NINE

A House of Leaves

When Tina Herrmann did not show up for her job at Dairy Queen in Mount Vernon on the afternoon of November 10, 2010, her friend and manager at the restaurant, Valerie Haythorn, called the Knox County Sheriff’s Office (KCSO). Not showing up to work was unheard of for Tina; she was very responsible, and had never done anything like this before. Valerie was sure that something bad had happened to her.

Valerie talked to a dispatch operator at KCSO in the early evening hours and explained her concern. The operator told Valerie that a sheriff’s deputy would go by Tina’s house to do a welfare check, to determine if anything seemed out of place, or whether a dangerous situation might have occurred.

Knox County Sheriff’s Deputy Charles Statler was contacted about Valerie’s call and told to do a welfare check on Tina Herrmann on the 400 block of King Beach Drive. Statler in his report noted, “Valerie advised that Tina did not show up for work today, and she is concerned that something may have happened to her because Tina was going to break up with her boyfriend Gregory Borders.”

Deputy Statler drove by the house shortly after 8:00 PM and noticed that there was no vehicle in the driveway and no lights on in the house. He rang the doorbell, but no one answered. Since he didn’t have a search warrant to enter the house, and nothing outside seemed amiss, he noted the situation—the lack of a vehicle in the driveway and the lights off in the house—but didn’t see further cause for investigation.

Though he didn’t have to, Deputy Statler made a second welfare check at around 11:15 PM. This time, he noted the interior lights of the house were on and that a blue 2004 Ford pickup was parked in the driveway. Once again, however, nothing seemed to be amiss at the residence.

Deputy Statler didn’t know it at the time, but the man who lived with Tina, Sarah and Kody, Greg Borders, was out of town for the night. And as far as Stephanie Sprang went, apparently, no one in her household was concerned for her safety at that point. They may have thought that she was spending the night with Tina, or perhaps was even out of town with her. No one reported Stephanie as missing.

* * *

Back at Matthew Hoffman’s house, Sarah tried to stay awake during the night, but the whole ordeal had been too exhausting. She found herself drifting in and out of a nightmarish sleep. Already her sense of time was starting to slip away. After what she guessed must have been many hours, the man who had kidnapped her returned to the bathroom where she lay on the floor.

He made sure that her restraints were still in place, and Sarah began to put into practice what she knew would be a very delicate but important fight for her life. She decided that she had to befriend him. “I have to get him on my side,” she thought, realizing that might be the only way to keep him from killing her. By this time, she had suspicions about what exactly he’d done to her mom and Kody. She was unaware, however, that Stephanie Sprang had also been in her mom’s house and had been murdered as well.

After some innocuous chitchat, Sarah asked Hoffman about the strange drawings on the wall. His answers didn’t make much sense to her, but she tried to follow what he said. He tried to explain to her about the characters drawn on the wall, some of them human, some of them animals, and some half-human, half-animal. She asked if he was an artist. He did not reply.

After a while the man took Sarah out of the bathroom; she was not blindfolded at that point. She looked around and was stunned. There were bags and bags of leaves stacked up in every room, and a layer of leaves was spread out on the floors of the rooms, almost like a carpet.

Sarah asked, “Why are there so many leaves in the house?”

The man replied, “I use them to keep the house warm. They’re insulation.”

Sarah didn’t know if he was lying about this or not, but it seemed like a very odd way of insulating a house.

Changing gears, Sarah asked, “Did you break into our house before?”

The man answered no.

“How did you get to our house?” She wanted to know this, because obviously he had not driven her away from the house in his own car, but rather in Stephanie’s Jeep.

The man answered, “I had someone drop me off there.”

Sarah did not quite believe him, but she didn’t press the issue.

She then asked, “Did you kill my mom and Kody?”

The man said, “No.”

She was very skeptical about this as well but didn’t question him further about it. Instead she asked, “What did you do to my dog?”

The man said, “I let it out of the house.” This, of course, was a lie. The dog was dead, its body parts stuffed into bags along with those of Tina, Stephanie and Kody.

By now Sarah was starving. She asked if he could feed her something. His answer surprised her. “I have some dead squirrels in the freezer. Do you want me to cook you up one?”

Sarah replied, “No!” She would rather go hungry than eat squirrel.

Finally he made a bowl of cereal for her. But the milk was sour, and it took a lot of control on her part not to gag and spit out the awful stuff. If this was all he was going to give her to eat, she knew she had to make the best of it.

Hoffman would say later that he was exhausted, so he tied the girl to him and fell asleep on a couch. Sarah adamantly denied this account, saying that Hoffman once again gagged her and kept her tied up where she could not get away. He also stuffed her in a closet at some point, though later on, both Hoffman’s and Sarah’s memories were so disjointed, it was hard to know when certain events had happened. Whatever the case, Hoffman took a much-needed nap to recoup after all his excursions during the night. He knew he’d need his strength to perform the many tasks necessary to keep himself in the clear.

* * *

When Tina Herrmann failed to show up to work on Thursday, November 11, her friend and manager Valerie Haythorn was so concerned that she again phoned KCSO. Sergeant Al Dexter learned from a phone call to Sarah and Kody’s school that they had not shown up either that day. All of this was becoming more worrisome. It was not like the kids to skip school.

A short time later, Valerie phoned KCSO once more and told them that she’d just learned that Tina’s friend and neighbor, Stephanie Sprang, was also missing. Valerie had phoned Stephanie’s house because she knew that Tina and Stephanie were such good friends. It was at that point that Valerie learned Stephanie was missing as well. Sergeant Dexter did a welfare check at Stephanie’s residence and another check outside of Tina’s residence. No one was at home at either place when he arrived. Sergeant Dexter also noted that the blue Ford pickup that Deputy Statler had seen in the driveway the night before was now gone from the area.

Around 4:00 PM, Valerie managed to contact Stephanie Sprang’s live-in boyfriend, Ron Metcalf, and they agreed to meet and check Tina’s residence. Ron lived with Stephanie on Magers Drive, only a few houses down the road from Tina’s place. When Valerie got there, she and Ron talked for a while, and then Valerie decided to enter the house. She removed a rear window screen, raised a window and climbed through. Everything was very still, quiet and spooky. Valerie went farther into the house, and what she saw terrified her: there were bloodstains on the living room and hallway carpet, a lot of blood. It looked as if someone had been dragged along the carpet. Valerie, now frantic, quickly left the house and phoned the sheriff’s office once more.

Previously, the officers had been sent to do only “welfare checks,” but now it was clear there was something seriously wrong at the house on King Beach Drive. This time, when KCSO sergeants arrived at the residence, they were determined to go inside and figure out just what had happened there.