Body Found In Tree At Fort Worden State Park Is Man Who Vanished

PORT TOWNSEND, WA - Mitchell Hamilton always made it in for breakfast.

He and a group of friends would meet religiously each morning at the Spruce Goose Cafe, a small restaurant with a big porch that overlooks the Jefferson County Airport. Beyond a row of Cessnas, the foothills of the Olympic Mountains are visible on a clear day.

So when Hamilton, 57, didn’t show up for breakfast one morning in fall 2017, his Spruce Goose friends found it strange.

“If he was gonna be gone, he always told somebody,” remembers Jim Unger, Hamilton’s friend and a Spruce Goose regular.

After a few weeks, wonder turned to worry, and Hamilton’s friends went looking for him. At the time, Hamilton was living in a storage unit that he had, by all accounts, outfitted nicely. A woman from the Spruce Goose went there and found Hamilton's email login and password. In his account, she discovered a receipt for hammock rope.

Hamilton did construction and was a woodworker, so he had plenty of rope strewn around his home. Odd that he would order a special type of rope, she thought.

She called police.

Body found at state park

On Jan. 13, two hikers at Fort Worden State Park, just north of downtown Port Townsend, saw something up in a tree. It was a climbing hammock suspended about 40 feet up, according to the Peninsula Daily News. The hikers called authorities. (The Peninsula Daily News has been covering the Hamilton disappearance from the beginning. You can more coverage in the Port Townsend Leader here.)

Jefferson County Sheriff's Det. Shane Stevenson took on Hamilton’s case when his disappearance was reported in October 2017. Using bank records, Stevenson confirmed that one of Hamilton's last acts was a purchase at the Port Hadlock QFC on Oct. 6, 2017. But that was the end of the trail.

Stevenson had by that point gathered plenty of other details, like that Hamilton had bought that hammock rope, and that he had experience with rock climbing. So when he heard a call come over the radio about a body found at Fort Worden, he had a gut feeling about whom the hikers had found.

“The reporting person had talked about the hammock rope,” Stevenson said, referring to the woman from the Spruce Goose who accessed Hamilton's email. "We knew [Hamilton] climbed mountains and would repel down cliffs. And, we don't have many missing persons in Jefferson County."

He went to Fort Worden with Port Townsend police Det. Jon Stuart. They retrieved the hammock, finding a body inside decomposed beyond recognition. Stevenson concluded that the person who died in that hammock was so well hidden in the tree, he probably didn't want to be found.

Despite the advanced decomposition, the body did have one very notable feature: The jaw showed signs of trauma, like it had been broken and repaired at some point.

"I can't say based off any special training, but I knew. It was Mitchell's jaw," Stevenson said.

Stevenson took that information back to Hamilton’s Spruce Goose friends. One of them remembered that Hamilton had fallen and injured his jaw while building a home years back. A check of local hospital records showed that Hamilton had visited Harrison Medical Center in Bremerton for an allergic reaction related to jaw surgery. Stevenson turned to Google, searching for oral surgeons in the Port Townsend area to see if he could get lucky.

“The first one I called, it was him,” Stevenson said.

A Quality Guy

Stevenson had gathered solid details, but he still didn’t have a positive ID on the Fort Worden body. For that, he turned to the King County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Dr. Katherine Taylor is the state’s only forensic anthropologist. She pulls double-duty as a King County death investigator at Harborview Medical Center and as a forensic analyst for police departments across the state. She’s on-call 24/7 for investigators, like Stevenson, who need to identify human remains.

“One time they found me when I was on vacation at Disney World,” she said in a recent profile for King County. “I can carry a cellphone, and law enforcement can text me a picture of a bone. I can turn around immediately and say ‘that’s not human dispose of it, and clear your scene.”

Stevenson sent Taylor photos of the jaw from the Fort Worden body and X-rays from Hamilton’s jaw surgery, plus some physical remains. With that, Taylor provided the last and most important piece of evidence. She confirmed that the jaw found at Fort Worden belonged to Mitchell Hamilton. With that, she put the mystery to rest - for Hamilton’s family, for Stevenson, and for his friends at the Spruce Goose Cafe.

Preparations are underway to return his remains to family in Eastern Washington and Idaho. And then, Mitchell Hamilton will finally be laid to rest.

Hamilton’s cause of death was ruled as suicide by asphyxiation, but people who knew him said there was no outward sign he was headed in that direction. He had lived in the area for some 20 years, owned a sailboat, and loved to talk about all the hikes he had done out in the Olympics.

“He was a quality guy,” Unger said on Thursday, speaking by phone from outside the Spruce Goose. “A friend.”

Image courtesy Washington State Parks