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Killer Stuffed His House With Leaves, Kept
Kidnapped Girl on Bed of Leaves
By Jessica Hopper - ABCNews.go.com
February 10, 2011
The Ohio man found guilty of holding a 13-year-old
girl hostage after killing her family and stuffing their dismembered
bodies in a hollow tree had an obsession with trees and leaves, police
documents show.
Pictures of Matthew Hoffman's home reveal a living
room stuffed with leaves, a bathroom lined with more than 100 bags of
leaves, and a freezer that contained only a couple of red popsicles
and two dead squirrels.
Hoffman, 30, is serving a life sentence for three
murders and for the kidnapping and rape of the teen.
The two police officers from Mount Vernon, Ohio,
who first entered Hoffman's home in November 2010 discovered mounds of
leaves so high they feared that bodies could be buried underneath
them.
"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,'" Mount Vernon Police Detective Craig Feeney
told the Columbus Dispatch.
By the time police entered his home, Hoffman had
already killed and dismembered Tina Hermann, her 11-year-old son Kody
Maynard and Hermann's friend Stephanie Sprang.
Police found Hermann's 13-year-old daughter in the
basement of Hoffman's home. She was bound hand and foot and was
confined to a makeshift bed of leaves.
Hoffman, an unemployed tree trimmer, confessed to
investigators that he had made the bed of leaves and covered it with
blankets. He told investigators that the little girl "liked that bed,
it was extremely comfy and I wanted to sleep on it."
While holding the girl hostage, he gave his victim
the book "Treasure Island" to read and watched the movie "Iron Man"
with her, according to his confession.
He also admitted raping the girl, who was found by
police wearing "a white plastic bag that had holes cut out for her
legs that she was wearing like a makeshift diaper," according to case
files.
Moments after her rescue, the girl told police that
she was late for school and asked if they could take her to school.
Unaware that Hoffman had murdered her mother and
brother, the girl told police that she feared Hoffman had killed her
dog. Hoffman would later confess to killing the dog because it would
not stop barking.
The girl also told police that the "suspect cut her
finger with a knife, usually gagged her and that he was going to
release her before Christmas," according to the records.
Hoffman's Obsession With Leaves Shows Signs of
Mental Illness
Knox County Prosecutor John Thatcher said that the
hundreds of bags of leaves found in the home were not connected to the
murders.
"Knox County has never seen a case like this
before. It has to rank there in Ohio history as one of the worst
homicide cases," Thatcher said.
Forensic psychologists said that Hoffman's
obsession with leaves and trees were indications of mental illness and
delusion.
"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.
Psychologists called the obsession with leaves
bizarre and unique from other convicted murderers.
"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," Dr. N.G. Berrill,
director of New York Center for Neuropsychology and Forensic
Behavioral Science. "Serial killers, from 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."
Berrill said that only Hoffman could explain why he
appeared to stockpile leaves.
"It would take talking to him to find out what it
means," Berrill said. "[Hoffman's delusions are] very elaborate
delusions related to trees, what trees produce, being in and around on
trees, putting people in trees."
Hoffman was an unemployed tree cutter. Neighbors
said that there were only two trees near his home.
"He couldn't have possibly got that many leaves
from that tree so he had to haul leaves from somewhere. I never saw
him raking," neighbor Jeannette Columber said.
Neighbor Henderson Butcher described his
interactions with Hoffman as friendly.
"He used to play around the trees around there a
lot...throw ropes in trees and had like a hammock on there," Butcher
said.
Other people said that Henderson would shoot
squirrels to eat.
"He was killing the squirrels because he doesn't
grocery shop," neighbor Kara Fowler said. "He would actually kill the
squirrels and eat them."
Matthew Hoffman's Freezer Contained Only
Popsicles and Squirrels
The released documents show that police taped hours
of conversations with Hoffman saying little. It was a bad dream that
prompted him to confess. Hoffman told an investigator that he'd had a
dream about being at a food processing plant.
"Hoffman said he opened a trash bag at the food
processing plant and saw cut up body parts and he got a knot in his
stomach and it all came back to him," according to the case files.
Hoffman asked an investigator to allow him to write
the location of the bodies on a piece of paper and then shoot him in a
faked escape attempt.
When police said they wouldn't agree to his terms,
he shut up for two more days before telling police where to find he
bodies.
The home full of leaves is in foreclosure,
according to court records. Wells Fargo Bank initiated the proceedings
Jan. 28.
Knox County killer of 3 says burglary was intent
In confession, he says he treated teen hostage well
By Holly Zachariah and Allison Manning - The
Columbus Dispatch
Wednesday February 9, 2011
MOUNT VERNON, Ohio - Matthew Hoffman chose the
house he wanted to burglarize, and then he waited.
Just before he took three lives and changed a
teenage girl forever, Hoffman spent the night in the woods across from
Tina Herrmann's isolated Knox County home. Bundled in a sleeping bag
to ward off the cold of the November night, he watched the split-level
house.
He dozed. Sometime after 9 a.m. on Nov. 10, a
Wednesday, he saw Herrmann leave. Hoffman sneaked across the road and
slipped under the overhead garage door, which wasn't completely
closed.
He swears that he went inside only to steal. He
says he was excited by just being in someone else's home alone.
But before that day was over, Hoffman, a
30-year-old unemployed ex-con, had killed Herrmann, her 11-year-old
son, Kody Maynard, and Herrmann's best friend and neighbor,
41-year-old Stephanie Sprang.
He also had kidnapped a 13-year-old girl, sexually
assaulted her and held her hostage until authorities, after days of
old-fashioned police work, raided Hoffman's home near downtown Mount
Vernon about 8 a.m. the following Sunday and rescued her.
Knox County Prosecutor John Thatcher told Hoffman
that he wouldn't seek a death sentence if the suspect would tell where
he had hidden the bodies of his victims and if he would give a full,
written confession.
Hoffman agreed on Nov.18, directing investigators
to a 60-foot-tall hollow tree in the Kokosing Wildlife Area near
Fredericktown. Inside that tree, detectives found the mutilated bodies
of the three, as well as the remains of the family dog.
Hoffman, an avid outdoorsman who was apparently
obsessed with trees and leaves, later told authorities that he had
used a rig-and-pulley system that he regularly used to climb trees to
get to the top of the hollow tree and drop the bodies inside.
On Jan. 6, he pleaded guilty to 10 felonies,
including aggravated murder and rape, and was sentenced to life in
prison with no chance of parole.
His four-page, first-person confession and the
entire investigative file, all released yesterday, offer excruciating
details of what happened in Herrmann's King Beach Drive home and what
followed in the days after.
The file doesn't make sense of a seemingly
senseless crime, but it does offer the first public peek into the mind
of a man who went from burglar to mass murderer in a matter of hours.
Although he coldly recounts gruesome details of the
murders, Hoffman seems to have convinced himself that in the four days
he held the teenage girl in his Columbus Road home, he was a nice guy.
The Dispatch has previously published the girl's
name but is no longer identifying her because she was the victim of a
sexual assault.
Hoffman tells of how he let her play Wii video
games, how they watched the Iron Man movies - both the first and the
second - together, and how he gave her a copy of the novel Treasure
Island to pass the time.
He said he cooked hamburgers for her and slept with
his arm around her.
He appears to believe that he showed her some
compassion.
He promised her that she would be OK, he said -
that she would be home playing with her family by Christmas. He showed
her the definition of ransom in a dictionary and told her that he was
negotiating with her family.
"I would not have hurt her. I could not hurt her,"
he said in the confession, which he dictated to his defense attorney.
"I planned on giving her more and more freedom until she ran away."
He recounts how he bound her hands and feet with
both rope and duct tape. When investigators broke through a door of
Hoffman's home on Nov. 14 and found the girl, she was alive but bound
on a bed made of tree leaves and blankets in a dark and dank corner of
the home's basement.
The door to the basement had been barricaded with a
sewing cabinet.
Thatcher, the prosecutor, said that Hoffman is just
building himself up in his mind and that, at his core, he's nothing
more than a calculated criminal with no remorse.
"His perception of himself is self-serving, and he
may very well believe he treated her like a houseguest, but she was a
kidnap victim," he said.
Larry Maynard, the father of Kody and the teenage
girl, has read the confession. He said he doesn't believe most of
Hoffman's story about how he cared for the girl.
Maynard said he still has a million questions and
no answers.
"Why would he tell us the truth? Why would he even
care?" he said. "Even from behind bars, he's still controlling the
situation."
Still, Hoffman stands by his story that he didn't
mean anyone harm. Herrmann - and Sprang, just minutes later -
surprised him after he'd been there only an hour.
He was cornered, he said, so he stabbed them both.
"At this time I was in a total state of shock," he
said. "I wandered around the house, slowly coming to the realization
of what I had done and how bad it was."
He says he had no plan, that he ran through his
choices. Yet he had come armed with a hunting knife - described in
police files as a serrated, "jungle primitive" knife bought online.
He was in the middle of what he called "processing"
the bodies in the home's bathroom when the children returned from
school. They surprised him, too. Hoffman said the girl ran to her
room, and he killed Kody just inside the front door.
Using an electrical cord from a fan, he tied up the
girl and left her in the kitchen. It appears that she never saw the
rest of the house, which was like a scene from a horror movie.
Hoffman told investigators that he left the house
in Sprang's Jeep Cherokee, with the bodies and the girl loaded inside.
It seems that Hoffman moved quickly that first
night, rigging the pulley equipment - he left the girl alone in his
home - and then taking the bodies to the woods. At various times, he
used several vehicles - his own, Herrmann's Ford pickup truck and
Sprang's Jeep - to move around. He walked from location to location
twice, as well, and once rode his bike.
One thing he hadn't counted on, however, was an
investigation so soon.
On Thursday morning, Herrmann's boss went by her
home and saw the blood. That triggered a full-scale missing-person
investigation. The entire community soon swarmed with authorities.
A key event occurred Thursday night when Hoffman
went to a bike trail near Kenyon College, where he had left Herrmann's
pickup. He intended to take the truck back to Herrmann's house and
burn the place down.
But the police were there. They had no reason yet
to suspect Hoffman, but a deputy questioned him anyway. He told the
deputy he was waiting for his girlfriend to get off work at the nearby
Kenyon Inn.
Deputies finally linked everything when they found,
while still examining the Herrmann home, a Walmart bag with two tarps
and a box of 55-gallon, heavy-duty trash bags.
They went to the store, watched surveillance video
and saw the man who had bought the tarps. They saw what he drove,
realized that the man the deputy had talked to at the park that night
drove the same car, and were pretty sure they had their man.
Footprints outside the Herrmann house led
investigators to believe that someone, a woman or girl with a size 7.5
shoe, had left the house alive with an attacker.
Was she still alive?
They knew where Hoffman lived. Now they just had to
go get him.
About 8 a.m. on Sunday, Nov. 14 - four days after
the murders - authorities busted in the door of Hoffman's home and
found him asleep on a living-room sofa.
Officers searched the barely furnished first floor
of the home and found no one else, dead or alive. What they did find,
however, was a room with thousands of leaves covering the floor, and
walls seemingly insulated with hundreds of plastic shopping bags
filled with leaves.
A sewing cabinet blocked what appeared to be a
basement door. They moved the cabinet and went down the steps.
There, they found the girl in disheveled clothes on
the makeshift bed. Hoffman was arrested, and the girl was reunited
with her father later that day.
Maynard said his daughter is back in school and
working with therapists to get past this tragedy and loss.
She is strong, he said, and has gotten through this
with her faith in God and the love of her family.
Hoffman, meanwhile, is in prison. In his
confession, he never asked for forgiveness or said he was sorry: "I
did not enter the house to kill those people. I did not know a single
one of them. I did not know their names, and I did not know who all
lived at the house. ... I did not plan for any of this to happen."
Thatcher, the prosecutor, said he believes
Hoffman's story that the home was chosen at random and that it was a
burglary gone very, very wrong.
Maynard thinks otherwise: "A thief steals, and a
murderer kills. He's just a monster. He's the closest thing to a devil
I've ever seen."
What was in the home (and mind) of Matthew
Hoffman?
By Allison Manning and Holly Zachariah - The
Columbus Dispatch
Wednesday February 9, 2011
MOUNT VERNON, Ohio - The first SWAT officer in line
burst through the front door of the home as a second one tossed in a
flash grenade to surprise, disorient and stun Matthew Hoffman, who was
sleeping inside.
Mount Vernon Police detective Craig Feeney and his
partner were the first two in.
"We plowed our way through the smoke and saw
something on the couch," Feeney said. "We yanked him to the floor and
he said, 'What's going on?' I said, 'You tell me.' But he was done
talking."
Even though that initial rush through the door took
only seconds, something besides Hoffman immediately caught Feeney's
eye. The floor of the room to the right of the front door was covered
with leaves.
"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?'"
By then, Hoffman had already killed 32-year-old
Tina Herrmann; her 11-year-old son, Kody Maynard; and Herrmann's best
friend and neighbor, 41-year-old Stephanie Sprang, in Herrmann's Apple
Valley home in Knox County four days earlier, on Nov. 10.
And he had kidnapped a teenage girl from the home
and sexually assaulted her.
But these officers at that moment on that Sunday
morning didn't yet know for certain who was alive, who was dead or
where anyone was.
After they handcuffed Hoffman and took him out of
the home, the officers found the girl in the basement, bound on a bed
made of leaves.
Then, Feeney and his partner went back to the
living room.
They didn't want to disturb any potential evidence,
but they had to see what they were dealing with. They poked at the
pile with sticks.
"All kinds of things go through your mind," Feeney
said. "I've seen a lot of crazy cases, but this guy? Wow. Who has a 14
x 14 tarp in their living room with leaves piled 3feet high?"
But that pile of leaves was just the beginning of
what awaited them in the Hoffman house. The detectives also found
three floor-to-ceiling rows of bagged leaves hanging on a living-room
wall.
They found a bathroom completely insulated by more
than 110 bags of leaves attached to the walls. The bags covered the
mirror; they surrounded the toilet.
Was it really insulation? An oddball hobby? Or just
a maniac's fascination?
Although he knows the investigators did amazing
work in those frantic days, Feeney doesn't buy Hoffman's written
confession that this triple murder was a burglary gone awry. He joins
the children's father, Larry Maynard, and other family members and
friends in his doubts.
Receipts that investigators found inside Hoffman's
home show he bought a pair of Sure-Grip gloves - most likely the same
gloves he left bloodied in the bathroom sink at Herrmann's home - at a
local Lowe's on Nov. 4.
He bought duct tape and another pair of gloves on
Nov.8. He had ordered the knife online and took it to the house with
him, even though he said he was just going to rob the place.
Feeney said he believes Hoffman likely knew he
couldn't stay in his home, forever, with what he'd done. Already a
convicted arsonist, maybe the leaves had another purpose.
"Were the leaves an accelerant?" Feeney said.
Would he have burned his own house down and fled?
Maybe, the detective said.
There were plenty more discoveries, according to
the detectives' notes, reports and photographs in the complete case
file, which the Knox County prosecutor's office released Monday in
response to a public-records request. The freezer in the kitchen held
two unskinned squirrels, red popsicles and little else.
Some walls and doorjambs were covered with doodles,
the kind a teenage girl would perhaps scratch on a notebook cover. A
giant peace sign on the door, stars on the wall, random names written
in marker. The leaf-filled bathroom had black doodles scrawled on the
white tub, including a jack-o-lantern.
Records show that before the murders, Hoffman's
life was a mess. He had no job and was collecting unemployment. His
car was being repossessed, and his girlfriend had told police that
he'd choked her on Oct. 24. She and her young son moved out then.
If there had been any evidence of a family at the
home, she took it with her.
Just as Hoffman didn't have anything to say the
morning of his arrest, his attitude didn't change much when
authorities got their first crack at questioning him.
In videos of the first marathon interview session
at the Knox County sheriff's office, Hoffman sat slumped over,
ignoring the questions of the tired detectives.
Then, after about 15 minutes, he raised his cuffed
hands and thumped his chest with a fist. He motioned as if breaking
something.
"Heart broken?" detective Sgt. Roger Brown asked
him. "Because of what happened?"
Hoffman shook his head no.
"Someone broke your heart?" Brown tried again.
Hoffman didn't answer. He didn't say a single word
until the tape ran out on the interview four hours later.
In the following days, hundreds of searchers combed
rural Knox County looking for the bodies. The three hadn't been seen
since Nov. 10, and Hoffman wouldn't talk.
On Tuesday, Nov. 16, he opened up to Special Agent
Joe Deitz of the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification &
Investigation, off-camera and in a single-stall restroom, according to
the case files.
Hoffman asked Deitz if he was recording what was
said. When the agent said no, Hoffman said he'd had a nightmare the
night before, his second in a jail cell where he was on suicide watch.
Hoffman dreamed that he was at a food-processing plant, and he opened
a trash bag filled with dismembered body parts.
He wanted to tell the detectives what had happened,
he told the agent, but on his own terms. He would write down the
locations of the bodies for a lawyer. Then Hoffman would escape, and
the special agent would shoot and kill him. Only after he was dead
could the lawyer say where the bodies were.
Hoffmann wanted to control the release of
information.
"Hoffman said he could not live with what he had
done and that if this could not be agreed to, then he would kill
himself in jail," the agent wrote in his report.
"Hoffman said he did not want to be injected with
Thorazine (a drug used to treat schizophrenia) the rest of his life in
prison and wanted to end his life."
He called himself a monster.
Deitz wouldn't go along with the plan, and Hoffman
later said he made up the story and didn't know where the bodies were.
But two days later, Hoffman must have decided he
wanted to live: He pointed detectives to a 60-foot-tall hollow tree in
the Kokosing Wildlife Area, near Fredericktown. He agreed to dictate a
detailed confession to his attorneys and to plead guilty to all 10
felony counts that prosecutors would bring against him. Prosecutors
took the death penalty off the table. On Jan. 6, Hoffman was sentenced
to life in prison with no chance of parole.
In his confession, also released this week, Hoffman
says he panicked when the women and children surprised him during a
burglary. He says he wanted to return and burn the house down after he
robbed it.
He had done as much when he was 19 and living away
from home for the first time in Steamboat Springs, Colo. Working for a
plumbing company at the time, he broke into a condo where he had been
working and robbed it.
After he was caught, Hoffman told detectives in
Colorado that he obsessed over the fingerprints he left behind, so he
returned, dumped 10 gallons of gasoline at the building and set the
place ablaze.
The 16 people living in the building escaped
unharmed, but not before the fire caused $2 million in damage.
"It was quite calculated. It wasn't a
spur-of-the-moment thing," said Capt. Bob DelValle, who investigated
the crime for the Steamboat Springs Police Department
Hoffman admitted what he'd done and spent six years
in prison before returning to Ohio in 2007. That punishment didn't
dissuade Hoffman from resorting to fire. It was the same solution he
came up with for the crime scene at Herrmann's home on King Beach
Drive.
But his plan was foiled.
A deputy spotted Hoffman loitering near Herrmann's
abandoned truck, where he had put the cans of gasoline. The deputy
didn't yet know that Hoffman would become a suspect in the
triple-murder case, but he did ask him what he was doing there.
Hoffman said he was waiting for his girlfriend to
get off work. The deputy asked for the girl's name. Hoffman said he
didn't know her last name because they'd just started dating. He gave
the deputy a first name: the same as the terrified girl he had left
bound in his home, shivering on a bed made of leaves.
Excerpts from Matthew Hoffman's confession
Given on Nov. 19, 2010
The Columbus Dispatch
February 8, 2011
I parked my car in Howard and walked from there to
the house. I got to the woods across the street from the house a
little after midnight. I slept across the street from the house that
night in a sleeping bag. I woke up at daylight. There were two
vehicles parked at the house during the night, and I saw that the gray
car had left. I went back to sleep until around nine on Wednesday
morning. I stayed there until a woman left in a pickup truck. This
meant there were no vehicles at the house. I walked across the street
and tried to enter the front door, but it was locked. I then went in
through the garage door. The garage door was not closed all the way so
I slid under it into the garage. I kicked the door into the house from
the garage. By this time it was approximately 10:30 a.m. Wednesday
morning.
I looked around the house to make sure no one was
there. Even if I did not take anything, there was a certain amount of
excitement in being in someone else's home without them being there. I
was looking for anything of value that could be carried out easily,
i.e. money, jewelry, etc. I did not find anything of any real value. I
was getting ready to leave as I had been there approximately an hour,
but someone pulled into the driveway. I was back in the bedrooms when
she entered the house and was unable to exit without breaking a window
and trying to jump out. I had brought my knife for a certain amount of
intimidation in case I ran inot someone and needed to make an escape.
When she made her way back into the bedrooms I
confronted her and made her get onto the bed lying face down. I
believe that we were in her bedroom. I had a blackjack, I was going to
try to knock her out. I hit her a couple of times in the head, but
this would not knock her out. It was not doing the job, and I started
panicking. The next thing that I knew her friend came into the
bedroom. I have no idea when she got there, what she was doing there,
and how she gained access. The other woman yelled at me, there were
now two to deal with and I did not know what to do.
I grabbed the knife that I had put down on the
nightstand and stabbed the woman on the bed, through her back, twice.
I chased the other woman down (Stephanie) and stabbed her a couple
times in the chest. Instead of running out of the house, she had run
into another bedroom. I believe this bedroom was for a girl due to the
contents of the room. I then went back to the other bedroom where the
first woman was located and stabbed her a couple more times. I could
tell that both women were now dead.
At this time I was in a total state of shock. I
wandered around the house slowly coming to the realization of what I
had done and how bad it was. During this time I killed the dog because
it would not stop barking. After a while I came to the conclusion that
I was going dispose of the bodies and burn the house down. At first I
thought about loading the bodies into the vehicle, driving it into
Foundation Park Pond, I would swim away as the vehicles sank, but I
felt that it was too cold and I might not be able to make it out of
the water. I decided to process the bodies and dispose of them inside
of a tree that I knew was hollow. I took the bodies into the bathroom
and begin processing the bodies to dispose of them. I used garbage
bags from within the house and placed the bodies inside.
Once I had finished processing the bodies, I moved
the Jeep into the garage to load up the bodies. I still had a couple
of bags to load into the Jeep when I heard the children come into the
house. ... I confronted the children, and the girl instantly ran to a
bedroom. I stabbed the boy in the chest a couple times. I ran into the
bedroom after the girl to make sure she was not on the phone for help.
... I saw the girl was not on the phone, and I could not bring myself
to kill her.
*****
I did not enter the house to kill those people. I
did not know a single one of them. I did not know their names, and I
did not know who all lived at the house. I chose the house to break
into because there was not any close neighbors, and I noticed the
garage door was ajar. I chose the house the day before. I did not plan
for any of this to happen. I did not want to kill anyone, and I tried
to just knock the first woman out so that I would be able to escape.
This was not working, a second woman showed up, and things quickly
spiraled out of control. They kept escalating and I was panicking. I
only chose to process the bodies to make their disposal easier.
Knox County man pleads guilty in dismemberment
slayings
Matthew Hoffman sentenced to life in prison
By Allison Manning - The Columbus Dispatch
January 6, 2011
MOUNT VERNON, Ohio - Matthew Hoffman appeared
emotionless this morning as he answered "yes" to acknowledge his
guilty pleas in the horrific dismemberment slayings of a Knox County
woman, her son and a family friend.
Hoffman pleaded guilty before a courtroom packed
with relatives and friends of the victims and was sentenced by Knox
County Common Pleas Court Judge Otho Eyster to concurrent terms of
life in prison with no chance of parole.
Hoffman fatally stabbed Tina Herrmann, 32; her son
Kody Maynard, 11; and family friend Stephanie Sprang, 41, in
Herrmann's home in Apple Valley on Nov. 10 and then cut up their
bodies.
Hoffman, 30, an unemployed tree trimmer, then
scaled a tall beech tree in a wildlife area northwest of Mount Vernon
and deposited garbage bags containing the dismembered remains of the
victims in the hollow of the tree.
The remains were located with Hoffmann's assistance
on Nov. 18, eight days after the victims - and a 13-year-old girl -
disappeared, triggering a massive search of the countryside by
officials and citizen volunteers.
Sprang's sister, Sherry Baxter, said in the
courtroom that the family agreed with authorities to take a potential
death penalty for Hoffman off the table in exchange for information on
where the bodies could be found.
The 13-year-old girl was found bound and gagged,
but alive, in the basement of Hoffman's home near downtown Mount
Vernon on Nov. 14 when authorities stormed the house. Hoffman was
charged with raping the girl.
In a statement read by Knox County Prosecutor John
Thatcher, the girl said: "This has changed my whole life and my
family's life, too." In the statement, the teen related memories of
the victims and said she's no longer scared of Hoffman.
"This is so sickening, Matthew, to know you even
had the guts to do this to a family," she said in the statement.
Hoffman, who was being held in lieu of a $1 million
cash bond, was indicted on Monday by a Knox County grand jury on
charges that include three counts of aggravated murder, rape and
aggravated burglary.
Thatcher said that the indictment did not contain
death-penalty specifications in accordance with the wishes of the
victims' families.
In addition to the murder charges, Hoffman was
charged with aggravated burglary, rape, kidnapping, tampering with
evidence and abuse of a corpse.
He received nine years each for his guilty pleas to
burglary, kidnapping and rape, four years for tampering with evidence
and 11 months for abuse of a corpse. The sentences will run concurrent
with the life sentences for murder.
Hoffman appeared in court in blue scrubs with a
dark prison jacket labeled "inmate worker." His hair was messy and he
was unshaven.
"The family deserves to know this a random burglary
that went terribly, terribly wrong," Bruce Malek, Hoffman's public
defender, said following sentencing. Hoffman did not specifically
target those he killed, Malek said. Prosecutor Thatcher agreed with
Malek's assessment.
The break in the case that led to the discovery of
the girl in Hoffman's home was a Walmart bag containing a tarp and
trash bags that the killer left behind in Herrmann's home, Thatcher
said after sentencing.
Using the bar code from the items at the store,
investigators were able to locate the transaction involving their
purchase and then match it to surveillance video of the man who bought
the items. Video showed him driving away in a Toyota Yaris.
Investigators then ran a database search for all
Yaris vehicles in the area, with Hoffman's name appearing among those
driving the model. Since a deputy had spoken to him in the area where
Herrmann's stolen pickup truck was found, he immediately became a
prime suspect.
Authorities then obtained a search warrant, entered
Hoffman's home, arrested him and freed the girl.
"For whatever reason, he chose to spare (the girl)
and thank God he did," Thatcher said. Hoffman planned to set fire to
the house where he stabbed and dismembered the victims, but did not go
through with his plan, Thatcher said.
The prosecutor said authorities began negotiating
with Hoffman and his lawyers on Nov. 17 on a potential deal. He agreed
to disclose where the bodies were hidden and to plead guilty without a
trial if he did not face the death penalty.
Family members of the victims agreed to the deal
the next day and the bodies were found hidden in the hollow tree.
Sheriff David Barber said they never would have been discovered
without Hoffman's directions.
Ohio kidnapping suspect Matthew Hoffman was
convicted of Steamboat Springs arson
By Doug Whiteman - The Associated Press
November 15, 2010
MOUNT VERNON, OHIO — An Ohio man charged with
kidnapping a 13-year-old girl, who was found bound and gagged in his
basement, served a Colorado prison term for arson he committed in
Steamboat Springs.
Matthew J. Hoffman, 30, suspected in the abduction
of teenager Sarah Maynard, was released from the Colorado Department
of Corrections in January of 2007.
Hoffman was convicted in 2001 of arson, burglary,
assault and motor vehicle theft in Routt County, according to Colorado
Bureau of Investigation records.
He was released from Colorado prison and paroled to
Ohio, said Katherine Sanguinetti, a corrections department
spokeswoman. Hoffman completed his Colorado term last month.
"I'm comfortable that it's the same guy," said
Capt. George Hartz of the Mount Vernon, Ohio, Police Department.
In August of 2000 Hoffman, then 20, set fire to a
townhome in Steamboat Springs to cover up a burglary and auto theft,
according to a Steamboat Pilot story.
No one was killed, but the fire spread to adjoining
units, causing about $2 million in damages. He was found guilty and
sentenced to an eight year term.
Scott Barnes, a plumbing contractor who had hired
Hoffman in Steamboat 10 years ago, recalled the kidnapping suspect as
a "quiet" young man.
"He was a little on the strange side," Barnes said.
Barnes said Hoffman had lived in a transient hotel
in Steamboat. "He was a follower, and did not have a strong
personality," Barnes said. "For a 20-year-old that's unusual,
especially to an employer who hires a lot of kids."
Hoffman worked for Barnes for about three months,
and had stopped showing up for work about a week or two before the
fire. "I was disappointed when he took that route," Barnes said.
This morning in Ohio, police cruisers blocked off a
park near Hoffman's home. The whereabouts of Maynard's mother, brother
and another woman remained a mystery.
Ten miles from home, Sarah Maynard was found alive
on Sunday, four days after disappearing with her family. Hoffman, who
lived in the house in this central Ohio city where she was found, was
arrested the same day, and authorities hope he'll provide information
leading to the others, although it's unclear whether he knew either of
the missing women, Knox County Sheriff David Barber said.
"We were hopeful that we would find more than one"
of the missing people in Hoffman's house, Barber said. "Our
information was definite that it was most likely that Sarah was going
to be in that house." Barber did not say what led investigators to the
two-story tan-sided house.
Hoffman has been charged with kidnapping. Barber
said more charges are expected against Hoffman, who lives at the home
about 40 miles north of Columbus.
Authorities have said an "unusual" amount of blood
was found at the home where Sarah lived with her 10-year-old brother,
Kody, and her mother, 32-year-old Tina Herrmann, and they were testing
it Monday.
On Monday morning, Mount Vernon police cruisers
blocked off Foundation Park, a public park with a lake a few blocks
from Hoffman's home, because an officer patrolling overnight had found
items potentially related to the investigation, police Capt. George
Hartz said. He would not say what was found, but said the park would
remain closed until police had determined whether it should considered
a crime scene.
Neighbors had said Hoffman frequented the park,
which was once a gravel quarry and now has ponds where people fish. It
was difficult Monday to see any police activity through the thick
trees bordering the park.
Barber was scheduled to brief reporters Monday
afternoon. His office said no updated information would be released
until that time.
Hoffman was being held in the county jail, where
personnel would not comment on whether he had an attorney. A bond
hearing was expected to be held Monday.
Barber said the girl was hospitalized in good
condition, but he would give no details.
Herrmann, her children, and Herrmann's 41-year-old
friend, Stephanie Sprang, disappeared Wednesday from Herrmann's home
in nearby Howard. Barber said DNA testing on blood found in that house
was expected to begin Monday.
Authorities believe the girl had been "under the
control" of Hoffman since Wednesday, when she and her brother last
attended school, the sheriff said. He did not know if Hoffman was
connected to either Herrmann or Sprang, but said he is not the
ex-boyfriend of either woman.
"At this time, whether he's connected to the family
or whether he connected himself to the family ... a lot of that
remains to be seen as the investigation continues," Barber said.
Authorities had talked to the girl but would not
release any details because the investigation is ongoing, Barber said.
Authorities blocked off about a half block on
either side of the home as they investigated early Sunday afternoon,
keeping people from entering or leaving about a half dozen homes. But
by late Sunday afternoon, the only sign of investigative activity was
red and white evidence tape sealing the front door of the home.
The house with green shutters and front door and a
large television antenna on the roof sits in a lower-middle-income
neighborhood with two bars within a block. Holly grows through the
weathered slats of the porch. A sheet covered one window, and blinds
were pulled down on the rest.
Dawna Davis, 35, who lives next door to Hoffman,
said she told her children to stay indoors when he was out. She said
he moved in alone about a year ago and that a girlfriend lived with
him temporarily with her son until about a month ago.
"He would sit and listen to us up in a tree. He had
a hammock and he would sit there and listen to us," she said. "He was
just different. He was very different." Davis said Hoffman did tree
trimming work and had built a fire Wednesday night in his backyard,
where there was a mound of ashes Sunday with tree parts on it. She
said he walked to Foundation Park almost every day and was a "nature
person" who collected leaves.
Attempts to reach relatives of Hoffman and of Sarah
were unsuccessful Sunday.
Herrmann was reported missing Wednesday when she
did not show up for work at a local Dairy Queen. Barber has said blood
indicating an injury had been found in her home, where Sprang's
vehicle was in the driveway.
Herrmann's pickup truck had been found Thursday
night near the Kenyon College campus, leading to a lockdown at the
school.
Denver Post writer Kieran Nicholson and Associated
Press writer Jeannie Nuss contributed to this report.
