In the summer of 1982, the community of St. Joseph, Missouri, was gripped by a heart-wrenching tragedy. On July 29th, 11-year-old Michelle Steele, a young female, vanished after a dental appointment. A massive search was launched by police and sixty-five volunteers when she failed to return home. The following day, her uncle made a devastating discovery; Michelle's nude and battered body was found on a bank of the Missouri River.
An autopsy would later reveal that she had been brutally beaten and strangled to death.
The investigation swiftly led to the arrest of Charles Ray Hatcher the very next day as he attempted to check himself into the St. Joseph State Hospital. Eyewitnesses had reported seeing a man matching his description near the crime scene. Hatcher, a man with a criminal history of sexual assault, soon became the primary suspect. While awaiting trial for Michelle's murder, Hatcher's chilling history of violence began to unravel. He confessed not only to the murder of Michelle Steele but to a horrifying string of fifteen other murders dating back to 1969.
Among his confessions was the murder of 4-year-old Eric Christgen, another child from St. Joseph who had been found dead along the Missouri River in 1978 after being sexually abused and suffocated. At the time of Hatcher's confession, another man, Melvin Reynolds, was wrongfully serving a life sentence for Eric's murder. Hatcher provided details about the crime that only the true killer could have known, leading to Reynolds' exoneration and release.
In October 1983, Charles Ray Hatcher pleaded guilty to the murder of Eric Christgen and was sentenced to life in prison. A year later, in December 1984, he was convicted of the murder of Michelle Steele and received a life sentence without the possibility of parole for fifty years. Despite requesting the death penalty, the jury opted for a life term. However, Hatcher would not serve his full sentence. Just four days after his sentencing for Michelle's murder, on December 7, 1984, the 55-year-old serial killer was found dead in his solitary confinement cell at the Missouri State Penitentiary, having taken his own life by hanging.
