Authors: Tim Junkin
Then Capel brought in Jackie Poling. Jackie gave a slightly different description. He remembered the man at the pond as looking twenty to thirty years of age, about six feet tall, skinny, with light brown curly hair, and wearing tan shorts and a tan T-shirt. Again, no mention of reddish hair or sideburns. Capel considered making another composite with him and started the process, but Jackie seemed so unsure of the different features that Capel gave up. Instead, Capel showed the composite Chris had helped create to Jackie. When seven-year-old Jackie seemed satisfied with the likeness, Capel concluded it was reliable.
Later, Detective Mark Bacon, who had first discovered Dawn's body, would criticize this protocol. He had received the same training in working with witnesses to create composite sketches that
Capel had; they'd attended the same program at the same time. “Showing a composite made by one witness to another is totally against all principles taught in identity school,” he said. “You never put two witnesses together at the same time. You do one composite with witness
one,
and you do another composite with witness
two,
and you hope that the two composites look alike.”
That evening, Capel tried to develop another composite likeness, this time with an adult eyewitness, Fay McCoullough. McCoullough had lived on Fontana Lane for ten years and had worked for the Social Security Administration for sixteen years. She'd reported seeing a strange man standing by the woods that morning as she drove out of the complex on her way to work. She'd slowed down as she passed him and gotten a good look at the man. She remembered him as being five foot seven to five foot eight, slim, with curly blond hair, and wearing khaki shorts, a sleeveless pullover shirt, and tennis shoes. No mention of a strawberry tint to the hair. No mention of sideburns. Capel worked with her for two hours trying to arrive at a satisfactory composite. But neither was happy with the result. Fay kept shaking her head that the sketch just wasn't right. The eyes were wrong, she insisted. Finally, Capel gave up. He threw the composite in her trash can, concluding that she just wasn't a reliable witness. After he left her house, she retrieved it.
After Capel finished with McCoullough, the detectives decided to run with the composite put together by Chris Shipley. It was too late to make the newspapers and television news shows the next day, so they arranged to have the composite drawing disseminated to all media outlets for broadcast on Friday.
T
HE MURDER OF
Dawn Hamilton created front-page headlines in all the local papers, including the
Sun,
the
Evening Sun,
the
News American,
and the
Times
of Baltimore County. Television news channels covered the crime in detail, and for several days Dawn's picture appeared everywhere. Thomas Hamilton, Toni Hamilton, Mercy Sponaugle, the Helmicks, and their neighbors in the apartment complex were all sought out by reporters. During one interview, Thomas Hamilton held in his hand a Ziggy cartoon Dawn had drawn for him. She had scribbled
I love you for all the world
in the corner. Hamilton leaned against the apartment wall heaving sobs. The words “pain . . . sorrow . . . hate . . .” came through. He covered his face with his free hand. He waved the cartoon at the sky. “If he wants to pick on a little child,” he cried, “let him pick on me . . .”
The funeral was held July 28. Sympathy and support poured in from the community. Afterward Thomas Hamilton wrote that Dawn's death was the most horrifying thing that a person could live through. He went into a deep depression, developed a drinking
problem, and tried to find new friends. Hamilton found it difficult to be around anyone who knew what had happened.
Dawn's mother, Toni, spoke to reporters outside her flat in Baltimore City. Fighting back tears, she cursed her daughter's killer, saying he should be tortured and slowly killed. “She couldn't even fight back,” she cried. “I just hope she didn't feel any pain . . .”
Parents in communities all around Fontana Village huddled with their children indoors in fear. The Baltimore County Police Department promised to spare no resource in tracking down the monstrous person responsible. Five two-man teams of homicide detectives and numerous teams of police officers from the Fullerton precinct were assigned to assist in investigating the murder, and the FBI would lend its expertise both in forensic testing and psychological profiling. Officers going door to door interviewed every resident of Fontana Village. Neighbors from adjacent communities; merchants from nearby Golden Ring Mall; employees from the local 7-Eleven, the Dunkin' Donuts, and other eateries on Rossville Boulevard; representatives of Essex Community College; and the manager of the Trailways bus station all were questioned. Even before the composite sketch was broadcast on Friday, the leads were substantial in number. Once the picture of the killer was shown on television and in the newspapers, calls flooded in. A hotline was set up for tips, and Metro Crime Stoppers offered a $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and indictment of the murderer. By Monday, July 30, the police department had received over two hundred telephone reports. Over the following week, the number would more than double.
Neighbors gave varying accounts of seeing strangers in the area with descriptions running from short to tall, stocky to thin, men on foot, men in cars, men wearing long pants, men in shorts. Some tips coming from different sources seemed to point to the same suspect; sometimes the reports seemed random, isolated, unhelpful.
On the day of the murder Officer Lionel Weeks interviewed William Adams of Fontana Village, who reported that a man named Bob, six feet tall, with blond curly hair, wearing a black cowboy hat and western clothing, and possibly driving a cream-colored Chevy van, had two weeks before been offering money to the neighborhood children to buy ice cream. Donna Hill, of Gemini Court, had seen a heavyset man in a cowboy hat hanging around the complex. Once the composite was released, Shannon Wooden, of Capella Court, said that the sketch resembled the man she'd seen wearing a cowboy hat and giving out money to children. He was driving a green-and-white car. And Robert Krue told Detective Ramsey of a man named Bob, six feet two inches tall, with blond curly hair, who resembled the composite.
The afternoon of the murder, Patricia Ruth claimed to have seen a man in light-colored shorts come running out of the woods at half past eleven that morning. He appeared exhausted and gave her an angry look.
Patricia Logan, of 8860 Fontana Lane, told Detective Ramsey that she'd seen a white male on the path near Fontana Village early that morning. She described him as six feet tall and in his midtwenties. He had light curly blond hair, a thin mustache, and was wearing cream-colored shorts and a gold T-shirt. She particularly remembered his eyes, which she said protruded strangely, like he was on drugs.
On July 30 Mary Ann Freeland told Detective Ramsey that on July 25 at about 2
P.M
., she'd observed a white male, about five feet eight inches tall, of medium build, with curly hair and a blond mustache, and wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, walking alone along Ridge Road near the woods where Dawn had been killed. Mrs. Freeland stated that she'd be able to recognize the suspect if she saw him again.
Mrs. Sarah Nelson, on Trimbleway, reported that around eleven o'clock or eleven thirty on the morning of July 25, she'd seen a white male, six feet tall, with dirty blond hair and a slender build, wearing a short-sleeve shirt and old jeans, standing by a car near the back of the woods off Bethke's Pond. She later saw police cars all over that area.
Thomas Jackson, of Serpens Court, told officers that he saw a six-foot-tall white male with a stocky build at 6:10
A.M
., wearing purplish shorts, a purple striped shirt, and white tennis shoes. The man had a mustache. He seemed to be loitering.
Debbie McNamara, of 26 Orion Court, said that between ten and eleven o'clock she had seen a white male, twenty-five to twenty-six years old, a little over six feet in height, weighing 180 pounds, with sandy blond hair and a mustache, sitting on the electric box out front of her place. The electric box was dusted for fingerprints but no prints were recovered. McNamara would later be asked to attend a police lineup.
Nancy Hall, of 18 Orion Court, was first interviewed by Officer Charles Moore and later by Detective Robert Castagnetti. She told them that around nine thirty that morning she'd seen a white male sitting on a transformer box on Orion Court wearing black khaki pants and a maroon pullover shirt. He had dark brown hair that was curly in the back and had a thin build. She said that her friend, Donna Ferguson, had seen him too. Two days later, this same Nancy Hall approached an officer and told him that the composite looked like a man she knew named Mickey Manzari. She reported that Manzari had been hanging around the complex, had been recently released from prison, and had brown curly hair. On July 31 officers arrested Manzari at Nancy Hall's apartment but later released him when his alibi checked out. Despite her error in fingering Manzari and despite the fact that the strange man she saw was wearing black
pants as opposed to the tan shorts described by the two boys and Fay McCoullough, Hall would later become an important prosecution witness at trial.
Donna Ferguson, interviewed by both Moore and Castagnetti, said that between ten fifteen and ten thirty that morning she also saw a white male wearing a maroon shirt sitting on the electric box on Orion Court but took little notice of him. About ten thirty she saw Dawn Hamilton go into the woods, yelling, “Lisa, Lisa,” and at about the same time heard a man's voice say, “Lisa and I are playing hide-and-seek; let's go into the woods and find her.” She reported, however, that she did
not
see the man who said this and didn't know if he was the same person she'd seen earlier. Ferguson also would testify for the state at trial. There, before a jury, she'd claim that she did in fact see the man who went into the woods with Dawn Hamilton and would identify him as the defendant on trial.
Mrs. Chris Wagner, of Breslin Court, told Robert Capel on the 27th that she'd seen a man in the Rossridge swimming pool who closely resembled the composite. Detective Capel interviewed the pool lifeguard and learned that the man was Thomas Darling. Darling's employment time card showed that he'd been at work all day on the 25th.
One neighbor claimed to have seen a nude man on the playground the week before.
Harriet Forrest, the manager of the nearby 7-Eleven, viewed the composite and called in saying that a man who matched it had been at the store at 10:30
A.M
. on the 25th. A store videotape of the subject was played, revealing a white male appearing to be twenty-five to thirty years old, six feet tall, of medium build, wearing a white T-shirt and tennis shoes, but without a mustache. Since he lacked a mustache, the lead was dropped.
On August 1, Gloria Curtis told an investigator that the composite looked like the resident of 8864 Trimbleway, Garvin L.
Porter. Porter turned out to be only five feet seven inches tall and weighed 170 pounds. He was dismissed as a suspect. Considerable weight was being placed on the descriptions given by the two little boys.
Later, on August 1, Jim Greeley and Robert Fertig of Pennsbury Place reported that their neighbor, Mr. King, looked like the composite. It was determined that Mr. King was driving his tractor-trailer all day on July 25.
The composite sketch, it seemed, favored a lot of people.
That same day, a Mr. Constantine of Pennsbury Place, advised police that the picture of the suspect was similar to a man wanted in the Fells Point area of Baltimore for a series of child rapes. This particular lead was never pursued.
A married couple from Orion Court told police that Clarence Conroy, who lived three doors down, had been previously arrested for child molesting, and except for his heightâhe was only five feet four inches tallâmet the description. Conroy went by the nickname Popeye and always wore a Pittsburgh Pirates hat. Police pulled Conroy's record. They later established that on the day of the crime he'd been mowing grass all morning and into the early afternoon at a distant location.
Detective Milton Duckworth, on July 31, tracked down Arnold Sanders after learning that Sanders had been fired from delivering the
Sun
newspapers because he often delivered them in a bikini bathing suit. Sanders had been taking classes at Essex Community College during the entire morning of July 25. His alibi checked out.
Detectives Capel and Ramsey had to sift through all these leads and see to it that each was adequately followed up. It was their responsibility to separate the wheat from the chaff. This was no easy chore. Interestingly, though, given what was eventually to happen, none of these reports suggested anything about a man with reddish or auburn hair or a man with mutton chop sideburns.
When a telephone tip came in suggesting that a W. F. Johnson of Spangler Way should be investigated, that he met the general description of the assailant and had spent two and a half years at the Clifton Perkins State Mental Hospital after being charged with child molestation, it was Detective Duckworth who was again assigned to track him down. Duckworth interviewed Johnson on July 27. He had already learned that Johnson was known to distribute sweets to the children at the Calvary Baptist Church, where he'd earned the nickname the Candy Man. Johnson came across as a creepy guy. He claimed that on July 25 he'd spent the day looking for work, as he'd been doing since losing his job eight months earlier. He admitted that he'd seen Dawn's picture on TV and knew her from church. He admitted giving candy to kids and said he did it because he loved children. Under no circumstances would he hurt one, he said. Detective Duckworth also interviewed the minister of the church who said Johnson was a constant source of concern as he liked to pick the little girls up and put them on his lap. Several mothers had complained about him touching their children. Detective Duckworth felt uneasy about Johnson. Johnson did not match the composite sketch. He was six feet six inches tall, weighed 215 pounds, and had brown hair. Still, Johnson had no verifiable alibi, and Duckworth believed that he should not be eliminated as a suspect.