"If he had lived, maybe seventy would have been killed," James William Miller told an interviewer in July 1984, at the end of a forty-three-day hunger strike in prison. "And I wouldn't have ever dobbed him in." He was talking about Christopher Robin Worrell, the young man he called his best friend in the world, who had raped and strangled seven young women around Adelaide in the summer of 1976 and 1977 while Miller drove the car.
Miller was born on February 2, 1940, and grew up in institutions, with a long record of minor offenses. He met Worrell in Adelaide Gaol, where Miller was serving three months for breaking into a gun shop and Worrell, thirteen years younger, was awaiting trial for rape and already on a suspended sentence for armed robbery. They shared a cell. Miller, who was homosexual, fell in love with him; Worrell was not. Miller said at trial that his role was to be "chauffeur and mug": to drive, wait at a distance while Worrell had sex with the women, and afterwards help bury them.
Between December 23, 1976, and February 12, 1977, they 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 killed each of them, and they were buried in bushland east of Truro and elsewhere. On February 19, 1977, a week after the last killing, Worrell died in a car crash, aged twenty-three. Miller survived it.
The first remains were found near Truro on April 25, 1978, and more over the months that followed. Miller was arrested on May 23, 1979. He led police to other graves, including Tania Kenny's, and was charged at first with four murders and then with seven. The trial lasted six weeks. Justice Matheson directed the jury that on the law of joint enterprise they must find him guilty, and on March 12, 1980, they convicted him of six murders. They acquitted him of the first, Veronica Knight, accepting that he had not known Worrell meant to kill her. As he was led away he shouted at Detective Sergeant Lawrie, "You filthy liar, Lawrie, you mongrel." Matheson gave him six life sentences.
A juror later hired a lawyer to ask the Attorney-General for a retrial because of the judge's direction; Chris Sumner refused. Miller never stopped saying he had killed nobody. "I was there at the time and for that, I am guilty of an unforgivable felony," he said. "I fully deserve the life sentences I am currently serving." In 2000 Chief Justice John Doyle set a non-parole period of thirty-five years. Miller spent most of his sentence at Yatala and died of liver disease in October 2008, aged sixty-eight; reports give the date as October 21 or 22. Because Worrell died before anyone knew what he had done, no court ever tried the man who did the killing.