A woman from a small Texas town vanished from her life without warning, and for nearly two decades, the truth behind her brutal murder remained buried beneath a web of false leads, mistaken suspects, and a killer who blended into the fabric of her closest circle.
Susan Atkins, a quiet and deeply religious 30-year-old factory worker, was found dead in her Stephenville home on July 28, 1987, her body draped over a bathtub filled with blackened water, her hands tied behind her back with a t-shirt. The scene was one of unimaginable violence, with evidence of strangulation, smothering, and drowning, all pointing to a killer who had spent hours inside her home, smoking cigarettes and drinking Coke as if he belonged there.
For years, suspicion fell on Susan’s estranged husband, Mike, a rebellious musician who had left her months earlier, taking her car, her jacket, and even their porcelain figurines. He left behind a cruel video and hidden notes blaming her for their failed marriage. Friends and family were certain he was the murderer, but his alibi, though initially unverified, eventually held up, and his fingerprints did not match the palm print found on the bathroom faucet.
Other suspects emerged, including a bartender named J. C. and Ray, the boyfriend of Susan’s best friend Cindy.
Both were tall and heavy-set, fitting a witness description, and both gave fingerprints voluntarily. But those prints also came back negative. The case went cold, and the killer remained free, hiding in plain sight.
Then, in 2005, a detective named Don Miller reopened the investigation. He sent six cigarette butts from Susan’s living room to a lab for DNA analysis. The profile did not match Mike, finally clearing him after 18 years of public suspicion.
Miller then digitized the old fingerprint evidence and ran it through an electronic database. The hit came back almost immediately.
The prints belonged to Joseph Hatley, a man whose name had never appeared in the case file. But the connection was chilling. Hatley was Cindy’s cousin, and he had spent time with Susan at Cindy’s house, often in the same social circle.
Susan likely knew him well enough to let him inside that night, to offer him snacks and a drink, never realizing she was welcoming her own killer.
Miller discovered that Hatley had been arrested for armed robbery in Las Vegas in 1988, a year after the murder, but no one had ever connected him to Susan’s case. Even more disturbing, Hatley’s girlfriend had reported him for sexual assault in 1988, telling police he had threatened her with a knife and boasted that he had killed before. She was not believed, and no charges were filed.
When Miller confronted Hatley in 2007, he admitted being at Susan’s house but claimed they had been drinking and using drugs, a lie contradicted by toxicology reports. He voluntarily gave a DNA sample, and the results matched the cigarette butts. Hatley was arrested and eventually pleaded guilty to murder, receiving a 30-year sentence.
But because of older sentencing laws, he was released after just 11 years, in 2018, for good behavior.
Susan’s family was devastated. The killer had spent only a fraction of his sentence behind bars, while her loved ones had endured two decades of uncertainty and pain. Hatley moved to Abilene, Texas, and lived in a trailer near his daughter’s home.
In 2021, he gave an interview to NBC, claiming he had not planned the murder, that he had been drunk and lonely, and that when Susan slapped him after he tried to kiss her, something snapped.
He said he killed her with a pillow and then held her under water to make sure she was dead, and to make the scene more terrifying. He expressed no genuine remorse. Less than a year later, in December 2021, Hatley was found dead in his trailer from cancer.
But the story did not end there.
The new owner of Hatley’s trailer discovered a stack of handwritten pages that amounted to a confession and autobiography. In those pages, Hatley wrote about a difficult childhood, violent urges, and the influence of alcohol and adult materials. He admitted that after the murder, he drove past the police station but lacked the courage to turn himself in.
He also wrote that he considered Mike his second victim, because Mike had suffered under suspicion for years.
Hatley described the attack on his girlfriend as a deliberate attempt to get caught, but he could not bring himself to surrender. He wrote of two sides of himself, one of which he described almost like a demon. Detective Miller, after reading the confession, began to wonder if Hatley had other victims.
He had worked as a truck driver, and his writings fit the profile of a serial killer. But so far, no other cases have been linked.
For Susan’s family, the resolution is bitter. The killer was hiding in plain sight for two decades, a cousin of her best friend, a man who sat in her living room, smoked her cigarettes, and ate her snacks after taking her life. The justice system failed them multiple times, from the initial mishandling of evidence to the early release of a confessed murderer.
Susan’s father, who found her body, never lived to see Hatley’s full confession.
The case stands as a stark reminder of how easily a killer can vanish into the ordinary, how long it can take for the truth to surface, and how even when it does, the pain never truly ends.
