It was Sept. 10, 2001, a week after Labour Day. The night air near Hixon felt like autumn.
Two men on motorcycles visiting from the United States pulled off Highway 97 at the Woodpecker Rest Area, 46 kilometres south of Prince George.
Something caught their attention. Rustling in the bushes. A bear spray can, a hammer and two pools of blood that contained someone’s dentures.
They called 911. They didn’t know it, but those were the first clues to the killing of one American by another, a mystery that would be solved in months by cross-border law enforcement co-operation. But it would take decades to bring the killer in front of a local judge.
Prince George RCMP officers arrived and called for detectives from the North District Major Crime Unit. They pulled out the yellow crime scene tape and went to work, finding eyeglasses, three different hammers and a folding knife with the blade open, all bloodstained. There were drag marks in the grass beyond the parking area. Almost 60 feet down a slope, amid small rocks and bushes, a path of flattened grass and bent branches led to a man’s body in a ravine.
“Homicide shakes Hixon-area residents” was the headline in the Sept. 12, 2001, edition of the Citizen.
A murder at a rest stop in northern British Columbia, the day before al-Qaida’s terrorist attacks on New York City, the Pentagon and rural Pennsylvania killed nearly 3,000 people — the most shocking breach of United States security since Pearl Harbor in 1941.
“You don’t expect it to happen,” a Woodpecker Rest Area neighbour told a Citizen reporter, “but then, you don’t expect the World Trade Center to blow up either.”
More than 24 years later, James Daniel Morgan, 65, was back to face justice for the killing of 74-year-old James Curtis Hamrick. On Jan. 9, in Prince George, Morgan was sentenced by a B.C. Supreme Court judge after pleading guilty to manslaughter.
This is the story of the World War II veteran and the hitchhiker, based on jailhouse interview transcripts and sworn statements from police and prosecutors found in the files of U.S. courts.
Anchorage away
Hamrick, a third class petty officer in the U.S. Navy during the war, packed up his green 1995 Dodge D250 pickup truck with an older beige camper and hitched up his homemade flatbed utility box trailer with pine wood sides.
He kept an eye on the time with the Rolex Oyster Perpetual watch on his left wrist. It was Sept. 8 when he left the modest apartment building near Anchorage’s football stadium and hockey arena, with his poodle, Muffy, as his companion. Hamrick’s daughter in Arizona was expecting him to arrive a week later, to live with her while he got back surgery to repair chronic pain.
Hamrick relied on a $730 monthly Social Security cheque. He had no credit cards, so he withdrew $600 from Wells Fargo Bank to pay for gas and food.
About six hours later, around dinner time, he stopped in Tok, an Alaska town of about 1,200 at the junction of the Alaska and Glenn highways, 144 kilometres from the Alcan border crossing to Beaver Creek, Yukon.
Hamrick spotted a tall, skinny, bearded man with unkempt hair, wearing a khaki trench coat, getting soaked in the rain. The man told him he had been refused entry to Canada because he was short of cash.
Hamrick felt sorry for the hitchhiker and decided to give him a ride.
The two of them eventually crossed the border into Yukon and stopped for a meal at the Koldern River Lodge in Beaver Creek before heading to Stewart, B.C., where Hamrick’s friend, Virginia Wood, hosted them on Sept. 9.
Morgan told people he was Daniel Curtis or Daniel Clark. His driver’s licence said something else. He didn’t say much to Wood, except that he came from Spokane, Wash., and muttered something about Idaho and the white supremacist movement. Hamrick spent the night in his camper, but Morgan slept in a makeshift shed.
When nobody was looking, he stole some hammers. But he would not use the tools to build or fix.
The next morning, Sept. 10, Hamrick replaced a damaged fender on his truck with a piece of cream-coloured aluminum siding on and got back on the road around 11:30 a.m.
There was some tension between the men. At the 7-Eleven Esso in Smithers, a gas station attendant watched Hamrick lose his patience when Morgan peeked under the tarp that covered personal items in the trailer. Hamrick mentioned that it was the second time he had done so. He also told the attendant they were supposed to part company at Hazelton.
Onward to Prince George and beyond. By early evening, Morgan drove the truck into the rest stop near Hixon, with Hamrick asleep in the passenger seat. The vehicle came to a stop. Hamrick awoke. They went different directions to find spots to urinate.
Morgan’s mind turned to Hamrick’s cash.
Placing a can of bear spray in his coat pocket, he went to find one of the stolen hammers.
He stepped between the truck and trailer and approached the five-foot-eight, 180-pound Hamrick, who wore a blue T-shirt and beige pants, as he relieved himself in the grass.
Morgan, only two inches taller but 30 pounds lighter, struck the elderly man on the crown of his head. Hamrick fell to the ground. Somehow he crawled to the passenger door of his truck and asked Morgan why he was doing this to him.
Morgan was too afraid to reply. Instead, he sprayed Hamrick in the face and hit him two or three more times with the hammer. When that didn’t work, he got back in the truck with thoughts of running him over.
Hamrick sat on a rock, in the headlights, soaked in blood. Morgan pulled a cloth-coated bungee cord from the back of the truck and tried to choke him. He hit him with a hammer again and raided Hamrick’s pockets. He stuffed hundreds of American dollars and a two-ounce bar of gold into his own, but he did not get Hamrick’s Rolex or Masonic ring.
Then he grabbed Hamrick by the ankles, tossed him into the woods, and got back into the truck.
As he departed the rest area, the two motorcyclists arrived.
While driving, Morgan noticed his own face was bloodied and running over the steering wheel.
Run for the border
Morgan abandoned Hamrick’s utility trailer and dog in Quesnel. The poodle was found in a shopping plaza. Morgan stopped near Boston Bar en route to Vancouver, where he dumped the truck and camper on Powell Street just a few blocks from the Vancouver Police Department’s headquarters.
He left the keys inside, hoping someone would steal it and put their fingerprints all over the interior. But he missed the blood marks that were low on the exterior of the passenger side.
Morgan used some of the cash he stole to buy crack cocaine in front of the police station. Tired and high, he went with a woman to her apartment in the Washington Hotel near the busiest intersection of the Downtown Eastside. One of her friends came along and remarked that the World Trade Center had been bombed.
Morgan stayed all day and most of the night before making his way a kilometre south to Pacific Central Station, Vancouver’s intercity bus and train terminal, on Sept. 12, to buy a ticket and board the Greyhound bus to Seattle.
The motorcoach arrived during the noon hour at the Pacific border crossing to Blaine, Wash., where passengers disembarked for U.S. Customs and Border Protection inspection.
Morgan carried a knapsack with his dirty clothes, toothbrush and hairbrush inside and a sleeping bag attached to the outside. He showed a customs officer his driver’s licence, identifying himself as 1953-born Daniel Walter Schmidt of Chattaroy, Wash. He claimed to have come from a funeral in Victoria, but did not say whose life was celebrated. He told the officer that he paid his bills by delivering RVs to customers, but wanted to buy a commercial fishing boat. Inside his front left jeans pocket was a roll of American hundred-dollar bills totalling $2,300.
Morgan returned to the bus, which rolled across the 49th parallel into a country stunned by the previous day’s images of the collapsed Twin Towers in New York City. By order of President George W. Bush, the Stars and Stripes flags were half-staffed.
The same day, back in Anchorage, Hamrick’s stepson filed a missing person’s report with local police. The body would be positively identified on Sept. 13.
Mounties in Boston Bar told the Prince George detachment they found Hamrick’s personal items, including his walking cane and an envelope containing X-rays and a label with Hamrick’s home address, dumped at a Trans-Canada Highway rest stop.
When he got off the bus in Seattle, Morgan bought more cocaine, a set of new clothes and rented a motel room. He even bought a used car — a used Daihatsu Charade three-door hatchback — for $1,000 cash from Fraser Auto Sales on Aurora Avenue North. He drove it across Washington to his sister’s house. While he was in Spokane, he converted a diamond ring he stole from Hamrick into $200 cash at the Empire pawn shop.
Back in Vancouver, on Sept. 15, police found Hamrick’s truck with a bylaw violation ticket on the windshield. They recovered Morgan’s DNA from the steering column and a toothpick.
A sheriff arrested Morgan on Sept. 17 in Pullman, Wash., for driving under the influence and marijuana possession and booked him as Schmidt. Morgan later told RCMP officers that he was let go after a couple of hours, so he continued driving to Idaho. Instead of fixing the faulty transmission on his car, he gave it away and reverted to hitchhiking. Florida beckoned, but he went only as far as the Midwest before turning around to Denver with a potential job waiting in Portland.
Instead, he found himself in Sacramento.
“That town has always, somehow stopped me,” he exhaled during an early 2002 interview with police officers. “I called it the methamphetamine capital of the world.”
He ended his solo journey with a breakdown.
“I find it impossible to live with myself. And I felt this way on Oct. 18 last year.”
He said he turned himself in to a Sacramento police officer and told him he was wanted for a parole violation. He also said he confessed to killing a man in B.C. and another in a Denver motel room. He was officially arrested for a parole violation, misdemeanor warrants and possession of hypodermic needles.
“Since then,” Morgan said during the jailhouse interview, “I’ve been waiting for you guys and other people to show up.”
Postscript
By the end of October 2001, the Washington State Homicide Task Force told the RCMP that Schmidt was really James Daniel Morgan, born April 11, 1960.
The search ended when they discovered Morgan was already in custody in Sacramento.
At the end of January 2002, two FBI agents, George Fong and Tom Anzelmo, along with two RCMP officers, Wayne Gordey and Bill Fordy, visited Morgan in the Deuel Vocational Institution state jail near San Francisco. Morgan confessed to Hamrick’s murder and the Denver murder during the recorded interview. DNA samples obtained with a warrant were sent to an RCMP lab in Edmonton. Hamrick’s DNA was on Morgan’s left boot.
Morgan told the officers he considered throwing away the boots, but for some reason he didn’t.
“I didn’t even wash them,” he said.
In Prince George on June 4, 2002, Morgan was charged with Hamrick’s first-degree murder and an arrest warrant was issued.
He pleaded guilty to the Denver second-degree murder on Nov. 29, 2004. A judge sentenced him to 48 years in a Colorado prison, minus 927 days served.
The Canadian government formally asked for extradition under the treaty with the U.S. in 2006 and a U.S. judge ruled Morgan was eligible to be sent north in 2007. A Canadian Department of Justice spokesperson told the Citizen that the U.S. exercised its prerogative to surrender Morgan only after the end of his Colorado sentence.
Canada sought Morgan’s temporary surrender and the U.S. agreed in late November 2025.
Hamrick’s daughter, Candyce Tracy, delivered an emotional victim impact statement by phone at the Jan. 9 sentencing. Justice Ronald Tindale gave Morgan a one-day sentence.
“My son and I live with daily reminders of what was stolen, a future with a loving parent, a grandparent and emotional stability and peace,” Tracy told Tindale. “We hope the legal process will finally acknowledge the depth of this loss. Closure is essential to our healing. As the surviving family, we seek resolution, not just for ourselves, but because the dead cannot speak.”
Morgan will not be free anytime soon. If ever.
There was evidence to support the first-degree murder charge, but the Crown and defence reached a plea bargain.
“This is a true joint submission where there’s been considerable negotiation and an acknowledgement by the Crown that the delay application would have been difficult to defend,” Tindale said.
Both parties agreed that a sentence of eight years for manslaughter with a hammer would have been fit if Morgan had been returned to Canada in 2006, when the sentence could have been concurrent to the Colorado sentence.
At the end of the long-awaited hearing in room 307, Morgan waived his right to appeal, so that he can be returned as soon as possible to a Colorado prison.
Court heard that Morgan is eligible for parole in Colorado but has not applied. Defence lawyer Jason LeBlond said his client suffers from heart problems, can only stand for a few minutes at a time, and needed a wheelchair while in custody in Prince George.
When given the chance to address the court, Morgan was brief.
“I’m so sorry,” Morgan said, his voice quivering. “I wish I had more than that. I’m just so sorry.”