Anatomy of Murder - Bumps in the Road (Jason Hamrick)

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

A marriage gone south leads to murder. The truth of what happened was much closer to home than anyone expected. The path to prove it would be bumpy. For episode information and photos, please visit https://anatomyofmurder.com/ Can’t get enough AoM? Find us on social media!Instagram: @aom_podcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @AOM_podcast | @audiochuckFacebook: /listenAOMpod | /audiochuckllc

So they sent two of their crime scene technicians out to see if they could find any cleaned up blood in that area. When they actually did that, it lights up like a Christmas tree. I'm Scott Weinberger, investigative journalist and former deputy sheriff. I'm Anastasia Nicolazzi, former New York City homicide prosecutor and host of Investigation Discovery's True Conviction. And this is Anatomy of Murder. The tragic irony at the heart of some of the most disturbing murders is that they so often start with a couple in love. And as we've heard time and time again, broken hearts and broken relationships can make people do the most desperate and despicable things. Throw in a child custody dispute, financial distress, and a love triangle or two,

and you might just have a recipe for disaster. So it may not be a surprise that domestic violence between intimate partners accounts for as much as 15% of violent crimes. And of those crimes that resulted in murder, women are five times more likely to be the victim than men. More likely, yes, but not always. Which brings us to the story of Angelina and Jason Hamrick, who in June of 2019 were raising three boys in rural Bethel, Indiana, not far from where Jason grew up. Jason at the time was 42 years old. He'd been a career Air Force officer, and the couple had met and fallen in love

while he was stationed in Seoul, Korea, where the Russian-born Angelina had worked as a cocktail waitress at her father's restaurant. It was a classic story of boy meets girl that ended in wedding bells, kids, and eventually a move back to Indiana, which for Jason was really a dream come true. Their house was this beautiful, huge house. It's on five acres of land. It's in the rural area

of Claremont County. It's a four bedroom, two and a half bathroom house. It has this huge deck off the back with an in-ground pool. It's just a great piece of land. That's the voice of Katie Terpstra, senior assistant prosecutor in Claremont County, Ohio, who over the next couple of years would come to learn all the ins and outs of Jason and Angelina's marriage, which despite starting out strong, soon went from troubled to tragic. Things weren't going well for them. I think that they often had problems. From talking to Jason's family, Angelina sort of always wanted things her way.

It was her way or the highway. She never thought Jason gave her enough money. She never thought she had enough freedom. So I think that there were issues all along. Jason was not from Claremont County. He was there because he was working in Cincinnati in the Air Force as a recruiter. So he was not someone who had a lot of family or knew a lot of people in the area. And so you can picture this almost being the dream for Jason. You know, he's an Indiana boy at heart. He's moved back home. He's close to his parents.

But for Angelina, the city-born woman from a faraway land, it could have been a very different experience for her. Now, as many of us know, it's very common when you're serving your country in the military that assignments change rapidly, and which means you're moving to a completely different base in another state or even potentially another country. And what was important to Jason was to be with his kids. And when it came to Angelina, remember, she was born in Russia and everything was new to her. He was a very dedicated family man, loved his boys, would always take any opportunity he could to be around his boys. With love turning from happy to heartache,

by 2018, Jason had filed for divorce, and he'd been awarded custody of the three children. But with Angelina struggling to make ends meet on her own, and with money and childcare tight for Jason as a single dad, he invited her to stay with him and their children. It was a compromise that he hoped would limit the disruption in their boys' lives. But in reality, the arrangement would prove deadly. On June 30th, 2019, Jason's parents received a call from the oldest of their grandsons who told them that they hadn't seen their father in two days. The police actually get a call from Jason's mom and stepdad. They're panicking

and saying, hey, we just got a call from our oldest grandson. He asked us where his dad was. Obviously, this was very unlike Jason, who was known as a responsible and a very hands-on dad. And in this day and age, when someone doesn't return any phone calls and texts for more than 24 hours, people have a really good reason to be worried. Almost immediately, alarm bells are going off for them because Angelina, through their divorce, was really not supposed to be left alone with the boys.

They were themselves suspicious because there's really no good reason for Jason not to be here. With Angelina claiming complete ignorance as to Jason's whereabouts, Jason's parents asked police to perform a welfare check at the house. They go out to the house to try to see, hey, can we find Jason? Can we figure out what's going on? And they get to the house, and Angelina's there with the three boys. And then they start talking to her, and she could not care less about where Jason is or what's going on.

Both officers on scene were wearing body cameras. We have a portion of that conversation. About what time did you last have contact with him Friday? We left for pizza around like 9 o'clock. I think it's last we saw him. Was anybody supposed to come and pick him up? Or was he supposed to go anywhere? Well, even if he's supposed to, he wouldn't tell me.

Did he pack any clothes? Any clothes or bags missing? I didn't see. We're not sharing the room to, he wouldn't tell me. Did he pack any clothes or bags? I didn't see. We're not sharing the room, so I can't tell you. For him just to vanish and you have no idea and not really seem to care, that's a problem for us. Okay. After that, she went on to tell police all sorts of things. That Jason had a girlfriend and maybe he'd run off with her. That maybe he was off getting drunk with a friend.

They're all kind of half-hearted excuses. Mostly her story is, I don't know. I don't care. I last saw him Friday night. I have no idea where he is. It's not my problem. So for me, Anastasia, the first question I would have is this. Was the wife just playing this down?

Her husband being missing for two days? No big deal, or even something he's done before. And that perhaps the call from the grandparents and the concern by her children may have been overblown, and that Jason was probably sleeping it off with another woman somewhere. Or she knows a lot more than she's telling officers. And of course, that means more investigative work needs to be done. And I think I tried to take the other side of it. Picture this relationship that has gone from bad to worse or in the middle of this just really messy divorce.

And their history is just soured. Maybe the grandparents don't like her. You know, maybe he does just get up and leave. Like, we don't know enough yet, or at least from the officer's perspective, in my mind, I can see it going either way. Yeah, maybe Jason really did take off on his own accord for reasons that at that moment we don't know, but it still feels a bit suspicious. It actually just so happened that one of the officers who was on scene was a female officer. She had also recently been through a divorce.

Even the officer was like, look, if someone told me my ex, who I do not like at all, was missing, I'd still be curious about it, but you don't care whatsoever. So again, it was all suspicious to them. But at this point, their priority is to locate the boy's missing father should they decide to take a routine look around the home. And as we know, that is standard in a welfare check, is to be able to ask to go inside. And you want to see if there's any signs of any struggle or any criminality.

And here we notice that there were no obvious signs of struggle or foul play in the home, which must have come as a huge relief to Jason's family. Obviously, as I said, these welfare checks are meant to check these type of things out. But there are signs that things aren't quite right. Jason's clothes, they're in the closet. His car, in the driveway. And his wallet on the bedside table. But his phone is gone, and so is his gun.

Yes, that is an obvious stop, wait, an automatic double take. But context here is important. Jason was a serviceman, so trained to use a firearm. And he did have a legally registered gun. But the fact that the gun was missing, yet his wallet was still there, well, that is starting to get problematic. Another side of that, Anastasia, to me is like we have this contentious relationship. He obviously must be upset if he left home on his own.

And he took a gun with him. So is there a mental health issue here? Is his own life in danger because of his potential despair? And so you can really flip this and go backwards and forwards depending whether there is something amiss and whether that is because something's happened to Jason or like Scott saying, is there something going on with Jason or maybe something that has nothing to do with anything we've said at all. But one thing is clear to all was that it was imperative to find Jason right away. But how? So the wallet's there and Jason's cars are there. His gun is missing and his phone is missing. Those are kind of the big highlights for them. So they really didn't know what else to do at

that point, because is it possible that Jason got into a car with a friend and left, you know, all that stuff behind? And it certainly wouldn't be the first time a broken marriage led to a runaway spouse. And despite their suspicions, there was no evidence that any type of crime had been committed. That is, until Claremont County Police received a frantic 911 call from a couple that lived less than a mile from the Hamrick home. 911, where is your emergency? There's a dead body laying at the end of our driveway. Oh my God. There is a neighbor of the Hamricks about half a mile down the road.

It's a very rural road. They were coming home after getting some dinner. I'm sorry? Yes, yes. It's laying in the ditch. It looks like somebody's tried to cover him up. It's a man. And the circumstances that led this 911 caller there were this. The husband was opening up the gate, and while he's doing that, the wife's sort of looking out of the passenger window, and she just starts screaming. Next to their driveway is the body of a man, bloodied and partially covered in what looks like grass clippings. They get out of the car. They don't really approach the body very close, but then the husband calls 911 to report what they found.

EMTs respond to the scene and immediately can see that the person is dead and has suffered from some kind of major trauma to his head, most likely a gunshot wound. They had Jason's age, his identifying features. They knew what he looked like and that they knew that this body matched his descriptions. They knew from the state of decomposition

about how long he had been out there and that matched up with how long Jason had been missing. Less than 48 hours after he went missing, investigators had located 42-year-old father of three, Jason Hammer. What they didn't know was what killed him or who. On June 30th, 2019, just two days since he had been celebrating the coming Fourth of July at home with his three sons, 42-year-old Jason Hamrick was found dead on the side of the road in rural Indiana, less than a half mile from his home.

There was a single gunshot wound to sort of the crown of Jason's head, and that bullet traveled through his brain and lodged into the right side of his jaw. So that was the injury that actually killed Jason and killed him very quickly. But it would take a medical examination to determine if Jason's death was a result of an accident, death by suicide, or possibly even murder. And so for that, we're going to go to the autopsy. When Jason was autopsied, the pathologist found what appeared to be a thin layer of residue on Jason's head, meaning the gun had been held right up to his head at the time it was fired. And it is important to note that the bullet recovered was a 9mm, the same caliber of Jason's missing gun.

So, could this have really been death by suicide? So, listening to this so far, the physical evidence, it's possible, but not probable for several reasons that I see, including the trajectory of the bullet from the top of the head down through the lower jaw, which seems to, for me, discount the theory. But it does also suggest that he was shot at close range. So I think more has to be done, especially through the ME's examination.

But there's also something pretty straightforward to note, is that the gun wasn't just missing then. It's still missing now. And normally when we're talking death by suicide with a firearm, the gun is found right there, unless someone else removed it before police arrived. All these things still needed to be figured out. But there were some other interesting findings from Jason's autopsy. He had these injuries to his back, which are called postmortem excoriations. So he had them basically in the shoulder blade area on his buttocks and on his heels. His clothes were actually torn apart as well.

So his shirt, his underwear, his pants had been ripped up. Indications that his body had been dragged after he was shot to the location of where his body was found. And the fact that he had been covered with brush and grass clippings, and if someone was trying to hide the body, was also potentially an indication that he did not die by his own hand, which of course then points to him being murdered. So the key to finding out who killed Jason

might first be finding out where was he killed. And that was really the big struggle in the early parts of this case was not knowing where Jason was murdered. When you're talking about proof beyond a reasonable doubt, which is a pretty high evidentiary standard, it's just hard to say what happened to him without knowing where it happened. Remember, police had already searched and photographed Jason and Angelina's home, and finding no evidence of any foul play had all but ruled out the house as a possible crime scene.

But they had not ruled out the woman he was living with, which is Jason's estranged wife, Angelina, whose bizarre behavior at the beginning of the case was feeling more and more suspicious. So they send officers to Angelina right away. She agrees to come back to the police department to be interviewed. But if police were expecting it to be a tearful death notification, they were sorely mistaken. She'd been in this interview room for a couple hours, and they'd been saying, we found this body, we think it's your husband. She was stone cold about it.

She's like, no, I don't think so. I don't think that's him. I think you're crazy. As she was offered photos of her husband's body to help confirm the identification, Angelina even refused to look at them, claiming that she had an aversion to blood. The interesting point being there that she hadn't yet been told the manner in which Jason had died. Yeah, and obviously, Anastasia, as you know, there are some forms of death that don't even involve blood. You know, strangulation, poisoning. I mean, I think you get the picture.

It was unclear how he died, yet she was already expecting to see blood. And that is definitely a big red flag for me. And the same for investigators who are now investigating all aspects trying to determine what and who had caused his death. But one of the other things that we're going to want to know now, even more so, is all about her. I mean, murder is the most extreme act. Did Angelina have a real reason to kill him? If we're thinking of motives here and we're pondering what

opportunities, we know that she had the opportunity to, but what may have been the motive? And, you know, there is no secret their breakup had been bitter after she lost custody, especially of those children. Angelina's behavior continued to demonstrate some erratic, let's say, behavior. There was an incident where she had missed her scheduled visitation time. So she came to the house sort of demanding to see the kids. Jason said, no, go away. One of their front windows was open and their two-year-old was close enough to the window that she actually grabbed the child and ran out to her car and locked the car. And Jason had to block her in and call the police. But other things and other people

had to be considered as well. You know, maybe Jason did have enemies or at least other enemies or had been mixed up in something that could have led him to trouble. As investigators began to put their case together, put their timeline together, and they're thinking about motive, they really wanted to know the behavior of both Jason, the victim, and Angelina. And she had been accused of leaving the boys alone while she left for long hours to drive in Uber. And there was also accusations that she had also been physically abusive. So while the issues in the relationship could hint at a potential motive, it also sparks the question, why then was Angelina living in the home together with Jason and their boys?

Jason had been ordered to pay essentially child support to Angelina during the pendency of the divorce, even when Jason got custody of the boys and control of the house. So when Summer came, he really kind of was out of money through going through this divorce and needed some type of child care for his boys. Meanwhile, Angelina's lack of income had forced her to start living out of her car. Angelina apparently approached him at the end of May and basically said, I'm out of options of where to live. And sort of out of the kindness of his heart, he said,

OK, you can come and stay with me and watch the boys while I have to go to work in the summertime. And it was that arrangement that had led the family to spend the 4th of July weekend together, complete with fireworks and a barbecue. A husband and a wife reunion of sorts, even out of financial necessity, hardly seems at least an obvious motive for murder. But as it turns out, there was a surprising new twist on their turbulent relationship, one which Angelina was more than happy to share with police. She had a boyfriend. She told us very early on about Michael Clark.

Like her soon-to-be ex-husband, Michael Clark also worked as an Air Force recruiter, who had actually worked alongside Jason at the same Ohio office. And in fact, Angelina and Michael Clark's affair had started years before at an Air Force party back in October of 2017. It was one of those functions where you got to bring your spouse along. So Jason brings Angelina,

Michael Clark's there with his wife, but that's the first time Angelina and Michael Clark really meet. They might've met one other time before then, but that's the first time thatina and Michael Clark really meet. They might have met one other time before them, but that's the first time that they're really spending any amount of time together. And that night, Michael Clark and Angelina exert their sexual relationship. Their brazen affair hit new heights when Angelina even suggested that the two married couples book a vacation cruise together. The people on that cruise are herself, Jason,

Michael Clark, and Michael's wife. Honestly, no one can really say what exactly happened on that cruise, but something happened to where Jason actually got off of the cruise ship and flew home early. And it's in January of 2018 when he actually files for divorce from Angelina. So investigators can now add infidelity to a list of potential motives. But more importantly, they can add another suspect, Angelina's illicit lover, Michael Clark. Again, it is not unheard of for people to have relationships outside of marriage. And they happen for lots of reasons. It can be for some the only way out of something loveless or more problematic,

but it could also go towards the person who is having the extramarital relationship. Some, whether it's a narcissistic need that they have or whether they are just risky or impulsive, it's really hard to use the fact of the affair itself to conclusively know what to make of it now in light and relation to Jason's homicide. So if it's true the affair was going on for so long, and if it's connected to that, meaning the murder, why kill Jason now? What would be the motivation in the timing?

Could it be the custody battle? Was it money? Did he have an insurance policy that she was interested in cashing in on? And also, what does it say potentially about Angelina's personality? Did she manipulate the situation? Is she that cold-hearted? I mean, these are all things, as an investigator, you have to step back and think of your theories within the motivations to murder. Are these all possible? They also need to look at whether they now have just one person of interest or two. So what are

investigators' next steps? Obviously for them, it's time to talk to Michael Clark. Once they're done interviewing Angelina, it ended up being about 11 o'clock in the morning on Monday, July 1st. And he answers the phone and he confirms right away, yes, I know who Angelina is. We're in a relationship together. But that's the least of Clark's admission to police. He goes on to drop a bombshell. As part of that initial phone call, they are talking to him and they're like,

well, what about, you know, Angelina and Jason? What can you tell us about that? Would Angelina ever want to kill her husband? And he basically goes, oh yeah, she talks about killing her husband all the time. Like it was just the most normal thing in the world. So I think the way he played it off to investigators was, they're going through this bad divorce, and I think it's just a way that she blows off steam.

I don't think she's serious about it. But as investigators pressed Michael Clark about his involvement in Jason's very real murder, it became clear that for Angelina, her plotting was more than just talk. Angelina would say things like, no body, no crime. We should make it look like a suicide. She would talk about poisoning him. They would talk about stabbing, but most of the time it was about shooting. Investigators now had somebody on the inside of this potential murder plot,

a co-conspirator who was willing to spill the beans. Unbelievably, the two even discussed where they should ambush him, at the house or when he was picking his kids up from school. But this was perhaps the most chilling detail of Michael Clark's admission. Michael Clark even described that at one point he had Angelina practice if she could drag his body as if he was a dead body. Was Angelina influencing Michael to do her dirty work? And you might be asking who potentially pulled the trigger. But there's one problem with that theory, is that Michael had an alibi for the

night that Jason disappeared. According to Clark, he had been transferred out of Ohio to Texas and claimed that he was nowhere nearby and that he was nowhere near the Hamrick home on the night the murder took place. I mean, they checked travel logs, they checked cell phones, they checked everything that they could possibly think to check, checking into basically, is there any possible way Michael Clark could have been in Cincinnati on that Friday evening while still being at his job Friday? It was basically ruled out that Michael Clark was not in Cincinnati or Claremont County area. He was not able to get up here in the time period that would be necessary for him to have actually been involved in the murder.

As for Angelina's alibi, she claimed that she was with Jason and their sons on June 28th, and that at some point, Jason had simply left the house, never to be seen again. But with her boyfriend Michael Clark now potentially facing charges of conspiracy to commit murder, police in Ohio are about to see how well Angelina's alibi holds up. They asked Michael Clark, would you be willing to come up here

and do essentially a sting operation to see if we can get her to confess to you? And he agrees to that. So you may be asking why Michael agreed to set up Angelina and was the case that good against him? I say it probably was. And he realized that they had the type of evidence to put him in a situation where it was part of a conspiracy to commit a murder. And when it comes down to it, sometimes a relationship is only going to get someone so far and that this is all going to be about self-preservation,

which can be a much more powerful instinct. And this next part of the case is interesting to me because, you know, as an investigator, you love digital evidence. And recordings, conversations that could be played back in court, that a jury can hear two people, in this case, potentially talking about a murder is powerful evidence. And I know, Anasika, you've had that in your cases, and ultimately, they do help you get to where you need to be

on the prosecution side. And that all comes down to, obviously, if they can be used in court. And depending on where you are, there's all different rules. You know, Scott and I have had this conversation offline multiple times, like, is that a one-party state? Is it a two-party state? Meaning that, is it a place that if one person on the line or on the recording knows it's being recorded, well, that's enough to get into court. And also, it matters whether or not the person who they are looking to hear what they have to say, in this case, Angelina, whether they have invoked their right to counsel, because then you can't use anyone else to talk to her as a potential agent at all. But that wasn't the case here.

But it definitely does get sticky sometime. Although here, it seems that they are definitely in the clear when it comes to if they get something off those tapes being used in court. Let's just say this. It does not come without real risk. As you said, Anasiga, you know, if you're getting somebody, a subject of your investigation, who's agreeing to cooperate to set up a controlled phone call, and for some reason they're not a good actor,

they don't say things correctly, or they're giving away hints within that phone call that your target may pick up, that could shut your investigation down as far as talking or getting information from your potential target. So it is a risky move. And if the person you're asking to do this for you isn't really good at it, it could go south quickly. So in this investigation, here's how they set up that call. He is instructed that you're to tell her that

you're coming up, you managed to get some time off, so you're here to support her now that Jason's dead. What they warned Michael Clark over and over and over again is basically like, look, this is not going to work if she's already told you that she killed Jason. You can't play dumb, you just try to keep it as normal as possible. It's also important to note that at this point, at least according to Michael, that while he had his suspicions, Angelina had not admitted to him that she had murdered Jason. If there was more to the story, the whole sting could go horribly wrong. So they meet up in a parking lot of a business and they go out to dinner and she's being very kind of cagey kind of very odd towards him they go back to the hotel room and she immediately goes

in the bathroom and turns on the faucets and is like whispering to him about what's going on she says okay we need to leave this hotel room and talk like outside, which Michael Clark was specifically said, don't be alone with her anywhere other than the hotel room. So he goes against that right away. They go outside and talk. Immediately, the cops must have been thinking this is not good. She's already suspicious and seems to think the hotel room may be bugged. And if Clark and Angelina are in on this together, police could be at risk of losing not one, but two murder suspects. He ends up freaking out and saying, I need to be out of here. I need to get out of here.

He leaves. She goes back to the hotel room and she immediately goes to the two video recording devices, knows where they are right away. She destroys them right away. And the only recording device that she doesn't destroy was one of the ones where Michael Clark didn't know where it had been placed in the hotel room. Investigators suspect that Clark had purposely tipped Angelina off and purposely sabotaged the investigation. And I would say that real, the proof is that, that the one thing she didn't destroy is the one thing that Clark didn't know where it was. But before investigators can deal with Clark, Angelina staged a dramatic scene.

And Angelina actually shows up at the police department demanding to see Michael Clark. So it was our lead investigator, Detective Mike Robinson, conducted the interview. And then Detective Robinson starts to push on some of the information, saying, look, flat out, I think you killed your husband. Like, I think you did this. We have a portion of that interview with the detective. The evidence that we have and collected and things like that, Angeline, I'm just going to be honest with you.

From what I heard rehearsing, it's all pointing to you. That you killed your husband. And what did I do? That you murdered your husband. And you placed his body where it was found. And then she starts telling Detective Robinson, I could do your job better than you. Give me a case and I'll solve it. She's laughing and she's saying, I would be a great detective. I would do such a better job than

you. There is something to be said for just the way that she is speaking, you know, acrimonious divorce or not, you know, having something to do with this or not. There is this, I don't know if it's a toughness, Scott, or a narcissism about it that is really almost bizarre. You know, you could almost just hear her talking about like, you guys have got nothing on me. I could run circles around all of you. But you also have to think about this. It's more information for investigators

because part of the mission of this interview is to get your subject to talk, is to continue the conversation. Because the more they talk, the more information you have and the more relevant testimony you have down the road. And continue to talk, Angelina did. Detective Robinson ends up confronting her about Michael Clark. He says that you guys talked about killing Jason. At first she says, I wouldn't kill Jason if I was going to kill anyone who'd be the guardian ad litem in my divorce case. The guardian, the person assigned by the court to supervise her visitation with her children. But even a quip like this speaks at least potentially volumes about her character and

the depth of her resentment over the divorce. Confronted with Michael Clark's confession about their plotting Jason's murder, she dismisses it all like it's a joke. It's about an hour, maybe a little bit over an hour long interview. And then she starts laughing and she says, those conversations weren't about killing Jason. It was about a video game and it was a character named Jason. So now it was basically Clark's word against hers. So investigators try another tact.

They ask Michael Clark to take a polygraph test. He ended up showing deception on the question of, do you know for sure who killed Jason Hamrick? And that's sort of when he broke down and confessed. Friday, June 28th, around 9 o'clock, Angelina called me and said, I did it. She just kept repeating, I did it, I did it. And eventually he realized she finally killed Jason.

She says, he's on the couch. There's a mess I need to clean up. What should I do? Can you come down and help me get rid of the body? But Clark claims that he never returned to Ohio to help. Instead, he left her with strict instructions. Get rid of the body and the gun and clean up the crime scene. It's an incredible, basic, straight out confession.

But for investigators, the most important information is not the who, but the where. Because now they finally know the location of the original crime scene where Jason was killed. Based on that conversation, now the officers know where to look. They know this happened inside the home. We can kind of go back and look again to see if we can find anything. This time, local law enforcement gets a critical assist.

Out of respect for one of their own, the Air Force Office of Special Investigations volunteered to lend a hand to the police investigation. So they sent two of their crime scene technicians out to assist with processing the house. And those two were human bloodhounds. I don't know a better way to describe them. They used Blue Star to see if they could find any cleaned up blood in that area. When they actually did that, it lights up like a Christmas tree.

You absolutely cannot tell from looking at the photographs with your naked eye that anything had happened there. But as soon as they do that, Blue Star agent, you can see where his head would have been. You can see where the blood would have pooled underneath the couch. Here at AOM, we've been provided some of the crime scene photographs. And this one in particular, we're going to talk about because it is of the living room where Jason Hamrick was murdered. The picture is of a couch on its side, the carpeting from underneath the couch lit up with blue star reagent, like luminol. It is very obvious that a large amount of blood seeped through to the bottom of that couch

and onto the carpeting. Which is the beauty of this type of technology. They would never have known that was there but for this Blue Star agent. And the blood evidence combined with what they knew from the autopsy about the contact burns to Jason's scalp and the trajectory of the bullet paint a horrific picture of how Jason was likely murdered. Shot from behind, gun to the back of his head while he was lying unsuspecting on the couch. This was not a crime of passion. This was not committed in a fit of rage or a fight.

This was cold and calculated and deadly. She was arrested on a charge of aggravated murder. In Ohio, aggravated murder is a murder conducted with prior calculation and design. In other words, premeditation. The trial date was set, and Angelina pled not guilty to murdering her husband. We know she did this, but are we ever going to be able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that she did this? Is this going to be a case where we know she did it, but she just continues to get to be out in the community with her boys and live life? Will she

get what she wants? Despite having what seems like a convincing case against her, including her boyfriend's confession, the blood in the house, and a clear demonstration of means, motive, and opportunity, every trial carries a risk for the prosecution. And this one comes with a number of unwelcome surprises. You know, when you look at all of the pieces of the puzzle, it becomes very obvious. Of course, Angelina did it. But, you know, we don't have a smoking gun. But what they do have is Michael Clark's cooperating testimony, an inside look at the plot and execution of the plan. After being arrested and charged with the

aggravated murder, he agreed to cooperate against Angelina and pled to a lesser charge of obstruction of justice. Obviously, we have a much stronger case with Michael Clark. When he was willing to cooperate, we were pretty happy about that. And we wanted to be able to tell the full story. And to do that, we needed Michael Clark. So we talked about motive, means and opportunity, Anasiga. And obviously, this relationship gone wrong, this marriage, three children between them. She wanted custody.

She wanted the home. And she also wanted her husband not to stand in the way of her new relationship with Michael Clark. And also, there's the potential for money, right? I mean, they're not divorced yet. So unless they had something else already on paper, which we don't know that they did, she gets it all if he dies before those divorce papers are signed. And we've already talked about the means as well.

And we know that Jason's own gun had been in their home and was now missing. There was a lot of taped evidence. And we're talking about controlled phone calls and statements she made to officers on body cam. All of these things are great walking into the courtroom, but there's an unknown. And the unknown is, will the judge allow the jury to use that evidence to make their final judgment? And it's not always easy to think it's going to make it all the way down the road. It's something that prosecutors and investigators also need to contend with all the time. And that's part of the reason why in most of these cases, they never stop working up through and until the time of trial. And one thing that we haven't talked about, which does become crucial to the prosecutor's case later on, is about how Jason's

body was removed from the house and dragged to the ditch, which was a half mile down the road. So the blood evidence showed us that he was killed while laying on that family room couch, which was consistent with the trajectory of the bullet that we had seen. It showed that she had taken his body from the couch, drug it across the family room, out the sliding glass door, and across a small portion of the deck to where the driveway is. And that scenario leaves prosecutors with something very important to consider. Could Angelina have moved this body on her own? Was that even physically possible? Because Jason was not a small man. He

was about six feet tall and he was over 200 pounds. And this is nothing less than extremely savvy, the way that they figured this out. Remember the tiny pieces of Jason's ripped clothing that were found with his body? Well, knowing that at least the likely killer had dragged the body from somewhere to this ditch where Jason was found, investigators decided to walk the half mile between where Jason's body was recovered and the Hamrick residence, just to see what they maybe would find. And when they did that, they found pieces of material throughout the roadway. First, the material looked to be sort of tarp-like material.

Then we got some material that looks like it came from blue jeans, then some material that looks like it came from underwear. Investigators followed this trail of breadcrumbs back to the Hamarik residence, and there they'd find remnants of a green tarp that had been cut up and just left lying besides the pool in the backyard. And investigators noted that it was even a body-like shaped hole that had been cut out of the tarp and that it was clear that someone had used this tarp because of that to move the body. And if that is true, it becomes much more plausible and likely that Angelina could have rolled Jason's body off that couch onto the tarp

and then dragged him out of the house and down the driveway. So she was somehow able to attach his body in the tarp to a vehicle, specifically Jason's vehicle, we suspect, and then drug it down the road. We do think that her original plan was to actually lift his body and put it in the trunk of the van, but she probably just could not lift him up that high on her own. And then we believe she just drug him down the road, which is why we found that evidence of that tarp and his clothing and those post-mortem excoriations on his back. And remember the grass clippings that were piled on Jason's body? Investigators were also able to match that grass with piles of lawn clippings from the Hambrick's backyard.

Remember we always talk about connective tissue, especially in forensic investigations? Boom, there you go. Due to delays caused by the pandemic, the trial does not begin until April of 2021, which was nearly two years since Jason was murdered. But prosecutors are ready to walk into court and present their evidence and their theory about how Jason was killed. And they were also able to lean on another account of Jason's murder that we haven't talked about, Jason's sons, who prosecutors believe were at the house at the time he was killed.

Both boys confirmed the only people at their house that night were their mom, their dad, and themselves. They were having a bonfire out kind of behind their pole barn on their property. Their dad was inside the house. Their mom was at the fire with them, but then left. The seven-year-old goes up to the sliding glass door in order to get a glass of water. Angelina comes out and says, no, you don't go inside. I'll get you something. And she gets him a glass of water. But while he's standing there looking through the sliding glass door, he sees his dad laying on the couch with a pillow on his

head, like covering his face, which he said, that's not what would usually happen. It wouldn't be normal for his dad to be laying on the couch like that. You know, Anastika, when I read that portion of the report talking about the fact that they believed when the murder occurred, which the timing was the killer's timing, right? It was up to them of when they chose to pull the trigger, knowing her own children were in the home. You can't wrap your head around anything more calculated, cruel, really. I mean, homicide always has those elements,

but when there are the children of the victim there, it's just a whole another level of awful. And there was also new information. A pillow was used with the weapon, likely to be some type of silencer. So you have the weapon, you have the pillow, and you have the victim's head. And they were able to confirm that fact forensically because they were able to determine that the pillow they found had gunshot residue on it. And they were also able to confirm that fact forensically because they were able to determine that the pillow they found had gunshot residue on it. And they were also able to tell that the way the wound was on the victim, it was consistent with an item like a pillow. What the pathologist says is that there could have been a very thin intermediary between Jason's head and the firearm. There was soot sound on the bone of Jason's head,

so they know if there was something to muffle the sound, the gun still would have been close enough that it could have left that soot on Jason's bones in his head. But if you think this is looking like a clear-cut case and that all the various pieces of evidence that were accumulated would be presented in court, while the judge in this trial has something to say about that. The judge we were in front of made some very interesting evidentiary rulings kind of leading

up to the trial that were very problematic for our case. About a week prior to trial, he decided that we were not allowed to talk about the divorce between Angelita and Jason at all. And he really didn't want Michael Clark to talk about any of those conversations they had planning the murder prior to the murder. So the motive is a huge part of it. And not to mention exactly the conversations of her wanting to kill him, her talking about all the ways to kill them, potentially not having that was a huge blow to us. So we're losing all of this information. And eventually he ended up saying, you can talk about it if it is something she said minutes or hours before his death, but not something that happened in the past.

While there are evidentiary rules, we're also dealing with different personalities and people making decisions. And judges can sometimes be very inconsistent with how they understand the law. And yes, it is absolutely frustrating to say the least, especially when issues seem like here, to me at least, clear cut. However, it is always the judge's courtroom and prosecutors need to go exactly with what he or she says, even if we don't like it. And I've certainly been in Katie's shoes many times before. But at the end of the day, we have to live with and abide by the various rulings. And that really just hope that it won't adversely impact the case

in any material way. So the conversations Angelina had with Clark about plotting Jason's murder are out. The recordings, also out. But here's what's in. Jason's blood found at the home, on Angelina's minivan, and on the washing machine. The remnants of the tart matching the one in Hamrick's yard, and thanks to some digital sleuthing, searches on Angelina's computer about how to dispose of a body

and video surveillance footage of her buying cleaning products. And that really was that ding, ding, ding, ding piece of evidence for me, Scott. But they also had the testimony of Jason and Angelina's next door neighbors who happened to own a nearby winery, who said that Angelina stopped by on the night of the murder. Angelina is at the winery and she makes a comment several times, the divorce court's leaving me no choice. I need to either kill him or I need to take my kids and flee back to Russia. And the final piece of the puzzle that helps Katie tell a very compelling story of Jason's murder. So our belief is that Jason and Angelina were home that Friday, June 28th, 2019.

Jason's in the backyard letting off fireworks with his boys. Angelina walks next door to the winery for about an hour and a half. She makes those comments to the winery owners. You know, I have no choice. I need to either kill him or flee to Russia. Then she comes back home around eight o'clock. She and the boys have a bonfire in the backyard. Jason goes inside to lay down.

And during that bonfire, she sneaks back into the house, gets Jason's gun where she knew he kept it. She knew where his key was to get into that gun. She crept up behind him and just shot him while he was asleep on the couch. And then Angelina called Michael Clark to tell him what she'd done. They discussed what to do. She said, I'm going to take the boys to get pizza and put them right to bed. And then we know from surveillance footage that she's at a local pizza store about 10 o'clock at night. We believe that after she put the boys to bed,

she basically got to work. She figured out how to dispose of his body. And it's physical evidence that helps paint a clear picture of the rest. We believe ultimately she decided to roll him off of the couch onto that piece of tarp that she had cut out of their pool tarp, drag his body out of the door, then down the road and ditching him where he was, covering up with the grass clippings that match grass clippings that were found in their yard. And then she got to disposing of the evidence. Police never found the gun that she used to kill Jason or Jason's cell phone. We believe she disposed of that in that Bellevue Beach park where she and Michael Clark had talked about along with probably the gun and the tarp and maybe any items of bloody clothing that she had.

Katie presents her case and then leaves it with the jury. And like most prosecutors trying a murder case, she's ready for deliberations to take as long as the jury needs to evaluate the evidence presented, which sometimes can be hours, sometimes days. But that's not what happened here. We got the call an hour and 45 minutes after they left to deliberate that they had a verdict.

So it was really pretty fast for us. I had to say it like a few times, like verdict, you're sure it's a verdict, not a question, not a problem, like it's a verdict? Angelina Hamrick was found guilty of aggravated murder and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 33 years. And while Katie Terpstra was relieved at the verdict in what was actually her very first homicide trial, she still remains deeply affected by how the murder impacted Jason's family, especially his three boys.

It was really hard for them. They did an amazing job on the stand, but just imagining that they're in this courtroom to testify against their mother for the murder of their father, what a difficult position that is to be in. And then saying these things was really hard for them. It was very emotional. You know, I saw multiple jurors sobbing, looking at these boys and what they kind of were having to go through with this trial. Angelina, who wanted custody of her son so badly,

she committed murder, showed no remorse for her actions and no reaction to their pain in the courtroom. When I think of Angelina, it's just, she is the poster child for a cold-blooded killer. I mean, her boys are in the backyard when she killed their dad. She just didn't care about anyone but herself. And I was thinking about that the other day, too, that usually in domestic violence situations or volatile divorces, it's not uncommon for there to be violence, but you almost always hear about it like a male being violent toward a female partner. And in this case, it was completely opposite, that Angelina was the violent person, Angelina was the aggressor, and just how male victims need to protect themselves too, and just be aware that this can happen to them too, depending on who the partner is.

Jason Hamrick served his country, loved his children, was wading through the waters of a messy divorce while trying to keep his children from being affected any more than necessary, what he unfortunately could never have accounted for was the pure heartlessness, indeed viciousness, of his soon-to-be ex-wife. Jason's life was taken tragically many years before his time. His boys lost both parents that night, one to murder and one ultimately to prison. So let's hope for their healing and lots of support as they continue to wade through these

turbulent waters of life. In the very home he lived with his children while sitting on a couch and without warning, Jason had a gun put to his head, trigger pulled, and died before he could even take another breath. And then, his body wrapped in a tarp, taken along the roadside, and dragged along the concrete and the rocks to the point that ripped off his clothing and shredded his jeans. This was not merely a cold-blooded murder, it was a desecration of his body, all part of a wicked plot orchestrated by his wife and her lover. The irony of children left orphaned after one parent kills the other, only for the remaining parent to be sentenced to life, lies in the tragic betrayal of the very roles that parents are expected to fulfill.

Instead of being providers of love, security, and guidance, these parents have rendered their children completely alone in the world. It's a cruel twist of fate where the ones who are supposed to protect them have become the architects of their greatest loss. Tune in next week for another new episode of Anatomy of Murder. Anatomy of Murder is an Audiochuck original produced and created by Weinberger Media and Forseti Media. Ashley Flowers is executive producer. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?