By Jerry Sena

Freddie Hammer has been here before, squarely in the cross hairs of the justice system.

The 48-year-old woodcutter, sometimes carpenter, husband, grandfather, uncle and self-proclaimed philanthropist has had his back against this wall before.

The first time, 30 years past, it took a million-dollar defense and eight years of appeals to free himself. And nothing short of a ground-breaking legal precedent – known today in legal circles simply as The Hammer Exception – could open the prison doors and set him loose to pursue a second chance that few men are ever given the opportunity to see.

But Freddie Hammer’s second chance is beginning to look more and more like his last. With the filing of three capital murder charges last week, Virginia authorities have laid the earliest groundwork for a death sentence.

Police affidavits filed with courts in Ashe County, and Wythe and Grayson counties in Virginia, lay out an impressive collection of circumstantial evidence supporting their claim that Hammer shot down three men in cold blood on the morning of Jan. 24.

An eyewitness has reported seeing Hammer traveling the highway that morning in his distinctive burgundy and white flatbed Ford truck, headed toward the Grassy Creek Christmas tree farm where 73-year-old Ronald Hudler, 44-year-old Fred Hudler, and 25-year-old John Miller were shot to death.

At least one other witness saw the truck speeding back toward Hammer’s Crumpler home that afternoon.

Hammer knew the Hudlers, sometimes did some work for them, and even drove to Chicago to haul back the gun safe police say he went that morning to rob.

Police have collected tire impressions, footprints, shell casings, and the pieces of a rifle sight they believe matches one once packaged within a box found at Hammer’s home.

Police have statements from Hammer’s own family identifying firearms he was known to possess – firearms that match the caliber and styles of the three different guns they believe killed the three men – all of which are now missing.

They have a Hudler Carolina Tree Farm secretary who says Hammer visited the office the day before the shootings. He’d asked after one of the Hudler brothers, Bill. telling the secretary he owed Bill money and wanted to find him. He asked where Ron was and she told him the Hudler patriarch would not return from a business trip for several days.

They have Hammer’s unsupported alibi claiming he was at the opposite end of the county at the time of the killings, tending to some work in Todd.

Taken together, the evidence police have claimed is substantial. But in the criminal courts, where a single reasonable doubt among 12 jurors is enough to blow up the chances of a conviction, none of it yet does anything but draw a convincing argument that Hammer had the motive, the opportunity and the means to commit the murders.

The final piece, placing Hammer at the scene, will take more.

That last piece may lay hidden somewhere in the materials police collected from a fifth-wheel trailer Hammer owns in Wythe County, Va., an hour north of the murder site. Investigators went there in the early morning hours of Jan. 27 – not quite three days after the murders – with a search warrant in hand. The warrant allowed them to look for the murder weapons and anything Hammer may have stolen from the Hudler farm. The court documents indicate they found neither guns nor cash. They did find evidence, say police, that someone had recently used the trailer’s shower. They also found partially burned clothing and some gravel that appeared to have been soaked with kerosene. But to collect it, they would need a new search warrant permitting them to take any newfound evidence not covered by the limited warrant they carried to the scene.

Later that day, updated warrant in hand, police proceeded to collect a list of items two-and-a-half pages long. It included, “gravel debri in petroleum substance” (sic), five unidentified metal objects, an unspecified number of metal eyelets from one or more shoes, three pieces of burnt fabric, a shell casing, a shoe impression, ashes and a “large pile of burnt debri” (sic). They took apart the plumbing in the bedroom and the shower. They collected soap from the shower and a bedroom sink. They took hair fibers, a mirror and a white wash cloth.

If Hammer killed those three men and fled to his Wythe County trailer to dispose of the evidence as police appear to believe, they will almost certainly find proof of it in these things.

The Philadelphia Story

In 1978, Freddie Hammer was 17. He’d dropped out of school and was employed as a construction worker near Philadelphia.

“I got hurt on the job,” Hammer recalled in an interview at his home last November. “They took me to the hospital and my brother went to the wrong hospital. And I couldn’t find him, so I just started walking towards the airport, which was the way home, or so I thought. I was so far away from the airport – I didn’t realize how far I was; it just looked like it was closer than that.

As he walked, Hammer said, an off-duty Philadelphia police officer offered him a ride.

At his trial, Hammer testified that the policeman, Charles Uffelman, was drunk and threatened him with a gun when he refused his sexual advances.

“He picked me up in some dark alley somewhere and tried to molest me,” Hammer said. “He got out of the car and drug me out of the car and we got in a little fight and I hit him in the head. Actually, I hit him in the head with a board, one time, and he fell over, and I took off. And he actually died in his own vomit.”

The board was a railroad tie.

Hammer’s first trial took three months and, according to Hammer, cost his step-father a small fortune.

1978 was a tumultuous year in Philadelphia, Hammer remembered.

“It was a bad time,” Hammer said. “If you killed a police officer it was a bad time.”

Hammer’s wife, Brenda, spoke up.

“It’s a bad time to kill a police officer any time.

“Well, this was a really bad time,” Hammer said. “The MOVE members and all that was going on.”

MOVE, a radical group led by a man calling himself John Africa, had been involved in the killing of a Philadelphia police officer that year. It was one of several high-profile police killings in the city that year and by October 1978, Hammer was on trial himself.

Once there, he found his case in the hands of a judge so predjudicial that seven years later the Pennsylvania Supreme Court took the rare step of denouncing the judge’s behavior in its decision to overturn Hammer’s conviction.

The justices granted Hammer a new trial even though his attorneys had failed to lay the proper groundwork for appeal during the 1978 trial. The exception they made became a precedent known as The Hammer Exception.

By the time the state supreme court had agreed to hear his case, though, Hammer had been in prison the better part of five years. A month before he learned of the court’s decision, Hammer and three other inmates assaulted a guard and escaped. While running, they stole a car and broke into a home in a nearby county.

They were caught the same day and Hammer was convicted and sentenced to two to five years for attacking the guard, two to five years for escape. He was sentenced to 28 to 56 months for stealing the car and 33 to 66 months for breaking into the house and stealing things there.

The escape added years to his sentence and when a second jury acquitted him of Uffelman’s murder, the court refused to give him credit for the years he’d spent behind bars for the wrongful conviction.

Hammer told a Philadelphia Intelligencer staff writer on his release, “There’s three people on this earth that I trust, myself, my mother, my father. Nobody else.”

Next Week: Hammer talks about the night Jimmy Blevins disappeared.