The Girl in the Leaves (23 page)

THIRTY-SIX

Bright Lights in a Sea of Darkness

On November 9, 2011, the day before the first anniversary of the tragic events that
had occurred one year earlier, Larry Maynard went around Mount Vernon and Apple Valley
with a journalist. They drove from Larry’s home up Interstate 270 and State Highway
3 to Mount Vernon, and Larry recalled all the events of his and Tina’s life. He spoke
of the good times, and the rough times when he and Tina had broken up, and also the
fact that they never lost respect for each other. “She was always a good person,”
he said. “And she loved her kids. For her, they were her whole world.”

As they drove up to Columbus Road, they turned right, and then suddenly there it was—the
house where Matthew Hoffman had kept his daughter, Sarah, for four days. Larry had
never been there, and he struggled with his emotions as he got out of the vehicle
and stood on the sidewalk in front of the house.

On the outside, it looked so ordinary. It was up for sale now, but no one was buying.
Larry stared at it for a while and then said, “Sometimes I can’t believe it all happened.
It just seems like a bad dream and someday I’ll wake up and find out that it was just
a nightmare. But then I realize, it’s not just a bad dream, and it did happen.”

Larry walked around the house and gazed down at the basement area where Sarah had
been tied up and kept on a bed of leaves. He mused, “A lot of people thought that
the leaves were just a sign that he was crazy. But I believe he had another intention
in mind. I think that when he was done with Sarah, he planned to kill her and then
burn the house down. What could burn more quickly than dried leaves? All the evidence
would be gone. He planned to burn it all down and then disappear. And he was an arsonist.
He liked fires. He’d already proved in Colorado that he cared nothing about human
life when he burned down that condo with people inside.”

Farther around the house, a large tree loomed over Matthew Hoffman’s yard. This was
the tree where Hoffman had perched for hours, staring down at the neighborhood. The
tree was bereft of leaves now, as it had been at this time the previous year, and
the cold gray skies of November made its branches look skeletal and foreboding. Larry
just gazed at it and shook his head. The thought of Matthew Hoffman up in that tree
was beyond words for him.

As they came fully around the house, something suddenly caught Larry’s eye, and he
gasped. He pointed it out to the journalist, and they both walked up onto the front
porch of the house. Someone had tied a dead squirrel to the front door handle.

Later, Larry said, “I don’t know who [did that] or why they did that. Obviously, Hoffman
was in prison, so he couldn’t have done it. I reported it to Sheriff Barber, and he
said that nothing like that was left there after the crime scene technicians had gone
over the house. I have two theories about it. One is that someone left it as a sign
to Hoffman, ‘This squirrel shows how crazy you are.’ The other theory is that someone
put it there to say to everyone, ‘This house is an evil place. Stay away.’”

After leaving Matthew Hoffman’s house on Columbus Road, Larry and the journalist had
lunch at a Mount Vernon restaurant. As they sat at their table, they could hear the
quiet whispers of the other diners, sense the furtive gazes in their direction. Larry
was used to this and told the reporter, “People want to say something to me, but they
don’t know what to say. They wonder if they should come up and give their condolences.
They wonder if they should just keep quiet. It happens every day. I’m always going
to be the dad of that girl who was tied up on a bed of leaves. I’m always going to
be the dad of the boy who was murdered in his own home.”

The restaurant was near the Knox County Sheriff’s Office, and by sheer coincidence,
Sheriff David Barber walked in to have lunch that same day. Larry and the sheriff
shook hands and spoke for a while. “I have no doubt that Sheriff Barber and his office
saved Sarah,” Larry commented later. “They did everything they could to find her,
Tina, Kody and Stephanie. They went full blast each and every day. They just didn’t
know at the time it was already too late for Kody, Tina and Stephanie. But I’ll always
be thankful for what all of those guys at the sheriff’s office did. They were barely
going home to sleep. They worked around the clock. It’s what you’d hope a sheriff’s
office would do in a situation like this. Even they couldn’t know how hard it would
be. Nothing like this had ever happened around here before.”

After lunch, Larry and the reporter went out to Tina’s home on King Beach Drive. It
sat empty now, also up for sale, but like Matthew Hoffman’s home, with no buyers.
On the outside it looked serene, as if nothing bad had ever happened there. Down the
hill, Apple Valley Lake looked pleasant and inviting.

Larry pointed out the porch area that someone had inexplicably tried to set on fire.
He also pointed to Sarah’s former bedroom, where she had tried to call 911 before
Matthew Hoffman restrained her—the same room where he had knifed Stephanie Sprang
to death.

In the front yard, numerous items were still stacked around a tree as a memorial to
the previous year’s tragedy. There were stuffed animals, balloons, toys and baseballs.
Especially baseballs, in memory of what a good pitcher Kody had been.

Larry said, “The stuff gets picked up every so often and taken away, but then new
items appear. This has gone on all year long since November 2010. I guess there’s
more now, since it’s almost the one-year anniversary.”

* * *

Around that anniversary time, Larry and his family participated in various events
to help raise funds for the Healing Hearts Foundation. One event was at the Blue Jackets
Nationwide Arena in Columbus, Ohio. There, Sarah met and was photographed with the
team mascot, Stinger. Later, a dinner was provided courtesy of the Front Street Restaurant.

Another event was a softball tournament at the Pipesville Road baseball fields where
Kody had once played, and where Matthew Hoffman left Sarah in the Jeep with the body
bags when he went on his various missions. There was a pitching contest and a home-run
derby.

Sarah had also recently spoken to a reporter from WBNS who wanted to know how she
was adjusting at her new school and what kinds of things she liked to do these days.
Sarah said, “I love volleyball. I serve and play first row and switch out with another
girl. It’s a fun sport to communicate with others. And you need skills that you don’t
necessarily have in other sports.

“I like music and love to swim in the summertime. Like going to the beach at Myrtle
Beach in South Carolina. And shopping. I’d like to get a cell phone for Christmas.
She also expressed a wish to go to San Diego, California, someday. She was entranced
by the thought of being on its beaches and going to its world-famous zoo.

Asked about how she felt now that nearly a year had passed, Sarah said, “I’m usually
pretty happy all the time. But going to the new school was kind of hard. I didn’t
know anyone, but I adapted fast. Lots of kids came up to me, asking me if I was the
new kid. And they became my friends.”

The reporter noted how observant Sarah was about people around her. She noticed everything,
from what they had in their hands, to their clothing and shoes. Sarah agreed that
she was now very aware of her surroundings at all times. She wasn’t afraid to be out
in crowds, but she had a very heightened sense of awareness at all times in public.

Then the reporter said, “From the moment you got home [on November 10, 2010] you remembered
everything vividly, didn’t you?”

At this question, Sarah began to tear up, and the smile disappeared. It was as if
she’d been thrust right back to that day and time. She began to cry and her voice
quavered. A box of tissues was called for, and she used several of them. It was obvious
that, beneath the surface, the memories were still deep and dark. After all, she was
still only a fourteen-year-old girl, one who’d experienced a nightmare beyond belief.

* * *

Perhaps the most evocative and heartfelt event commemorating the anniversary of that
horrible day was a candlelight vigil held on Apple Valley Lake at sunset on November
10, 2011. As darkness came on, scores of people arrived from all over the area to
meet with Sarah and remember Stephanie Sprang, Tina Herrmann and Kody Maynard.

It was a brisk autumn night, and everyone was bundled up against the chill as the
breeze blew off the lake. Suddenly, Sarah spotted Sheriff David Barber in the crowd.
With a burst of exuberance she ran up and gave him a big hug, and shouted with delight,
“Sheriff!” She held him tightly for a moment, knowing how much he and his office had
done to rescue her.

Then Sarah, the sheriff, Larry and his family, and everyone else present lit small
candles, placed them in small containers and set them adrift on the lake—dozens of
small candles bobbing up and down on the ripples. If Kody, Tina and Stephanie were
looking down from above, they would have seen a dazzling sight—so many tiny flickering
lights of hope in a sea of darkness.

Robert Scott
is the author of eighteen true-crime books, which have sold nearly a half-million
copies worldwide. He has been featured on such television true-crime channels as truTV
,
E!, and Investigation Discovery
.
He is a member of several national journalistic associations. His website is www.robertscotttruecrime.com.