UNMARKED: A True Crime Podcast · UNMARKED: A True Crime Podcast

Hadden Clark: Disturbing Letters from a Serial Killer

·39 min·2 clips

Clark dresses as Laura Hodling, enters through a hidden key, and leaves wearing her clothes.

1. Unmarked: A True Crime Podcast focuses on Haddon Clark and the question of how his violence, letters, and identities fit together. 2. Host James Buddy Day is joined by retired FBI Special Agent Lou Luciano, who spent 26 years in federal law enforcement and worked Clark-related cases in Baltimore and beyond. 3. The episode asks whether Haddon Clark is understood by motive or only by labels like "evil," and whether his handwritten letters reveal anything beyond performance. 4. Luciano describes the 1980s Baltimore and Hyattsville investigations, including the disappearance of 23-year-old Laura Hodling and the later recovery of her remains near Interstate 270. 5. The show traces Clark back to Troy, New York, where he was born on July 31, 1952 as one of four children in a household marked by instability. 6. The transcript says Clark had early developmental delays, a speech impediment, anger problems, and evaluation for cerebral palsy without a definitive diagnosis. 7. It also says his father Haddon Clark Sr. had bipolar disorder and his mother Flavia struggled with alcoholism. 8. The episode describes a family environment of violence, frequent moves, and abuse that extended to the children at the family property in Wellfleet, Cape Cod. 9. Luciano says investigators heard accounts of the grandfather taking the children into the woods behind the property and abusing them in a makeshift shelter. 10. The show links that environment to animal torture, bed-wetting, and fire-setting as early behaviors associated with control. 11. Clark’s identity-shifting appears in the transcript through the name "Kristen," the request to be called "Mr. Bunny Rabbit," and the handwritten letters the host says will be posted in Unmarked Case Files. 12. Luciano says the Clark family case required separating truth from performance because Clark confessed to some murders he could not have committed and embellished others. 13. The episode notes that Clark attended the Culinary Institute of America in New York, where he reportedly ate raw chicken and drank beef blood before being thrown out. 14. The transcript states that Clark enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1982, received an honorable discharge in June 1985, and was later diagnosed by a Navy psychiatrist with paranoid schizophrenia. 15. The episode also references Clark’s older brother Bradfield, who was convicted in California for strangling and dismembering Patricia Mack in 1984. 16. Buddy Day and Luciano connect the brothers through the same childhood abuse, animal killing, and a shared tendency to dehumanize people as "just animals." 17. The interview style is investigative and conversational, with Buddy Day pressing Luciano on case details and Luciano answering in retrospective, case-file language. 18. The tone stays grim and procedural, but the format also includes direct quotations from Clark’s letters and from Luciano’s memories of field work. 19. People interested in serial-killer profiling, FBI casework, and Haddon Clark’s letters would likely follow this episode. 20. Listeners wanting a light true-crime recap or a fully resolved case may skip it.

As heard by us

A careful true-crime portrait that tests a confession against specific evidence.

Haddon Clark is treated less like a headline villain and more as a case for how a damaged family can shape a damaged life. The episode stays close to concrete details: Clark is convicted of two murders, suspected in others, and his brother Bradfield sits inside the same…

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Why you'd press play

You want a serial-killer case that treats motive as pattern, not theater.

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