Slouching Towards Bethlehem Read Online Free PDF Page A

Debbie, the Millers’ fourteen-year-old, testifying in a steady voice about how she and her mother had gone to a supermarket to buy the gasoline can the week before the accident. There was Sandy Slagle, in the courtroom every day, declaring that on at least one occasion Lucille Miller had prevented her husband not only from committing suicide but from committing suicide in such a way that it would appear an accident and ensure the double-indemnity payment. There was Wenche Berg, the pretty twenty-seven-year-old Norwegian governess to Arthwell Hayton’s children, testifying that Arthwell had instructed her not to allow Lucille Miller to see or talk to the children.
    Two months dragged by, and the headlines never stopped. Southern California’s crime reporters were headquartered in San Bernardino for the duration: Howard Hertel from the Times , Jim Bennett and Eddy Jo Bernal from the Herald-Examiner . Twomonths in which the Miller trial was pushed off the Examiner ’ s front page only by the Academy Award nominations and Stan Laurel’s death. And finally, on March 2, after Turner had reiterated that it was a case of “love and greed,” and Foley had protested that his client was being tried for adultery, the case went to the jury.
    They brought in the verdict, guilty of murder in the first degree, at 4:50 p. m. on March 5. “She didn’t do it,” Debbie Miller cried, jumping up from the spectators’ section. “She didn’t do it.” Sandy Slagle collapsed in her seat and began to scream. “Sandy, for God’s sake please don ’ t ” Lucille Miller said in a voice that carried across the courtroom, and Sandy Slagle was momentarily subdued. But as the jurors left the courtroom she screamed again: “You’re murderers....Every last one of you is a murderer! ’ Sheriff’s deputies moved in then, each wearing a string tie that read “1965 sheriff ‘ s rodeo , ” and Lucille Miller’s father, that sad-faced junior-high-school teacher who believed in the word of Christ and the dangers of wanting to see the world, blew her a kiss off his fingertips.
    The California Institution for Women at Frontera, where Lucille Miller is now, lies down where Euclid Avenue turns into country road, not too many miles from where she once lived and shopped and organized the Heart Fund Ball. Cattle graze across the road, and Rainbirds sprinkle the alfalfa. Frontera has a softball field andtennis courts, and looks as if it might be a California junior college, except that the trees are not yet high enough to conceal the concertina wire around the top of the Cyclone fence. On visitors’ day there are big cars in the parking area, big Buicks and Pontiacs that belong to grandparents and sisters and fathers (not many of them belong to husbands), and some of them have bumper stickers that say “ support your local police . ”
    A lot of California murderesses live here, a lot of girls who somehow misunderstood the promise. Don Turner put Sandra Garner here (and her husband in the gas chamber at San Quentin) after the 1959 desert killings known to crime reporters as “the soda-pop murders.” Carole Tregoff is here, and has been ever since she was convicted of conspiring to murder Dr. Finch’s wife in West Covina, which is not too far from San Bernardino. Carole Tregoff is in fact a nurse’s aide in the prison hospital, and might have attended Lucille Miller had her baby been born at Frontera; Lucille Miller chose instead to have it outside, and paid for the guard who stood outside the delivery room in St. Bernardine’s Hospital. Debbie Miller came to take the baby home from the hospital, in a white dress with pink ribbons, and Debbie was allowed to choose a name. She named the baby Kimi Kai. The children live with Harold and Joan Lance now, because Lucille Miller will probably spend ten years at Frontera. Don Turner waived his original request for the death penalty (it was generally agreed that he had demanded it only, in Edward