Terror in East Lansing: The Tale of MSU Serial Killer Donald Miller (2 page)

* * *

New Year's Day 1977 marked the start of the
winter term at Michigan State University, with students streaming
back on to the campus from Christmas break, prepared to resume
their march toward fulfilling necessary requirements for degrees.
Then, of course, there was catching up with old friends, making new
ones, and partying—both to welcome in the New Year and simply for
the sake of keeping up with campus traditions.

It was on that cold day that Martha Sue Young
went missing. East Lansing police officer Kenneth Ouellette had
just begun his shift when the call came in. It was from Gene
Miller, Donald's father. Ouellette knew the Millers because he and
Donald had sometimes gone to a local sportsman and rifle club
together.

Gene Miller was calling the station at the
request of Sue Young, Martha's mother. The young woman was missing
after allegedly being dropped off at her home by Donald a few hours
earlier, having gone out with him as friends.

Ouellette went to Young's house, initially
believing there was probably nothing to worry about. "Typically,
most of these things turn out to be that they stayed at a friend's
house or their date's house," the officer suggested. "It's that
college-town type of thing you associate with it."

But Ouellette changed his tune once he got to
the house. Martha Sue Young's disappearance suddenly struck him as
anything but normal. As he honed in on some of the things about her
and Donald, such as that they did not drink, that neither were
known to be active in the party scene, that both still lived at
home, and that both attended church regularly and held religious
views that were conservative, the officer grew increasingly
concerned about Martha's unexplained absence.

* * *

In 1985, Michigan State University's School
of Criminal Justice celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. With a
rich history of producing graduates who went into fields across the
criminal justice spectrum and around the world, there was reason to
celebrate.

When the new program began in 1935, there
were a mere twenty-three freshman and eleven sophomore and junior
enrollees. By 1985, enrollment in the school had soared to six
hundred undergraduate students, one hundred and fifteen students
seeking master's degrees, and twenty PhD candidates.

Among the school's accomplishments was the
first annual Institute on Police Community Relations in 1955 and a
designation by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in
1973 as a national center of excellence. According to a 1979
article in the
Journal of Criminal Justice,
"Michigan State
University ha[d] the highest known reputation among the almost
1,200 criminal justice programs in the country." Moreover, the
Joint Commission of Criminology and Criminal Justice Education and
Standards had consistently rated the School of Criminal Justice as
one of the top two such programs in the nation.

In all, nearly six thousand students had
graduated from the School of Criminal Justice in the program's
first fifty years, many going on to distinguished careers in law
enforcement, government, criminology, and other related fields.

* * *

A few days before Martha Young's
disappearance, the coed had expressed relief that Donald Miller had
seemingly accepted the end of their engagement with no hard
feelings. As a result, she even agreed to attend Miller's birthday
party at the home of a friend of his grandmother the following
evening as previously planned, if only to keep up appearances for
his family.

On Friday afternoon, New Year's Eve 1976,
Young stopped by the Great Steak Restaurant in East Lansing, where
her mother was having lunch with a friend, to show the two women
the shoes she had purchased for a party she planned to attend on
New Year's Day. It seemed as though 1977 was destined to get off to
a great start for the college student.

That evening, Sue Young was in the kitchen
when Martha came in to give her a kiss good-bye before leaving for
what was supposed to be a fun night that she and Donald Miller were
sure to enjoy.

It would be the last time Sue Young would
ever see her daughter alive.

* * *

Police officer Kenneth Ouellette was worried
about the missing Martha Sue Young. And there was plenty to
consider when it came to her health and safety. "We started to
focus in on the fact that Donald was not a drinker or a partier,"
Ouellette said. "Martha Sue was not a partier, they both lived at
home, they both had conservative religious views, they were active
in the church. As I would eliminate some of these things, the
concern grew."

As a result of the officer's alarm over
Martha Young's inexplicable and uncharacteristic absence, he
focused his investigation on the last known person believed to have
seen her alive: Donald Miller.

* * *

At midnight on January 1, 1977, Peter Houk
took his place as Ingham County's new prosecuting attorney. His
very first case turned out to be one of the most important and
publicized of his career. It also laid the groundwork in forever
changing the façade of innocence and safety that had seemed a given
across the beautiful campus of Michigan State and the surrounding
community. A killer was on the loose and hidden in plain sight.

The spotlight was squarely on Donald Miller,
whose alibi would be discredited over the coming months. Evidence
indicated that Miller had not told police everywhere he had been on
the day Martha Sue Young disappeared. He took two polygraph tests
and failed both. The lack of emotion shown by the suspect about his
ex-fiancée's disappearance gave the authorities and family members
of the missing young woman further cause for suspicion.

Houk and the lead investigator, East Lansing
police detective Rick Westgate, had little doubt that Martha Young
was the victim of foul play and that Miller was behind it.
Unfortunately, there was no solid evidence to build a case. Without
such, Miller was able to remain free, which would cost other young
women their lives. For the time being, there wasn't anything the
authorities could do about it.

The suspect lived with his parents, who
staunchly supported his innocence, much to the chagrin of the
police, who were convinced otherwise. Westgate would later say, "If
the parents hadn't been so stubborn and they had listened to all of
the information we had regarding where he had been, if they
wouldn't have blocked us, there wouldn't have been three other
homicides."

Miller found work as a security guard after
graduating from Michigan State University with a degree in criminal
justice. To law enforcement and prosecutors, this was surely a slap
in the face. Miller, who should have been on the road to becoming
one of their own, had instead thumbed his nose at them, almost
daring them to prove what they knew before he killed again.

* * *

Almost a year passed before the authorities
finally got a break in the case that had gone nowhere. A high
priority had been given to the case in an effort to reassure coeds
that the college campus was safe, with a normally low rate of
violent crime in East Lansing, in spite of the unsolved mystery of
Martha Sue Young's disappearance.

In October 1977, clothing belonging to Young
was found in Bath Township, just north of East Lansing. According
to police, it had been "systematically placed as if she'd levitated
out of her clothes."

"That's when our office, in particular, and
East Lansing knew we were dealing with something out of the
normal," Houk recalled. "We were convinced we were dealing with
some type of psychopath."

Unfortunately, this crime took place in the
pre-DNA technology era, making it difficult to cull any useful
evidence from the clothing and crime scene. Minus the solid
physical evidence needed, authorities were unable to charge Miller
with anything. Once again, the case was stalled, and the killer
continued to plot his strategy for more victims right under the
noses of the police.

* * *

On June 15, 1978, twenty-eight-year-old
Marita Choquette went missing from her apartment in Grand Ledge,
Michigan, a city west of downtown Lansing, the state's capital,
which was popular with rock climbers because of its ancient
sandstone and quartzite rock ledges. Choquette worked for WKAR, a
television station in East Lansing.

Twelve days after Choquette's disappearance,
her mutilated remains were found in Holt, southeast of Lansing. The
same day, June 28, 1978, Wendy Bush, a twenty-one-year-old student
at MSU, disappeared. She was last seen alive on campus outside of
Case Hall, home to James Madison College in the South Complex.

It was obvious to authorities, students, and
East Lansing residents alike that a killer was on the loose,
targeting young women and almost daring the police to stop him in
his tracks. But before they could do so, another life was
claimed.

On August 14, 1978, Kristine Rose Stuart, a
thirty-year-old middle school teacher who happened to live just
blocks from Donald Miller's house, vanished. This, in addition to
the other cases of murdered and missing women, caused hysteria on
and off campus, with the local media feeding the flames, fury, and
fear of a serial killer at large.

"It was very unnerving," Detective Westgate
recalled. "You just don't have things like that go on in the
community."

For the thousands of coeds and other women in
the normally tranquil college town, that fact was small
consolation, as a murderer had obviously made his presence felt and
intended to strike fear into the hearts of those most
vulnerable.

* * *

As with most serial killers, overconfidence
and a brazen, reckless nature proved to be this one's undoing. On
August 15, 1978, with the disappearance of Kristine Stuart still
very fresh, Donald Miller randomly picked a house in East Lansing
where he sexually assaulted and attempted to murder
fourteen-year-old Lisa Gilbert. Her younger brother Randy came home
during the attack and Miller went after him.

Lisa managed to escape from the house and go
for help. A local fireman spotted Miller's car leaving the scene
and called the East Lansing police department.

With several eyewitnesses, the police were
finally able to get what they needed to arrest Donald Miller.
Having worked the case for many months and coming up empty, a
relieved Westgate took the suspect into custody.

Former prosecuting attorney Houk was
especially pleased that Miller had been apprehended. "I had a wife,
I had a young daughter, and I used to be terrified at night when
Donald Miller was on the loose because I was certain he was a
serial killer," he recalled. "I used to take to sleeping down on my
couch in the living room."

In 1979, after a trial by jury in Eaton
County, Donald Gene Miller was convicted of "two counts of assault
with intent to commit murder and one count of first-degree criminal
sexual conduct" in the attacks on Lisa Gilbert and Randy Gilbert.
Miller was sentenced to three concurrent terms of thirty to fifty
years behind bars.

Miller's imprisonment notwithstanding, the
police still did not know the whereabouts of the four young women
they were convinced he had murdered. In an attempt to put closure
to the cases for families of the victims, the decision was made to
offer Miller a plea deal, with the cooperation of Sue Young,
Martha's mother, and Ernie Stuart, the husband of Kristine
Stuart.

In addition to his earlier convictions,
Donald Miller pleaded guilty in 1979 to two counts of manslaughter
in the deaths of Young and Stuart, and he assisted authorities in
locating the remains of the murdered, missing women.

With the help of psychiatrists and the "truth
serum" drug sodium amytal, Miller confessed to killing all four
women. In July 1979, he led authorities to the skeletal remains of
his ex-fiancée, Martha Sue Young, and of schoolteacher Kristine
Stuart.

"He knew exactly where he was taking us,"
Westgate indicated. "He didn't even get out of the car. He just
pointed to where [they were]."

Miller's defense attorney, Thomas Bengston,
tried to explain his client's murderous actions. He suggested that
Miller had "severe mental illness," which caused him to "lose
control of his conduct."

Law enforcement officials saw Miller as
merely another serial killer who found sexual and sadistic
satisfaction in murdering his victims and burying them where they
couldn't be found without his help.

* * *

Incredibly, the plea bargain to which Donald
Miller agreed did not add any time to the thirty to fifty years
behind bars to which he had already been sentenced. Regardless, the
higher end of that term would have been enough to keep him
incarcerated for a good while, had it not been for issues within
the Michigan prison system that allowed Miller's sentence to be
reduced.

In 1999, at age forty-four, after spending
twenty years in prison with time off for good behavior, Miller was
eligible for parole. That wasn't exactly what the family members of
his victims had envisioned when the plea bargain had been
approved.

"You talk about a guy who had unbelievable
luck," Houk griped. "Michigan enters into a real crisis in prisons,
and we start whopping all sorts of prison time off of prison
sentences, so [Miller's] forty-year prison sentence in the Eaton
County case gets reduced by almost half, and he became eligible for
parole."

There was little reason to believe that
Donald Miller had been adequately rehabilitated while serving time.
Studies show that few violent offenders have been able to
successfully rehabilitate within the difficult environment of the
prison system. Indeed, according to Dr. Frank Ochberg, former
director of the Michigan Department of Mental Health, "These guys
don't get better. After they pass such a certain threshold, none of
them can be treated or reformed. They are ruthless predators."