, the boyfriend of Susan’s best friend. Susan knew Ray very well, which meant she would have no problem letting him into her house. He was also very tall and heavy-set, which fit the general description witnesses had given.

 Beyond that, there was not much pointing to him. And at first, the detective did not seriously believe Ray was involved. But, once they started talking, his opinion began to change. From the first minute of the interview, Ray was acting suspicious. He told the detective that ever since the murder, he had not been able to stop thinking about how the killer could have gotten into Susan’s house.

 Since Ray was the one who had nailed her window shut, he started talking through different weak spots in the house and suggesting possible ways someone might have climbed inside. Then, the detective asked whether Ray had an alibi for the night Susan was killed. Ray said he had been at a friend’s house playing a game called Dungeons and Dragons.

 That detail immediately caught the detective’s attention because back then Dungeons and Dragons had a pretty dark reputation. The game was often linked in the media to black magic and Satanism and even serious newspapers had published stories making those kinds of claims. So at the time people who played games like that were sometimes looked at with suspicion and some believed they might be involved in something dark or dangerous.

Given the level of violence in Susan’s murder, the detectives wondered if there could be some kind of connection. But Ray also agreed to give his fingerprints without hesitation and because of that his possible involvement became less clear. While the detective waited for the lab results on the fingerprints, he kept looking for other suspects but none of those leads went anywhere and the whole time he kept coming back to one question.

Was it possible that Susan’s husband had somehow committed the murder and still managed to build himself an alibi? So the detective contacted the officers in Indianapolis again and asked them to double-check Mike’s alibi just to make sure it actually held up. But to his surprise they told him that no one had really verified it at all.

Officers had spoken with Mike and he had told them he spent that evening with several people who could confirm his story. He also promised to come down to the station and give them a list of names. But he never did. That meant Mike did not really have a confirmed alibi. And once the detective realized that he immediately bought a plane ticket to Indianapolis and started thinking through his next move.

 He could not force Mike to give his fingerprints and he did not want to simply ask for them and risk tipping him off. Mike was not especially tied down to one place, and if he realized police were closing in on him, he could easily disappear. So, the detective came up with a plan. He and another officer decided to put Mike under surveillance and wait for him to do something that would give them a legal reason to arrest him.

 If they could pick him up on a separate offense, they could take his fingerprints without needing his consent, and Mike might never realize it had anything to do with Susan’s murder. The officers parked a van near the house where Mike was living with his brother and began watching him. For several days, nothing happened.

 But then, the detective noticed something interesting. Mike and his brother were holding a garage sale, and they had laid out different items in front of the house. When the detective looked through the binoculars, he saw porcelain figurines among the things for sale. And as we remember, Susan had told her friend that Mike had taken those exact kind of figurines from her home when he left.

That [snorts] gave the detective exactly what he needed. If the figurines really had been taken from Susan’s house, he could treat them as stolen property, and that was enough to justify an arrest. He contacted the local police department, and officers picked Mike up. Once he was in custody, they took his fingerprints and sent them to the lab.

 Now, all the detectives could do was wait. By that point, the lab had fingerprints from Ray, J.C., and Mike. And in the detective’s mind, Mike was still the most likely person to have killed Susan. A few days later, the results finally came back. But instead of giving detectives the answer they expected, they brought another unexpected turn.

The fingerprints found in Susan’s bathroom did not belong to Ray, J.C., or Mike. For the lead detective, the results were a real shock. By that point, he had already started preparing the paperwork to have Mike extradited back to Texas. But now, he had no choice but to step back.

 For a while, he kept trying to poke holes in Mike’s alibi, but he never found a single piece of evidence showing that Mike had returned to Texas around the time Susan was killed. So, in the end, the detective was left with almost nothing. Even then, he still believed Mike was the most likely person responsible, and Susan’s loved ones felt the same way.

When Susan’s family realized police could not prove Mike had been involved, they filed a civil lawsuit against him. One of the reasons was that Susan had an $11,000 life insurance policy, and Mike was the person who stood to receive the money. Mike did not take part in the case because he could not afford an attorney, and the judge ultimately ruled in favor of Susan’s family.

 He ordered Mike to pay them $700,000. But there were two major problems. Mike had no money and no valuable property, and as long as he was living in another state, there was almost nothing the court could actually collect from him. After that, Mike continued living under a cloud of suspicion. For years, people still believed he had killed Susan.

 When he began performing with his rock band, strangers would sometimes walk up to him after shows and ask him outright if he had really murdered his wife. In 2005, after one of those performances, Mike was talking with a friend when the conversation turned to Susan’s murder. He told her that even 18 years later, people still thought he was a killer, and that carrying that accusation for so long had taken a heavy toll on him.

His friend thought it was unfair, and she began wondering if there was anything she could do to help. Eventually, she found an email address for the police department that had handled Susan’s case and sent them a message explaining what had been happening to Mike all these years. That email caught the attention of a detective named Don Miller, and he became interested in the case.

 By then, Susan’s murder had been sitting cold for years with no real progress at all. But, when Miller began going through the evidence, he saw that six cigarette butts, believed to have been left by the killer, were still sitting in storage. He sent them to the lab, and technicians were able to recover the DNA of an unknown man.

 The profile was not in the FBI database, so Miller started with the most obvious step. He went to see Mike and asked him to provide a DNA sample, and Mike agreed. Sometime later, the results came back from the lab. The killer’s DNA did not match Susan’s husband. For the first time in 18 years, detectives 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 crying. He said the accusations had basically destroyed his life. Miller then started thinking about how to identify the real killer, and he noticed something important. All those years later, the fingerprints from Susan’s bathroom had still never been digitized.

 So, he sent them to specialists who entered them into an electronic fingerprint database. And almost immediately, they got a hit. The prints belonged to a man named Joseph Hatley. Hatley’s fingerprints had been taken back in 1988, 1 year after Susan’s murder. At the time, he had been arrested for armed robbery in Las Vegas, but investigators in Texas had no idea any of that had happened because no one had ever looked at Hatley as a suspect.

Detective Miller began digging into him and confirmed that his name had never appeared anywhere in the case file. But then, while trying to find a connection between Hatley and Susan, Miller uncovered something that stunned him. Hatley was the cousin of Cindy, Susan’s best friend. And that was not the only connection.

 Miller also learned that Susan may have known Hatley very well. He had spent time with her at Cindy’s house, around the same group of friends, which suddenly made the scene in Susan’s living room make much more sense. Susan may have let him inside because she thought of him as a good friend. As Miller kept looking into Hatley’s background, he found something else.

About a year after Susan’s murder, Hatley’s girlfriend had gone to police and accused him of sexually assaulting her. He was 20 years old at the time, and according to the woman, he had attacked her while threatening her with a knife. She also said he had told her he had killed before, and that he would have no problem doing it again.

But despite all of that, Hatley was never charged, and no one at the police department connected that incident to Susan’s murder. After gathering all of this information, Detective Miller went to speak with Hatley in person and asked him for a DNA sample. By then, Hatley was living near Austin and working as a warehouse manager.

 He agreed to meet with detectives at the station, and almost right away, he admitted that he had been at Susan’s house shortly before she died. He claimed the two of them had been drinking and using drugs, but he insisted that they had not had sex, and that he had not killed her. Detectives knew Hatley was lying because Susan’s blood had shown no signs of alcohol or drugs.

 Still, he agreed to give a DNA sample voluntarily, so police let him go and waited for the results. The process took several days, and while detectives were waiting, something unexpected happened. Officers spoke separately with Hatley’s wife, who was also named Susan, and she told them he had been beating her and sexually abusing her for years.

 She admitted she was terrified of him and believed he might kill her or hurt their daughter and son. But police promised her they were not going to let him hurt anyone else. Detective Miller decided to use those accusations to arrest Hatley while the lab was still comparing the DNA samples. Hatley was taken into custody, and not long after that, investigators got the results they had been waiting for.

 The DNA from the cigarette butts in Susan’s home matched Hatley. At that point, police had both his DNA and fingerprints tying him to the scene, which left Hatley with almost no realistic way to deny he was involved in Susan’s murder. When Detective Miller called Susan’s father and told him the killer had finally been identified, her father was sure he was talking about Mike.

 So, when Miller said a different name, he was stunned. The same was true for almost everyone who had loved Susan, but especially Cindy. She could not even imagine that the person behind Susan’s murder was her own cousin, a man she had been close to and had always thought of almost like a brother. Hatley’s trial was scheduled to begin in October 2007, 20 years after Susan was killed.

 But her family did not want to sit through a long public trial listening to his attorneys tear Susan down and try to convince a jury that Hatley was innocent. So, when prosecutors offered a plea deal that would send Hatley to prison for 30 years in exchange for admitting guilt, Susan’s family agreed to support it, and Hatley took 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 heavily intoxicated and everything was a blur. So, he claimed he could barely recall any of the details. Still, the confession was enough and Hatley was sent to prison.

 But then, Susan’s family was hit with another painful reality. Because his sentence fell under older laws, he was eligible for early release. And in 2018, after serving only 11 years, he was set free for good behavior. For Susan’s loved ones, it was almost impossible to accept. After everything he had done, 11 years felt like nowhere near enough.

 But there was nothing they could do to change it. After his release, Hatley moved to Abilene, Texas and settled into a trailer near his daughter’s home. Three years later, in 2021, he gave an interview to NBC where he revealed more details about what had happened that night. Or at least, he gave his version of it. According to Hatley, he had not gone to Susan’s house planning to kill her.

 He said he was drunk and lonely and had simply been looking for company. Susan let him in, brought him a Coke and snacks, and for a while, the two of them talked and laughed. At some point, Hatley tried to kiss her and Susan slapped him. After that, according to him, something in his mind snapped and he lost control.

Hatley claimed he killed Susan with a pillow and that everything he did afterward, including holding her under the water in the bathtub, was done for two reasons. First, he said he wanted to make sure she was really dead. And second, he wanted to make the scene look even more terrifying.

 As part of the same program, reporters also spoke with Mike and he described how being accused of Susan’s murder had broken his life apart. Less than a year after that interview aired, in December 2021, Hatley was diagnosed with cancer and was supposed to begin chemotherapy. But on December 9th, he was found dead inside his trailer. Even then though, the story was not quite over.

 Sometime later, Hatley’s trailer and everything inside it were sold to a new owner who began going through the things Hatley left behind. While sorting through the trailer, the man came across a stack of handwritten pages and started reading them. To his surprise, the pages appeared to be a kind of autobiography Hatley had written shortly before his death.

 And what he found in those pages disturbed him enough that he contacted Detective Miller. He gave him the papers and Miller began reading through them. In those pages, Hatley wrote about his difficult childhood and claimed he had been beaten by his own mother. He also admitted that violent thoughts had started coming into his mind when he was very young and that over the years, those thoughts only became harder for him to control.

He also wrote about the influence of alcohol and violent adult materials, which he said made his urges even worse. Hatley also wrote about Susan’s murder. According to him, when they used to spend 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 seemed to go hazy and by the time his mind cleared again, he had already beaten her badly. Even in his own version of events though, Susan was still alive at that point and Hatley admitted he could have stopped right there but chose not to. Susan promised she would not tell anyone what had happened if he spared her, but Hatley had no intention of stopping.

He asked her if she believed in God and when Susan said yes, he told her, “Start praying.” After the murder, Hatley drove past the police department and thought about turning himself in, but he did not have the courage to do it. In the days that followed, he talked with friends and relatives about Susan’s murder.

 He admitted that those conversations excited him. He also considered Mike his second victim because Mike had immediately become the main suspect and eventually spent years suffering under the weight of public suspicion. In the handwritten pages, Hatley also wrote about the attack on his girlfriend, the one she had reported to police years earlier.

 He admitted that he had been deliberately violent enough to give her a reason to report him. He wanted someone to stop him, but he could not bring himself to surrender to police. In the end, Hatley tried to explain all of it by saying there had always been two sides of him and that one of those sides was something he described almost like a demon.

He claimed he had spent his entire life fighting that part of himself, but even in those pages, there was no real remorse for Susan’s murder or for the people he had hurt. After reading all of it, Detective Miller began to wonder whether there may have been other victims in Hatley’s life. He had spent years working as a truck driver and his handwritten confession sounded almost like the textbook profile of a serial killer.

 Miller tried to look for other possible victims, but so far that search has not led to anything concrete. So, in the end, the long and twisted case was finally solved, but it still left a bitter feeling for everyone involved. Susan’s family was deeply frustrated by the fact that her killer had been identified only almost two decades later, even though another victim had tried to get him arrested 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 when the case was finally solved, Hatley spent only 11 years behind bars. For Susan’s family, that felt painfully unfair. Especially considering the brutality he had shown towards Susan.

Share your thoughts on this story in the comment section, and don’t forget to press the like button if you enjoyed my video. Thank you for watching.