He Was Hiding in Plain Sight for Two Decades

When a woman from a small Texas town suddenly stopped coming to work, her family immediately knew something was wrong.  But as soon as the police started investigating it, the story only got more confusing.  There were many suspects and disturbing clues. However, investigators still could not figure out what really happened.

    For almost 20 years, the truth remained buried until one unexpected breakthrough changed everything.  Susan Atkins was born on April 6, 1957, in Texas.  She grew up in a religious family, and church was an important part of her life from the beginning.  Her father was a deacon at the local church.  So Susan and her brother spent a lot of time there growing up.

The family later moved to Stephenville, a small town near Dallas. Susan was always quiet and a little shy.  She didn’t want to be the center of attention and didn’t usually surround herself with large, noisy groups of friends. But the people she let into her life were everything to her.  And once Susan got close to someone, she treated them almost like family.

After graduating from high school with honors, Susan began working at a local sandpaper factory.    A few years later, she met a man named Mike.  And in 1980 they got married.  Shortly after the wedding, Mike decided he wanted to leave Stephenville and try living in a bigger city. Susan was not thrilled with this idea .

  She was close to her parents and had never lived far from home before. But Mike insisted, and eventually she agreed to go with him.  So the couple moved to El Paso , about an 8-hour drive away, and almost immediately Susan realized that this was not where she wanted to be.  So eventually she and Mike returned to Stephenville.

  After a few years, the marriage began to fall apart. Mike left town, and Susan stayed in Stephenville, trying to get through the divorce on her own.  It was a painful time for her. She became more withdrawn, more depressed, and for a while the only real comfort she received was from the people who still tried to be around her.

  They looked after her, spent time with her, and gave her at least a little light during a very difficult time.  In July 1987, Susan was 30 years old, still going through a divorce, and working in a factory.    On July 28, Susan’s father received a call from her boss.  He told him that Susan had not shown up for work for the past 2 days, and that he had tried to contact her but could not get an answer.

Her father immediately realized something was wrong.  Susan took her job seriously, and she wasn’t the kind of person who would just skip a shift without warning anyone.  He tried calling her, but when no one answered, he got in his car and drove to her house.  As he approached the front door, he heard a television playing somewhere inside, but no one came to the door when he knocked.

Then he tried to turn the handle and realized that the door was not locked.  So he went inside and started calling his daughter. But the only sound he heard in response was the television from the living room. When Susan’s father walked into her bedroom, he immediately saw that something was wrong.  The bed had clearly been moved .

  The mattress was partially hanging from the frame, and torn bed linens were scattered around the room, mixed with clothes on the floor .  By then he was starting to panic.  He was about to leave the bedroom when something else caught his attention.  The bathroom door was slightly ajar, so he walked over and peeked inside.  To his horror, he saw Susan.

  Her body was thrown over the edge of the bathtub.  She was naked, and her hands were tied behind her back with a T -shirt.  Even though he was shocked and trying to dismiss what he saw, Susan’s father realized almost immediately that his daughter was gone.    There was nothing he could do to save her.  So he ran out of the bathroom and called the police.

  In a small town like Stephenville, murders were extremely rare, so the police and all available officers went to Susan’s house.  One of the investigators who arrived at the scene noticed Susan’s father standing outside.  He knew the man well and at first couldn’t understand why he was here until he remembered that he had a daughter and realized that the victim was almost certainly her.

The police began processing the scene, and from the moment they went inside, it became clear that whoever killed Susan had used a level of violence none of them had seen before.  The bathtub where her body was found was filled almost to the top, and the water was almost black with blood.  After examining the scene, detectives believe the killer may have held Susan underwater until she died.

  But that was n’t all.  There was a mark on Susan’s neck that looked like it had been left by some kind of cord or rope, and investigators found the cord lying on her bed. They also noticed clear makeup stains on her pillow .  All in all, it seemed that the killer first tried to strangle her with a cord in a pillow, and then dragged her into the bathroom and held her under water.

  And because Susan’s clothes had been removed, detectives also believed she may have been the victim of sexual assault.  The attack was so brutal that investigators had a hard time accepting it as an accident.  This didn’t look like a simple robbery gone wrong.  It seemed to them that someone had come into Susan’s house with anger, hatred, and some very personal goal to hurt her.

Susan’s body was handed over to the medical examiner while police continued to search the house.  In the living room, they noticed an ashtray on a small table near the sofa that was filled with cigarette butts. There were also snacks and a can of cola. Susan’s father told investigators that she did not smoke and almost never drank cola, so the police began to suspect that the killer had left these items.

Judging by the number of cigarettes, he could have spent several hours in the house.  And from this, investigators began to put together a possible picture of what happened.  Susan may have known the man and ushered him inside, then brought him snacks and a drink and let him smoke in her living room. As the detectives continued to walk around the house, they noticed something strange.

All the window frames were nailed together , making it impossible to open them.  This made Susan look like she was afraid someone might try to break into her house.  At the same time, forensic experts found fresh marks on the front door, which could indicate an attempted burglary.  But the police were skeptical of this theory, as the living room scene suggested that Susan may have let the killer inside voluntarily.

However, they cannot completely rule out the possibility that the killer first attacked Susan and then sat in the living room smoking cigarettes and eating snacks.  Soon, forensic scientists found one of the most important pieces of evidence in the house. Clear palm print and fingerprints on the faucet in the bedroom.

  Based on the location of the print, it appeared that the killer may have rested his hand on the faucet, holding Susan’s head under water. The problem was that investigators couldn’t just run the print against a database and wait for a match.  At that time, they would have had to manually compare it to possible suspects.  DNA was even more complex.

Detectives understood that the cigarette butts could contain the killer’s saliva, but DNA analysis was not available to them in the form it is today. So at this point, fingerprints have become their strongest evidence .  Police also spoke to Susan’s neighbors, and one of them gave detectives an interesting tip.

  Someone saw a very large man near Susan’s house.  They couldn’t remember much about him , but investigators still considered the information important. When the medical examiner completed an examination of Susan’s body, the report confirmed that she had been sexually assaulted, but due to the condition of her body, the experts were unable to determine an exact cause of death.

They saw signs that Susan had been strangled with a rope and smothered with a pillow. They also saw signs of her being held underwater, but they couldn’t say which of these actions actually killed her. The exact time of death was also difficult to determine.  All the experts could say was that Susan was probably attacked sometime in the evening, about 2 days before her body was found .

  After speaking with Susan’s family and friends, police learned that none of them had actually heard from her in the past 2 days.  Her best friend Cindy said she last saw Susan 4 days before the body was found.    On July 24, Cindy and her boyfriend Ray were going to a carnival in a nearby town, and Cindy decided to invite Susan.

  According to Cindy, the divorce had been weighing on Susan for several months, and Cindy was trying to bring her back into the world a little. She noticed that when Susan was around other people, when she had somewhere to go, someone to talk to, something to distract her from everything, she seemed a little more herself.  So whenever Cindy had the opportunity, she tried to invite her.

  She often invited friends to her house, and recently she had started inviting Susan as well. Gradually, it seemed to help.  Susan was still not completely healthy, but she was starting to look like someone who could finally get over the divorce and find herself again. Then Cindy told the police something else.

  She said she had no doubt that Susan’s husband, Mike, was the person behind the murder. And detectives soon learned that almost everyone close to Susan felt the same way, including her father.  Investigators found that Susan and Mike’s marriage was troubled almost from the beginning.  When they met, Susan was a quiet, shy woman from a religious family.

Mike, on the other hand, was more of a rebellious outsider.  He played the guitar, dreamed of becoming a famous rock musician, and barely held down a job.  He was constantly getting into fights, and generally had a personality that made many people keep their distance.  When Susan started dating him, her friends and parents tried to talk her out of it.

  But Susan fell in love with Mike, and they eventually got married. For the next few years, Susan effectively ran the household. She worked at the factory, often taking on extra shifts, while Mike spent his time playing guitar, drinking beer, and lifting weights in the yard.  From time to time, he tried to get a job, but he never lasted long because he was constantly fired.

  After 7 years of marriage, just a few months before Susan’s death, Mike received a job offer in Indiana, but Susan did not want to move to another state.  So Mike just left without telling her, and not empty-handed.  He took her car, her jacket, and even the porcelain figurines that the two of them had collected for years.

But Mike didn’t stop there.  Before disappearing, he recorded a 30-minute video on cassette tape and left it with Susan.  In it, he blamed her for the breakdown of their marriage and said what a terrible wife she was.  Then Susan began finding notes hidden throughout the house.  Mike left them in different places, and each one was full of insults, accusations, and cruel little messages that seemed intended to hurt her.

All of this genuinely scared Susan, and she told her friends that she was afraid of Mike.    What scared her most was that one day he might come back, come into her house, and hurt her. That’s why she asked Cindy’s boyfriend, Ray, to board up her windows so no one could open them from the outside.  Rai even offered to lend her a gun, but Susan refused.

  Cindy also told police that Susan had recently filed for divorce and that she and Mike were still married at the time of her death.  Based on all this, detectives began to consider Mike as the prime suspect.  But there was one obvious problem.  He lived in Indianapolis, about a 15-hour drive away.  The police needed to know if Mike had returned to Texas around the time Susan was murdered.

  So they turned to officers in Indiana. They talked to him , but Mike denied any involvement in Susan’s death.  He also claimed to have an alibi for the night of the murder, and this information was passed on to detectives in Texas. With this, the theory of Susan’s husband’s involvement began to look less plausible, and detectives began considering other possible suspects from Susan’s friend, Sandy .

  They learned that shortly before her death, Susan had begun dating a man named J.C.  He worked as a bartender and they met a few times.  But, according to Cindy, the relationship ended almost as quickly as it began. Susan told her that J.C. was pushing for sex much faster than she was comfortable with, which was why she decided to stop seeing him.

The lead detectives went to the bar where J.C. worked to speak to him in person, and almost immediately something snapped inside him .  J.C. was tall and stocky, matching the general description of the man witnesses had seen near Susan’s house.  And during the conversation, the detective noticed something else. J.C.

 was smoking and drinking Coke from a can, as was the person who seemed to be spending time in Susan’s living room .  This proved nothing, but it made the detective pay closer attention. J.C. also seemed nervous, and when asked where he was the night of Susan’s murder, he said he didn’t remember .  There was another problem. Ji’s story didn’t match what Susan told her best friend.

He denied pressuring Susan to have sex with him and insisted he did not pressure her in that way. In fact, he claimed they had already had sex, which directly contradicted what Susan had told Cindy.  But then J.C. said something that made the detectives even more suspicious .  According to him , he and Susan had an intimate relationship in her bedroom .

  It seemed to the detective as if J.C. was trying to explain in advance why his fingerprints or DNA could have ended up in that room.  However, JC agreed to take a polygraph test and voluntarily gave his fingerprints.    The test results were inconclusive , and the expert could not say for sure whether he was telling the truth .  Fingerprints were another problem.

Detectives had to send them to a lab in another city, where experts would compare them manually .  And since there was already a lot of work to do, it could be months before they received an answer.  By that time, the detective already had some doubts about Gee’s involvement. Partly because he was willing to hand over his fingerprints so easily.

While they waited, investigators continued to examine other people.  And soon they turned their attention to Ray, the boyfriend of Susan’s best friend.  Susan knew Ray very well, which meant she would have no problem letting him into her house .  He was also very tall and stocky, which matched the general description of the witnesses.

  Besides, there was little to point to him.  And at first, the detective seriously didn’t believe Ray was involved.  But as soon as they started talking, his mind began to change.  From the first minute of the interrogation, Ray behaved suspiciously. He told the detective that since the murder he couldn’t stop thinking about how the killer could have gotten into Susan’s house.

Since it was Ray who had boarded up her windows, he began talking about various weak points in the house and suggesting possible ways someone could have gotten inside. The detective then asked if Ray had an alibi for the night Susan was murdered.  Rai said he was at a friend’s house, playing a game called Dungeons and Dragons.

  This detail immediately caught the detective’s attention, because at the time, Dungeons & Dragons had a rather shady reputation. The game was often associated with black magic and Satanism in the media, and even serious newspapers published articles with such claims.  So at the time, people who played such games were sometimes viewed with suspicion, and some believed they might be involved in something dark or dangerous.

Given the level of violence in Susan’s murder, detectives wondered if there might be some connection. But Ray also agreed to give his fingerprints without hesitation.  And because of this, his possible involvement became less obvious.  While the detective waited for the results of the fingerprint lab tests , he continued to search for other suspects.

But none of these clues led anywhere.  And all the time he kept coming back to one question.  Is it possible that Susan’s husband somehow committed the murder and still managed to create an alibi?  So the detective contacted the officers in Indianapolis again and asked them to check Mike’s alibi to make sure it was indeed true.

  But, to his surprise, they told him that no one had actually confirmed it. The officers spoke with Mike, and he told them he had spent that evening with several people who could corroborate his story.  He also promised to come to the station and provide them with a list of names, but never did.  This meant that Mike didn’t really have a confirmed alibi .

  And as soon as the detective realized this, he immediately bought a plane ticket to Indianapolis and began to consider his next move. He couldn’t get Mike to give his fingerprints, and he didn’t want to just ask for them and risk exposing him.  Mike wasn’t particularly attached to one place, and if he realized the police were approaching him, he could easily have disappeared.

  So the detective came up with a plan.  He and another officer decided to set up surveillance on Mike and wait for him to do something that would give them legal grounds to arrest him.  If they could have arrested him on a separate offense, they could have taken his fingerprints without his consent, and Mike might never have found out that it had anything to do with Susan’s murder.

The officers parked the van near the house where Mike lived with his brother and began watching him. Nothing happened for several days .  But then the detective noticed something interesting. Mike and his brother were having a garage sale and had various items laid out in front of the house.  When the detective looked through the binoculars, he saw porcelain figurines among the items being sold.

And, as we recall, Susan told her friend that Mike had taken just such figurines from her house when he left.  This gave the detective exactly what he needed. If the figurines had indeed been stolen from Susan’s house, he could have considered them stolen property, and that was enough to justify an arrest. He contacted the local police station, and officers took Mike away.

  After he was detained, they took his fingerprints and sent them to the lab. Now the detectives could only wait.  At that time, the lab had Ray, JC, and Mike’s fingerprints.  And in the detective’s opinion, Mike was still the most likely person to have killed Susan.  A few days later, the results finally came.  But instead of giving the detectives the expected answer, they brought another unexpected twist .

  The fingerprints found in Susan’s bathroom did not belong to Ray, J.C., or Mike.  For the lead detective, the results were a real shock.  At that point, he had already begun preparing documents to extradite Mike back to Texas.  But now he had no choice but to retreat.  For some time he tried to find holes in Mike’s alibi, but never found any evidence that Mike had returned to Texas around the time Susan was murdered.

  So, in the end, the detective was left with almost nothing.  Even then, he still considered Mike the most likely culprit.  And Susan’s loved ones felt the same way .  When Susan’s family realized that the police could not prove Mike’s involvement, they filed a civil lawsuit against him. One reason was that Susan had an $11,000 life insurance policy and Mike was supposed to receive the money.

  Mike did not participate in the case because he could not afford a lawyer, and the judge ultimately ruled in favor of Susan’s family.  He ordered Mike to pay them $700,000.  But there were two main problems. Mike had no money or valuables .  And while he lived in another state, the court could recover almost nothing from him.

  After that, Mike continued to live under a cloud of suspicion.  For years, people still believed he killed Susan.  When he started performing with his rock band, strangers would sometimes approach him after concerts and ask him directly if he had really killed his wife.  In 2005, after one of these performances, Mike was talking to a friend when the conversation turned to Susan’s murder.

He told her that even after 18 years, people still thought of him as a murderer, and that the fact that he had carried this accusation for so long made him very sad.  His friend thought it was unfair, and she began to wonder if there was anything she could do to help.  Eventually, she found the email address of the police department that was handling Susan’s case and sent them a message explaining what had been happening to Mike all these years.

  This letter caught the attention of a detective named Don Miller, and he became interested in the case. By then, Susan’s murder had been at a standstill for years without any real progress.  But when Miller began examining the evidence, he saw that six cigarette butts believed to have been left by the killer were still lying in the warehouse.

  He sent them to the lab, and technicians were able to obtain the DNA of the unknown man. The profile was not in the FBI database.  So Miller started with the most obvious step.  He went to Mike and asked him to provide a DNA sample, and Mike agreed.  After some time, the results came back from the laboratory .  The killer’s DNA did not match that of Susan’s husband.

    For the first time in 18 years, detectives were finally able to rule out the man almost everyone believed guilty. When Miller called Mike and told him the results, Mike burst into tears.  He said the allegations had effectively ruined his life.  Then Miller started thinking about how to identify the real killer and noticed something important.

All these years later, the fingerprints from Susan’s bathroom have never been digitized.  So he sent them to specialists who entered them into an electronic fingerprint database , and almost immediately they got a result.  The prints belonged to a man named Joseph Gatley. Gatley’s fingerprints were taken back in 1988, a year after Susan’s murder.

  At the time, he had been arrested for armed robbery in Las Vegas, but investigators in Texas had no idea about it because no one had ever considered Gatley as a suspect. Detective Miller began investigating him and confirmed that his name had never appeared anywhere in the case.  But then, while trying to find a connection between Gatley and Susan, Miller discovered something that stunned him.

  Gatley was a cousin of Cindy, Susan’s best friend.  And that wasn’t the only connection. Miller also learned that Susan may have known Gatley very well.  He had been hanging out with her at Cindy’s house with a group of friends, which suddenly made the scene in Susan’s living room much more understandable.  Susan may have brought him inside because she considered him a good friend.

As Miller continued to research Gatley’s past, he discovered something different. About a year after Susan’s murder, Gatley’s girlfriend went to the police and accused him of sexual assault.  He was 20 years old at the time, and according to the woman, he attacked her, threatening her with a knife. She also said he told her he had killed before and that he would have no problem doing it again.

  But despite all this, Gatley was never charged , and no one at the police station linked the incident to Susan’s murder. After gathering all this information, Detective Miller spoke to Gatley personally and asked him to provide a DNA sample.  At the time, Gatley was living near Austin and working as a warehouse manager.

He agreed to meet with detectives at the station and almost immediately admitted that he had been at Susan’s house shortly before her death.  He claimed that the two of them drank and used drugs, but insisted that there was no sex between them and that he did not kill her. Detectives knew Gatley was lying because no signs of alcohol or drugs were found in Susan’s blood.

Nevertheless, he agreed to voluntarily provide a DNA sample, so the police released him and awaited the results.  The process took several days, and while the detectives waited, something unexpected happened.  Officers spoke separately with Gatley’s wife, also named Susan, and she told them he had been beating her and sexually harassing her for years.

  She admitted that she was very afraid of him and believed that he could kill her or hurt their daughter and son. But the police promised her they wouldn’t let him hurt anyone else.  Detective Miller decided to use these allegations to arrest Hatley while the lab was still comparing DNA samples.  Hatley was taken into custody, and shortly thereafter, investigators received the results they had been waiting for.

  DNA from cigarette butts in Susan’s house matched Hatley’s.  By that point, the police had both his DNA and fingerprints linking him to the scene, leaving Hatley with little real opportunity to deny his involvement in Susan’s murder.  When Detective Miller called Susan’s father and told him that the killer had finally been identified, her father was certain he was talking about Mike.

  So when Miller called out another name, he was stunned.  The same was true of almost everyone who loved Susan, but especially Cindy.  She couldn’t even imagine that the person behind Susan’s murder was her own cousin, someone she was close to and had always considered almost a brother.  Hatley’s trial was scheduled to begin in October 2007, 20 years after Susan’s murder.

  But her family didn’t want to go through a long, public trial, listening to his lawyers humiliate Susan and try to convince the jury of Gatley’s innocence. So when prosecutors offered a plea deal that would have seen Gatley serve 30 years in prison in exchange for pleading guilty, Susan’s family agreed to support it, and Gatley agreed.

  He admitted that he went to Susan’s house that night and killed her, but insisted that he remembered almost nothing about it .  According to Gatley, he was heavily intoxicated and everything was a blur.  So he claimed he barely remembered any details.  Nevertheless, the confession was enough, and Gatley was sent to prison.

  But then Susan’s family faced another painful reality.  Since his sentence fell under the old laws, he was eligible for early release.  And in 2018, after serving only 11 years, he was released for good behavior.    It was almost impossible for Susan’s loved ones to accept this after everything he had done. 11 years seemed far from enough.

But there was nothing they could do to change it.  After his release, Gatley moved to Abalin, Texas, and settled in a trailer near his daughter’s house.  Three years later, in 2021, he gave an interview to NBC where he revealed more details about what happened that night. Or at least he expressed his version of events.

  According to Gatley, he did not come to Susan’s house planning to kill her. He said he was drunk and lonely, and just looking for company.  Susan let him in, brought him a Coke and snacks, and the two of them talked and laughed for a while.  At one point, Gatley tried to kiss her, but Susan slapped him.  After that, he said, something in his head snapped and he lost control.

Gatley claimed that he killed Susan with a pillow, and that everything he did after that, including holding her underwater in the bathtub, was done for two reasons. First, he said he wanted to make sure she was really dead.  And secondly, he wanted to make the scene even more horrific. As part of the same program, journalists also spoke with Mike, and he told how being accused of murdering Susan destroyed his life.

  Less than a year after that interview, which aired in December 2021, Hatley was diagnosed with cancer and was scheduled to begin chemotherapy.  But on December 9, he was found dead in his trailer.  Even this is not the end of the story.  Some time later, Hatley’s trailer and everything in it was sold to a new owner, who began going through the items Hatley had left behind.

    While rummaging through the trailer, the man came across a stack of handwritten pages and began to read them.  To his surprise, the pages turned out to be a kind of autobiography that Hatley had written shortly before his death, and what he found in these pages disturbed him so much that he contacted Detective Miller. He gave him the documents, and Miller began to read them.

  In these pages, Hatley wrote about his difficult childhood and claimed that he was beaten by his own mother.  He also admitted that thoughts of violence began to enter his mind when he was very young, and that over the years these thoughts became increasingly difficult for him to control.  He also wrote about the effects of alcohol and violent adult material, which he said further fueled his desires.

  Gatley also wrote about Susan’s murder.  According to him, when they spent time together at Cindy’s house , he convinced himself that Susan was flirting with him.  That’s why when he went to her house that night, he tried to kiss her.  But when Susan slapped him, he claimed that everything seemed to go blurry.  And when his mind cleared, he had already brutally beaten her.

Even by his own version of events, Susan was still alive at that time.  And Gatley admitted that he could have stopped there , but decided not to. Susan promised she would n’t tell anyone what happened if he spared her, but Gatley had no intention of stopping.  He asked her if she believed in God.  And when Susan said yes, he told her, “Start praying.

”  After the murder, Petli drove past the police station and considered surrendering, but he lacked the courage to do so.  In the following days, he talked to friends and relatives about Susan’s murder.  He admitted that these conversations excited him.  He also considered Mike his second victim, because Mike immediately became the prime suspect and ended up suffering under the burden of public suspicion for years.

In the handwritten pages, Gatley also wrote about an assault on his girlfriend, which she had reported to the police years earlier.  He admitted that he had intentionally been so cruel that he had given her a reason to report him. He wanted someone to stop him, but he couldn’t bring himself to surrender to the police.

Ultimately, Gatley tried to explain it all away by saying that he always had two sides to him, and that he described one of those sides as almost demonic.  He claimed that he had struggled with this part of himself his entire life. But even in those pages, there was no real remorse for killing Susan or for the people he had wronged.

  After reading all this, Detective Miller began to wonder if there might have been other victims in Gatley’s life.  He had worked as a truck driver for years, and his handwritten confession sounded almost like a textbook profile of a serial killer.  Miller has tried to find other possible victims, but so far these searches have not led to anything concrete.

  So, in the end, the long and confusing case was solved, but it still left a bitter feeling in everyone involved. Susan’s family was deeply disappointed that her killer was only identified nearly two decades later, even though another victim had tried to have him arrested for assault and sexual assault.  She even told officers that Gatley claimed to have killed before.

  But despite this, her words were not taken seriously.  And even when the case was finally solved, Hatley only spent 11 years behind bars.  To Susan’s family, this seemed painfully unfair, especially considering the cruelty he had shown toward Susan. Share your thoughts on this story in the comments section and don’t forget to hit the “Like” button if you enjoyed my video.

  Thank you for watching.