MIDDLETOWN, Calif. – Middletown’s own murder mystery, unsolved after 50 years, will be explored by Gibson Museum’s Fireside Chat speaker, Sandra Hoberg Fox, on Sunday, June 26.

Fireside Chats are free of charge and begin at 3 p.m. at the Gibson Museum,  21267 Calistoga Road.

Joan Hamann Dole’s body was found in her Anderson Springs home on Nov. 20, 1966, riddled with five carefully directed shots.

Dole's murder was an ongoing topic of conversation for many years after her death.

Was Dole killed by the Pacific Gas and Electric meter reader? Or by her fiancé, editor of the local newspaper? A case can be made for either of those headlines.

Or … many local citizens who lived here at the time have their own ideas about what happened to Joan Dole on that rainy night. Dole had reported break-in burglaries of her home twice in the preceding months.

It was not simply the murder itself that captured the attention of everyone in and around Middletown. It was the victim. The murdered woman was the Hamanns’ daughter.

Huck and Skee Hamann had become popular personalities in Middletown as soon as they retired and returned to Lake County from Los Altos in the early 1950s.

The couple welcomed and befriended practically every child in the area. Both of them loved nature, and went out of their way to help children learn to appreciate its marvels.

They were early proponents of environmental considerations and the premise of living with the earth, and preserving its bounty.

Each summer they took a group of kids backpacking in the Sierra. Year-round they identified local flora and played educational games with local children.

Huck Hamann fashioned rings from the semi-precious local stones that he or the children found and gave one to each child as an incentive to learning.

Joan Hamann Dole, recently returned from a career in New York City, was their only child.

Hoberg Fox has collected information about Dole’s murder over the years since it happened.

With help from the late Judge Bill Harpham and from her cousin John Flynn, an investigator in the Lake County District Attorney’s Office, Hoberg Fox was able to track down the only existing copies of the court records of the murder trial.

Leal Grupp of Napa, son of the defense attorney in the lengthy trial, loaned photos and paperwork from his father's old case files.