User:Mobyrock/workdesk/Charles Hatcher

Charles Hatcher
http://www.crimezzz.net/serialkillers/H/HATCHER_charles_ray.php Born in 1929, Hatcher spent half of his first 30 years in prison, convicted of numerous property crimes such as theft. He seemed to shift gears in 1959, with his arrest and conviction for the attempted abduction of a 16 year-old newsboy in St. Joseph, Missouri, moving on from that point to log convictions for sexual assaults and kidnapping of children in California, Nebraska, and Iowa. The latter charge, involving the March 1982 abduction of a boy at Bettendorf, sent Hatcher to a state mental institution, where psychiatrists pondered his case for two months before setting him free. On July 29, hikers found the nude, ravaged body of 11-year-old Michelle Steele, beaten and strangled to death on a bank of the Missouri River near St. Joseph. Hatcher was arrested next day, as he tried to check in at the St. Joseph State Hospital. While awaiting trial, he confessed to fifteen other child-murders dating from 1969. The first victim, 12-year-old William Freeman, had disappeared from Antioch, California, in August of that year, one day before Hatcher was charged with child molestation in nearby San Francisco. In another case, Hatcher penned a crude map that led searchers to the remains of James Churchill, buried on the grounds of the Rock Island Army Arsenal, near Davenport, Iowa. Innocent suspect Melvin Reynolds was already serving life for another of Hatcher's crimes -- the sex-murder of four-year-old Eric Christgen, but Hatcher's confession released him from custody. Convicted of the Christgen homicide in October 1983, Hatcher drew a term of life imprisonment with no parole for at least 50 years. Facing his second Missouri conviction a year later, in the Steele case, Hatcher requested a death sentence but the jury refused, recommending life on December 3, 1984. Four days later, the child-killer hanged himself in his cell, at the state prison in Jefferson City.

-- The case of Melvin Reynolds is a good example,78 but by no means unique.79 On May 26, 1978, four-year-old Eric Christgen disappeared in downtown St. Joseph, Missouri. His body later turned up along the Missouri River; he had been sexually abused and died of suffocation. The police questioned more than a hundred possible suspects, including "every known pervert in town," to no avail. One of them was Melvin Reynolds, a twenty-five-year-old man of limited intelligence who had been sexually abused himself as a child and who had some homosexual episodes as an adolescent. Reynolds, although extremely agitated by the investigation, cooperated through several interrogations over a period of months, including two polygraph examinations and one interrogation under hypnosis. In December 1978, he was questioned under sodium amytal ("truth serum") and made an ambiguous remark that intensified police suspicion. Two months later, in February 1979, the police brought the still cooperative Reynolds in for another round of interrogation -- fourteen hours of questions, promises, and threats. Finally, Reynolds gave in and said, "I'll say so if you want me to." In the weeks that followed, Reynolds embellished this concession with details that were fed to him, deliberately or otherwise. That was enough to convince the prosecutor to charge Reynolds, and to convince a jury to convict him of second-degree murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. [*pg 142] Four years later, Reynolds was released when another man, Charles Hatcher, confessed to three murders, including that of Eric Christgen.

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A seemingly average petty criminal, Charles Hatcher took a big step up to murder when he stabbed fellow prisoner Jerry Lee Tharrington to death in the kitchen of the Missourri State Penitentary in 1961. Suspected of the murder but never tried, Hatcher soon turned his rage on the weakest of prey: children.

Upon his release for a child abduction conviction in the mid-1960's, Hatcher began a crime spree of abductions, molestations, and murders involving young children. Along the way, he was arrested many times but always avoided serious punishment, once being forced only to stay in a mental hospital for one year after the attempted murder of a boy, and on another occasion he was only held briefly because of his deteriorated mental state after sodomising another boy. After these incidents Hatcher would simply resume his murders.

On July 30, 1982, Hatcher raped and murdered eleven-year-old Michelle Steele in St. Joseph, Missourri. Arrested for the murder, Hatcher cracked and began confessing, claiming guilt in fifteen other child murders dating back to 1969. His slayings claimed lives in California, Iowa, Missourri, and Illinois. His first child-killing took place in Antioch, California, just one day before he was arrested on molestation charges in San Francisco. He also drew a map pinpointing the location of a Bettendorf, Iowa, boy that had not been previously found. Found guilty in the Steele slaying and the killing of another Missourri child, four-year-old Eric Christgen, Hatcher was sentenced to two life terms, though he had requested the death sentence. The cowardly child-murderer took care of it himself, hanging himself in his cell just four days after his last sentence.

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Justice is shown to triumph--ultimately--in this engaging, instructive true-crime study. In 1978, four-year-old Eric Christgen was kidnapped and killed in St. Joseph, Mo. The police fixed on Melvin Reynolds, a passive, feckless bisexual, for the murder, but only after relentless questioning did he confess. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Four years later, when 11-year-old Michelle Steele was kidnapped and killed in the same town, arrested was Charles Hatcher, a drifter who had spent years in California mental institutions. Through the efforts of FBI agent Joseph Holtslag, Hatcher finally confessed to 16 murders, among them that of Christgen. He committed suicide in prison; Reynolds was released. Another disturbing factor in the case, as St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter Ganey shows, is that Hatcher, prior to confessing, was able to deceive the psychologists who examined him. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:3IMlR55zQm8J:www.radford.edu/~maamodt/Psyc%2520405/serial%2520killers/Hatcher,%2520Charles%2520-%2520fall,%25202005.pdf+Eric+Christgen&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=us