Between 1967 and 1971, several young Black women were found strangled in Stamford, Connecticut. In March 1972 the police arrested Benjamin F. Miller Jr., a white postal worker who called himself an ordained minister and preached on the city's street corners. Miller had confessed while he was a patient on a locked psychiatric ward, and he soon took the confessions back. In January 1973, with the prosecutor and the public defender asking for the same result, a panel of three judges found him not guilty by reason of insanity on three counts of murder and sent him to a state mental institution for up to 25 years.
In 1988 a federal appeals court ruled that the state had kept from Miller and his lawyer a police file on another man, R.L., who had been arrested in July 1972 while trying to strangle a woman in the same part of the city. The court ordered Miller released unless Connecticut tried him. The state did not. In May 1989 the charges were dismissed. Miller was never convicted of any of the killings, and the insanity finding against him did not survive.
The federal appeals court named five women whose deaths were charged against Miller. Rosell Rush, called Sissy, was found on August 4, 1967. Donna Roberts was found on May 3, 1968, and Gloria Kahn on September 8, 1968. Gail Thompson was found on July 10, 1971, and Alma Henry on August 22, 1971. All five were young Black women, and all had been strangled. The court record says little else about them, and their ages and families have not been reported. By January 1972, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, investigators had found six victims in all.
Miller was white, a postal worker and, by his own description, an ordained minister. He spent much of his free time preaching to Black people on Stamford street corners, and especially to Black women, the federal court wrote. He had a long psychiatric history. He had been a patient at Fairfield Hills State Hospital as early as 1953. The National Registry of Exonerations gives his age as 42 in 1971. He was married; when he later explained why he had confessed, he spoke of fearing arrest for adultery and a divorce, and the registry's summary refers to his relationships with Black women outside his marriage.
Miller's name first reached the investigators by an odd route. In April 1969 a Stamford clergyman whose surname was also Miller, and who was not related to him, reported an anonymous telephone call. The caller, whose voice sounded to him like a Black man's, described where the body of a woman lay, a body that had not yet been found, and asked that she be given "a Christian burial." Investigators drew up a list of every clergyman in the area named Miller, and Benjamin Miller was on it. After three more bodies had been found, they asked him to come in for an interview. He said he was too busy with church work, and the investigators let the matter drop; the registry describes him as briefly interviewed and cleared. No one came back to him until 1972.
In January 1972 the state police and the Stamford police formed a special team of detectives to work on the killings. The team learned of Miller's psychiatric history and of his contacts with Black women, and over the next several weeks detectives questioned him "several times and at length," in the words of the federal court. He denied the killings.
Some of his answers matched facts that had not been made public. Shown a photograph of Thompson's body, he correctly described a detail of her death that differed from what the public had been told. Detectives gave him a polygraph test on his denials, and the result was inconclusive, apparently because of his erratic behavior. To the prosecution these answers looked like knowledge only the killer could have. To the federal court years later, they were part of a record that had to be weighed against a great deal the defense never saw.
On February 16, 1972, Miller was involuntarily committed to Fairfield Hills State Hospital and diagnosed with chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia. A psychiatrist at the hospital, to whom the investigators had spoken in January, wanted to see him that day; Miller refused and agreed instead to see another psychiatrist on the staff. Hospital records described him as delusional, with what they called "religosity." He was given medication regularly and at times was placed on suicide watch.
The first psychiatrist went on to interview him several times. He told the detectives he believed Miller was the killer and urged them to keep going. On February 29 he called them to say that Miller wanted to talk. That day Miller wrote that he had killed seven women, and he went on to describe Thompson's death in detail. On March 1 he signed typed statements and, with the detectives, reenacted what he had described. The registry says he led them to the places where three other women had been found. On March 2 he signed a statement about Alma Henry and on March 10 one about Donna Roberts.
He was arrested on March 17, 1972, and on May 15 he was indicted on five counts of murder, for the deaths of Rush, Roberts, Kahn, Thompson and Henry.
Miller's public defender was Herbert J. Bundock, who had been a public defender since 1962. To Bundock, Miller told a very different story. He said that the detectives had pressed him again and again to confess and that for weeks he had denied everything. He said he finally confessed while on medication, after the hospital psychiatrist and another doctor had "broke him down," and that the psychiatrist had shown him a statement to sign so that he could plead temporary insanity. He gave his reasons for signing: he feared a beating, he feared losing his job, he feared his family would suffer, and he feared arrest for adultery and divorce. At the places the detectives took him, he said, he answered their leading questions with "I think so" to please them.
His father told the defense that in February his son had telephoned him and said he had signed a confession, that he was sick, and that he "would have signed anything."
The State's Attorney, Joseph T. Gormley Jr., made an offer: if Miller pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, the state would present only a bare prima facie case. Gormley also told Bundock that the hospital psychiatrist believed Miller could be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Bundock interviewed Miller, Miller's father and the other psychiatrist who had seen Miller at the hospital, and read the psychiatric records. He did not interview anyone else at Fairfield Hills. He believed the confessions held details that only the killer could know, and so he did not look into whether his client was innocent. He later testified that choosing an insanity defense meant admitting the act while denying the capacity to be responsible for it. A court-appointed psychiatrist found Miller chronically psychotic and delusional and unable to tell right from wrong, but he had, in the federal court's words, "no certain idea" whether Miller had committed the killings.
In June 1972 Bundock filed a motion asking the state for any evidence favorable to the defense. Gormley let him see the file on Miller. He never formally answered the motion, and he never turned over the file on R.L.
In January 1973 the counts for Rosell Rush and Gloria Kahn were dropped, and Miller entered pleas of not guilty by reason of insanity on the counts for Roberts, Thompson and Henry. The trial took one day, before a panel of three judges of the Connecticut Superior Court for Fairfield County. The state's case rested mainly on the confessions. The hospital psychiatrist and the court-appointed psychiatrist testified for the insanity defense, and both the prosecutor and the public defender urged the panel to accept it. After a short recess the judges found Miller not guilty by reason of insanity on all three counts.
Under Connecticut law at the time, a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity could be entered only after the trier of fact found beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant had committed the acts charged. In March 1973 the panel held a separate hearing, found by a preponderance of the evidence that Miller was mentally ill and dangerous to himself and others, and committed him to the custody of the Commissioner of Mental Health for up to 25 years. The federal court noted later that a person acquitted outright could have been committed only on clear and convincing proof of dangerousness, a standard Connecticut later wrote into its statutes. By the time of his federal case, the official responsible for holding him was the director of the Whiting Forensic Institute.
On July 29, 1972, after Miller had been charged, R.L. was arrested while he was trying to strangle a Black woman in the same part of the city where the women had been found. The detectives' reports on him went to the State's Attorney. As the federal court summarized it, the file tied him to at least four of the five women.
It described him as a man who spoke of Black people with contempt. He had been arrested close to where three of the women had been found, and his car had been seen near those places several times. In 1967 he was seen in bars near Port Chester, New York, that Rosell Rush had frequented. In 1968 he was seen where Gloria Kahn lived, and he was seen cruising Stamford on the night she was killed. In 1971 he worked where Gail Thompson lived, and Thompson was last seen in a car like his. He sold pornographic playing cards; a deck in the trunk of his car was missing one card, and a similar card had been found in the Thompson investigation. A vacuum sweep of the trunk turned up limb hairs that appeared to come from a Black person. He belonged to a club on the street where Alma Henry was last seen alive. During the Thompson and Henry investigations he had asked a police officer where stakeouts were placed and how long they lasted, and he had remarked on a detail of the deaths that had not been released.
None of this reached Miller's defense through the prosecutor. Bundock did know about the July arrest: Miller's father had sent him newspaper clippings, including reports that the investigation might be reopened. Bundock did not follow the lead. At the later hearing he called the facts about R.L. irrelevant, saying that attacks of that kind happened regularly along the Merritt Parkway.
What became of the charges from his July 1972 arrest, and whether he was ever questioned about the five deaths, has not been reported.
Miller stayed in confinement. In 1982 he filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in the Connecticut courts, arguing that the state had withheld the file on R.L. and that his lawyer had failed him. After an eight-day evidentiary hearing, the habeas court denied the petition in a decision dated October 13, 1983. It found that Bundock had enough information to advise his client, and it held that the withheld material showed only "similarities in crimes," not enough to raise a reasonable doubt. It added that the public reports of the arrest had given Miller the means to learn what he said had been kept from him.
In 1985 the Connecticut Appellate Court rejected the habeas court's procedural bar to the claims but upheld the result. It called the material about R.L. clearly exculpatory. It then asked whether it was reasonably certain that disclosure would have changed things, and concluded that Bundock would have given the same advice in any case. The Connecticut Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal that year.
In 1986 Miller turned to the federal courts. On July 28, 1987, Judge Ellen Bree Burns of the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut denied his petition, deferring to the state courts' findings and agreeing with the state appellate court's test.
The appeal was argued on January 19, 1988, before Judges Lumbard, Kearse and Pierce of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. John R. Williams of New Haven represented Miller; Assistant State's Attorney Frederick W. Fawcett argued for the respondent, Dr. Colin C. J. Angliker, director of the Whiting Forensic Institute.
On May 20, 1988, the court reversed, in an opinion by Judge Kearse. It held that the prosecution's duty to disclose favorable evidence applies to a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity just as it does to a guilty plea, because an insanity plea gives up the rights a full trial would protect. It held that the state courts had used the wrong test: the question was whether there was a reasonable probability of a different result, not whether a different result was certain. And it held that the question was not only whether Bundock would have changed his advice, but whether Miller himself, judged objectively, would have refused the insanity plea and insisted on a full trial.
Measured that way, the court found the withheld material significant. It undermined confidence both in Miller's decision not to contest the charges and in the finding that he had committed the acts. The court rejected the argument that the state could have offered more evidence at a full trial, since it had chosen a procedure that spared it from doing so, and it found that the evidence about R.L. would likely have been admissible. Having decided the case on the disclosure issue, it did not reach the claim of ineffective counsel. It sent the case back with instructions to grant the writ unless the state brought Miller to trial within a reasonable time.
The state asked the United States Supreme Court to review the decision. On October 11, 1988, the Court denied the petition in Angliker v. Miller.
Connecticut did not retry him. On May 8, 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a judge dismissed the case on double jeopardy grounds, and Miller was released. He went straight back into a mental institution of his own accord; his lawyer said that his long confinement had left him unable to live on his own.
The registry lists the case as an exoneration in 1989. Its summary, written by Maurice Possley and posted in December 2012, names false confession, false or misleading forensic evidence, official misconduct and inadequate legal defense as the factors that contributed to the outcome, and records that DNA evidence played no part.
The state's case against Miller rested mainly on his 1972 statements, and he withdrew them. They were made while he was involuntarily committed, medicated and at times on suicide watch, after weeks of questioning. The details in them that matched unpublished facts persuaded the prosecutor and his own lawyer; the federal court held that the evidence about R.L. was strong enough to undermine confidence in any finding that Miller was the killer.
The finding of not guilty by reason of insanity rested on the confessions and on the agreement of both sides. It was not a conviction, and it fell away when the federal court ordered the writ and the charges were dismissed. No one else is known to have been charged in the five deaths.
1953: Miller is a patient at Fairfield Hills State Hospital.
August 4, 1967: Rosell Rush is found dead in Stamford.
May 3, 1968: Donna Roberts is found dead.
September 8, 1968: Gloria Kahn is found dead.
April 1969: A Stamford clergyman reports an anonymous call about an undiscovered body; investigators list local clergymen named Miller.
July 10, 1971: Gail Thompson is found dead.
August 22, 1971: Alma Henry is found dead.
January 1972: A special team of state and local detectives begins questioning Miller.
February 16, 1972: Miller is involuntarily committed to Fairfield Hills and diagnosed with chronic undifferentiated schizophrenia.
February 29 to March 10, 1972: Miller writes and signs statements confessing.
March 17, 1972: Miller is arrested.
May 15, 1972: Indicted on five counts of murder.
June 1972: The defense asks for favorable evidence; the file on R.L. is not disclosed.
July 29, 1972: R.L. is arrested in Stamford while trying to strangle a woman.
January 1973: Two counts are dropped; a three-judge panel finds Miller not guilty by reason of insanity on three.
March 1973: Committed for up to 25 years.
1982: State habeas petition filed.
October 13, 1983: State habeas court denies relief after an eight-day hearing.
1985: Connecticut Appellate Court affirms; the Connecticut Supreme Court declines review.
July 28, 1987: Federal district court denies his petition.
May 20, 1988: Second Circuit orders the writ granted unless the state retries him.
October 11, 1988: U.S. Supreme Court denies the state's petition.
May 8, 1989: Charges dismissed; Miller released and voluntarily enters a mental institution.