The Most Wonderful Terrible Person

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0:58Do you ever go back to San Bernardino? Not if I can help it. Why? It's ugly out there. Nah. I'm a city girl, L.A. girl, beach girl. I don't go back there. Deborah Miller is 72. In the 1950s, she moved to San Bernardino County with her parents and her two younger brothers. Do you remember, did you find yourself closer to your mother or your father? At the time, I thought I was closer to my father. Tell me a little bit about him. What did he do? What was he like? He was very handsome, like Errol Flynn, kind of handsome. He was very gifted. He had a wonderful voice. He played the piano, anything you wanted, by ear.

2:06He was a dentist. He did not like being a dentist. He'd gone into it because his brother and his brother-in-law went into it. After World—well, during World War II, they set up these programs to get doctors and dentists through school faster because they needed them. Now, this is after World War II, and the schools remained. And so my father graduated from dental school and was a practicing dentist at 21. His name was Gordon Miller. The family were Seventh-day Adventists, and her father hoped to leave dentistry and enroll in an Adventist medical school in California to become a doctor. Deborah says that her father felt he only had two options doctor or dentist he didn't really want to do either one he wanted to be a pilot he would take Deborah and her brothers on drives to the airport to watch the planes and what about your mother?

3:15she was very pretty she had long nails always I remember saying to her I wish my nails could be like yours And she said, they will when you grow up. She was sort of the most wonderful, terrible person I've ever known in my entire life. On the one hand, she spoiled me with material things. And that was the way she showed her love. On the other hand, she was very mean to me.

3:51and my house, everything was unpredictable. You know, you could do one thing and it'd be fine and do it again another day and you would be slapped or, you know, whatever. So it was a nervous house to grow up in. Her mother's name was Lucille Miller. When the family moved from Oregon to California, Deborah was in the middle of the first grade, which meant she had to start at a new school. And I'm shy. Well, I don't know if I'm shy anymore. But my mom told the teacher to bring out the most popular girl in the room, typical of my mom. And she did, and we became best friends. Deborah says that as she got older, she started getting closer to her mother.

4:40I had been Daddy's little girl, but he was becoming obnoxious. Um, he didn't like that I was growing up and I wanted nail polish and a little bit of lipstick. And, and if he'd had his way, you know, he would have sent me to the bathroom to clean my face. And my mother wouldn't let him. I remember that morning around the breakfast table, um, when my father said, why is she wearing lipstick? Take off that lipstick. and my mother said, leave her alone. And sort of from that point on, I knew she was my ally. Do you remember any time watching them together interacting, any closeness that you ever saw between them, niceness?

5:37I never saw closeness between them. My father was a very cold man, and my mother was a very affectionate woman. I mean, there couldn't have been two people more who shouldn't have been together.

5:54When Deborah was 13, her mother had an affair with someone from their church. It was the father of Deborah's best friend. I knew about it. How did you know about it? Well, my mother told me. I was a little bit of her confidant, even though I was 13. And I felt proud to be her confidant. Eventually, Deborah's father also found out about Lucille's affair. He often threatened to leave, and some nights he did, walking out of the house with his portable radio and a change of underwear. In the mornings, he would come back. But eventually, he really did move out. In July of 1964, he and Lucille began to file for divorce.

6:46But he would still come to see Deborah and her brothers. Well, he would come up and visit us for dinner. And it would just be silent, you know. Nobody tried to make it like nothing unusual was happening. But then, Gordon moved back in. He and Lucille saw a marriage counselor. Debra remembers things were cold and tense. Her father hadn't started medical school like he'd planned. He kept working as a dentist. He told his accountant he was sick of looking at open mouths. The family had been in California for seven years, and they were over$63 ,000 in debt. Debra's father often got migraines. She later learned that he had become addicted to pills that he was prescribing himself.

7:40And then, on October 8, 1964, she woke up to find a police car at the top of their driveway. And I knew my father was dead. I knew that he wanted to commit suicide. and I knew that he planned to do it in a car accident so that my mother would have insurance, you know, to raise us. So that's what I thought had happened. She knew all of this because it's what her mother had told her. So I walked over to the other side of the house, to my mother's room, and she was all curled up in the middle of the bed with this sort of white light nightgown on. And I said, did he kill himself? And she said, no, it was an accident.

8:39And then she asked me to go get my brothers. Guy was three years younger and Ron was five years younger. And we all stood at the end of her bed. She didn't call us to her to hug her, or it was in a way like a very cold setting and awkward for her children. Then the next thing I knew, we were being picked up by friends of my father and mother that I didn't really know. A woman named Joan Lance came in a green station wagon. She picked up Deborah and took her to her house. Deborah's mother stayed behind. At the Lance's house, Deborah says she didn't know what to do. She sat in front of the television.

9:33Sometimes the phone rang, and she tried to eavesdrop. But Joan Lance would either whisper or use the phone in her bedroom and close the door. A friend that we knew came by in her car to take me for a drive. And it was getting late in the afternoon, and I was like 13. And we went up in the hills, and she let me drive. She'd done that before. And I remember I said to her, when is mom coming home? And she said, she won't be coming home, Debbie.

10:14And she didn't. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

10:30Deborah Miller's mother was arrested 12 hours after her father had been found. What did they say your mother had done? They said that she had drugged my father and had set our Volkswagen on fire. on a dark street that had no lights, late at night, and burned him up. According to Lucille Miller, the night before, on October 7th, she and Gordon left the house late to go to the store. She said that Gordon wanted hot chocolate, and they needed milk. On their way out, Gordon grabbed a blanket and a pillow. He had said he was feeling sick, and he fell asleep in the passenger seat. Lucille drove them to the store, they bought milk, and started driving home.

11:27According to a woman named Maurice Swenson, Lucille Miller appeared at her front door at 1.45 a.m. She was alone, asking for help. She said she'd been driving with her husband along Banyan Street when the car suddenly swerved and caught fire. Lucille got out of the car, but Gordon didn't. He often took sleeping pills, and she couldn't wake him up. She thought he could have bumped his head and been knocked unconscious. His door was locked. Lucille said she threw a rock to break his window and looked for a stick to try to push him out of the burning car. She said she ran to the intersection for help, but there were no houses there.

12:12The road was empty. Only one car passed by, and it didn't stop. Lucille said she ran up to a different street. She finally reached the Swenson's house, which was half a mile from the burning Volkswagen. Maurice Swenson answered the door and called the police. By 3 a.m., the highway patrol had arrived and put out the fire. Investigators said that the car had started burning around 12.30 a.m., an hour and 15 minutes before Lucille arrived at the Swenson's door. They thought that parts of Lucille's account seemed off. She said she'd been driving 35 miles per hour, but the detectives found the car was in a low gear.

12:58Also, its parking lights, not its driving lights, were on. In the back of the car, detectives found two cartons of milk standing upright, but a tipped-over gas can. I had been with my mother when she got that can and filled it up. Um, you know, if she was diabolical, it was going to be part of her alibi. But if she wasn't, she did run out of gas all the time. She was kind of a dingbat, even though she was really smart. So she kept it in the car because she kept running out of gas. My dad was like, Get it together, lady. So she kept it in the car. And that was bad news. Lucille was charged with first-degree murder.

13:51She waited in jail before trial. Debra remembers going with her brothers to visit their mother. The sheriff agreed to let us see her in his office. so I remember my brothers had you know they had those little crew cuts in those days and their little chino pants and shirts and we were sitting there first and they had her come in in handcuffs and sit down with her children and took them off when we were there and I think all of us were so stunned that I don't really remember the conversation

14:45I just remember thinking at the time this 13 year old how cruel it was to do that to her and to her children Leading up to the trial, Lucille's affair with Deborah's best friend's father became its own news story. The man, Arthwell Hayton, a well-known attorney, denied it. He held a press conference. He said, As you gentlemen may know, there are very often women who become amorous toward their doctor or lawyer. This does not mean on the physician's or lawyer's part that there is any romance toward the patient or client. He said, I would deny that there is any romance on my part whatsoever. But newspapers printed a birthday card he'd given to Lucille, calling her sweetie pie, and signed, Your Baby, Arthwell.

15:46Arthwell Hayton's wife had died unexpectedly about seven months earlier. Her name was Elaine Hayton. Elaine Hayton and Lucille Miller had been friends. On April 24, 1964, Arthwell was away on a trip. Elaine and Lucille had spent time together at Elaine's house that evening. And the next morning, Elaine didn't wake up. Newspapers reported that her death was an accident and could have been due to an allergic reaction to hairspray. But after Gordon Miller died, the sheriff told reporters that he was taking another look at Elaine Hayton's death. On January 11, 1965, Lucille Miller's trial began. A huge crowd came to watch.

16:40So many people were trying to get in at the same time that the glass courtroom doors shattered. Debra remembers sitting in the courtroom, watching her mother. I was there almost every day because it was the only way to see her. I really didn't go to school that year. I had a teacher who would help me on the weekends, but I was at her trial. Deborah also testified. She described going with her mother to buy the gas can. The trial went on for more than two months. Lucille's lawyer told the jury that a nail had been found in one of the car's tires. He said that the nail could have caused Lucille to swerve off the road, and that when she swerved, a tube could have come loose and caused a leak in the engine.

17:35Lucille's lawyer also argued that there may have already been something wrong with the car, because earlier that day, Gordon had accidentally hit a German Shepherd. He said that Lucille couldn't have wanted her husband dead. She was pregnant, and her lawyer told the jury that she was hoping the baby would save her marriage. Some people close to the family stood by Lucille and felt that the police were reckless to arrest her so quickly. I think they kind of jumped the gun and then had to make it true. The three people that were with her immediately after the accident, Harold and Joan Lance and Sandy, believed she was innocent.

18:25Sandy was the Miller's babysitter and a close family friend. Lucille's case got a lot of attention from newspapers. We even made it to the New York Times. We made it to the Los Angeles Times. And then the San Bernardino son covered it religiously. So the prosecution is feeding them information. And my mother's side, their attitude was, don't say anything. You just be quiet. Let them make all that noise. And so pretty much what would get in the papers were, you know, accusations, reporting the accusations of her, and nothing about that there might be doubt. On March 5th, 1965, the jury found Lucille guilty.

19:27I remember she said, oh, no. and she turned around because she heard me go into hysterics. And she said, we don't act like that in public. In the courtroom, that's what she said? Yes, yes. And you could hear her? Yeah, she directed it at me. It was very soft and sweet, but, I mean, one reason I think she got convicted, She was completely unlikable. Her personality did not come through it. She was so stoic through the whole trial. And I guess she expected me to be that way when the verdict came. So I guess I was in a family where appearances meant everything. I didn't understand that at the time.

20:23And I wasn't mad. I was removed from the courtroom, and Harold Lance had me under his arm, and there's a picture of me on some magazine or some newspaper where I'm hysterical, and I'm under his arm as he's taking me away from the courtroom. One of the many reporters covering the case was a woman in her early 30s. She'd just left a job at Vogue in New York and moved back to California, where she grew up. She reached out to Lucille's lawyer and asked to meet Lucille for an interview. But as with the others, the lawyer told her no. The reporter was Joan Didion. Her essay about Lucille Miller's trial was published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1966.

21:21It starts, This is a story about love and death in the Golden Land, and begins with the country. It later became the opening essay in Joan Didion's first non-fiction book, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In the essay, she described the San Bernardino Valley. Here is the last stop for all those who come from somewhere else, for all those who drifted away from the cold and the past and the old ways. Here is where they are trying to find a new lifestyle, trying to find it in the only places they know to look, the movies and the newspapers. It continued, It was a spotty case, and to make it work at all, the state was going to have to find a motive.

22:10They set out to find it in accountant's ledgers and double indemnity clauses and motel registers, set out to determine what might move a woman who believed in all the promises of the middle class, who had come out of the bleak wild of prairie fundamentalism to find what she imagined to be the good life. What would drive such a woman to sit on a street called Bella Vista and look out her new picture window into the empty California sun and calculate how to burn her husband alive in a Volkswagen. To Joan Didion, San Bernardino was, quote, a harsher California, and Lucille Miller was a woman who perhaps wanted too much.

22:56Joan Didion never interviewed Lucille Miller. When the essay came out, there was one paragraph in particular that people who lived in San Bernardino seemed to hate. It went, this is the California where it is possible to live and die without ever eating an artichoke. The country of the teased hair and the capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbie and a Tijuana divorce and return to hairdresser school. We were just crazy kids, they say without regret. and look to the future. A columnist at the local paper called the essay defamatory.

23:45The paper also published quotes from a letter by the mayor of San Bernardino, objecting to Didion's portrayal, and quoted someone who had written into the paper calling Joan Didion, our candidate for a fat lip. My mother hated that essay, and taught her children to hate that essay. she believed it was all lies and told us that Joan Didion was a liar the way she presented our family and where we lived like you know where we were like kind of the hicks or something I don't know that's how my mother read it as a complete degradation of her and where she lived and her life. And I remember reading it and seeing what my mother saw.

24:43In 1965, Lucille Miller was sent to the California Institution for Women at Frontera. She had been sentenced to life in prison. How did she fare in prison? How did she do? Did she make friends there? Did she... Oh, she became a drug lord in prison.

25:08We'll be right back.

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26:38Let's go do the impossible. I'm not going to let some stupid monsters stand in my way. Percy Jackson and the Olympians. New season now on Disney Plus and Hulu. Learn more at DisneyPlus.com slash What's On. Lucille Miller was serving a life sentence at the California Institution for Women at Frontera. Well, you have to survive. And somehow she set up business. She had us sneaking stuff into her when we visited her. I was terrified. They were so nice to us at the desk that But I didn't want them to not like me anymore, and I didn't want to get caught and then maybe go to juvie. Her mother would tell her what to buy and bring.

27:34Debra remembers sneaking bottles of vodka into the prison trash cans and hiding them with paper towels. We would go to the store and buy mace, because that's a high. I think they still use it in prison. And I'd have to clear the shelves of all the mace and go to the counter. You know, why was I buying all this? I never liked it. I was very embarrassed. And then we'd go home and we'd wrap it in plastic bags. And then we would hide it, take it into her. I remember having a pea coat and they never checked our pea coat out front. And I had money to buy her candy and stuff. and then you would set the stuff beside her and she would slip it right up her, like four of them, and then, you know, take them back and sell it.

28:32And then she wanted makeup, land cone. So I was sneaking land cone into her. I felt she knew I was afraid. She knew I didn't want to do it, and somehow I had the feeling that if I wasn't going to do it, there was no point in me coming to visit her. She never said that, but she also didn't do anything about my fear. It didn't matter to her. We owed her, I guess. I don't know.

29:15After seven and a half years in prison, Lucille became eligible for parole. Everybody liked her. I mean, she was a charmer. She was fun, funny. They said that she should be released. When she went up to the board the first time, they recommended that she be released, and she was. Where were you at that point in your life? I mean, you were older now. You were 20, 21? Yes, yes. I had come back from being in college in Northern California, and I dropped out, and I had a job, and so I was working. It was 1972. Lucille joined Deborah and her brothers at the home of a family friend in West L.A. I moved with her every place she lived for years.

30:21And it was often very toxic. But I wanted my mom. Hook or crook, I wanted my mom. By 1984, 12 years later, Lucille was no longer living with Deborah or her brothers. She was in and out of our lives. And, you know, they didn't have cell phones, not that it would have mattered. But we didn't know how to get in touch with her half the time. And she didn't get in touch with us. And she would pop up and then she'd disappear. And so when she died, we weren't in sorrow. We didn't experience sorrow. In 1986, Lucille Miller died of breast cancer. She was 56. Her funeral, in a way, was kind of hilarious.

31:18That day is the first day that I began to doubt her innocence. You had thought she was innocent all of these years, everything she put you through in the contentiousness. Still in your mind, that was your mother, and your mother could be a little wild sometimes, but you never doubted that. No, I doubted. I doubted. She was so wicked in me, so I doubted. But it was at that funeral that I, you know, really, you know, began to think, oh, my God, she was probably guilty.