No Regrets (37 page)

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.

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:

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.

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 was 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.