The 1987 murder of Susan Woods, a Stephenville sweetheart

BY BROOKLYN MCKINNEY / Multimedia Journalist

One hot July night in 1987, 30-year-old Susan Woods sat in the Stephenville Dairy Queen with her friends Cindy Hallmark and Roy Hayes. While they were enjoying their hot fudge sundaes, Woods savored every bite, not knowing that it would be her last.

Four nights later, her father, Joe Atkins, found his daughter and called Stephenville police, completely distraught.

The body was found draped over a bathtub completely nude, her head submerged in black water with her hands tied behind her back with a tank top. Throughout her home, there were more signs of a struggle.

“It was pretty clear that the person who killed her tried to kill her three different ways, with a pillow across the face clearly with some type of…looks like an electrical cord with a ligature mark across her neck. And then by drowning her,” Brian Burrough, Editor-at-Large for Texas Monthly said in an interview with ABC’s 20/20.

Close-ups were taken of the pillow smudged with Woods’ mascara and tears. The killer had slammed her head into it with so much force that it created an imprint of her expression before she died.

Another thing that stood out to investigators was the bag of chips, a Coke can and the six cigarette buds sitting on a table across from the TV. Whoever had done this, she had trusted enough to invite them into her home.

This seemed unusual because she was known by most as timid and reserved. Who would have wanted to hurt Susan Woods?

She was loved by many in Stephenville, including her friend Gloria Martin.

“Susan was a very shy, quiet person until you got to know her. She was hilarious. She didn't mind embarrassing you if she thought of something funny that would get your goat. But you couldn't stay mad at her because she was so cute,” Martin said.

While her friends couldn’t stay mad at her, her ex-husband sure did. He drove off to Indiana in a rage without saying a word, taking the couple’s only car and some of her other belongings just a few months before the murder.

But, Michael Woods didn’t stop there. He had also left vulgar videotapes and notes throughout the house putting her down and blaming her for tearing apart their marriage.

Michael made it clear that he resented her for moving back to Stephenville after his previous job offer in El Paso didn’t work out. They had been starving, living off of bacon bit sandwiches before their return, but Stephenville just wasn’t the place for Michael’s rock star dreams.

In a god-fearing rodeo town like Stephenville, Texas, where everyone wore cowboy boots, had crew cuts and went to church on Sundays, Michael was an outsider.

Michael spent his days in Stephenville sunbathing in the yard, playing his guitar, and riding his motorcycle around town. 

“Well, I wanted to work, but I couldn't find places that would hire me or keep me. And I had a bit of an attitude,” Michael said in an interview with ABC News.

According to investigators interviewed by ABC News and Texas Monthly, if you asked anyone in Stephenville, they knew that Michael Woods murdered his ex-wife. 

Michael tried to turn a new page in Indianapolis and began performing music, but the shadow of the investigation would haunt him forever. Texas police even followed him to Indiana, certain that they would get his fingerprints to match the ones on Susan’s bathtub that night.

But they didn’t. 

Michael Woods was the only remaining suspect, so after just a few years the investigation was ended. That is, until 2005. 

Michael Woods confided in his friend, Barbara Gary, about his constant state of paranoia brought on by suspicion from his former wife’s family and investigators.

This led to her sending an email to the Stephenville police department, asking them about the case.

According to Texas Monthly, Gary told police over a phone call that the situation “was killing Michael and his family, and she wanted to know where the case stood.”

A year later, Lt. Don Miller of the Stephenville, Texas, police took over the case and started pursuing new leads.

Forensic technology that wasn’t available in 1987 enabled him to test the DNA on the six cigarette buds at the crime scene. There was only one problem.

The results came back as an “unidentifiable male,” and Stephenville police needed to gain Michael’s trust to receive his DNA and eliminate him from the suspect list for good.

For the first time in over 20 years, Stephenville police would fly to Indianapolis and come face to face with Michael Woods. Woods finally cooperated and gave them his DNA, completely clearing him from the case.

While this heavy burden that Michael carried for nearly two decades was lifted, this meant that Miller now had no suspects and no leads to work with.

The fingerprints from Susan’s bathtub were his last hope.

When the Texas Department of Public Safety had gained access to the FBI database in 2006, Miller drove to Austin and handed the prints over to a DPS officer.

They traced back to a man named Joseph Scott Hatley, who had been arrested in 1988 for armed robbery in Nevada.

When Miller dove deeper into his criminal file, he made a gruesome discovery.

Joseph Scott Hatley raped 16-year-old Shannon Meyers-Barrientos in Stephenville just a year after Susan Woods’ murder. While on the run, he had committed a robbery in Nevada but was able to return to town after just 120 days in a youth offender program.

Hatley met Barrientos when he was 20 years old. He had graduated from Stephenville High School, and his sister Regina lived next door to Barrientos.

They met at Regina’s and started a relationship, but Hatley quickly became controlling and aggressive. She told ABC’s 20/20 that any time they had intercourse, it was always by water, in the bathroom.

Once he had raped Myers holding a knife to her throat, and her mother had gone to the police. The charges were dropped and Myers would end her relationship with Hatley.

Ten months later, Hatley asks to meet so that he can explain himself.

“I wanted to know, why did he betray the trust that I instilled in him? As soon as I got in the vehicle, I knew I made the biggest mistake of my life,” Meyers said.

Late at night, he had pulled up to a roadside park 3 miles south of Stephenville. Hatley wanted to have sex immediately, but Meyers told him no. This set him off again, and he continued to rape and beat her all night.

Hatley would have a beer, smoke a cigarette, and then do it all over again. Meyers ran away, and he shoved her head into a creek.

“He said, ‘I've killed before, and I'm not afraid to kill again,’” Meyers said to police. 

Despite having enough physical evidence from visible bruising and a rape kit, the court failed to convict Hatley for assaulting Meyers.

Hatley had come from a well-known family in Stephenville, a churchgoing family, while Meyers was a party girl with a bad reputation.

No one in town believed her, and Hatley would continue to stalk and harass Meyers for several months.

“I'm still mind-blown by that. You had pictures of bruises of him choking me. You had the rape kit. You had everything to me,” Meyers told 20/20. “The justice system that day raped me. It was a lot for the 16-year-old me to take.”

On July 6, 2007, Miller and his partner brought in Hatley for questioning. While he seemed eerily calm and detached, he cooperated and gave police a sample of his DNA.

While he was being questioned about Susan Woods, investigators were also speaking to Hatley’s disabled wife, who had alleged that he was physically abusing her.

Hatley was arrested the next day on domestic violence charges, and the DNA at Susan’s crime scene was a perfect match.

So Hatley had murdered Susan Woods in 1987, but why connect him to Susan Woods?

Regina and Scott Hatley were Cindy Hayes’ cousins, and Cindy was Susan’s best friend. Hatley had stayed in Stephenville for several years after he graduated high school, and his social life mainly revolved around his sister Regina and her friends.

While Hatley was nothing more than an acquaintance to Susan Woods, they did run around the same circles. 

Shortly after Susan’s divorce, she became a new face at the “round table” at Regina’s house where Hatley and his friends would hang out.

Based on interviews with ABC’s 20/20, Susan’s friends and family were floored.

“He was my first cousin that I was raised with. He was like a brother to me. It was very, very hard to take,” Hayes said. “But the evidence was there.”

Hatley continued to attend parties with their mutual friends after her death and even signed the guest book at her funeral. Everyone thought it was her ex-husband that killed her, but it turns out that Susan’s monster was never sleeping in her bed; he was sitting right across from her. 

Hatley took a plea deal and received a 30-year prison sentence for the Susan Woods murder. He would be released in 2018 after serving just 11 years and died after battling cancer three years later.

Hatley refused to talk about why he killed Susan Woods while he was alive, but he left all of the answers behind in the trailer where he died.

Police discovered several newspaper clippings of Susan Woods, Shannon Meyers, and even Miller. They also found a disturbing manuscript with over 200 pages worth of details about Hatley’s life and confessions.

Hatley alleged that his abusive mother beat him and this fueled his violent fantasies, but she firmly denies that she ever laid a hand on her son.

Hatley and his sister were also bullied in school for being on the chubbier side. At school, Hatley was seen as nerdy and quiet, with not that many friends while he was loud and pushy around his family.

Roy Hayes told 20/20 that his wife Cindy often saw Hatley as the “bully” of the family.

In high school, Hatley joined the Air Force and fell hard and fast for a dark-haired woman from Ohio. After she decided to enlist, he moved with her onto a military base in Guam and got a job as an insurance salesman.

Before long, their marriage fell apart, and when prayers didn’t work, Hatley lit all of the candles in their house and pledged his life to Satan.

“I got on my knees and asked Satan to help me out of my situation…I prayed that I would give him my soul for my freedom,” Hatley writes. “If I could have only known what consequences my actions would bring to my life…May God have mercy on my soul.”

His drinking habits would only get worse, causing Hatley to forge checks from the company he worked for when he needed more money. He even began to believe his former wife was involved in an affair.

After their marriage fell apart, Hatley returned to Stephenville, and his high school friends at the “Round Table”. One night in his drunken state, he thought that Woods was flirting with him one night and would show up at her doorstep

“By the time I came out of the fog I had brutalized her,” Hatley writes. “At first she said she was going to tell what I had done to her. She then said she would not tell anyone if I just let her go.  “I found it interesting that she thought any of that mattered. I asked her if she believed in God. She said she did. I told her then you need to pray.”

After murdering Susan Woods and assaulting Meyers,  Hatley knew that he couldn’t stay in Stephenville.

Hatley would move to Nashville in 1993, get married, and have two children. He was a hard-working truck driver, valued by his company until he rear-ended another truck in Dallas.

Hatley then took a well-paying job at a Nashville warehouse, but his past would continue to haunt him. 

His daughter got injured in a car accident and would need extensive physical therapy, and his wife was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. When a tornado damaged their apartment complex, they moved into a duplex only to see a drunk driver plow through it.

Hatley began to believe that this was God punishing him for what he did in Texas.

After his life started to calm down in the late nineties, he got a job offer for another warehouse in Round Rock and returned to Texas. Due to his long work hours and drinking habits, Hatley would continue to beat his disabled wife in their poolside apartment.

Then one morning in 2006, the police came for him.

After he served his sentence, he became sober for a time and moved to Abilene to be near his daughter Amanda. At the age of 56, his cancer had spread to his spine and he was found dead on the floor of his trailer.

“All those things he did, the rape and the violence, he did those same things to my mom,” Amanda says. “So it didn’t surprise me,” Amanda told Texas Monthly.

Only one other woman has crossed paths with the monster that possessed Joseph Scott Hadley and lived to tell the tale. She has bravely told her story of harrowing abuse to several reporters.

“I don't see myself as a hero. I also don't see myself as a victim,” Meyers said in an interview on ABC’s 20/20. “I do feel a connection with Susan because she lost her life and I'm here. I still feel like, you know, we're bonded by that. Strangely.”

For more information, go to: https://abcnews.go.com/US/become-monster-convicted-killers-thoughts-grave/story?id=106291548, or https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/susan-woods-stephenville-murder-hidden-killer/.