BEFORE LEAVING THE BARRACKS, Deke Stanton roused Hank Carlson, the other trooper who’d been asleep when the call had come in. Leaving Trooper Manning to handle the radio and phones, Stanton and Carlson suited up, grabbed evidence kits, and jumped into their cruiser. They were on the road - according to their own log entry - by 0634, just twelve minutes after the completion of Stanton’s conversation with Bass McClure. As they headed north, with Stanton at the wheel, Carlson radioed back to Manning, instructing him to try to reach their commanding officer, Captain Roger Duquesne, at home, and apprise him of the situation, and to call Mercy Hospital and have them send a bus to the Hamilton place. A “bus” is universal police jargon for ambulance. Carlson - no doubt at Stanton’s direction - also told Manning to notify the Franklin County Medical Examiner’s Office to dispatch an investigator to the scene and expect two cases sometime around mid-afternoon. Ottawa County had no medical examiner of its own: There simply weren’t enough suspicious or unexplained deaths during the course of a year to warrant budgeting for one.

With Route 30 all but deserted early that Sunday morning, Stanton drove with his headlights on and his roof lights flashing, but without his siren. He kept the speedometer at a pretty level eighty-five on the straightaways, slowing for turns. He would have gone even faster, he explained later, but was on the lookout for the most common, and most dangerous, road hazard likely to be encountered at that hour: the four-legged variety. Hit a deer while you were doing ninety, and your car was history, he knew; hit a moose and you were, too.

Leaving Route 30 for county roads that became progressively less paved, Stanton had to slow down considerably. As he turned onto Flat Lake Road, the asphalt gave way to hard-packed dirt, and for the last few miles he rode his brake with his left foot while working the accelerator with his right. Even so, he wasn’t able to make as good time as Bass McClure had earlier that morning: Despite an overabundance of horsepower, the low clearance and automatic transmission of the cruiser made it no match for the Renegade.

By the time Stanton and Carlson arrived, it was somewhere around seven-thirty. There would be some disagreement as to the exact time, with Stanton placing it at 0724, while McClure insisted that he’d looked at his watch at one point and noticed it was seven-forty, and the cruiser was still nowhere in sight. That wouldn’t be the only point of contention to arise between the two men, who had little in common and had always been a bit wary of each other. Stanton’s spit-and-polish military bearing struck McClure as a silly affectation; he saw no reason for a by-the-book approach to every little detail, when common sense and native intuition generally cut to the heart of things much more quickly. Stanton, for his part, regarded McClure as a seat-of-the-pants amateur, with little technical knowledge regarding the preservation of a crime scene. The truth is, that when it came to their criticisms of one another, they were both pretty much on target.

McClure came out of the guest cottage with Jonathan Hamilton and met Stanton and Carlson on the pathway. As Stanton would learn, this marked at least the second trip Jonathan had been permitted to make on the path since McClure’s arrival: first in bare feet, and now in shoes.

“Is he in your custody?” Stanton asked McClure, nodding at Jonathan and dispensing with so much as a greeting.

“Custody?” McClure replied. “It’s not like I caught him takin’ niners.” “Niners,” were bass under ten inches, which had to be released.

“Where are the DOAs?” Stanton asked.

McClure pointed in the direction of the path that led to the greathouse. “Main house,” he said. “Second floor.”

Stanton asked McClure to accompany him, motioning Carlson to stay with Jonathan. “Don’t let him out of your sight,” he instructed the trooper, “and don’t let him touch anything.” In his initial report, Stanton would write that the subject (meaning Jonathan) appeared agitated, nervous, and unwilling to make eye contact with any of the other men.

Instead of walking on the flagstones of the pathway, Stanton insisted that he and McClure walk alongside them, in the ivy and pachysandra that bordered them. To McClure, this precaution seemed no better than a tradeoff, risking the contamination of one area for that of another. But he said nothing.

At the greathouse, Stanton took pains to avoid disturbing anything, donning rubber gloves before entering, being careful to avoid stepping on visible bloodstains, and disturbing nothing that might prove to have evidentiary value. When McClure led him to the second-floor doorway, Stanton poked his head in and studied the sight that greeted him. He said nothing, nodding rather nonchalantly. But McClure was certain he saw the investigator swallow hard several times and turn nearly white.

While McClure waited in the hallway, Stanton entered the room and looked about. It was the first of four visits he would make to the crime scene that morning, returning to take blood samples, photographs, and measurements; to dust for latent fingerprints; and to take an inventory of every item in the room. To McClure’s way of thinking, all of those things could have been accomplished on a single visit. He suspected that Stanton was having some difficulty remaining in the room, but again he said nothing.

By the time Stanton was finished, an ambulance from Mercy Hospital had arrived. Stanton let the EMTs observe the bodies from the doorway, but wouldn’t let them into the room itself until the medical examiner’s investigator had arrived, which took another half hour. When she did arrive (“she” being a rather striking redhead who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five by McClure’s guess), she needed less than ten minutes to do whatever it was she needed to - or perhaps she, too, wanted to be out of the room as soon as possible. She moved the bodies gingerly, bagged the hands with plastic and tape, and took rectal temperatures with separate thermometers. She reported Carter Hamilton’s as 92.6°, and Mary Alice Hamilton’s as 92.2°. She told Stanton that, given the room temperature and the fact that the bodies were pretty much uncovered, the numbers suggested that the deaths had occurred some six to eight hours earlier, or sometime between one and three in the morning.

“What was the weapon?” Stanton asked her.

“The weapon - or weapons,” she said pointedly, “will probably turn out to be some kind of hunting knife or knives. You’ll have to wait for the post.”

Finally, Stanton let the EMTs come into the room. Although by law they didn’t have the authority to pronounce the victims dead, no one raised an objection when they placed them in body bags. There may have been some disagreement about time of occurrence, contamination of evidence, and number of weapons, but nobody had any doubts about the fact that Carter and Mary Alice Hamilton were good and dead.

ONLY AFTER THE bodies had been transported off in the ambulance, and the ME’s investigator had driven her own car back down the dirt road, did Deke Stanton turn his attention back to Jonathan Hamilton. Instructing Trooper Carlson to secure the crime scene - including the greathouse, the guest cottage, and the pathway that connected them - with yellow plastic tape, he addressed Jonathan for the very first time. By then it had been roughly an hour and a half since Stanton’s arrival.

“Come on over here, son,” he said.

Jonathan, who had been sitting on a tree stump under Trooper Carlson’s watchful gaze until that time, looked up uncertainly.

“Yes, you,” Stanton said.

As McClure watched from perhaps ten feet away, Jonathan rose slowly and walked toward Stanton. When he got within arm’s length, Stanton stopped him by holding up a hand. To McClure, it seemed as though Stanton, who was about five-ten, was a bit put off by Jonathan’s height.

“What happened here, son?” Stanton asked.

Jonathan shrugged and said, “I d-don’t know.”

The sun was up by this time, and Stanton was wearing aviator-style sunglasses, the kind with mirrored lenses. He kept them on as he spoke. “I think you do,” he said. “Your granddaddy and grandma are upstairs in the main house. They say you cut them. All I want to know is why you did it. I know there must have been a good reason.”

McClure was surprised at the transparency of Stanton’s ploy. If Jonathan had indeed committed the crime - and McClure had little doubt that he had - surely he knew that the victims were in no condition to tell Stanton anything. But then again, maybe nothing was transparent to Jonathan.

When Jonathan said nothing, Stanton repeated himself. “Tell me why you did it,” he said.

Both McClure and Stanton would later agree that those were the investigator’s words: “Tell me why you did it.” It was their recollections of Jonathan’s response that would differ. McClure would recall that Jonathan replied, “I don’t know what happened.” Stanton would write in his report that all Jonathan said was, “I don’t know.”

The two men would also disagree on precisely what happened next. According to Stanton’s report, the investigator asked Jonathan if he’d be willing to take a ride with him down to his office to answer a few questions, and Jonathan said he would. As McClure would remember it, Stanton simply took Jonathan by the upper arm, led him down the pathway to the cruiser, and placed him in the backseat. Both men would agree that Jonathan was not handcuffed at that point.

It is unclear exactly what Stanton had in mind next. He’d closed the back door of the cruiser and walked around to the driver’s-side door. It appeared to McClure that the investigator was about to get behind the wheel and drive off with Jonathan, leaving Trooper Carlson behind to safeguard the crime scene. But doing so - driving off alone with an unhandcuffed suspect - would have been in direct violation of state police regulations, notwithstanding the fact that the cruiser was outfitted with a wire partition that divided the front seat from the back. And Stanton certainly considered Jonathan to be a suspect, or more precisely the suspect, particularly given his later version of Jonathan’s statement to the effect that he didn’t know why he’d killed his grandparents.

But before Stanton could do whatever it was he was about to do, the relative silence was broken by the sound of sirens approaching in the distance. Within a minute or so, an entourage of four vehicles pulled up the driveway, two with roof lights flashing, one with the wail of its siren winding down. The first three were state police cruisers: two of them similar in appearance to the one in which Stanton and Carlson had arrived, the third one unmarked. The fourth vehicle was a sport-utility model of some sort, either a Ford Explorer or a Toyota 4-Runner.

A beefy, red-faced man in civilian clothes stepped out of the lead car and looked around. After a moment, he spotted Deke Stanton and ambled over to him. McClure could hear Stanton greet him as “Captain” before they huddled; he couldn’t pick up their conversation. After a few minutes, they stepped apart, and it became apparent to McClure that the captain (who was most certainly Roger Duquesne, although later reports referred to him only as “the responding supervising officer”) had drawn up a plan of sorts. He would lead the way in his cruiser, with Stanton, Carlson, and the prisoner (McClure distinctly heard him refer to Jonathan Hamilton as “the prisoner”) following him in a second car. But rather than driving south back to the Troop J barracks, they would head over to Northeast Regional Headquarters in Saranac Lake, where the facilities were larger, and where the interrogation room was fitted with a recording device and a two-way mirror. The four other investigators, who had arrived in the remaining two cruisers, would stay behind and complete the crime-scene investigation.

As for the remaining car, the sport-utility vehicle, it turned out that it belonged to a newspaper reporter. She’d picked up the radio traffic on her police scanner and had been heading to the scene when the convoy of cruisers had sped past. She fell in line, matching their speed, figuring correctly that, under the circumstances, they had better things to do than pull her over and ticket her. The name of the reporter was Stefanie Grovesner, and she worked for the Daily Record, up in Plattsburgh.

By that afternoon, news of the double murder and the arrest of Jonathan Hamilton would begin to spread across the state and into neighboring Vermont and Canada. By evening, local affiliates would have picked up the story. To most of the viewers who caught it on the ten o’clock news, it was just another grisly crime, made a bit more interesting because of the remote rustic setting, and the fact that the suspect was the grandson of the victims. Only Chuck Scarborough of NBC’s Channel 4 News down in New York City, would point out the true significance of the story: Because it was a double murder, it meant that the perpetrator would be eligible for the death sentence under New York’s recently revived capital-punishment murder statute.