Pam Hamill wants America to know that her father was not responsible for the death Senator Joe Biden's wife and infant daughter in 1972. "[My dad] raised seven children, he was married to my mother for 53 years before he passed, and wasn't a drunk driver."



Hamill's father, Curtis Dunn, was the driver of the tractor trailer that crashed into the Biden family's car on December 18th, 1972 in the town of Hockessin, Delaware. Neilia Biden was driving her station wagon with her three young children after picking up a family Christmas tree.



According to a police investigation, Mrs. Biden pulled out into the intersection and didn't see Curtis Dunn's tractor trailer coming down the highway. His daughter Pam tells INSIDE EDITION's Paul Boyd, "He said, 'She never saw me coming. She drifted into the intersection.' He said he did everything he could. He said he jerked the wheel, flipping his tractor trailer on its side." Neilia and Naomi Biden, the couple's 13-month-old daughter, were killed, and Biden's two sons were injured. Curtis Dunn was cleared of any wrongdoing in the accident, but the tragedy would haunt him for the rest of his life, until his own death in 1999. "He couldn't celebrate Christmas anymore," Hamill tells INSIDE EDITION. "He couldn't enjoy the holidays. Even though he was not at fault, he was part of that accident." Just as the Biden family suffered grievously, Pam Hamill wants everyone to know that her family has suffered too. She's heartbroken about public comments made by the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee saying that his late wife and daughter were the victims of a drunk driver. Last month INSIDE EDITION reported that in December 2007, Biden opened up to a group of University of Iowa students, saying, "Let me tell you a little story. My wife and three kids were Christmas shopping for a Christmas tree, a tractor trailer, a guy who allegedly, and I never pursued it, drank his lunch instead of eating his lunch, broadsided my family, killed my wife instantly, killed my daughter instantly, and hospitalized my two sons." INSIDE EDITION also found that in a 2001 speech archived on Biden's own website, he told students at the University of Delaware, "I got one of those phone calls...I got a phone call saying, 'Your wife's dead; your daughter's dead' ... It was an errant driver who stopped to drink instead of drive and hit a tractor trailer, hit my children and my wife and killed them." INSIDE EDITION spoke with Jerome Herlihy, who was a Deputy Delaware Attorney General at the time of the accident. He was called in to oversee the police investigation, which found Curtis Dunn was not at fault.



"There was no evidence at the time that was presented to me that the driver of the truck was impaired by alcohol," Herlihy says.



Yet, the false story accusing Dunn of drunk driving is now widely accepted as the truth and was discussed on television news programs as recently as last month during the Democratic National Convention. Pam Hamill says her family was unaware that Senator Biden had made comments calling her father a drunk driver until they saw the INSIDE EDITION story in August. Hamill talked of her first reaction to hearing the news. "I just burst into tears and I looked at my husband, 'I just gotta say something. I gotta address this. I gotta clear my father's name. This is not true.'" Hamill says she did reach out to Joe Biden once before, seven years ago, to tell the Senator her father had been tormented by the accident. "I felt compelled to write to him and tell him my dad never forgot that, he hung onto that, he grieved over that for years." Biden sent back a handwritten letter on U.S. Senate stationary in which he thanked her for her "thoughtful and heartfelt note." He went on to write, "All that I can say is that I am sorry for all of us and please know that neither I nor my sons feel any animosity whatsoever."



Hamill says she and her family have been reluctant to speak out in public until now. "We have always, always been very private about this, very respectful to the fact that he had loss of life. Losing your wife and daughter, that's tragic, that's absolutely. But drunk driver never happened, and we need him to acknowledge that." In a statement to INSIDE EDITION in August, Biden's spokesman said: "His focus has always been on the tragedy of losing his wife and daughter, not on the circumstances that led to the crash. Dredging up the details of the accident now serves no purpose." Hamill says she's fearful that with Biden now in the national spotlight, the fiction that her father was driving drunk will forever be remembered as fact. "I don't want it to be in history books or how about some time they make a movie and they portray my father as a drunk driver. We have to defend his honor; he's not here to do it. Who could fault us for that?" Senator Biden's spokesman also acknowledged that Biden understands that the accident is painful for everyone involved.

