November 15, 2023 • 27 mins
A 30-year-old ex con named Matthew Hoffman is a stalker who has layered his home with thousands of pounds of dead leaves. Hunting for just the right home to invade, he soon finds his perfect opportunity. Only one person at King Beach Drive will survive his ferocious attack, and she’ll have to use all her wits to keep alive in the house of leaves he has built for her.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Murder Holmes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Eight fifty seven. This morning, we come into this room. Man,
it is now ten thirteen. I'm not real good at math,
so I'll just round things off. Eight fifty seven, nine
fifty seven, not quite ten fifty seven. So we're just
over an hour fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
In a cramped interrogation room at the Knox County Sheriff's
Department in Mount Vernon, Ohio, two detectives are trying to
get an unemployed tree trimmer named Matthew Hoffman to talk
about three people who have vanished from a home at
four eighty one King Beach Drive. They take turns trying
to make him talk, but no matter what team of
detectives are in the room, he says nothing. And they're
(00:48):
starting to run out of the patients.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
And those people have gone through hell more and more
in the last hour and fifteen minutes we have sat here, Matt,
because you are control their lives. You are controlling the
strings of these people's hearts.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
They try the soft approach. I understand you're upset. I
can see it in your face.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
You're not even looking at me and I and that's cool,
but I can tell that you're upset.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
They try the good cop, bad cop approach. I guess
I don't understand you at all. I don't understand the
shit you did.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
He honestly didn't do it, or he would be telling
us where the where the rest of them are? Gary,
You're miser misunderstanding Matthew.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Well, you know what you want to play this little game?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
It acts like a hard ass. Okay, you don't want
to tell us where Cody is.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Okay, you don't want to tell us where the girls are?
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Wy don't you tell us how you killed the dog?
And finally, I know you are awake approach Matthew. I
saw you move your lips. Okay, I mean I know
you you're what stand? How are you playing this game?
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Because he is awake, his eyes are open. Sometimes he'll
lean his head on the metal interrogation desk, then lean
back again, swallow hard, stare right through the two detectives
facing him, as if they weren't there at all. After
two days of interrogation, ten hours and sixteen minutes of
(02:18):
almost complete silence, they are in the interrogation room again
for a change. They try a little small talk, hardly
expecting him to answer. They ask him what he's had
for breakfast at the county jail. He answers in a soft,
flat voice.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
Generic cheerios, one pack to sugar, has you that? One
pie or a half pint of milk though curtain and
a pine bagelsenhnogishu bagel.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
He even throws in a tinge of irony.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
After hours and hours of silence, It's like the detectives
have been zapped with a cattle prod. They nod at
each other excitedly, lean forward his knee and to wait
for all his anguish and self hatred to come pouring out.
But instead, Hoffmann thoughtfully SIPs the coffee they have brought
for him, holds it between his hands, and goes silent again.
(03:14):
It will be another week before he finally tells them
where he's buried, the dismembered bodies of the mother, the son,
her best friend, and the family dog. And what really
took place at forty one King Beach Drive. This is murder, Holmes,
I'm at Ranovitch. You've seen a house like forty one
(03:47):
King Beach Drive and Howard, Ohio a hundred times before.
Maybe Google Maps has routed you through some suburban cul
de sac and you picture living there for a moment.
It is one of those forget raised ranch homes on
a sloping lawn that needs a fresh coat of gray paint.
A kid's empty swing set nearby. Someone's made an effort
(04:08):
to keep a few potted plants alive. Sweep the leaves
away from the garage door. Just type in four eighty
one King Beats Drive and you'll see it. The house
where three people lost their lives pops up on Zillow, Trulia,
and Redfin, even though it was just recently sold again
a couple of months ago. In the photographs, it looks
(04:29):
like any starter home. There's a brand new stove and refrigerator,
four ceiling fans to keep the kitchen and living room
cool on a stifling summer day, brand new wall to
wall carpeting in the two bedrooms, a shower curtain tastefully
pulled over the bathtub in the master bedroom. Every room
vacuumed and mopped, except for a small pool of water
(04:51):
on the concrete floor.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Of the basement.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
It's so unexceptional in many ways that you wonder why
a troubled loner who lived ten point three miles away
found it at all, but take a closer look at
that garage door with the eight small windows. Back on
November ninth, twenty ten, Matthew Hoffman, aged thirty, was slowly
driving around Howard, Ohio, looking for a home to burglarize.
(05:16):
Then he noticed something specific about four eighty one King
Beach Drive. The garage door didn't quite close. There were
two inches of visible space between the poured concrete floor
and the edge of the garage door, just enough space
to get his hand under the simplest, most innocuous things
(05:37):
can lead to the most sickening crimes.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
If Tina Hermann's.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Garage door had fully closed, as you can clearly see
it does now and pick number thirty on Zillo, Matthew
Hoffman would have sped up in his dented Toyota Yaris
and found a weak spot somewhere else. But Hoffman had
an eye for details. He had finally found the right
place after a short break. We'll find out what happened next.
(06:12):
We're back with murder homes. In twenty ten, a thirty
two year old woman named Tina Herman, her boyfriend, and
two young kids, Sarah and Cody, ages eleven and thirteen,
lived at forty one King Beach Drive. The broken garage
door was the result of a fight she'd had with
her boyfriend, who'd kicked it after they argued one night.
(06:35):
At three forty am on November tenth, Tina's boyfriend left
for work at a distribution center thirty miles away. Tina
listened to him drive away and went back to sleep.
They agreed to break up and she needed to get
a little rest because her best friend, Stephanie Sprang was
(06:55):
coming by early in the morning to help her find
a new place to live. Tina fell back asleep with
no idea that her house was being watched in the dark. Meanwhile,
Matthew Hoffman was lying in wait in the woods on
the other side of King Beach Drive. The sound of
the car leaving had awakened him from a light sleep.
(07:17):
He crawled out of a sleeping bag and took a
sip of water. Instead of going back to sleep, he
watched the home carefully, even though it would still be
three more hours before the sun came up. This is
the thing about Hoffman. He got a thrill from invading
homes that weren't his. It was the only time he
really felt alive. Everything else was difficult for him. Relationships, communications,
(07:40):
simple small talk, holding down a job. He had just
been fired from his job as a tree tromer, and
the car he drove was going to be repossessed. Recently,
his girlfriend had moved out after he tried to choke her.
He was also working on a serious criminal record out
west invade a home when the owner was away, stole
(08:02):
an odd assortment of property, and then tried to burn
it to the ground. He spent eight years in jail
and was a model prisoner, but he had started to
fall back on bad habits. There's something else that's extremely
odd about Hoffman too, but we'll get to that later.
As the sun came up, Hoffman rolled up the sleeping
(08:24):
bag and sat perfectly still. He had this capability of
sitting as still as a statue. Sometimes he would perch
in the tree outside his decrepit home and sit there
for hours, watching the neighbors. The neighbors had started to
keep their distance from him. He had even built a
hammock way up in an elm tree, as if he
were more comfortable there than in his own home. That morning,
(08:48):
hidden by leaves again, he watched the two kids, Sarah
and Cody leave the home and step onto a school bus.
Sometime before nine am, Tina Herman left a home as well,
backing her car out of the garage. It closed, but
not completely. There was still that two inch gap. Hoffman
(09:10):
watched the bright sunlight glint off the roof of her
car until it disappeared. Then he walked across the road,
gripped the bottom edge of the garage door, and hauled
it up. He was finally inside for eighty one King
Beach Drive, where he stood in the garage listening for
the sound of anyone else in the home, but there
(09:30):
was only the sound of the dog barking upstairs. So
he slipped on a pair of sure griped gloves and
opened the basement door, his footsteps soundless on the plush carpeting.
The dog led out a worried whine and scurried away
as soon as it saw him. A pot of dripped
coffee sat near the sink, an unfinished glass of orange
(09:52):
juice on the kitchen table, a list of chores that
Tina had quickly written out. Hoffman hadn't stolen any anything yet,
and he also didn't leave. It's as if subconsciously something
had shifted and he was already on a low boil. Meanwhile,
Tina was shopping at the Kroger's supermarket in Mount Vernon.
(10:13):
After getting some gas, she headed home to meet her
best friend Stephanie, who was going to pick her up
to help her look at apartments with things on the
rocks with her boyfriend, she needed to find a new
place to live, even though for eighty one, King Beach
had finally started to feel like a real home for
her kids. But as soon as Tina re entered her
home carrying two bags of groceries, a man came running
(10:37):
toward her down the hallway and grabbed her. Only one
hundred and twenty pounds, Tina didn't stand a chance against
Matthew Hoffman. Investigators would later determine he had most likely
already begun stabbing her before he was interrupted by the
arrival of her friend, Stephanie. Stephanie had found the front
door open and heard screams from her friend, but instead
(10:59):
of running away, she ran into the house to defend Tina.
Hoffman attacked her, stabbing her to death. Then he furiously
turned his attention to Tina again. In just a few minutes,
it was all over but the family dog wouldn't stop
its steady, high pitched barking, so Hoffman methodically walked toward it,
(11:21):
hunting knife in hand. It was a clear, blue autumn day,
not a cloud in the sky. The chill in the
air was just beginning to wear off, but inside, for
eighty one King Beach Drive, Hoffman was heaving breaths. Finally,
the home was completely silent again, the way it was
when he first walked in. A murder home is almost
(11:44):
always two things, the place a family feels safest and
the last place on earth they expect to be hunted down.
Detectives determined that Hoffman dragged Tina's body to the master
bathroom first, then Ephani's, then the dogs, where, in Hoffman's
own words, he processed them with his hunting knife, wrapping
(12:07):
the body parts in garbage bags. Meanwhile, at the Knox
County Middle School, Cody and his older sister Sarah were
in the midst of a normal school day, unaware of
what had happened. At the end of the day, they
took the school bus back home. They got off the
school bus and walked up the short winding flagstones to
the front door. Once in the house, They began to
(12:30):
take their shoes off, but saw blood right next to
the door. They called out to their mother. She didn't
greet them, which was strange. They noticed the grocery spilled
all over the floor. Cody screamed first when he saw
the intruder dressed in black, and then the boy ran
as fast as he could to the front door of
(12:51):
forty one King Beach Drive. He even managed to open
it before he was dragged back inside and stabbed. No
one heard his or Sarah's scream as Hoffman grabbed a
phone from her and pulled her to the floor. Hoffman
tied Sarah up with electrical cord from a ceiling fan
and gagged her. Then he pulled a pillowcase over her head,
(13:13):
leaving her lying on the kitchen floor. Even Hoffman will
later confess that he didn't know why he didn't stab her.
All he can say is that he had a sudden
impulse not to. Sarah heard banging sounds in the bathroom
from her position on the floor. Hoffman would come out
and open the refrigerator or a cabinet looking for cleaning supplies,
(13:36):
and then he would continue to labor in the bathroom
until the sun started to go down. Finally, Hoffman returned,
blindfolded her, and led her to Stephanie's cheep.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
In court.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
More than a year later, Hoffman's lawyer would turn to
teenis surviving relatives and say that his client only wanted
to rob the home, but investigators would deny that. Instead,
they believed it's something evolved in his mind as he
wandered through a house that wasn't his, something that compelled
him to murder innocent people. I talk with doctor Judith Joseph,
(14:10):
a board certified psychiatrist and a behavioral science researcher who
works with people like Kaufman. I ask how someone's intentions
could change from burglary to murder and then kidnapping so quickly.
Speaker 5 (14:24):
We know that a lot of times people who are psychopathic,
there are baby steps. They have a conduct disorder in childhood,
so they do things that are priming their brains to
be aroused by violence. So they'll kill animals, they'll kill insects,
they'll set fires, they'll steal Those are all the type
of foreplay that lead to adult deviant behavior that classifies
(14:49):
as psychopathy. So if you look at the DSM criteria
for conduct disorder, you're going to see a list of
behaviors that are red flags. And I use these assessments
every day because I do clinical research because we want
to rule out people who meet criteria for conduct disorder,
because guess what, those people end up meeting criteria for
(15:09):
anti social personal disorder in adulthood. So it's these categories
of behaviors that are deviant, that are not typical, that
are actually red flags for harmful behaviors that we see.
Those categories of behaviors make you likely to meet criteria
for anti social personality disorder in adulthood. And we know
anti social personality disorder leads to what people know is
(15:32):
that compathy.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
We'll be back after a short break to find out
what happened next to Sarah. We're back with murder homes.
The following day, November eleventh, Tina's boyfriend return home after
spending the night with a friend. He found the door unlocked,
(15:56):
the house empty, but bloodstains everywhere. Police arrived immediately, and
the ritual that's familiar with every murder home began. Neighbors
whispered to each other in small groups as the home
was taped off. Detectives arrived and left the home in
twos and threes. Then came the satellite truck from local
news station WCMH. It was another beautiful blue autumn day.
(16:22):
Yellow leaves fell from the beech trees on the other
side of King Beach Drive, but an entire family was missing,
leaving nothing behind but the signs of a violent struggle,
and detectives were sure there was at least one survivor
because there were two sets of bloody sneaker prints leading down.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
To the garage.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
All day, cars slowly passed by the unmarked police vehicles
on the side of the road. One of those was
the silver Toyota driven by Hoffmann. In the trunk of
his car, there were more cleaning supplies he had purchased
at the nearby wal Mart and a can of gas.
He had meant to return and burned the home to
the ground the night before, but when Tina's boyfriend had returned,
(17:05):
that plan went out the window. As the adrenaline rush faded,
Hoffman had lost interest in all the details he had
cared about so intensely just hours before. In his rear
view mirror, he looked at the faces of the horrified
neighbors and then drove to his home at forty nine
Columbus Road, twenty minutes away, where he had chained Sarah
(17:27):
to a bed of leaves in the basement. The house
was covered with dead leaves. Rows and rows of plastic
bags filled with them hung on the walls. On the
living room floor, a fourteen by fourteen foot tarp covered
a pile of leaves three feet high. The bathroom alone
was covered with one hundred and ten bags of leaves.
(17:50):
If for eighty one King Beach Drive seemed like a
real home, forty nine Columbus was the exact opposite.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
It reeked of mildew and mold. There was no heat.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
The stench of rotting, dried leaves was everywhere. This is
the other odd thing about Matthew Hoffman. He had a
thing about leaves. In fact, in psychiatric terms, he suffered
from dendrophilia, a sexual attraction to trees. I asked doctor
Judah Joseph, who treats people like Haufman, about paraphilias and
(18:23):
dendrophilia specifically.
Speaker 5 (18:25):
So when we think about sexual attraction, we think about
being attracted to a consenting adult. Paraphilias are not typical,
so you can have benign sexual attractions that are not traditional,
such as masochistic, statistic sexual behaviors. We don't want to
pathologize those type of intimate relationships and those type of
(18:48):
intimate sexual behaviors because they're not pathological, they're consensual, they
just don't happen to be typical. Then there are the
harmful sexual interactions and attractions such as pedophilia, which is
non consensual sexual behavior with a minor right that is harmful,
(19:11):
that is not okay, and it is not typical. And
then people have the more common voyeurism. Those are more common.
They're not okay either, they're not typical. But things that
are not as extreme as people who have sexual interactions
with animals or that's not safe, that's not empathic, and
(19:34):
that's a paraphilia, or in this case, sexual arousal and
interactions and behaviors with inanimate objects like trees, so they
may view leaves or parts of trees as being sexual
or have romantic feelings around those things, and so that
is an atypical sexual arousal.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
His house was lined with thousands of pounds of dead
leaves in plastic bags. Hundreds of pounds of leaves were
covered by a tarp on the floor. I'm trying to
understand how the sexual thing, the.
Speaker 5 (20:11):
Sexual part of it, is more about being basically turned
on right. So you know, it's possible that when he
was trimming those trees in his brain, the connections that
were being lit up were lighting up the genitalia. So
pruding that tree is equivalent likely to kissing, right, But
(20:36):
his brain likely wasn't set up to think of kissing
as foreplay. So for his brain, foreplay may have been
trimming those trees. If someone who's married goes out and
buys roses and sprinkles those roses on a bed, that's
their type of foreplay. His type of poor play may
have been putting those leaves on the bed. Putting those
leaves on the floor, you know, it's priming the brain
(20:58):
for what's next.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
There's security footage of Matthew Hoffman walking through a wal mart.
It is very ordinary.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
It's at night.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
He's picked up heavy duty contractor garbage bags, tarp and
a turkey sandwich. But being a little eighty d he's
also selected a Halloween T shirt from the bargain bin
on sale. Besits two weeks after the holiday. He'd feel
a little more at home in a world where the
holiday lasted all year long. In his bathroom, he's even
(21:30):
drawn a jack o' lantern's mouth around the faucet. In
between the terrible things he does, Hoffmann olways seems as
if he's adrift. Each decision he makes seems arbitrary, as
if he were floating hopelessly through life, barely in control.
The only exceptional thing about him in the end is
(21:50):
his sudden capacity for violence, whether it's killing and skinning
squirrels in his yard, setting a house on fire, or
murdering a family. The Greeny wal Mart security footage eventually
proves to be his undoing Lying on the sofa in
the living room with iron Men playing on repeat again
and Sarah back down in the basement chained to her
(22:12):
bed of leaves. Hoffman had no idea his home was
the one being watched this time. On November fourteenth, at dawn,
a swat team made a dynamic entry. The first officer
of a swat team kicked in the door, and the
second threw a flash bangrenade. It rattled toward Hoffman and exploded.
Startling in disoriented, he tried to stumble down the basement's
(22:35):
steps towards Sarah. In his inverted world, he'd actually become
her protector. He was quickly tackled and dragged out of
the house, where the officers made him lie spread eagled
on his own overgrown long They found Sarah on the
bed of leaves in the basement. A flash went off,
(22:56):
capturing her terrified expression as they photographed her. The kidnapping
was officially documented. They finally took off her blindfold, reached
out to her outstretched hand, cut the chain, and led
her out of the home. Her eyes were so used
to the dark she had to shield them from the sun.
The police cut into the tarp covering the pile of
(23:18):
leaves and the living room floor, convinced they'd find another
body there, but came up with nothing. They stared in
amazement at strange black doodles drawn in marker around every
door jam and window frame. Random names were written on
the walls, a giant peace sign drawn in black marker
over a door. The Jack o' lanterns scrolled over the
(23:38):
bathroom sink. Within an hour, Sarah was talking to police
at the Knox County Sheriff Department, with Hoffmann seated just
a few rooms away. After three interrogation sessions in which
Hoffman still refused to say a word, he was handcuffed
and led out of the interrogation room. In the hall,
(24:00):
off camera, he began speaking to the detective, who hadn't
been able to extract one word out of him. In
a soft, flat voice. He told the detective he had
a terrible dream. He was cutting up bodies, body after body,
cutting off limbs. There was so much blood, and he
still had so much grisly work to do with his knife.
He wanted the detective to let him run away, and
(24:22):
made the detective promise he'd shoot him. It doesn't work
that way, Matthew, the detective said back in the interrogation room.
The next day, Hoffman went silent again. When they asked
him where the bodies were. They tried everything, asked him
how he liked his coffee, watched him eat a cheeseburger,
read a pleading text from his mother, but Matthew Hoffman
(24:44):
didn't say a word or move an inch. The detectives
left the room, and Hoffman stared straight at the camera,
motionless again, as if he were willing himself to vanish
for good inside himself, leaving nothing but the outer bark
of his body behind it would be d days before
they were able to coax the information they needed from
him and got what they wanted and X on a map.
(25:07):
On a cold November afternoon, in two armarked cars didtectives
whould pull off the highway onto a dusty road leading
deep into the Cocusing wildlife area. There, a tree surgeon
would start a chainsaw and cut a hole seventy foot
tall hollowed out peach tree.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Piece by piece, he.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Handed over the tightly wrap remains of Tina, Stephanie, Cody,
and the family dog. A procession of three white horses
would slowly drive down the same rural road a few
hours later, gleaming in the winter sun. And what about
Tina Herman's house on King Beach Drive where all these
(25:47):
grizzly murders took place? For months, the house sat on
the market. The news of the murderers had spread wide
and no one was willing to touch it. After some time,
the property owner for City Mortgage turned the house over
to the local Habitat for Humanity Chapter. Finally, two years
after the murders of kidnapping, a family bought the home
(26:07):
and tried to make it their own, and just this
year it changed hands again. Whether the people living there
now know of its history or the House of Leaves
remains unknown. As for Matthew Hoffman's home at forty nine Columbus,
It's sold in twenty twenty one for a steep discount.
You can still view pictures of it on Zilo. This
(26:32):
is Murder Holmes. I'm Matt Marinovitch. Thanks for listening. Murder
Holmes is a production of iHeart Podcasts. For more shows
from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Wid
Murder Holmes is a production of iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Eight fifty seven. This morning, we come into this room. Man,
it is now ten thirteen. I'm not real good at math,
so I'll just round things off. Eight fifty seven, nine
fifty seven, not quite ten fifty seven. So we're just
over an hour fifteen minutes.
Speaker 1 (00:25):
In a cramped interrogation room at the Knox County Sheriff's
Department in Mount Vernon, Ohio, two detectives are trying to
get an unemployed tree trimmer named Matthew Hoffman to talk
about three people who have vanished from a home at
four eighty one King Beach Drive. They take turns trying
to make him talk, but no matter what team of
detectives are in the room, he says nothing. And they're
(00:48):
starting to run out of the patients.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
And those people have gone through hell more and more
in the last hour and fifteen minutes we have sat here, Matt,
because you are control their lives. You are controlling the
strings of these people's hearts.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
They try the soft approach. I understand you're upset. I
can see it in your face.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
You're not even looking at me and I and that's cool,
but I can tell that you're upset.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
They try the good cop, bad cop approach. I guess
I don't understand you at all. I don't understand the
shit you did.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
He honestly didn't do it, or he would be telling
us where the where the rest of them are? Gary,
You're miser misunderstanding Matthew.
Speaker 1 (01:33):
Well, you know what you want to play this little game?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
It acts like a hard ass. Okay, you don't want
to tell us where Cody is.
Speaker 1 (01:41):
Okay, you don't want to tell us where the girls are?
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Wy don't you tell us how you killed the dog?
And finally, I know you are awake approach Matthew. I
saw you move your lips. Okay, I mean I know
you you're what stand? How are you playing this game?
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Because he is awake, his eyes are open. Sometimes he'll
lean his head on the metal interrogation desk, then lean
back again, swallow hard, stare right through the two detectives
facing him, as if they weren't there at all. After
two days of interrogation, ten hours and sixteen minutes of
(02:18):
almost complete silence, they are in the interrogation room again
for a change. They try a little small talk, hardly
expecting him to answer. They ask him what he's had
for breakfast at the county jail. He answers in a soft,
flat voice.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
Generic cheerios, one pack to sugar, has you that? One
pie or a half pint of milk though curtain and
a pine bagelsenhnogishu bagel.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
He even throws in a tinge of irony.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
After hours and hours of silence, It's like the detectives
have been zapped with a cattle prod. They nod at
each other excitedly, lean forward his knee and to wait
for all his anguish and self hatred to come pouring out.
But instead, Hoffmann thoughtfully SIPs the coffee they have brought
for him, holds it between his hands, and goes silent again.
(03:14):
It will be another week before he finally tells them
where he's buried, the dismembered bodies of the mother, the son,
her best friend, and the family dog. And what really
took place at forty one King Beach Drive. This is murder, Holmes,
I'm at Ranovitch. You've seen a house like forty one
(03:47):
King Beach Drive and Howard, Ohio a hundred times before.
Maybe Google Maps has routed you through some suburban cul
de sac and you picture living there for a moment.
It is one of those forget raised ranch homes on
a sloping lawn that needs a fresh coat of gray paint.
A kid's empty swing set nearby. Someone's made an effort
(04:08):
to keep a few potted plants alive. Sweep the leaves
away from the garage door. Just type in four eighty
one King Beats Drive and you'll see it. The house
where three people lost their lives pops up on Zillow, Trulia,
and Redfin, even though it was just recently sold again
a couple of months ago. In the photographs, it looks
(04:29):
like any starter home. There's a brand new stove and refrigerator,
four ceiling fans to keep the kitchen and living room
cool on a stifling summer day, brand new wall to
wall carpeting in the two bedrooms, a shower curtain tastefully
pulled over the bathtub in the master bedroom. Every room
vacuumed and mopped, except for a small pool of water
(04:51):
on the concrete floor.
Speaker 3 (04:52):
Of the basement.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
It's so unexceptional in many ways that you wonder why
a troubled loner who lived ten point three miles away
found it at all, but take a closer look at
that garage door with the eight small windows. Back on
November ninth, twenty ten, Matthew Hoffman, aged thirty, was slowly
driving around Howard, Ohio, looking for a home to burglarize.
(05:16):
Then he noticed something specific about four eighty one King
Beach Drive. The garage door didn't quite close. There were
two inches of visible space between the poured concrete floor
and the edge of the garage door, just enough space
to get his hand under the simplest, most innocuous things
(05:37):
can lead to the most sickening crimes.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
If Tina Hermann's.
Speaker 1 (05:41):
Garage door had fully closed, as you can clearly see
it does now and pick number thirty on Zillo, Matthew
Hoffman would have sped up in his dented Toyota Yaris
and found a weak spot somewhere else. But Hoffman had
an eye for details. He had finally found the right
place after a short break. We'll find out what happened next.
(06:12):
We're back with murder homes. In twenty ten, a thirty
two year old woman named Tina Herman, her boyfriend, and
two young kids, Sarah and Cody, ages eleven and thirteen,
lived at forty one King Beach Drive. The broken garage
door was the result of a fight she'd had with
her boyfriend, who'd kicked it after they argued one night.
(06:35):
At three forty am on November tenth, Tina's boyfriend left
for work at a distribution center thirty miles away. Tina
listened to him drive away and went back to sleep.
They agreed to break up and she needed to get
a little rest because her best friend, Stephanie Sprang was
(06:55):
coming by early in the morning to help her find
a new place to live. Tina fell back asleep with
no idea that her house was being watched in the dark. Meanwhile,
Matthew Hoffman was lying in wait in the woods on
the other side of King Beach Drive. The sound of
the car leaving had awakened him from a light sleep.
(07:17):
He crawled out of a sleeping bag and took a
sip of water. Instead of going back to sleep, he
watched the home carefully, even though it would still be
three more hours before the sun came up. This is
the thing about Hoffman. He got a thrill from invading
homes that weren't his. It was the only time he
really felt alive. Everything else was difficult for him. Relationships, communications,
(07:40):
simple small talk, holding down a job. He had just
been fired from his job as a tree tromer, and
the car he drove was going to be repossessed. Recently,
his girlfriend had moved out after he tried to choke her.
He was also working on a serious criminal record out
west invade a home when the owner was away, stole
(08:02):
an odd assortment of property, and then tried to burn
it to the ground. He spent eight years in jail
and was a model prisoner, but he had started to
fall back on bad habits. There's something else that's extremely
odd about Hoffman too, but we'll get to that later.
As the sun came up, Hoffman rolled up the sleeping
(08:24):
bag and sat perfectly still. He had this capability of
sitting as still as a statue. Sometimes he would perch
in the tree outside his decrepit home and sit there
for hours, watching the neighbors. The neighbors had started to
keep their distance from him. He had even built a
hammock way up in an elm tree, as if he
were more comfortable there than in his own home. That morning,
(08:48):
hidden by leaves again, he watched the two kids, Sarah
and Cody leave the home and step onto a school bus.
Sometime before nine am, Tina Herman left a home as well,
backing her car out of the garage. It closed, but
not completely. There was still that two inch gap. Hoffman
(09:10):
watched the bright sunlight glint off the roof of her
car until it disappeared. Then he walked across the road,
gripped the bottom edge of the garage door, and hauled
it up. He was finally inside for eighty one King
Beach Drive, where he stood in the garage listening for
the sound of anyone else in the home, but there
(09:30):
was only the sound of the dog barking upstairs. So
he slipped on a pair of sure griped gloves and
opened the basement door, his footsteps soundless on the plush carpeting.
The dog led out a worried whine and scurried away
as soon as it saw him. A pot of dripped
coffee sat near the sink, an unfinished glass of orange
(09:52):
juice on the kitchen table, a list of chores that
Tina had quickly written out. Hoffman hadn't stolen any anything yet,
and he also didn't leave. It's as if subconsciously something
had shifted and he was already on a low boil. Meanwhile,
Tina was shopping at the Kroger's supermarket in Mount Vernon.
(10:13):
After getting some gas, she headed home to meet her
best friend Stephanie, who was going to pick her up
to help her look at apartments with things on the
rocks with her boyfriend, she needed to find a new
place to live, even though for eighty one, King Beach
had finally started to feel like a real home for
her kids. But as soon as Tina re entered her
home carrying two bags of groceries, a man came running
(10:37):
toward her down the hallway and grabbed her. Only one
hundred and twenty pounds, Tina didn't stand a chance against
Matthew Hoffman. Investigators would later determine he had most likely
already begun stabbing her before he was interrupted by the
arrival of her friend, Stephanie. Stephanie had found the front
door open and heard screams from her friend, but instead
(10:59):
of running away, she ran into the house to defend Tina.
Hoffman attacked her, stabbing her to death. Then he furiously
turned his attention to Tina again. In just a few minutes,
it was all over but the family dog wouldn't stop
its steady, high pitched barking, so Hoffman methodically walked toward it,
(11:21):
hunting knife in hand. It was a clear, blue autumn day,
not a cloud in the sky. The chill in the
air was just beginning to wear off, but inside, for
eighty one King Beach Drive, Hoffman was heaving breaths. Finally,
the home was completely silent again, the way it was
when he first walked in. A murder home is almost
(11:44):
always two things, the place a family feels safest and
the last place on earth they expect to be hunted down.
Detectives determined that Hoffman dragged Tina's body to the master
bathroom first, then Ephani's, then the dogs, where, in Hoffman's
own words, he processed them with his hunting knife, wrapping
(12:07):
the body parts in garbage bags. Meanwhile, at the Knox
County Middle School, Cody and his older sister Sarah were
in the midst of a normal school day, unaware of
what had happened. At the end of the day, they
took the school bus back home. They got off the
school bus and walked up the short winding flagstones to
the front door. Once in the house, They began to
(12:30):
take their shoes off, but saw blood right next to
the door. They called out to their mother. She didn't
greet them, which was strange. They noticed the grocery spilled
all over the floor. Cody screamed first when he saw
the intruder dressed in black, and then the boy ran
as fast as he could to the front door of
(12:51):
forty one King Beach Drive. He even managed to open
it before he was dragged back inside and stabbed. No
one heard his or Sarah's scream as Hoffman grabbed a
phone from her and pulled her to the floor. Hoffman
tied Sarah up with electrical cord from a ceiling fan
and gagged her. Then he pulled a pillowcase over her head,
(13:13):
leaving her lying on the kitchen floor. Even Hoffman will
later confess that he didn't know why he didn't stab her.
All he can say is that he had a sudden
impulse not to. Sarah heard banging sounds in the bathroom
from her position on the floor. Hoffman would come out
and open the refrigerator or a cabinet looking for cleaning supplies,
(13:36):
and then he would continue to labor in the bathroom
until the sun started to go down. Finally, Hoffman returned,
blindfolded her, and led her to Stephanie's cheep.
Speaker 3 (13:48):
In court.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
More than a year later, Hoffman's lawyer would turn to
teenis surviving relatives and say that his client only wanted
to rob the home, but investigators would deny that. Instead,
they believed it's something evolved in his mind as he
wandered through a house that wasn't his, something that compelled
him to murder innocent people. I talk with doctor Judith Joseph,
(14:10):
a board certified psychiatrist and a behavioral science researcher who
works with people like Kaufman. I ask how someone's intentions
could change from burglary to murder and then kidnapping so quickly.
Speaker 5 (14:24):
We know that a lot of times people who are psychopathic,
there are baby steps. They have a conduct disorder in childhood,
so they do things that are priming their brains to
be aroused by violence. So they'll kill animals, they'll kill insects,
they'll set fires, they'll steal Those are all the type
of foreplay that lead to adult deviant behavior that classifies
(14:49):
as psychopathy. So if you look at the DSM criteria
for conduct disorder, you're going to see a list of
behaviors that are red flags. And I use these assessments
every day because I do clinical research because we want
to rule out people who meet criteria for conduct disorder,
because guess what, those people end up meeting criteria for
(15:09):
anti social personal disorder in adulthood. So it's these categories
of behaviors that are deviant, that are not typical, that
are actually red flags for harmful behaviors that we see.
Those categories of behaviors make you likely to meet criteria
for anti social personality disorder in adulthood. And we know
anti social personality disorder leads to what people know is
(15:32):
that compathy.
Speaker 1 (15:34):
We'll be back after a short break to find out
what happened next to Sarah. We're back with murder homes.
The following day, November eleventh, Tina's boyfriend return home after
spending the night with a friend. He found the door unlocked,
(15:56):
the house empty, but bloodstains everywhere. Police arrived immediately, and
the ritual that's familiar with every murder home began. Neighbors
whispered to each other in small groups as the home
was taped off. Detectives arrived and left the home in
twos and threes. Then came the satellite truck from local
news station WCMH. It was another beautiful blue autumn day.
(16:22):
Yellow leaves fell from the beech trees on the other
side of King Beach Drive, but an entire family was missing,
leaving nothing behind but the signs of a violent struggle,
and detectives were sure there was at least one survivor
because there were two sets of bloody sneaker prints leading down.
Speaker 3 (16:40):
To the garage.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
All day, cars slowly passed by the unmarked police vehicles
on the side of the road. One of those was
the silver Toyota driven by Hoffmann. In the trunk of
his car, there were more cleaning supplies he had purchased
at the nearby wal Mart and a can of gas.
He had meant to return and burned the home to
the ground the night before, but when Tina's boyfriend had returned,
(17:05):
that plan went out the window. As the adrenaline rush faded,
Hoffman had lost interest in all the details he had
cared about so intensely just hours before. In his rear
view mirror, he looked at the faces of the horrified
neighbors and then drove to his home at forty nine
Columbus Road, twenty minutes away, where he had chained Sarah
(17:27):
to a bed of leaves in the basement. The house
was covered with dead leaves. Rows and rows of plastic
bags filled with them hung on the walls. On the
living room floor, a fourteen by fourteen foot tarp covered
a pile of leaves three feet high. The bathroom alone
was covered with one hundred and ten bags of leaves.
(17:50):
If for eighty one King Beach Drive seemed like a
real home, forty nine Columbus was the exact opposite.
Speaker 3 (17:57):
It reeked of mildew and mold. There was no heat.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
The stench of rotting, dried leaves was everywhere. This is
the other odd thing about Matthew Hoffman. He had a
thing about leaves. In fact, in psychiatric terms, he suffered
from dendrophilia, a sexual attraction to trees. I asked doctor
Judah Joseph, who treats people like Haufman, about paraphilias and
(18:23):
dendrophilia specifically.
Speaker 5 (18:25):
So when we think about sexual attraction, we think about
being attracted to a consenting adult. Paraphilias are not typical,
so you can have benign sexual attractions that are not traditional,
such as masochistic, statistic sexual behaviors. We don't want to
pathologize those type of intimate relationships and those type of
(18:48):
intimate sexual behaviors because they're not pathological, they're consensual, they
just don't happen to be typical. Then there are the
harmful sexual interactions and attractions such as pedophilia, which is
non consensual sexual behavior with a minor right that is harmful,
(19:11):
that is not okay, and it is not typical. And
then people have the more common voyeurism. Those are more common.
They're not okay either, they're not typical. But things that
are not as extreme as people who have sexual interactions
with animals or that's not safe, that's not empathic, and
(19:34):
that's a paraphilia, or in this case, sexual arousal and
interactions and behaviors with inanimate objects like trees, so they
may view leaves or parts of trees as being sexual
or have romantic feelings around those things, and so that
is an atypical sexual arousal.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
His house was lined with thousands of pounds of dead
leaves in plastic bags. Hundreds of pounds of leaves were
covered by a tarp on the floor. I'm trying to
understand how the sexual thing, the.
Speaker 5 (20:11):
Sexual part of it, is more about being basically turned
on right. So you know, it's possible that when he
was trimming those trees in his brain, the connections that
were being lit up were lighting up the genitalia. So
pruding that tree is equivalent likely to kissing, right, But
(20:36):
his brain likely wasn't set up to think of kissing
as foreplay. So for his brain, foreplay may have been
trimming those trees. If someone who's married goes out and
buys roses and sprinkles those roses on a bed, that's
their type of foreplay. His type of poor play may
have been putting those leaves on the bed. Putting those
leaves on the floor, you know, it's priming the brain
(20:58):
for what's next.
Speaker 1 (21:01):
There's security footage of Matthew Hoffman walking through a wal mart.
It is very ordinary.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
It's at night.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
He's picked up heavy duty contractor garbage bags, tarp and
a turkey sandwich. But being a little eighty d he's
also selected a Halloween T shirt from the bargain bin
on sale. Besits two weeks after the holiday. He'd feel
a little more at home in a world where the
holiday lasted all year long. In his bathroom, he's even
(21:30):
drawn a jack o' lantern's mouth around the faucet. In
between the terrible things he does, Hoffmann olways seems as
if he's adrift. Each decision he makes seems arbitrary, as
if he were floating hopelessly through life, barely in control.
The only exceptional thing about him in the end is
(21:50):
his sudden capacity for violence, whether it's killing and skinning
squirrels in his yard, setting a house on fire, or
murdering a family. The Greeny wal Mart security footage eventually
proves to be his undoing Lying on the sofa in
the living room with iron Men playing on repeat again
and Sarah back down in the basement chained to her
(22:12):
bed of leaves. Hoffman had no idea his home was
the one being watched this time. On November fourteenth, at dawn,
a swat team made a dynamic entry. The first officer
of a swat team kicked in the door, and the
second threw a flash bangrenade. It rattled toward Hoffman and exploded.
Startling in disoriented, he tried to stumble down the basement's
(22:35):
steps towards Sarah. In his inverted world, he'd actually become
her protector. He was quickly tackled and dragged out of
the house, where the officers made him lie spread eagled
on his own overgrown long They found Sarah on the
bed of leaves in the basement. A flash went off,
(22:56):
capturing her terrified expression as they photographed her. The kidnapping
was officially documented. They finally took off her blindfold, reached
out to her outstretched hand, cut the chain, and led
her out of the home. Her eyes were so used
to the dark she had to shield them from the sun.
The police cut into the tarp covering the pile of
(23:18):
leaves and the living room floor, convinced they'd find another
body there, but came up with nothing. They stared in
amazement at strange black doodles drawn in marker around every
door jam and window frame. Random names were written on
the walls, a giant peace sign drawn in black marker
over a door. The Jack o' lanterns scrolled over the
(23:38):
bathroom sink. Within an hour, Sarah was talking to police
at the Knox County Sheriff Department, with Hoffmann seated just
a few rooms away. After three interrogation sessions in which
Hoffman still refused to say a word, he was handcuffed
and led out of the interrogation room. In the hall,
(24:00):
off camera, he began speaking to the detective, who hadn't
been able to extract one word out of him. In
a soft, flat voice. He told the detective he had
a terrible dream. He was cutting up bodies, body after body,
cutting off limbs. There was so much blood, and he
still had so much grisly work to do with his knife.
He wanted the detective to let him run away, and
(24:22):
made the detective promise he'd shoot him. It doesn't work
that way, Matthew, the detective said back in the interrogation room.
The next day, Hoffman went silent again. When they asked
him where the bodies were. They tried everything, asked him
how he liked his coffee, watched him eat a cheeseburger,
read a pleading text from his mother, but Matthew Hoffman
(24:44):
didn't say a word or move an inch. The detectives
left the room, and Hoffman stared straight at the camera,
motionless again, as if he were willing himself to vanish
for good inside himself, leaving nothing but the outer bark
of his body behind it would be d days before
they were able to coax the information they needed from
him and got what they wanted and X on a map.
(25:07):
On a cold November afternoon, in two armarked cars didtectives
whould pull off the highway onto a dusty road leading
deep into the Cocusing wildlife area. There, a tree surgeon
would start a chainsaw and cut a hole seventy foot
tall hollowed out peach tree.
Speaker 3 (25:25):
Piece by piece, he.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Handed over the tightly wrap remains of Tina, Stephanie, Cody,
and the family dog. A procession of three white horses
would slowly drive down the same rural road a few
hours later, gleaming in the winter sun. And what about
Tina Herman's house on King Beach Drive where all these
(25:47):
grizzly murders took place? For months, the house sat on
the market. The news of the murderers had spread wide
and no one was willing to touch it. After some time,
the property owner for City Mortgage turned the house over
to the local Habitat for Humanity Chapter. Finally, two years
after the murders of kidnapping, a family bought the home
(26:07):
and tried to make it their own, and just this
year it changed hands again. Whether the people living there
now know of its history or the House of Leaves
remains unknown. As for Matthew Hoffman's home at forty nine Columbus,
It's sold in twenty twenty one for a steep discount.
You can still view pictures of it on Zilo. This
(26:32):
is Murder Holmes. I'm Matt Marinovitch. Thanks for listening. Murder
Holmes is a production of iHeart Podcasts. For more shows
from iHeart Podcasts, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Wid
Host
Matt Marinovich
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