Deadly Valentine

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A beautiful home, an affluent woman, a vicious murder.

While her husband mourned, investigators searched for clues.

A greetings card, an exotic dancer, and an operating room schedule showed investigators a side of medicine they hadn't seen before.

It was Valentine's Day, 2001, and Susan Hamilton had a busy day planned.

Her husband, Dr.

John Hamilton, was an obstetrician.

Susan ran his medical clinic.

Susan Hamilton was the proverbial trophy wife.

By all accounts, she was a star.

And he was indeed a very fortunate man to have her.

But Susan never left the house that day.

Dr.

Hamilton was performing surgery all morning.

When he finished, he stopped home on his way to his office to give Susan some flowers for Valentine's Day.

Once there, he found the back door wide open.

Upstairs in the master bathroom was his wife, unconscious.

I think my wife is dead.

My wife's bleeding over the place.

Dr.

Hamilton tried to revive her, but it was too late.

In this case, the attacker was in complete control.

It's unfortunate, but I don't think Mrs.

Hamilton really stood a chance.

The killer apparently escaped through the Hamilton's back door.

None of the neighbors saw anyone leaving the home.

We were suspicious of the fact that maybe a burglar could have came in and possibly attacked this woman trying to steal some jewelry or trying to steal some of the valuables from that home and she possibly surprised them.

This was a prominent part of Oklahoma City.

The bigger homes, wealthier people, affluent folks, you know, the kind that go to the country club.

And police had another possible lead.

As an obstetrician gynecologist, Dr.

Hamilton performed abortions at his own clinic, the one his wife wife Susan ran.

Dr.

and Mrs.

Hamilton had been targeted by anti-abortion protesters.

They'd even made up wanted posters, I believe.

Wanted for murder, John Hamilton, you know, that sort of thing.

And both Dr.

Hamilton and his wife were unapologetic about their work.

Here in the Bible Belt, that's not something that citizens typically embrace.

We know it goes on, it does happen, but to be openly doing something like that and have a clinic that does those kind of procedures didn't sit well with a lot of people.

At the police station, Dr.

Hamilton was grief-stricken.

Please help me.

Please help me.

Please, please, please, please.

Investigators hoped forensic evidence at the scene could tell them more.

Susan and John Hamilton had been married for 15 years, the second marriage for both.

Everyone loved Dr.

Hamilton.

His wife, beautiful woman, wore her age incredibly well.

Country club set, absolutely.

She looked like she would hang out with that kind of affluent crowd.

Everyone said they were just wonderful people and very much in love.

At Susan's autopsy, the medical examiner examiner found no signs of sexual assault.

She had been strangled with some neckties.

Then, the perpetrator drove her head onto the floor many times.

Death was caused by repeated blows to her head with a blunt object.

The wound to her forehead or the left side of her head was substantial and massive.

I think that weapon has to be a weapon of opportunity.

It has to be something that was in that environment that was accessible to that person.

In a search for suspects, investigators learned that an anti-abortion group planned a demonstration in front of the Hamiltons home.

We were able to determine that the house had been picketed, as well as a permit to picket that residence had been attained within a month of the time of this homicide.

At the crime scene, investigators found no evidence of a break-in,

but they did find a potential clue.

On the kitchen counter, they found the Valentine's Day card John purchased for his wife.

And the card read, We are important, loving, caring people together.

My life would be incomplete without you.

I love you, John.

The card Susan gave to her husband had an entirely different message.

One of the captions she had written herself said, obviously, I bought this card before last Monday.

Then as you open the card and begin to read the inside of it, she had written, I bought this card two weeks ago, so they don't seem as appropriate now.

I love you.

Signed, Susan Hamilton.

Police wanted to know what had happened two weeks earlier.

Dr.

Hamilton said they had a fight about money.

But investigators found evidence there was more to it than that.

There was accusations that he was having an affair with one of his clients who was a topless dancer.

And this came from phone calls that Susan Hamilton had gotten hold of.

Susan discovered her husband called the dancer more than 60 times.

This was nuclear in her eyes.

And she even moved out

for a night, went to stay with her friend, Dr.

Hamilton, had been to her club.

She had done a table dance for him for about $100,

possibly on more than one occasion.

Dr.

Hamilton denied the two were having an affair, but with so many calls, Susan was skeptical.

It was not even the fact that he had done it, that he had actually been chasing this girl a little bit.

What was important was that Susan Hamilton believed he had done it.

One week before the Valentine's Day murder, Susan Hamilton had made Dr.

Hamilton write a letter to this dancer refusing to be her doctor any further.

And the media had their own suspicions about Dr.

Hamilton.

It started when reporters heard the tape of Dr.

Hamilton's 911 call.

No, listen, listen, I'm a doctor.

I've been trying to CPR.

Please send somebody, quick.

Is she not breathing?

No, she's not breathing.

I don't get pulp.

Please.

And if you listen to it over and over again, it sounds strange.

The things he's saying, the order in which he says them, he's going to, you know, it just, it sounds weird.

So the local TV station, KW-TV, sent the tape to a company specializing in computer voice stress analysis.

The test charted the micro-tremors in Dr.

Hamilton's voice.

It showed no excessive blood flow impacting Dr.

Hamilton's voice.

On this, I'm very confident confident that this doctor is not stressed to the degree that I would think he would be under those circumstances,

which makes me feel very confident that he rehearsed this before he made his call.

The analysis couldn't say, yes, he did or no, he didn't, but it certainly gave an insight into

maybe there was something more to the story that we didn't know.

And homicide investigators started to question Dr.

Hamilton's unusual behavior captured on videotape just after the murder.

He seemed to be out of control with emotions one way or another.

He would get upset and start moving back and forth.

He would start crying.

He'd stop.

And that was one of the concerns that I had.

It was almost like he was acting.

But Dr.

Hamilton had an alibi for the time of the murder.

He was in surgery all morning with plenty of witnesses.

Obviously, a doctor couldn't be in two places at the same time.

Or could he?

She was strangled.

She's found naked.

Topless dancers, abortions.

You start hearing all that mixed together.

It made for a lot of talk in this town.

To analyze the forensic evidence from Susan Hamilton's murder, homicide investigators asked blood spatter expert Ross Gardner for his opinion.

This case is like many in the sense that what the suspect says ultimately is going to be tested against the crime scene.

When emergency workers arrived, Dr.

Hamilton was covered in his wife's blood.

Dr.

Hamilton's presence in the crime scene, the fact that he's bloody is completely expected.

He's come home, he's found his wife dead, he's cradled her, he's taken action.

But not all the blood on Dr.

Hamilton's shirt could be explained away.

Dr.

Hamilton's claims presented some major contradictions.

I don't expect to find spatter.

The spatter I observed were present on the front of his shirt below his neck, on both sleeves at the cuff,

and these suggested that his arms and his body had been in close proximity to a spatter event.

On Dr.

Hamilton's shoes were tiny blood droplets almost invisible to the naked eye.

These were suspicious, not only the shape, but the angle at which the blood landed on the shoes.

There were some coming down on the toe from above 40, 50 degrees.

There was no possible way that someone had lifted Mrs.

Hamilton's head, dropped her head down, created additional spatter, and somehow Dr.

Hamilton's shoes were exposed to that, that you couldn't explain it from that.

The blood on Dr.

Hamilton's shoes was the result of medium velocity impact spatter, the kind caused as a result of the beating.

Tom Beville, a blood spatter expert hired by Dr.

Hamilton, agreed with Gardner's assessment.

The spatter places the shoe within an area capable of receiving spatter, and the spatter is being generated by some impact into a blood source, which in this case is Mrs.

Hamilton.

And blood spatter found four inches up inside his right shirt cuff was most telling.

It was direct spatter, meaning the blood landed directly on the shirt.

For spatter to get up inside the cuff meant it had to be traveling at some speed.

For it to get on the inside,

the blood has to be coming at an angle capable of missing the wrist and the edge of the cuff and the outside and going on the inside of it.

That puts very limited positions with which that could have occurred.

The only way that that could have happened is from somebody

using their hand to either hold a weapon or something like that and

beat Susan Hamilton and the blood droplets come spewing off that and be driven up in that angle.

Scientists performed DNA testing on each and every bloodstain on Dr.

Hamilton's shirt and shoes.

It was all Susan's blood.

Luminol tests revealed even more of Susan's blood on the inside of Dr.

Hamilton's car.

There was blood found on the steering wheel.

There was blood found on the seat, the driver's side, left edge of the seat, and also some hair

and

tissue found on the

floor of the vehicle on the driver's side.

Investigators discovered what may have been the murder weapon.

The Hamiltons maid said that a marble figurine from the bathroom was missing.

And communication records indicated Dr.

Hamilton was not in the hospital in between his two operations on the morning of the murder.

He started getting pages from that hospital to get there now because that second patient had already been put under anesthesiology.

The blood spatter evidence proved he was home.

Dr.

John Hamilton was arrested and charged with murder.

Well, can you leave the door open?

I mean, it's just, I mean, I feel like I'm in a cage.

I'm sorry, but

I tried to explain to you that

I'm not sexy cases and everything else, and that's why I was hoping there was someplace else you could put me.

This is just,

I'm sorry, I am so distraught.

I need, I just, I want to talk to somebody.

I want to,

I just can't.

I mean, I'm in nuts.

Well, that's the whole purpose of you being here.

Okay,

the stage was set for one of the most publicized trials in Oklahoma history.

My very last words to her were, I love you.

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Interest to this case was the stature of John and Susan Hamilton and the murder occurring on Valentine's Day.

Valentine's Day is a day for love.

This wasn't a very loving scene that...

I saw that day.

So what really happened between Dr.

John Hamilton and his wife Susan in the days and weeks leading up to Susan's murder?

Prosecutors learned that Dr.

Hamilton was making financial payments to others without Susan's knowledge.

He had been sliding money to one of his children by a previous marriage.

Well, she found out he lied to her.

about that and she absolutely went ballistic about that, told him

if he ever did it again, she'd leave him.

There was no question who wore the pants in the family and it was not John.

And Susan suspected there was more going on between her husband and the exotic dancer than he admitted.

My thinking is Susan at this point says, you have broken my trust and it's over.

The stripper actually told me that she really believed that John Hamilton was trying to work up the nerve to ask her out on a date.

There wasn't any relationship there.

On the morning of Valentine's Day, prosecutors believe the couple exchanged cards and they argued about Susan's not-so-veiled message inside.

I don't believe I'd ever wanted to get this from my wife for Valentine's Day.

It wasn't one of the more cheerful ones that you want.

Forcing an exchange of thoughts about one another,

thoughts that maybe would have been better aired with a counselor in the room.

The evidence suggests Dr.

Hamilton went to the hospital, performed one operation, then returned home, possibly with an attempt toward reconciliation.

Prosecutors say the couple argued once again.

In anger, Hamilton took several neckties from his closet and strangled her.

Once unconscious, he hit her head on the floor and struck her with a blunt object.

This created the medium-velocity blood spatter found on his shoes and on the inside of his shirt cuff.

Before he could clean up, the hospital paged him for his next surgery.

So he took his bloody trousers and the murder weapon and left for the hospital, leaving the back door open.

That's how Susan's blood and hair got inside his car.

How Dr.

Hamilton disposed of the murder weapon and bloody trousers remains a mystery.

At the hospital, Dr.

Hamilton scrubbed up for his second operation, washing away the forensic evidence.

But he was still wearing the shoes covered with his wife's blood.

His ability to perform the operation didn't surprise prosecutors.

My wife happens to be a surgeon.

You revert to something you've done a thousand times.

I'm not sure I'd wanted him to perform a surgery on me.

When Dr.

Hamilton went home, he called 911, but delivered a performance that didn't fool the forensic speech experts.

Dr.

Hamilton probably believed that performing CPR would cover any blood evidence of the murder, but he was wrong.

At Dr.

Hamilton's trial, in a devastating blow, Tom Beville, the blood spatter expert hired by the defense, testified that he concurred with the prosecution's expert.

In my opinion, when you look at this case in its totality, in other words, look at all the physical evidence, look at all the statements,

I am certainly well beyond any reasonable doubt that Dr.

Hamilton is the person that has done this.

John Hamilton was found guilty of his wife's murder

and sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.

We all felt sorry for him because, you know, his situation, but to us,

the evidence evidence was so overwhelming and it just seemed to show on his face that he was guilty.

John will rot in jail.

John will have to pay for this at a higher level than what he's already paid.

Meaning,

going to hell.

The forensic findings I thought were powerful.

That's the glorious thing about this case.

There was absolutely no doubt in my head.

He is the killer.

He's made his own bed.

That's one of the interesting things about forensic pathology and forensics.

It's a study of human nature.

That's the dark side to it.

It's really unfortunate, but we could be pretty mean and nasty.