No Regrets

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 forher 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 ofblood. 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