I had explained in another post about how Rhonda feared dying the way our maternal grandmother had died. We didn’t learn about this story until we were teenagers and it had a profound effect on Rhonda, especially when she became a single mother. My mother showed Rhonda and me a detective magazine that had published the story of our grandmother’s murder. I don’t know what happened to that magazine over the years.

A while back I was researching to see if I could find that magazine but I had no luck. Not too long after that one of my second cousins (that I connected with on Ancestry.com) contacted me and asked me about that magazine. Unfortunately I had no answers for her. We both did our own research. I had no luck but she did and sent me the info. Thanks to that cousin I was able to purchase the magazine.

As the story goes, on November 3, 1957, our grandmother, Ethel Walker Hamilton, was murdered in Dayton, Ohio. My parents had already moved to California by that time.

My grandmother and grandfather had gotten a divorce and grandma remarried a man with the last name of Hamilton. No relation to us. The marriage didn’t last but just a few months and at the time of my grandma’s death she was living in an apartment with her daughter/my aunt.

I am sharing that story here so the reader can better understand Rhonda’s one fear and why she took self-defense classes.

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