Four young deaths and a tragic life

Her younger brother carried the secret for 35 years and by last year he could hold it in no more. Still, several California law enforcement agencies gave him the brushoff when he tried to come clean.

It was only when he reached Mendocino County sheriff’s detectives that Gerald Miller’s burden was lifted: His sister, Cheryl Athene Miller, he told them, had slain four of her babies between 1965 and 1970.

These were not newborns tossed in dumpsters after the first gasps of breath. Each had a singsong name. One was old enough to crawl. Another had probably taken her first steps. But using the same method, and for reasons investigators will not disclose, Miller -- then known as Cheryl Scott -- snuffed the life out of Sherry Mae, Carla Marie, David Wayne and Kimberly Dale, authorities allege.

Pathologists at the time ruled all the deaths to be medical, from natural causes, although investigators had suspicions by the time the fourth child succumbed. Now, the 59-year-old Miller, who has been subsisting on disability checks in San Francisco residential hotels, sits in Mendocino County Jail on $2 million bail. She will be arraigned Nov. 15 on four counts of homicide.

It was last summer when Gerald Miller placed his call. By the time investigators pored over old medical records and tracked his sister down for a chat in February, she was ready to talk.

“She was surprised and finally ready to deal with it,” said Mendocino County Sheriff’s Sgt. Scott Poma, who described Miller as somewhat emotional. “She confirmed that she was involved in the children’s deaths.... She killed them all the same way.”

Earlier this week, after further investigation, two deputies returned to Room 309 of the Cable Car Hotel with an arrest warrant and escorted Cheryl Athene Miller through the dingy red-carpeted lobby into a squad car.

Jean-Claude Lair, the hotel’s owner, described Miller as generally “very polite, very nice.” But mental illness and regular drug use took its toll, he said. Miller smoked marijuana incessantly in her room, Lair said, and held an expired medical marijuana card, a copy of which is in her landlord’s file next to the San Francisco County social worker contact listed in case of emergency.

Her disability check, for $773.70, was paid directly to Lair by the San Francisco Public Guardian to cover her rent. She often ate her meals at local soup kitchens and earned spending money by selling the city’s homeless newspaper, the Street Sheet, at California and Polk streets.

There were outbursts. “The police used to come because she would get drunk and throw her furniture out the window,” said Lair, whose hotel is at California and Hyde streets in Nob Hill. “She would say to me, ‘Oh Jean-Claude, I’ll pay you back.’ ”

He often pestered her to make sure she was taking her psychiatric medication, and she assured him that she was. A heavy woman, she kept herself clean, wearing her graying hair in a thin ponytail, Lair said.

Miller’s first hint that the dark secret had been unearthed came in a letter, Lair said, followed by a visit from detectives. When Lair asked her about it, she seemed unbothered. “Oh, it’s nothing, she said. It’s an old story,” he recalled.

That story, according to officials, began Dec. 7, 1965, when then-Cheryl Scott, 18, was living in Escondido’s Dreamland Motel with the man she described as her husband, Jerry Wade Scott. Their 11-day-old, Sherry Mae Scott, arrived at Palomar Medical Center by ambulance late at night. She was already dead. The cause was determined to be acute hemorrhagic pneumonitis, bleeding or inflammation of the blood vessels of the lungs, said Apollo Ayala, an investigator with the San Diego County medical examiner’s office.

A little more than a month later, the family had a stable address. Yet again, a child was delivered by ambulance to Palomar, dead on arrival. This girl, 14-month-old Carla Marie Scott, the parents reported, had been born premature and had already been treated for a possible brain tumor and heart problems in Salinas and Reno.

The cause of her death was also deemed natural. Both cases are now being reinvestigated, Ayala said.

On April 9, 1967, in Long Beach, 3-month-old David Wayne Scott died too. Los Angeles County coroner’s Capt. Ed Winter would say only that his office was reviewing the file and cooperating with Mendocino officials.

The last child -- 9-month-old Kimberly Dale Scott -- died Feb. 10, 1970, in the Mendocino County town of Calpella, where Miller had moved to be near her mother.

Poma, of the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department, said investigators found the death suspicious because it was the fourth. But four separate pathologists had deemed the deaths to be natural.

The case was closed, although county officials later removed two more children from Miller’s home. Those two, who were not Jerry Scott’s children, were raised elsewhere and are now adults, Poma said. Investigators have spoken to Scott. They believe that he was not home during any of the killings and was not involved.

When Gerald Miller called last summer, he was eager to unload. “He was happy that we listened to him,” Poma said. His sister had shared the secret when her brother was in his early teens. He had carried it until his father died recently. Their mother died many years ago.

In an interview with the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Gerald Miller, who lives in Florida, said Cheryl had suffered a rough childhood in Contra Costa County, with frequent beatings by her mother. She had drifted, used drugs and served time in prison. California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records show that Miller served time in prison in Del Norte County in the late 1990s.

He shared the terrible burden with an Episcopal priest in 2001, when a diagnosis of cancer and AIDS compelled him to seek a baptism.

He included the secret in a confession he wrote -- one that the priest assured him would be burned. But she also whispered to him, “You know what you need to do,” the brother told the Santa Rosa paper.

Poma said Cheryl Miller discussed the deaths with the distance of decades, showing some concern but never weeping. Asked if she understood the consequences, Poma paused. “She does now,” he said.

lee.romney@latimes.com

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Times staff writers J. Michael Kennedy and Tony Perry contributed to this report.