How Investigators Discovered Three Murder Victims Inside a Tree

The investigator's dog didn't alert on the tree—its trunk was too thick to give away any secrets. But on November 18, 2010, this was where the police and Ohio Bureau of Investigation had been told to look in: a hollowed-out tree in the middle of the woods in Kokosing Wildlife Preserve. And there they were, two women and an 11-year-old boy, in pieces, in garbage bags, placed inside the tree.

Once the death penalty was off the table, suspect Matthew Hoffman got down to writing. The unemployed tree trimmer had been arrested after police found 13-year-old Sarah Maynard bound (and alive) in his basement atop a pile of leaves—one of many piles in his bizarre home, its walls covered with plastic shopping bags full of leaves.

In a 10-page confession letter, Hoffman wrote that he'd invaded Maynard's mother Tina Hermann's home to rob it on November 10, 2010. He didn't expect Hermann to come home so quickly, or for her close friend and neighbor, Stephanie Sprang, to enter the home as he attempted to beat Hermann unconscious.

As he stabbed both women to death, he wrote, he also didn't expect Hermann's kids 11-year-old Kody Maynard and 13-year-old Sarah Maynard to come home from school. He attacked both children as they walked in the front door, but claimed he didn't kill Sarah because he thought he could subdue her.

His confession also detailed how he'd "processed" the bodies of his spree murder victims and hidden them away in a tree.

"It's kind of primitive, if you think about animals—sometimes after a kill, they'll hide it away," Dr. N.G. Berrill, a forensic psychologist in New York who was not affiliated with the Hoffman case, tells A&E.

Berrill adds that the state of Hoffman's home indicates "a psychotic preoccupation with collecting leaves as a form of camouflage." He believes Hoffman's behaviors indicate signs of schizophrenia.

It is unclear if Hoffman was ever officially diagnosed with that mental illness. But in jail, Hoffman said he did not want to be injected with Thorazine, a treatment for schizophrenia, according to The Columbus Dispatch.

Police had tracked down Hoffman on November 14 after finding a shopping bag and receipt for tarps in Hermann's garage. When they viewed the store’s surveillance footage, it showed Hoffman, who a clerk remembered driving a unique compact car. Police then searched for local owners of the car brand and found Hoffman's driver's license photo. In it, he was wearing the same shirt he had on in the store surveillance footage.

As the Interrogation Raw footage shows, Hoffman had initially told interrogators that he'd "found" Maynard in his house in the days after the crime and realized that he must have done something bad.

Hoffman described taking care of her, feeding her and allowing her to shower. But investigators found that he'd sexually assaulted the teenager during her four-day captivity. Maynard later said all she was offered to eat was cereal with rotten milk.

Hoffman had transferred Maynard from her home to his own using victim Sprang's vehicle; the blindfolded Maynard later learned that she'd been placed atop her mother, brother and family friend's bodies, she told producers of the Dr. Phil TV talk show, two years after her rescue in 2013.

"Knowing that you can never say 'mom' again, it's the worst feeling in the world," Maynard told Elizabeth Smart in a 2019 Lifetime special, Smart Justice: The Jayme Closs Case.

Closs, who was kidnapped and held in captivity for 88 days, lost her parents, James and Denise Closs, when her kidnapper Jake Patterson murdered them before abducting her.

Maynard felt a kinship to the 13-year-old. "If [Closs] is able to look up to me, I can help her in a very positive way," Maynard said, encouraging the recently recovered Closs not to give up.

Maynard described her rescue to Smart, saying, "The moment I was saved, I was forever relieved. I was happy. I knew I no longer had to be in danger. That I no longer had to be in that basement ever again."

But the teen had a hard time adjusting after her trauma. "It was hard for me to connect with society. It was hard for me to go to school. It was hard for me to make friends."

"The Girl in the Leaves," written by true crime author Robert Scott with Maynard and her father, Larry Maynard, includes the then-teen's impact statement at Hoffman's trial, where she describes her mother's love of dolphins and sunflowers and her brother's skill as a baseball pitcher. Kody had hoped to be a helicopter pilot when he grew up, she said.

"They didn't just die. Their lives were brutally taken," Maynard told Smart and a panel of other abduction survivors. "It made me become a really strong woman. It made me become a really strong mother."

On January 6, 2011, after pleading guilty to all charges, Hoffman was convicted of three counts of aggravated murderer, kidnapping and rape, among other crimes. He is currently serving life without parole at the Toledo Correctional Institution.