On June 30th, 2001, a body would be discovered in a remote house, and a host of baffling questions would arise shortly after the autopsy results came in.
Forty-one-year-old Eric Tamiyasu lived in Hood River, Oregon, and had recently built a home next to the orchard business he owned on Binns Hill Road. It was a rural area, with no other neighbors close by.
On the evening of June 25th, 2001, Eric had invited his friend Diana Anderson over to the house. The two had been friends for a long time, but had developed romantic feelings for one another over that period, and were beginning to enter into the early phases of a more serious relationship. That night was their first official “date.”
According to Diana’s later recollections, she and Eric had a strange experience that evening, as both of them heard someone apparently tapping on the house’s windows, and on two occasions, an unknown person rang the front doorbell and then evidently ran away. Diana stated that Eric had heard someone running down the driveway, but had not seen who it was, and had also found a footprint in the dirt near the front door.
Diana left the house several hours later, unsettled by the sounds, but not attributing much importance to them.
Five days later, a friend and business associate of Eric’s, Don Dixon, allegedly began receiving phone calls from Eric’s other acquaintances, who claimed they had not been able to get hold of Eric for nearly a week. Concerned, Don went to Eric’s house on Saturday, June 30th, and let himself in with his spare key.
Immediately, Don noticed a foul smell permeating the residence, and to his horror, soon came across the nude and decomposed body of Eric Tamiyasu, lying sprawled across his bed.
Police arrived in short order, and reportedly searched the remains and the premises for evidence of a crime. Sergeant Gerry Tiffany of the Hood River County Sheriff’s Department was one of the first on the scene, and later recalled that because there did not appear to be any sign of a break-in or robbery, nor any hint of violence done upon the body, investigators initially attributed Eric’s death to some natural cause, such as a cardiac arrest.
Supposedly, after the body and the bedding were removed from the premises, County Sheriff Joe Wampler asked Don Dixon to help burn the soiled mattress, in order to spare the victim’s family from having to see the grisly aftermath of Eric’s death. Don, reportedly not feeling the request was inappropriate at the time, agreed, and burned the bed the morning after the remains were discovered.
Unfortunately for everyone involved, this action would soon complicate matters immensely. The same day that the mattress and bed frame were burned, the autopsy on Eric Tamiyasu’s body was completed, and determined that Eric had been killed by three .22-caliber gunshots to the head, probably four to five days previously. What had first been treated as a natural death was now a homicide investigation, meaning that some of the evidence might have been burned away along with the bed frame.
Because of the rather unorthodox destroying of the bed only hours after the body was found, suspicion immediately fell on Sheriff Wampler himself. Though it would seem that Wampler had no particular motive for killing Eric Tamiyasu, rumors soon began to swirl that Eric had had an affair with Wampler’s wife. Wampler vehemently denied this.
Another person of interest in the murder was a close friend and business partner of Eric Tamiyasu’s, named Eric Smith. According to Don Dixon, Eric Smith had been arguing with Eric Tamiyasu not long before the murder, and it was speculated that Smith had stolen some money—between fifty-thousand and sixty-thousand dollars—from their shared used car business.
Investigators did pursue this lead, but found that neither Eric Smith nor Eric Tamiyasu had invested anywhere near fifty-thousand dollars into the failed business venture, and there was no evidence that Eric Smith had absconded with any money, nor argued with his business partner about anything at all.
As a matter of fact, it was noted that not only was Don Dixon the initial source of the Eric Smith lead, but he was also believed to be the person behind the rumors about Eric Tamiyasu’s alleged affair with Sheriff Wampler’s wife. Thus Don Dixon, the man who had discovered the body, was also considered a person of interest in the crime.
Interestingly, Eric’s sister Ramona told authorities that Don had called her to tell her that her brother was dead, not long after the remains were found. Ramona asserted that Don had told her there were not any “exit wounds,” which Ramona found strange, since at that point the bullet wounds in Eric’s head had yet to be discovered. She further claimed that when she asked Don what he meant, Don said that he assumed that Eric had committed suicide because he had been depressed lately, and that Don had therefore looked for gunshot wounds when he first found the body.
Both Sheriff Wampler and Eric Smith took polygraph tests and passed. Don Dixon claimed he would take a polygraph test if certain allowances were made for his medical conditions, which might influence the outcome of the test. He eventually took an independently-administered polygraph, but the results were reportedly inconclusive.
The only other person of interest mentioned in connection with the case was the unnamed ex-boyfriend of Diana Anderson, who purportedly had a history of stalking behavior, and may have been the person at Eric Tamiyasu’s home on the night that he and Diana heard the tapping and the doorbell. Though Diana allegedly saw a footprint in the dirt outside the residence shortly after hearing the noises, heavy rains had washed the print away by the time police realized Eric’s death was a homicide.
In 2002, the case was featured on the popular Unsolved Mysteries television program, but as of this writing, there have been no further developments.
Crime Immemorial 