On August 5, 1992, a woman in the Harrisburg area of Pennsylvania was raped, beaten and left for dead. She survived. The next day police arrested Joseph D. Miller of Steelton, a borough next to Harrisburg. Within days he had confessed to murder and led investigators to a landfill in Swatara Township. It took another twenty-four years, and DNA identification of a woman who had disappeared in 1986, for the full count of his victims to be settled in court.
Miller was known as Joey. He was short and tattooed, spoke with a lisp from a childhood fall, and had a wife, three children and a job while he was killing. A psychologist who examined him for the defense, Stanley Schneider, found "borderline mental retardation," emotional problems and learning disabilities, and said he had been raised in a "violent, abusive, alcoholic home." One of his lawyers described him as having a fourth-grade education. Whether he was intellectually disabled or a calculating killer who knew what he was doing became a central question in his case.
Prosecutors said he chose young African American or minority women, often living on the margins, and left their bodies in secluded places. Edward Marsico, the Dauphin County district attorney in 2016, said Miller "purposely selected" women whose disappearances he expected would draw little attention.
Kelly Ann Ward, 26, of Harrisburg, was last seen in early 1986 (reports give January and February). For more than ten years no one knew what had happened to her. In February 1997 human remains were found in a wooded area off Chambers Hill Road in Swatara Township, near a former landfill. DNA testing in 2010 established that they were those of a Black woman, and in 2014 an FBI laboratory match with a sample from her family identified them as Ward's.
Selina Franklin was 18 when she disappeared on May 16, 1987. Police questioned Miller at the time; he said he had dropped her off.
Stephanie McDuffey was 23 when she disappeared on November 6, 1989. She was eight and a half months pregnant. Her remains, and those of her unborn child, were later recovered from the Swatara Township landfill.
Jeannette Thomas, 25, was last seen on January 8, 1990, leaving Dinger's bar in Harrisburg. She was reported missing three days later, and her body was found in a Dauphin County landfill on February 4. She had been sexually assaulted and beaten to death.
Kathy Novena Shenck, who also went by Pheonix Bell, was found in Perry County on February 27, 1990. According to the authorities, Miller ran over her several times with his car and buried her body in a dump.
In June 1992, a woman in Perry County survived being stabbed and sexually assaulted, in an attack later attributed to Miller. The woman attacked on August 5, 1992, was bound and gagged at a Conrail site in Susquehanna Township and survived because a security guard arrived. She later testified against him.
Jeannette Thomas's murder had already been solved, as far as the courts were concerned. Four days after her body was found, police arrested William M. Kelly Jr., 28, a man with an IQ of 69 and a history of mental illness. After a four-hour interview, police said, he confessed, although his accounts varied. Two witnesses said they had seen him leave the bar with Thomas. On October 1, 1990, Kelly pleaded guilty to third-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in prison. Serological testing excluded him as the source of semen found on her body.
After his arrest in August 1992, Miller admitted the Thomas killing along with Franklin's and McDuffey's. The two witnesses saw his photograph and recanted: he bore a striking resemblance to Kelly. In December 1992 the Dauphin County district attorney, Richard A. Lewis, asked the court to vacate Kelly's conviction, citing DNA evidence linked to Miller. On January 8, 1993, Kelly's conviction was vacated, the charge was dismissed and he was released. The National Registry of Exonerations lists his case among wrongful convictions caused by a false confession and mistaken identification.
Miller was not charged with Thomas's murder at the time. He was already facing a capital trial.
In his August 1992 statements Miller described beating Franklin and McDuffey to death after sex and led police to their remains at the Swatara Township landfill. He later recanted. In March 1993 a Dauphin County jury convicted him of both murders and sentenced him to death. He was separately convicted in Perry County of murdering Kathy Shenck.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld the convictions and death sentences on August 25, 1995, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case in February 1996. An execution was stayed in March 1996 while Miller pursued post-conviction claims, and on February 24, 2000, the state Supreme Court rejected those claims and again affirmed the death sentence.
In 2002 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia that people with intellectual disabilities cannot be executed. That year Dauphin County Judge Jeannine Turgeon found that Miller qualified and vacated his death sentences. He was left with three life sentences, two from Dauphin County and one from Perry County. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court upheld her ruling in 2008.
Kelly Ann Ward was the case that remained. Investigators came to believe that a body Miller had described in his 1992 statements, a woman he said he left near a road, was Ward. When detectives interviewed him in May 2015, he denied it. "It's just a coincidence," he said, and "I didn't do this one." He also said, "I don't remember, I was in a dark place then."
On April 13, 2016, Marsico announced that Miller, then 51 and held at the state prison at Smithfield, had been charged with Ward's murder, calling him one of the most prolific killers in the county's history. Because he had been found intellectually disabled, the death penalty was not available. That month Miller confessed on tape to killing Ward and Thomas. He told police he had sex with both women, killed them during arguments over money and buried them in makeshift graves. In the recording, which the district attorney released, he apologized to the families.
On June 24, 2016, Miller pleaded guilty in Dauphin County Court to the first-degree murders of Kelly Ann Ward and Jeannette Thomas. Judge Andrew Dowling sentenced him to two more life terms, to run after the ones he was already serving. He said nothing to the families in court.
"He didn't even show any remorse from what he took from not only us but the other families," said Erica Stoney, Thomas's great-niece. "I'm just glad today justice was served, not only for my aunt but the other families."
Miller has been in custody since August 1992. As of 2016 he was held at SCI Smithfield in Huntingdon County, serving life sentences with no possibility of parole under Pennsylvania law for first-degree murder. No later change in his status was found as of October 2026.
He is not the Illinois murderer Joseph Robert Miller.