Yahoo Movies How a bloody scalp found on a rural PA road led cops to a killer
Part 2: Virginia Hayden talked to her grandson about feeding a body to pigs
Part 3: Virginia Hayden talks to the police – and talks, and talks ...
Editor's note: This is the first of a three-part series delving into the bizarre homicide case of Thomas Hayden, whose scalp was found in a plastic bag along a Dover Township road in 2012.
Anthony Suglia hates litter. For 30 years, the self-employed contractor has driven the country roads near his home in northern York County and, particularly on Schoolhouse Road, near the intersection with Conewago Road, he has seen a lot of trash along the road. It disgusts him. “People see that winding section of the road and think it’s OK to throw their trash out there,” he said. “I live here.”
When he spots trash, he stops and throws it into the bed of his truck. In the past, he’s found all variety of stuff, including a toilet.
On Jan. 18, 2012, he was driving home from work when he spotted a plastic bag on the side of Schoolhouse Road, right where the asphalt meets the bank of Davidsburg Run.
It was a vacuum-sealed plastic bag, maybe 12 by 18 inches. He wasn’t quite sure what was in the bag, but he knew it wasn’t normal. “It looked a bit odd,” he said. He thought it contained “a dead animal or worse.”
He drove home and asked his wife and a neighbor – who was retrieving his mail – to look at the bag. He said they concluded, “This doesn’t look right. It wasn’t an animal, and it wasn’t trash.” They could see long gray hair in the bag, attached to what looked like a piece of skin, along with some blood-stained fabric.
They called the police.
Northern York County Regional Police Department Cpl. Stephen McClure, working the 3 to 11 p.m. shift, stopped by and picked up the bag. He wasn’t sure what to make of it either. How it wound up beside the road was anybody's guess. Perhaps it had been in the creek and was washed onto the side of the road by flood waters.
He took it back to the station, cut it open, photographed the contents and hung them out to dry in the station’s garage. “Everything inside was wet,” he would testify later.
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He sent the bag and its contents to the Pennsylvania State Police crime lab. The blood, it turned out, was human. The skin appeared to be a piece of scalp with long strands of gray hair still attached. The pieces of fabric were sections of a sheet and a pillowcase, the tags still attached. The state police sent the blood samples to a lab to extract DNA. The results of that test were entered into a national database.
There were no matches.
The bag and its contents were placed in a locker, where they remained for five years.
Evidence in search of a crime.
At the time, police had no idea that that piece of scalp and bedding would lead them to solving the murder of a man who, until five years passed, nobody knew was dead. They had no idea that it would send them on a journey with as many twists and turns as the country byway it was found beside, an investigation that one detective described as "an unbelievable true story."
And if Anthony Suglia hadn't hated litter, one prosecutor said, "none of this would have ever happened."
A daughter doesn't hear from her father
Thomas Hayden Sr.’s daughter, Kim Via, hadn’t heard from her father since the fall of 2011, and she was concerned. It was strange that he would just cut off contact with her. She had an inkling why he would do that, but it was just that, an inkling.
Her father, she said, “was no angel.” He wasn’t a perfect person, she said, noting that he could be physically and verbally abusive, something he inherited from his father. He was “a rambler,” she said, the kind of person who moved from place to place and seemed to grow uneasy staying put.
People who knew him when he was young described him as a character. He was one of 10 children, six boys and four girls. His father was retired military, settling in Leonardtown, Maryland, after his retirement and establishing a dry-cleaning business. The family lived on a small farm, raising tobacco and keeping horses. The family was well known in town, Thomas’ younger brother, Owens Hayden, said.
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Thomas married young. He and his first wife met in high school, and when Kim was born, he was 16 and she was 17. A couple of years later, they had a son, named Thomas after his father.
Kim was always a daddy’s girl, she said. He lavished attention on her. When she was a child, she said, she and her father were inseparable. She recalls riding the Ferris wheel with her father at a local carnival and her father pointing out that they could see their house from the top of the ride.
The family moved to Gonzales, Louisiana, about halfway between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, when Kim was 5. Her father, who had worked as a mechanic, managed a gas station and later got a job as a cop with the city’s police department. A few years later, they moved to northern Virginia, where Kim’s maternal grandmother lived, and Thomas got a job in Washington with the postal service. He was injured in a workplace accident and went on worker’s comp and then Social Security disability.
Thomas and his first wife divorced after 20 years of marriage and Thomas returned to Maryland.
That’s where he met Virginia Fogle. They connected on an internet dating site. Thomas was computer illiterate, Kim said, and he had a friend chat with Virginia on his behalf. Kim was apprehensive. He told her, “My friend pretended to be me.” She replied, “Oh, dad, you can’t do that.” He said, “I’m a grown man. I’ll be fine.”
Kim didn’t like Virginia from the first time she met her. She thought she was narcissistic. Owens didn’t like her either. “I did what I could to get along with her,” he said. “She wasn’t too easy to get along with. She was hard to take. She definitely was full of herself. That’s a first impression, but it didn’t take long to know it.”
Thomas and Virginia got married in 1998. Nobody in Thomas’ family knew about it until after the fact.
A wife who rarely spoke about her family
Hayden’s family didn’t know much about Virginia. And neither did her own. Her daughter, Carolyn Cooksey, said she knew she was from Maryland and lived in Taneytown for much of her life. “She’s the only mother I’ve ever known,” Carolyn said. “But she’s a hard person to know.
“Virginia rarely spoke about her family,” Carolyn continued. “We really didn’t see a lot of her family, and she didn’t talk about them.” What information Virginia did share was suspect. “Her stories changed so much that it’s hard to know what to believe,” Carolyn said.
Virginia was born July 18, 1951. She told her family that when she was young, her mother traded her and her sister to an older couple for a highchair, saying that her mother was unable to care for her after her father’s death. Carolyn doesn’t believe that, since the man she said was her father died four years before Virginia was born.
Carolyn was born in May 1970, when Virginia was just shy of her 19th birthday. Her father, Virginia’s first husband, Edward Clabaugh, divorced her in April 1973 after discovering she was having an affair, Carolyn said. Clabaugh, a janitor at a middle school in Sykesville, hanged himself in the school gym a year and a half later.
In June 1974, Virginia married Floyd Fogle, who was 22 years older than her. She met him while she was babysitting Fogle’s children and the two began an affair that resulted in Virginia becoming pregnant, Carolyn said. He had children from his previous marriages, and they had a daughter, Connie, together. Fogle died in November 1990 of a massive heart attack at 61.
After Fogle died, Carolyn said, “Virginia was a loose cannon.” Carolyn recalled she was hurt on the job and later had some mental health problems. She threatened her family not to speak ill of her, Carolyn said.
She dated several men, Carolyn said, and at one point began seeking men on online dating sites.
Then she met and married Thomas.
A father who stopped answering the phone
After they married, Thomas sold his house and bought an RV, setting out with Virginia on a nomadic life that crisscrossed the country. They traveled out West and throughout the South. Once, Kim said, they came to visit her in Louisiana and stayed for about a week. During that short visit, Kim said she noticed some friction between them. “There was some fussing back and forth,” she said.
Eventually, they sold the RV and bought a trailer in Florida. After a few years, they moved back to Maryland and then to Pennsylvania, where Virginia’s daughter, Connie Pender, lived, buying a townhouse in a development in rural Dover Township, on a street called Barley Circle.
Kim was in touch with her father. He called her on her 40th birthday, saying “Lordy, lordy, look who’s 40.” The next time she spoke to him, he said he wasn’t feeling well. Kim took that with a grain of salt. Her father never felt good – he was kind of a hypochondriac – always winding up in the ER for ailments real or imagined. “It was his thing,” Kim said.
At that time, Thomas was estranged from his son, Thomas Jr. Kim wasn’t sure what precipitated the split, but she said, “They’re both hotheads.” Her father called and asked Kim about her brother. “Don’t put me in the middle,” Kim said. They argued about it – Kim strongly suggesting that if her father had a problem with her brother, he should discuss it with him – and finally, her father told her, “Fine, I’m just not going to call for a while.”
That was the last time she spoke to her father.
She tried over the ensuing years to speak to him, but every time she called, Virginia would answer the phone and tell her, “He doesn’t want to talk to you.” Virginia told Kim that he was sitting right there, and Kim would ask her to take a photo of him with her phone so she could see him. Virginia would decline.
Virginia told Kim that her father called her “a greedy little bitch.” Kim said, “I couldn’t fathom where in the hell that came from. We were always taught to be self-sufficient, and I never asked him for anything.” Kim flew into a rage and threw out all the birthday cards and letters her father had sent her.
“The biggest question was, why wouldn’t he talk to me?” Kim said. “Let him tell me these things. I didn’t know if she even told him I called.”
Kim kept calling, begging Virginia to allow her to talk to her father, often becoming emotional. Virginia always had the same answer: “He doesn’t want to talk to you.”
She wasn’t the only member of the family wondering what was going on. In 2010, Thomas’ younger brother, Gary, died of colon cancer at 55. Owens spoke to Thomas the day after their brother died. “That was the last time I heard from him,” Owens said. “It wouldn’t be strange not to hear from him for a year, but after a year, I got concerned.”
Kim visited her Maryland hometown around that time and Owens shared his concern about her father. He also told her that one of his older brothers, Spencer, was also worried about him. Spencer told Kim, “Something’s happened to Tom. I can’t reach him.” She asked Spencer where her father was and he said, “I don’t know.”
He also mentioned that Thomas’ oldest friend, Burris Rogers, who’d known Thomas since they were kids, mentioned that he hadn’t heard from him in a long time, which was unusual.
“Something was wrong,” Owens said.
A week after Kim returned home, she got a Facebook message from Virginia, asking her why she was “spreading Spencer’s lies.”
Kim responded, “What lies?”
And Virginia replied, “That your father’s dead.”
Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: A bloody scalp found by a York County, Pa., road would point to a killer
