A Noise Downstairs(10)

West Haven College was, and remains, a close-knit community, and affairs in academia are hardly unheard of. Hoffman could have taught a course in them. From all accounts, Hoffman did not present as a so-called ladies’ man. He was a much-praised professor, admired by his students, and his affairs with college employees, or their spouses, were conducted with the utmost discretion.

There is no evidence he had a sexual relationship with a student. Hoffman seemed to understand behavior of that sort could land him in serious, professional trouble. Nor was he ever the subject of a sexual harassment complaint.

And yet, people knew. Or at least suspected.



“Yeah,” Paul said under his breath. He could remember going to Kenneth’s office one time, and as he arrived the door opened and a woman came out, tears streaming down her cheeks. You might see a student emerge crying from a meeting with a professor, especially if the prof had found proof of plagiarism, but this woman was a colleague, not a student.

When Paul came in he couldn’t help but ask, “What happened?”

Kenneth had been unable to hide his look of discomfort. He struggled for an answer, and the best he could come up with was, “Some sort of personal issue.”

Paul, at first, thought he’d heard “personnel” and asked, “Jesus, is she being fired?”

Kenneth blinked, baffled. “If they were going to fire anybody, it’d be . . .”

He never finished the sentence.

Paul read on:


While Hoffman had a pattern of one affair at a time, his statement after his arrest made clear he was seeing Jill Foster and Catherine Lamb simultaneously, although neither knew about the other.

Also apparently in the dark was Hoffman’s wife, Gabriella. Interviews with various sources suggest Gabriella was aware of some of her husband’s acts of infidelity over the years, but she did not know he was juggling two mistresses in the last few months.

Jill Foster, assistant vice president of student development and campus life, was married to Harold Foster, assistant manager of the Milford Savings & Loan office in downtown Milford. Catherine Lamb, a senior sales manager at JCPenney, was the spouse of Gilford Lamb, director of the college’s human resources department.

After his arrest, Hoffman admitted to police he’d become increasingly obsessive, and possessive, where the women were concerned. He wanted them all to himself, to the point of telling them they were forbidden to continue having sexual relations with their own husbands. It was a demand they’d each found impossible to accept, and no doubt, rather difficult for Hoffman to enforce. But just the same, they’d asked him how they were to explain that to their spouses. Hoffman told investigators he felt that for them to be sexually involved with anyone but him amounted to betrayal.

In what one Milford detective called the understatement of the year, Hoffman told them, “Perhaps I was being unreasonable.”



“Maybe just a little,” Paul said, moving the story farther up the screen.


But it was during this period of “being unreasonable” that Hoffman set a trap for them both.

He invited them one night to his home when his wife and son were out for an extensive driving lesson. (Leonard wanted to work on his skills to improve his chances of getting a job that involved operating a truck.) Both of the women probably expected a private romantic rendezvous and were undoubtedly surprised to discover each other. They were acquainted through college functions and must have wondered if they had been called there for some other reason.

Posing as the perfect host, Hoffman offered the women glasses of wine, which they accepted. The wine, however, had been drugged, and soon Foster and Lamb were unconscious. When they awoke, they found themselves bound to kitchen chairs, an old-fashioned Underwood typewriter on the table before them.

Hoffman demanded written apologies from them for—as he himself described it later to investigators—their “immoral, licentious, whore-like behavior.”

With one hand freed by Hoffman, Jill Foster typed: “i am so sorry for the heartache i have brought to your life please forgive me.”

When Hoffman released Catherine Lamb’s hand, she wrote: “i am so ashamed of what i have done i deserve whatever happens to me.”



“Sounds like you dictated what you wanted them to say,” Paul said under his breath, shaking his head.


Hoffman took the two sheets of paper from the typewriter, put them in a drawer in the kitchen, and returned with a single steak knife that he used to slit the women’s throats.

Hoffman then wrapped the women in sheets of plastic, loaded them in the back of his Volvo. He also placed into the front passenger seat of the car the antique typewriter, which had the victims’ blood on it.

North of Milford, he pulled over, thinking he might have found a wooded area suitable for disposing of the bodies. West Haven College colleague Paul Davis spotted his car and pulled over. When Davis saw the bodies in the back of the station wagon, Hoffman tried to kill him with the shovel he’d brought to dig his victims’ graves.

“If the police had not come along when they did,” Davis said in an interview, “I wouldn’t be here now.”

Davis could not explain what made Hoffman, a former mentor, commit such a heinous crime.

“I guess there are things we just never know about people, even those closest to us,” Davis said.