Stepfather Convicted After 16 Years : Determined Reporter Solves Child’s Murder

KENOSHA, Wis. — A phone call from a stranger started it all--a reporter’s obsession with a little boy’s death and a suspicion that a terrible crime had gone unpunished for 16 years.

The boy, Donnie Miller, died in 1969 at age 4. How he died had been a mystery, but his sisters thought they knew. Nearly a generation later, when they told a radio reporter, he decided to look deeper.

That began a six-month odyssey for reporter David Cole, leading to a reopening of the case and a murder conviction. The boy’s killer: his stepfather.

“If it weren’t for David Cole, this case would still be sitting in a file drawer,” said Richard Ginkowski, special prosecutor in the trial. “There’s no question about it.”

Convicted in January

David Wilson, 52, was convicted in January of second-degree murder in the death of Donnie, whose stomach had been ruptured, bringing on shock and infection. Wilson was sentenced Tuesday to 20 years in prison.

For Cole, a 30-year-old reporter and the news director at WLIP-WJZQ radio, the conviction marked the end of a journey through faded records, a family’s torment and the short life and abrupt death of a child.

That journey began with a phone call.

When Cole arrived at work one day in December, 1984, he found a message from the evening disc jockey. “A lady called,” the note said. “Here’s her tale of woe . . . .” Pamela Miller, 27, one of Donnie’s four sisters, wanted to talk with a reporter.

When Cole returned the call, Miller said that she needed help finding a teen-age half-sister and hoped that Cole could give the search some publicity. He tape-recorded some interviews but did not broadcast a story.

Cole and Miller talked a few times over several days, and Donnie’s death came up. Miller said that she told Cole that “it was my family’s feeling that David Wilson was responsible.”

Miller said that she had told others of that ugly suspicion, which was shared by her sisters, but she had been rebuffed or told that only their natural father could reopen the case--and she didn’t know where to find him.

Mother Died

Their mother, Darlene, died in 1973 of brain cancer. With the family gathered at the funeral home, Wilson was arrested and later pleaded guilty to sexual abuse of two of his stepdaughters, Ginkowski said. Wilson, who also had two daughters with Darlene and five children from an earlier marriage, served two years in prison.

Miller and a sister, Joan Miller Flatley, 23, told Cole that their stepfather had often struck and kicked their brother. After Donnie’s death, according to three sisters’ statements in court documents, Wilson ordered his stepdaughters not to volunteer information to police, and warned them that if they said anything, they would be “sleeping with Donnie.”

The Millers’ story intrigued Cole. Eventually, he devoted hundreds of hours to the case, more than 95% of it on his own time, and compiled a 35-page investigative report. At the start, he went to work with the only tool he knew--reporting.

In almost six years at WLIP in southern Wisconsin, Cole had covered the police beat, traffic accidents and school board meetings, but he had never done a major investigative piece. His formal journalism education had consisted of one high school course.

But he knew a good story when he saw one, and he believed the sisters.

He tracked down old neighbors from Pleasant Prairie, just outside Kenosha, where Donnie had lived with his family. He retraced investigators’ steps and consulted with a forensic pathologist who, according to court records, concluded with “better than a 95% level of certainty” that Donnie had died from physical abuse.

Cole laid out an ambitious schedule. From 4:15 a.m. until noon, he worked as anchorman and reporter. His afternoons were spent at the courts and at the coroner’s and sheriff’s offices reviewing the death certificate, divorce records and other documents.

After a few weeks, Cole met with Dist. Atty. Robert Zapf and urged him to reopen the case. Zapf said it would be difficult. Donnie’s mother and coroner Harold Wagner were dead, and some evidence might no longer be available.

Cole persisted. He admitted that he was obsessed. “The thing that got me going was the apparent injustice of it all,” he said.

What especially piqued his interest was Wagner’s description of a tear in Donnie’s stomach that measured three centimeters--more than an inch. Wagner reported the cause of death as “shock and peritonitis following rupture of the stomach due to undetermined trauma.”

Cole said that he thought of child abuse when he read the report.

But Ginkowski noted that “by 1969 standards, there’s no way he (Wagner) could have said with a reasonable degree of certainty that this was caused by child abuse. . . . We know so much more about child abuse today than we did back then.”

The coroner also reported that Donnie had five old rib fractures.

At the trial in January, prosecutors charged that Wilson had delivered a “high-energy” kick or punch to Donnie’s stomach. The time of Donnie’s death proved to be critical, Ginkowski said. It occurred between lunch time and midafternoon, when Wilson was alone with the boy.

Last May, Cole typed a report giving details of his investigation and why the case should be reopened. He delivered it to county officials, including Zapf and Gilbert Dosemagen, the Kenosha County executive.

Dosemagen was impressed. “He had an issue he felt very strongly about, and he handled it very professionally and logically,” he said.

Within weeks, the case was reopened. Because of the county’s overburdened staff, Ginkowski was appointed special prosecutor. Last August, after an official investigation, Wilson was charged with second-degree murder. Cole then did his first broadcast on the case.

Shortly afterward, some of Wilson’s friends and five children from his two marriages picketed WLIP. John Crosetto, one of Wilson’s attorneys, suggested that although Cole was not responsible for Wilson’s trial, only for having a special prosecutor named, the reporter had not been objective about the case.

“What David Cole did was write a very dramatic (report) from his investigation,” he said. “He had an ax to grind, in the sense that he picked up on third-hand information that supported his belief that David Wilson had caused Donnie Miller’s death.”

Wilson’s attorneys plan to seek a new trial in an appeal based in part on pretrial publicity and the televising of the trial by a local cable station.

Wilson, meanwhile, faces another charge of interfering with the custody of his 16-year-old daughter, about whom Miller first called Cole. The girl is now living with relatives.

After the verdict, Cole and the four Miller sisters--Pamela, Joan, Susan Antrim and Dawn Stewart--gathered to celebrate and to visit Donnie’s grave.

“We couldn’t have done it without him,” Joan Miller Flatley said.