The Valentine's Day Mystery

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Speaker 6 He was a wealthy doctor with a perfect life and the perfect wife until the day he says he found her dead, Valentine's Day.

Speaker 3 My wife, my wife, my wife, I think my wife is dead.

Speaker 10 She had enemies.

Speaker 11 There were calls that were made to Susan that scared her.

Speaker 13 So imagine everyone's shock when they charged him with murder.

Speaker 14 He just couldn't have done it.

Speaker 9 Sure, they had their problems.

Speaker 15 She finds a huge number, and I'm talking close to 100, phone calls to this phone back and forth to John.

Speaker 16 But he did love her.

Speaker 18 I told some people at the clinic, I wish I had someone that would look at me the way John looks at Susan.

Speaker 16 The question for the jury was: Did he love her to death?

Speaker 20 The motive was love

Speaker 22 lost.

Speaker 23 I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dayline.

Speaker 24 A dozen roses? Check.

Speaker 8 How about a candle at dinner and a champagne toast to love?

Speaker 25 Isn't that what Valentine's Day is supposed to be about?

Speaker 8 We all know red is for the ribbon on the box of chocolate,

Speaker 26 not for the pool of blood in the master bath.

Speaker 12 Maybe Chicago gangsters get killed on St.

Speaker 27 Valentine's Day, but not pretty doctors' wives in Oklahoma City.

Speaker 20 It was huge. It had all of the appeal of a romance novel gone bad.
It was the high society doctor married to the beautiful wife that were crazy about one another.

Speaker 30 That high society doctor was Dr.

Speaker 34 John Hamilton, an OBGYN who, in addition to his regular practice, ran an abortion clinic, a role that in conservative Oklahoma would bring him some unwelcome notoriety.

Speaker 37 He and his wife Susan had met in 1985 at a friend's birthday party.

Speaker 33 Both had recently separated, John from his first wife and Susan from Dick Horton.

Speaker 39 Who was she?

Speaker 23 What was she like?

Speaker 4 I think the best way to describe her is

Speaker 4 a woman that always wanted to be a mother, was proud to be a mother.

Speaker 4 Even though she had a great education, Her passion was to be a good mother.

Speaker 19 Susan, then 39, and John, 37, each had two children from their first marriages.

Speaker 24 Friends say that when they met each other, they made an instant connection.

Speaker 19 Vesta Hall was a nurse in John's clinic.

Speaker 18 She was beautiful, vivacious, intelligent,

Speaker 18 just a really neat lady. I told some people at the clinic, I wish I had someone that would look at me the way John looks at Susan.

Speaker 42 Two years after their first date, they married at a local country club.

Speaker 40 Dr.

Speaker 6 Steve Jimerson, a colleague of John's, was best man.

Speaker 22 Oh, they were la-la.

Speaker 44 I mean, he fawned over her a lot.

Speaker 8 The doctor and his wife built an envious lifestyle for themselves.

Speaker 7 A big, comfortable house in a top-notch neighborhood, lavish dinner parties, spur-of-the-moment vacations.

Speaker 6 And the seemingly inseparable couple became even more so after they married.

Speaker 36 Susan managed John's abortion clinic, working there two days a week.

Speaker 45 And as you might guess, it was a job that came with a little danger.

Speaker 6 Anti-abortion protesters were a curbside reality.

Speaker 28 Dick Horton sometimes worried for his ex's safety, but knew she wasn't one easily rattled or intimidated.

Speaker 4 I don't think there was any question she wore the pants and if there was another pair she'd go get those.

Speaker 46 If anything, threats against the clinic only seemed to bring the Hamiltons closer together.

Speaker 44 She was very strongly pro-choice and very outspoken about it, about the right of women. They were kind of a unit.

Speaker 44 in that regard.

Speaker 6 February 14th, 2001, would have been their 15th Valentine's Day together.

Speaker 35 But that Wednesday morning, John arrived home from the hospital and found a horrific scene.

Speaker 24 Susie, lying beaten and strangled on their bathroom floor, her head bludgeoned, surrounded by a pool of blood, her face savaged, almost unrecognizable.

Speaker 8 Two neckties were knotted about her throat.

Speaker 12 John frantically called 911.

Speaker 12 Please, please, send, please, please, send an ambulance, please.

Speaker 3 My wife, wife, my wife, my wife, I think my wife is just dead, sir. Please, sir, please do.

Speaker 52 He told the operator he was trying CPR.

Speaker 3 So, listen, I'm the doctor. I've been trying CPR.
Please send somebody, quick. Is she not breathing? No, she's not breathing, and I don't get pulse, please.
Okay,

Speaker 3 you're doing CPR on her? Yes, I'm trying. Yeah, I'm gonna hang up so I can get in, please.
We'll be right there.

Speaker 19 By the time emergency workers arrived, it was clear that Susan Hamilton was dead.

Speaker 37 Possibilities. Was it a robbery gone bad? A random intruder?

Speaker 19 Or maybe more more likely, an anti-abortion zealot targeting the doctor and his wife?

Speaker 19 Over the next few hours, investigators would explore those theories and more as they tried to understand just what had happened to Susan Hamilton that Valentine's Day morning.

Speaker 54 Coming up,

Speaker 15 John's puzzling phone bill, which finds a huge number, close to 100, phone calls to this phone back and forth to John.

Speaker 10 When dateline continues.

Speaker 40 on Valentine's Day morning 2001. Susan Hamilton had been strangled and brutally beaten in her bathroom.

Speaker 34 Her naked body was discovered by her husband John.

Speaker 56 It was violent. It was a violent scene.

Speaker 40 Oklahoma City investigators Teresa Sterling and Randy Scott, both since retired, arrived at the Hamilton house at noon that day.

Speaker 55 They found a disturbing scene that didn't suit a moneyed neighborhood.

Speaker 58 Ladies laying in the floor, covered in blood, blood all over the floor.

Speaker 8 Right away, detectives started asking who could be responsible. Now keep in mind, John Hamilton was a doctor who performed abortions.

Speaker 42 His wife Susan worked at the abortion clinic two days a week.

Speaker 46 Is it possible that in conservative Oklahoma, she'd been murdered by an anti-abortion zealot?

Speaker 8 Just the week before Susan was murdered, a wanted poster had been left for Dr. Hamilton.

Speaker 40 It read, A reward in heaven will be bestowed on anyone contributing to bringing this murderer to justice.

Speaker 46 And both John and Susan had received threatening phone calls that week.

Speaker 13 I was afraid for his safety.

Speaker 44 There were things done that were dangerous.

Speaker 44 I mean, trying to set fire to his clinic, vandalizing his home, just putting out brochures all over his neighborhood and his kids' school that, you know, said wanted dead or alive.

Speaker 7 What's more, only days before the murder, another anti-abortion group had applied for a permit to stage a protest in front of Hamilton's house.

Speaker 15 I interviewed those people. Every avenue was checked.
Other little issues about maybe was it the burglary? We checked every avenue of any burglary similar, remotely close in the neighborhood.

Speaker 30 As is routine in domestic murders, the detective would look at the spouse, John Hamilton, himself.

Speaker 38 In this case, though, the spouse had an alibi and a good one.

Speaker 25 He'd been up at dawn for a 7 a.m. surgery at an outpatient clinic.

Speaker 8 It was over by 8, and afterwards, John stopped by the hospital, where he had another procedure scheduled for later that morning.

Speaker 30 At around 8.30, he bumped into his former medical partner, Dr.

Speaker 6 Karen Rysig.

Speaker 61 I had gone into the doctor's lounge to dictate the procedure, and he was in there. He was talking on the phone.
It sounded like he was talking to Susan.

Speaker 61 Just, you know, just a very lighthearted conversation.

Speaker 24 Afterwards, the doctor decided to swing back home he has time to get back by the house because their house is very close in between the two hospitals so he runs by that house he was only at home for a few minutes because at 9 a.m his pager went off the hospital calling him to get back for a second surgery by 9 30 he was scrubbing up for the operation a complicated removal of a tumor The procedure came off without a hitch, and later, none of the other doctors reported anything at all unusual in his behavior.

Speaker 44 They all said he was just as normal and jovial as he always was.

Speaker 57 By 10.45, he was on his way home again, which is when he says he discovered Susan in a pool of blood.

Speaker 45 The timeline was extremely tight for the doctor to even be considered as a suspect.

Speaker 24 You'd have to believe that he committed the violent murder in that narrow window between his two surgeries.

Speaker 8 His former medical partner, for one, thinks that would be impossible.

Speaker 61 I personally don't believe a physician could do a surgery, go commit a brutal crime of murder, and go back and do another surgery and be and even be in his right mind.

Speaker 8 Investigators though weren't ruling anything out, especially not after finding a Valentine's Day card her to him opened that day.

Speaker 15 It indicated that she still felt something for John, but it just things weren't the same as they were going to be.

Speaker 6 The card had been found inside John's Jaguar. What were they to make of Susan's handwritten message?

Speaker 53 Obviously, I bought this before last Monday.

Speaker 8 What was that all about?

Speaker 30 A neighbor was about to give the cops the dish.

Speaker 14 She was upset and angry with John, and I think she just wanted to have somebody to talk to.

Speaker 24 Susan's friend, Susan Johnston, the woman next door, had pulled one of the investigators aside and put a bug in his ear that the week before Valentine's Day, Susan Hamilton had confided about problems in her marriage.

Speaker 14 Susan had noticed that John was getting a lot of cell calls.

Speaker 14 I think she became particularly alarmed when he didn't answer it and he finally told her that it was a patient and that she was down on her luck and having hard times and he was just helping her out.

Speaker 8 The patient, as Susan discovered, was a stripper at a nightclub.

Speaker 24 Susan demanded to see John's cell phone bill and when she got a hold of it, her worst fears seemed to be realized. Whoever this woman was, there were way too many calls to and from her.

Speaker 15 She gets the the bill. She finds a huge number, and I'm talking close to 100 phone calls to this phone back and forth to John, and she gets very suspicious of us and confronts John about it.

Speaker 33 John had an explanation for his wife.

Speaker 7 The patient had been having serious psychological problems and had even threatened suicide.

Speaker 6 John, the good doctor, was simply trying to counsel her.

Speaker 47 And while he may have stepped over his boundaries professionally, he said he never had an affair with her.

Speaker 8 Susan's friend, for one, believed him and encouraged Susan to do the same.

Speaker 14 I said, Susan, I don't think it's true. I do not think that John's having an affair.
He's crazy about you. You have a good marriage.

Speaker 14 And I just don't think that it's true. At the end, I think she was calmer and she said, I'm going to think about it.

Speaker 8 When Susan's ex-husband learned of her murder and the domestic melodrama about the cell phone log, he thought he knew right away what had happened.

Speaker 4 They had to find the stripper. The stripper did it.

Speaker 27 One thing everyone who knew the couple, including the neighbors, seemed to agree on, was that whoever Susan's killer was, it certainly was not John Hamilton.

Speaker 14 He just couldn't have done it. He was so kind,

Speaker 14 and you never heard him raise his voice or anything like that.

Speaker 28 Investigators had plenty of theories to work with, but before that Valentine's Day was over, they would have a suspect in custody.

Speaker 19 A name that would shock everybody.

Speaker 20 Coming up, the motive was love lost.

Speaker 10 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 8 Investigators have a word for rage crimes, overkill.

Speaker 12 And that's what had happened to Susan Hamilton on that Valentine's Day morning, 2001.

Speaker 12 Whoever killed her had cracked her skull open with an object never found and bashed her face into the bathroom tile.

Speaker 6 Two men's ties were tightly knotted about her neck.

Speaker 30 The scene was a bloody mess.

Speaker 38 And while there were scenarios to seriously consider, a berserk robber, or maybe the legion of activists opposed to the couple's abortion practice the crime scene wasn't telling them that not least of all in a bloody crime there were no footprints leading out of the house shouldn't the killer have left a trace there's no burglary prints to obtain downstairs there's no tracks that ran out through the the creek bed and behind soon after their arrival investigators started questioning dr john hamilton himself by then there had been that neighbor's tip about problems in the hamilton marriage And that wasn't all.

Speaker 57 The doctor's behavior in the minutes after finding Susan dead seemed off.

Speaker 8 Hamilton had told the 911 operator he was performing CPR.

Speaker 37 But when the first responder, firefighter David Bradbury, arrived on the scene, he thought there was something odd about the way the doctor was performing chest compressions.

Speaker 67 He had one hand on her chest, one hand on her abdomen, attempting to do compressions the way that we are taught to do CPR.

Speaker 67 We interlock our hands, that palm goes on the center of the chest on the sternum.

Speaker 63 And Bradbury says he didn't see any signs that the doctor had even attempted mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

Speaker 67 The way that this woman had been beaten him, her face was swollen, her face was bloody. I didn't notice any blood on his mouth whatsoever.

Speaker 43 After arriving at the crime scene, investigators placed John in the back of a police car.

Speaker 45 And it was there they noticed something else odd.

Speaker 42 Detective Teresa Sterling.

Speaker 56 He was acting very upset. He was scraping his knuckles on the mesh screen in the police car.
He was banging his head into the screen. He was acting bizarre.

Speaker 8 By that afternoon, police had taken the doctor down to the station.

Speaker 36 They took his clothes as evidence and placed him in an interview room for hours on end, watching, taping him on the surveillance camera.

Speaker 15 John Hamilton was just not the victim's spouse that we were seeing. He was more suspicion drawn each time that we'd watched something.

Speaker 30 When left alone in the room, Hamilton seemed to be checking out his shoulder area.

Speaker 36 Had he hurt himself?

Speaker 2 If so, how?

Speaker 30 And when they found fresh scratches on his hands and arm, did that explain maybe the business about scraping his hands on the patrol car cage?

Speaker 68 Was he trying to cover up earlier injuries?

Speaker 15 That would cause a suspicion for us to wonder why he's wanting to scrape his hands up. That goes to another issue.

Speaker 15 We talk about possibly being staged or draw attention to me instead of emotionally upset

Speaker 15 over the loss of his wife.

Speaker 38 Still, there was the doctor's seemingly solid alibi.

Speaker 27 After all, he'd had a busy morning performing not just one but two surgeries with only a brief stop at home in between.

Speaker 15 I think the biggest part for us was try to figure out how he could get there and spend any time there and get back to commit the

Speaker 15 second surgery.

Speaker 6 And as the detectives looked more closely into the doctor's timeline that morning, they saw a hole.

Speaker 33 Not a big one, but maybe enough time to kill and get back.

Speaker 27 They'd learned that second surgery, originally scheduled for 9 a.m., hadn't actually gotten underway until 9.40.

Speaker 26 And why was it delayed?

Speaker 31 Because Dr. John Hamilton was late.

Speaker 19 The surgical team was about to get started when they realized the doctor was still at home.

Speaker 56 He's supposed to be there, and they've got a lady under anesthesia without the doctor, and that is just unheard of.

Speaker 8 To investigators, that delay opened up the doctor's window of opportunity by up to an hour.

Speaker 40 Late that afternoon, Valentine's Day 2001, they arrested John Hamilton for the murder of his wife.

Speaker 55 You're under arrest.

Speaker 55 You're going to be transported to Oklahoma County Jail.

Speaker 40 He was jailed immediately and denied any bail.

Speaker 55 The case now landed in the hands of Wes Lane, then the district attorney, who would try Dr. John Hamilton for murder.

Speaker 38 The prosecutor was well aware of the hurdles he faced, not the least of which, the lack of motive.

Speaker 6 Lane looked for signs of spousal abuse in the past, but couldn't find anything substantive.

Speaker 23 Until that Valentine's Day morning, there was no anger issues, no histories of this guy,

Speaker 23 nothing hitting the switch and flipping out.

Speaker 20 Let's put it this way, nothing that we could

Speaker 20 really present.

Speaker 24 Everyone who knew the couple was saying the same thing.

Speaker 8 It just didn't make sense for the mild-manner doctor to have killed Susan.

Speaker 47 Even Susan's children were standing by their stepfather.

Speaker 44 Susan's Susan's children, when it first happened, were calling me trying to find if I knew of any reason, somebody or some person might have been there.

Speaker 44 And I don't think they believed it.

Speaker 37 Over the next few months, though, with the help of some unique forensic evidence, the DA would put together a novel theory of just what happened between husband and wife.

Speaker 53 Something maybe grimly fitting for Valentine's Day.

Speaker 20 She was

Speaker 20 talking, leaving him, and so the motive was love

Speaker 3 lost.

Speaker 68 The state of Oklahoma would charge Dr.

Speaker 8 John Hamilton with just loving his wife to death.

Speaker 16 Coming up, the prosecutor would seem had his work cut out for him.

Speaker 18 I have never, ever, one second, not one moment in time have I ever thought he was guilty.

Speaker 17 Ever.

Speaker 10 When dateline continues.

Speaker 43 In December 2001, 10 months after the Valentine's Day killing of his wife Susan, Dr.

Speaker 12 John Hamilton was being tried for her murder.

Speaker 49 A crowd lined up to attend the proceedings.

Speaker 63 Loyal patients, former employees, and fellow physicians, all standing behind the doctor.

Speaker 18 I have never, ever, one second, not one moment in time, have I ever thought he was guilty.

Speaker 8 Ever.

Speaker 63 Wes Lane, the prosecutor, was surprised to find he had an unpopular case on his hands.

Speaker 23 There were people that thought this guy was being sandbagged, railroaded. A very nice, innocent guy was facing a nightmare.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I mean, I talked to everybody from

Speaker 20 the restaurant waitress that would wait on them on Saturday mornings, and she was agasp.

Speaker 20 that we could have charged John Hamilton because she would see them at breakfast together, all all lovey, dovey. And so, yes, there was a vast amount of opposition and grand skepticism.

Speaker 36 What he hoped to show the skeptics through trial was that, yes, the doctor was indeed a man who loved his wife.

Speaker 40 Loved her maybe too much.

Speaker 20 John Hamilton is a control guy.

Speaker 20 He wants to have everything

Speaker 20 in control,

Speaker 20 in order.

Speaker 33 To the prosecutor, the Valentine's Day card John had received that morning lit the fuse for the violence that followed.

Speaker 69 In that card, Susan had written a message alluding to the couple's flare-up just days before.

Speaker 33 Susan, ballistic with suspicions that he was having a fling with a stripper.

Speaker 6 The prosecutor told the jury he envisioned the murder this way.

Speaker 28 The doctor, coming back mid-morning after his first surgery, trying to patch things up with his wife, who majorly wasn't buying it.

Speaker 20 He knew that she was still considering divorce.

Speaker 20 Something happened in that bathroom that absolutely triggered him, in which he grabbed the ties and he then surprised her and in his rage did all the rest of the work.

Speaker 49 The doctor, according to the prosecution's version, now had to cover up his frenzy by going back to perform his second surgery as though nothing had happened. And here's the thing about that timeline.

Speaker 30 John had to have left the house by 9.20 to make it back to the hospital by 9.30 when he was seen scrubbing up for surgery.

Speaker 30 Susan, as it turns out, should also have left by 9.20 because she had a 9.30 meeting at a friend's house 10 minutes away.

Speaker 12 But from all appearances, she never got much of a chance to get ready.

Speaker 35 When she was discovered, she was still undressed, her hair still wet.

Speaker 26 Which means if John Hamilton didn't do it, you'd have to believe whoever did arrived right as he was leaving or had been waiting inside all along.

Speaker 20 So somebody would have had to come in, get enraged, surprised her, and thrown her to the ground and done the rest of it.

Speaker 47 And in photos of the crime scene, the prosecutor pointed out for jurors something that needed explaining.

Speaker 27 A wet rag left in the pool of blood from the victim's head.

Speaker 12 It looked like the start of an attempted and then abandoned cleanup.

Speaker 20 We could tell that the blood had been moved around. We actually believe that John Hamilton was trying to clean things up before he got paged.

Speaker 23 So you'd have to think that the opportunistic robber breaking in to steal some jewelry.

Speaker 20 What motive? And there was nothing

Speaker 20 and there was nothing stolen.

Speaker 38 Nothing was stolen.

Speaker 45 And yet, there was this curious story that cropped up in the days after Susan had been murdered.

Speaker 6 A friend was combing Susan's clothes closet for something appropriate for her to be buried in when she came upon something concealed in an underwear drawer.

Speaker 40 It was Susan's good jewelry.

Speaker 38 Dick Horton heard the story firsthand from the friend.

Speaker 4 She calls us us and says, I found the jewelry in her underwear.

Speaker 38 Now, what did that mean?

Speaker 4 Susan was a very disciplined individual. She would have never hidden it in her underwear, and all of a sudden

Speaker 4 just clicks that he's trying to make it look like a robbery.

Speaker 33 Now, this was the reasoning as the prosecutor saw it.

Speaker 6 The doctor wanted the police to believe the crime had started as a robbery.

Speaker 8 So what do robbers take?

Speaker 38 Jewels.

Speaker 10 So he hid his wife's jewelry before the 911 forces arrived, fully intending to get it out of the house sometime later.

Speaker 36 But he never had a chance to do that, or to tell the cops that the killer had gotten the jewels.

Speaker 10 That's because he was put in the back of the police car and never got back inside the house again.

Speaker 69 And finally, there was the story told by blood.

Speaker 27 The medical examiner had determined that Susan had been strangled with two neckties, but her fatal injuries came from being bludgeoned with a blunt object, a murder weapon never found.

Speaker 33 Investigators had to interpret the blood evidence left behind. And for that, they hired a bloodstain expert named Ross Gardner.

Speaker 64 This was a relatively contained crime scene. Good amount of blood, a lot of impact spatter.

Speaker 49 Gardner carefully examined everything the doctor had been wearing that morning.

Speaker 12 A lot of the blood on his clothing could be explained by his attempt to administer CPR.

Speaker 27 But the expert looked at Hamilton's shoes, the left one in particular, and found that to be a different matter.

Speaker 40 The shoes were found next to Susan's body.

Speaker 6 John said they fell off his feet as he was attempting to revive her.

Speaker 50 The expert though was certain that whoever was wearing that left shoe that day was present when Susan Hamilton was being bludgeoned to death.

Speaker 64 Effectively, the inside and front of that shoe was in motion around this spatter event for Mrs. Hamilton that's radiating out.
And the only explanation of that event is the wounding to Mrs. Hamilton.

Speaker 40 And there were curious stains on the doctor's shirt. The blood expert thought he saw a similarity between their angular shape and the wound created on Susan's head.

Speaker 8 His theory was that the stains on the shirt were left by the murder weapon as it came in contact with the garment.

Speaker 8 Of course, he didn't have the actual murder weapon to make a true comparison, but he was able to leave the jury with a vivid impression.

Speaker 8 The doctor's shirt may have taken a kind of photograph in blood.

Speaker 64 He took a one-to-one image of Mrs. Hamilton's head at the injury, the laceration.
We took a one-to-one image of his shirt.

Speaker 64 We overlay it, and you could overlay the pattern transfer right on top of the wound, and you see an immediate, I mean, they match up.

Speaker 49 But the most damning blood evidence of all may have been found in the doctor's car.

Speaker 6 On the steering wheel and driver's side seat and doorsill, crime scene investigators recovered strands of Susan's hair and a piece of her flesh.

Speaker 24 How did they get there from the bathroom?

Speaker 8 To the investigators, the only plausible explanation was that the doctor had bundled up the murder weapon to dispose of it somewhere along the way as he raced back for his second surgery.

Speaker 8 A bloody bundle that leaked.

Speaker 15 You know, you wouldn't have had time to wash it up, or you wouldn't have had time to have gotten it off your clothing. He left in a hurry, obviously, the first time that he was at the house.

Speaker 15 So leaving in a hurry, that's evidence that gets transferred from one thing to another.

Speaker 52 By the time the prosecutor had wrapped up his case, he'd laid out a theory of what had happened.

Speaker 32 That the doctor had used the neckties to pull his wife down to the ground, then bashed her head in with that murder weapon never found.

Speaker 37 Afterwards, he tried to clean up, but quickly gave up.

Speaker 20 This had a lot of dots to connect, and we knew we had enough dots that if we could get it to lay out in an understandable manner, we knew the jury would

Speaker 20 be hard-pressed not to convict him.

Speaker 31 Dr.

Speaker 36 John Hamilton, though, was ready to explain it all, and his version of the truth would be completely different from the prosecutors.

Speaker 8 His long silence behind bars ended as he prepared to tell the jury and us what really had happened that Valentine's Day morning.

Speaker 54 Coming up.

Speaker 39 The more Susan and I talked about things, the more things were clarified, the more things we got straightened out. Things weren't nearly as bad as they portrayed them to be.

Speaker 10 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 32 For 10 months, ever since that Valentine's Day when he was arrested for the murder of his wife, John Hamilton had kept his silence behind bars.

Speaker 37 Now he would be able to tell his side of the story.

Speaker 41 Matt Martin, the doctor's lead attorney, knew it would be uphill.

Speaker 11 We've got a circumstantial case, and I think that the prosecutors in this case were putting as sinister a spin on it as they possibly could.

Speaker 57 To the defense team, it seemed obvious from the first moments that investigators never seriously considered any suspects other than the husband.

Speaker 11 The focus was always on John. It was never anywhere else.
It was never on any abortion protesters.

Speaker 11 It was never on anyone that there were calls that were made to Susan that were scared, that scared her that weren't brought out.

Speaker 38 The defense was dealt a setback at the start of trial.

Speaker 6 The judge ruled that he would not allow any testimony about threats the abortion doctor and his wife may have received.

Speaker 37 So the strategy would be to pick apart both the evidence and the logic of the prosecution's case.

Speaker 11 I never saw anything to indicate that John said, if I can't have you, nobody can.

Speaker 26 After all, only two people in the world knew what was really going on inside the Hamilton marriage.

Speaker 19 John Hamilton, who had spent every day since his wife's murder in a jail cell, would finally get a chance to testify about the last days of the marriage, a story he also told us.

Speaker 39 The more Susan and I talked about things, the more things were clarified, the more things we got straightened out. Things weren't nearly as bad as they portrayed them to be.

Speaker 8 As John Hamilton told it, by Valentine's Day, the couple had already patched up the raw wounds of that ruckus over his unorthodox relationship with a stripper.

Speaker 63 The doctor said he'd even started seeing a therapist on his own to earn back Susan's trust, and that she, Susan, had decided to go into counseling with him.

Speaker 39 Initially, she didn't want to go, but eventually she said, yes, I'll go.

Speaker 23 You were starting to see her come around?

Speaker 60 Yes.

Speaker 39 In fact, she even told her best friend Sherry, I don't believe John had an affair. So in Susan's mind, the affair was not an issue anymore.

Speaker 47 Even the prosecutor, Wes Lane, had to admit that John had been telling the truth about that suspected affair.

Speaker 50 Lane had questioned the other woman.

Speaker 23 Had there been a fling? Had there been an illicit relationship with the stripper point? Topplist answered. No.

Speaker 37 The doctor refuted the prosecution's case against him point by point, like the observation made by detectives at the station that he seemed to be checking out scratches to his shoulder.

Speaker 38 They'd been suspicious earlier back at the house when he'd scratched his hands against the cage of the police car.

Speaker 30 Was he nervous about what an examination of his body would reveal?

Speaker 39 I was frantic. I mean, I knew Susan was dead.

Speaker 39 I knew that they were suspecting me. I was scared.
I was

Speaker 39 a million thoughts were running through my head.

Speaker 39 The major one is that I'd lost the love of my life.

Speaker 39 I was never going to see Susan again.

Speaker 48 They're going to accuse you of trying to cover up the scratches.

Speaker 23 that Susan made defensively as you were killing her.

Speaker 39 If Susan had scratched me, wouldn't you assume that they would have found tissue, blood, DNA of some sort under her fingernails? Nothing was found. It was looked for extensively.

Speaker 19 Prosecutors had made a big deal about the doctor showing up late for his second surgery that morning.

Speaker 27 Was he in fact late, they theorized, because he was killing his wife during those moments, then trying to figure out what to do next.

Speaker 41 Dr. Hamilton had a more simple explanation for being late.

Speaker 37 He'd been told that the surgery before his was running long, long and he decided to use the delay to run home and give his wife a Valentine.

Speaker 39 I talked to this the surgery nurse and she said the surgery before yours started 30 minutes late.

Speaker 23 So you thought that the second operation was going to be backed up?

Speaker 39 Right. I still had 15 or 20 minutes.

Speaker 39 I have a bad habit of trying to do too much in too short a period of time.

Speaker 39 But because it was Valentine's Day, I wanted to give Susan her first Valentine's card and, you know, start her day off right before she got busy with her meetings.

Speaker 23 So that was the reason you went home?

Speaker 39 Right. And Susan's getting ready,

Speaker 45 you know,

Speaker 39 trying to get dressed. And we kissed and I gave her her Valentine's card.

Speaker 39 She went in the closet and got one and gave it to me.

Speaker 23 Now the card would later become an issue because people saw kind of a snarky line from Susan of, well, obviously I got this before the trouble, huh? Did you understand what she was saying in it?

Speaker 39 Oh, sure. But it also said something to the effect how much she loved loved me and our time together.

Speaker 40 As for the discovery of Susan's hair and blood tissue in his car, Hamilton explained it this way.

Speaker 63 He said after calling 911, he realized the EMTs wouldn't be able to get their ambulance past his car out front.

Speaker 50 So he raced out to move it.

Speaker 46 He said he'd gotten Susan's blood on him from performing CPR.

Speaker 12 Blood that then transferred from his hands and clothes to the car.

Speaker 39 I wanted EMT to be able to get in.

Speaker 23 A lot of people don't get that.

Speaker 23 Here there might be a spark of life in your wife and you're giving her CPR. Oh, I've got to move the car.

Speaker 39 Yeah, I think that that just goes to, I think probably in my heart I knew she was dead, but I didn't want to believe that or give up.

Speaker 39 I just, I wanted them to be able to get in and help, and I didn't want any obstruction.

Speaker 39 So, yes, I went and tried to move the car and I was, you know, I was so nervous, I was shaking so much, I was unsuccessful.

Speaker 23 So these things that you say are kind of like out of focus moving the car, there was the other thing, the business about moving her jewelry, hiding it in her drawer, huh?

Speaker 11 Why do you hide her jewelry?

Speaker 60 I don't know.

Speaker 39 I mean, because it was out there in view, I guess.

Speaker 33 In murder cases constructed on the interpretation of blood evidence, it's not unusual for juries to hear from dueling experts when they go to trial.

Speaker 32 And that's what happened here.

Speaker 19 It was seen as a coup for the defense that it locked up one of the most highly regarded blood spatter experts in the nation, Tom Tom Beville, a veteran of almost three decades with the Oklahoma City PD.

Speaker 33 He'd even mentored the blood expert used by the prosecution.

Speaker 70 I was hired either the next day or within two days at least of the actual crime by the defense.

Speaker 23 And they thought they were very clever because they took you, in effect, off the market. The prosecution wasn't going to be able to tap your expertise.

Speaker 70 I would believe that they thought that, yes.

Speaker 55 And as expected, his take on the story told by the blood put his client, Dr.

Speaker 12 Hamilton, in a better light.

Speaker 63 For instance, the shirt that the prosecution suggested had a bloodstain left by the murder weapon, the defense's expert, Bevel, couldn't go that far.

Speaker 70 In order to say that, you have to have the murder weapon. The murder weapon was never found, so you don't have an object to compare it against.

Speaker 59 And the shoe splattered with Susan's blood from different directions as she was being killed?

Speaker 38 Not necessarily a killer's shoe, countered the defense expert, but the shoe of Dr.

Speaker 12 Hamilton as he gave his wife CPR.

Speaker 70 He jumped out of his loafer shoes, which would have reoriented them, and he jumped over to her side and knelt down to try and assist her and to do CPR.

Speaker 6 Beville was the last witness in the trial, and from everything he testified to under the defense attorney's gentle questioning, he'd helped Dr.

Speaker 33 Hamilton, an authoritative figure on the stand turning blood evidence from damning into benign.

Speaker 57 Then the the prosecutor rose for his cross-examination.

Speaker 8 And oh, how the case changed.

Speaker 26 The bottom fell out of everything.

Speaker 53 All the air in the courtroom was gone.

Speaker 20 It was one of those moments

Speaker 54 coming up.

Speaker 9 One of those Perry Mason moments.

Speaker 29 I've never seen a case like Dr. Hamilton's where the defense expert offered the most compelling evidence against the defendant.

Speaker 10 When dateline continues.

Speaker 35 Tom Bevel, the blood spatter expert hired by Dr.

Speaker 47 John Hamilton, had wrapped up his questioning under defense attorneys.

Speaker 38 As the last witness in the trial, he'd refuted a lot of the prosecution's findings and bolstered his client's case.

Speaker 62 Then came the prosecutor Wes Lane's turn on cross-examination.

Speaker 8 Now, courtroom lawyers like to talk about Perry Mason moments when a trial is electrified by unexpected testimony, but it hardly ever happens.

Speaker 50 It did in this case, though.

Speaker 24 Did it ever?

Speaker 8 The prosecutor tossed out an open-ended question.

Speaker 20 Well, Mr. Beville, is there anything that either the state's experts or the Oklahoma City Police Department missed in their examination of the evidence?

Speaker 36 The blood spatter expert on the stand on the payroll of the defense hesitated before answering.

Speaker 70 I expected an objection, and I looked at the defense table, which was over to my left.

Speaker 70 There wasn't an objection. So I answered and I said, yes, sir.

Speaker 8 There was a detail that the witness wanted to talk about, something he'd noted, and what would later be regarded as the atomic bomb of the trial of Dr.

Speaker 6 John Hamilton.

Speaker 38 It was about that bloody shirt taken from the doctor.

Speaker 70 In my examination, I found additional blood that was not talked about anywhere on the inside of the right cuff.

Speaker 8 Prosecutors hadn't talked about this stain.

Speaker 24 Maybe they'd missed it altogether.

Speaker 45 It was up inside the sleeve.

Speaker 8 How did it get there?

Speaker 20 And that's when he started explaining that the blood spatter inside the sleeve, the only thing that he could think of that it was consistent with was John Hamilton.

Speaker 20 when he was beating her with that blunt instrument that was driving that up inside his shirt.

Speaker 63 If you can get whiplash in a courtroom, that's what happened.

Speaker 30 The defense's expert was saying that Dr.

Speaker 63 John Hamilton most likely created those bloodstains by bashing in his wife's skull.

Speaker 39 It was a shock to everybody. Nobody expected that to happen.

Speaker 23 Juror is saying, look at this shirt.

Speaker 39 This is the... His own expert is saying he's guilty.

Speaker 23 They can almost envision whatever that murder weapon is, the bludgeon coming right down on poor Susan's head, causing the blood spatter.

Speaker 60 It's a vivid picture.

Speaker 39 It sure is.

Speaker 53 On Redirect, Hamilton's lawyer tried to diffuse the bombshell testimony by suggesting that the spatter could have resulted from the doctor performing CPR.

Speaker 33 But his argument wouldn't be enough.

Speaker 69 It took the jurors just two hours to reach their verdict.

Speaker 76 We, the jury, in paneled and sworn the above entitled cause, Due upon our oaths, find as follows.

Speaker 70 Defendant is guilty.

Speaker 26 The doctor realized he'd been scuttled by his own man, the expert on blood spatter.

Speaker 39 I still believed that the system would work

Speaker 39 and that

Speaker 39 justice would

Speaker 39 come out. And

Speaker 39 I was wrong.

Speaker 39 I was horribly wrong.

Speaker 6 Two weeks later, he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

Speaker 45 The doctor was still in shock as the judge added his opinion.

Speaker 13 Based upon the comments a majority of the jurors made to me, in which they indicated they were very disappointed that they didn't have the sentence of death as an option, I would consider yourself, or you should consider yourself very lucky.

Speaker 45 But for John Hamilton, the fight wasn't over.

Speaker 39 You know, I've come to find out that blood spatter is really junk science. If this blood splatter is real science, then why should two prominent national authorities disagree with the findings?

Speaker 39 One says the shoes is what convicts him. The other says it's his shirt that convicts him.

Speaker 39 They don't agree.

Speaker 27 Hamilton hired a new attorney, Rob Nye, to appeal the verdict.

Speaker 29 I've been doing criminal trials and appeals for 22 years, and I've never seen a case like Dr. Hamilton's where the defense expert offered the most compelling evidence against the defendant.

Speaker 33 One of their arguments was that Tom Beville should never have been allowed to testify.

Speaker 29 Either Tom Beville lied to the defense about what his testimony would be, or defense counsel took a risk that should never be taken.

Speaker 37 Tom Bevel denies lying about his testimony, and the courts didn't buy the argument either.

Speaker 24 The appeals made their way all the way up to the U.S.

Speaker 32 Supreme Court, but they ultimately failed.

Speaker 23 There are a lot of people, the ones who think you're guilty, are saying it's time for Dr. Hamilton to finally admit his guilt.

Speaker 23 Be a guy, step up to the plate, and tell the story the way it was.

Speaker 39 I'm telling the truth now.

Speaker 39 If I was the guy they think I am, then

Speaker 39 what do I have to lose by telling the truth?

Speaker 39 I don't have anything to lose. If I really did it,

Speaker 39 if it would clear my conscience, but I didn't do it. I didn't kill Susan.

Speaker 53 For Susan's family and friends, the case is now closed, but it may never bring closure.

Speaker 8 After all, nothing can bring back the beautiful, headstrong woman they all loved.

Speaker 23 It's changed Valentine's Day forever for you and your kids, huh?

Speaker 4 Actually, we've turned it into a positive. It started out negative.

Speaker 4 And we changed it to instead

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 4 Valentine's Day is a day to celebrate love.

Speaker 4 There isn't any greater love.

Speaker 58 Betgate.

Speaker 8 Today, John Hamilton resides in prison, behind the walls where Valentine's Day has little meaning at all.

Speaker 17 That's all for now.

Speaker 7 I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 13 Thanks for joining us.

Speaker 59 Hey, everybody.

Speaker 2 It's Rob Lowe here.

Speaker 8 If you haven't heard,

Speaker 2 I have a podcast that's called Literally with Rob Lowe.

Speaker 72 And basically, it's conversations I've had that really make you feel like you're pulling up a chair at an intimate dinner between myself and people that I admire, like Aaron Sorkin or Tiffany Haddish, Demi Moore, Chris Pratt, Michael J.

Speaker 2 Fox.

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