Dogged Detective, Surprise Ending

The details of Alma Nappier’s death March 28, 1980, near this farm town 90 miles southeast of Los Angeles rang too familiar to attract much notice:

A Nuevo woman died in an early morning traffic accident Friday in the Winchester area. Alma Nappier, 44, lost control of her automobile while driving along California 79, north of Benton Road, at 3:05 a.m.

Her automobile drifted onto the dirt shoulder of the highway and rolled over. Nappier, alone, was ejected from the vehicle as it flipped. The vehicle caught fire upon impact.

A few paragraphs, that’s how a local paper remembered her. No one probed deeper. Not for 18 years.

*

Special Agent Steve Utter works for the California Department of Justice. His job is to track convicted sex offenders who fail to notify authorities of their whereabouts once they are released from prison.

When he picked up the trail of Craig Miller in 1996, Utter had never heard of Alma Nappier. He had hunted sex offenders through the sprawl of Southern California, but he could not imagine the twisted path that lay ahead.

It started in Calimesa, where he found Miller, thanks to a tip from a parole officer. Released from prison two years earlier, Miller had told local authorities he’d settled in Redlands, 10 miles away. A search of the Calimesa house turned up pornographic Polaroids and a gun cleaning kit.

Miller had served 12 years in prison for sexually abusing his 10-year-old stepdaughter, and if Utter had anything to say about it, he was going back--maybe for good.

“I felt he was going to hurt somebody,” Utter said. “I just saw a guy who, I felt, still had the same propensities he’d had when he was originally arrested.”

Miller was charged with failure to register as a sex offender--a felony. Given his criminal record, he could be sentenced to 25 years to life under the state’s three-strikes law. That, Utter figured, was justice.

San Bernardino Superior Court Judge Jerome Stevens figured otherwise. After Miller’s trial started seven months ago, the judge noted a mistake in prosecutors’ court filings--the date of offense showed the wrong year.

Even though the judge said Miller, 43, “deserves to be in custody for the rest of his life,” he refused to let the prosecutors amend the date. In a deal, Miller pleaded guilty and the judge ignored his earlier convictions. Miller received a term of seven years--he would probably be out in five.

At the prosecutors’ table, Utter sat dumbfounded.

“I felt this guy was someone deserving of a life term. I saw that being undermined right there in court,” he said. “I didn’t want to see [Miller] get away with this.”

Weeks later, Utter was rifling through the district attorney’s file when he came across an intriguing letter. It was written after the sentencing by Barbara Lunsford--one of Miller’s ex-wives and the mother of the girl he molested--and addressed to the judge.

“Please do not take what I have to say as a lack of respect for your position, but you, sir, have made a terrible mistake.”

For five pages, she recounted how Miller, a heartthrob she had met in junior high school, had turned her from bride to hostage, forcing her to play Russian roulette, beating her regularly and at least once kidnapping her from their home and taking her to a trailer where he tortured her for three days. The stepdaughter Miller molested, she wrote, was left in shambles, rendered unable to conceive children.

Utter had read such accounts before. Miller’s record was littered with them. As he read the last page, though, his eyes widened.

“When I first met Mr. Miller, he was using his grandmother’s El Camino for transportation. He said that he had a pickup truck and that he had been out drinking one evening and that he ran off into a ditch and wrecked it. . . .

“After we were married for a few months, his story changed quite a bit. During his acts of abuse and terror on me, he would state that he ‘really had wrecked his truck because he ran a woman off the road by bashing into her car.’ He also stated that after he ran her off the road ‘he stopped, got out of his truck, went over to the car, which had overturned, could smell and see gasoline leaking from the vehicle, so he took his cigarette lighter from his pocket and set fire to the car.’ ”

For a while, Lunsford wrote, she thought he made up the story to scare her. Then she came across an old newspaper clipping Miller had kept. A Nuevo woman. Alone on the highway. An early morning traffic accident. It was sometime in late 1979 or 1980, she couldn’t remember the details.

“There is no doubt in my mind about Mr. Miller’s involvement in this crime,” Lunsford wrote. “I just wish that [there] were some way I could prove it.”

Utter was unsure what to make of the letter. As tips go, it was lousy--a vague reference to an old, undocumented crime. And if there was a trail to the truth, it was surely cold by now. Still, he had sifted through the case file enough to believe that Miller was capable of murder.

Miller’s first wife had told investigators that he blamed his mother for his parents’ divorce, and had directed his anger at every woman he’d met since.

A psychologist who interviewed Miller explained him this way in 1982: “It seems to him that his appointed task in life relative to the opposite sex is to extract as much pleasure from them as he possibly can, while at the same time inflicting as much pain and anguish on them as possible. . . .

“He shows no inclination to alter his perverse and dangerous sexual behavior, and it is quite likely to continue upon his eventual release back into the outside community.”

*

In the Riverside County community of Hemet, Linda Parrott had a story to tell about Craig Miller and the early morning of March 28, 1980.

She had been there in the darkness on California 79, and what she saw filled her with such terror she had never repeated the whole story. If she could lock the images away, hide them in a part of her mind where they’d never haunt her again, she would. But she couldn’t.

At 50, she had put her wildest days behind her. Sober for 14 years, she was trying to start over, to watch her grandchildren grow in a small, safe town where neighbors looked out for one another, where no one asked about Craig Miller.

The secret was eating her away inside.

“You don’t forget something like that,” she said later. “You don’t ever forget. You tuck it away. It’s your own little living hell. It never leaves your memory.”

*

A former Santa Barbara beat cop, Utter, 34, had never investigated a homicide in his life. But if his work tracking people had taught him anything, it was how to research. He headed to the Riverside Press-Enterprise’s library.

Combing two years’ worth of accident articles, he found the brief item on Alma Nappier’s crash. If there had indeed been a crime, he now had a victim.

Calling Barbara Lunsford, the ex-wife who wrote the damning letter, yielded even more clues. She recalled that Miller’s truck was a red Ford pickup, one that had substantial front-end damage when he sold it.

And she recounted how once, after exploding in a fury, Miller let slip that a woman named Linda, a barmaid at the Winchester Inn pool hall, was with him the night he forced that car off the road.

“It was exactly like a puzzle,” Utter said. “Each piece added to the puzzle, and the clearer the case became. I felt like I was getting closer.”

He paid a visit to the old Winchester Inn, a wood-frame saloon off California 79. The bar had changed hands over the years, and the former owner didn’t remember any Lindas. But his wife did. There was a Linda Morris who worked at the bar in the 1980s, she said. She jogged the memory of a former employee. It seemed Linda Morris had changed her name to Parrott.

After a check with local authorities, Utter discovered that the best place to meet her was the Riverside courthouse.

*

Linda Parrott had begun to question why, every time she tried to put her life back together, bad luck seemed to rot it. Ten years after she quit the bottle, her grandson died in a house fire. Two years later, in 1996, her daughter was shot and killed by a gunman aiming at somebody else. She wondered if God was trying to tell her something about Craig Miller.

“I felt, at the time, that I was being paid back” for keeping her secret. “In order to find peace within myself, I had to tell someone.”

One morning this spring, she walked into the Riverside courthouse for the last of the proceedings against her daughter’s killer. A prosecutor told her someone wanted to see her.

Teary-eyed from the trauma of her daughter’s death, she stepped into a private conference room. Sitting at a table were a detective from the Sheriff’s Department and Special Agent Steve Utter.

“I’m here about another investigation we’re conducting,” Utter said. “This particular incident happened in March of 1980 and resulted in the death of a woman.”

She knew. She said two words. “Car accident.”

He asked her to pick at the scabs of her memory one more time.

“I’ll tell you exactly what happened,” she said. “Craig Miller.”

And as her eyes filled, she let the story pour out:

She and Miller had gone to the inn that night to do what they always did--drink. Late in the evening, she found herself playing pool with a woman she had never met. One criticized the other. Parrott walked away from the game and wound up at the bar. Miller apparently began arguing with the other woman, whom Parrott would almost two decades later come to know was Alma Nappier.

The next moment she remembers, Parrott said, she was climbing into Miller’s red Ford pickup. They pulled out of the parking lot and began following another friend toward his home.

Behind the two-car caravan, another car appeared with its headlights off. When Miller spotted it, he whirled the truck around to confront whoever was in the car. His headlights illuminated the face of a woman behind the wheel of a Chevy compact. The woman from the pool game.

In their drunkenness, they presumed she was tailing them, spoiling for a fight.

Miller hit the gas, cruised past her, and watched as the woman made a U-turn and followed him down California 79, a dark two-lane road snaking through the hills toward Temecula.

Three vehicles--Miller’s truck, his friend’s Lincoln and Nappier’s Chevy compact--began jockeying for position, racing at up to 60 mph, Parrott recalled.

“It became like a little cat-and-mouse game,” she said.

Just why Nappier was involved in this kind of game was unclear, Utter said. He found only that she loved animals, lived on a farm with sheep and taught herself Italian.

The jockeying continued. Miller ended up behind Nappier on a desolate stretch of roadway. He rammed the pickup into the back of her compact.

“Craig was screaming, and I was screaming at him. . . . I remember smacking him and screaming at him, ‘Stop this damn truck and let me out!’ And he kept telling me, ‘Just sit back and shut up.’ You could see, you could see the adrenaline pumping in his face.”

The engine roaring, he continued the assault, ramming the smaller car five or six more times as she braced herself against the dashboard, Parrott recalled. Nappier was boxed in, with Miller’s friend in the front and the red pickup behind.

Finally, Miller punched the gas and slammed the left rear bumper of the compact, sending it off the edge of the highway and down an embankment, Parrott told the investigator.

“I remember seeing the dirt, and the car, flipping, flipping, flipping.”

Miller stopped the truck and jumped out. Parrott, frozen, waited a few moments before getting out to see what happened. When she did, she saw Miller sticking his head in the window of the overturned car.

“He took out his lighter, flicked it . . . and the whole thing went up in flames,” she said.

Parrott spotted a body about 30 feet from the wreckage. She ran over and checked for a pulse. She found none. She yelled for Miller.

“We’ve got to get the hell out of here!” he told her. He grabbed her and pulled her up the embankment, yanking her out of her sandals.

They drove in silence to the friend’s house.

“Look at my goddamn truck,” he said to Parrott. “Look what she did.”

“He showed no remorse,” Parrott said. “No nothing.”

Perhaps a week later, Miller dropped by to see her.

“If you say anything about this,” he warned, “they’ll take your kids away.”

She never saw him again.

*

Utter sat across from her as she finished, breathing a sigh of relief.

Now he had a case.

The Parrott interview led him to Miller’s friend, who corroborated key details of her account. He found the man who purchased Miller’s truck, who said it had sustained heavy damage to the front bumper and grille before he bought it. Utter tracked down the CHP officer who wrote the original accident report. The two visited the embankment off California 79 and found a dented water pipe and warped fence--never repaired after the morning of March 28, 1980.

Utter also found a coroner’s report on Nappier. An autopsy found that she had no alcohol or drugs in her system when she died. One recent morning he visited her grave at Westminster Memorial Park in Orange County and took a picture of her headstone. He hadn’t found anyone who knew her well--her estranged sister said she had sold real estate--but he wanted to show a jury she had lived and died.

“It doesn’t matter how long ago it happened,” he said. “She had her life taken away from her. All these years she’s laid [there], and everyone thought it was an accident. Things like this don’t stay buried. Eventually, the truth comes out.”

On Friday, Riverside County prosecutors filed a charge of second-degree murder against Miller. If convicted, he faces a sentence of 15 years to life, authorities said.

In a brief telephone interview from Ironwood State Prison in Blythe, Miller said he’d never been in a traffic accident near Winchester and suggested that the investigation was engineered by his ex-wife.

“It’s all fabrication and lies,” he said. “This woman ruined my life.”

He insisted that his pickup was in “fine” condition when he sold it, and could not remember the women he socialized with in the early 1980s. He accused Utter of carrying out a “personal vendetta.”

He is expected to be arraigned within two weeks.

*

“We were cowards,” Parrott said recently. “All of us were cowards at the time. There’s no excuse for not telling someone. . . . Nothing will bring her back. The wrong choices were made that night.”

To this day, she said, she won’t drive down California 79 unless she has to. And if she does, she looks away from that embankment as she passes.