Miller was born in 1940 in Adelaide and had a long record of minor offences and a childhood in institutions. He met Christopher Worrell in prison and was in love with him; Worrell was heterosexual and violent, and the relationship, as Miller described it at trial, was one in which he did what Worrell wanted in order not to lose him.
Between December 1976 and February 1977 the two of them picked up seven young women in Adelaide: Veronica Knight, eighteen; Tania Kenny, fifteen; Juliet Mykyta, sixteen; Sylvia Pittman, sixteen; Vickie Howell, twenty-six; Connie Iordanides, sixteen; and Deborah Lamb, twenty. Worrell raped and killed each of them. Miller's evidence, which the jury substantially accepted, was that he drove, waited at a distance, and afterwards helped bury the bodies in bushland near Truro, north-east of the city. The case is known in South Australia as the Truro murders, and he as the Truro murderer.
Worrell was killed in a car crash in February 1977, weeks after the last murder, with Miller in the car. The bodies were not found until April 1978, when a woman picking wildflowers near Truro came on remains, and the rest were located over the following months.
Miller was arrested on May 23, 1979 and tried in 1980. He was acquitted of the murder of Veronica Knight, the jury accepting he had not known what would happen the first time, and convicted of the remaining six. He was sentenced on March 12, 1980 to life with a non-parole period later set at thirty-five years.
He maintained to the end that he had killed nobody, and the South Australian courts held that he was liable as a participant in a joint enterprise, which is the legal question the case is known for. He died in prison of liver cancer on October 22, 2008. Because Worrell died before any charge, no court ever tried the man who committed the killings.