Ep 35 | Matthew Hamm Part 1 Transcript

Ep 35 | Matthew Hamm Part 1 Transcript

Before we begin this podcast, please be advised that the following episode contains language that some listeners may find offensive and inappropriate. The opinions expressed by the host and guests are their own and do not reflect the views of the podcast producers. Listener discretion is advised.

Before you called, I actually, I texted one of my friends and I was like, you know, I This guy's about to call me. I'm going to do an interview with him, but I'm not real excited about it. I was kind of a roamer, man. I, I, I manipulated and conned and connived everything I could in my whole life. He would lean his head against me.

It was almost like a weird Eskimo kiss. He would just touch foreheads with me for a minute and then I would laugh and he would laugh. The first thing that I ran out of was the cigarettes and then the dog food and then the food in the house. I just got high or if I avoided addressing the real issue at all.

You are now listening to the podcast Voices of a Killer. I'm bringing you the stories from the perspective of the people that have taken the life of another human and their current situation thereafter in prison. You will see that although these are the folks that we have been programmed to hate, they all have something in common.

They are all humans like us that admit that they made a mistake. Will you forgive them or will you condemn them? They are currently serving time for their m**ders and they give us an inside glimpse of what took place. Place where they killed and their feelings on the matter now. Here are the voices of those who have killed.

On May 31st, 2017, a police SUV from Monato County pulled through the gravel back roads of Fortuna, Missouri. With a population of fewer than 1000 people, Fortuna is a sparse place and most houses are unmarked. On that day, however, a man stood at the side of his lot in Morgan Street, waving the cops in.

That man was 35 year old Matthew Hamm, and he was about to turn himself in for m**der. Today, we're talking to Matthew about the events that brought him to this moment. This conversation, split into two parts, isn't an easy one. It's a story of childhood trauma and a battle with addiction, and sadly, it ends in tragedy.

But as Matthew retells the life choices that led him to his rock bottom, we invite you to put prejudice aside and see him for who he truly is. A man who's been through hell and back and wants to atone for his past. So sit back and listen to part one of Matthew's journey on this episode of Voices of a Killer.

So Matthew, where are you from? Where was I born? Yeah. I was born in Raytown, Missouri. Raytown? Outback, Kansas City, yeah. How long did you stay there? Uh, I was real young. I guess some things happened with, between my real mom and my dad, uh, when I was real young. The next thing I know, I was somewhere around six years old living in Eldon, Missouri.

I don't remember when I left Raytown. Yeah. I know I had some issues with my real mom. She took my brother and I one weekend since we were going to World's Fun. And it took my dad about a year to find us. After that, we never made the worlds of fun. She just took us and, ah, I don't remember a whole lot. I got some pretty bad memories about it, but I guess your real mother and your real father had a turbulent relationship.

Yeah, they, yeah, they did. It was, my dad quit drinking and my mom, she just couldn't, she actually went further into he***n and they just, they split up because of that. When my dad was 38, when my brother, well, when I was born. So they were older in life. My dad decided to quit drinking so he could raise us right.

My mom just wasn't on board, so they split. And she took the kids? Well, yeah, they were back and forth there for a while. From my understanding for, I don't know, a couple of years, they just tried to make it work for the sake of my brother and I, but it just, it never panned out. She never could quit all the way and my dad got tired of it.

When they split, she willingly let him have a I don't know, it took my dad about a year, shortly, well, a little bit over a year, he said, to find us. Besides that instance, how would you describe your childhood? Was there abuse, or anything like that? Yeah, yeah, there was abuse, physical, sexual, mental, there was a lot of abuse from my parents, from my mom, my real mother.

And her boyfriend, uh, whose name was Carlos, I remember we used to have to sit on these little car dollies in the garage that he owned, and he would throw wrenches at us if we moved. That's one of the memories I have, and then being huddled down in the floorboard of an old station wagon to get the heat in the winter months, I can remember that, but it's so far back, I don't really know.

We're in chronological order that that goes with my parents splitting up and all that. I don't really know. Do you ever remember any instances where your your mom your dad your stepdad or anything abused you? Oh, yeah, I can remember my dad my real father Larry. He never did. I remember when he laid hands on us, it was because we really deserved it, and that was later on in life, we were 15, 16, sneaking out of the window.

But when we were very young, I remember my mom very well, I can remember the liquor on her breath, I can remember her hitting us with a belt. We had our eyes glued, our eyelashes glued, sometimes at night, that way she could put us in our room. We really had no choice but to go to sleep, and then she would go out in the living room, we'd hear her partying.

I can remember a lot of physical abuse. I don't really remember any sexual, the emotional, I definitely remember that. Yeah. Do you feel like that kind of shaped you as an adult to, to have that happen to you? Yeah. There's some ways that I'm sure it shaped me that I'm still learning about, I'm still figuring out, you know, with just being honest with myself, but it's really apparent when I think about relationships with girls.

I always latched on to girls real quickly in life. You know, every girl that I met, you know, even at the age of 14, a girlfriend quickly became the one, you know. Just fear of abandonment from women was a real big thing, and I can see that very prevalent in my history. Yeah. As far as anything else goes, you know, I never really had a thing for, I never killed any animals, uh, I never had any thoughts of killing animals or people or just of aggression really at all.

I don't really remember any of that growing up. At what age did you get into drugs or alcohol? Oh boy, let's see. I moved down to Florida from Eldon and it was either late 90 or early 91. Somewhere around 93 and 94. I started to take cigarettes from my mom's pack when she would leave, my stepmother, I call her mom, she would leave the room and I would take cigarettes and then my dad would keep, he had a bottle of bourbon up in the cabinet that he'd had for years, he just never even drank it, he just had it and I remember I would sneak sips of that, that graduated as soon as I started going to school and I wasn't cool as far as like hanging out with the kids who were doing the responsible thing, you know, the healthy, productive, emotionally, you know.

Those kind of kids, I didn't mix well with them, so I started hanging out with the guys who had chain wallets, and they rode skateboards or BMX bikes, and they skipped school, and when that stuff comes around, alcohol, cigarettes, and weed, right around the age of 14, 15, I started doing all those things pretty regularly.

Yeah, did you ever get into m***, he***n, cr***, sh** like that? Yeah, I got into m*** later on. I did cr*** one time, but it was like an eight day stretch. And it was probably the worst feeling, like it's just very, very hard to put a finger on it. If you've never been through it, it's very hard to understand, but it was very, very traumatic.

Emotionally, it was like a very big, I don't know, you just felt like the world was over when you didn't have it. And that lasted for about eight days. And then, see, that was probably when I was around 22. And right around that same time, I did m*** for the first time. m*** was never an everyday constant. My biggest things was alcohol, because I could get people to buy it for me at any store.

I never really knew a lot of drug dealers, but then later on I started doing m*** here and there when it would be around, and I knew I liked it immediately, but the next time I wanted to get high, it wasn't something that I could easily find. The alcohol always was, so I was always addicted to something.

Mainly it was weed and alcohol, but yeah, I did m***. I did ecstasy down in Florida for about a year straight. Yeah, just stuff like that. How old are you? I've always used the Celsius. Yeah. I'm 41 now. Our childhoods shape who we grow up to be. Early life experiences lay the blueprint for our adult lives, and they can create scars that run deep.

From birth, the cards were stacked against Matthew Hamm. His parents split, and his mother, a he***n user and unfit to parent, abducted her two sons for over a year. Life in her care was unsafe for any kid to be in. Matthew recalls painful memories from that time in his life, of being struck with wrenches and having his eyelashes glued shut so he wouldn't disturb his mom partying in the next room.

Trauma like that doesn't just disappear, it stays planted inside somebody into adulthood. Some end up with violent tendencies, others battle nightmares and insomnia. Matthew's vice was substance abuse. As a teen, Matthew got swept up into a world of drugs and alcohol, caught up in In the wrong crowd in school using became a regular habit.

Name, a drug, m***, cr***, or alcohol. Matthew was always addicted to something. Drugs could numb any emotion if only temporarily, and this became the coping mechanism he would turn to time and time again when things got hard. Now, I've talked to countless guys from prison. Most of them are easy to empathize with.

They're ordinary people who made a bad mistake, and many of them are owning up to it. But if I'm being honest, this was the interview I was dreading the most. That's because Matthew Hamm isn't serving any m**der charge. He's in prison because he killed his 11 month old son. So Matthew, I gotta be honest with you man, I, uh, before you called, I actually, I texted one of my friends and I was like, you know, this guy's about to call me, I'm gonna do an interview with him, but I'm not real excited about it.

And the reason I'm not really excited about it is because it's, it's a crime that we all cringe with whenever a child, a child dies, you know what I mean? So And then I, I thought about it a little bit more and it's, you know, you deserve a voice as well just as anybody else. I think that a lot of people make mistakes.

Even really good people make bad mistakes. And that one's a really bad one, you know, killing a child. But I have this feeling that your intention wasn't death. What you did was abuse and it resulted in death. So I am gonna obviously interview you and I am gonna let you tell your side. But it's a very difficult pill to swallow and I'm I'm certain that it's something that you're not proud of.

I'm certain it's something that you probably didn't wake up and say, you know what, I'm going to kill a child today. And children can be frustrating. I've got two and whenever they were little, it was hard when they would cry and they wouldn't shut up. You know, it's, and obviously there's ways to deal with that.

And so what I want to know is make sure that I'm on the right track. You didn't intentionally try to kill this child, did you? Oh, no. No, absolutely not. Um, however, you said something about a mistake, and I don't really like calling it a mistake, Toby. I don't, hell, I don't even call it an accident. I don't blame what happened on things that people have choices in.

My son had no choice. I did. I made many choices in my lifetime that led me to where I was at that point in my life. I made choices not to do the responsible appropriate things with my life and it was, it resulted in my life ending up the way it did. So the victim in your case is your child? Yes. So do you have a relationship with Your victim's mother?

No, no, I don't. I haven't talked to her or seen her since I was in court. Okay. Your child in this case, how old was he when he passed? 19 months. And take me back to, uh, let's say the weeks prior to this happening, what was your life like? I want to know what you were like, Matthew, as a person weeks or even a year before this happened, what was your life like?

Okay. I failed to get a job to hold a job. I failed to really even look for a job for the past two or three years of my freedom. I didn't care at all about a job. I lived just day by day. I was always very happy as long as I was using or I felt like I had a purpose or something to do. If I was ever sitting still trying to watch a movie, I always found myself restless.

I was very discontented. I was very unhappy. I looked outside of myself for things to make me happy, which is, you know, the addiction, women, cars. At one point, I even remember just going back and forth, you know, trading up and buying and selling stereo equipment just because it gave me something to do. I wasn't really a good person, Toby.

I wasn't a productive person. I wasn't somebody that I couldn't say I was a good friend to anybody. I don't believe that I was a good son to my dad. I believe my stepmother suffered a lot because of the way that I acted growing up. I was a roamer, man. I manipulated and conned and connived everything I could in my whole life.

I was very self absorbed, self centered. If it wasn't something to do me better, I didn't want any part of it. I always believed that I could be a good person, but I didn't really have too many Good quality characteristics that would come out. I like to laugh. I think I'm funny, but those things don't matter a whole lot if you're not internally happy and it's hard to explain, but I just, I wasn't a happy person.

I lived as if somebody who's unhappy and they know it and they're only happy when certain things are happening and that's me.

Matthew is candid about who he was back in the day, and as he talks, the sincerity and self awareness in his voice is striking. He's critical of his former self, and he's quick to take accountability for his actions. This is the voice of somebody who's spent a lot of time in introspection, tallying up the life choices that led him to where he is today.

Not a mistake, he says about his crime, but a string of bad choices with only himself to blame. Battling addiction, living from day to day, Matthew lived a shallow existence as a young adult. He was a roamer, drifting from place to place, from one hustle to another. He shirked responsibility and couldn't hold down a proper job for long.

Instead, he schemed and manipulated others, and although drugs gave him a short burst of gratification, At his core, Matthew was deeply unhappy. Addiction is a crippling disease and it hindered his ability to live a happy, productive life. But that was until his son entered the picture.

No, I have quite a few other children really, but I've never, I was never really involved in their life. Are you now? Am I now? No, no. I don't, the ones that do know that I'm in here probably wouldn't want to contact me for obvious reasons. And the ones who don't know about me in here, they may not know about me at all.

I know I have a daughter. And, um, I'm a teacher in Oklahoma that had been trying to reach out to me 10 or 12 years ago. And I shined that on for about a month with promises of wanting to be in her life and do good. And that, you know, that quickly went down the tubes. Um, I've had kids with a girl named Leslie in Scioto, Illinois.

When I went up there to be of help to my stepsister, Katrina, who was a preacher's wife. And all I did is really drug them through the mud. And I got One of their congregation members, their daughter, I got her pregnant, sneaking out of their house. And I found out years later that I had a son with her.

I've never really made good on any attempts to be a part of their life and be productive. With Orion, you were actually living with his mother and him all together? Y'all were all living together? Yeah. Yep. How was that relationship like? Well, it was good and I loved her very much. I cared about her. I had known her for 20 years before we actually ever got together.

I met her a long time ago, probably 2001. I met her and she was with somebody that I was hanging out with, drinking with a lot. Anyway, 20 years later I got together with her and we ended up having our son there but she moved in with me and, uh, I thought we were good together except it was just constant, you know, search for using.

Neither one of us wanted or cared about a job. We provided for our son just day at a time, you know, in whatever way we could to make money. Most of the time it was, you know, selling stuff that we would buy at auctions. We would Facebook sites or on eBay and, you know, we prided ourself on doing that because we had a good rating with eBay and I knew what stuff to buy and how much it would bring and I always felt like I was good at that, but it was built on a real crappy foundation so it never led anywhere good.

But yeah, we all lived together and my son was always real happy. I was the father that would gripe at her for giving him chocolate and when she would go in the gas station to pay for gas, I would unhook my seatbelt and turn around and hurry up and feed him a couple of bites of chocolate. We had a lot of memories like that.

Yeah. From my experience, most little boys, even, hell, even young teenagers, are more attached to their mother than they are of their dad. Was that the case for Orion? Yeah. Well, see, they go through cycles. The books that I read told me that they go through cycles where they crave The closeness of a mother, and then there's cycles in their life where they crave the closeness of their father.

I always thought, well, that's pretty cool. I always thought mama's boy was a never ending I thought that statement just rang true no matter what. But it turns out that young kids, when they're young like that, in that age They have the different cravings for the opposite, you know, parent. I don't know exactly where he was at that point, but I know that he slept with me every night.

I never put him in his crib in his room because I always wanted him close to me. So I definitely had the, I had the bond with him. We had the little funky thing. We were leaning. I would lean in real close when I was talking to him. He would lean his head against me. It was almost like a weird Eskimo kiss.

He would just touch foreheads with me for a minute and then I would laugh and he would laugh. So we had a pretty good bond. I don't think that he looked at me as, you know, I wasn't a stranger to him. He wasn't, I don't believe he was afraid of me at all. It was nothing like that. Yeah. So you guys had a pretty good relationship?

Yeah, Orion and I did. He obviously, I think he was definitely more for mom. Mom was a lot more, you know, she had the more forgiving voice, you know. I was the guy running around the house with the harsh tones, and when she was taken forever, I would say, You know, hurry up, and you know, I had that domineering voice, so I think that he definitely craved his mother more than he did me, but, you know, when it was just me, we never had, I mean, he never ran from me, he would always run up to me if I was, you know, in the house, he didn't have any issues like that.

You know, I never gave him a reason to feel like that. I never gave him a reason to fear me, uh, besides my voice. Had you ever had to reprimand him physically or spank him? No, I don't really think you spank a 19 month old child. There were times where you have to, you know, you have to be, for their own safety, you have to move them.

Or, you know, there's been times where I would put him in his crib because I was going outside and I needed to be outside for a few minutes.

Matthews defers to admit that he's made a lot of mistakes in his life. He fathered a few children before Orion, but whether because of fear of responsibility or custody claims, he failed to be involved in any of their lives. But when Orion came into his life, things would be different. He saw a chance at having a happy family of his own.

Where he could finally do good and be a loving, active father. Life was far from perfect. He and Ashley, Orion's mom, had no fixed income and both battled different kinds of addictions. But they were happy. It was the small things that brought them joy. An Eskimos kiss before bed, Sneaking chocolate to Orion in the backseat at the gas station.

The bond between father and son was strong and Orion had no reason to fear his dad. The thought of Matthew laying a finger on Orion seemed impossible. So how did Matthew end up here? We'll answer that question after the break.

The day that this happened, you're left alone to watch over him? Yeah, well, so what had happened is April 26th, Ashley went to court down in Morgan County, and she had taken some stuff to make sure that her system produced a clean urine sample. She was out on bond. Yeah. But about a week prior to this, she got caught stealing a pair of brand new boots out of a Westernwear store down in Versailles, Missouri.

Yeah. And so when the cops came out to the house and they just told her, Hey, look, we're not going to give you a big hard time about this, but the owner wants the property back. So she gave it to the officers and they left. They never did anything more with it. But when she went to court, uh, about a week later, they kept her because the officer that came to get the stuff said that there was a report made of her stealing and they felt like she was, or they believed rather that she was a threat to the community.

So they revoked her bond and kept her bond. And then I was there at the house when her mom came, swung by and said, Hey, I got a call from Ashley. This is what happened. But then she took Ashley's car. So I didn't have a car. I didn't have any way to go hustle money. I didn't have a way to do what I normally do, which was, you know, pretty much just con and connive, hustle, whatever.

So I would do jobs down at the lake. I would do working at a power wash at somebody's house for 100 for five hours worth of work. But most of the time it was all people gotten. Yeah. So basically now the mother of Orion is locked up. You have no vehicle and you're left with the child, just you and him in the house to, for you to take care of them.

Yeah, it was me, Orion, our dog, Raiden. And, yeah, it was just, uh, as you can imagine, I was alienated from neighbors, I didn't really have anything to do with them, I didn't belong to a normal class of people, I was, you know, I didn't have relationships with neighbors, so I didn't have anybody I could really ask for anything.

Yeah, well, and most people aren't going to offer help to a dude, that all goes to the women. Yeah. So Matthew, you're basically caught in a spot where you're taking care of a young child and lacking the car, lacking the resources to really take care of him. So after your mother in law left, what was your plan of action for just that night alone?

Did you just kind of like resolve yourself to, hey, you know, mom's going to be in jail. You know, did you hang out at the house that night or did you try to, what was your plan just that night? Oh, okay, well, just that night I really wasn't too worried about anything. I figured Morgan County, the waiting list for her to go back to court and get a bond reinstated, she wasn't there for anything where she would be sentenced to jail for, like, months or years.

So I figured when she went to see a judge again, that they would probably say, okay, so we believe that You know, this amount of time you've been in jail suffices to teach you a lesson to stop stealing sh**. At least that's what I thought. That night I really didn't have an issue. I had a fridge full of food.

I had dog food. The only thing I didn't have was money in my pocket in the car. What happened, Toby, is that I ended up being without Ashley for quite a bit longer than I ever planned for, and I started to run out of all that stuff, too. And how long was it between the time that she got locked up to the crime?

Let's see, it was roughly weeks, days? Yeah. No, no, it was four weeks ish. Okay. Around the month that you were just dad and Orion, what was the first two weeks like? Was it starting to get pretty stressful? Did you What was that like? Yeah, well, so the first thing that I ran out of was the cigarettes, and then the dog food, and then the food in the house.

Did you ever try to call the mother in law that took the car? Yeah, I tried. Yeah, as a matter of fact, yeah, I did. Her name is Tina and I tried to call her from a, well, it's the guy that I used to get dope from there where I lived. I went down to his place and actually this was about a week and a half, two weeks after Ashley had been arrested.

I'm like, man, I got to go out and get a job. I got to figure something out. I don't know how much longer she's going to be gone. I went down there and she didn't answer the phone. I went down there the next day, she answered the phone, but she told me that she had doctor's appointments and to call her back again.

And I called her back again and she said, oh, I just don't know that I've got a whole lot of stuff going on. So, she gave me the reason that she couldn't, and so I just quit calling her out of anger towards her. I just quit calling her, asking her. I told myself she just, she needs me to beg for her help, because we never really got along.

Of course we wouldn't. I wasn't a very good person, you know, but she needed me to beg her, I told myself, so I wasn't going to do it. So, my pride just said, ah, screw it, I'll do it without you. And I just quit calling her. She later said that she tried to come by the house a couple of times, but I never, if she did, I was unaware of her presence.

This is her grandson, right? And she didn't want to come check on him? Well, that's, she came at one point, she came and that was about. And most, most, yeah, most grandmothers would be like, you know, hover, you know, like every other day or what, less than that, maybe just to, you know what I mean? Their grandmothers are supposed to be, and she didn't do that?

Yeah. Well, so she took me to a court date I had in Cole County about four or five days after Ashley got arrested. So she came and took me to a court date there in Coole County and she asked, you know, hey, how's he doing in this? And of course, again, I, my pride is there. I'm like, oh, we're fine, you know, and she didn't offer me any money or anything.

I didn't ask. I just let her know I was doing good. We're okay. But. This was still fairly early into Ashley's being gone, so I didn't really need her like that. Here's the thing, Toby, I don't want to get into blaming other people, but Ashley's mother, Tina, she's really got a lot of emotional, mental history.

She didn't work. She's married to a guy who was pretty well off, so she never had to do anything. She just She sat around and drank vodka a lot, and she didn't really have anything else going on in her life. Well, she had a grandson going on in her life. Well, yes, she did. She did. She didn't really See, I don't want to blame her, but she didn't really have the loving grandmother facade that you would expect from at least somebody who wanted Well, yeah, that's what I'm hearing.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm not trying to say she, you know, she's the reason the, your boy died, but goddamn, you think most grandmothers, you know, usually, you know, they're going to take care of some sh**. They're going to be. Making sure that, hey, do I need to take him to give you some time away from the kid because, you know, being a parent is hard with a young child like that, but I understand what you're saying.

It's not her fault, but I'm just trying to make a point. In April 2017, Ashley's mother pulled up at Matthew's Fortuna home. She brought some unwelcome news. What had meant to be a quick court trip to Morgan County for Ashley had turned more serious. She was being kept in jail for shoplifting longer than they'd expected.

Ashley's mom took the car, and as days turned to weeks, Matthew was left in a predicament. He's now a single dad with no car and no source of income. In the backwoods of Fortuna, he lived in isolation, knowing few of his neighbors and nobody who could call on for support. There was Ashley's mother, but Matthew's relationship with her was bristly at best, and asking for her help would bruise his pride.

But day by day, food supplies and essentials were running out and the stress of Matthew's back was building. He had a hungry toddler to feed. What would he do when the fridge ran empty? So let's talk about week three. Did it start to get really stressful and what was it like on about week three? Yeah, well, okay, so I guess as you can imagine, the food's running out.

The dog food is really, if it's not gone at that point, it's very close. And then the refrigerator is getting low. I don't have a car still. I don't have cigarettes. I'm bumming cigarettes from a guy I normally get dope from. In this whole time, I'm doing things to earn dope from him. Let's see, what's one of the things I did is I asked him if he would like a new washer and dryer set.

I said I would give you mine, the ones that I had, my dad had bought, and they were very good. They were high dollar, they were high quality, they were nice whirlpools. And I said, I will trade you these for your old ones and a gram of dope. And that would be my bargaining chip. So when I had the opportunities to do things different, I didn't even make right decisions then.

Yeah. So you could have traded out the washing machines for some food for the kid, in other words. I could have. Well, he went to town one time. He did bring some groceries back, but it was real minute. It was like 15 worth. I told him I need some laundry soap and some food for Orion. So he brought me about 15 worth.

Right. So I did, I lived in a world that was not conducive to like, it wasn't really a human life. It was more of a shady, solitary existence. I had too much pride and I was too fearful to tell people I needed help. I didn't want somebody coming to take my son because I couldn't take care of him, but I didn't want to not be able to take care of him either.

And in my mind, if I just got high, or if I avoided addressing the real issue at all, then it doesn't exist. I know that's hard for a lot of people to understand. A lot of people who listen to your podcast, I know they're going to be like, none of this sh** makes any sense at all in a real life. It's a pretty raw, uncut for me way that I lived life, and it's, I'm not happy about it at all.

I don't want anybody to ever believe, oh man, he's just fine with it. No, I'm, I'm actually just learning how to live, not with complete shame. Yeah. I would never be able to do anything productive if I lived in that, but I don't blame anybody for what happened. Three weeks in, I had a couple of options on how to handle things differently, and I chose not to.

So I made decisions that kept me from doing the right thing for the right reasons. At about week three, is Orion starting to get really irritated that mom's not around? Nah, I wouldn't say he's irritated. He was a pretty happy baby, but you could tell that he noticed her not around. In the mornings, at some point he stopped doing it, but he would get all, he would climb over most of the time.

He'd have to climb over me. So I would feel him climb over me and I'd wake up and I'd watch him and he had just learned to walk a couple of weeks prior. So he would waddle, you know, down towards the kitchen and I would see him look in the bathroom. And he didn't like going to the laundry room a whole lot, I think it was just because it was back there, it was a small room, darker, so he'd never go all the way back, but he did that every once in a while, and it's, I just knew that he was just looking for mom.

But there was a little bit of unhappiness, if I'm being honest, you could see a little bit of his spirit was dampened, it was dull. I guess I never really even reflected a whole lot on that, but yeah, you could tell that he knew that there was something that wasn't normal, wasn't up to par. Well, I never really even thought about it, too.

Day by day, life got harder for Matthew and Orion. The stress of being a single parent and the dwindling cash made each passing week more difficult. Orion seemed to notice the change in routine, too. Something seemed off, as if the absence of his mother had dampened the light in the toddler's eyes. And as the pantry ran bare, Matthew struggled to hold on to necessities for his son, relying on the big bag of oatmeal he had left.

Despite his scarcity, Matthew made some questionable choices. At one point, he traded his whirlpool dryer and washer, not for the food he desperately needed, but for the drugs. Everything revolved around chasing the next high, and drugs let him escape the reality of his situation. If only for a short moment, shame kept him from asking for help when he needed it most, but the burden of Matthew's shoulders continued to grow, as did his irritability.

He would come down to the house, and he would come inside for a little while, and he would sit, and we would end up, we'd smoke dope. Who's he? The guy that I get it from. Okay. Saratown. Alright, gotcha. The one that had helped me previously. So I would go down there, or he would come up, and he would hang out, and I would smoke.

I had been up for a couple of days. It was just more of the same. It was just more hoping just to survive through another day. I still had bread. I still had peanut butter. I had a whole bunch of oatmeal. I had about a half a gallon of milk, just very little cereal. I think I had some cinnamon raisin bagels.

There was a couple other things I had. Some link sausage, some eggs. Just the This stuff that you could survive on through a couple of days if you lived by yourself in a hotel kind of stuff, um, but that's about where I was on that day. Of course, I wasn't worried about eating. I was making very little by little to feed Orion, and the dog had moved on to eating oatmeal now.

I could, I had a plethora of that, so I would make oatmeal for the dog even. That's about what the day was like, and trying to figure out a way to scheme up cigarettes and more food, but He, O'Reilly, was being irritated with you and crying that night? Well, he was crying, I don't know that he was irritated with me, he might have, he, like, well, you know what, I guess he probably was, I wasn't I didn't want to play anymore.

I was trying to count out some change. I was counting pennies and nickels and stuff. And before that he had been rolling. We bought him one of those little bouncy house castles. There's a Ninja Turtles themed bounce castle, but it was a smaller one. And they got me on it because it only came with 15 balls that they sell you a whole extra big.

Bag of balls for 20 bucks. And I had to buy a couple of those to fill this thing. And that had been bought, you know, months before. And he took those balls and he would roll them back and forth. And he was in front of me and I had a futon in the living room. That I had laid out as a bed, and that's where we slept was in the living room, and it was laid out, and we were rolling balls back and forth, and when I quit doing it, he kept playing.

Well, he had rolled four or five in between my legs under the bed, and he kept trying to climb under the bed. And, you know, just trying to, at that time, I, you know, I wasn't aggravated at all. I just didn't want him under the bed, so I kept moving him, but eventually I brushed him to the side and I said, I said, Orion, that's enough.

And so I moved my legs a little bit closer. I moved the table, a little coffee table, closer to me. That way he couldn't come in between my legs anymore. And he went around the back. Of course, this is hindsight. I wasn't paying attention like I should have been. But he went around the back of the futon and, uh, I don't know, I heard him cry and it sounded somewhat muffled.

And in my mind, he was around the back side of the futon and he was climbing under the bed that way. And we had an old, a glass, it was a three pane glass kitchen table. And my parents left. When my dad died and my mom went to Waterloo, Iowa, with her daughter, it was under there. It was wrapped in sheets.

But my first thought is great. He's under there. He's hurt himself on that glass. And I had change in my right hand and I was thumbing it out into my left palm and I was counting it out and setting it in stacks of 10. And I picked up my glass of pink lemonade. It was one of those old Campbell's cups.

Those glass mugs are like a bowl except they got a little loop on it for a cup. There's this big doinky thing, and it was in my hand, and when I heard him crying, I just stood up, and I just, out of a fit of anger, I just turned, and I threw it, and it hit him. It hit him. How far away was it? Apparently, six feet, seven feet, maybe.

Did you throw it overhanded, Adam? Yeah, well, yeah, it was from the side, because I stood up, and as I hit, as I stood all the way up, I turned my body and flung it with my left hand at the same time. I wasn't facing him like I was turning to face him as I threw it, I wasn't, he was behind me. I didn't know where, I just, I threw the cup without any thought that it would ever hit him.

I just threw it. And I guess it's safe to say that when I threw it in the moment You'd have to assume that somebody doesn't care that somebody's back there. I didn't have any forethought to the fact that it could hurt him at all. I just, I flung a man and it hit him and he immediately stopped crying and I dropped what I was doing.

I ran around, I picked him up and I patted him on his butt and he was looking at me. He wasn't crying, and deep down I knew that he wasn't okay, but he wasn't crying, and in that moment, all I wanted to do was lay down with him, so I lay down with him, and I woke up sometime later, it was still dark outside, and he was cold.

Was he unconscious? No, he was looking directly at me. I scooped him up, and I remembered saying, oh, bub, I'm sorry. So, um, you said that after you had struck him he was still conscious and he was actually looking at you. What was his, you know, overall well being like as that happened? Did he have a seizure?

Did he, was there blood coming from his head? No. No, there was no blood. Now, as I was holding him, I was pinning his bottom side, right, and his left arm was out to the side. And I didn't really notice it at first, but it locked up. It was locked up, and as I went to lay down, I noticed that his arm was doing a slow rise.

If you've seen somebody in a boxing ring, they knock down and they get Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah, I know. I don't, I have to explain it myself, but it's, that's what it was. And I didn't really, I just, I didn't think it was something that was life ending. I thought, wow, he's just stunned.

In my mind, he was not in any imminent danger. I was in no shape to be making judgments on the health of anybody, but in my mind, he's not bleeding, he's not crying, he hasn't been hit by a truck. I threw something and it hit him in the head and he's probably got a very bad headache or anyway, and when I saw the arm, I was like, oh no, he's almost unconscious now.

And his eyes were cluttery, but then he was just more blinking and he was looking at me and as I laid down, I just, I closed my eyes. And I was just, I was patting him on his chest, on his sternum, I was patting him like I always do when we lay down at night to get him to go to sleep, and Did you actually fall asleep with him?

Yeah. And you said you'd been up for a few days, usually like when someone, and I'm pretty sure this is accurate, but, you know, you're up for a few days, you gotta spend, uh, spun out at some time and fall asleep, and at that very end of being spun out and about to go to sleep, you probably got a lot of sh** going on in your head where you can't think straight and all that, but you were actually able to fall asleep, and you say you woke up and he was cold?

Yeah, he was, uh, I don't know how you would measure the coldness that I felt, but it wasn't like, oh man, he's like ice, it was like Well, it's less than a body temperature, so I get it, because your body's supposed to be at 98 degrees or something like that, 96, 98, I don't know, but Matthew tells the story in detail.

It's clear he has relived this series of events many, many times. And as he speaks, the scenes unfold frame by frame in my head like a movie. The rolling plastic ball, the mug broken in two, the toddler's glazed over eyes. As Matthew sat on the bed, counting up his last few coins, Orion was playing at his feet with bounce castle balls.

The boy got stuck and, in a sudden moment of anger, the weeks of pent up stress broke out. Matthew flung a soup sized Campbell's mug and it struck Orion. Instantly, Orion's cries stopped and Matthew immediately knew that something was very wrong. Though the toddler's eyes were still open, he looked vacantly at Matthew.

Matthew softened, drawing his son towards him, but in his drug induced stupor, he couldn't see the urgency of what had happened. Hoping that it would pass, he laid down with Orion, and, just like they always did before bed, patted his back, and drifted off to sleep. But when he woke, his worst nightmare came true.

Orion was cold. What was your reaction whenever you realized that he had passed? Oh, well, at first it was just, I don't know, I just, I told myself that there's no way. I just kept, and I remember saying out loud, I remember saying, no way, there's, it's not, no way. I remember stammering and saying that over and over, there's no way, there's no way.

And it was just a real shock, a whole lot of, there's no way. And then after about 10 minutes, I went out in the yard and I just, I walked around the house real quick and I just remember looking at the house. I don't know that I had any agenda. I just walked out and I just, I remember walking around looking at the house and then I walked back in.

And as soon as I walked in, I made it to the kitchen, and I saw him on the bed where I'd left him, and I stopped exactly right where I was, stopped where I was, and I just, I fell back against the wall, and I slid down beside the, the refrigerator in the wall, and I just, I remember crying, saying, there's no way, and I never really have believed in God, but I just remember cursing God, saying, God, please don't let this happen.

Please, this can't be right. I remember cursing, saying, hey, this can't be. I just knew that if there was a God that everybody talked about, there's no way he'd just let this happen to me in my life. There's no way that this is happening. I just remember looking at my son and I just, I remembered all the things that I, I don't know.

It was a very quick blur of emotion and feeling. I still wasn't sober headed. So I don't know how much of it was drug induced stupor and hysterics. And how much of it was really genuine. But I know that I cried for a very long time and I couldn't, I didn't even go back near the bed for probably another hour.

I went to the back, I went to the back room, the laundry room, and I pulled one of my hoodies down off of the hanger. And I went out and I walked through the neighborhood and I just remembered. Breathing, tell myself to breathe. And yeah, I don't know. I just remember being very emotional, very hurt, out of breath.

As you were walking around, you're probably thinking, what's my next move? Yeah. And what kind of thoughts ran through your mind? Obviously you, you know, you capitalize on one of those thoughts, but what other thoughts, was it call the police? Was it, you know, what were all the thoughts? Well, and this is how it was in my head, Toby, is I told myself, Ashley's in jail, and I know it sounds very silly in hindsight, but it just fueled every choice that I made from here on out was, Ashley's in jail.

There's no way that I'm not going to see her again and tell her what happened. There's just no way that I want somebody, while she's in jail, telling her that I'm arrested for the death of our son. It's just not going to happen. I thought, I'll just wait until she gets out. But then I start weighing out, well, what does that look like?

I'm not What do you mean, wait till she gets out? You can't do that. You've got everything that we know about, you know, human bodies. We know that we can't just preserve one just wrapped up in blanket or anything and just put it, you know, in the bedroom for a rainy day. It just It was never There was never an option.

I thought, there's no way I'm going to bury him. I didn't want to get rid of my son. It was my son. I never had custody of any of my kids, Toby. I never maintained custody longer than five years with my son Gabriel from a previous relationship with another woman. But I even lost him to the state. Well, she took him when her and I split up, and then she ended up losing him, but I never made arrangements to try to get him back in my life either.

But I never had any of my kids, and this was the one that I thought, hey, I'm not on parole. I don't have anybody breathing down my throat. There's no reason I can't have my family, and the last thing I ever wanted to do was get rid of him. So, in my mind The fact that I've been burying him was not an option.

That means that he's gone. That means that I don't have him. And I thought, well what else can you do? What are you gonna do? And I thought, well, maybe I'll just, I'm calling the cops. I need to call the cops. I need to call the cops and let them know what happened. And, surely, they are going to understand me.

They're going to understand what was going through, and I thought, and at that time, I was still full of excuses. I was still full of, oh, well, you know, there was always something to blame. There was other aids in my situation that made it this way. It wasn't my own doing, and I never, I didn't have what it took to just stand on what I knew to be the truth back then without the excuses, so I thought, well, they're going to understand.

I've got, I've got this reason. This is what happened. Surely, they're going to believe me, and I thought, there's no way they're going to believe me. There's absolutely no way they're going to believe me about anything. They're going to take my sorry ass to jail. They're going to throw me in a cell, and they're going to, they're going to forget me.

They're going to literally do away with me. And in that moment, I knew how dire the situation was, and I said, well, if I'm going away forever, if I'm leaving this earth, because in my, I didn't plan on being here anymore. I was going to kill myself. I didn't know how, but I knew that's the route I was going to take.

Soon as I saw Ashley again. I knew how that was going to turn out, and then I thought, the next time I'm alone after that, I'm done. Like I said, I didn't know how, but I knew that was my agenda. So I made a decision to do what I thought would be possible. I thought, well, you can cremate him, and you still have him, and, well, that's what they did with your father.

They cremated your father, and, you know, you had an urn, and there's a headstone still, but That's what you do. You don't bury them. You don't try to get rid of them. You don't hide them. Again, I know what it sounds like even as I say it for somebody else's ears to hear it. I know it just sounds completely absurd, but that's what my head was telling me.

It was telling me I'm never going to get rid of him. I want to keep him. Was that not also part of hiding what happened though? Well, see, and that's the part I didn't really, yeah, see, and I, that part of me never registered. It never registered that what I'm doing, it looks like I'm hiding everything that happened.

I never, man, I was one track. I was very selfish in the way I lived, Toby. I didn't have any thought as to the care that I had for Ashley being able to hear from me was even born in a selfish attitude. It was because that's the way I wanted it. It wasn't out of concern for her. I told myself it was, but it wasn't, it was, I was a selfish piece of sh**, that's how I lived my life, and of all the good stuff that I could put out there, that was really the root of it, was I lived for me, I wanted me to be happy, instant gratification, whatever it was.

Orion, a light in Matthew's life, was gone, and Matthew felt his life crumbling around him. Orion had been his chance at having his own happy family. Now all that was snatched away. Confronting the reality of the loss was too painful and Matthew, not ready to give his son up yet, kept repeating, there's no way, there's no way.

Pulling on a hoodie, Matthew walked through the neighborhood and weighed up the options ahead of him. He could turn himself in to the police, surely, if he told them the truth, they'd understand that it was an accident. But he knew better than that, they'd surely misinterpret him, play him as the villain and throw him in jail.

The more he thought about it, the more he convinced himself of one thing. Ashley needed to hear what happened directly from him. Before he could do that, he needed to find a way to preserve his son's body. Not ready to let go of Orion yet, Matthew rationalized to himself that there was only one viable choice to cremate him.

Did you have immediate neighbors? Yeah, yeah, I had uh, Ron was the guy right next to me, who actually ended up coming to see me when I was in county. And actually purchased the land that I had. And then behind me, the neighbors, I didn't know them. I had seen them out before, but I had never spoken a word to them.

It's a country ish type setting. Do you know Fortuna at all? I know it's a small town. Yeah, it's very small. There's a few gravel roads intersecting here and there. I knew by name maybe three, four of the neighbors that lived within a five block radius of me. And of course they were all the bad ones. The only responsible neighbor that I talked to was Ron next door and he worked for the electric company.

And the only reason I talked to him is because Well, he was good friends with my dad. Well, not good friends, but he was cordial to my dad before my dad passed. And after he passed, he came over wanting to know if there was anything he could do to help. I maintained a half assed relationship with him, just as far as it would go.

If I ever needed to get a ride, maybe he could help, but we didn't have anything in common. He was a working Class man and I was not. So yeah, there were some neighbors around, but you know, I'd actually been to one before and I'd knock on their door a few times to ask them for a ride into town to get cigarettes when I could count change or get money from the other guy I got dope from.

They didn't even answer the door. And I, I'd watch them leave the front porch and I would build up the courage to go and ask them for something and I'd knock on the door for 10 minutes. They'd never answer it. They weren't messing with me either. So you decided to cremate your son? I, yeah. Yep, in the simplest terms, that's what I thought I would, I was going to do.

That was the fix to my problem because I knew my life was over and I knew that I wanted to be the one to tell Ashley what happened and I didn't want to go anywhere until that was done. And then, I'm still, at the time, I'm still able to smoke and I can still get dope for the time and, you know, I I told myself there's no reason to quit what I'm doing right now until it's absolutely over.

So, um, I asked if you had immediate neighbors because I was just curious to know how you got away with, uh, cremating your son with immediate neighbors, uh, and, you know, burning a child in the, what, the backyard? I don't know. Yeah, okay. Yeah, well, that's a Good question. I had about, uh, I don't know, a little over an acre, and on that land, there was another 14 by 60 trailer that my dad purchased, oh, I don't know, probably 6 or 7 years, 8 years prior, and we pulled it on the lot because we were going to, the lot that we lived on was actually never meant for us to live on.

We were going to put trailers on there and rent them out. My dad had remodeled a house right on the edge of Highway 5, about 6 blocks from that location. But then when my dad's health got worse and worse, he had to go back out on the truck and they had to sell the house for money to pay bills and so they sold the house they wanted to live in.

They bought a little trailer to fix up and move into, and that's the one that I lived in. There was another one that they bought shortly before that, but it needed more work, so eventually once my dad passed, that was all of my dad's tools, everything that he had was in there. And it was so rotten down and decrepit, the weather had torn it apart, we never, his health didn't, he couldn't go out and fix it, and I wasn't about to take my time and try to remodel a place, you know, that is, it was nothing, it really just needed to be torn down anyway, so I emptied everything out of it.

This has been months prior and, you know, what I had, I put in, there's another little shed that my dad bought before he passed and I consolidated a lot of stuff, put it in there, the tools and stuff that I wanted to keep and what I didn't, I put on garage sale sites on Facebook or certain kind of things, higher quality things I would put on eBay and then once that was done, there's no reason for that building to be.

About a month before this happened, Ashley and I had torn it all the way down from the foundation, we dropped it all the way down. To tear the metal off the roof and take it in for, you know, to sell that for money and we burnt it where it stood. So there was three different burn piles among that 60 foot expanse of yard.

And it was pretty much all done at that time. There was still some wood. There was still a lot of other stuff laying around, fiberglass material, some old trash. There was a couple of bags of clothes that had been in the back room that got wet from a leak in the roof. They were all moldy. So. That kind of stuff had all been like, you know, gathered up and put in three different piles and it had pretty much all been done at that point, but yeah, I used a file cabinet because in my mind it absolutelyit needed to be separate, so I used an old file cabinet that was in the back room of that old trailer.

I moved it over closer to the porch of the one that I lived in. With some intention of using it somewhere in the future, but I saw that, and in my mind, that was my way of keeping him separate from everything else. To burn? So I just, yeah. So you put him inside the file cabinet? Yes. And then put him in the burn pile?

Well, I, I, I just want to know what kind of emotions is it like picking your son off the bed, passed away, and, you know, bring him over to the filing cabinet to actually burn his body. What's that whole ordeal like emotionally? Well, man, I, it was, I don't know, nothing really felt real and nothing felt real at that moment.

All I could focus on was the little, his little wisps of hair. And I just, I remember thinking, he's going to stay with me this way. I don't know. It just, it quenched any kind of fire that I had in me. Everything was very robotic for me after that. I don't remember eating anything. Uh, I, it felt like a week.

I don't, I don't think I ate anything at all. Uh, I, I, I really couldn't pinpoint an exact emotion. It's, it's, it's torture, uh, it's very torturous. It feels like an emotional floodgate was just opened up somewhere inside of me and I, I didn't, I didn't have any way to shut it off. Uh, as I was moving, I was crying just out of the habit of crying.

I don't even remember feeling the emotion when I was crying there at the very end. I just know that I was just continuous stream of crying. I didn't, I couldn't catch my breath. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't talk. I couldn't get my nose to stop running. I couldn't do anything. I was shaky. My hands were shaky.

My knees were shaky. I couldn't walk. I almost fell going down the ramp that my dad built on the front porch for a wheelchair. I remember walking down it like I was walking on flat land, and all of a sudden I realized that I'm not stepping evenly. I'm stepping down. It's a downgrade. And All that stuff just felt brand new.

It was like, I had never been like, I don't know, everything was just different. It, it just, it's as, it wasn't right. It's as if his passing put you into a whole new world, basically, but you had to grasp what was going on in a whole new world of his passing. Basically, cremating your son's body is an experience that's hard to imagine from a practical standpoint.

It was easy enough. There were already burn piles across Matthew's lot from stripping down his father's trailer. The neighbors wouldn't raise an eyebrow at Matthew's burning another object. Either way, if they noticed, Fortuna was a disconnected community home to just about a handful of people who minded their own business and Matthew was mostly anonymous here.

So Matthew placed his son's body in an old cabinet, trying to physically separate him from the fire. As he did so, Matthew was in a detached and robotic state, though a flood of emotions surged through him. It all felt surreal, as if he was facing a whole new world. As flames engulfed the makeshift casket, everything in Matthew's life was about to change.

Basically, you tried to cremate your son, you know, obviously you had to open up the cabinet to see what has happened so far. And I know that, you know, cremation is, you have to have really high temperatures. Were you able to achieve those high temperatures to get your results that you were after? No, I wouldn't by any means say that it was done on a level that it should be.

As I was trying to make sure, so you can't just light something like that and it just burn thoroughly all the way. It just doesn't happen. So, there has to be something to keep that, and I didn't know what to do after I started. I was like, oh man, I'm, I can't, there's no, I can't believe this is not done. So I just started gathering up anything else that I could, and I would poke it in the pile underneath of the cabinet to let all the extra two by fours, one bys, anything that would burn.

And upon doing that, some insulation had got down under there and I found that the insulation for very, it took a very long time to burn away. And so as I'm pushing it down underneath of the file cabinet. I'm noticing that this flame is, it's very hot, and I don't know what it was. I never knew this, previous to this, I never knew, but I guess it seemed to burn at such a hotter temperature, and it burned for so much longer, that became the source of the flame, along with some wood here and there, but once it got big enough, the insulation would continue to burn rather than just snuff itself out.

But it was very hot when it was burning, and after about, it was probably a solid hour worth of doing that, I was able to see what was going on enough that I couldn't see the actual remains. What I could see was the crusted up sheet that had been around him. I really couldn't tell what was going on. But when I was looking, I was like, man, there's nothing in there anymore.

There's nothing in there. So because this, because it was dark and it was nearing daylight, I decided that I was just going to leave it. I said, I'm just going to leave it like this for now. And I'm going to let it finish doing its thing. I'm going to let this flame die out. And when that thing is no longer too hot for me to handle.

I'll come out and deal with the rest of it. And I don't remember having, there was a little bit of nervousness, but I knew that Ron next door, I knew that he was at work because he had his Ameren UE truck always stacked up by his driveway and it was gone. I knew he was gone and his wife never came out of the house.

And as far as I knew, all the other neighbors that were around were either at work or the last thing they were going to do is pay too much attention to me. So later on in the morning, I don't know, it was about 11, 10. 30, 11 ish, I went out there and I was able to grab a hold of it and I had a blue tarp that I planned on catching everything and so what I did is I just rolled the thing over onto the tarp.

And I reached up, I grabbed the, by the bottom of the drawer and I just pulled it out and jiggled it a little bit and everything that I thought was going to be there was there. There was a lot of ash. It was there in pretty much completion. There were some parts that obviously it wasn't ash, but you know, you can't go back and try it again when you're at that point.

So what did you do with the remains? I double bagged the Cble grocery bags together. I put them together and I put them in an old cigar box that I had. An old wooden cigar box is a cubicle, a cube looking cigar box. It was one that I bought from an auction and I put them in there and then I put it down inside of a metal bean pot and I put it in a cabinet underneath the sink.

And uh, that actually became. My spot. Uh, so was all of them able to fit in the cigar box? Yeah. Yeah. Yep. I, I was honestly surprised myself, but I didn't know how much I had really retained. I just told myself that, that that was him. So everything that I had, I knew what I had was him. I didn't know that I had every bit of it, because I don't think, I don't really know if that's possible, but I knew what I had was him.

On the next episode of Voices of a Killer. Prosecutors say Matthew Hamm caused the death of his infant son by striking him in the head with a plastic mug. He said, are you Matthew Hamm? And I said, yes sir, I am. I need you to turn around for me. My dad used to tell me growing up all the time, you do the right thing for the right reason.

I didn't love her, right? But I did love her. I cared very much about her. The villain who's a half assed villain is never a good villain. I hope that you do get out. I don't, like I said, I got a different view now than before I interviewed you.

What tf***uck have I got myself into? That's a wrap on this episode of Voices of a Killer. I want to thank Matthew for sharing his story with us today. His ability to be open and honest is what makes this podcast so special. Keep an eye out for the second part of this story that will be coming out next week.

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Your feedback helps us improve and reach new listeners. Thank you for your support, and we can't wait to share more stories with you in the future. Thank you for tuning in. I'm your host, Toby, and we'll see you next time on Voices of a Killer.