Court Orders Freedom or New Trial : ’62 Murder Reopens Old Wounds for a Small Town

It has been 24 years since Booker T. Hillery Jr. was convicted of the murder of 15-year-old Marlene Miller, but few in this San Joaquin Valley farming center needed the U.S. Supreme Court to remind them of the case.

Certainly not the thousands of residents who have signed petitions opposing Hillery’s parole every time he has come up for review. Nor the black members of the Second Baptist Church, who, outraged that blacks were excluded from the grand jury that indicted Hillery, a black ranch hand, for the murder of the white teen-ager, campaigned for a new trial. Nor the Miller family members, haunted by the image of her body in the irrigation ditch where it was found.

But the court’s action last Tuesday ordering that Hillery be freed or given a new trial has nonetheless rekindled old resentments and sharpened old pains. The court, upholding a century-old legal doctrine, ruled 6 to 3 that Hillery had been unconstitutionally discriminated against because blacks were purposely excluded from the Kings County Grand Jury that indicted him.

“There is a vigilante feeling in the community. Honest to God, it worries me,” said Brent Madill, a 48-year-old optometrist who serves on the City Council. “I’ve heard many say if Hillery is released somebody is going to get him. I don’t know if anybody actually would go that far, but that’s what you are hearing all around town.”

But Burdella Minter, 49, the Second Baptist organist and singing teacher, said, “It renewed my faith in the Constitution and the Supreme Court.”

This city is a quaint, quiet town tucked away on the valley’s west side, 30 miles south of Fresno. Many downtown buildings have been restored to the turn-of-the-century look of their origin, a renovation that is a source of pride in the community and that has won kudos from the League of California Cities. About 24,000 people live here and only about 5% are black, the same figure as at the time of the murder. The county population is 80,000.

But if there are racial tensions, they are quiet. Law enforcement officials can’t recall any recent examples of racially motivated trouble. Crimes of violence are also uncommon. When Miller’s body was found near her home five miles out of town, residents went into shock.

She was home alone on the murder night and the scissors, inscribed “Marlene M,” that she had been using to make a dress to wear on her 16th birthday was found embedded up to the handles in her chest. The clothes were ripped from her body and the coroner concluded that she had been the victim of an attempted rape.

Trial evidence was circumstantial. Hillery, employed at a ranch half a mile from the Miller home, was on parole after serving time for the rape of a local woman. Witnesses testified to seeing Hillery’s car near the scene. Tire marks, a boot print and a bloody glove found at the scene were traced to the ranch hand. Hillery was convicted and sentenced to death. His death sentence was eventually overturned and another jury imposed a life term.

Blacks, however, were not excluded from those trial juries in the county.

Through it all, Hillery insisted on his innocence. And he became a skilled “jailhouse lawyer” who doggedly pursued appeals for nearly a quarter century.

Robert Maline, 39, has been the county district attorney for eight years and has to decide whether to prosecute Hillery again.

“It is going to be difficult. Many witnesses are dead or have moved away. Legal rules have changed since 1962. We can expect, for example, Miranda problems,” he said, referring to the 1966 Supreme Court decision requiring that suspects in criminal cases be advised of their constitutional right to have an attorney present during questioning by authorities. Maline said he knows that Hillery wasn’t read his rights when he was arrested, since it was not required at the time. “So it looks like none of the statements he made will be admissible.”

Maline expects that it will take him a week or two to decide whether to go ahead with another trial.

“It will take that long to run down witnesses, to go over the evidence to see what condition it is in, to find out if much more sophisticated scientific procedures available today--blood and fiber analysis, for example--would be of help. But there’s no denying, Hillery is in a good position. If we don’t file, he just walks with no parole supervision. Nobody watches him. He’s just out there.”

At the county Sheriff’s Department headquarters here, Detective Sgt. Jim Hill, 40, a 13-year veteran, is assembling the records and evidence in anticipation of another trial.

“We have well over 10 boxes of evidence in storage. We are supposed to have Hillery’s car somewhere in the county, but I haven’t found it yet,” Hill said. “We’re getting everything ready. It will take time. We will have to locate those witnesses still alive.”

At Miller’s Jewelry Store in the century-old opera house, Bernard Miller, 64, uncle of the murdered girl, said: “I would like to put the Supreme Court judges that voted to overturn the conviction in the same position we’re in. Would they have voted that way if it were their daughter, granddaughter or niece?”

He said a black woman met him on the street last Tuesday and told him of the decision: “I am truly sorry about it. I hope it doesn’t cause your family a lot of grief.”

“This isn’t a racial matter,” Miller said. “It is pure and simple a case of a man found guilty of murder.”

Walt Miller, 43, brother of Marlene and a local builder, said he and his parents have never publicly talked about the crime.

‘The Only Salve’

“Time is the only salve we have. My parents are in their middle-70s. I hoped they would never be put through this again,” he said.

Every time that Hillery’s case would come up for a parole board hearing, county residents would petition with several thousand signatures to the San Quentin board protesting any effort to set him free. Nancy Mack, an administrative assistant at the Kings River School, headed the petition drives.

“Several of us walked the streets, walked the neighborhoods seeking signatures,” Mack said. “We blanketed the downtown area with petitions. We put them in all the stores. . . . At one parole hearing we had more than 13,000 sign the petitions. The last time we had 9,600 signatures. Every time Hillery would come up before the board the petitions were there. . . . My daughter was the same age as Marlene Miller. I know Marlene’s parents. . . . Can you blame me? To this day I cannot drive by that irrigation ditch where Marlene’s body was found without getting emotionally choked up. The Supreme Court did not act properly.”

Minter also circulated petitions concerning Hillery, but hers called for his parole.

“I moved to Hanford from Detroit in 1973,” said Minter, whose husband works for a local tire manufacturer. “Four years ago I was asked to sign a petition that Mr. Hillery never be granted parole. I didn’t know anything about the case so I began reading up on it.”

She searched a file at home and found the July 31, 1962, local newspaper story in which Hillery’s attorney asked the county Superior Court judge, the late Meredith Wingrove, why no blacks were on the grand jury.

Wingrove is quoted in the article as saying he had not been able to find one black in the county qualified to sit on the grand jury.

“It made me mad. I was so upset with that judge I decided that I would fight for Mr. Hillery’s rights. I wasn’t concerned then or now about his guilt or innocence, just that the law of the land was not followed. Blacks were excluded from the grand jury, which is unconstitutional,” Minter said.

So she and her church women circulated petitions encouraging parole for Hillery. Minter said they obtained more than 400 signatures and sent the petitions to the San Quentin board. Hillery wrote her letters thanking her.

“Some people hate me in Kings County for what I’ve done. I can understand how they feel, but they should understand why I feel the way I do,” she said. “You cannot have double standards in America. I feel sorry for the Miller family over the loss of their daughter. Yes, I can relate to how they feel. My father was murdered. I can tell you something else. I sincerely believe in the Constitution and in the laws of this land. I had my son arrested when he was a teen-ager for throwing a rock through a neighbor’s window. I had him arrested. . . . And I have a stepson in San Quentin for raping a white girl. He did it and that’s where he belongs. I think if Hillery is guilty he should remain in jail for the rest of his life. But his initial indictment by the grand jury was not conducted properly and that isn’t right either.”

Hillery is at the California Medical Facility at Vacaville, where he was moved last year from San Quentin for a psychological evaluation, an evaluation he has refused to undergo. In an interview after the Supreme Court ruling, Hillery, 54 and graying, said he expects to be released soon:

“I plan to live in Berkeley. I have relatives in Berkeley, my father and uncle. . . . I intend to go back to Hanford. I have aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews and other relatives there. . . . (Freedom) is what I’ve been working toward all these years. I have no bitterness at all. I have maintained my innocence throughout my nearly 24 years in prison. I am not the guilty party. I feel sorry for the family.”

Hillery, the divorced father of two sons, said he studied law through correspondence courses and initiated all the petitions on the arduous journey through the courts. Described by a Vacaville spokesman as a model prisoner, he worked at the San Quentin inmate canteen for several years and played on the prison’s football team until he was 50.

He said he was confident that some day the Supreme Court would rule in his favor and that that helped sustain him even during the years when he was on Death Row, before his sentence was modified to life imprisonment.

Since the Indictment

“Hillery is a good jailhouse lawyer,” said Clifford Tedmon, 61, the Sacramento attorney who has worked with him on the appeal, filed in 1983, that resulted in the court reversal. “He pursued the discrimination charge, the lack of blacks on the grand jury, from the time of his indictment until now. It was a clearly defined issue. That’s why the Supreme Court took it. His constitutional rights were violated.”

Raymond Niday, 63, a Lemoore insurance man who was foreman of the grand jury that indicted Hillery 24 years ago, said the “indictment was based on evidence, not the color of his skin,” which is not the issue in this case. Niday said, however, that economics, not race, was the governing factor in selecting grand jury members:

“Three classes of people served on the grand juries, a businessman able to sustain his family whether he worked on a day-to-day basis or not, a retired person or a housewife. Farm laborers, wage earners, blue collar people could not afford to serve on grand juries. You would have created a hell of an imposition on any person in those categories. They had to be out earning their living. . . . Blacks at that time in this county were at the lower end of the economic scale, just as many whites were. If a person had the ability to partake, he or she would never have been excluded. A person also had to be a registered voter. Many minorities then did not register to vote, did not have the political interest. . . .

“The evidence was totally overwhelming against Hillery. We had no other alternative but to indict him. . . . The court’s decision is a travesty, transposing an incident that happened nearly a quarter of a century ago into the present day. It isn’t an easy transposition. The futility of it all upsets me.”

Phillip West, 61, the local high school principal since the fall of 1962, was one of Miller’s teachers at the time that she was murdered.

“The community was in shock,” he said. “It was not just the murder, but the brutality of it. In a small town like this there are auto accidents and student deaths over the years, but nothing like that. . . . People here have not forgotten. . . . I am appalled by the Supreme Court decision. I don’t believe it’s right to have a person found guilty of a crime freed on a technicality.”

West said Miller was a sophomore with better than average grades participating in many school events and active in the Future Farmers of America and the 4-H Club. The 1962 high school yearbook was dedicated to the murdered girl. Next to her picture are the words: “Forever in the thought and prayer of all her friends.”