Deadlock : 4 Hung Juries Leave Murder of Altadena Couple Unsolved

The prosecutor, clearly troubled, rose to face the judge in Pasadena Superior Court.

This moment, Deputy Dist. Atty. William E. Holliman said Tuesday, marked the most difficult court appearance in his 22 years with the district attorney’s office.

Although Holliman said he was certain of the guilt of the defendant, who sat at attention in a powder-blue vest and dress pants, the prosecutor said his office would not seek a fifth murder trial for Harles Hamilton.

As Holliman’s face tensed, relief swept across the face of the 29-year-old Hamilton, who has spent most of the last four years in jail. Since December 1984, he had been charged with the murder of an elderly Altadena couple, David and Bertha Goldman.

They were found bound together and beaten to death in their house in a manicured neighborhood of winding streets near the Altadena Town and Country Club. David Goldman, 77, was a prominent Pasadena attorney and a Jewish lay leader at the local and international level. Bertha Goldman, 74, was a retired school teacher.

On four occasions, including last week, juries had deadlocked over Hamilton’s guilt or innocence. His fingerprints were not found at the scene, nor did any witnesses testify they saw him there. Still, prosecutors said the mountain of circumstantial evidence warranted a conviction.

But after four years, the People of the State of California vs. Harles E. Hamilton was over. Judge Coleman A. Swart dismissed all charges in the case, described by everyone involved as tragic, frustrating, unforgettable and strange.

Legal experts noted that it was rare for a person to be tried four times, rarer still for all four trials to end with hung juries.

“Bizarre things have happened that I can’t talk about,” Holliman said. Events surrounding the case, he said, would make a soap opera seem undramatic.

“It could be ‘L.A. Law,’ ” the judge acknowledged.

“There’s been a new twist with every trial,” said defense attorney William E. Turner.

One week after the murders, the other major suspect, Calvin Dean, killed himself with a single shot from a .38-caliber revolver when sheriff’s deputies approached to arrest him on a street in Altadena.

While giving investigators an amazingly detailed description of the murders, Hamilton blamed the Goldman killings on Dean, a close associate whom he had seen the night of the crime.

Furthermore, what Hamilton said Dean told him helped police solve another murder in North Hollywood. Dean’s fingerprints were found on a louver in the house where Lillian Charig had been slain a month earlier.

In another dramatic turn of events, Dr. Donald M. Trockman was found dead of an overdose of heroin and morphine last October. A well-known forensic psychiatrist and expert witness on drugs, he had testified during the Hamilton trials about the effect of drugs on Dean.

To complicate matters further in the latest trial, Rayford Fountain, one of Hamilton’s two attorneys, was indicted in March on charges that he had asked a jail-house informant to falsify testimony in the case. The informant never testified. Fountain denies the charges.

Before the fourth trial, Judge Swart concluded that despite Fountain’s request to be removed from the case, the court-appointed attorney should continue to defend Hamilton. The defendant agreed.

Jury deliberations created unusual situations as well. In the fourth trial, after six full days of deliberation, a juror who was nine months pregnant asked to be relieved of her duties. This would have meant that an alternate would take her place and that the jury, then deadlocked 11-1 for acquittal, would have to begin its consideration anew.

After the judge and attorneys talked with the woman, she agreed to deliberate one day more. The next day, Swart declared a mistrial on the basis of a hung jury.

But he did so only after taking a step he had never taken before in his six years as a judge. He gave written comments to the jury about the evidence, asking questions that seem to indicate he thought Hamilton was guilty. Alluding to Hamilton’s admission that he sold items from the Goldmans’ house the day after the murder, Swart asked, “Who had the property taken in the burglary?” and “Who knew the details of the murders?”

After the trial, the judge said that although the evidence was circumstantial and complicated for a jury to understand, it was sufficient for conviction.

In some of the trials, according to defense attorneys and prosecutors, jurors questioned whether Hamilton, a black, was being treated fairly.

‘Racial Element’

“Jurors have reported to us a racial element has been a factor in deliberations,” said James E. Rogan, the other of the two prosecutors. “That is what necessitated us to try this case multiple times because we have tried to eliminate that (racial bias) factor.”

Because the case was not clear-cut, defense attorney Turner said, it was to his client’s advantage to have black jurors, who might be sympathetic. “When you’ve got circumstantial evidence like in this case, white jurors seem to draw inferences in favor of the prosecution, black jurors . . . in favor of black defendants.”

The first jury, in July, 1986, voted 8 to 4 to acquit Hamilton. Two of the 12 jurors were black, and they voted to acquit, prosecutors say. A member of the jury told prosecutors that a black juror said to other members of the panel: “Do you know how many innocent black men get convicted?”

After the second trial, when the jury deadlocked 6-6, Rogan said, two jurors came to him with tears in their eyes, saying a black juror who voted to acquit had said: “Why should we convict this black . . . for killing these two old rich Jews?”

“That was the primary reason we decided to try the case a third time,” Rogan said.

In the third trial, jurors voted 11 to 1 for conviction.

Multiracial Jury

But the pendulum swung the other way in the fourth trial. Jurors from the multiracial jury said race was not a consideration in their 10-2 vote for acquittal.

After Hamilton’s arrest, he was extensively interviewed, and racial issues arose while he was being questioned by a white sheriff’s deputy.

According to a transcript, the investigator pleaded with him to tell the truth, saying: “You’re a black man; you’ve got a record on you; you ain’t gonna get too damn many breaks, pal.”

Yet Hamilton also used his race as a tool during the interviews, saying of Calvin Dean: “He’s your man. He’s the one that did it--all by his self, ‘cause you know in a neighborhood like that . . . I would stand out like a sore thumb. Somebody definitely would have seen me. See, he’s a white guy . . . a real clean-cut looking guy.”

During the interviews, Hamilton denied that he had been at the Goldmans’ house. Then he changed his story. He signed a statement that said: “I was there but I didn’t kill anybody. But Calvin Dean killed the people in the house. He beat them to death.”

‘Thread of Truth’

Defense attorney Fountain said: “It’s clear Mr. Hamilton made some bad discrepancies about time and place . . . but a thread of truth comes through.”

Only during the first trial was the confession introduced as evidence. Because of defense attorneys’ strong attack on how the confession was obtained, prosecutors decided not to use the confession again.

Eventually, Hamilton recanted his confession, saying: “I retract all that I said. . . . I’ll just face the music.”

Even more than about the issues of racial bias, defense attorney Turner said he was worried about the prosecutors’ persistence in trying to find someone to blame.

Stolen Items

The trail led to Dean and Hamilton after investigators canvassed Pasadena pawn shops and discovered that Hamilton had been selling items stolen from the Goldmans. At Hamilton’s apartment on North Marengo Avenue, where he lived with his fiancee, Kathy Robinson, and at Dean’s Altadena apartment, officers found other evidence from the Goldman house.

In statements to sheriff’s investigators, Hamilton told of his relationship with Dean.

The 32-year-old Dean, who had spent much of his life in jail, had arrived in Los Angeles in 1984 by bus from Texas, where he had escaped from a halfway house.

They met that summer when they worked at a Burbank company that makes walk-in freezers. Both had done time for burglary and both had lived in halfway houses for ex-convicts.

By the fall, when Hamilton had moved in with Robinson in her apartment on North Marengo, he and Dean were seeing one another often.

Came to Apartment

Hamilton told investigators that Dean came to his apartment on the night of the murders. Hamilton said he had spent the evening watching a videocassette of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

The more details Hamilton gave investigators, the more they were convinced that he was directly involved in the murders. Hamilton did say he and Dean pawned a pillowcase full of silverware and jewelry that belonged to the Goldmans.

The drawn-out legal proceedings took their toll.

Hamilton’s mother acknowledged her anguish in coming to trial after trial for the youngest of her 14 children.

As she stood in the courtroom hallway waiting last week for the verdict, she said: “It’s been very difficult. I’m just trying to keep peace in my family.”

After his arrest, Hamilton broke up with his fiancee, Robinson. Her testimony about evidence found in the apartment she shared with Hamilton played a key role in the trials.

Stolen Roast

Two days after the murders, prosecutors say, Hamilton had Robinson cook for him and Dean a roast stolen from the Goldmans.

Robinson, Hamilton said, had long urged him to return to the Christian faith of his boyhood. Now, he said, he wishes he had.

The multiple trials were also extremely difficult for the Goldman survivors: a son, a daughter, a brother and a sister-in-law, who during the closing arguments maintained their front-row vigil across from Hamilton’s mother.

The Goldmans’ daughter, Marilyn Cross, attributes a recent separation from her husband to stress caused by the case. Formerly of Laguna Beach, she lives in St. Louis but attended the trials daily. Her aunt and uncle traveled 150 miles round-trip from Laguna Beach to attend, and the Goldmans’ son, Kenneth, drove from his home in West Hills.

For them, the repeated trials have been traumatizing. “It affects the way you work, the way you play,” said Kenneth Goldman, 50, a furniture salesman. “You know that when you get a headache, it’s from the case.”

Doubts System

Goldman said he has concluded that the criminal justice system does not work. “That’s a hard thing to say for the son of a father who practiced law for 50 years.”

A probate and corporate attorney, David Goldman once was president of the Pasadena Bar Assn. Several times he was president of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center. He also served as an international vice president of the B’nai B’rith’s Anti-Defamation League. “He was extremely interested in fighting bigotry, whether it was anti-Semitism or anti-black,” Kenneth Goldman said.

What has been most difficult, Cross said, is the racial issue raised by some jurors. “We were raised in a home where there was no bigotry. Our parents were very liberal, and that’s a double whammy,” said Cross, whose own adopted child is half-black.

“I was raised to believe,” she said, “that you live by the rules and you do what’s right, and those who don’t will be properly punished.”

In the courthouse lobby, after his release, Hamilton said the Goldman family stared at him “with daggers in their eyes. I hope they can forgive me, because . . . I did not do it.

‘Crime Doesn’t Pay’

“I credit God and Jesus Christ with what happened today. I have learned that crime doesn’t pay.”

Prosecutor Holliman questions Hamilton’s motives, calling him the ultimate con man.

Whoever broke into the Goldman house, Holliman said, left $40,000 worth of bearer bonds lying on the living-room floor. The bonds were “as good as cash, and the dumb crooks didn’t even know it.”

In the end, Holliman said, the stolen gold, silverware, jewelry and household items from the house probably netted no more than $600 from pawn shops.

“When I walk away from this job,” Holliman said, “I’ll think about this case a long time.”