No Regrets (38 page)

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.

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.

I promise you: You will have no regrets.

I have had
to deal with all manner of brutality, tragedy, sorrow, and pain, but I can recall no other story I have researched that had the sheer gut-wrenching impact of the Christine Jonsen case.

Beyond the news headlines, there were questions raised and differing legal philosophies that had to be dealt with. Few of my readers choose to read about murder cases for their sensationalism, and if they do, they will be disappointed. I believe they want to understand the motivations behind the killings and to learn how detectives approach each case and combine modern forensic science techniques with old-fashioned hunches and years of experience. In this light, in this case, it’s important to explore the ramifications of the most widely accepted standard used to weigh insanity and murder in America: the M’Naughton Rule.

This premise originated in England in 1843 at the trial of a man named M’Naughton. In essence, it is a very simple rule: If the accused recognized the difference between right and wrong at the time he committed the crime, he was legally sane. Further, the rule decreed that if he knew what he was doing was wrong and made an attempt to escape detection by covering up his crime, most juries would find him guilty. However, if he should be found sitting next to his victim babbling incoherently,
making no excuses, and with no comprehension of what he has done, he will be far more likely to be deemed insane. But it is a judgment almost impossible to assess. Unless the jury members were there at the crime scene— which they cannot have been—they cannot know what the mental acuity of the perpetrator was at that precise moment. A defendant may have been seen before the crime, and he may have been seen after the crime. But who can say that his mind is the same mind it was at the time of the murder?

Some forty-five years ago, the American Law Institute, objecting to the “right or wrong concept” of M’Naughton, suggested a substitute ruling to test insanity. This modified test would ask, “Did the defendant have the substantial capacity to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law?”

That is, the defendant might have known that what he was doing was wrong—but, if insane, would not have had the ability to stop. In 1971, the Washington State Supreme Court upheld the M’Naughton Rule in a murder conviction and threw out the proposed substitute.

This is all fairly technical, but in viewing Christine Jonsen’s case, it is necessary in order to understand and evaluate what she did on an icy night along the Columbia River in eastern Washington.

Before I attended Christine’s trial, I wrote about three other cases in which I doubted the sanity of the defendants.

• A brilliant and wealthy young man had been under psychiatric care since his mother committed suicide a few years before. He himself had attempted suicide three times. He knew that his mind was not tracking well, and he went to Western Washington State Hospital and
begged to be admitted. He told doctors there that he was afraid he would hurt someone, but they gave him tranquilizers and sent him away. The next day he beat two elderly neighbors to death with a hammer he had just borrowed from them. That, of course, seemed to be the act of an insane person. But he took pains to wash his own bloodied clothing—allegedly to escape detection. Under M’Naughton, he was found guilty of first-degree murder and sent into the general population of the Washington State Penitentiary.

• A fifteen-year-old boy whose father had been diagnosed as insane saw his parents literally “shoot it out” in a gun battle when he was three years old. He was close enough to be drenched by their blood as he crouched, screaming in terror. He had shown signs of profound mental illness for years before he finally raped three women and killed two more. But he, too, made efforts to cover up his crimes. He was convicted as an adult of first-degree murder and sent to prison under the M’Naughton Rule.

• A young man, also highly intelligent, who had fled to Turkey to avoid the “CIA,” who were “trying to assassinate me,” hid in his mother’s home, terrified of “them.” Voices told him to kill his mother, the mother who had tried vainly to have him admitted to a mental institution. He did kill her, and then returned to the blood-washed home where the crime occurred. He cleaned up all signs of her murder and gave detectives a strange alibi. He, too, was convicted under the M’Naughton Rule.

None of these frankly psychotic defendants had anything at all to gain from their crimes. They were caught in
the grip of tortured, fragmented minds, and although they had cried out for help, no help came. Each made vague efforts to cover up their crimes, and these efforts made them guilty under the M’Naughton Rule. They should not have been loose in society, yet one wonders what possible good came from throwing them into a prison where there was only token treatment for mental illness.

Those who kill for lust, financial gain, jealousy, pure meanness, or in the commission of another felony deserve what they get—every bit of it. But what of the truly lost souls?

Christine Jonsen was lost. She was a delicately pretty and very shy young woman with haunted dark eyes. She was born in Yugoslavia, but her father left soon after her birth and her mother died when she was only five. Apparently there was no one in Yugoslavia who was able to take the little girl in. She was shipped off, alone, to America, where a cousin who lived in southwest Washington had agreed to adopt her. And so, she grew up in that rainy, often economically depressed corner of the state where most people make their living catering to tourists, or from logging and commercial fishing.

Christine tried very hard to be perfect, perhaps because she was an orphan, taken in by kind relatives. She wanted them to be proud of her, and she never wanted to be a burden. She won citizenship awards in high school, made the honor roll, and was named a princess in a local logging festival. Yet she always needed to belong, to have someone to call her own.

After graduation from high school, Christine went to Grays Harbor Community College. During her college
years, she and her roommate became involved in the Mormon Church and transferred to Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The Church would become a powerful influence in Christine’s life, and she lived, always, by its tenets. Or, rather, by the way she interpreted them.

A few years later, Christine met the man who would become her husband when they both worked for a company selling campground sites. He was thirteen years older than she was, but that seemed a good thing to her; he made her feel safe and protected. They dated for two years before they married. When Christine’s husband got a job as a salesman in eastern Washington, they moved far away from Grays Harbor County and her relatives.

Richland-Pasco-Kennewick, Washington, called the “Tri-Cities,” are relatively new cities that sprouted up from the brown earth along the Columbia River in the forties and fifties with the advent of atomic power. It was as different from the Pacific Coast towns that Christine had grown up in as if she had moved to the middle of the desert in Arizona. But she was happy; she had what she’d always wanted and needed: a man she loved to whom she would devote her entire life. She had no ambitions for herself beyond being a good wife, and a mother.

Christine was thrilled when her first son, Ryan, was born eighteen months later. He was a lovely baby, husky, smiling, cheerful. Her friends recall her as a most devoted mother. A year and a half later, she gave birth to a second son, Christopher. He, too, was a handsome little boy, and their mother loved both sons fiercely. She hoped to give them all the things she never had and vowed to keep them safe always.