0:02 [SPEAKER_00]: Apple Valley sits in the hills of Knox County, about an hour northeast of Columbus, Ohio. 0:08 [SPEAKER_00]: A late community of winding drives and modest houses built around a private reservoir. 0:14 [SPEAKER_00]: The rocks are wooded. 0:15 [SPEAKER_00]: In the second week of November, the maples have already let go, and the oaks are letting go reluctantly. 0:22 [SPEAKER_00]: The hills turning the scraped brownish yellow that central Ohio wears that time of year. 0:27 [SPEAKER_00]: The late goes from recreation to scenery, flat and cold under a dull sky. 0:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Around the county is cornstouble and wooded ridges. 0:36 [SPEAKER_00]: White farmhouses and Amish buggys on the berms of the state routes. 0:40 [SPEAKER_00]: A county of 30 odd churches in one real town, Malvernon, the seat, is courthouse square, brick storefronts, and a civil war monument, with a downtown that empties by six. 0:53 [SPEAKER_00]: Tina Herman lived on King Beach Drive with her two children. 0:58 [SPEAKER_00]: She was 32. 0:59 [SPEAKER_00]: She managed to darey queen in Malvernon, and the people she worked with, 1:07 [SPEAKER_00]: A woman in the middle of the usual turbulence of a working life. 1:11 [SPEAKER_00]: She and her boyfriend were in the middle of an amicable split. 1:15 [SPEAKER_00]: She loved the neighborhood, and had been looking for another place in it. 1:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Because whatever was ending, she did not want Apple Valley, Dend with it. 1:23 [SPEAKER_00]: Her shifts at the dairy queen were the armature of the family's week. 1:27 [SPEAKER_00]: She worked a single mother schedule, opens and closes and doubles. 1:32 [SPEAKER_00]: The store was three minutes from her kid's school, work, kids, home. 1:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Her best friend is short-wank away. 1:39 [SPEAKER_00]: The people who knew her described a woman who laughed often and had no enemies. 1:45 [SPEAKER_00]: Her children were Sarah and Cody Maynard. 1:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Sarah was 13 in the seventh grade. 1:53 [SPEAKER_00]: A boy remembered for a sweet temperament, and a mop of hair, his joyful smile. 1:58 [SPEAKER_00]: Their father, Larry Maynard, lived out of the area for work by had stayed close and friendly with Tina. 2:05 [SPEAKER_00]: Sarah, the eldest, was known as a private girl. 2:08 [SPEAKER_00]: She attended middle school. 2:10 [SPEAKER_00]: She was old enough to babysit her brother. 2:12 [SPEAKER_00]: Cody was an enthusiastic boy of 11. 2:18 [SPEAKER_00]: The vocabulary of a childhood that had not yet needed bigger words, and there was Stephanie Spring. 2:24 [SPEAKER_00]: She was 41, a mother of three, and she lived a few doors down. 2:29 [SPEAKER_00]: She and Tina had become friends, inseparable, in and out of each other's houses. 2:34 [SPEAKER_00]: On the morning of Wednesday, November 10, 2010, Stephanie walked over to Tina's house, and as she had walked over a hundred 2:48 [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing, about what was to come, announced itself. 2:52 [SPEAKER_00]: November 10th in central Ohio, Rhin Gray and Raw. 2:55 [SPEAKER_00]: The sky, the color of an old dry road, daylight already contracting towards the 430 dusk of the coming solstice. 3:03 [SPEAKER_00]: By the following afternoon, all four of them, Tina, Stephanie, Cody, and Sarah would be gone. 3:19 [UNKNOWN]: You 4:03 [SPEAKER_00]: Matthew Hoffman was 33 years old that November. 4:06 [SPEAKER_00]: The file on him was assembled afterward. 4:09 [SPEAKER_00]: It shows how much a community can fail to know about a man. 4:12 [SPEAKER_00]: He grew up in Central Ohio and finished at the Knox County Career Center in 2000. 4:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Then he went west to Steamboa Springs, Colorado. 4:22 [SPEAKER_00]: ski country where he worked as a plumbers helper and lived at the edges of the other people's prosperity. 4:28 [SPEAKER_00]: They are he committed the crime that should have been the warning. 4:31 [SPEAKER_00]: He had not broken into a client's vacation condo to rob it, he had moved into it quietly, living in a space that belonged to someone else while they were away. 4:42 [SPEAKER_00]: Treating another person's home as his own, first long as the absent town, when a caretaker discovered the intrusion, Hoffman set the place on fire and flood, investigators in Ralph County, he stood together. 4:55 [SPEAKER_00]: He pleaded to Arson, and a judge gave him eight years. 4:59 [SPEAKER_00]: He served six in a Colorado prison, and the file closed there. 5:03 [SPEAKER_00]: In the mountains, they thousand miles from the county that would need it. 5:07 [SPEAKER_00]: He was not a thief. 5:09 [SPEAKER_00]: They thief once objects and leaves. 5:11 [SPEAKER_00]: Hoffman, one of the inside of other people's lives, the trespass itself, and he had reached for fire the moment it was threatened. 5:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Everything he would do in Ohio a decade later was already there in that condo. 5:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Back in Knox County, he bought a small house on Columbus Road in Mount Vernon in 2009, and he worked when he worked as a tree trimmer. 5:34 [SPEAKER_00]: The return itself was unremarkable. 5:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Ohio was home, prison was behind him, and an ex-convict with a trade settling near family is the system operated as intended. 5:46 [SPEAKER_00]: Corole and its paperwork ran their course and expired. 5:49 [SPEAKER_00]: By 2010 he was a resident, 30 years old, his past sealed in a Colorado file cabinet. 5:55 [SPEAKER_00]: He was entitled to a fresh start and squandering it, unemployed and running out of money 6:03 [SPEAKER_00]: An arborist without steady employment, a climber of trees for money, and for something he never named. 6:10 [SPEAKER_00]: The neighbors have knew him, which is all men like him permit. 6:14 [SPEAKER_00]: A loner, his own mother would call him publicly. 6:17 [SPEAKER_00]: When the cameras came, quiet, he kept tuned south. 6:21 [SPEAKER_00]: They had a girlfriend for a time, inside the man. 6:24 [SPEAKER_00]: The quiet had he texture that no one on the street could have guessed. 6:27 [SPEAKER_00]: He had become strange. 6:29 [SPEAKER_00]: He began to fill his home with leaves, bags and bags of them, stacked in rooms, forward a ceiling in places, tens of thousands of leaves, hold indoors by a man whose relationship to trees had crossed out of profession into obsession. 6:46 [SPEAKER_00]: He climbed trees at night, he kept them in his fashion. 6:50 [SPEAKER_00]: None of it was known. 6:51 [SPEAKER_00]: Nobody injured his house during that period. 6:54 [SPEAKER_00]: And by the second week of November 2010, Matthew Hoffman was unemployed, broke and scouting. 7:01 [SPEAKER_00]: What he was scouting for, by his own after the fact telling, was a house to burglarize. 7:06 [SPEAKER_00]: He drove and walked the county with a burglar's eye, reading driveways and sidelines and routines. 7:13 [SPEAKER_00]: King Beach Drive was not a fate. 7:15 [SPEAKER_00]: It was part of his inventory. 7:17 [SPEAKER_00]: He would tell investigators he had been in the area before that the streets geometry recommended it, the woods behind the spacing of the wands, the specific house recommended itself by the one inch invitation of the garage door. 7:31 [SPEAKER_00]: He had been inside houses before, moving through the county's unlocked world while it was at work. 7:43 [SPEAKER_00]: Unking me to drive an Apple Valley. 7:45 [SPEAKER_00]: He found what he was looking for. 7:47 [SPEAKER_00]: A house with no close neighbors on the critical side, a garage door standing a jar, trees swaying behind it, filled with leaves. 7:55 [SPEAKER_00]: Any other time he would have taken a bag and filled that bag with leaves. 8:00 [SPEAKER_00]: More leaves to bring to his home, to surround himself with, to lay in, to spread himself on. 8:06 [SPEAKER_00]: He loved the leaves. 8:08 [SPEAKER_00]: They comforted him, in a way no human had. 8:10 [SPEAKER_00]: He did not know who lived there, in the house on King Beach Drive. 8:14 [SPEAKER_00]: He would say so himself later in writing, a plain denial of ever having known a single person inside. 8:21 [SPEAKER_00]: Tina Herman did not show up for a shift in the dairy queen on Wednesday. 8:25 [SPEAKER_00]: She was a manager who showed up, and the absence ringed wrong immediately, and by Thursday November 11th, the wrongness had grown official enough for a welfare check. 8:35 [SPEAKER_00]: The alarm had risen the ordinary human way first, co-workers calling the phone that did not answer. 8:41 [SPEAKER_00]: The school registering two absences that no parent had called in, Stephanie missing from her own house a few doors away, which turned one family's silence into two house homes worth. 8:52 [SPEAKER_00]: In the hours before any deputy was involved, the people who loved these four were already calling each other. 8:59 [SPEAKER_00]: each styling the next, each hearing the same nothing, a sheriff's deputy went out to King Beach Drive, the house was quiet, the family truck was gone, and inside, the deputy found what the sheriff would later call an unusual amount of blood. 9:14 [SPEAKER_00]: Enough that the question was not whether something terrible had happened, but to how many, there were signs of cleanup, hurried and partial, the house said violence, the empty room said abduction, there were no bodies, that said the next eight days on their course, blood and quantity, and more than one place, and no one to attend to, four people were gone, Tina, Stephanie, 9:42 [SPEAKER_00]: Cody, Sarah, the family's little dog, Tanner, was gone to, which registered as a detail then, and his horror waiter. 9:51 [SPEAKER_00]: The same day, Tina's pickup truck turned up miles away, near Kenyan College, Kenyan and November is bare stone and bear trees on a bike trail nearby. 10:02 [SPEAKER_00]: A deputy came across a man sitting alone in a parked car and stopped in question him. 10:08 [SPEAKER_00]: A man sitting low near where a missing woman's truck has just been dumped, earns a question, the man had answers. 10:15 [SPEAKER_00]: He was calm, his name was Matthew Hoffman, in the deputy took it down, ran what there was to run, found no life warrant, no red flag, and released him. 10:25 [SPEAKER_00]: The stop became the key. 10:26 [SPEAKER_00]: cases great civic wound. 10:28 [SPEAKER_00]: The deputy did the job as the job is defined. 10:31 [SPEAKER_00]: A name, a war check, nothing returned. 10:35 [SPEAKER_00]: The failure was upstream, and every system that had blood-a-convicted arsenous settle into a county without a flag. 10:42 [SPEAKER_00]: And so, on the 11th of November, with the blood nigh-ed dry on King Beach Drive, the man who had spilled all of it, answered a deputy's question, and drove away to his house of leaves. 10:53 [SPEAKER_00]: And while we did, Sarah Maynard was in his house the whole time. 10:58 [SPEAKER_00]: By that evening, Knox County understood a haddy catastrophe, for missing one crime scene, no bodies, no suspect, and the county began to search. 11:09 [SPEAKER_00]: It searched for eight straight days, and Matthew Hoffman will home and lived his days. 11:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Matthew held still, he waited to see whether the county would find its way to his door. 11:20 [SPEAKER_00]: The Knox County Sheriff's Office ran the case with help ahead never needed before. 11:25 [SPEAKER_00]: State agents from BCI, the FBI eventually consulting a rural department of modest size, suddenly administering one of the largest search operations in Ohio that year. 11:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Sheriff David Barber became the county's public face, a career warm and standing at the 11:45 [SPEAKER_00]: In the men and women under him work the hours of missing children's case demands, what follows is drawn from Hoffman's own written confession, produced as part of the bargain that spared his life, in checked against the physical evidence. 11:59 [SPEAKER_00]: He entered through the garage sometime that morning, armed with a box cutter, intending he insisted, only to steal. 12:06 [SPEAKER_00]: He was inside when he realized the house was not empty. 12:09 [SPEAKER_00]: Tina Herman and Stephanie spraying Warhome, the morning had put them together, 12:14 [SPEAKER_00]: As their mornings usually dead, Stephanie had walked over two women in a kitchen on a great Wednesday with the kids at school and the day ahead of them shaped like every other day. 12:26 [SPEAKER_00]: The wounds concentrated in their backs suggested that the last ordinary thing either women did was turned around. 12:33 [SPEAKER_00]: Matthew Hoffman did not panic. 12:35 [SPEAKER_00]: Panic is a burst. 12:37 [SPEAKER_00]: What the body's recording was repetition, multiple stab wounds to the back and both women, sharp force wounds, delivered over and over to people turned away from him. 12:47 [SPEAKER_00]: The little dog, Tanner, art, me killed the dog too. 12:52 [SPEAKER_00]: A box cutter is short, intimate and slow. 12:55 [SPEAKER_00]: A gunpanics, a box cutter persists. 12:58 [SPEAKER_00]: He had carried it in as a tool of the burglary, and when 13:06 [SPEAKER_00]: He used it until the house was silent, and then he stayed, he stayed in the house with what he had done, for hours, into the afternoon. 13:15 [SPEAKER_00]: He was still there when the school day ended. 13:18 [SPEAKER_00]: Cody Manard came home first. 13:20 [SPEAKER_00]: He was 11. 13:21 [SPEAKER_00]: He walked into his own house. 13:23 [SPEAKER_00]: and often killed him with a box cutter, a fifth grader with a backpack, stabbed again and again, Sarah came home after she was 13, coming home from the seventh grade on an ordinary Wednesday, a girl walking into her home into the worst facts of her wife, standing in her own kitchen. 13:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Her brother was dead, her mother was dead, her mother's best friend was dead. 13:46 [SPEAKER_00]: and the man who had done all of it was standing in her house. 13:49 [SPEAKER_00]: He did not kill her, he bound her, and he kept her in the house. 13:53 [SPEAKER_00]: Through the hours that followed, into the evening, Matthew Hoffman dismembered the bodies of Tina Hurman, Stephanie Spring, and Cody Maynard, in the same house the family had woken up in that morning. 14:05 [SPEAKER_00]: The burglary by that point was 12 hours gone. 14:08 [SPEAKER_00]: This was concealment. 14:10 [SPEAKER_00]: This was a project undertaken calmly 14:15 [SPEAKER_02]: Hi, my name is Valerie D. Barn, and I work out a dairy queen on the general manager out there. 14:21 [SPEAKER_02]: Uh-huh. 14:22 [SPEAKER_02]: One of my employees did not show up for work for afternoon at 4 o'clock. 14:25 [SPEAKER_06]: Okay. 14:26 [SPEAKER_02]: Which is totally uncharacteristic of ours. 14:28 [SPEAKER_02]: She's one of my managers. 14:29 [SPEAKER_06]: Okay. 14:30 [SPEAKER_02]: I drove out by her house and went north on the door, left her note. 14:32 [SPEAKER_02]: She's not answering her phone. 14:34 [SPEAKER_02]: Which is her own character. 14:35 [SPEAKER_02]: She's not answering her text. 14:36 [SPEAKER_02]: And she is not answering her phone. 14:38 [SPEAKER_02]: But her truck and her coat are in the house. 14:40 [SPEAKER_02]: But her coat is in the house. 14:42 [SPEAKER_02]: I'm very concerned about her. 14:43 [SPEAKER_06]: What's your name? 14:45 [SPEAKER_02]: My name is Tina, I'm an A.T.R.R.M.A. 14:48 [SPEAKER_02]: and then. 14:49 [SPEAKER_06]: Okay. 14:50 [SPEAKER_02]: Now, she and her boys are under splitting up, and he can be a real jerk with her. 14:54 [SPEAKER_06]: Okay. 14:54 [SPEAKER_06]: Do you have a full number for her? 14:57 [SPEAKER_02]: Um, I've got, I do, but it's in my song. 14:59 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay. 14:59 [SPEAKER_06]: That's fine. 15:00 [SPEAKER_06]: What was your name again? 15:02 [SPEAKER_02]: My name is Valerie H.Born. 15:03 [SPEAKER_07]: Okay. 15:04 [SPEAKER_07]: Okay. 15:05 [SPEAKER_07]: I will have a debt to be swinging out there and check on her. 15:08 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay. 15:08 [SPEAKER_02]: I first came to say it here. 15:13 [SPEAKER_07]: This would have to be something that can help you. 15:17 [SPEAKER_02]: Yes, this is Valerie Hathon. 15:19 [SPEAKER_02]: I called in last night about Tina, Roman being missing. 15:24 [SPEAKER_02]: I am proud of her health now. 15:25 [SPEAKER_02]: I just went in a long time because I'm so worried about her. 15:28 [SPEAKER_02]: There's blood everywhere. 15:30 [SPEAKER_07]: Okay. 15:33 [SPEAKER_07]: Where are you at? 15:33 [SPEAKER_07]: I'm sorry. 15:34 [SPEAKER_07]: I just got back to my cell. 15:36 [SPEAKER_02]: Okay. 15:36 [SPEAKER_07]: Oh, that's it. 15:37 [SPEAKER_07]: Sorry. 15:37 [SPEAKER_07]: You just made it kind of so me and a little bit. 15:39 [SPEAKER_07]: Okay. 15:39 [SPEAKER_02]: So you know how I'm going to work for me. 15:40 [SPEAKER_02]: She did not show a four test today. 15:42 [SPEAKER_02]: And we have now been able to locate her or her children for the lives of 24 hours now. 15:47 [SPEAKER_02]: I just don't go back in the house. 15:48 [SPEAKER_07]: I'm not going to be locked in the driver. 15:50 [SPEAKER_07]: Okay, thank you. 15:51 [SPEAKER_07]: All right. 15:52 [SPEAKER_02]: Let's go. 15:53 [SPEAKER_02]: All right. 15:55 [SPEAKER_02]: All right. 15:56 [SPEAKER_02]: All right. 15:57 [SPEAKER_02]: All right. 15:57 [SPEAKER_07]: All right. 15:58 [SPEAKER_07]: All right. 15:59 [SPEAKER_07]: All right. 15:59 [SPEAKER_07]: All right. 16:00 [SPEAKER_07]: All right. 16:00 [SPEAKER_07]: All right. 16:00 [SPEAKER_07]: All right. 16:01 [SPEAKER_02]: All right. 16:02 [SPEAKER_07]: All right. 16:02 [SPEAKER_07]: All right. 16:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Gross abuse of a corpse, three counts. 16:12 [SPEAKER_00]: He did this work in the bathroom with the box cutter and a hatchet brought in from his vehicle. 16:17 [SPEAKER_00]: He begged what he had done in black plastic, and he attempted to clean up of the house that he abandoned unfinished. 16:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Late that night, he loaded the bags in the living girl, into Stephanie Springs' Jeep, he drove out of Apple Valley, into the dark hills of Knox County, door to place he knew from the other wife, the tree-life, a wooded preserve near Frederick's town. 16:39 [SPEAKER_00]: He drove county roads past midnight, in a Jeep that was not his. 16:44 [SPEAKER_00]: loaded with a 13-year-old girl who would lost everything she had by sundown. 16:49 [SPEAKER_00]: He drove Sarah Maynard to the house on Columbus Road, the house of Leaves, and put her in the basement. 16:55 [SPEAKER_00]: For the next three days, Knox County looked for a family, as Matthew Hoffman watched. 17:01 [SPEAKER_03]: You want to talk to one of us alone or do you want to 17:15 [SPEAKER_03]: You look per mega timing, you work out the jam, you know, other people, there's family members out there, other people, and they all stay on this closure, that's all they want. 17:29 [SPEAKER_03]: They've been up for days like you and I, you know, heart, heart, heart. 17:42 [SPEAKER_03]: I don't understand sign language, man. 17:44 [SPEAKER_03]: What do you want from us? 17:47 [SPEAKER_03]: Tell me what you want from us? 17:49 [SPEAKER_03]: We want a couple minutes here just to kind of think about all this, because I know it's overwhelming for you right now. 17:55 [SPEAKER_03]: I'm beginning to think about it, don't care. 18:00 [SPEAKER_00]: The search was enormous by the standards of any rural county, deputies, state investigators, canine units, aircraft, a diver dogs, and civilians in the hundreds. 18:11 [SPEAKER_00]: They walked the fields of Apple Valley Drive and dragged the edges of the reservoir. 18:16 [SPEAKER_00]: They combed found park in the east branch, in the bike trails, blocked by block, on by pond, in the grain of ember cold, in car hearts and blaze orange. 18:27 [SPEAKER_00]: Thermos is in truck beds, church basements making sandwiches. 18:31 [SPEAKER_00]: Larry Maynard, the children's father, drove in and stood at the searches, and did the interviews a missing family father has to do, asking anyone who knew anything to come forward. 18:42 [SPEAKER_00]: There had been blood, but no bodies. 18:45 [SPEAKER_00]: He trucked a no driver. 18:47 [SPEAKER_00]: The searching had its own economy. 18:49 [SPEAKER_00]: Farmers walked their own back acreage, so teams would not have to. 18:53 [SPEAKER_00]: School buses ran their rounds. 18:58 [SPEAKER_00]: The children inside them were living through the version of the story. 19:01 [SPEAKER_00]: The adults could not shield them from. 19:03 [SPEAKER_00]: That two kids from their own school may be dead. 19:07 [SPEAKER_00]: At the visuals, hundreds of candles in the early dark, everyone holding one, new witch ending the odds favored. 19:14 [SPEAKER_00]: and held the candles anyway. 19:16 [SPEAKER_00]: It was the last thing they would ever get to do for four of their own, and they intended to do it properly. 19:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Inside the house on King Beach Drive, among the blood evidence, investigators had found items that did not belong to the household. 19:30 [SPEAKER_00]: A large tower, heavy garbage bags, objects with no history in the house, which meant they had arrived with 19:38 [SPEAKER_00]: which meant they had been bought. 19:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Investigators traced the products to the Walmart in Mount Vernon and they began pulling register data and surveillance video, hour by hour, looking for the transaction, they founded, store cameras shoot a man moving through the aisles, selecting tarps and trash bags and assured, paying and walking out to the parking lot where the cameras kept following. 20:02 [SPEAKER_00]: He loaded his purchases into a vehicle. 20:05 [SPEAKER_00]: The vehicle had plates. 20:06 [SPEAKER_00]: The plates went to the Ohio Motor Vehicle Records, and the records returned to name and an address. 20:12 [SPEAKER_00]: The least cinematic break in the case was most instructive, a retail receipt, a man planning the concealment of three bodies still has to stand at a register like everyone else. 20:24 [SPEAKER_00]: Detectives drew up the warrant for Columbus Road and put SWAT on it. 20:28 [SPEAKER_00]: Its owner would get no warning. 20:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Now there was probable cause, and there was also a terrible clock, because if the man on the video was the man from the blood house, then anyone still alive was wherever he was. 20:41 [SPEAKER_00]: Before the dawn on Sunday, November 14th, SWAT team hit the house on Columbus Road. 20:47 [SPEAKER_00]: Columbus runs out of Mount Vernon, past body shops and modest frame houses. 20:52 [SPEAKER_00]: At that hour, in that season, it was black dark and hard frost. 20:57 [SPEAKER_00]: The neighbors asleep, the street about to learn what it had been living beside. 21:01 [SPEAKER_00]: The entry was fast and loud, as such entries are designed to be, and it was over in moments what they found first was the strangeness. 21:10 [SPEAKER_00]: The house of a man who had brought the outdoors inside by the ton, rooms given over to bagged leaves, stacked to the ceiling, a residence turned into a nest, the officers moved through it, toward the basement, officers who served that warrant, described the interior in the spare terms of rapport writing, the bags of leaves and their hundreds, the leaves everywhere, in piles, glued to the wall, coming from the ceiling, 21:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Wolves in one small room marked with the doodles of the occupant. 21:44 [SPEAKER_00]: A house with almost nothing in a normal life requires an enormous quantities of one thing no life requires at all. 21:51 [SPEAKER_00]: The men moved through it with their weapons up, clearing room by room. 21:56 [SPEAKER_00]: Sarah Maynard was there. 21:57 [SPEAKER_00]: A wife, 13 years old, bound and gagged on a makeshift bed of leaves, four days into captivity in the house of the man who had murdered her family. 22:08 [SPEAKER_00]: The officers cut her loose and brought her up out of the basement, and into the grace Sunday light, and Knox County got the single mercy this case contains. 22:17 [SPEAKER_00]: One of the four was alive. 22:18 [SPEAKER_00]: After days of what evidence and lowering hope, the search had produced a living child, then the same fact turned over. 22:26 [SPEAKER_00]: She had been found in a man's basement, which meant the man was found too, and the man was not talking. 22:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Three people were still missing, and hope for them now had to survive the knowledge of what their abductor kept in his house. 22:39 [SPEAKER_00]: What those four days were is recorded in the charges Hoffman would plead to. 22:44 [SPEAKER_00]: Kidnapping in the rape of a child, she was 13. 22:47 [SPEAKER_00]: He will die in prison for it, among the other things he will die in prison for. 22:51 [SPEAKER_00]: With the sheriff himself kept returning to in the days that followed, was her, were inspired by Sarah's bravery, David Barber said. 23:00 [SPEAKER_00]: The girl in the basement, survived four days of the unservivable, and came up the stairs, still herself, everything the case got afterward. 23:09 [SPEAKER_00]: It got because she lived, and the officers who carried around used the same word the sheriff had used. 23:15 [SPEAKER_00]: Brave. 23:16 [SPEAKER_03]: Somebody will cry today. 23:19 [SPEAKER_03]: If I make a phone call after this interview, somebody will cry, but I guarantee that some of that cry will be joy, because they know where Cody is. 23:28 [SPEAKER_03]: They know where Tina is. 23:29 [SPEAKER_03]: They know where Stephanie is. 23:32 [SPEAKER_03]: I know they'll cry for some much joy, Matt, because I've already heard it with Sarah. 23:37 [SPEAKER_03]: What I'm probably gonna do, Matt, is leave this room, and when I get away from these guys, probably cry like a baby, because it's working on me, man. 23:47 [SPEAKER_05]: I can't tell you something, but you know, why do I must do that, something wrong? 24:09 [SPEAKER_05]: So, let's try to tell what just happens, and what one did you find outside of the house? 24:24 [SPEAKER_04]: No. 24:25 [SPEAKER_05]: You understand? 24:26 [SPEAKER_04]: There's... Did you ask her to just speak with her about, you know, what happened? 24:33 [SPEAKER_04]: How did you get to hear her? 24:34 [SPEAKER_04]: You know, I need to ask that. 24:39 [UNKNOWN]: I figured I had done something that I didn't know. 24:41 [UNKNOWN]: I had to just try to grow pieces together. 24:44 [SPEAKER_04]: Did you recognize or is someone that you didn't have seen before? 24:48 [SPEAKER_04]: Did you realize that this is a person you've seen before that now it was in your house here? 24:53 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know where to raise that tension. 24:55 [SPEAKER_04]: You don't know. 24:55 [SPEAKER_04]: I mean, I'm just asking because they were the tertiary's in the camera and they weren't taking me, you know, at the time this happened. 25:02 [SPEAKER_04]: So I was just wondering if you 25:04 [SPEAKER_04]: You know, in other words, it was something you knew, and then, wow, why are you already getting in my house? 25:10 [SPEAKER_04]: As she said, she asked you to hold my arms too, do you remember that? 25:13 [SPEAKER_05]: I don't know what to talk to you. 25:18 [SPEAKER_04]: I think that was a really good, you know. 25:23 [SPEAKER_04]: That's the one I thought I wanted to try it on. 25:25 [SPEAKER_04]: I didn't know I'm there. 25:27 [SPEAKER_04]: I was going one day out of my class, that's there. 25:30 [SPEAKER_05]: What you had for this? 25:31 [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. 25:32 [SPEAKER_05]: You could go. 25:41 [SPEAKER_05]: So I didn't know how to call her out of after I graduated from high school. 25:46 [SPEAKER_04]: I did. 25:48 [SPEAKER_05]: That's where I got into my first trouble. 25:49 [SPEAKER_05]: I did something really bad. 25:53 [UNKNOWN]: And I pieced together a few years ago. 25:56 [UNKNOWN]: And it went into my first prison time. 26:03 [SPEAKER_04]: You're out there with a tough purpose. 26:05 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't know. 26:05 [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so if you're in town with me, 26:16 [SPEAKER_05]: I don't want to hurt anyone next to me. 26:24 [SPEAKER_05]: You know what? 26:25 [SPEAKER_05]: It takes a kind of medication. 26:27 [SPEAKER_05]: I mean, if it doesn't hurt anybody, it doesn't directly address the problem. 26:40 [SPEAKER_05]: It's just how we're going to treat the virus. 26:43 [UNKNOWN]: I just want to do something better. 26:46 [SPEAKER_04]: That wouldn't be a good thing to do. 26:49 [SPEAKER_02]: Well, that can work through them. 26:51 [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, potentially I can guarantee these things. 26:55 [SPEAKER_04]: But facility you might go to, you know, where you might go, what might happen? 26:59 [SPEAKER_04]: And the attitude that the people in this history have to take for you can be affected by the fact that you decided at this point to do the right thing. 27:08 [SPEAKER_03]: And the moment we broke in your house, found you found her in the basement, you owned it all. 27:13 [SPEAKER_04]: You only all. 27:15 [SPEAKER_04]: Okay, you can't do any other part of it at all, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I 27:40 [SPEAKER_04]: to your own fault. 27:41 [SPEAKER_04]: It's not going to figure out how, but I mean, I know, you know, you've got muscle up in your street. 27:47 [SPEAKER_04]: You want your life to adapt as a major, and kind of give you a little bit of a lot of people on a really good way, so you've got to have the four-year fire fire in your sister's fires. 27:56 [SPEAKER_04]: Okay. 27:57 [SPEAKER_04]: With Austin, I say this very generally, you are sitting in salt fitting, and that doesn't even help you. 28:06 [SPEAKER_00]: Hoffman was arrested in that house. 28:08 [SPEAKER_00]: He said nothing useful, detectives worked him with the patient's reserve for a man who isn't quite right. 28:15 [SPEAKER_00]: He was cooperative in tone, but empty in content. 28:18 [SPEAKER_00]: And that emptiness held for four days while the search kept walking the fields. 28:23 [SPEAKER_00]: He was charged at first, only with kidnapping. 28:26 [SPEAKER_00]: A million dollars bond. 28:28 [SPEAKER_00]: The search went on. 28:30 [SPEAKER_00]: But it's character changed. 28:31 [SPEAKER_00]: On Monday, the sheriff said the reality that the three missing might be dead was now more prevalent. 28:37 [SPEAKER_00]: They hope being lowered into the ground slowly. 28:40 [SPEAKER_00]: Family said they were still hopeful. 28:42 [SPEAKER_00]: The searchers kept walking the fields. 28:45 [SPEAKER_00]: Day 5, 6, 7, nothing. 28:48 [SPEAKER_00]: In the jail, Hoffman was placed on suicide watch. 28:51 [SPEAKER_00]: He sat there. 28:52 [SPEAKER_00]: While the county had hollowed out, kept walking its fields in the cone. 28:56 [SPEAKER_00]: And he owned the only map. 28:58 [SPEAKER_00]: The proof was standing in a wildlife preserve near Frederickstown, 60 feet tall, and no one alive but Matthew Hoffman knew to look inside it. 29:08 [SPEAKER_00]: The bodies were recovered on Thursday, November 18th. 29:12 [SPEAKER_00]: and they were recovered because Matthew Hoffman decided to trade them. 29:16 [SPEAKER_00]: Through his attorneys, he offered the location in exchange for his life. 29:21 [SPEAKER_00]: In the county took the deal, prosecutors waited death penalty, against three families waiting beside telephones, and made the only humane call available. 29:30 [SPEAKER_00]: Matthew Hoffman's mother had visited him in jail the night before the information came through. 29:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Her first visit, and told reporters she believed it played a part, who had passed between mother and son in that visiting room, is theirs. 29:44 [SPEAKER_00]: The place was the co-cossing lake wildlife area, off a rural road near Frederickstown. 29:50 [SPEAKER_00]: A mild deep into woods so dense, the investigators concluded he must have dragged his cargo the final distance. 29:59 [SPEAKER_00]: stood an old beach, 60 feet of it, hollow through the heart of the trunk. 30:04 [SPEAKER_00]: He'd put them inside the tree, Tina Herman, Stephanie Sprayne, Cody Manard, that remains in their black plastic, had been lowered down into the hollow, using a rigged pulley, the equipment and craft of his trade, turned to this. 30:20 [SPEAKER_00]: The little dog was in the tree with them, the bags had settled far down inside the trunk and the recovery team, unable to reach them from above, had to cut a hole into the living wood, to bring the three of them out. 30:34 [SPEAKER_00]: The recovery took a better part of the day, the team's worked in the cold under the bare canopy, and a silence witness is called church-like. 30:43 [SPEAKER_00]: A mile from the nearest road, in a preserve where the county's families had hiked and hunted for generations, men and gloves received what came out of the trunk and carried it out of the woods and procession. 30:55 [SPEAKER_00]: The tree had been a landmark to people who loved that ground. 30:58 [SPEAKER_00]: It is a different landmark now. 31:00 [SPEAKER_01]: Ohio Police have discovered the missing family members of 13-year-old Sarah Maynard, who was found bound and gagged last Sunday in the basement of Matthew Hoffman. 31:10 [SPEAKER_01]: The discovery has ended all hopes that they may be found alive. 31:14 [SPEAKER_01]: Sarah's mother Tina Herman, her brother Cody Maynard, and her mother's friend Stephanie Sprang, were found stuffed in a hollow tree, an Apple Valley, Ohio after Hoffman's lawyers told authorities where the bodies were. 31:28 [SPEAKER_01]: Knox County Sheriff David Barbers says the case is now a homicide investigation, but did not characterize the information provided by Hoffman as a confession. 31:38 [SPEAKER_01]: There are no other suspects and currently no motive. 31:41 [SPEAKER_01]: The victims are believed to have been killed in their blood-spattered home 10 miles from where Hoffman lived on November 10. 31:47 [SPEAKER_01]: It was unclear whether Sarah, who was also in the house at the time witnessed the killings. 31:53 [SPEAKER_01]: Knox County Prosecutor John Thatcher said, quote, The tragedy today is just devastating. 31:58 [SPEAKER_01]: The results aren't what we wanted them to be. 32:00 [SPEAKER_00]: In the aftermath, there was talk about the tree itself, whether it should come down, whether the ground should be marked. 32:07 [SPEAKER_00]: The quiet consensus was to leave the woods alone, and let the preserve go back to being a preserve. 32:13 [SPEAKER_00]: The families buried their dead in proper ground, with services that overflowed the churches. 32:18 [SPEAKER_00]: The town line the routes, Tina and Cody were more and together, mother and son, in the image from that week, the ribbons, the possessions, the dairy queen son, with its message up in plastic letters, became the county's permanent album of the worst Monday ever had, co-coating kept its trees, grief does not need the landmark, it knows the way, only a tree climber could have done it, 32:48 [SPEAKER_00]: rigging, the arborist knowledge of how a great trees put together, and what a hollow one can hold. 32:54 [SPEAKER_00]: Trees were the one thing in Matthew Hoffman's life he was intimate with, and the one thing he loved, Hoffman's fixation on trees surfaced everywhere in the case. 33:03 [SPEAKER_00]: the profession, then not eclimbing. 33:05 [SPEAKER_00]: The House of Leaves, the request from custody. 33:08 [SPEAKER_00]: The officers now harm the tree. 33:11 [SPEAKER_00]: His inner wife held a canopy. 33:13 [SPEAKER_00]: People were the species he could not connect to. 33:16 [SPEAKER_00]: When he gave up the location, he made it clear that he wanted the tree not to be damaged. 33:20 [SPEAKER_00]: He considered his sacred. 33:22 [SPEAKER_00]: Dr. Ogles' office received a came out of the beach on the 18th, an autopsy in a case like this, is not a formality. 33:30 [SPEAKER_00]: It is the last interview the victims will ever give, conducted in a steel room. 33:35 [SPEAKER_00]: The cause of death was the same for all three, blood boss, from repeated sharp-force injuries, concentrated in the back. 33:43 [SPEAKER_00]: This was consistent with the 33:46 [SPEAKER_00]: A sharp force injury is either an incised wound or a stab wound, in the difference's direction, an incised wound is longer than it is deep, made by drawing an edge across tissue. 33:58 [SPEAKER_00]: A stab wound is deeper than it is long, made by driving the point in. 34:02 [SPEAKER_00]: A box cutter, a retractable blade made for cardboard, makes both, as a short cutting edge and a fine point. 34:10 [SPEAKER_00]: And in a hand-using force, it opens skin, then fat beneath it, then muscle, and where it reaches them, the vessels. 34:18 [SPEAKER_00]: The hatchet, the edge shopping tool, is what it answered the bone. 34:23 [SPEAKER_00]: The damage meant the autopsies were also reconstructions. 34:26 [SPEAKER_00]: The examiners matching and confirming were turning the three people to themselves before they can be returned to their families. 34:34 [SPEAKER_00]: The deal that produced the bodies also produced the document because the bargain required a Hoffman to tell authorities in full, how and why. 34:42 [SPEAKER_00]: The confession was made public that winter and reading it is like listening to a man described someone else's crime from very far away. 34:50 [SPEAKER_00]: After the murders by his own telling, he went to fetch 34:55 [SPEAKER_00]: He was going to go back and burn the house on King Beach Drive to the ground, the same as the Colorado solution, fire to erase the scene, three bodies and the evidence with them, but a sheriff's deputy pulled up almost immediately and asked for his license in his business there, so he could not burn the house, he went home instead, he built a campfire in his yard, he drank a bottle of wine, he burned his shoes. 35:20 [SPEAKER_00]: On January 6, 2011, in the Knox County Common Police Corps, before Judge Oathel-Eister, Matthew Hoffman pleaded guilty to all 10 felony accounts, three aggravated murders, kidnapping, the rape, burglary, abuse of a corpse, tampering, there was no trial, no defense theory, no jury. 35:41 [SPEAKER_00]: The plea was the deal completing itself, wife and prison, with no possibility of parole. 35:46 [SPEAKER_00]: Hoffman offered no explanation beyond the document. 35:49 [SPEAKER_00]: After the hearing, the veins took him to prison, where he remains, and where he will die. 35:57 [SPEAKER_00]: Two weeks after the bodies came out of the tree, someone set fire to the house on King Beach Drive. 36:02 [SPEAKER_00]: The fire caused minor damage and was ruled arson, and it has never been officially explained. 36:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Hoffman was in a cell. 36:10 [SPEAKER_00]: Whoever struck the match, the house were a happened and become a thing the county could not look at. 36:16 [SPEAKER_00]: And eventually it came down and the lot went back to grass. 36:20 [SPEAKER_00]: The dairy queen ran a fundraiser for Sarah and Stephanie's family. 36:24 [SPEAKER_00]: There were funds for the funerals, benefit nights, jars by cash registers across the county, with the family's photographs taped to them. 36:32 [SPEAKER_00]: Tina Herman was a good mother in the middle of building a life she liked. 36:36 [SPEAKER_00]: Stephanie Spring died a few doors from her own home, because she was the kind of friend who walked over in the morning. 36:42 [SPEAKER_00]: Cody Manard was 11, and the whole of his life was still ahead of him, and a man he never saw coming, took it all from him. 36:50 [SPEAKER_00]: Listener. 36:51 [SPEAKER_00]: There's a kind of house a person never leaves. 36:54 [SPEAKER_00]: Sarah Manard walked out of the basement on Columbus Road on a Sunday in November. 37:00 [SPEAKER_00]: She got free. 37:01 [SPEAKER_00]: She grew up. 37:02 [SPEAKER_00]: She had the years the tree took from her mother and her brother. 37:05 [SPEAKER_00]: She is the one who lived. 37:07 [SPEAKER_00]: The officers cut the restraints off her body that morning. 37:10 [SPEAKER_00]: The untie her hands and took the gag from her mouth and carried her up into the gray light. 37:21 [SPEAKER_00]: in a few merciful seconds, but some bindings and no rescue reaches. 37:25 [SPEAKER_00]: A part of a person can stay tied in a room. 37:28 [SPEAKER_00]: The body has already left. 37:30 [SPEAKER_00]: A part of her can stay gagged, holding a silence that has no bottom. 37:34 [SPEAKER_00]: Any basement that was demolished years ago. 37:37 [SPEAKER_00]: And still stands, whole and dark, somewhere inside her, because a house is not only a place. 37:44 [SPEAKER_00]: It is also a set of rooms that get built in 37:47 [SPEAKER_00]: in the room's Hoffman built in that 13-year-old did not come down when the real house does. 37:53 [SPEAKER_00]: They cannot be searched or bulldozed or returned to grass. 37:57 [SPEAKER_00]: She carries them. 37:58 [SPEAKER_00]: She carries them into rooms. 38:00 [SPEAKER_00]: He never saw ages. 38:02 [SPEAKER_00]: He never touched. 38:03 [SPEAKER_00]: through a life he will never know anything about. 38:06 [SPEAKER_00]: This is what violence steals. 38:08 [SPEAKER_00]: Not only the dead, though it takes them entirely, it takes the survivors right to a single unhaunted room, the ordinary luxury of walking into a kitchen, and finding only that. 38:19 [SPEAKER_00]: Somewhere in Sarah, a door stands open, into the worst afternoon of her life. 38:24 [SPEAKER_00]: And no amount of living closes it all the way, there is a version of her still down in that dark, still bound, still waiting for the sound on the stairs. 38:33 [SPEAKER_00]: The woman who walked out has had to build her whole life around that girl and carry her to, gently. 38:40 [SPEAKER_00]: The bravery the sheriff named in the first week was never only about those four days, it is about every day after, 38:53 [SPEAKER_00]: Hoffman asked one thing of the world when it was over. 38:56 [SPEAKER_00]: He asked that the tree be spared, not the women, not the boy, not the girl he kept in the dark beneath his floor. 39:03 [SPEAKER_00]: He went in mercy for wood, he never thought to ask if for her. 39:06 [SPEAKER_00]: The man can love each tree and hollow a child, and grieve only the tree. 39:12 [SPEAKER_00]: The why is grass? 39:13 [SPEAKER_00]: Sarah goes on to Ford. 39:16 [SPEAKER_00]: carrying the one house that will never come down and the girl still bound inside it, climbing up out of that basement, every single morning, the out of that house of leaves.
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