The handwritten letter from Eastern Correctional Institution in Westover, Md., went unopened for two weeks.
“It was in another room, not where I go,” director Michael Bay tells us. “It just sat there. I didn’t want that dark energy around me.”
As the director of big budget, action-packed blockbusters including Armageddon, the first five Transformers movies and the Bad Boys franchise, Bay says he likes to “explore and develop characters” by talking to people in the real world, from alligator wranglers to NASA physicists and astronauts.
But he’s never spoken to a serial killer, let alone one who admitted to eating the flesh of Michelle Dorr, the 6-year-old he murdered in 1986 in Silver Spring, Md., or fatally stabbing 23-year-old Laura Hoeteling in 1992 in her Bethesda home while wearing, he has claimed, a wig and woman’s clothes.
So Bay was apprehensive to see what convicted murderer Hadden Clark had written to him in April 2023, a month after Bay had sent a letter to the killer in prison asking if he’d be willing to talk to him.
Clark was interested.
“I wanted to get into his psychology,” says Bay. “Into the twisted mind of a serial killer.”
Bay’s ensuing prison-house conversations with the former trained chef – and the explosive, confessions Clark allegedly made to Jack Truitt, the long-haired, bearded cellmate he believed was Jesus – became the basis of Bay’s latest project, Born Evil: The Serial Killer and the Savior, on Investigation Discovery/ID and streaming on Max. (An exclusive clip is shown below.)
Starting Monday, Sept. 2, at 9/8c, the five-part docuseries – Bay’s first documentary and his first project with the true crime network – goes in-depth into the grisly murders that landed Clark in prison for 60 years, not to mention the myriad other people the diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, now 72, claims to have killed.
Michael Bay with Jack Truitt for Born Evil: The Serial Killer and the Savior.
Investigation Discovery
In more than 14 hours of private, recorded conversations from prison, Bay, the series’ executive producer, spoke to a criminal “the FBI refers to as ‘a person of interest’ in more than 20 states,” says Bay.
Born Evil , he says in an ID release, “could potentially open the door to solving many cold case murders.”
But first, he shows what makes Clark tick.
In revealing, often chilling discussions, Bay gets Clark to open up about his life, starting with his dysfunctional childhood, and how that shaped him.
“The Clarks look like the Beaver Cleaver family,” says Bay. “But Hadden said he was really mentally abused.”
Growing up, Clark says, his parents – and other kids – often called him derogatory names. He says his alcoholic mother made him wear dresses and called him “Kristen.”
“His upbringing was very sad,” says Bay.
Murder Runs in the Family
Bay learned about Clark from one of his longtime collaborators, Corey Turner, and filmmaker Paul Hogan, who are executive producers on the project. Hogan told Bay he remembers seeing Clark when he was 13, when Clark worked as a gardener and lived out of a small, white truck in Hogan’s church in Bethesda. “Something seemed off about him,” says Hogan.
Intrigued, Bay started looking into it further. “As a director, I always look for a hook, what’s different, and kept delving deeper,” he says.
In this case, he says, “the hook was a serial killing family you’ve never heard of.”
Clark’s brother, Bradfield Clark, now 73, was convicted in 1985 of killing and dismembering a female co-worker in California, allegedly eating parts of her corpse.
Clark claims he himself learned about killing by witnessing his late father murder a woman. For his part, Clark claims to have killed countless others. Viewers are made aware of this thanks to Clark’s cellmate Jack Truitt, a convicted murderer who compels Clark — who believes Truitt is Jesus — to divulge a critical, long-held and deadly secret.
Cold Case ‘Treasure Chest?’
Bay says he went easy on Clark at first.
“And then there were times that I would start challenging him a little more and I’d get tougher with him,” he says. “I’d say, ‘Well, what do you mean, you felt bad?’ There’d be a long pause and he’d go, ‘Yeah, about the bad stuff I did. But I’m basically a good person.’”
The documentary features macabre drawings Clark drew, including one that says, “I trick them and then I eat them.”
“He has quotes that are completely dark,” says Bay. “It’s like if you’re looking for the grossest movie lines, this is a guy writing those lines.”
One of the most jarring parts of the documentary comes when Clark throws out a series of female names, prompting Bay to ask in one recorded conversation, “Hadden, wait, who are all these women?”
The names could be potential leads for investigators to solve other alleged murders.
“This show can open up all these other cases,” he says. “So it’s like a treasure chest.
“The best thing we could do is help families have some closure and peace,” he says.
