Authors: Tim Junkin
T
HE
M
ARYLAND
P
ENITENTIARY
, the oldest continually operating prison in the Western world, sits like a medieval castle high on a promontory at the intersection of Madison and Forrest Streets in the city of Baltimore. Its grimy walls have incarcerated generations of convicts including “Negro Bob” Butler, who was reputedly the first to enter the institution upon its completion in 1811, as well as the celebrated “Tunnel Joe” Holmes, who chiseled through slate, concrete, and seventy feet of earth and clay to escape. For two centuries it has housed the state's most violent and incorrigible criminals. Its walls enclose men who live by brute force, who seethe with anger, who are pitiless. Kirk Bloodsworth spent nearly a decade in the Maryland Penitentiary, much of it on death row.
This mausoleum was built at an elevated altitude, supposedly to benefit from the breezes off the water. Beneficent city officials believed that the disorders that seemed to habitually infect prisonersâsmallpox and dysenteryâmight be alleviated by fresh air. Initially, there were few buildings nearby. No one had ever heard of a skyscraper. As its population of convicted criminals grew, as time
passed, this prison witnessed the dramatic growth and transformation of a society.
The first settler of the city of Baltimore is reputed to be David Jones, who in 1661 surveyed about 380 acres of prime land along the eastern bank of Jones Falls and then built himself a house on what is now Front Street. Irish immigrants and German-speaking settlers from Pennsylvania had already begun farming the rich Susquehanna sediment covering the rolling hills of Baltimore County near where the city eventually sprang up. Easy access to a port was essential to the farmers looking to trade with England, Europe, and the West Indies. Baltimore's natural harbor, gouged deep by a glacial trowel, fit this need.
Throughout the eighteenth century, schooners laden with corn and tobacco sailed from Baltimore, down the wide Chesapeake into the Atlantic, and returned loaded with sugar, rum, and slaves to sell. In 1784 Baltimore City's first police force was formed. By 1790 the population of the city had grown to over thirteen thousand and had become a favored destination for immigrants sailing to America. Greeks, Italians, Jews, Lithuanians, Poles, Ukrainians, and others found their own neighborhoods and settled into city life or moved into outlying Baltimore County to farm or trade. In 1876 Johns Hopkins University opened its doors. And on August 16, 1893, Oriole pitcher Bill Hawke threw the first modern major league no-hitter defeating rival Washington 5 to 0.
Inevitably, as the new industrial century took shape, as Baltimore grew into a major international port, its population rapidly increased and swarms of new neighborhoods pushed the city's boundaries away from the water, westward, northward, and eastward. Passenger steamers, ferryboats, cargo ships, oyster dredgers, and sailing clippers filled the harbor. Trolley cars careened up the city streets and railroads expanded their networks of tracks. Roads and highways crisscrossed the landscape. Outlying towns were
swallowed up and absorbed by the urban spread. Crowded city neighborhoods gradually blended into crowded suburbs. In 1957 the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel opened, burrowing beneath the Patapsco River and Baltimore Harbor. Heralded as a marvel of modern construction, it allowed automobiles to travel from Washington, D.C., and points south directly north toward Philadelphia and New York on Interstate 95, without having to navigate the narrow streets and bottleneck traffic in the city. Interstate 95 was followed by Interstate 695, the Baltimore Beltway, which encircles the city with high-speed lanes. These roadways have become the conduit for millions of travelers. They also provide easy access to the many localities along their edges, places previously somewhat insulated from the outside world.
One such area of Baltimore County, known as Essex, sits not far from the junction of these two major arteries, I-95 and I-695. Just a few miles east of the Baltimore City line, slightly north, and not far from the headwaters of Back River, this area contains a congestion of shopping centers, malls, roadways, small industrial buildings, and a host of working-class communities with names such as Rosedale, Rossville, Overlea, and Bluegrass Heights. Sandwiched between I-695 and Rossville Boulevard, and just north of Pulaski Highway and the Golden Ring Mall, sits a sprawling apartment complex of 356 units of squat, flat-roofed, two-story squares, all joined and running together in long, identical rectangular rows. These units border Bethke Pond and a low-lying wooded area, dense with thornbush and vine. The complex is known as Fontana Village. In the summer of 1984 Fontana Village received much unwanted notoriety as the scene of a terrible and brutal murderâa crime that spawned a statewide manhunt, led to one misstep after another by both the hunters and the man they accused, and rekindled a national debate over the propriety of the death penalty.
T
HE MONTHS OF
July and August can be hot in Baltimore. Temperatures routinely run into the nineties and the humidity turns the air clammy, making it seem even hotter. These dog days, as they're referred to locally, send adults inside seeking air-conditioning or window fans, and kids searching for swimming pools, broken hydrants, or shaded parks. The southern flank of the city that sits on the Patapsco River benefits from the prevailing breeze skimming off the Chesapeake Bay. But the crowded neighborhoods spiraling around the city to the north feel little relief. Late afternoon thunderstorms sometimes cool the air sending swaths of steam rising from the burning, pervasive asphalt, but the heat soon returns. At times it is unrelenting.
For the residents of Fontana Village the summer of 1984 was no different from most in regard to the weather. It had been hot and sticky. Folks living in and around that area were taking it easy. Some rose early, as the hours before and after the sun got high were the most bearable. Ladies sat outside on their adjoining front stoops and fanned themselves to feel a breeze. People put off their outdoor projects, waiting for a break in the temperature. Most families felt reasonably safe in Fontana Village. Children played around Bethke's Pond or on swings shaded by the stands of oaks, maples, and elms that bordered the woods dense with underbrush. Mostly occupied by low-income tenants, the apartments housed plenty of kids and young parents.
After dark on July 24 of that year, television screens could be seen flickering from some of the apartment windows in Fontana Village. News shows reported that Ronald Reagan and his running mate, George Bush, were likely to win a second term against Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro; the summer Olympics were about to start in Los Angeles; movies like
Beverly Hills Cop
and
Police Academy
were popular in area theaters; a company called Apple had recently introduced a home desktop computer
called the Macintosh; and there was to be a break in the weather: the next day, Wednesday, July 25, 1984, was to be cooler and less humid, with temperatures in the low to mid-eighties, a day to enjoy the outdoors.
It was around 11
A.M
. that Wednesday morning that Dawn Venice Hamilton, a pretty nine-year-old child with sandy bangs and a page-boy haircut, left the apartment in which she was staying to find some friends outside. She stopped by Bethke's Pond and saw two boys she knew, Christian Shipley and Jackie Poling, fishing for bluegill, and noticed that one had caught a turtle. While she examined the small creature, a man approached and asked her what she was doing. She told him she was looking for her friend Lisa. By one account the man told her that he was playing hide-and-seek with Lisa and asked her if she wanted to play. By another account he simply offered to help her search. She was last seen alive walking into the nearby woods with this strange man. The border of the woods was in shadow. As Christian Shipley and Jackie Poling watched, the figures of the man and little girl traversed a culvert, crossed into this line of shadow, and quickly disappeared.
When Dawn failed to return home a short while later, Elinor Helmick, who was watching over her, went searching. When her search proved unsuccessful, she called the police. Within ninety minutes, over one hundred Baltimore County police officers and cadets were canvassing the area where Dawn had last been seen. It was around two thirty that afternoon when Dawn's body was spotted in the woods. She was lying on her stomach, naked from the waist down, her head bloody, her skull crushed. She had been terribly brutalized, sexually assaulted, and murdered. The residents of Fontana Village and its environs were horrified. The police, who suddenly seemed to be everywhere, vowed to find the fiend who could perpetrate such an unthinkable atrocity on a child.
T
ONI
H
AMILTON
, D
AWN'S
mother, worked as a dancer in a club on North Point Boulevard, something she'd done for a while, a way to make a living. Thomas Hamilton, Dawn's father, had worked many different jobs, mostly as an electrician. Toni was just seventeen at the time of Dawn's birth. Neither parent had wanted to stay married, and neither felt they could handle raising a child. As a result, when she was just an infant, Dawn Hamilton was given away by her parents to a friend and neighbor, a gentle forty-one-year-old woman of Philippine descent named Casimira Escudero Sponaugle, who went by the nickname Mercy. Mercy raised Dawn in a frame house on Hilltop Avenue in Rosedale, a neighborhood about three miles from Fontana Village. She obtained legal custody of Dawn through social services and later tried to adopt her. Mercy had lost her own teenage daughter to a car accident in 1982, and Dawn had become her baby girl. But Thomas Hamilton, who was intent on maintaining a close relationship with his daughter, objected to the adoption, so it never occurred.
That July Mercy had arranged for Dawn to attend a Catholic summer camp near Annapolis where the kids could swim in the river and learn to canoe and sail. The camp was supposed to have begun on July 16. In June, though, once the school year had ended, Thomas had taken Dawn to visit her grandparents in Pennsylvania. Mercy thought Thomas knew about the camp schedule and that he had dropped Dawn off at camp. Mercy thought Dawn was at camp on July 25. Thomas claimed he had never been told about the camp. He was staying with friends at their apartment in Fontana Village for the summer and had Dawn there living with him. Unbeknown to Mercy Sponaugle, Dawn was staying that week with her father; his friends, Gary and Elinor Helmick; their two children, Lisa and Gary; and some cousins at the Helmick's apartment at 8749 Fontana Lane.
Had she known this, Mercy Sponaugle probably would not have
worried. Dawn had a good relationship with her father and enjoyed being with him. And Mercy thought of Dawn as quite self-sufficient. Dawn was, after all, a leader of her fourth-grade class at Rosedale Elementary School. Mercy called her the “big Mama.” She described her as a confident and cheerful girl, and as a trusting child, unafraid of strangers. Dawn was about four feet nine inches tall and weighed ninety-nine pounds. After her body was found, police interviewed Mercy Sponaugle at her home in Rosedale. Sponaugle was distraught. “She was the same as my child,” she cried. “Her books are in my house, her beautiful artwork is here. What did they do with my baby? Why wasn't she in camp? First my daughter, and now Dawn. What am I going to do?”
O
N THE MORNING OF
July 25, 1984, at a little after six o'clock, Thomas Hamilton kissed his daughter, who was sleeping on the couch, and left Fontana Village for work in White Marsh, an industrial area about five miles to the north. The morning was cool, and the day promised to be clear and fine. He drove with his window rolled down and listened absently to the radio during the trip. It was around noon that he got a call from Elinor Helmick telling him that Dawn was missing. His first concern was that maybe she'd fallen into the pond. He left work and rushed straight back to Fontana Village.
Elinor Helmick had a houseful of children that morning. In addition to her own kids, Lisa (age four) and Gary (age six), and Dawn Hamilton, she was looking after her sister's two kids, Missy and John-John. She'd spent the morning in typical fashion, making breakfast for the children and doing household chores while the kids watched the
Facts of Life
on television. At ten thirty, when the program ended, Elinor shooed the children outside to the back field where just through the trees there was a playground. Dawn Hamilton was wearing a pair of blue shorts, a peach-colored pullover
shirt, and sneakers; she was carrying the gray shoulder bag that she took with her everywhere. A little while later, Dawn and Missy, Elinor's niece, returned to the back door and called for Elinor. Elinor came halfway down the steps from the upstairs and was told by them that little Lisa and John-John were in the woods. Elinor told Dawn and Missy to go to the fence and call the two children to come back to the house. The kids weren't supposed to be in the woods. Elinor didn't want them near the pond. Dawn and Missy left, and Elinor went back upstairs for a cigarette. A few minutes later she saw out the window Missy, little Lisa, and John-John all walking up the path to the house. Looking past them she saw a bunch of kids on the playground. Elinor came downstairs and began to scold the children for going into the woods when Missy told her that Dawn had gone into the woods and not come out.
Elinor went out back to the fence and called for Dawn. When she got no answer, she walked down the trail, past the playground, and into the woods, calling her name. She reached the pond and saw Christian Shipley and Jackie Poling fishing. She questioned them and they told her they'd seen Dawn go into the woods with a man they described as white, around thirty, with blond hair and a blond mustache. Elinor, more worried now, walked farther into the woods and up a hill, calling for Dawn but heard no response. She walked back to her apartment, called the police, and reported Dawn missing. Elinor also called Thomas at work and told him what was going on. She then got in her car and drove up to the farm store where the kids often went to buy candy or gum. Dawn hadn't been there. She drove up Rossville Boulevard, circling the woods near where the trail runs out. In an isolated spot, back where the road dead-ends, a car had pulled over and parked. A man got out of the car, and Elinor asked him if he'd seen Dawn. She described her to him. When he said no, she drove back to her apartment where she met the three policemen who had arrived. She told them what she'd
done and seen. The man she'd met on the dead-end road was wearing camouflage pants and had long dark hair, she reported. Later she learned that his name was Richard Gray.