Table of Contents
Content warning: rape, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, murder.
I am tired. I am tired of writing the same story with different names. A girl tells. Nobody listens. A man walks. Another woman pays.
This time the town was Stephenville, Texas. The man was Joseph Scott Hatley. But this post is not about him. It is about Susan Woods, who should be alive. It is about Shannon Myers, who told the truth at 15 and was treated like the problem. And it is about his wife, a disabled woman whose words finally put him in handcuffs nearly twenty years after a girl tried to do it first.
Here is what happened, and why every one of us should be furious.
1. Susan Woods should be alive.
In July 1987, Susan Woods was 30 years old, living alone in Stephenville and going through a divorce. She was raped and murdered in her own home and found in her bathtub. For almost two decades, the town was convinced her husband did it. DNA later cleared him.
The man who actually killed her was an acquaintance. He went to her funeral.
2. A girl told them who he was.
Shannon Myers was a 15-year-old newcomer to town (some outlets report 16). Hatley was 20. Within about a year of Susan’s murder, he assaulted Shannon, and then took her to a roadside park in Erath County where he beat and raped her for hours. She spent days in the hospital. A rape kit was done. She named him.
And she told police something else: during the attack, he said he had killed another woman.
Read that again. A teenage girl handed law enforcement a violent rapist who was bragging about a killing, in the same small town where a woman had just been murdered.
3. Texas law had a “promiscuity defense.” For sexual assault of a child.
This is not a metaphor. Until September 1, 1994, the Texas Penal Code said it was a defense to sexual assault of a child if the child was 14 or older and had previously “engaged promiscuously” in sexual conduct.
The law of the state looked at a raped girl and asked whether she had been good enough to deserve protection. The detective who later solved Susan’s murder said that back then, if you could show the victim was promiscuous, the charge would likely go away. It took public backlash to close that door, and it closed years too late for Shannon.
4. They put her reputation on trial instead of him.
Hatley’s family hired a private investigator. By the detective’s account, that investigator worked to destroy Shannon’s reputation and got enough people talking badly about her that the grand jury declined to indict.
The physical evidence did not change. Her injuries did not change. Her identification of him did not change. What changed was the story about her.
The detective’s summary of how the town saw it says everything: Hatley was clean-cut. “He was a Stephenville kid.” Shannon did not have that reputation.
He was protected by his image. She was punished for hers.
5. “Wild child” is what they call a girl being preyed on.
Shannon said she felt officers turn skeptical the moment she said she and Hatley had been in a sexual relationship. She believes her “wild child” reputation shaped how she was treated.
Let us be very clear. A 20-year-old man in a sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl is not a relationship. It is the crime. The thing they used to doubt her was itself evidence against him.
6. Every no-bill has a cost, and women pay it.
The grand jury said no. Hatley went on with his life. He later wrote about drifting through roadside bars seeking out vulnerable women. Whatever he did in those years, there is no known record of it, because nobody was looking.
When a system refuses to believe one girl, it is not being neutral. It is making a decision about who the next woman will be.
7. His wife is the one who finally stopped him.
In June 2006, when investigators brought Hatley in for questioning about Susan’s murder, they also spoke with his wife. She was disabled. She told them he had repeatedly abused her, physically and sexually. Her sexual assault allegations are what led investigators to arrest him. He was charged with assaulting her.
Think about the courage that took. A disabled woman, living with the man, speaking up to police. She did in one interview what the system refused to do for Shannon in 1988.
8. It took science and one detective, not “the system.”
In 2006, Lt. Don Miller of the Stephenville police took over the cold case. DNA from cigarette butts at the scene, untestable in 1987, cleared Susan’s husband. Fingerprints from the scene, re-run through the state database, matched Hatley. His DNA matched too.
When Miller dug into Hatley’s file, there it was: Shannon’s report. Sitting there the whole time.
Hatley pleaded guilty about a week before trial and was sentenced in 2007 to 30 years for Susan’s murder.
9. Thirty years became eleven. And Shannon never got her day.
Hatley was released in 2018 after serving about 11 years. He was found dead in his trailer around 2021, reportedly after a cancer diagnosis.
He was never held to account for what he did to Shannon. When people asked the Erath County DA whether her case could go back to a grand jury, the answer was no. In the 1980s, Texas had a five-year limitation for sexual assault and ten years for sexual assault of a child. Today there is no statute of limitations for sexual assault of a child in Texas. Today does not help a girl from 1988.
10. Shannon outlived his story.
Shannon has spoken publicly on Dateline and ABC’s 20/20. She told her truth again, as an adult, to a national audience, about the man a grand jury refused to charge. And she has said she is no longer his victim.
She is a Survivor. She was right at 15. She was right the whole time.
What this case asks of us
- Believe girls the first time. Shannon’s report contained the key to a murder. It sat in a file for eighteen years.
- Stop asking whether she was “good.” A girl’s sexual history is not a defense for the man who raped her. Texas only stopped saying so in 1994. Watch for the same logic wherever it hides now.
- Name the age gap. A grown man and a child is not a romance, a relationship, or a “wild child” problem.
- Count the women. Susan. Shannon. His wife. Behind every man the system protects, there is a list.
- Push for no statutes of limitations on sexual violence. Shannon’s case shows exactly who time limits protect.
If you are a Survivor and need support, RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline is 1-800-656-4673, and the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
Sources
- Texas Monthly, “Everyone in Stephenville Thought They Knew Who Killed Susan Woods”: https://www.texasmonthly.com/true-crime/susan-woods-stephenville-murder-hidden-killer/
- Texas Monthly podcast, Stephenville Episode 4: Shannon: https://www.texasmonthly.com/podcast/stephenville-episode-4-shannon/
- Texas Monthly podcast, Stephenville Episode 6: Hatley: https://www.texasmonthly.com/podcast/stephenville-episode-6-hatley/
- ABC News / 20/20, “‘I had become a monster'”: https://abcnews.com/US/become-monster-convicted-killers-thoughts-grave/story?id=106291548
- Beneath the Surface News, on the DA and the statute of limitations: https://www.beneaththesurfacenews.com/post/can-the-man-who-confessed-to-killing-susan-woods-face-additional-charges-here-s-what-the-da-says
- Beneath the Surface News, on Hatley’s death: https://www.beneaththesurfacenews.com/post/the-man-who-killed-stephenville-resident-susan-woods-in-1987-found-dead-inside-his-trailer
- May v. State (Tex. Crim. App. 1996), noting the promiscuity defense was abolished effective September 1, 1994: https://hallapproved.com/tx/cases/criminal/1996/2459757/
