Shortly before eight on the evening of September 2, 2003, Amanda Hamm's 1997 Oldsmobile Cutlass went down the westside boat ramp at Clinton Lake, in DeWitt County, Illinois, and sank. Her three children were strapped in the back seat: Christopher Hamm, six; Austin Brown, three; and Kyleigh Hamm, twenty-three months. They drowned in less than five feet of water. The car was being driven by Hamm's boyfriend, Maurice LaGrone Jr. Hamm, who was twenty-four, and LaGrone both got out uninjured.
The two had met working at a factory near Heyworth. They told police the car had rolled into the lake by accident during a family outing. Hamm, who is five feet ten, said she had tried to unbuckle one of the children, panicked and saved herself. Kyleigh's father, Shane Senters, was a former boyfriend of hers. The children were buried together that September at Memorial Park Cemetery in Clinton after a service at the Assembly of God church, and Hamm grieved at the graveside among family and friends.
Three months later, on December 9, 2003, both were arrested and charged with first-degree murder. The prosecution's case was that LaGrone had planned the drownings because the children got in the way of his life of sex and drugs, and that Hamm had gone along to save their troubled and sometimes abusive relationship. Prosecutors described him as an addiction for her, a man who had replaced the children as the center of her attention.
LaGrone was tried first, before a McLean County jury, and testified. After four weeks of evidence the jury of seven women and five men deliberated for more than twenty-three hours over four days and in April 2006 convicted him of murder. "It wasn't the big pieces that mattered, it was the little details, like he watched them go into the water," one juror, Greg Haddock, said. Another said he had shown no emotion describing the children's deaths but wept when two of his relatives testified. The jury found him ineligible for the death penalty the prosecutor, Roger Simpson, had sought; two jurors said intent to kill had not been proved. He was sentenced to life without parole. He has maintained that it was an accident that started as a prank.
Hamm's trial began in November 2006, moved to Macon County. She did not testify. In December the jury acquitted her of murder and convicted her on the lesser charges of child endangerment resulting in death. Her lawyer, Steve Skelton, said the verdict showed the jurors did not believe she had helped plan the killings, but did believe she knew LaGrone was a danger to her children. LaGrone's lawyers pointed out that her jury had been given a lesser alternative and his had not, on the same facts. She was sentenced to ten years.
She was released from the Illinois Department of Corrections in 2008. Counting the years in the county jail awaiting trial, she had been in custody about five years; one account says that with credit for that time and day-for-day credit she served only about fourteen months in prison itself. She moved to Chicago, married, and took the name Amanda Ware. When she was giving birth to her third child with her husband, a doctor recognized her from the Clinton case and called the Department of Children and Family Services, which took the children into care, and a Cook County judge later ruled that the state had proved its case that they faced an uncertain future in her custody.
The reporter Edith Brady-Lunny, who covered the case for The Pantagraph, wrote a book about it, The Unforgiven. In Clinton, park benches at Kiwanis Park were dedicated to the three children in May 2005.