Charles Ray Hatcher
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| Charles Ray Hatcher | |
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| Background information | |
| Born: | July 16, 1929 Mound City, Missouri  |
| Died: | December 7, 1984 |
| Cause of death: | Suicide |
| Penalty: | Life imprisonment |
| Killings | |
| Number of victims: | 16 |
| Span of killings: | August 27, 1969 through July 29, 1982 |
| Country: | USA  |
| State(s): | Missouri, California, Illinois |
| Date apprehended: | July 30, 1982 |
Charles Ray Hatcher (July 16, 1929[1] – December 7, 1984), was an American serial killer who confessed to murdering 16 people between 1969 and 1982.
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[edit] Childhood and youth
Charles Ray Hatcher was born in Mound City, Missouri, a small town 34 miles north of St. Joseph. He was the youngest of Jesse and Lula Hatcher's four children. His father was an ex-convict and an abusive alcoholic. Hatcher was teased in school and he would often inflict pain on his classmates. In the spring of 1935, he and his older brothers were flying a kite with copper wire they had found in an old Model T Ford. His oldest brother, Arthur Allen, was about to hand the kite to him when it hit a high voltage power line and electrocuted him. Arthur was pronounced dead at the scene. Soon afterward, his father left home and divorced his mother. His mother remarried several times, and in 1945, Hatcher moved with his mother and her third husband to St. Joseph.
[edit] Criminal beginnings
In 1947, Hatcher was convicted of auto theft in St. Joseph after stealing a logging truck from Iowa-Missouri Walnut Company, his employer of two weeks. He received a two-year suspended sentence. In 1948 he was convicted of auto theft a second time for stealing a 1937 Buick in St. Joseph. Hatcher was sentenced to two years in Missouri State Penitentiary. On June 8, 1949 Hatcher was released from prison after serving a little more than half of his time. However, he was back in prison in just a few months after being convicted of forging a $10 check at a gas station in Maryville. On March 18, 1951, Hatcher escaped from prison and attempted a burglary, but was caught and received an extra two years in prison.
After serving his additional time he was released from prison. Hatcher stole a 1951 Ford in Orrick, Missouri and was subsequently sentenced to four years in prison. Before he was sentenced, Hatcher escaped from the Ray County Jail in Richmond, Missouri. He received an additional two years for the attempted escape. On March 18, 1959, Hatcher was released from prison after the sixth prison sentence of his career.
[edit] Suspicion of murder
On June 26, 1959, Hatcher attempted to abduct a 16-year-old St. Joseph newspaper boy named Steven Pellham. He threatened Pellham with a butcher knife. Pellham reported the crime and Hatcher was arrested when the police stopped him in a stolen vehicle.
Hatcher was sentenced to five years in the Missouri State Penitentiary for the attempted abduction and auto theft under the Habitual Criminal Act. While Hatcher was waiting to be transported to prison, he attempted to break out of the Buchanan County Jail. This attempt was unsuccessful. When Hatcher arrived at the Missouri State Penitentiary for his fourth term, he was starting to be known as being the most notorious criminal in northwest Missouri since Jesse James.[citation needed]
On July 2, 1961, inmate Jerry Tharrington was found raped and stabbed to death on the prison’s kitchen loading dock. Hatcher was the only one missing from the kitchen crew at the time of the murder. He was sent to solitary confinement for the Tharrington’s murder, but there was not enough evidence to convict him in court. While in solitary confinement from the murder, Hatcher wrote a note claiming that he needed psychiatric treatment. However, the prison psychologist felt that it was simply a scheme to get out of solitary and possibly out of prison early. Treatment was refused and Hatcher was returned to the general population. His sentence was reduced to three quarters the original time.
On August 27, 1969, A six-year-old Hispanic boy was reported missing in San Francisco, California. The boy had been last seen walking away with a man that offered him ice cream, as reported by the six-year-old girl he was playing with. The boy was found by a man walking his dog — just as the boy was being beaten and sexually assaulted. Police arrived in time and arrested the assailant, who identified himself as Albert Ralph Price; the identification found on him was from a man named Hobert Prater. The boy survived the assault. FBI records finally identified the man as Charles Hatcher.
Still going by the name Albert Price, Hatcher was brought before a judge in California for the charges of assault with attempt to commit sodomy and kidnapping. Psychiatric competency evaluations were ordered to determine Hatcher’s competence. A complete mental evaluation during a 90-day stay at California State Hospital was ordered after Hatcher was completely unresponsive during the preliminary evaluations. This was the first time Hatcher faked mental illness and avoided prison. During his time at the hospital, Hatcher claimed he heard voices and faked delusions of persecution, as well as suicide attempts.
Hatcher was repeatedly sent back to the courts from the hospital; each time, psychologists said that he was competent to stand trial and he was sent back to the hospital. One psychiatrist at the hospital identified him as having a passive-aggressive personality with sexual deviation and pedophilia. It was also reported that the staff felt Hatcher was fabricating or exaggerating the symptoms of his mental disorders. The first psychiatrist concluded that Hatcher was insane and recommended vigorous treatment in a secure hospital. The second psychiatrist, who referred to Hatcher as "Mr. Prince,"[2] concluded that he was incompetent to stand trial and sent him back to the hospital.
On May 24, 1971, Hatcher was finally sent to trial and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Once again, Hatcher was sent for evaluations, this time at a different hospital and it was concluded that he could not stand trial. On June 2, Hatcher escaped from the hospital. He was caught a week later 90 miles away in Colusa, California. He was arrested under suspicion of auto theft and went by the name Richard Lee Grady. Hatcher was returned to the California State Hospital for an evaluation of a mental disorder, where he was recognized by the staff. On April 4, 1972, after finally deciding that Hatcher’s treatment was going nowhere and that he was endangering other patients, he was sent to the prison state hospital at Vacaville. In August 1972 Hatcher was transferred to San Quentin Prison, and finally would be forced to trial, three years after the crime.
After it was determined that he was capable of rational thinking, based on a letter he wrote to his public defender, Hatcher was finally tried for the abduction and molestation of Gilbert Martinez. He was convicted of the charges and was committed to the California State Hospital as a mentally disordered sexual offender.
On March 28, 1973, security guards found Hatcher hiding in a cooler near the main courtyard of the hospital. There were two sheets stuffed into his pants. He admitted to the guards he was attempting to escape from the hospital. The doctors felt that he was still a threat to society and he was sent back to court for sentencing. Hatcher was sent to a medium security prison in Vacaville, California with a sentence of one year to life in prison.
A psychologist interviewed Hatcher at the reception center and found him to be a "manipulative institutionalized sociopath." Hatcher was recommended for transfer to a maximum security prison. He then attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. A psychiatrist concluded that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, which saved him from the maximum security prison. He remained at Vacaville. In August 1975, guards stated at the parole review that Hatcher was not a custodial problem and had performed his tasks well in the hospital kitchen. The California Parole Board found that Hatcher had improved dramatically through his time in prison, which was two years, seven months, and seventeen days based on various reviews. After continued treatment and rehabilitation, a parole date was set for December 25, 1978. Hatcher received a modified parole date that led him to be released 19 months earlier than expected. A bill had been passed that would give credit to inmates for time spent not only in jails, but in mental health facilities as well. On May 20, 1977 Hatcher was released to a halfway house in San Francisco, California.
[edit] Melvin Reynolds
On May 26, 1978, four-year-old Eric Christgen disappeared in downtown Saint 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 100 possible suspects, including "every known pervert in town," to no avail. One of them was Melvin Reynolds, a 25-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 -- 14 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 confession 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. Four years later, Reynolds was released when Charles Hatcher confessed to three murders, including that of Eric Christgen.[3]
[edit] Death
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. It was then that he also confessed to the murder of Eric Christgen. He was convicted of the Christgen homicide in October 1983, and drew a term of life imprisonment with no parole for at least 50 years. Facing his second Missouri conviction a year later for the murder of Michelle Steele, Hatcher requested a death sentence but the jury refused, recommending life on December 3, 1984. Four days later, Hatcher hung himself in his cell, at the state prison in Jefferson City.
