‘We Found a Stranger Living in Our Basement—While We Were Still Home’

The first thing Sharon Hoggatt noticed on the morning of Tuesday, April 28, was that her home’s deadbolt was locked. She and her husband, Dutch, never lock the deadbolt. 

Second, she saw an empty black planter. The ground around it was wet. She was the last one to leave the house at 8 a.m., and she hadn’t seen that when she left. As a professor, Dutch left earlier for his classes at Harding University, and he didn’t typically come home until the afternoon.

Just to check, she dialed him and asked if he’d been home since then.

He hadn’t. But someone else had.

An uninvited guest 

The pair live in Searcy, AR, a town an hour northeast of Little Rock with a population of 20,000.

“We’ve never had any problems,” Dutch, 71, says. “I’ve always felt secure in our community and especially in that neighborhood.”

Dutch stayed on the phone with Sharon, 70, as she did a quick walk-through of the home. Before she hung up the phone, she told her husband, “Call me back in 10 minutes to make sure I’m still alive.”

He did. She was, but her hackles were also up.

When Dutch came home later that day, he couldn’t find his outdoor work shoes, which he always leaves, along with his work clothes, inside by the door. 

Sharon also noticed that one of the dining chairs that neither she nor her husband ever sits in had been moved. But they dismissed the signs.

Until the next day, with the doughnuts.

On Wednesday, Dutch brought doughnuts to his students at the university, coming home with four left over. 

They returned home later that day to two.

Sharon had also found wrappers on the stairs from the Whitman’s Sampler chocolates her husband had gifted her a few days earlier. When he told her he hadn’t eaten any, she admits she started to suspect his memory was slipping.

They left for a bible study that evening, but when they reached the church, Sharon decided she needed to skip it. She wanted to talk with her daughter, Cherisse Gregory, about what was going on. 

“I said, ‘Why don't you go back home and show her so she can see it firsthand,” Sharon explains. Cherisse’s husband, Mark, volunteered to join them. 

“He could tell my wife was creeped out,” Dutch says.

They returned to the Hoggatts' home and decided to search the entire place, top to bottom. They went downstairs to the split-level home’s lower level. Sharon noticed that the boxes storing her Christmas decorations were pushed out.

And that’s where they found him. 

“She saw two legs in jeans and my son-in-law said her eyes got huge,” Dutch says. Slowly, Sharon backed out of the space and told Mark that someone was in there. Mark took a bat and hit the wall to make noise, and told the man he needed him to come out.

That’s when the man who had been holed up in their basement for days finally appeared.

How the stranger got in 

Sharon immediately texted Dutch: “There is a man in our house.”

When he arrived, five deputies were on the scene to arrest the man, who had apparently walked through barbed wire to get to the Hoggatts' home

“He was cut from head to toe,” says Dutch.

The couple learned from police that the man had arrived at their home on Sunday, initially spending the night in their crawlspace, which stands 3.5 feet tall. On Tuesday morning, he heard Dutch leave and entered the home while Sharon was still inside. He hid, waiting for her to leave. 

He then found the space under the stairs and went through the Christmas decorations, finding two pillows to fluff his makeshift nest in the basement, which included sheets he pulled from the laundry. He helped himself to a gallon of milk, juice, oranges, bananas, a can of peaches, and cans of soup.

Upon arrest, the man was charged with residential burglary and theft of property of less than $1,000—charges Sharon has no intentions of pursuing. To her, she’s more “upset that he used two of her favorite Christmas pillows.”

Still, the incident has been big news in the small town, making friends and family concerned.

“People are saying that now we have to move,” Dutch says. But “this is the first incident I have heard of—it’s a fluke.”

And, admittedly, the whole ordeal has changed them.

“Now every time we leave the house, we lock the doors,” Dutch says. “We have learned our lesson.”