On July 29, 1972, Stamford police arrested a man named Robert Lupinacci as he was trying to strangle a Black prostitute in the woods beside the Merritt Parkway, in the same stretch where the bodies of five young Black women had been found over the previous five years. By then the killings were supposed to be solved. Four months earlier, at a crowded news conference before the television cameras, the police had announced the arrest of Benjamin Miller. The mayor smoked a cigar, the state police commissioner praised the investigators, and leaders of Stamford's Black community said they were relieved. There was little appetite for reopening anything.
The women had been found strangled in the wooded area off the parkway, most of them with their own bras, which gave the case its name. On August 4, 1967, the body of Rosell Rush, known as Sissy, was found near River Bank Road. Donna Roberts was found on May 3, 1968, and Gloria Kahn, whose name also appears as Conn, on September 8, 1968. Gail Thompson was found on July 10, 1971, and Alma Henry on August 22, 1971. Most of the women worked as prostitutes. The slow pace of the investigation, which Black residents attributed to who the victims were, made the case a source of anger in the city. Later lists of the victims include Rose Ellen Pazda, whose skeletal remains were found after she had been missing for nearly two years; the indictment against Miller named Rush instead.
Miller was a white postal worker who called himself an ordained minister and spent much of his time preaching to Black residents on Stamford street corners, especially to Black women, waving a Bible and calling on prostitutes to repent. He had a history of mental illness and had been hospitalized at Fairfield Hills State Hospital as early as 1953. His name first came up in April 1969, when a Stamford minister, the Reverend James Miller, no relation, reported an anonymous call from a man describing where an undiscovered body lay and asking that the woman be given "a Christian burial." Investigators drew up a list of every clergyman named Miller in the area. When Benjamin Miller said he was too busy with church work to be interviewed, they let it drop.
In January 1972 a special team of state and local detectives took the case full time and went back to him. Over several weeks they questioned him repeatedly and at length. He denied the killings but admitted having had sex with Gail Thompson in his car in North Stamford, though her autopsy showed no recent intercourse. Some of what he said matched details that had not been published: shown a photograph of Thompson's body, he said correctly that a handkerchief, not a bra, was around her neck. A polygraph was inconclusive. On February 16, at the detectives' suggestion, he saw a psychiatrist, was involuntarily committed to Fairfield Hills, and was diagnosed with chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia. He was medicated and at times placed on suicide watch.
A hospital psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Miller, also no relation, interviewed him several times, told the detectives he believed Miller was the killer, and on February 29 called them to say the patient wanted to talk. That day Miller wrote on a pad that he had killed seven women. Over the next ten days he signed statements admitting the killings of Thompson, Henry and Roberts, reenacted the Thompson killing for the detectives, and led them to the places where bodies had been found. He was arrested on March 17, 1972, and indicted on May 15 for the murders of Rush, Roberts, Kahn, Thompson and Henry. He later told his public defender, Herbert Bundock, that he had denied everything for weeks, that the psychiatrist had shown him a statement to sign, and that he confessed on medication because he was frightened, because the detectives said he would lose his job and his family would suffer, and because he had simply given them the answers their questions pointed to. His father said Ben had phoned him to say he had signed a confession but was sick and would have signed anything.
The State's Attorney, Joseph Gormley, offered a deal: if Miller pleaded insanity, the state would present only a bare case. Bundock, convinced the confessions contained details only the killer could know, took it, and never looked into Lupinacci, even after Miller's father sent him clippings about the arrest. In January 1973 the counts for Rush and Kahn were withdrawn, and at a one-day trial a panel of three judges, with both sides urging the insanity defense, found Miller not guilty by reason of insanity on the other three. In March he was committed to the custody of the state mental health commissioner for up to twenty-five years.
What neither Miller nor his lawyer knew was what the state had on Lupinacci. The detectives who arrested him had turned their full reports over to Gormley. Lupinacci was described in the file as a "sex nut" who patronized Black prostitutes and spoke of Black people with contempt. The bodies of three of the women had been found within a hundred feet of the spot where he was caught, and his car had been seen near the scenes several times. He had frequented bars in Port Chester, New York, in 1967, as Rush had just before her death; he had been seen at the Hotel Hazelton, where Kahn lived, and cruising the area the night she was killed; he had worked at the motel where Thompson lived, and Thompson was last seen in a car like his. A pornographic deck of cards in his trunk was missing the queen of hearts, and a similar card had been found near Thompson's body. The trunk also held hairs from a Black person's limbs. Alma Henry was last seen on the street where his club met. He had asked a police officer about the location of stakeouts, and he had remarked that not all the victims were strangled with bras, a fact never made public.
Miller spent sixteen years in state institutions, latterly at the Whiting Forensic Institute. His habeas petitions failed in the Connecticut courts, which found the Lupinacci material clearly exculpatory but concluded it would not have changed the outcome. On May 20, 1988, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit disagreed. In Miller v. Angliker, Judge Amalya Kearse wrote that the withheld evidence was enough to undermine confidence both in Miller's decision not to contest the charges and in any finding that he was the killer, and ordered him released unless the state brought him to trial. It did not. He was set free and is listed by the National Registry of Exonerations. Nobody else was ever charged with the Stamford killings.
Ben Miller died in February 2010 at the age of eighty. His obituary in the Stamford Advocate ran to three sentences.