Yazzolino again asked Dick Hamilton if he would submit to a lie-detector test.
“I don’t believe in such tests,” Hamilton said.
“Richard,” his pastor said. “If you have nothing to hide, it could do you nothing but good to take a polygraph. It will clear your name.”
The small room grew quiet except for the sound of a ticking clock. Hamilton stared down at his hands, which were folded on the tabletop. Finally he blurted out, “I’m ready to tell you what really happened now. But I want to write it down...”
Although Yazzolino and MacNeel were convinced that Dick Hamilton was somehow involved in the disappearance of his family, even they were not prepared for the statement which Hamilton wrote out painstakingly in his own hand. Many of the words in the scrawled document were misspelled. Even so, his confession was, in its own grotesque way, a classic statement. It is still used today in many Northwest law schools as a prime example of a confession that demonstrates intent, premeditation, and the suspect’s cognizance of right and wrong at the time of the actual crime.
It is shocking and difficult to read:
I don’t know when I first planed [sic] to kill my wife. I starting planning about 3 or 4 weeks ago. First I thought I would hide the bodies in the Columbia up by the Sandy River. At first I planded to dismember the bodies this way mabey [sic] they would never be found.
On the day it first snowed I went out there and found that I wouldn’t be able to get over to the river because of a deep stream that crossed the way. I went on to work and told my boss that I had stopped to help some people out of the snow. At one time I asked one of the janitors for some plastic bags so I would be able to carry the bodies without a lot of blood.
On Friday night I called (a friend) and asked her if she would type a paper for me. She said she would the (next) day. On Saturday about noon she did type my paper as I asked her to.
I went home at 3:30 Saturday afternoon. When I got home, Carol let me in. Sometime later—I don’t just (know) how long, I asked Carol to sign the paper. I had it covered with another sheet. I told her it was part of her Christmas present. Then I asked her to come into the bedroom and take her glasses off. I asked her to turn around, I think she sensed something as she acted nervoise. I tried to break her neck quickly but I couldn’t. She screamed some and I tried to quiet her and choke her. Then Robert tried to open the door and come in. I pushed the door closed with my head and told him to go back to his room. In the fight Carol scratched me and a lot of the furniture was kicked around the room. At last I got all the way on top and hit her head on the floor. When I stoped she was still breathing so (I got) my hunting knife and cut her throat.
The incredibly evil confession continued as Hamilton wrote about washing up. One of Carol’s friends from work had stopped by to give her a ride, but he said he had gone to the door and told her that his wife was “sick” and wouldn’t be going to work.
He wrote of fixing the children’s supper. Then he had settled them in front of the television while he returned to the bedroom. He cleaned up and carried his wife’s body into the bathroom.
“I cut her head off and her ring finger off but just couldn’t cut anymore. After trying to eat some boiled eggs, I wraped [sic] Carol up.”
Hamilton wrote that he had then driven to a drugstore to get “some pills” for himself. He sent his children to their room while he placed Carol Hamilton’s body in the trunk of her car. He threw her clothes and other possessions into the trunk, too. His children sat near the decorated tree as he made several trips in and out. And then he had put their coats on and taken them to the car.
We left about 9 or 9:30, I think. First I went to several Goodwill and Salvation Army boxes and left everything. Then I got myself a milkshake and some french-fries for the kids. Then I drove out to the Sauvie Island turnoff, but thought I should go further on. I paused 2 or 3 times and even drove part way down to the river. I findly made up my mind to start back and at the latest do it at Sauvie Island. When I got there the kids were still asleep and I carried Carol’s body down to the water put it in. Then I carried Robert down and put him into the water and hit him 2 or 3 times with a rock on the head. When I got Judy she was crying and I felt horrible but I couldn’t stop. I hit her on the head 2 times with a rock and ran back to the car. I drove so fast trying to get off the island I nearly had several wrecks.
Page by page, Hamilton handed his confession over to the investigators. And, still, he continued his chilling narrative. He wrote of how he had parked his wife’s red Ford in a parking lot before he threw his knife and his own bloody clothes off a bridge. He left the car, and he walked aimlessly for a while. But he got cold and tired, and decided to call a cab. He didn’t give his exact address to the driver but asked to be let off in the general vicinity of his home.
He had destroyed his entire family and left them floating off the beach on Sauvie Island. Once home, he wrote, he had hidden his bloodied, sandy shoes in the attic. “Then I took two sleeping pills and went to bed.”
There had been no clandestine lover for poor Carol Hamilton. There had only been a husband who wanted out of his marriage. He was tired of being tied down by the responsibility of supporting two small children. With all of the options Dick Hamilton had—separation, divorce, counseling, or just disappearing himself—he had chosen the most horrible way imaginable to rid himself of his wife, Carol, and his children, Judy and Bobby Lee.
Leaving Hamilton’s stunned friends to deal with his dark confession, Blackie Yazzolino and Darril MacNeel took the confessed killer to the old Rocky Butte Jail. There, an ID tech took black and white and color photographs of Hamilton’s scratched cheek and jaw, his lacerated right hand, and a bruised area on his left chest. It was obvious that Carol Hamilton had fought desperately for her life and the lives of her children. Hamilton was booked into Rocky Butte, charged with three counts of first-degree murder.
There would be no bail.
Judge Carl Etling signed a search warrant that allowed Chief Deputy District Attorney of Multnomah County Des Connell, Portland Detective Sergeant Hank Kaczenski, and Lieutenant Robert Pinnick of the State Police, and Detectives Sawyer, MacNeel, Yazzolino, Barst, Phil Jackson, and Hugh Swaney from the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office to enter the Hamilton residence. It was now after one in the morning on Christmas Day. But there was no Christmas spirit now. As with all search warrants, there were specific items listed: one human finger; a wedding ring belonging to Carol Hamilton; white cotton rope approximately one-half inch in diameter (similar to that used to tie bedclothes around the body); bedclothes to compare with those found with the body and head; women’s clothing of the same size as that found near the decapitated body; children’s clothing to test for size and laundry marks; a sharp cutting instrument to test for bloodstains; bloodstains about the premises or on items in the premises; insurance policies on the life of Carol Hamilton and/or Judy Hamilton.
The Hamiltons’ house was a neat three-bedroom rambler, indistinguishable at first glance from thousands of similar homes in Portland. But it wasn’t the same at all. “The first thing we noticed,” Yazzolino recalled, “was the floors. They were hardwood floors, but someone had sloshed so much water over them in an attempt to clean them, that they were warped all out of shape.”
The walls looked clean, but on closer observation, the investigators saw what appeared to be dried droplets of blood. These were principally in the area of the southeast bedroom and the bathroom. Bob Pinnick took scrapings of these stains after they were photographed. The outside surface of the garage door was smeared with a dark red dried substance. A shower curtain rested in a laundry basket inside the garage, its lower edges stained with dark brown.
Oddly, there were no women’s clothes in the master bedroom—or in any other room. Hamilton must have wanted to rid himself of every vestige of Carol. An envelope lay in an open bureau drawer in the northwest bedroom. There was no address on it. When it was opened, the following statement wa
s found inside:
I, Carol Ann Hamilton, do admit that I did commit adultery with Ron Wilson [the name was written in after the paper had been typed] on the Saturday afternoons of November 16, November 23, and December 21. I also admit seeing this person often since the first of August.
On agreement made verbly [sic] at this time (December 21), I will not oppose a divorce prepared by my husband on any grounds he wants. December 21, 1968.
Carol A. Hamilton [written in]
This was the statement that Dick Hamilton had prepared and asked Carol to sign without reading, because it was “part of her Christmas present.”
Now the investigators’ attention wandered unbidden to the Christmas tree, even though they had tried to ignore it. It was too sad to think of. But they had to look. There were carefully wrapped presents there with Judy’s and Bobby’s names on them. Yazzolino noticed that a few presents had been unwrapped; they were the packages with Dick Hamilton’s name on them. A box that had held an electric shaver still rested on a crumpled bed of wrapping paper and bore a tag, “To Dick, from Carol.”
“He’s already opened it,” Yazzolino said. “He’s been using the razor she meant to give him on Christmas.”
Detective Hugh Swaney located a trapdoor that led to a crawl space beneath the house. It was in a bedroom closet. He opened it and saw a small pile of freshly dug dirt directly under the opening. The pile measured approximately two feet in diameter. The thought uppermost on everyone’s mind was Bobby Lee. The two-year-old boy was still missing. Swaney photographed the small hill of dirt and then tediously removed the soil with a serving spoon. There was no hole beneath the dirt; it had to have come from somewhere else under the house. He held his breath as he saw the pair of small black mittens that lay near the edge of the pile of dirt. There was a cigarette filter there, too. Swaney lowered himself down into the crawl space, which measured between eighteen inches and two feet in height. It was not an assignment for anyone with even a trace of claustrophobia. He clutched a flashlight and crawled on his belly over the entire square footage of the crawl space. Twenty feet from the trapdoor, Swaney found a freshly dug hole four feet by eighteen inches. The dirt in the hole was removed with the serving spoon. There was nothing in the hole.
(Later, Hamilton would say that he had considered burying some member of his family down there but had discarded the idea as impractical.)
After the sun rose on Christmas Day, Swaney went back to the quiet neighborhood in southeast Portland. Accompanied by uniformed officers Milligan and La Follette, he carried the pictures of Carol and Judy and began a door-to-door canvass of the Hamiltons’ neighbors. The family immediately north of the Hamilton home had just watched a television broadcast about the bodies that had been found on Sauvie Island. They had thought the dead child pictured looked familiar. But they hadn’t realized the child was Judy. Now, looking at the photo, the wife cried, “Oh my God, it is her! It’s Judy!” She put her head down on the chair and began to sob. It was grief that would sweep the blocks that surrounded the Hamiltons’ small house. None of their neighbors could recall any dissension in the family. They had seemed quiet, religious, and devoted to each other. No one had ever seen a strange man entering the Hamilton home while Dick Hamilton was away.
Patrol officers located Carol Hamilton’s red Ford behind a Safeway store located on Hayden Island. Yazzolino and MacNeel ordered it towed to a garage where Bob Pin-nick oversaw it as it was processed for evidence. Pinnick removed a number of items and sealed and tagged them: two blankets; two stuffed animals; one nylon stocking; one cardboard box with magazines and newspapers; one white rag; a brown paper bag with potato chips and cookies; a red and white plastic flashlight; jack, a jack-handle and lug wrench; one spare tire and wheel; one axe; one hunting knife; vacuum sweepings of entire vehicle; a black sock; dirt from under front fenders; radio knobs (for latent prints); a piece of plastic and plastic bags.
At eight-thirty on the morning after Christmas, MacNeel and Yazzolino arrived on Sauvie Island to assist Oregon State Police in their dragging operations for Bobby Lee’s body. Hamilton had said his tiny son was wearing a red blazer jacket, dark pants, and brown shoes. Working with River Patrol deputies F. Hanna and F. Pearce, the men rowed back and forth for six hours, looking for some trace of the little boy in the twelve-foot-deep river. The OSP crew had already dragged the river for three days, and they had found a number of items connected with the case, but they hadn’t found Bobby Lee.
They never found Bobby Lee’s body. He was lost in the mighty Columbia River, perhaps even carried out to the Pacific Ocean.
On December 30, Dick Hamilton talked again to his minister—who advised Yazzolino and MacNeel that there had never been a “Ron Wilson.” They were not surprised at all; the veteran detectives figured Hamilton had simply made him up out of whole cloth. He was someone to blame for the slaughter of Carol, Judy, and Bobby Lee.
The obvious question, not so easily answered, was “Why? Why had Hamilton wanted his family dead?” It had haunted the detectives as they carried out their investigation of the triple murder. There was no lover. There never had been. So Hamilton could not have been jealous of Carol. Her friends and coworkers could not recall that she had ever spoken of problems in her marriage. She was a private woman, yes, but they felt sure she would have said something or made some slip if she was hiding such a huge secret. Adultery was against her morals and her religion. Besides, she loved Dick.
Gladys and Judy King said that Dick had been the strong disciplinarian in his family, while Carol tended to be more permissive. “We think they might have argued over that,” Judy said, “but I never thought that Dick would be violent.”
Still, as they pushed their search for a motive further, Blackie Yazzolino and Darril MacNeel discovered hidden dimensions of Hamilton’s personality. They found he had fancied himself something of a ladies’ man—or at least he believed he had great potential in that area. Several young women at his job said that he had made attempts to date them. And they had turned him down. The bonds of marriage and fatherhood had begun to chafe. He had married too young. He wanted out, but he didn’t want to be burdened with alimony payments and child support payments. He wanted to be as free as he had been before he met Carol. But the detective partners didn’t find any women who had actually agreed to date Hamilton.
Richard Duane Hamilton went on trial on three counts of murder in the first degree. His plea of temporary insanity was rejected by the jury when they saw the voluminous physical evidence, listened to witnesses, and then read his gruesome and almost matter-of-fact confession.
He was found guilty on all three counts and sentenced to three consecutive life sentences in the Oregon State Penitentiary at Salem. Each life sentence carried a twenty-five-year minimum of hard time before he could be considered for parole
No one will ever really know what went on behind the closed doors of Dick and Carol Hamilton’s home. If Carol had reason to be afraid, she never told anyone. She trusted in the Bible, in her church, and in her husband.
To Save Their Souls
I remember almost every case I’ve written over the last twenty-five years very clearly. Yes, I falter occasionally on names, but the events stay in my brain even when I’d prefer to forget them. This story of Christine Jonsen* is one that I’ve tried to forget. Few authors would want to write it, and it’s a case that will be difficult to read, but I think it illustrates one of the most difficult dilemmas in the criminal justice system. Was a confessed murderer sane or insane at the time of the crime? How many times have I heard someone say: “Well, he had to be crazy to do that!” More than I can count. Still, with some eleven hundred true-crime stories behind me, only a handful have gone to court with a “Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity” plea. Often suspects will initially attempt to appear psychotic, but even their own attorneys quickly detect the falseness there and talk them out of making such a plea.
“Temporary insanity” is a handy catch-all that works in
the movies and on television—but rarely in real life. Christine Jonsen’s story is one of the few I have covered where I felt that a murder defendant was actually innocent by reason of insanity. She was, I believe, a woman driven to carry out one of the saddest crimes I have ever written about. I have no sympathy for the cold-blooded killer who plans his—or her—murder meticulously and then talks about a sudden “blackout” or fakes mental illness. These defendants are despicable.
But for this desperate woman, it was a far different story. Afterward, she did have agonizing regrets, but she still believed she had done what she had to do to save the very souls of those she loved most in all the world.
Christine was most assuredly not a Diane Downs or a Susan Smith. She wanted nothing for herself; she had no lover waiting for her, no better life to run to. Indeed, this case reminds me of poor, deranged Andrea Yates, who on one tragic morning in Texas methodically destroyed her four children. In her second trial, in July 2006, Andrea Yates was found innocent by reason of insanity.
When stories like this flood the media, I wonder why nobody saw the danger, or if they did, why no one saw fit to step forward and get involved. Not all cries for help are loud and piercing screams—some are subtle: curtains drawn against the sunshine, children kept indoors rather than being let out to play, or a vacant look in a mother’s eyes.
I sat in the trial that ended this case and felt nothing but compassion for the accused. Perhaps you will see it in the same way. And if you ever feel the need to intervene in a situation that seems somehow wrong, please do.