Texas Monthly

Back at the roadside parks out of Stephenville, Don Miller has shown me the scene where Scott

Hattley attacks Shannon Myers. The ditch where Hattley pushed Shannon's face into the mud is still there, though it's deeper today.

The picnic tables where they sat are still there under an old metal roof with fresh graffiti on the paint.

99 out of 100 people who visit the park today will only ever see this much. Don and I of course see something very different.

35 years of pass since that pitch black night in 1988 and it's been 17 years since Don first identified Hattley's fingerprints in Susan Woods' bathroom.

A lot has happened since then and I'll tell you about all that in a bit. But the best way to begin to tell you the whole story is with something that just happened at Christmas time in 2021.

Don had just retired from the Stephenville police force. That's when he got that phone call. A man in Abelene said his neighbor had just died and this man had bought the trailer where his neighbor had been living.

And as he was cleaning out the RV in some cubby holes, he found some pictures of myself and you of me. He found pictures of me and Shannon from newspaper articles.

You know there were clippings about the case about us and then he found some writings.

The man who made this discovery had no idea what to make of it but he was scared. The whole collection had a menacing feel to it.

This man and his family had been living close by. He just wanted someone to come take it away. So Don went and that's how we came to possess what the man had found.

Scott Hattley's handwritten life story almost 200 pages in slanted neatly printed capital letters. It was very dense and very long but it told a story no one had known.

Don reached out to me through a friend thinking I might want to write about it. I had to read through it two or three times to begin to grasp how extraordinary it was. I brought along a copy and asked Don to flip through it again.

So just initial reaction, these first few pages which are about his childhood.

Well this is the man who obviously in my mind was very proud of what he did. He wanted notoriety of it. I have since learned that it's not uncommon for this type personality to write manifestos.

When I read through what Hattley had written I was struck by its candor. It's wrenching self awareness in places. By how this 50 year old adult looking back on his life and where it went so horribly wrong could be so clearied about the little steps that led him to commit such violence against two women in Stephenville all those years ago.

He writes about the intense anger he had felt since he was at least eight years old. How he had wanted to commit a Columbine-style school massacre years before Columbine itself.

How he amassed a set of secret habits that kept his violent fantasies and checked for a time. And how his descent and the violence turned him into something else. He wrote,

my god I had become a monster. Yes, Scott Hattley was a murderer and a rapist and I have no sympathy for him. But what he'd written provided an unusual glimpse of what remained of his humanity while at the same time conjuring the self portrait of a man who was aware enough to look inside himself for answers. But still couldn't find them.

But Don, after more than 40 years of police work, is a tough old cop, the kind who still calls criminals maggots. And he found this line of inquiry a little less engaging.

Okay, yeah, so we all have our baggage. We all have things that we wish we didn't have to go through as kids. I feel like that little boys who don't like their mommies are not well adjusted adults. That screams at me.

...