ELEVEN

A Footprint in Blood and Oil

Because Tina’s pickup truck had been found so close to Kenyon College in the town of Gambier, the school was put into a state of lockdown. At 10:15 PM November 11, e-mails and phone calls were sent out to students and faculty. All of the messages warned people to stay in place, which meant no wandering around the campus grounds. Students not already in their dormitories were escorted there by campus security officers. Students residing at the Brown Family Environmental Center, near where Tina’s pickup had been found, were transported to Weaver Cottage on the Kenyon campus.

Additional campus security officers were brought in to help secure the campus, and the sixteen hundred students cooperated during the lockdown. Mark Ellis, communications director for Kenyon College, later said, “We were contacted by the Knox County Sheriff’s Office, who [informed us] of a crime at Apple Valley and the possibility that a dangerous person might be on campus.” This lockdown was taken seriously by students and faculty.

Back at the Kokosing Gap Trail parking lot, investigators were busy taking multiple photos of Tina Herrmann’s pickup truck and scouring the surrounding area for evidence. Once they finished the onsite investigation, they loaded the pickup onto a car carrier and took it to a police impound yard. There it would be searched in a more thorough manner under very controlled conditions. Of vital interest to the investigators was whether any blood could be found in the pickup, as well as any fingerprints that did not match those of Tina, Sarah, Kody or Stephanie. Meanwhile, Hoffman moved Sarah down into his dark basement and onto a bed of leaves that he had constructed for her, and removed her blindfold. She recalled later, “I was really afraid when I was first taken there. It was so dark, you couldn’t see anything. There were no windows, so you couldn’t tell if it was day or night.

“He would come down there sometimes and just stand there and stare at me. He didn’t say a word, just stared. And then he would go back upstairs. I don’t know which was worse—him not saying anything or him saying something. I couldn’t figure out what he wanted when he didn’t say anything. It was hard to tell what he was thinking that way. Mostly I just laid alone in the dark. And even though there were blankets and stuff that he put there, it was always cold. At least it was better than lying on the floor [of the bathroom] where he first kept me. That was not only cold, it was hard too.

Even though it was almost impossible to keep her thoughts from conjuring up frightening images of what might happen next, she later said that she tried to suppress these thoughts as best she could. Her plan was to only deal with whatever was happening at the moment. Especially when it came to interacting with her captor.

While Hoffman was planning his next move, BCI&I Special Agents Edward Lulla and Edward Carlini arrived at Tina Herrmann’s residence on King Beach Drive. It was 9:45 PM on Thursday, November 11. Outside the house, they were briefed by KCSO Sheriff David Barber and several KCSO detectives, who gave the BCI&I agents all the background on the incidents that had led up to the request that they be there: the report by Valerie Haythorn, the blood in the house and the missing individuals.

Sheriff Barber added that a KCSO patrol deputy had spotted the pickup truck that Tina usually drove, in a parking lot of the Kokosing Gap Trail. The pickup truck had been towed to a storage yard for analysis.

After the briefing, Agents Lulla and Carlini and Detective Sergeant Roger Brown pulled on protective footwear over their shoes and entered the residence. During their initial run-through, they noticed that the garage door was off its track. They did not know whether this was something new or had been that way for a while.

Given that it looked to be a very complex crime scene, Agents Lulla and Carlini requested that BCI&I Special Agent Gary Wilgus join them to do any blood-spatter analysis. Wilgus, however, told them he couldn’t make it there until the next day, so the two other agents decided to start doing some of the processing before he arrived.

In the initial walk-through, Agents Lulla and Carlini noted “a remarkable amount of blood in three separate areas of the house, each [of] which led to the main bathroom of the house. In the bathroom were large stains and a bathtub and shower wall covered in suspected blood.”

Both Agent Lulla and Carlini worked until 4:00 AM, November 12. Because of the very late hour, it was decided that the residence would be secured by KCSO, and the BCI&I agents would return again later in the day.

* * *

When he returned to his house following the incident with Deputy Aaron Phillips at the Kokosing Gap Trail parking lot, Matt Hoffman made sure that the girl was tied up on the bed of leaves in the basement and then decided to drink a bottle of wine and burn some incriminating evidence. He started a bonfire in his backyard and threw his shoes into the flames. This didn’t seem to concern his neighbors, since they were used to him doing odd things at all hours of the day and night. Hoffman made sure that the shoes burned down to ash. He wasn’t worried about the girl in his house—she was tied up and gagged. He then slept for a couple of hours and woke around midnight. Before he left, he went down to the basement and looked at the girl again. He didn’t say anything, just stared at her.

In the early hours of Friday, November 12, Hoffman decided to go back to the woods near Tina’s house, the same woods where he had spent the night of November 9. He’d left items there he now needed to collect before the police found them. He also wanted to see what kind of police activity was going on at the residence on King Beach Drive.

Hoffman drove to a parking lot at Millwood and then rode his bike to a hill near Apple Valley Lake. From there he left his bike and slowly made his way on foot to the woods near Tina’s residence. It was miles away, and once again this took a lot of time.

When he arrived, in the darkness of the early morning hours, Hoffman noticed the crime scene tape around the house and the police working, both inside and out. Hoffman spent awhile in the woods, watching. In some ways he liked this—seeing what they were doing and not being seen. The police seemed to have no idea he was down there spying on them. Hoffman got a kick spying on people—he had often done so from up in the branches of a tree on his property,

After quite a while of watching, Hoffman gathered up a few of his things before making his way back, on foot, to his bike and then backtracking to his car. Authorities would learn later just what he took from the woods—a baseball cap and a knife—and what he left behind. And as with much of what Hoffman did, none of it would make much sense to other people. The walk to his bicycle took quite a long time, and it was about 9:00 AM when he got home, once again exhausted from all his nocturnal activities.

* * *

Sarah, left in her cold dark dungeon on the bed of leaves, was fairly certain that her captor was gone once again. But he had told her that someone else would be watching the house whenever he wasn’t there. And besides, what could she do? She was tied to the primitive frame of the bed of leaves.

Sarah believed Hoffman was telling the truth about an accomplice. How else could he have moved so many vehicles around by himself? And how had he gotten to her house in the first place, if someone had not dropped him off there? Obviously he had driven Stephanie’s Jeep away from the house, with her in it, and she had even seen the silver car he’d approached, parked at the Pipesville Road baseball fields.

Sarah decided not to cause any waves. If someone was indeed watching the place, she didn’t want anything bad reported back to her assailant. It was best to do just what he said. It was her best insurance of survival.