The Illinois Supreme Court set out the sequence in two flat sentences. "In April 1993, he was released from prison. Five months later, he killed three more women and disposed of their bodies in drainage ditches."
What made that possible was not an outrage. It was arithmetic.
Joseph Robert Miller had been convicted of two murders in 1978 and sentenced to fifteen to thirty years. It was not life. He served his time, reached his parole date, and walked out. A parole agent named Jack Thurmon later testified about the release at his second trial.
He was born Joseph Robert Tarczon and abandoned at an orphanage soon after birth, then adopted by a Chicago couple named Miller whose surname he took. By his own later account and that of his biographers the adoptive home was violent. Between the late 1960s and 1977 he was arrested eleven times, on charges including theft, carjacking and sexual assault, and each time a plea deal kept the prison stay short. In the early 1970s he lived in Bloomington, in Waukegan and for a time in Virginia. By 1977 he had settled in Skokie, married a local woman named Marsha, and was delivering pizzas.
The first two killings were in the Chicago suburbs. Martha Ryan, thirty-one, also known as Martha E. Kowalski, was reported missing from Chicago on October 25, 1977. She had last been seen getting into an orange Chevrolet Vega with a young man, and her body was found eight days later, wrapped in a blanket near a liquor store in Skokie, close to where Miller lived. The description of the car and the driver brought police to him. The next day Ann Iecile Maxham, twenty-two, was found in Skokie as well, and another woman who worked the same streets identified Miller and his wife as clients. He was charged with both murders on November 5, 1977.
The prosecution did not go the way the charges suggested. Searches of his apartment and car turned up evidence connecting him to an armed robbery in Skokie, a kidnapping in Cook County and an aggravated battery in DuPage County, and he was the prime suspect in other killings going back to October 1976, but procedural errors made some of it inadmissible and his wife would not testify against him. Cook County offered a deal, drop the kidnapping and aggravated battery counts for a guilty plea on robbery, and he took it. Two murder convictions, one armed robbery, fifteen to thirty years.
He served his sentence at the Illinois River Correctional Center in Canton, took part in sex offender programs, and was regarded as a model prisoner. A bad leg injury in the mid-1980s left him disabled and on a state disability pension. He was paroled to Peoria in April 1993, on the prison chaplain's advice, to a nursing home, where he was thought friendly and talkative and went to church with the other residents. A friend sent him a bus ticket, and members of a church there helped him find his feet. A witness at his later sentencing hearing said he had seemed happy that September.
In late August he was hired to do repairs at the home of an eighty-eight-year-old woman named Bernice Fagotte. A few weeks afterward a newspaper deliveryman told police she had not collected her paper or her mail. She has never been seen again, and he has never been charged over her.
On September 18, 1993, Marcia Logue was found in a drainage ditch in the 500 block of South Cameron Lane, tied and gagged with a pillowcase in her mouth. She was thirty-four, and she had been beaten and stabbed. Helen Dorrance, twenty-six, was found fifty feet away the same day, strangled.
Eight days later Sandra McMahill Csesznegi, forty-two, was found in another drainage ditch near Christ Church Road, badly decomposed and also strangled.
Logue had last been seen alive on September 15, getting into a maroon car driven by a white man witnesses put in his forties or fifties. All three women lived in Peoria and all three had worked as prostitutes.
The trial was moved to Sangamon County because of the coverage at home. The jury convicted him on all six counts of first-degree murder, two for each woman, and found him eligible for death because he had killed more than one person. A defense psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Chapman, testified that he suffered from a dissociative disorder of the multiple personality type. The jury found nothing sufficient to preclude a death sentence, and the state put the two 1977 murder convictions and the 1978 robbery in front of it as aggravation.
The Illinois Supreme Court affirmed on direct appeal. When it heard his post-conviction appeal in 2003 the sentencing question had already gone: Governor Ryan had commuted every death sentence in Illinois on January 10 that year, and the court noted that a commutation removes the judicially imposed sentence and replaces it with an executive one, which made the point moot. He is held at the Dixon Correctional Center.
Detectives said afterward that they considered him a suspect in the deaths of four other women in Chicago and could not link him conclusively. He has also made prison statements admitting to further killings. Neither has been charged. The convictions cover five women.
Sandra Csesznegi has a dress on a fence on Southwest Adams Street in Peoria. In 2020 a project called Remember Her, Peoria hung close to a hundred of them, one for every woman and girl murdered or missing in the county since 1993, and her family brought a memorial they had made for her. One of the organizers said that the fact a murdered woman was a drug user or a sex worker has no place in the conversation, because these were somebody's daughter, sister, aunt, mother, grandmother, friend.
One thing about Miller himself is unresolved. His birth year is given as 1945 in some records and as January 15, 1955 in others. The witnesses who saw the driver of the maroon car in September 1993 put him in his forties or fifties, which fits the earlier year better, but a witness estimate is not a record, and no primary document settles it.