Episode 29: Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies, I'm your host Julie Mattson. Today we head to Oklahoma City to investigate the murder of Susan Hamilton, which took place on Valentine's Day in 2001. Susan Hamilton had a seemingly perfect life in her beautiful home in Oklahoma City, until her husband John Hamilton called 911 to report that he'd found his wife dead on the bathroom floor. Susan was lying strangled with two ties around her neck and her head bashed in. After 14 years of marriage, the Hamilton's seemed to be very much in love. But when Investigators uncovered evidence that Susan had found records of dozens of calls from her husband's cellphone to a topless dancer, and had thoughts of divorce, the question came up, 'Did Dr. John Baxter Hamilton love his wife to death?' Listen in and find out more about the Hamilton Valentine's Day Murder…
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0:06 Welcome to Pushing Up Lilies.
0:08 I'm your host, Julie Mattson. Pushing Up Lilies is a weekly true crime podcast with spine tingling, unusual and terrifyingly true stories from my perspective as a forensic death investigator and a sexual assault nurse examiner.
0:24 Do I have some stories for you?
0:26 Are you ready?
0:31 Hey y'all?
0:31 I hope everyone had a great Valentine's Day yesterday.
0:35 I don't even know what the next holiday is.
0:38 I swear they're going so quickly.
0:40 I just can't believe that it's already mid February.
0:44 It's crazy Texas made it through the terrible ice storm once again.
0:49 Now we're having rain and wind like you would not believe but I wanted to give a shout out to some of my greatest fans and it is Joy and Max and their son Max.
1:03 They are up in North Dakota and I got a message from Joy that they listen all the time.
1:09 Their son listens as well.
1:11 They had gone to a hotel.
1:13 She sent me a great picture of her husband Max looking under the bed in the hotel room.
1:20 Apparently they had just listened to my episode about the dead body that was put under the hotel room bed.
1:28 And so now max wanted to check to make sure there was not a body under there before they went to sleep which I thought was amazing.
1:38 I still do that after I had that scene.
1:42 They are now a part of the club and I love it.
1:46 Thank you so much joy for that photo and any time that y'all have anything to send me feel free.
1:53 You can shoot me an email or even on Facebook private message me on Facebook.
1:58 I will always answer shout out again to Joy, Max and their son Max.
2:02 Thank you all so much for listening.
2:04 I appreciate you so much.
2:06 No, I found another interesting Valentine's Day murder story that I thought y'all would really like.
2:12 And this happened in Oklahoma City, so it's not too far actually from where I'm at.
2:18 And John Hamilton was actually a very prominent Ob/Gyn who worked in that area and his wife, Susan was a P.A..
2:27 She worked for him. Now the two had been married for 14 years, apparently he was obsessed with her.
2:35 He doted over her and on their wedding day he actually gave her a Porsche.
2:41 Not many people get a Porsche on their wedding day from their new husband.
2:45 But they had a beautiful home.
2:47 They took exotic vacations and so things again as we see looked great from the outside, but maybe not so wonderful from the inside.
3:00 On Valentine's day of 2001, he actually ordered an expensive arrangement of red orchids for Susan.
3:08 And he had apparently come home to pick up his date book, found her in the bathroom floor in a pool of blood and she had been strangled with two of his ties and her head had been badly smashed in.
3:27 Now he said that he had performed surgery on that day at 7 a.m. And then he came home to exchange Valentine cards with Susan and then at 8:50 he realized he was late for his next surgery because he got beeped and so he went back to the facility performed the second surgery came home to get his date book because he left it there and then that's when he found her now there was a Valentine card from Susan to him and in it she had written that she had bought the Valentine cards for him two weeks ago.
4:12 So she said I guess this doesn't seem appropriate now but I do love you have a good day and then signed her name which that kind of makes you think okay something's going on.
4:25 I bought these cards two weeks ago now all of a sudden they're not appropriate.
4:30 So something's happened in that two weeks but hey I'm gonna give them to you anyway because I do love you.
4:37 So of course that being written in the Valentine card made police question the marriage in general.
4:44 And then also as it always does when someone is killed one of the first people they look at is the spouse there was no forced entry.
4:54 So it looked like whoever did it had a key or maybe the door was unlocked.
5:00 Who knows?
5:01 But of course when we go on a scene we always look for signs of forced entry or a broken window or a way that someone that shouldn't have been there actually got into the residence, nothing was missing.
5:16 It didn't look like a robbery again, no signs of forced entry.
5:20 So it appeared that whoever did this actually had access to the house on a normal basis.
5:28 Now in addition to delivering babies, Hamilton also performed abortions.
5:33 And of course Susan worked there with him, protesters would occasionally pick it the clinic and also pick up their home.
5:41 He had once been targeted by a militant antiabortion group called The Army of God.
5:49 And the members of that group actually supported the 1998 killing of an abortion provider in New York.
5:56 So this group was well known.
6:00 They obviously did not like him because he performed abortions and they had sent I'm a poster at one time a wanted poster that actually had his photo on it.
6:10 And then I guess in the past he had received some threatening calls that were believed to have been from this militant antiabortion group Army of God.
6:22 So there was that but then on the flip side it was found that Susan was considering divorce.
6:31 So when we find out that you know in almost all cases we start to look at the spouse what's going on behind closed doors.
6:39 I know this family looks great, they look happy, everything's amazing, they make all this money but one person starts talking about divorce and that changes everything.
6:50 So neighbors start reporting marital issues.
6:55 Susan had apparently told neighbors that she found calls on his phone to a topless dancer.
7:03 And so she was thinking of divorce.
7:06 As most of us would write if we found that our husbands have been calling topless dancers, we would not be okay with it.
7:14 And so that is a completely normal response in most of our opinions.
7:21 But Hamilton, on the other hand was reportedly obsessed with her.
7:27 So he denied an affair.
7:30 He also denied that she wanted a divorce.
7:33 He denied knowing that he said that he called the stripper because she was in need of attention.
7:40 Well no sir that's not appropriate and no wife would be okay with that and let me know if you would.
7:49 But I I mean number one, how did he meet her?
7:54 Number two, why does he have her phone number. And number three, you shouldn't be calling a stripper.
8:01 So anyway it was alleged that he murdered her between surgeries.
8:07 The district attorney believed that he started to clean up and then left and then came back to finish cleaning up.
8:15 And that was the reason why he had made two trips to the home.
8:18 But Susan's blood and pieces of her skin were actually on his car steering wheel and then there was blood spatter on his left shoe.
8:29 Hamilton took the stand to testify that the blood came from moving the car for emergency vehicles.
8:39 So he apparently stopped life saving measures after he called 911 to go outside get in the car and move it so the ambulance could get closer to the home.
8:54 Okay I'd like to know how many people would actually do that.
8:58 How many people would care how close the ambulance was and actually think to go move a vehicle and leave your wife.
9:06 But okay defense hired a crime scene investigator to testify that the blood found on him was consistent with him trying to save her life.
9:18 Blood was found later on the right sleeve of his shirt which was consistent with him having that shirt on and striking his wife over the head with a blunt object.
9:34 It took the jury less than two hours to actually convict him of first degree murder.
9:41 Now he was sentenced to life in prison and he's at the Dick Conner correctional center in Hominy Oklahoma.
9:48 And it's funny how things come out in court that never came out before.
9:53 But it was found later that they were actually in a dispute over money.
9:59 Susan's daughter Angela said that her mom was scared and had never felt so alone even after she had married John and Susan suspected an affair.
10:14 And then she also found these calls to the stripper.
10:17 So there were issues you know that no one knew about before and things that she had shared with her daughter that she really didn't share with anybody else.
10:25 Now of course the stripper gets on the stand and she said That he was calling her 10 times a day basically that he gave her samples of an antidepressant because she had been depressed and that he was trying to help her but that he called her frequently to check on her.
10:44 So 10 times a day is a little much.
10:47 I mean I'm sure he never called his wife that often but Susan had also told her family before that he smothered her so he just was constantly on her.
10:59 What are you doing where you go in giving her all these gifts and even though to a lot of people that seems great enough is enough sometimes and you just feel smothered and who knows, he may have tried to control where she went when she went.
11:15 We really don't know.
11:16 Apparently part of the issue was that he paid for his son's car repairs and didn't tell her she felt deceived and was upset that he had lied about that.
11:27 I mean I don't know, I mean it sounds like they had plenty of money so I don't know really where that came from.
11:34 But going back to the surgeries, Hamilton was late for that second surgery Of course we had said that he had gotten paged because he was late but there was no indication really that he had been paged.
11:49 He just showed up late when that happened.
11:52 They said he was more talkative than normal.
11:54 He said he was late because he was shopping for a Valentine's present, which completely is the opposite of what he had told the police that he went back to get a date book.
12:06 Now interesting he had paid $158 for the flower arrangement back on February 12 but he never picked it up so he never went to get them to give them to her and never had them delivered.
12:22 There was a card, chocolate and a stuffed bear in the house and then his Valentine's card was in the jaguar which I guess is the vehicle that he drove.
12:33 So at 11 a.m. He went home after the surgery and then he found her and called 911.
12:41 He had on a bloody sports coat, dress slacks and a dress shirt and guess what was missing?
12:49 He didn't have on a tie.
12:51 She was nude in the bathroom with reportedly two ties around her neck.
12:57 But the story goes that she had actually been dead for hours.
13:02 Who knows when the actual murder took place.
13:05 We see this a lot on police videos because we've all watched tv shows but they put Hamilton in a patrol car outside the house and then they interviewed him for about five hours.
13:18 Now of course those interview rooms are videotaped and Hamilton wept and acted worried and upset and distraught when the police officers were in the room but he would stop crying and then pace whenever he was left alone.
13:34 Susan had been strangled with the necktie and then hit with a blunt object and her face was slammed repeatedly onto the marble floor and now she was in the master bedroom. They said the attack had taken about two minutes and so a lot of the jury's actually cried when they looked at the autopsy photos because her skull was in such bad condition and she evidently took three hard blows to the head. An expert thought that she had tried to remove the necktie from around her neck and then was taken down by someone and then her head was like beat onto the floor and then she had actually tried to rip it off.
14:20 And the reason that they know that is because her fingernail scratches were on her neck where she had tried to take it off.
14:28 The most probable explanation, according to defense experts for the blood spatter on his shirt would be that he had beaten her with a blunt object.
14:39 Now he claimed to be covered with blood because he tried to perform CPR and he tried to remove the tie from around her neck.
14:47 He said that his shoes came off when he jumped over her and that he was bloody because he had basically tried to save her life.
14:56 John Hamilton's had finger nail scratches on his shoulders when he was arrested. And then of course we said her flesh and some of her blood were found inside his car. Police think that they fell off his clothes, off of the instruments, when he took them to dispose of them in his truck.
15:15 So he said that he had gotten in the car, he was bloody from helping his wife but that he had moved it because he thought that the car would actually keep the ambulance from getting too close to the house.
15:26 And then he claimed that he was shaken too much and he couldn't get the key in the ignition, but there were no footprints leading to the car indicating that he had left after he found her.
15:40 As you would expect if he had originally told the truth, if he had found her attempted CPR and then gone out to move the truck.
15:48 Like he said there would be blood on the door handle on the key on the outside of the car.
15:54 But there was not.
15:55 The family's housekeeper also said that there was a marble statue missing from the bathroom, that may have been the murder weapon but it was not found.
16:06 And then the housekeeper also said that on a couple of occasions she had seen bruises on Susan.
16:13 Now Susan had a friend that she confided in who said that they had shared their stories of being abused by their spouses over like a five-year period and had actually joined other abused women in the support group.
16:28 She suspected her husband was having an affair with this topless dancer and found the dancers number 60 times on his cell phone where he had been calling her.
16:39 The dancer who is known as Nina actually had first seen Hamilton for an abortion in the early nineties.
16:49 But she also went to his office for gynecological services.
16:53 So she denied an affair or any type of personal relationship.
16:58 She said she'd done table dances at two Oklahoma City clubs for him.
17:03 He paid her for the lap dances.
17:05 He paid her more than normal.
17:07 When Susan learned of the phone calls, Hamilton's reportedly wrote Nina and told her that he could no longer be his doctor.
17:16 So he said that she was manic depressive and suicidal patient and he'd been trying to help her.
17:24 And that was his explanation for the numerous calls to her phone.
17:30 The couple had actually discussed divorce a couple of days before the murder And they had fought for several months before the murder over.
17:39 Like I said, Hamilton's giving his son money behind her back to fix his car.
17:45 There's a lot of weird twists and turns to this story.
17:48 But again, like I said, strip club while she giving you her number, then it came back we'll know she'd had an abortion there in the 90s.
17:59 She was actually a patient.
18:03 Would that not be weird?
18:04 Like if you were an Ob/Gyn and then you had a patient who was a stripper and then you went to watch her strip? That would just be weird.
18:11 That be like seeing your dad in the audience if you were a stripper. I don't know, it just seems super unusual, but when it came out that he ordered the flowers never gave them to her.
18:22 The blood on things.
18:25 It shouldn't have been in the blood, not on things that it should have been on all of those things.
18:32 And just the fact that they're married.
18:34 I mean, we know, like I said, we've gone over it multiple times, how a lot of times on the outside, everything looks amazing and great and we all think money can buy happiness.
18:45 You know, I'm sure we've all said it.
18:47 Oh well he's rich.
18:48 I can put up with just about anything if I've got money, but this was not the case.
18:53 So another really sad Valentine's Day murder.
18:58 I'm excited to tell y'all next week's story.
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