Rod Sadler - KILLING WOMEN: The True Story of Serial Killer Don Millers Reign of Terror

KILLING WOMEN

THE TRUE STORY OF SERIAL KILLER DON MILLER'S REIGN OF TERROR

ROD SADLER

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Copyright 2020 by Rod Sadler

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This book is dedicated to Lisa, Randy, Martha, Marita, Wendy, and Kristine

His persona is a disguise the same disguise that he used before, both to get closer to his victims and to deny culpability. Millers crimes identify him as a human predator, and there is no reliable basis to conclude he has changed.

Eaton County Prosecuting Attorney Jeffrey Sauter

October 7, 1998

Acknowledgements

Id like to thank several people for contributing to this book: Mike Hocking, Ken Ouellette, Mike Woodworth, Gina Woodworth, David Bankhead, Rich Deer, Brent Morton, Neil OBrien, Vince Green, Heidi Williams, Lesley Morgan, Douglas Lloyd, Peter Houk, Randy Gilbert, John Boggs, Vance Diggers, Dr. Frank Ochberg, Tom Bengston, Gene Miller, Kay Young, Rod Dropping, Dick Fitzgerald, Jane Sobleskey, Jeff Weiss, Don Ulrey, Ryan Wilkinson, and Jim Kus.

Foreword

In the summer of 1978, I had been an assistant prosecuting attorney in Eaton County, Michigan, for less than two years when I took a call in my office from a dispatcher at the Eaton County Sheriffs Department. That one call signified the beginning of a journey that would have a permanent effect on me both personally and professionally.

The dispatcher reported that two teenagers in Eaton Countys Delta Township (the western portion of metropolitan Lansing, Michigan) had just been attacked in their home in broad daylight. I learned that the fourteen-year-old female had been raped and nearly strangled to death with her own belt, and her thirteen-year-old brother had been stabbed several times. The assailant had been confronted while leaving the residence by a passerby who had spotted a nude and frantic female running toward the road in front of her house. That passerby was not only willing to provide aid, but was astute enough to confront the assailant and accurately record the license plate number on his brown Oldsmobile Cutlass. The dispatcher informed me that the license plate came back to someone I was very familiar with: Don Gene Miller.

That call, and that day, were the beginning of the end for Miller, and it significantly changed the course of many lives, including my own.

Most everyone in law enforcement in mid-Michigan already knew who Don Miller was. He had been the prime suspect in the New Years Eve disappearance of his girlfriend, Martha Sue Young, the previous year. Since Ms. Youngs disappearance, the MSU/East Lansing community had endured the disappearance and murders of three more women.

The only crimes Don Miller was prosecuted for were the attacks on the Delta Township teenagers, and a later prosecution in Michigans Upper Peninsula for possession of a self-made garrote while he served his Eaton County sentences. I was tasked with trying Miller on the teenager assault cases in Berrien County, Michigan, due to a change of venue granted because of intense pretrial publicity. During that process, I got to know Don Miller (a fellow graduate of MSUs School of Criminal Justice), as did the entire mid-Michigan law enforcement community.

As one of Michigans first true serial killers, Don Gene Miller left a permanent imprint on my professional and personal life, as well as the victims, their families, witnesses, police officers, and court personnel involved in bringing him to justice. Although there have been less than a half dozen other such killers in this area since then, none have left their mark on the greater Lansing, Michigan, region like he did.

I have known Rod Sadler for over thirty years. He served with the Eaton County Sheriffs Department during my tenure as an Eaton County prosecutor, trial judge, and criminal defense attorney. In the narrative that follows, hell provide you with both the publicly known details of the Miller cases, and intimate details of the investigation that the public was never made aware of. It will take you back over forty years to a time when life seemed much simpler until, for those living in my hometown, it changed forever.

G. Michael Hocking

December 2019

Preface

There are very few cases more perplexing than those of a serial killer.

In the 1970s, names like Gacy, Bundy, and Berkowitz dominated headlines worldwide. Over a period of time, their cases have captivated us internationally. They were high-profile serial killers who had been caught. There were, and will always be, others out there.

Robert Ressler, a criminal profiler in the Behavioral Sciences Unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is oftentimes credited with coining the phrase serial homicide in the seventies. Although the term had been used before that time in writings, it hadnt been widely accepted. Ironically, Resslers alma mater, Michigan State University, would be the venue for a series of murders that would begin only three years after he first used the term.

Murders that involve a serial killer can occur over weeks, months, or even years. Several jurisdictions are likely to become involved, and finding a link between a suspect and his or her victim can be extremely difficult, if there even is one. There are obstacles and challenges faced by the investigators that have to be overcome. Information and leads can quickly build to a point where they become voluminous, and the investigators have to sort through it all, hoping to find that one piece of information to tie them all together.

In early January 1977, a missing persons case first appeared in the Lansing, Michigan, papers. Martha Sue Young, a coed from Michigan State University, had disappeared from her home after she was supposedly dropped off by her boyfriend in the early morning hours on New Years Day.

Eighteen months later, with Martha Sue Young still missing, a second woman, employed on the MSU campus, was reported missing. Marita Choquette, who lived in the small town of Grand Ledge, was last seen at her home, yet her car was found in the early morning hours at her work place on 3241campus. She was nowhere to be found.

Two weeks later, a third MSU coed, Wendy Bush, was reported missing after she failed to show up to work on campus. A witness reported seeing her with a man near the MSU library late the previous night.

Two months after Wendy disappeared, Kristine Stuart, a Lansing area teacher, was reported missing as she walked home near the MSU campus.

While the investigating law enforcement agency in Martha Sue Youngs disappearance suspected her boyfriend was involved in her disappearance, they werent convinced he was involved in the others.

By August 1978, only one body had been found, and no one had been charged in that murder.