The Girl in the Leaves Read online

  Sarah didn’t take any more chances. When he left this time, she just sat quietly in the Jeep. Once again she thought about what she needed to do to stay alive. She had no idea if he would take her into the woods somewhere or to a house. Whatever he did, she would have to react to the situation when it came up. Thinking too far ahead wouldn’t do her any good at all, she decided.

  He was gone for what seemed like more than an hour. Sarah was beginning to get cold. And she was hungry. She hadn’t eaten since lunchtime.

  More questions raced through her mind. What was the man doing now? Where would he take her? Once they got there, would he kill her? And most of all, once again: where were her mom and brother?

  * * *

  As far as Matt Hoffman was concerned, everything had gone to hell as soon as the kids walked into the house and started calling for their mom. In Hoffman’s mind, there was nothing to do at that point but grab them. He’d tried grabbing both of them, but the girl had been too fast, and managed to sprint by him.

  The boy was not so lucky. He’d taken perhaps two steps toward the door before Hoffman plunged his knife into the back of the boy’s head. The boy died almost as soon as he hit the floor.

  As with the two women, Hoffman was taking no chances. He stabbed the boy two more times to make sure he was dead and then raced toward the room where the girl had gone.

  He found her in there, trying to make a phone call. Hoffman snatched the phone out of her hand and raised his knife to stab her. But then—he pulled back. Even later, Hoffman couldn’t express why he did so. He felt a sudden impulse that he didn’t want to kill her.

  Instead, he cut a length of electrical cord and tied her wrists together, then told her that if she screamed, he would kill her. He gagged her with some material, slung her over his shoulder and took her to the basement. There, he found some rope and bound her feet. Then he carried her back up to the kitchen and laid her on the floor.

  It took several hours for Hoffman to dismember the bodies, put them into garbage bags and pour motor oil on the bloody spots around the home. When he was finally done in the house on King Beach Drive, Hoffman loaded the girl into the Jeep, along with several of the trash bags. He knew what the trash bags contained, but the girl didn’t. She was still securely tied up and blindfolded.

  Hoffman drove the Jeep to an empty parking lot at the Pipesville Road baseball fields near Howard. He told the girl not to peek, but she disobeyed him, and he caught her. Telling her that he had someone who would be watching her, Hoffman then left the ball field parking lot and walked to the Gap Trail parking lot where he’d left his Toyota Yaris. This took longer than expected. His plan had gone off track very early on and just kept getting worse, as far as he was concerned.

  Hoffman got into his Yaris and drove back to where the Jeep was. Since he’d parked it far back in the lot, no one had come by, and the girl and the trash bags were still there, undisturbed.

  Hoffman picked up the girl and deposited her into his Yaris. Once again he told her to behave herself and she wouldn’t get hurt. He started the engine and drove back to his own residence on Columbus Road. He parked the car in a small alley in back and then, after making sure no one was watching, carried the girl into his house.

  His luck was holding so far. No one had seen him bring the girl into the house. Once he had her there, he again told her not to make any trouble for him. He told her there would be someone outside the house watching to make sure she didn’t do anything foolish.

  * * *

  After what had seemed like a very long time to Sarah Maynard, the man finally came back to the Jeep. He roughly picked her up and carried her into another vehicle. Even though she couldn’t see, she knew they were traveling some distance from the ballpark. It was more than just a few minutes to wherever they were going.

  Once the man stopped the vehicle, he picked her up once again and carried her into a house, took her into a room and removed her blindfold. Sarah saw that it was a bathroom, but unlike any bathroom she had ever seen. There were dozens of weird drawings on the walls. They were done mostly in black paint upon a white wall, with figures of people and animals all jumbled together. There was a dog, a bird and a smiling man with a yin and yang symbol on his shirt. There was also a truck that appeared to be a vehicle used in tree trimming. But the strangest depiction of all was a large drawing of a middle-aged balding man. Coming directly out of his mouth was the actual bathroom faucet.

  All the drawings and writings looked crazy to Sarah. Obviously this man was crazy as well. Just how crazy, she didn’t know. She wondered once again what his plans were now that he had her here. Would he keep her for a while? Would he kill her right here? Or would he take her someplace else in his car?

  * * *

  Hoffman was far from through for the evening. He had the blond girl in his house, but now he had to go back and get rid of all those trash bags sitting in the Jeep he’d stolen and left at the ballpark. Making sure the girl was safely tied up in the bathroom, with duct tape and rope, Hoffman got back into his Yaris and took his tree-trimming climbing gear with him. He had a spot in mind where he could deposit the trash bags, and if he was lucky, they might never be found.

  Hoffman drove to a Walmart near Mount Vernon and bought some blue tarp and large plastic garbage bags. He also bought a turkey sandwich, and on impulse, a Halloween T-shirt because it was on sale for a dollar. There was hardly anyone in the store at that hour, which was around midnight. Hoffman paid for his purchases with cash and walked out to the parking lot. All of it had gone smoothly, and no one had been suspicious about his activities.

  Hoffman drove away and at around 12:30 AM, parked his Toyota Yaris at a canoe access parking lot on a river. He started walking toward the Pipesville ball field parking lot where he’d left the Jeep, quite a distance away. Once again, all of this was taking longer than planned. He didn’t get there until around 2:30 AM.

  Hoffman started the Jeep and drove to a nature preserve miles away. Once there, he had a very good hiding spot. He was sure no one would ever find where he was about to put all those trash bags. If his luck held, no one was ever going to know exactly what had happened at that home on King Beach Drive. And in one regard he had been lucky: Greg Borders was gone all day and night. After work on November 10, Greg spent the night at a friend’s house, and on November 11, the two went golfing.

  For Hoffman, meanwhile, time was moving on. After getting rid of the trash bags, he drove the Jeep back to the house on King Beach Drive and swapped it for the pickup truck that was there. His intention was to get a couple of gas cans, fill them with gasoline and bring them back to the Herrmann house. For some reason, he left the extra trash bags and blue tarp that he’d just bought at Walmart in the garage. This may have been because he intended to come back and burn the whole place down, but that part of his plan did not work out. The pickup truck was having problems and would not stay in gear. It bumped and jerked down the road, and Hoffman didn’t want to be pulled over by some policeman.

  Finally, in frustration, Hoffman abandoned the pickup truck in a parking lot near a place called the Brown Family Environmental Center, close to Kenyon College, in the small town of Gambier. From there he started walking once again and did not reach his Toyota Yaris until around dawn.

  Instead of going back to burn down the house on King Beach Drive, Hoffman returned home. He was exhausted by now. Hoffman went inside his house and looked in the bathroom. The girl was still tied up and lying on the bathroom floor. It was time to deal with her.

  NINE

  A House of Leaves

  When Tina Herrmann did not show up for her job at Dairy Queen in Mount Vernon on the afternoon of November 10, 2010, her friend and manager at the restaurant, Valerie Haythorn, called the Knox County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO). Not showing up to work was unheard of for Tina; she was very responsible, and ha
d never done anything like this before. Valerie was sure that something bad had happened to her.

  Valerie talked to a dispatch operator at KCSO in the early evening hours and explained her concern. The operator told Valerie that a sheriff’s deputy would go by Tina’s house to do a welfare check, to determine if anything seemed out of place, or whether a dangerous situation might have occurred.

  Knox County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Statler was contacted about Valerie’s call and told to do a welfare check on Tina Herrmann on the 400 block of King Beach Drive. Statler in his report noted, “Valerie advised that Tina did not show up for work today, and she is concerned that something may have happened to her because Tina was going to break up with her boyfriend Gregory Borders.”

  Deputy Statler drove by the house shortly after 8:00 PM and noticed that there was no vehicle in the driveway and no lights on in the house. He rang the doorbell, but no one answered. Since he didn’t have a search warrant to enter the house, and nothing outside seemed amiss, he noted the situation—the lack of a vehicle in the driveway and the lights off in the house—but didn’t see further cause for investigation.

  Though he didn’t have to, Deputy Statler made a second welfare check at around 11:15 PM. This time, he noted the interior lights of the house were on and that a blue 2004 Ford pickup was parked in the driveway. Once again, however, nothing seemed to be amiss at the residence.

  Deputy Statler didn’t know it at the time, but the man who lived with Tina, Sarah and Kody, Greg Borders, was out of town for the night. And as far as Stephanie Sprang went, apparently, no one in her household was concerned for her safety at that point. They may have thought that she was spending the night with Tina, or perhaps was even out of town with her. No one reported Stephanie as missing.

  * * *

  Back at Matthew Hoffman’s house, Sarah tried to stay awake during the night, but the whole ordeal had been too exhausting. She found herself drifting in and out of a nightmarish sleep. Already her sense of time was starting to slip away. After what she guessed must have been many hours, the man who had kidnapped her returned to the bathroom where she lay on the floor.

  He made sure that her restraints were still in place, and Sarah began to put into practice what she knew would be a very delicate but important fight for her life. She decided that she had to befriend him. “I have to get him on my side,” she thought, realizing that might be the only way to keep him from killing her. By this time, she had suspicions about what exactly he’d done to her mom and Kody. She was unaware, however, that Stephanie Sprang had also been in her mom’s house and had been murdered as well.

  After some innocuous chitchat, Sarah asked Hoffman about the strange drawings on the wall. His answers didn’t make much sense to her, but she tried to follow what he said. He tried to explain to her about the characters drawn on the wall, some of them human, some of them animals, and some half-human, half-animal. She asked if he was an artist. He did not reply.

  After a while the man took Sarah out of the bathroom; she was not blindfolded at that point. She looked around and was stunned. There were bags and bags of leaves stacked up in every room, and a layer of leaves was spread out on the floors of the rooms, almost like a carpet.

  Sarah asked, “Why are there so many leaves in the house?”

  The man replied, “I use them to keep the house warm. They’re insulation.”

  Sarah didn’t know if he was lying about this or not, but it seemed like a very odd way of insulating a house.

  Changing gears, Sarah asked, “Did you break into our house before?”

  The man answered no.

  “How did you get to our house?” She wanted to know this, because obviously he had not driven her away from the house in his own car, but rather in Stephanie’s Jeep.

  The man answered, “I had someone drop me off there.”

  Sarah did not quite believe him, but she didn’t press the issue.

  She then asked, “Did you kill my mom and Kody?”

  The man said, “No.”

  She was very skeptical about this as well but didn’t question him further about it. Instead she asked, “What did you do to my dog?”

  The man said, “I let it out of the house.” This, of course, was a lie. The dog was dead, its body parts stuffed into bags along with those of Tina, Stephanie and Kody.

  By now Sarah was starving. She asked if he could feed her something. His answer surprised her. “I have some dead squirrels in the freezer. Do you want me to cook you up one?”

  Sarah replied, “No!” She would rather go hungry than eat squirrel.

  Finally he made a bowl of cereal for her. But the milk was sour, and it took a lot of control on her part not to gag and spit out the awful stuff. If this was all he was going to give her to eat, she knew she had to make the best of it.

  Hoffman would say later that he was exhausted, so he tied the girl to him and fell asleep on a couch. Sarah adamantly denied this account, saying that Hoffman once again gagged her and kept her tied up where she could not get away. He also stuffed her in a closet at some point, though later on, both Hoffman’s and Sarah’s memories were so disjointed, it was hard to know when certain events had happened. Whatever the case, Hoffman took a much-needed nap to recoup after all his excursions during the night. He knew he’d need his strength to perform the many tasks necessary to keep himself in the clear.

  * * *

  When Tina Herrmann failed to show up to work on Thursday, November 11, her friend and manager Valerie Haythorn was so concerned that she again phoned KCSO. Sergeant Al Dexter learned from a phone call to Sarah and Kody’s school that they had not shown up either that day. All of this was becoming more worrisome. It was not like the kids to skip school.

  A short time later, Valerie phoned KCSO once more and told them that she’d just learned that Tina’s friend and neighbor, Stephanie Sprang, was also missing. Valerie had phoned Stephanie’s house because she knew that Tina and Stephanie were such good friends. It was at that point that Valerie learned Stephanie was missing as well. Sergeant Dexter did a welfare check at Stephanie’s residence and another check outside of Tina’s residence. No one was at home at either place when he arrived. Sergeant Dexter also noted that the blue Ford pickup that Deputy Statler had seen in the driveway the night before was now gone from the area.

  Around 4:00 PM, Valerie managed to contact Stephanie Sprang’s live-in boyfriend, Ron Metcalf, and they agreed to meet and check Tina’s residence. Ron lived with Stephanie on Magers Drive, only a few houses down the road from Tina’s place. When Valerie got there, she and Ron talked for a while, and then Valerie decided to enter the house. She removed a rear window screen, raised a window and climbed through. Everything was very still, quiet and spooky. Valerie went farther into the house, and what she saw terrified her: there were bloodstains on the living room and hallway carpet, a lot of blood. It looked as if someone had been dragged along the carpet. Valerie, now frantic, quickly left the house and phoned the sheriff’s office once more.

  Previously, the officers had been sent to do only “welfare checks,” but now it was clear there was something seriously wrong at the house on King Beach Drive. This time, when KCSO sergeants arrived at the residence, they were determined to go inside and figure out just what had happened there.

  TEN

  A Chance Encounter

  David Barber had been the sheriff of Knox County, Ohio, for eighteen years by November 2010. He was one of those guys who had come up through the ranks. Before becoming sheriff, he’d been a uniformed deputy sheriff, a detective, a detective sergeant and the lieutenant in charge of the detective division at the KCSO.

  He’d won numerous awards over the years, including Ohio’s Distinguished Law Enforcement Service Award in 1999. He was very proud of his office having received CALEA accreditation in July 20
07. CALEA stood for Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, which had been created in 1979 as a credentialing authority through the joint efforts of law enforcement’s major executive associations. CALEA’s goals were to “strengthen crime prevention and control capabilities, formalize essential management procedures, and establish fair and nondiscriminatory personnel practices.” It was also to “solidify interagency cooperation and coordination and increase community and staff confidence in the agency.” In layman’s terms, being accredited by CALEA helped KCSO work more smoothly with other law enforcement agencies in cases of an emergency where a lot of police presence was needed.

  Sheriff Barber had no idea on the morning of November 11, 2010, that in a very short amount of time he and his office were going to need all the benefits CALEA accreditation had to offer. All he knew then was that KCSO was the smallest sheriff’s office to ever achieve CALEA standards.

  Despite the sheriff’s rightful pride in the accreditation, he did not regularly need to go outside his own department for help. Crime in Knox County was simply not prevalent. In the preceding year there had been only one confirmed robbery, one stabbing, one kidnapping case, and one homicide. Even the number of vehicle thefts had totaled only thirty for the whole year.

  * * *

  Because of Valerie Haythorn’s initial phone call to KCSO, the first officer to have had any contact with the King Beach Drive residence was Deputy Charles Statler of KCSO’s Patrol Division.

  The Patrol Division, headed by Captain David Shaffer and comprised of three sergeants and eighteen deputies, was responsible for protecting the sixty thousand people in the county, spread out over 525 square miles. Cities like Mount Vernon had their own police departments, but all the rural areas, including Apple Valley, where Tina, Sarah, Kody and Stephanie lived, were patrolled by KCSO units.