The End of the Dream (45 page)

“ Meighen asked.

“Well, I’d been looking in windows since I was about thirteen or so. I came to her house, and a couple of others nearby. I saw her in there and I went back two or three times. One night, I saw her in the bedroom with a man. They were making love, and I watched. It wasn’t too long after that I went inside myself Maybe a few days later. See, I never saw her undressed and I wanted to, so I kept coming back to look in her window.
 
That night that it happened I did see her undressed.”

“How could you see into the room? “

“The curtainit was kind of bamboo and you could see in if the lights were on and it didn’t come quite down to the bottom.” Miller said that Kay’s apartment had become a regular stop on his nocturnal rounds of window peeping. He correctly described her car as a dark blue Volkswagen station wagon with a square back and recalled where she had parked it.
 
. , “Her apartment was just off the alley to the west, “ Ivan Miller said. “She lived in the back half of a duplex, the front door was on the east and there’s a window on the south that goes into the dinette, and then you go into the front room and the bedroom’s on the left.” He was absolutely right. Miller said that on the night of July 29 he’d arrived at Kay Owens’ bedroom window later than he usually did, until this night, he’d never been there to see her prepare for bed. By the time he got there on the weekend before the murder, the man had been there, and he’d gotten up and pulled the curtains tight and Ivan Miller couldn’t see in the room anymore. But, now, he was determined to see Kay Owens nude.

“I got there just after sunset. You could still see light on the horizon but the sun was down, and it was pretty dark. I was at her place from then until two in the morning. It was clear, and it was real quiet and the stars were out. I looked through her bedroom window on the west side of the house. She took off all her clothes after awhile and went and took a shower. She walked around for a while naked and I was masturbating.” Miller’s eyes took on a faraway, glazed look as he finally told in detail the story he’d carried in his head for seven years. He told of waiting “a real long time” until Kay Owens turned out the light and got into bed. “When she went to bed, I waited. I wanted to go home, but I wanted to go in too. I tried to make up my mind. I stood there smoking a cigarette and finally I decided to go in. I had a pocketknife and I cut the screen on the window. She’d left it open a little bit. She’d had it shut and then she opened it just before she went to bed.” Even though what had happened could not be prevented all these years later, the men listening tensed. It was terrible to think of the woman in danger, oblivious to the man watching her. “There were plants just outside the window, “ Miller said. “I stepped on them and they were squishy. When I got in, there was a table underneath the window.” Miller recalled how he’d sat down in a chair near the folding door that separated Kay’s bedroom from the living room.

He was able to describe that bifold door perfectly. He told of sitting quietly outside the bedroom as Kay Owens slept, unaware of his presence.
 
“It seemed like I sat in that chair for a pretty long time.

The door was hooked on the inside the bedroom side.

The chair was nice. It felt nice to sit in. I couldn’t see anything because it was dark. “I couldn’t open the door [the bifold doors] right away. I had the fishing knife, and I found I could open up the hook on the door. I pushed it aside, and I went in the bedroom. I couldn’t see anything but I knew about where the bed was and I went up to it and just stood there, real nervous.

It was so dim that I couldn’t see her. She was sound asleep and snoring.
 
“I was trying to find her. I reached out with my left hand and reached down and felt around. I found her that way. I stood up again and waited.
 
I didn’t want to wake her up. I’m not sure if she jumped or not when I felt heri’m trying to remember.

She wasn’t covered up. She was on top of the covers.”
 
The jail interview room smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke. The detectives waited for Ivan Miller to continue his terrible story.

“I turned on the light and then I jumped on top of her, “ he said.

“I put my hands around her throat and I wanted her not to wake up.

I wanted her to be unconscious. While that was going on, she was fighting me and then she went unconsciousor pretty close. I remember putting some paper down her throat.” Burt Cowan had guessed this detail, but it was clear that Ivan Miller knew what had happened. “She was fighting and awake and I remember opening her mouth and putting the paper in, “ Miller continued, his voice tight. “What kind of paper was it? “ Meighen asked quietly. “It felt soft, pretty soft, like tissue paper. It was right by the bed on the bed stand. I think maybe I must have put the paper down her throat before I turned the lights on.

Then, after she was unconscious, I turned the light onit was a chain light that hung from the ceiling.” So Kay Owens had never seen her killer. She must have been unconscious by the time the light was turned on, choked with Miller’s hands and the Kleenex that blocked her throat.

“I started to do things to her, “ Miller continued, his words bubbling up under pressure. “I moved her around on the bed and touched her, and things like that, maybe making love to her.” Miller said his victim had still worn her nightgown, and he described it as a peach or yellow shortie gown with white lace at the top. That was right too. How many times had he gone over this ugly crime in his mind over the years? He knew every detail precisely. The two Salem detectives hoped that Kay Owens was already dead at this point. At the very least she was mercifully unaware of the actions of the teenager who had crept into her apartment. As the graphic confession continued, there were more particulars that tied this suspect tightly to the murder. He said he had inserted a candle into the victim’s vagina. He had taken her makeup mirror from the bathroom and held it at an angle so that he could watch himself as he raped her. “I got this mirror and was making love to her, and I was holding it so I could watch myself.

“ Ivan Miller said he thought the victim had been breathing while he was raping her. “I remember when I was through with the mirror, I was just kind of pretending that maybe she was alive. I couldn’t have an orgasm at first so I was pretending that she was alive.” He said he had tried to remove the Kleenex gag from her throat but that she’d swallowed it and he’d been unable to get it out. “What did you do with her nightgown?
 
“ Tom Mason asked. Miller said he’d choked her with it, but he didn’t know why he’d done that.

“Do you remember how you did it? “

“I put it around her neck, and I was like mad or something, and I felt like doing that. It was kind of knotted. It was only one time, but I pulled real hard.

I don’t know why, because she was unconscious, but I did that and then I made love to her.” The detectives winced as Miller referred to rape as “making love, “ but they fought down their revulsion and continued to question him on specifics. Thus far, he had demonstrated that he knew everything that had gone on in Kay Owens’ apartment so many years before. After he’d achieved orgasm, Miller said he’d tried to loosen the garotte from around Ms. Owens’ neck, but that it had been too tight.
 
“She didn’t have to have it on anymore, but I couldn’t get it off. “I looked inside her purseit was like a straw fishing creel and I took out her red wallet. I took a little bit of money out of it and put it in my pocket.” Miller said that then he had started “feeling different” and that he’d found an orange cloth (Kay Owens’ scarf) and wiped off everything he had touched. The mirror, the phone, the window. He erased every trace of himself with his victim’s scarf. He said he’d thrown the scarf onto a bush between the duplex and the house next door. It had undoubtedly been Ivan Miller that Kay Owens’ elderly neighbor had seen at 2,30 A. M. “Where did you go then? “ Vern Meighen asked. “Home.” Ivan Miller explained that he always crawled out of his bedroom window and returned the same way, so that his family wouldn’t know he was out. On the night of the murder, though, his father had replaced the screen. “I had to go in through the front door. My family was up and I made up a story about going to some coffeehouse I’d heard about.” He said he had told no one about what he’d done. Shortly after Kay Owens’ murder, he left Salem to drive to Minnesota with relatives. It all fit. Ivan Miller knew the complete layout of Kay Owens’ apartment, and he knew about the Kleenex, the mirror on the bed, the orange scarf, the color of her nightgown, the plastic bifold door, the cut in the window screen, her purse and wallet, the hanging lamp over her bed. None of this had ever been released to the media. Meighen and Mason stared at Miller. He couldn’t weigh over one hundred fifty pounds or stand more than five foot seven. Had Kay Owens had any warning, she probably could have handled him. She had been taller than he and almost as heavy. If she had screamed, a dozen people would have come running.

But she never had a chance. One moment she’d been sound asleep, the next she’d been gagged and strangled. Ivan Miller had planned his attack on Kay Owens carefully, he was intrigued by fetishes. He told them that he had worn a shirt he’d deliberately dyed black. “When I went out looking in windows, I figured I wouldn’t be seen if I wore black.”

“Have you ever killed anyone else? “ Meighen asked suddenly.

“No.” Miller did admit to several other sexual offenses, however.

He recalled entering one house and hiding under a bed because he planned to attack the two sleeping occupants of the home one at a time. While he waited, he’d felt the urge to urinate and he had done sointo the mattress, awakening his planned victims. They had discovered him and chased him from the house. He confessed that he’d been fishing on the north fork of the Santiam River once when he saw a little girl riding a bicycle. He had enticed her down onto the riverbank and into his car, where he disrobed her and fondled and kissed her.

“But I didn’t rape her, “ he said. He had never been apprehended in either case. In another incident, in downtown Salem, Miller said he had parked his car and debated taking his knife with him when he went in search of a female. He had decided not to take the knife, but he’d approached a woman telling her he had a knife. He ordered her to come with him to “have intercourse.” She’d screamed, and he’d been frightened off. Ivan Miller had watched a woman through her window as she took a shower. Like a scene from Psycho, he’d opened her door with a knife and surprised her in the shower. He forced her to perform oral sex. “But I didn’t rape her because she told me her boyfriend would be there any minute.” After he had signed his confession, Ivan Miller led the two Salem detectives on a grim tour around Salem. He pointed out Kay Owens’ duplex and the sites of his other attacks. Vern Meighen and Tom Mason did a psychological background check on the confessed killer.

They learned that Ivan Miller had been a loner most of his life, deeply involved in drugs and pornography. As a teenager, he had been sullen and untalkative and he’d refused to go out during the daytime hours.

His family knew he sneaked out at night, but they had had no idea of the awful scope of his wanderings. They told the detectives that they had never connected him to the headlines about Kay Owens’ murder.

Miller had never had a girlfriend until he’d moved to Arizona when he was about nineteen. There, he became obsessed with a go-go dancer who had just broken up with her husband. Their affair lasted only a few weeks before the dancer reconciled with her husband, leaving Miller distraught. “One night, “ a relative recalled, “He was drinking and he got quite unmanageable at our house and started throwing things. He went into the back bedroom and we heard a gunshot. I ran back and found he’d tried to fake a suicide attempt.” Tom Mason learned that Miller had eventually married a woman who was also named Kay, either by coincidence or by design. She had children from an earlier marriage, and her relationship with Ivan Miller soon foundered, principally because she would not allow him to discipline the children. And, like the first suspect in Kay Owens’ murder, Miller had been arrested for sexually molesting his stepchildren. It was that charge that had placed him in the Marion County Jail. When the two Salem detectives talked with the inmate to whom Miller had originally confessed, they got a broader picture of the intricacy of his fantasies. Ivan Miller had bragged that after Kay Owens’ murder he had been consumed with the idea of having sex with another woman who was unconscious. “He said he never wanted to kill anyone again, “ the informant said, “but that he wanted to find some way to drug a woman instead of having her awake when he had sex with her.” The physical evidence in the Owens caseas meager as it wa shad been held for seven years in a secure locker in the Salem Police Department. Now, Oregon State Police criminalists found matches with the hair samples and isolated Ivan Miller’s blood type in the semen he left behind.

Kay Owens’ death had been explained, solved. Had it not been for Ivan Miller’s conscience, it might have remained a tragic mystery forever.

The killer didn’t know his victim, he left no evidence that could be traced to him. There was no way that a connection could have been made between a beautiful, vibrant woman and the disturbed teenager whose chief preoccupation was voyeurism. It was the kind of case that every homicide detective dreads. Miller told his cellmates that Kay Owens was the kind of woman he’d always dreamed of having, and the only way he could possess her was to kill her. Sadly, her seemingly irrational fear that someone was watching her and waiting for her had been all too accurate. Ivan Miller had been a voyeur for half his life since he was twelve. It is a common misconception that window peepers and exposers are not dangerous. In truth, many murderers begin with just that kind of aberrant behavior and escalate to far more dangerous assaults.

Ivan Miller is a prime example of the dread progression of violent sexual behavior.
 
During the summer of 1978, Ivan Miller pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to twenty-five years in the Oregon State Penitentiary. But prison sentences are rarely finite numbers and even life sentences seldom mean life. Ivan Miller was released from prison in 1990 at the age of thirty-six and remains free at this writing. 46The GWho Fell in Love with Her Killer Almost everyone has someone who cares about them, looks after them, and even loves them. So it may be almost impossible to comprehend the overwhelming need of the victim in this case simply to have someone notice her. She was so needy that she was willing to forego love and concern. She had taken care of herself since she was a child, and she thought she knew how to survive. But she ached for someone who would pay attention to her and reassure her that she wasn’t invisible.