"It's page one in the handbook," said Detective Mike Garvey, the first cop to speak with Carl Dorr. And the more they looked at Carl Dorr, the more he looked like their man. After all, hadn't he threatened his wife, saying he would abduct their daughter just three months before? Hadn't he and Dorothy been battling over the kid for years? Wasn't Carl the last to see her alive? They went right at him, asking him to take a polygraph the very next day. When the polygraph examiner, a local fire marshal, told them that Carl might know more about Michele's whereabouts than he was telling them, the cops thought they had their man.
"It was good cop, bad cop," Carl later said. "They were right in my face, telling me I had failed the polygraph exam and that it had been 24 hours and they knew she was dead. 'We're going to find her,' they said, 'When we do, we're coming to get you.'"
His estranged wife told the cops she thought he had done it too. She gave them an extra motive. Her estranged husband was trying to get out of paying her $400 a month in child support. Carl Dorr was caught inside a nightmare. When he told the police that he loved his daughter, they didn't believe him. He took a second lie detector test and passed easily. In an attempt to prove his innocence, he underwent hypnosis and took sodium pentothal, the so-called truth serum. None of this convinced the cops. But then Carl may have been his own worst enemy. He snapped, and in a psychotic episode told a psychiatrist that he had abducted and killed his daughter.
"I started hallucinating," he recalled. "I couldn't take the pressure. My brain was soup."
In his altered mental state he began to believe that people on television shows were talking about him. He looked behind the set and when he didn't see anything, he thought the police were altering his reception.
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