No Regrets

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 talksabout 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