Idaho sisters lost touch as their family unraveled. Then police knocked on the door

As a child growing up in Mountain Home, Katie Siira learned to lean on her older sister Kari, observing how effortlessly her elder sibling by just 11 months seemed to coast through life, constantly smiling and making her presence known in almost any social setting. Kari’s endless energy and unrestrained boisterousness, including as teammates in youth soccer and volleyball, allowed her much shyer, younger sister to sit back and watch as she worked to develop her own confidence.

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“She was always the one that was doing all the talking,” Katie Siira said in an interview with the Idaho Statesman. “It was nice to feel like I could live in that shadow, because she was always the one that was kind of leading the charge.”

And Kari just loved animals, her sister said. Any chance she got, she’d be rolling around on the floor playing with dogs she came across.

Their tight kinship as Irish twins endured through their adolescence, but eventually loosened as each finished high school and Katie left their hometown for college a few hours away.

But already by her senior year of high school, with an individualized education program in special education classes, Kari struggled as her autism spectrum disorder presented new obstacles in her life, Katie said. Kari became more scattered and the long-held goal of becoming a nurse fell by the wayside.

The death in 2014 of their grandmother, the girls’ hero who also acted as the family’s focal point, further distanced members of the Siira clan. Fissures grew and sides took shape as the girls’ uncle, Eric A. Hamilton, positioned himself to take control of his mother’s assets, Katie said. Strained relations led to a family fallout.

Without a better option and not able to care for herself or drive, Kari, then age 21, moved in with her uncle and his wife, Laura D. Hamilton, and their four kids at their rental house in Mountain Home. Unable to work but collecting monthly supplemental security income from the federal government for her disability, Kari had come to rely on her grandmother to help manage regular life responsibilities, like paying bills and doing her laundry, Katie said. With her gone, the Hamiltons invited Kari in. Eventually, Kari’s friend, Megan M. James, would join them and she and Laura began to act as Kari’s live-in caregivers as her immediate family lost touch.

Before they knew it, Katie and Kari hadn’t had a substantive conversation in years, exchanging only a text on birthdays and a holiday or two. At some point, Kari’s phone number stopped working. On occasion a relative would spot her around town and report back. But the sisters’ stepmother, who raised them with Katie’s father, hadn’t connected with Kari over that time, either, despite them all still living in Mountain Home. Life continued to pass the Siiras by without much in the way of updates.

As recently as fall 2023, the stepmother ran into Laura Hamilton, who was working as a clerk at a Dollar Tree in town, and Hamilton indicated that Kari Siira still lived in her home under her care, according to court records.

The arrival in May 2024 of Elmore County Sheriff’s deputies to Katie and Kari’s parents’ home — Katie lived nearby and was visiting — came as a shock to their family. Detectives wanted to know the last time any of them had heard from Kari. Dread filled their living room.

“We realized that we hadn’t heard anything in a long, long time,” Katie said.

Caregivers charged with murder

Today, Laura Hamilton, 58, is charged with four felonies, including first-degree murder and failure to notify authorities of a death, after investigators estimated that Kari Siira vanished in August or September 2020 at age 27. Led by Elmore County Prosecutor Shondi Lott, the prosecutor’s office in December 2025 filed its notice of intent to seek the death penalty for Hamilton, an Australian citizen, court records showed.

Megan James, 33, who at the time was Siira’s fellow caregiver, was also arrested and charged with her murder and related felonies, the Elmore County Sheriff’s Office first reported in June 2024 while withholding Siira’s name as the victim. James was previously Siira’s classmate at Mountain Home High School, class of 2011, according to a school yearbook reviewed by the Statesman.

According to the court records reviewed by the Statesman, Laura Hamilton and James are suspected of confining Siira, who had intellectual disabilities, for up to months in a windowless garage by chaining her — including with a dog collar and padlock — to a pool table at a residence where they all lived with Siira’s uncle in the 900 block of West 4th North Street. Laura Hamilton and James are also accused of torturing Siira: They allegedly deprived her of food, forced her to use mold- and urine-saturated bedding and later struck her in the head until she died at the home, the records revealed. In addition, they were each charged with grand theft of Siira’s supplemental security income.

In May 2024, James approached the Elmore County Sheriff’s Office and reported to detectives that more than three years earlier she helped Eric Hamilton dump Siira’s body in a secluded part of Owyhee County. They concealed Siira’s remains in a large white portable cooler and drove a half-hour south in Eric Hamilton’s pickup truck to a rugged, mountainous area, where they dug a pit and left his niece’s body, the probable cause affidavit read. Then they tossed the cooler in the Snake River and returned home, James told police.

When James reported the death to police, she joined detectives and directed them to Kari Siira’s remains at a location beyond Crane Falls Lake, Elmore County Sheriff’s Deputy Eric J. Brown wrote in the affidavit included in court records. James also told police she had a prior romantic relationship with Eric Hamilton, 56, and that they shared a 3-year-old child, but she had recently been kicked out of the Hamiltons’ home days before she met with police. James told investigators that Laura Hamilton was aware and consented to that relationship with her husband, which Laura Hamilton later disputed.

Days after James met with police and detectives visited with the Siiras, Eric Hamilton dialed 911 in early June 2024 to report that he wanted to confess to a murder, the affidavit read. He said his wife and James had starved and beaten his niece, and, after she was already deceased, he helped cover up her death by helping move Kari Siira’s body and burying it behind a rock at Crane Falls.

Eric Hamilton warned dispatch that he would be dead by the time police arrived, according to Brown’s report. When deputies got to the home on West 4th North Street, what sounded like a gunshot rang out from the residence. Officers eventually entered the home to find Eric Hamilton’s body in the main bedroom with no signs of life from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the affidavit read. Laura Hamilton, also at the home at the time, was taken into custody and driven to the Sheriff’s Office.

The Elmore County Sheriff’s Office denied Statesman public records requests for the 911 audio recording and all police reports related to Laura Hamilton and Megan James, citing pending prosecutions.

Idaho’s death penalty history

In the prosecution of Siira’s death, state attorneys are making the rare decision in Idaho to seek the death penalty for a female murder defendant. Her sister, Katie Siira, supports the push.

“Pursuing capital punishment in this case feels appropriate because I feel like the intent — her intent — was evil,” she told the Statesman. “And I don’t know that anything less than that is going to feel like justice for losing my sister.”

Idaho’s pursuit of the death penalty for Laura Hamilton comes in the wake of the botched lethal injection last week of a female prisoner convicted of murder in Tennessee that made national headlines. It represented that state’s first effort to execute a woman in more than two centuries.

Christa Pike, 50, survived after two doses of lethal injection drugs were administered, garnering fresh scrutiny of capital punishment practices in the U.S. Pike remains hospitalized as her public defense team works to prevent a possible second attempt on her life, according to news reports.

In February 2024, Idaho also failed to put a prisoner to death by lethal injection — the first unsuccessful execution attempt in the state’s history. For nearly an hour, members of the prison system’s execution team were unable to find a vein suitable for an IV in prisoner Thomas Creech’s body to deliver the same chemicals used in the attempt to execute Pike. The incident led the Idaho Legislature the next year to pass a law that switched the state to a firing squad as its primary execution method.

Creech, now 76, remains on death row in Idaho under a federal stay of execution. A legal appeal from his attorneys argues that another attempt to put him to death would violate Creech’s constitutional rights and is tied up in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The similarities between Pike and Creech’s failed executions weren’t lost on the Idaho chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which objects to capital punishment in the U.S. criminal justice system.

“The ACLU of Idaho opposes the death penalty in any form as a violation of a person’s Eighth Amendment right to be free from cruel and unusual punishment,” Rebecca De León, communications director of the organization, said in a statement. “Through no fault of the medical staff administering the injections, these attempts at lethal injection did not work, and instead created incredible physical and psychological harm, which we believe qualifies as torture.”

Idaho has one woman on death row. Robin Row, now 69, has sat for nearly 36 years among the current group of eight prisoners sentenced to death in the state. She was added as a member in late 1993 following her conviction on three counts of first-degree murder for the killing of her husband and two young children in an Ada County house fire that she set.

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Since 1994, the Idaho Department of Correction has executed three prisoners, each by lethal injection. The last one took place in June 2012, followed by the failed attempt to execute Creech in 2024.

Before that, the state hanged prisoners sentenced to death, last doing so in 1957. Dating to before statehood in 1890, a total of 26 prisoners have been put to death, including 10 executions at the Old Penitentiary in Boise, according to the Idaho State Historical Society.

But Idaho has never executed a female prisoner. Over the decades since her conviction, Row has continued to litigate her death sentence as the possibility of a death warrant draws closer by the year while she exhausts her state and federal appeals.

And with the murder prosecution of Laura Hamilton in Elmore County, another woman could be subject to being added to Idaho’s death row.

“Absolutely nobody should champion state-sponsored torture or cruel and unusual punishment at the hands of the government,” De León said in her statement. “It is antithetical to our American values, and an offense to our Constitution.”

‘Going for so long’

Since her June 2024 arrest, Laura Hamilton has remained in custody at the Elmore County Jail in lieu of $5 million bond as she awaits trial. A date for her trial has yet to be set. The Australian Consulate has taken an interest in her case, given the country in 1985. Its staffers in San Francisco have remotely attended some of Hamilton’s hearings, court records showed.

“Australia opposes the death penalty in all circumstances for all people,” the Australian government states publicly.

Hamilton’s public defense team, made up of attorneys Tom Monaghan and Jay Kiiha, did not respond to requests for comment. Monaghan previously represented serial killer Joseph Duncan, who murdered four members of a North Idaho family in 2005.

Last month, Hamilton’s attorneys asked to push court proceedings out further. But prosecutors objected and a judge maintained the current briefing schedule ahead of setting a trial date likely for sometime next year.

“This case has already been going for so long,” Lott, the lead prosecutor, said in an email to the Statesman.

In the meantime, a judge repeatedly deemed James mentally unfit for criminal proceedings. Following stints at State Hospital South in Blackfoot after her arrest, she now also remains in custody at the Elmore County Jail.

In August, James took a plea deal in exchange for prosecutors dropping a first-degree murder charge under her agreement to testify against Hamilton at trial. James is set to be sentenced after she pleaded guilty to second-degree kidnapping, failure to notify of a death, abuse or neglect of a vulnerable adult and grand theft.

In a guilty plea advisory form signed by James, she identified that she is taking various medications for diagnoses of mental health disorders that include “learning, depression, PTSD.” In response to a pair of questions about whether she is mentally incapable of understanding the proceedings or what it means to plead guilty, and if anything in her life affects her ability to voluntarily enter a guilty plea, she circled “YES” bubbles for each before crossing them out and adding her initials to then circle “NO” to both.

James is scheduled to be sentenced in early December and could receive a maximum 59 years in prison and fines totaling $130,000. In the plea deal, prosecutors agreed to recommend no more than 20 years fixed and no fines to the judge, and the defense has accepted no less than 10 years in prison, including time already served, according to court records.

“We reached a deal with James because she was involved, but less culpable than Hamilton,” Lott told the Statesman. “The deal includes that she will spend somewhere from 10 to 30 years in prison and will testify truthfully in Hamilton’s trial. If she fails to do so, we reserved the right to refile the murder charge against her.”

James’ attorneys, public defenders Robert Chastain and Brian Marx, did not return requests for comment.

As part of the agreement, the judge isn’t bound to accept the recommendation from either side.

A voice for Kari

About a year ago, Katie Siira, 32, now a Boise resident, sat for a new tattoo. She wanted to permanently honor her sister, Kari, for all the world to see.

On her right forearm, she had an artist inscribe a Hindu symbol that represents the path of life, which leads to enlightenment. And at the top, she chose to have a Celtic sister knot inked and a daisy — the birth flower for Kari’s birth month of April — placed at its center.

“It makes me think of just how wonderful of a person that she was, even through all of the adversity that she went through,” Katie said. “She definitely had some struggles in life, but she always just tried to move forward with those, and so that was kind of a good representation of I think just her as a person.”

Today, Katie works at veterinarian clinic. Every time a dog walks in, she can’t help but think of her sister and just how much she’d have loved to shower it with affection.

More than two years since Katie learned of her sister’s death and the tragic circumstances surrounding the end of her life, she has worked to overcome her grief. Even so, she’s had to come to terms with knowing that she will never have the chance to see or speak to her older sister again.

She continues to await Laura Hamilton’s trial just as James’ sentencing day approaches in early December, when Katie Siira will be called upon to deliver a victim impact statement. As the younger sister, she is no longer most comfortable living in her elder sibling’s shadow. Katie said she feels pulled to speak on Kari’s behalf to ensure that she is properly represented by those who loved her, to guarantee that she isn’t simply forgotten.

“I feel like there were a lot of instances in which my sister wasn’t heard, my sister was not looked after. I think that she was taken advantage of in a situation,” Katie said. “So this feels like my last chance to really be her voice and speak up for her, because I feel like she’s gone so long without having any voice.”

This story was originally published October 9, 2026 at 3:00 AM with the headline “Idaho sisters lost touch as their family unraveled. Then police knocked on the door.”

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