by Ann Rule
Dr. Brady, one of the outstanding forensic pathologists in the Northwest, performed the postmortem exams on the nameless victims at 8:30 A.M. on Christmas Eve. It was impossible to pinpoint cause of death in the woman. Of course, decapitation itself would have been fatal, but Brady felt that had occurred after death, even though that was impossible for him to ascertain. He found some abrasions and bruises on her neck, but any bludgeoning, cutting, or other wounds delivered to the woman’s head were, of course, missing.
The little girl had succumbed to head wounds. While the adult woman (her mother?) had not eaten for many hours before her death, the child had partially digested food in her stomach—which appeared to be cookies, candy, and french fries.
Was it possible that the dead woman and her child had been attempting to hitchhike into the Portland area for Christmas and were picked up by a maniac? Had he decided to rape the mother and ended up killing her, only to realize he had to get rid of her child, too? A possible theory, but why would a killer have felt compelled to destroy all vestiges of identification if the victims had been strangers to him? No. Detectives were convinced that the pitiful victims were somehow linked to their killer. He (or she) did not want their identity known because that might send police to his door asking questions.
Further, although the woman had been found nude, vaginal smears failed to indicate the presence of semen or seminal fluid. Although such evidence could very well have dissipated after the body’s immersion in water, there were no other signs of scratches or contusions on the inner thighs which usually accompany forcible rape.
Multnomah County Chief Deputy District Attorney Des Connell assigned a photographer from the Department of Public Safety to take pictures of the dead child for identification purposes and for possible press releases. Robert Zion from the Scientific Investigation Unit did his best to make the photographs something that would be suitable to appear in the media. The child’s wounds were covered with makeup and the resulting photos showed only a pretty little girl who appeared to be asleep.
Shortly after two that afternoon, Zion was summoned again to the ME’s office. Search parties on Sauvie Island had made another grisly discovery. Deputy Ernie Thompson of Columbia County, who had spent much of the morning rowing back and forth through the chill waters of the Columbia, had hooked onto a white pillowcase with an object inside. It was a woman’s head. It was brought to Dr. Brady’s office, and there was no question that this head belonged to the body found the night before. Zion waited while the head was prepared and made up for photographs.
The woman appeared to be between twenty-five and twenty-seven. She had dark brown hair which was short and curved around her ears, with bangs. Her complexion was slightly rough as if she had suffered acne as a teenager. Still, in life, she had probably been attractive. Now, a large, reddened contusion on the left temple area extended back into her hairline. Someone had dealt her a powerful blow to the head, fracturing her skull.
The head had been wrapped in six pillowcases slipped one inside the other to make a relatively thick bag. The white case with a purple and green trim which actually encased the head was heavily soaked with blood.
The decapitated head was not the only item retrieved from the river. A thermal undershirt, large beach towel, white terry cloth bathrobe, pink and white striped blanket, two bags of costume jewelry, and a green and blue checked dress (cut up the back and through each sleeve) were also marked and tagged for evidence. It was beginning to look as if the killer, whoever he was, had used almost the entire contents of an average family’s linen closet to cover up his bloody crime. Why had he thrown away the costume jewelry? Perhaps he feared it would haunt him, and he never wanted to see the pieces again.
Christmas Eve came and still no police agencies had reports of missing persons whose descriptions matched the dead woman and child. Portland papers and television stations cooperated with police by showing the photographs of the victims. Headlines cried out: “Do You Know This Woman and Little Girl?” It was not a happy Christmas feature, not the kind of heartwarming news that city editors seek on the most sentimental holiday of the year, but it had to be done.
Detectives felt sure that somewhere there was a Christmas tree waiting for the small girl whose body had washed up on the island. Yet they received no calls regarding the published pictures. They could only assume that the victims had come from some distance away from Portland, outside the normal circulation of city newspapers and TV stations. Or perhaps there was a father somewhere, and he, too, might have been a victim of murder—one not yet discovered.
Finally the publication of the pictures struck a nerve with someone. A young woman who lived with her parents in a suburb southeast of Portland was stunned when she opened her paper. Judy King stared at the face of the Jane Doe, whose hair had been combed neatly, whose eyes were closed, but who was no longer alive. Judy didn’t want to acknowledge the similarities to one of her closest friends and to the friend’s small daughter. She even tried to tell herself she was being influenced by the power of suggestion. But she knew better. She recognized her friend Carol Ann Hamilton and her daughter, Judith Ann Hamilton. Filled with horror, she stared at the two photographs in the Oregonian.
Judy King was twenty. Her mother, Gladys King, had befriended Carol Hamilton and her husband, Richard, many years before. At that time the couple were not yet married; they were students attending the Warner Bible School in Portland. Both Carol and Richard had come from out of state and they had no relatives in Oregon. Mrs. King had “sort of adopted” them into her family. Although Carol was a few years older than Judy, the teenagers had become good friends. When Dick and Carol were married, Judy was thrilled to be the maid of honor at their wedding.
When their first baby, a girl, was born, she was named “Judy” in honor of Judy King. Two years later, they had a baby boy, Robert Lee. Both Judy and her mother had been babysitters for the youngsters and grown even closer to the family. When Carol Hamilton found steady work at the post office, she hired a full-time sitter, but she still visited with the Kings often.
Dick Hamilton still attended the Bible college and also worked as a part-time medical technician. With Carol working and Dick’s part-time job, they were able to buy their own home on S.E. 157th. Judy had always seen them as the ideal family. That was why she and her folks had been shocked on the previous Sunday evening when they received a visit from Dick Hamilton. What he told them left them thoroughly confused. When he showed up at their home unexpectedly, Dick was disheveled and upset. He had obvious scratches on his face. With great difficulty, he told Judy and her mother that Carol had left him for another man.
Dick was so distraught over the thought of losing his wife to a lover that he said he’d walked for miles on Saturday night trying to sort things out in his mind. At one point, he said, he had fallen, hurting his hand and scratching his face.
Mrs. King could not imagine Carol Hamilton being involved with another man. She felt she knew the young mother as well as anyone. Carol was a devoted mother, a faithful churchgoer, and a hard worker. Was it possible that she had been carrying on an affair so torrid that she would take her children and walk out on her husband less than a week before Christmas? Mrs. King could not believe it.
After Dick left, she and Judy had stared at one another, dumbfounded. Neither of them could picture Carol Hamilton cheating on Dick. She had always adored him, and they had never seen her with any other man.
Now the two women studied the faces in the newspaper. There was no mistake; that was Carol and little Judy. But where was the little boy—Bobby Lee? Had Dick been right after all? Had Carol run off with a man, a man who’d killed her and Judy, and abducted Bobby?
“We have to call Dick,” Mrs. King said grimly. “Better we tell him than have him read it in the paper.”
But she was too late; Dick Hamilton already knew. It was a quarter to five on the afternoon of Christmas Eve when Multnomah County Detective Tom Sawyer received a call from th
e Portland Police Department’s major crime unit. Hamilton had called the Portland police to say that he believed the unidentified bodies found on Sauvie Island were his wife and daughter. The Portland detectives told him to remain at his home; someone from the sheriff’s office would contact him right away.
Tom Sawyer phoned Hamilton, who seemed to be doing a good job of keeping his emotions in check. He said he had seen the picture of his daughter in the paper and read the clothing description. He was positive it was his little girl. “The last time I saw Judy—last Saturday, the twenty-first—she was wearing her blue dress and her parka jacket.”
Sawyer asked Hamilton if he felt able to come to the morgue to make a positive identification, and he said he could. Less than an hour later, the slender, twenty-five-year-old Bible college student appeared at Sawyer’s eighth-floor office. Judy King had driven him down, and she told the detectives that her family was trying to support him in his hour of grief. Hamilton identified his daughter’s photo.
Sawyer, along with Phil Todd and Phil Jackson of the Portland Police Department, talked with Hamilton. They advised him of his rights under Miranda, explaining that he seemed to be the last person to see his family. Hamilton nodded politely as if he understood.
Jackson asked quietly, “Does your wife have any scars on her back?”
“Yes,” Hamilton said. “One at the end of her tailbone— where she had a cyst taken off.”
Jackson looked at Sawyer over Hamilton’s bent head and shook his head. He then showed Hamilton the picture of Carol Hamilton that Bob Zion had taken.
Hamilton swallowed hard and then he nodded sadly. “That’s her...that’s my wife.”
The detective trio asked no more questions. Instead, they asked Hamilton to wait for a few moments and contacted Detectives Yazzolino and MacNeel, who had been assigned to work the case. The two were legendary in the Homicide Unit in Multnomah County, having worked some of the most infamous cases in Portland’s criminal history.
Blackie was garrulous and usually had a grin on his face; he was known all over Portland. MacNeel was more reserved. Together, they were perfect detective partners. Now the veteran investigators headed for downtown Portland, driving along glistening black pavement where Christmas lights on trees along the curb cast colored haloes through the rain. It wasn’t the first Christmas they’d been called out, not by a long shot, but the case that awaited them would flash back on their conscious minds for every Christmas that lay ahead.
Richard Hamilton, still maintaining a rigid control of his emotions, listened once again as they read him his rights. Again he nodded that he understood. He was quite willing to talk to them, seemingly anxious to get the weight of the world off his shoulders. Sighing, he told Yazzolino and MacNeel about the upheaval in his formerly happy home.
“It all happened in the past few weeks, and I had no idea what was coming,” he said.
“I never expected that she would betray me like that.”
The two detectives waited for him to go on. Hamilton said he had asked to be let off early from his job at the medical laboratory on Saturday afternoon, December 21. “I usually work Saturdays from seven in the morning until five-thirty. But I told my supervisor that I had ‘babysitting’ problems at home. I told him my wife had to work at the post office because of the Christmas rush. So I left work around three-thirty.”
But Hamilton told Detectives Yazzolino and MacNeel that the real reason he wanted to go home early on Saturday was that he believed his wife had been seeing a man in their home, having an affair in their own bedroom. “I planned to surprise them. I’ve found evidence around the house before, and always on a Saturday.
“I saw a man’s T-shirt lying under the bed in our bedroom once,” he said. “When I pulled it out, I saw it was not a brand I wore—and it was much too large for me. I guess I was in shock. I pushed it back under the bed. Later, it was gone, and my wife never mentioned it.”
There were other things that made him suspicious. “I found hair on one of the pillows of our bed. It was light-colored and it was very greasy. I don’t use hair gel,” Hamilton said. “I also found indentations on the pillows, and I knew I didn’t make them.”
Hamilton said the final blow was when he found a partially burned note in an ashtray. “It was addressed to someone named ‘Ron,’ and it was in my wife’s handwriting. It said she would be back soon.”
“Did you ever confront your wife with your suspicions?” Yazzolino asked.
Hamilton shook his head.
“So what happened when you came home last Saturday?” MacNeel asked.
Hamilton said that he’d arrived home shortly before four. When he entered his house, he’d seen a man sitting in the living room while his wife was in the kitchen. His children had both been playing inside. “The man was about twenty-five,” he said. “I’d never seen him before. He was husky, with light brown hair, and he was wearing gray fabric gloves.”
“They didn’t hear you come in?”
“Not at first. I was prepared to deal with them, though. I had typed out a confession for Carol to sign. I confronted them and told them what I suspected. I gave them the note of confession. It was an admission of Carol’s infidelity and she signed it.”
“Just like that?” MacNeel asked. “She didn’t object or try to explain anything?”
“No.”
“Then what?” Yazzolino said, never changing expression.
“I told her she’d have to leave and that I would help her move her things from the house.”
Hamilton said that Carol had hurriedly packed her clothing, sheets, and blankets. “Everything. She put it all in her car that was parked in the driveway. It’s a red Ford. That was the last I saw of her or my children.”
Dick Hamilton said that he had been completely overwhelmed by her faithlessness, so much so that he’d simply turned on his heel and walked away from his home, headed west toward the Gresham area. “I just wanted to leave all of it behind.”
He had not yet mentioned his small son. That seemed a blazing red flag to the two detectives. They had waited for Hamilton to ask about him, but he didn’t. Yazzolino and MacNeel looked at each other. They each had more than two decades on the force, and a long time working as partners. They no longer had to speak their feelings aloud to each other, but they were totally in accord at this point. They had seen and heard some mighty peculiar examples of human behavior in their day, and now, with just the slightest flick of an eye, they signaled each other that something was hinky.
Sure, it was possible that a sweet, churchgoing little wife could become smitten with another man and forget her marriage vows. They’d seen that happen in other cases. It was even possible that Carol Hamilton’s best friends might have had no idea of what was going on. Judy King, who sat quietly by while Hamilton answered questions, looked totally bewildered by the story he was telling, but she appeared to be a naive woman who might have missed signs of Carol’s infidelity.
Stretching possibility even further, the two detectives supposed a woman could even have run off with her lover, had a violent fight with him a few hours later, and ended up dead before the affair ever got off the ground.
It was possible, but not likely. Something didn’t wash. The man before them showed so little emotion, evinced no outward signs of grief—not even when he had just seen pictures of his wife and small daughter, pictures taken after death. Shock could account for that flatness of emotion, but a man in shock would hardly be able to point out so many details and tell them such a complete story. And he still hadn’t mentioned his son. Most fathers would be frantic by now, hoping against hope that the last member of his family might have survived.
Hamilton seemed oblivious to that glaring exception to expected behavior. Instead, he agreed to go through his recollection of the previous Saturday once more. In the second telling, his story changed somewhat. This time, he recalled that when his wife and children were leaving their home, they were in a different car. Not
a red Ford at all. “It was a Hillman automobile,” Hamilton said, “and it had Washington plates. Ron was driving.”
“But didn’t you say that you last saw your wife loading her things into her red Ford?” Yazzolino asked.
Hamilton seemed perplexed as he realized he’d made a mistep in his story. “I guess I’m a little confused,” he muttered. “I’m kind of in shock.”
Yazzolino suggested that it might be easier to sort things out if he took a polygraph test. But Dick Hamilton said “No” at once. He didn’t want to take a lie-detector test. That wasn’t necessary. He thought it might be best to stop the interview, until he could talk to his minister.
Darril MacNeel called the Hamiltons’ pastor, who said he would leave at once for the homicide offices. Gladys King accompanied him. Both she and her daughter felt so sorry for Dick that they were doing their best to stand by him.
An hour later, Mrs. King and the pastor arrived at the Multnomah County sheriff’s offices. The minister spoke privately with Hamilton for twenty minutes. Gladys and Judy King told Yazzolino and MacNeel that they had known Dick for a long time, and they could not even imagine that he might have guilty knowledge of the tragedy that had occurred.
And now their minister walked from the interview room, his face a study of deep distress. He beckoned to the two detectives. “I’m convinced that Dick had nothing to do with what happened to Carol,” he said. “I’ve talked to him and I feel he’s innocent of any wrongdoing.”
Detectives Yazzolino and MacNeel felt sorry for the preacher. The man before them was a good man and a good Christian, but he was as naive as the two women. Patiently, they outlined the discrepancies in Hamilton’s story for him, and he listened intently. Finally they suggested that he be present in the interview room while they talked with Hamilton. Both the suspect and his pastor agreed to this. The four of them met behind closed doors while Judy and Gladys King waited outside.