Hamilton murder case shrouded in mystery, claim villagers
Even though her badly decomposed body was eventually found in an unmarked grave close to his home, many villagers feel there are still many unanswered questions.
“Everything just doesn’t add up,” said one man, whose home is within sight of the house where Hamilton lived with his parents, William and Betty.
“Hamilton was an oddball, a big fella, but he must have needed help to hide the body. He couldn’t have been on his own.”
Sion Mills, on the main road between Derry and Omagh, was once one of the North’s main bases for the manufacturing of linen. But the production lines have long since stopped at Herdman’s Mill overlooking the cricket pitch where the West Indies were bowled out for just 25 runs by Ireland in July 1969.
It was here that burly 15-stone Hamilton, with an IQ of 68, a depraved loner whose twisted obsession with older women terrified his neighbourhood, kept his lookout for vulnerable, innocent victims.
“There were about a dozen of us who used to go out walking regularly, usually on our own, and none of us knew — that pig was probably watching our every move,” said one mother who wasn’t prepared to identify herself.
“Sion Mills will be a safer place without him.
“Nobody knows for sure everything that happened the day that poor woman went missing. Nobody is shouting about it, but you find people whispering things like: ‘Who else knew what he was at? He couldn’t have done all this on his own, could he? It would have been impossible to move the body by himself, wouldn’t it?’
“Why is the car [the red Hyundai Lantra that Hamilton was driving when he kidnapped Ms Harron and later set alight], still there at the side of the house? It’s under a cover, but why haven’t they [the police] taken it away?”
Hamilton’s home, on the Newtownstewart side of Sion Mills, just off the main road and the turn-off for the village of Clady, is about 200 yards from the Seein Burn. It was on the bank of this narrow waterway where Ms Harron’s naked body, wrapped in a meal sack, was buried for four months before it was found by search dogs
Hamilton was barely out of school uniform when he become a serious danger to women, exposing himself to and then raping a woman when he was just 17.
Yet even some of his closest neighbours were unaware they had a pervert living in their midst.
“That’s what really upset people,” said one woman. “Nobody knew he had this history.”
“But we got justice today. Nobody had a bad word to say about Attracta Harron. They are a good family, well liked and respected and everybody was devastated by what happened to her.”
