Matthew Hoffman confers with his attorney during his arraignment in the Knox County Court of Common Pleas in January. He claimed he wasn't looking to hurt anyone.
Yet Matthew Hoffman's planned burglary in November quickly became a twisted nightmare, during which the Ohio man killed two women and an 11-year-old boy, then hid their bodies in a hollowed-out tree.
The sicko also kidnapped a 13-year-old girl and sexually assaulted her for several days in his leaf-lined basement.
The details of the crime, for which Hoffman is spending the rest of his life in jail, emerged with the release of his lengthy confession on Monday. Excerpts were published in the Columbus Dispatch the next day.
"I did not enter the house to kill those people," he wrote in a four-page confession offered days after the crime to avoid the death penalty. "I did not know a single one of them."
The 30-year-old's brutal crime began shortly before midnight on Nov. 9, 2010. He walked to the home of Tina Herrmann, who lived there with her two young children.
"I slept across the street from the house that night in a sleeping bag," Hoffman said in the confession. "I woke up at daylight."
The two vehicles that had been parked outside the house the night before were gone, so he slipped in through the garage door, which was ajar.
Victims (l. to r.) Tina Herrman, 32, Kody Maynard, 11, and Stephanie Sprang, 41. (WBNS-10TV)
"There was a certain amount of excitement in being in someone else's home without them being there," he said. "I was looking for anything of value that could be carried out easily."
After about an hour, Hoffman said, he found nothing worth stealing, and was about to leave when Herrmann returned home. He hid in a bedroom, and claimed to be unable to escape without jumping out a window.
Armed with a blackjack and a knife, which he had brought "for a certain amount of intimidation," he confronted Herrmann.
The two fought. Hoffmann knocked the 32-year-old woman to the bed, facedown.
"I hit her a couple of times in the head [with the blackjack], but this would not knock her out," he said. "It was not doing the job, and I started panicking."
That is when he claimed Herrmann's friend Stephanie Sprang arrived.
"I have no idea when she got there, what she was doing there, and how she gained access," Hoffman said. "The other woman yelled at me, there were now two to deal with, and I did not know what to do."
The ex-con grabbed his knife and "stabbed the woman on the bed, through her back, twice."
Sprang ran into another room. Hoffman found her and stabbed the 41-year-old several times in the chest. He went back to Herrmann and stabbed her several more times.
