(suspenseful music)
- A mystery that grows stranger by the minute,
an entire family just vanishes.
- [Narrator] Four people disappear,
leaving behind a bloody trail.
- It felt like something you would watch on a scary movie.
\h- I haven’t slept all freaking night.
- We also have officers on,
quad runners checking fields.
- [Detective] Tell me a little bit about Tina.
- We butt heads.
- [Narrator] The clock is ticking
and lives are on the line.
- She could be being tortured.
\h\h\hShe could be locked up somewhere, tied up somewhere.
- [Narrator] Investigators \h\h\hsearching for answers
in the interrogation room.
- Kody alive, Matt, \hStephanie alive?
- [Detective] This \his a game to him.
\h- The clock was running and we were running out of time.
(suspenseful music)
\h\h\h\h- [Narrator] Every suspect accused of a crime
has the right to remain silent.
\h\hMany agree to be interrogated anyway,
\h\hbut they can stop the interview at any moment,
making it a race against time.
Justice hangs in the balance.
(soft suspenseful music)
(phone rings)
(soft suspenseful music)
(suspenseful thumping music)
\h- Tina Herrmann had two children,
a 13-year-old girl, Sarah,
one 11-year-old boy, Kody.
She had not come into \hwork on Wednesday.
\h\h\hShe was a very dependable employee.
It was unusual for her not to show up.
\h\hWhen Tina failed to show up for work again,
\hthe manager came over to the house.
\h\hShe let herself in through a rear window.
- There was blood leading \h\hfrom the front door,
through the hallways,
\h\hback into the rooms and into the bathroom.
(suspenseful music)
\h- She had groceries on the floor in the kitchen
that she had apparently \h\h\hjust carried in,
and they contained items that would’ve
\h\h\h\h\h\hnormally been refrigerated immediately.
- We begin tonight with \h\ha developing story,
\ha mystery that grows stranger by the minute,
an entire family just vanishes.
- Tina’s two children who had been in school on Wednesday,
had not been in school \h\hthe following day.
\hAnd that, of course, heightened the concern
because Tina wasn’t \h\h\haccounted for
and her children were \hnot accounted for.
- We started seeing distinct patterns.
We saw three separate blood stain patterns
in three different rooms.
(tense music)
And we saw drag marks
\hfrom each of those blood stain patterns
\h\hthat converged into the bathroom.
\h\h\hOil had been poured down, and it looked to be
as if it might be an attempt \h\hto set the scene on fire.
\hSo, the motor oil led to a significant amount
of footwear impressions that were found in the residence.
\hThey were able to find that that was
a seven and a half Airwalk.
We made our conclusion that it was most likely
the 13-year-old girl who had walked out of there.
\h\hAnd we hoped that she was still alive.
(taut mellow music)
\h- I met Tina Herrmann and we worked the same shift together.
\h\h\h\hShe loved to do anything with her kids.
\h\hBoth kids were involved in sports.
She never missed a game,
took ’em to the movies.
Everything was always \h\h\habout the kids.
(tense mellow music)
- We also learned that one \hof Tina’s close friends,
Stephanie Sprang, also was missing
and had not been accounted for
since that previous Wednesday.
\h- Stephanie was a very loyal friend.
If she knew someone \hwas going through
a rough time in her life, and Stephanie
was going to be there to help her through.
- Stephanie was probably Tina’s \hclosest friend that she had.
She lived down the street \h\h\hfrom Tina Herrmann.
\h\h- We were told that Tina was in the process
of looking for an apartment.
Stephanie came over to the house
to go apartment-hunting \h\h\h\h\h\hwith Tina.
(tense mellow music)
- [Reporter] As the search intensifies,
\hso does the fear in this community.
- I think everyone’s just \h\hkind of really scared
\h\h\hthat something like this could happen so close to home.
- It felt like a nightmare, \h\h\h\hwas like something
\hyou would watch on a scary movie,
\h\h\hnot something that would happen to people that you knew.
(tense mellow music)
- You know, I’m a father, man.
You know, my kids are my life.
All I would ever want to do is protect them, you know?
- Well, she didn’t show \hup for work Wednesday
\hand nobody could get a hold of her.
- I talked to her Tuesday night
and I talked to her Wednesday at 12:10.
(taut music)
- Tina Herrmann was in a \hrelationship with a man
by the name of Greg Borders, \h\h\h\ha live-in boyfriend.
And they had been living \htogether in this house
for some period of time.
- I just know things \h\hweren’t the best
between the two of them.
\h\hShe was looking to move out and leave him.
- A major concern was that \hher boyfriend, you know,
\hwas not at the scene until late in the day on Thursday.
It seemed, you know, unusual.
(suspenseful music)
\h- I’m glad you’re, I’m glad you came in.
- When the boyfriend \h\h\hwas interviewed
by the Knox County \hSheriff’s office,
I was a able to observe \h\h\hfrom another room
during that interview.
(tense mellow music)
- He had what was a very easy to check out alibi.
He said that he had left \h\hfor work very early,
which is his normal routine.
He said he worked an hour and a half away
in a large warehouse;
that he had made plans \h\hwith another worker
to go golfing on that \hfollowing Thursday;
that he was invited to spend the night
at the friend’s house.
\h\hThe initial response in terms of both his demeanor
and the story that \h\hhe was telling
suggested that he was not involved.
(suspenseful music)
(radio chattering)
\h- We had basically run out of suspects.
\hWe were thinking, "Well, where do we go from here?"
\hJust about that point, I was actually, I think,
\hdriving back toward the Sheriff’s office,
when I got the call.
- [Reporter] Friends \h\h\h\hand neighbors
scouring a wooded area,
looking for any sign of a missing family.
(suspenseful music)
\h\h\h- So in the garage, there was a shopping bag.
And inside that shopping \h\h\hbag were two tarps
\h\h\h\hand a package of heavy-duty garbage bags.
\h\h- The name of the store was on the bag.
\hIf this store might be able to do some research
and find out if someone \hpurchased these items
in this timeframe we’re looking at.
- They were able to find that purchase,
find a video of that person.
\hThe video cameras caught the offender
going into his car and leaving.
Couldn’t get a plate \hfrom that vehicle,
\h\h\h\h\h\h\hbut it was a unique-looking compact car.
\h\h\h\h- The security person actually said that he thought
the vehicle he was driving \h\h\h\hwas a Toyota Yaris.
\hSo I thought, "Well, how many Toyota Yarises
could there be in Knox County?"
\h\hAnd on the first page for that search,
the last one on the page \h\hwas Matthew Hoffman.
He looked very much like the subject in the video,
\h\h\hand was actually wearing the same shirt
in his driver’s license photo
that he was wearing \h\h\hat the store.
- Matthew Hoffman had an interesting past.
\h\hHe was convicted of arson, which involved a home invasion
and said that he committed the \harson to cover up his tracks.
(soft suspenseful music)
- They went in through the front of the house
and they found him asleep on the couch in the living room,
and immediately took \h\hhim into custody.
- Mr. Hoffman had what I would \h\hcall a fetish with leaves.
\h\h\hHe was a tree trimmer for a while
and he was oftentimes known to climb trees
and be sitting in trees.
\h\h\h- I mean, the whole house was full of leaves.
\h\hHe had collected a large amount of leaves,
had them tacked to his walls.
\hI don’t know if he was using them for insulation
or what, you know, in bags,
\hbut there were just huge piles of leaves
all through the house.
(suspenseful music)
They started doing a room-by-room search,
and they didn’t find anything \h\helse on the ground floor.
They didn’t find anything else on the second floor.
\h\hAnd then they noticed that there was a dresser
\h\hpushed against the basement door, leading to the basement.
\h\hYou know, it was strange, what’s down in his basement?
(suspenseful music)
\hAnd it was only on removing that dresser
and going down into the basement that they discovered Sarah.
(tense mellow music)
- And I could hear Joe yelling,
"They found her, she’s \halive, she’s alive."
- And in this basement area,
there was a large \hpile of leaves.
And then he had placed a number \h\hof blankets on top of that,
\h\hand that’s where he was having Sarah sleep.
She was tied with bungee cords
\hwrapped around her feet, her ankles, and her wrists.
\hAnd she also had, you know, like work gloves
over her hands with duct tape.
(tense mellow music)
- In the beginning, there \h\hwasn’t a lot of hope
that anybody would be alive.
\h\h\hIt was just pure elation for all of us.
It did give us some hope
\h\hthat there would be others somewhere else.
\h- Sarah said that she and her brother
\h\hhad arrived home from school on that Wednesday,
that they’d come in the front door
and you know, seen blood on the floor.
\h\hAnd that then, this guy just appeared from around the corner,
that she ran back into her bedroom.
She was there in the \hhouse for a while.
She heard noises coming \h\hfrom the bathroom.
She said that she suspected that they had been killed.
She was afraid she was \h\hgoing to be killed,
but that he had told \hher that, you know,
he had not killed him.
\h\h\hYou know, that things would be okay.
- Sarah did confirm \hin her interview
after she was rescued
that he had sexually \h\h\hassaulted her.
\hThrough her account, it gave us a better timeline
as to how things occurred.
(soft suspenseful music)
- Anytime you’re involved \h\hin an interrogation,
the first thing you wanna do \his establish communication.
That it’s just a matter \hof trying to come up
with the right way to have that person
identify with you, trust \h\h\hyou to some degree.
\h\h\h\h- We work towards him caring about his own family,
his own mother, and this \hwould give her closure
and give her respect.
- The detectives were trying
several different types \hof questions for him,
at times would try to appeal
\h\h\hto his empathy towards the victims.
- They also tried to be
a little bit more \hstern with him.
\h\h- You’ve got this anxiety of, you know,
\h\hthere could be people alive, hidden somewhere.
- This is a very public case.
The local public defender knew
that we had a guy in custody.
\h\h\hSo, they were trying to basically force their way in,
figuratively, not literally, \h\h\h\hto get access to him,
\h\h\hto basically be able to counsel him,
\h\h\hwhich, you know, I mean, that’s their role.
We knew that he was gonna have
\ha first appearance in court eventually,
’cause he was being charged.
The clock running, and we were running out of time.
- [Journalist] Sunday,
\h13-year-old Sarah Maynard was found,
bound and gagged, but alive
\hin the basement of a Mount Vernon home,
and deputies arrested \h\hMatthew Hoffman.
(taut mellow music)
(suspenseful music)
\h\h\h\h- He almost seemed comatose in that interview.
It was something I had \hnot seen in 22 years
in law enforcement, the way he reacted.
- It was obvious we were hitting a cord with him.
\h\h\hI think he was probably trying to resist a connection
initially, as far as doing some form of sign language
and trying to resist that.
- At least it was communication.
\h\h\h\h\h\hThat was a big breakthrough given the fact
that he’d been absolutely \h\h\h\halmost catatonic
up until that point.
(soft suspenseful music)
\h\h- My having come from having talked with Sarah,
who had spent the last \hcouple days with him,
let me go in and talk \h\hto him about her,
\habout the fact that she’s concerned about
\hwhat’s going on with the rest of her family members,
to just try and work the young girl angle to him.
\h\hMy short-term goal was just to get him to respond.
You know, we had rescued Sarah.
\hI thought maybe there’s something going on here.
A lot of times you just have to wait, you know,
\h\h\h\h\h\hbecause they become uncomfortable with the silence.
(suspenseful music)
(sniffling)
- In this interrogation, as in any interrogation,
\h\h\hthe person who controls our ability
\h\hto continue talking with the subject, is the subject.
In other words, they’re the ones who basically
at any time can say, "I want an attorney."
And you know, we knew \h\hthat any attorney
that he was gonna get was gonna immediately
tell him to stop talking.
\h\hAnd I knew we were coming to a close here,
\h\hso I wanted to give him something
to think about overnight.
I’m trying to keep an open \h\hline of communication.
Here’s my information.
Make some kind of a personal connection
because tomorrow, we’re gonna be back to fight another day.
(soft suspenseful music)
- [Detective] Have a seat.
(soft suspenseful music)
- I don’t think it \hwas a coincidence
that he picked that home
with a 13-year-old girl in it.
(suspenseful music)
He chose not to kill her and to take her instead.
\hSo, we thought let’s see how he will behave
with a female interviewer.
The day before, the \hgentleman had had
a table between them.
So we changed up the room
\h\hso that we put a chair close together.
I had my hair in a ponytail
and we actually talked \h\h\habout me looking,
trying to look a little younger
and looking more relaxed \h\hand more comfortable
\hso that he felt more relaxed and off guard.
\h\hGoing at him hard didn’t seem to work.
\h\h\hWe decided we were gonna go very slowly and a soft approach.
He was actually shivering \h\hpretty significantly.
So I’m trying to get him relaxed,
to think that I’m interested in how
\h\hhe’s handling the situation right now.
So that was just a way to try to put him off guard,
to break down those barriers
\hso that I can get to that backstory.
- As we were going through \h\h\h\hthe day, I thought,
well, you know, he’s \h\hgotta be hungry.
- He wants to be taken care of.
\h\hHe wants to be paid attention to.
Especially by a female.
And I just fed into him, \h\hgiving him that focus
and giving him that attention,
\h\hso that he would bring his guard down.
(suspenseful music)
- These people have been \hmissing since Wednesday
\hand there’d been a great deal of searching going on.
\h\hGiven the fact that we had significant signs of struggle,
trauma, injury, it heightens the concern and the anxiety.
\h\h- [Reporter] After five days of searching,
Knox County Sheriff’s deputies
finally find 13-year-old \h\hSarah Maynard alive.
32-year-old Tina Herrmann, \h11-year-old Kody Maynard,
\h\h\h\h\hand Tina’s friend, 41-year-old Stephanie Sprang
are all still missing.
(soft suspenseful music)
(Matt sniffling)
(suspenseful music)
\h\h\h- Hoffman outright lied about what happened with her.
Basically saying, you know,
\h\hhe just took care of her while she was there,
when we know that he had \hsexually assaulted her,
but I wasn’t gonna confront it.
\h\h\h\hI think it’s very important for him to hear
\hthat I’m not gonna judge him in any way,
\hso I can, you know, be his partner in this, so to speak.
- Okay.
He would completely shut down.
We did get nuggets \h\hof information
that we certainly could have used against him.
We knew that if he \hdoesn’t say this,
we probably will never find them,
so we need to get him talking.
(suspenseful music)
- Everyone at work \hwas very hopeful,
but as the days went on,
we were feeling less and less.
- It was like a roller coaster.
I was always hopeful that they \h\hwould find them all alive.
I was fearful that \h\hthey wouldn’t.
(suspenseful music)
- The two clocks that were \hrunning in our mind were
\h\h\hone, how long he was gonna agree to continue to talk to us,
\hand two, the point at which he was gonna have
\h\han appearance in court, at which time
\h\hhe was going to be given a lawyer.
\h\h- We started hearing that the Defense Attorney’s Office
wanted to communicate with him.
\hWe were hitting a point where we need to push now
because we only have \hso much time left.
- His whole demeanor \h\h\h\hhas changed.
\h\h\hHe is now much more comfortable and kind of,
you know, calling the \hshots, in a sense.
\h\h- The day before, said he wanted to talk with me alone.
- My first thought was, \hwell, this is a test.
- Okay.
\h- So we didn’t know what he was going to want to do.
\h\h- I mean, literally all the rules are off and he knew that.
(taut mellow music)
\hSo, we go down to the bathroom down the hall.
\hIt’s a small one john, one sink, you know, room.
And you know, he wants \hme to go in with him.
(suspenseful music)
\h- Obviously, he knew there were no cameras,
so we didn’t know what he was going to want to do.
- And then he says he’s had this dream
about working in a meat packing plant.
And he saw cut up body parts,
and it all came back to him.
The whole discussion again \hconfirmed the worst fears
\h\h\hthat those people were in fact deceased.
(suspenseful music)
So he wanted to tell us where the bodies were,
but it was only gonna be under
a certain set of circumstances.
(suspenseful music)
Then we would agree \hto take him out,
\hto have him show us where the bodies were
and that while we had him out,
he was going to try to escape
\hand we would agree to shoot him and kill him.
\h\h\h\hWe finished in the bathroom and went back down
\hto the interview room and, you know,
brought Kristin back in and, \hlet’s have this discussion.
\h- At this point, all the evidence was there.
\h\hYou know, I have enough information in front of me
to know we had him.
- He knew he was guilty.
He knew he was caught.
He knew this was over.
\h\h\h\hSo, we just started trying to push even harder
and get him to admit it without \h\h\hgiving him anything back.
\h\h- The one thing he had any control
over the last thing in his life
he was gonna have control over,
was this stretch of time,
by basically dragging this out.
So I was gonna, you know,
just start to turn \hup the heat more.
- I was told that the \hprosecutor had said
\h\hthat he’s gonna get arraigned soon.
And we knew we were \hon a time crunch
and it wasn’t working as the way we wanted it to.
And the reality is that he’s \h\hnot telling us the truth.
(knock at door)
(tense music)
\h\hI had never had that happen before.
I’ve had long interviews before,
but I’ve not had them \hstop the interview.
You can be frustrated \hwhen somebody else
comes in to stop the process
when the individual is still willing to talk.
(door bangs)
(taut mellow music)
Apparently, between the Knox County prosecutor
and the attorneys, they had decided on the deal
\h\hof taking the death penalty off the table.
Once the deal was made, that’s when
\hhe was willing to give up where the bodies were.
(suspenseful music)
\h\h\h- We headed out to this Pocosin Wildlife Refuge area.
(suspenseful music)
There’s this large \hbeech tree there,
\h\h\habout 70 feet up, the branches kind of wide out.
\h\hI could see that about seven foot above the ground
there was what appeared \h\hto be a knot hole.
I could see that there was a \hblack garbage bag in there.
\h\hAnd obviously, that was the confirmation we needed
\hto believe that that was, in fact, the tree.
\h\h\h- [Reporter] This is the tree investigators say
Matthew Hoffman left the \hremains of his victims.
The hole you see here,
\hcut by investigators to retrieve the three.
(suspenseful music)
- I remember investigators \h\h\h\hsaying they brought
\h\ha dog out there and the dog didn’t hit on the tree,
’cause it was so thick.
\h\hHe went up to the very top of the tree
\h\hand he drops the bags the whole way down to the bottom.
(suspenseful music)
They had to pull all the bags \h\hout and open them all up.
(suspenseful music)
And basically make sure we had every body part.
That scene is not something \h\h\hthat you can forget.
(suspenseful music)
\h\h- He said that he had just identified the house
the day before, that he had \hgone and spent the night
\hacross the street in a sleeping bag.
\hTina left, and he felt like she had gone to work
\h\hand she was gonna be gone for a while.
- He stuck with his story \h\hthat this was simply
a home invasion for a theft.
(suspenseful music)
And Tina came home unexpectedly.
He said that he just \h\hwanted to hit her
over the head and knock her out,
but she wouldn’t go unconscious.
And in the midst of attacking her,
Stephanie just came \h\hinto the house.
\h\h- She just walked into the place, came upon this,
\h\hand then when there were two people there,
he basically felt out of control
and had to start stabbing people.
(suspenseful music)
- He says he didn’t expect the children
to come home so early.
And he heard them coming in
and accosted them at the door.
\hWhen he got to down to just having the 13-year-old girl,
he believed he didn’t \h\hneed to kill her
because he felt he \hcould subdue her.
So that’s why he did that out of
\h\h\h\h\hbasically the kindness of his heart.
(suspenseful music)
Mr. Hoffman described how
\h\h\h\hhe took care of the bodies by processing them.
\h- Then he thought, "Well, I’ll put them in the tree."
You know, he knew of this tree,
\h\hspent a lot of time in the woods,
\h\hand that then he would go get gasoline
\h\hand come back and burn the house down.
(taut mellow music)
\h\h\h\h- I was impressed through the entire case,
\h\h\h\hhow Knox County Sheriff’s Department handled the situation
\h\h\h\h\h\hand it was good old-fashioned police work,
how they found Matthew Hoffman.
And they did a fantastic job
in getting to where this \h\hcase was so quickly.
(suspenseful music)
- Finding the pleas \hto be voluntary,
the court accepts the pleas
and finds the defendant guilty.
(taut mellow music)
- Life in prison is not enough \hjustice for Matthew Hoffman,
but there’s also judgment day.
So he’s got judgment day coming.
(soft somber music)
\h- The funeral was held in a church in Columbus.
There was no sitting room.
There was people standing.
\h\hI say there was probably at least 500 people, if not more.
\hThere’s not a day that I don’t think about ’em.
I just want people to know, you know,
that they were mothers, that they were friends,
that they were amazing people.
- I just never thought \hthat life would ever
not have Stephanie in it.
I just wish that everybody
could really know how \hwonderful she was.
- Sarah, she’s doing \h\ha lot better now.
She has children of her own.
The last time I talked to her,
she was getting ready to go back to school again.
\h- This case stands out in the fact that
the 13-year-old girl was saved,
\hand that rarely happened in the cases that I worked.
\h\h\hThis case really made me realize that there’s some cases
\h\h\hwhere you’re really gonna make a difference.
- When you do interrogations,
you have to have the mind of the eternal optimist,
\h\h’cause a lot of times you’re not getting a lot,
but you have to believe in your heart and in your mind
that you’re gonna get it.
I have no regrets about \hthis case whatsoever.
\h\hI mean, you know, the fact that Matthew Hoffman
\h\h\h\hwas a complete whodunit and got away,
you know, with the girl;
\h\h\hthe fact, you know, that we got what we did,
bringing a quick conclusion to it
\hand having him get life in prison without parole.
There is a part of me that just felt like,
Matthew Hoffman, you’re \hno longer in control.
(tense music)