Murder or self-defense? A father's rage against his daughter's boyfriend receives its final judgment

WEST PALM BEACH — Patty Lampp didn't see her son's murder, but a vision of it is etched into her brain as if she did. She sees his face — the terror as his killer brandished the gun, the panic when he fell backward — then nothing; just a bullet to the brain.

Only one person saw the shooting, and his retelling is nothing like the one in Patty's mind. Joseph Hamilton said he confronted 23-year-old Nicolas Lampp to demand that he break up with his daughter. Lampp swung at him, Hamilton insisted, would've killed him or hurt him badly had he not shot him to death instead.

A jury convicted the father of premeditated murder Wednesday. Hamilton's self-defense story was a lie, they agreed, one of many made to disguise the 52-year-old father's vendetta against Lampp. Circuit Judge Sarah Willis sentenced Hamilton to life in prison, securing the fate he told investigators he'd gladly take if it meant protecting his family.

His eyes scanned the courtroom Wednesday, but none of them were there.

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Nicolas Lampp, an employee at the Super Target on Okeechobee Boulevard, stepped out of his car holding a Jack Russell terrier named Pebbles when Hamilton confronted him on Feb. 27, 2021. Lampp's neighbors said they heard a series of rapid-fire shots, then silence.

Hours before the shooting, Hamilton spat a warning at his daughter Makayla. Break up with Lampp, he told her, "for the sake of the air he breathes."

Assistant State Attorneys Reid Scott and Aleathea McRoberts repeated the warning to jurors, picking apart Hamilton's story just as his attorneys worked to pick apart Lampp's character. Each side accused the other man of being controlling, dangerous and instigating, though only one could defend themselves against the accusations.

Hamilton didn't. He declined to testify in his defense, though the jury heard hours' worth of his statements anyway. Some were recorded during an interrogation inside of the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, others while he sat alone in the back of a deputy's cruiser.

"Why couldn't that boy just take my advice and leave my fricking kid alone?" Hamilton muttered in one recording, his voice picked up on the cruiser's dashboard camera. "All he had to do was say 'Yes, sir. I understand, sir.' "

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This was an angry father who wouldn't take 'no' for an answer, McRoberts said. Hamilton confessed to killing Lampp only after deputies revealed they had surveillance-camera footage and eyewitness testimony that tied him to the murder. His denials turned into brags then, promises to detectives that he'd done his job and would do it again.

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Assistant Public Defenders Scott Pribble and Stephen Arbuzow warned the jury against heeding his words during that two-hour interrogation. This wasn't a man proud of killing Lampp, they said; it was one too insecure to admit he'd been in fear for his life when he pulled the trigger.

A clinical toxicologist testified that Lampp had traces of two non-prescribed drugs in his bloodstream when Hamilton confronted him: anti-anxiety meds the toxicologist said can cause poor judgement and impulsivity.

Lampp took these drugs to avoid having epileptic seizures, his family said, but Pribble suggested they made him combative and violent that afternoon. Even without the drugs, Lampp was stronger than his girlfriend's father, he said — taller and lither, likely capable of subduing the man more than twice his senior.

He didn't do that, though, the prosecutors reminded the jury — not even close. He was shot through the head with a Target bag in one hand and Pebble's leash in the other, the downward angle of the bullet suggesting he was falling or already on the ground when Hamilton executed him.

Hamilton would have called 911 after the shooting if he acted in self-defense, McRoberts argued. Instead, he fled from the Trails at Royal Palm Beach apartment complex through a cut in the fence, the hood of his white jacket pulled up over his head. He dismantled his gun and discarded the pieces across the county.

Hamilton applauded himself for the cleverness later, sitting handcuffed in the back of the PBSO cruiser while the deputies fished through a storm drain for the barrel of his gun.

"I bet they're thinking, 'Damn, this mother-(expletive) is smart,' " he said.

Hamilton showed none of that bravado when his eldest daughter, Christina Capula, testified Tuesday. His shoulders slumped as she described how a woodworking accident years earlier had reduced her father from the quiet provider of their family to the over-the-top man he is today.

He'd been strong once, but nerve damage to his hand keeps him from doing basic tasks, she said. He lost his job, his house and his marriage in the aftermath of the accident, and maybe a bit of his pride, too, when Lampp stepped in to support his children in Hamilton's stead.

He didn't like the wedge he felt Lampp was driving between him and her sister, Christina testified. No one in their family liked how skinny Makayla appeared, either, or the words they saw carved into her upper arms with a razor blade: "I'm stupid," and "my fault."

It's why her mother, father and sister confronted Makayla at her workplace hours before the shooting, urging her to break up with Lampp, who they believed could be responsible for her worsening mental health. She wouldn't, she said. She loved him.

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The jury reached its verdict in just an hour — a third of the time it took the attorneys to deliver their closing arguments the day before. Lampp's father, Glenn, began to weep. His mother approached the stand with a photo of her son cradled in her arms.

Lampp was not an abuser, she told Willis. If he hovered, it was to keep his girlfriend from hurting herself — something Makayla's sister testified that she sometimes threatened to do.

The Palm Beach Post's attempts to reach Makayla Hamilton for comment were unsuccessful. She did not appear at her father's nearly two-week trial. Posts to her public Facebook page are sparse, save for a tribute she wrote to Lampp three months after he was killed.

"You were my future," she wrote. "And you were taken away way too soon."

Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Palm Beach County man gets life for murder of Super Target employee