Texas summers are brutal. In July 1987, the heat in Stephenville was the kind that sticks to your skin, but for the Woods family, the air went cold when Susan Woods didn’t show up for her shift at the local sandpaper factory. Her father, checking in on her, walked into a nightmare. He found Susan, just 30 years old, dead in her bathtub.
The scene was gruesome. She was naked, beaten, and the water in the tub had turned black.
Stephenville is the "Cowboy Capital of the World," a place where everyone thinks they know their neighbor. In 1987, the town decided they knew exactly who did it. They looked straight at Michael Woods, Susan’s estranged husband. He was a biker, he had a temper, and he’d left a nasty tape recording behind when he moved back to Indiana. To the locals and the police, it was an open-and-shut case of a domestic dispute turned deadly.
Except it wasn't.
The Long Shadow of Michael Woods
For nearly twenty years, Michael Woods lived as a pariah. Imagine having your wife murdered and then having the entire world—including your own in-laws—convinced you’re the monster. Michael moved away, but the suspicion followed him like a ghost. He was depressed, haunted, and constantly looking over his shoulder.
The police were so sure it was him that they arguably stopped looking elsewhere. This is the classic "tunnel vision" that plagues many cold cases. They had fingerprints from the scene that didn't match Michael, but back then, without a match in a local database, those prints were just useless swirls of ink on a card.
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Michael even faced a lawsuit from Susan’s family. He was the villain in a story he didn't write. Honestly, it’s heartbreaking to think about a man losing his partner and his reputation in one fell swoop, while the real killer just... went to the funeral.
A Breakthrough in 2006
The case sat gathering dust until 2006. Lt. Don Miller took a fresh look at the files. Science had finally caught up to the crime.
Miller did what should have been done years prior: he ran those mystery fingerprints through the state’s Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS).
The computer didn't stutter. It flagged a match: Joseph Scott Hatley.
Hatley wasn't a stranger. He was a local guy, a "cowboy" type who had actually been an acquaintance of Susan's. He’d even attended her funeral and expressed his "condolences" to the family. Talk about cold-blooded.
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Why Hatley wasn't caught sooner
This is where the story gets frustrating. A year after Susan's murder, a 16-year-old girl named Shannon Myers reported that Hatley had brutally assaulted her. If the dots had been connected then, the police might have realized they had a predator in their midst. But in the late 80s, these types of reports didn't always trigger a cross-reference with high-profile cold cases.
The Confession from the Grave
When confronted in 2006, Hatley didn't initially admit to the murder. He claimed they’d "fooled around" but denied killing her. However, the DNA evidence was undeniable. Faced with the needle or a deal, he took a plea for 30 years.
He only served 11 of those years. He was released in 2018.
But the real "motive"—if you can call it that—didn't surface until 2022. Hatley died of cancer in a trailer, and after his death, investigators found a literal mountain of writings. Hundreds of pages. It was a diary of a monster.
In those pages, Hatley admitted to the "fear" he felt as a drug. He wrote about how he went to Susan’s house, thinking she was flirting with him. When she rejected his advances and slapped him, he "brutalized" her. He described the murder as a blur, admitting he used a pillow to suffocate her.
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He wrote, "I had become a monster."
What We Can Learn From the Susan Woods Case
This story isn't just a "true crime" tidbit; it's a cautionary tale about the justice system. It highlights how easily a community can pick a scapegoat and how DNA technology is often the only thing standing between an innocent man and a life of ruin.
If you’re following this case or similar ones in Texas, here are the actionable takeaways:
- Support Cold Case Initiatives: Many departments, like the one in Stephenville, only solve these cases when a dedicated detective decides to pull a file from the basement. Advocacy for cold case funding is vital.
- Question Initial Narratives: The "angry husband" trope is common because it’s often true, but as we saw with Michael Woods, it’s not always true. Evidence must lead the investigation, not local gossip.
- Understand DNA Limitations: While DNA solved this, it took 20 years for the technology to be accessible and the databases to be populated enough to find Hatley.
- Acknowledge the Victims: Susan Woods wasn't just a "case file." She was a daughter and a worker at a sandpaper factory who deserved a life that wasn't cut short by a man who couldn't handle the word "no."
The closure for the Woods family came late, and for Michael Woods, it came after a lifetime of misery. But the truth, eventually, found its way out of the bathtub and into the light.
The most important thing to do now is to ensure that victim statements, like the one Shannon Myers gave in 1988, are taken with the gravity they deserve, preventing future predators from hiding in plain sight for decades.