Authorities have released images of Matthew Hoffman's house and they reveal that the 30-year-old stuffed his living room with leaves and lined his bathroom with more than 100 bags of leaves.
In addition, the unemployed tree-surgeon's bed - where the teenager was raped - was made from leaves and his freezer contained dead squirrels.
Hoffman, who stabbed his victims to death on November 9, is currently serving a life sentence for the three murders in Ohio County - he had hidden the bodies high in hollow trees but told the police where he had hidden them in a bid to escape Death Row.
And two police officers from Mount Vernon, Ohio, who were investigating the whereabouts of the missing trio, first entered Hoffman's home in November last year to discover the mounds of leaves.
By that stage Hoffman had murdered and dismembered Tina Hermann, her son Kody and Mrs Hermann's neighbour Stephanie Sprang, and the piles were so high that the officers feared that corpses might have been buried underneath them.
Detective Craig Feeney told the Columbus Dispatch: 'So much runs through your mind: "What if someone is hiding under that pile?" Or in this case, I thought, "Is that where he's hiding the bodies?'''
Mrs Hermann's 13-year-old daughter was discovered in Hoffman's basement, with her hands and feet bound - she had been confined to a makeshift bed of leaves.
During police questioning Hoffman confessed to investigators that he had made the bed of leaves and covered it with blankets and that the rape victim 'liked that bed, it was extremely comfy and I wanted to sleep on it'.
Forensic psychologists have suggested that the obsession with leaves and trees showed that Hoffman was unhinged and mentally disturbed.
'If trees gave him comfort at all and were familiar at all, that would explain why he would put the bodies in the tree,' said Dr James Alan Fox of Northeastern University, who has written five books about serial killers, told ABC News.
Dr N.G. Berrill, director of New York Center for Neuropsychology and Forensic Behavioral Science, agreed and said to ABC News: 'It certainly suggests that he is likely to be mentally ill, mentally ill as compared to other killers who show up in the news like serial killers or psychopaths.
'Serial killers, from a professional point of view, they are not mentally ill. They have character disturbances, but they know what they're doing is wrong. They take too much pleasure, too much gratification to stop.
'It would take talking to him to find out what [stockpiling leaves] means. [Hoffman's delusions are] very elaborate delusions related to trees, what trees produce, being in and around on trees, putting people in trees.'
A neighbour, Henderson Butcher, said that there were signs that Hoffman was attracted to trees and leaves.
'He used to play around the trees around there a lot, throw ropes in trees and had like a hammock on there,' Butcher was quotes as saying in ABC News.
Another neighbour, Kara Fowler, said: 'He would actually kill the squirrels and eat them - he was killing the squirrels because he doesn't grocery shop.'
John Thatcher, the Knox County Prosecutor, said he believed that the hundreds of bags of leaves found in Hoffman's house were unconnected to the murders.
Earlier this week Hoffman made a chilling confession detailing how a planned break-in turned into every American family’s nightmare.
He said he randomly targetted the isolated Know County split level house where Mrs Herrmann lived with her two children and spent the night in a sleeping bag in the woods across the street.
At about 9am on November 9 last year, he slipped into the house through an open garage door after watching Mrs Herrmann drive off in her car.
He insisted he never planned to hurt anyone when he sneaked into a suburban home at breakfast time looking for valuables to steal.
But before the day was over, the ex-convict had brutally murdered a 32-year-old mother, her eleven-year-old son and a 41-year-old woman neighbour at the house in Mount Vernon, Ohio.
After the bloodbath he hid the bodies – as well as the family’s pet dog that he also stabbed – in a hollowed out tree in a nearby park.
source
No comments:
Post a Comment