Dateline: The Monster at Large - What happened to Susan Woods? Disturbing details of the 1987 homicide, revealed 

Susan Woods was a 30-year-old woman from Stephenville, Texas, whose tragic murder in 1987 remained unsolved for nearly two decades. Her estranged husband, Michael Woods, was a suspect for almost 20 years. Her case gained renewed attention when it was featured on NBC's Dateline: The Monster at Large. The show aired on August 14 2024, at 8 p.m. EST on Oxygen.

After being non-responsive for 2 days, her body was discovered in the bathtub by her father. During the investigation, some horrific details came forward that led to the culprit. It was not her husband. Read on to know about those horrific details.

Here are the horrific details about the Susan Woods case as shown in Dateline

In July 1987, Susan's body was discovered submerged in her bathtub, bound. Initially, her estranged husband, Michael Woods, was a prime suspect due to their tumultuous relationship. The husband, according to reports, had also made a vulgar tape and handwritten notes blaming Susan for their bad marriage. This led the investigators to consider him the prime suspect.

However, Woods refused to take the blame and claimed that he was in Indiana at the time of the murder. But it was only when they found out that the fingerprint from the crime scene didn't match Woods' that they cleared him of the charges. However, forensic evidence, including fingerprints and DNA, ultimately cleared him of any involvement, as shown in the Dateline episode.

In 2006, cold case detectives re-examined the evidence and submitted the fingerprints found at the crime scene to a national database. This led to a match with Joseph Scott Hatley, a man with a criminal history who had been convicted of armed robbery in Las Vegas in 1988.

Hatley had known Susan through a relative and had attended her funeral. He was arrested in 2006 and pleaded guilty to her murder in 2007, receiving a 30-year sentence.

How did the police get hold of Hatley and his crime in Dateline?

Early on in the investigation, Hatley produced vague answers. But it is only later that they found out that Hatley had notes written about the murder. Later, he claimed that Susan used to flirt with him, and when he reached her house, Susan ended up slapping him. Furious, he r*ped and killed her, sufficating her under a pillow.

“My God, I had become a monster… She was alive. I could have stopped, but I didn’t,” one of his notes reads.

Hatley served only 11 years of his sentence before being released on parole due to good behaviour, as shown in Dateline. In 2021, he was found dead in his trailer home from complications related to cancer. His passing provided some closure to Susan's family and friends, who had suffered for years without answers.

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