Read Terror in East Lansing: The Tale of MSU Serial Killer Donald Miller for Free Online Page B

River
College before attending CSUS, where he was on the dean's list.
Like Sowers, he seemed tireless with the sky the limit. Aside from
being an accounting executive at Miller Advertising, Miller was
vice president of the campus chapter of Sigma Phi Epsilon and the
1979 Man of the Year.
    When Mary Beth turned twenty-one on October
21, 1980, she and Craig Miller had been dating for nearly a year.
With a spring graduation coming up, marriage plans did not seem
premature. New Year's Eve 1981 seemed the perfect wedding day for
the couple because New Year's Eve was Mary Beth's favorite day.
    * * *
    On the night of the Sigma Phi Epsilon
fraternity function, Craig and Mary Beth arrived late, favoring
some quiet time together over the dinner that started three hours
prior to their arrival.
    That didn't mean they weren't looking to make
the most of their outing in the spirit of true fraternity and
sorority members. From every indication, Miller and Sowers were
happy and content on this night. According to dance attendee Sheryl
Arkin, neither shied away from attention. "She had barely gotten in
the door," said Arkin of Sowers, "and five of the Alpha Chi pledges
were around her in a circle. She was just talking away."
    Nevertheless, Craig and Mary Beth's stay was
relatively short. They left the Carousel restaurant just after
midnight. Shortly thereafter, a fraternity brother happened by
chance to notice them in the back of an Oldsmobile Cutlass rather
than Mary Beth's red Honda.
    After an exchange of words between the
fraternity brother and the front seat occupants of the car—a woman
was in the driver's seat with a man beside her—the Oldsmobile sped
off with Craig and Mary Beth still in the back seat.
    That was the last time they were ever seen
alive.
    * * *
    That afternoon, Craig Miller's body was
discovered alongside a gravel road twenty miles from Placerville,
near Bass Lake in El Dorado County, California. He had been shot
three times at point blank range. An autopsy performed the
following day revealed that Miller had been shot once above the
right ear, once in the back of the neck, and once at the right
cheekbone—apparently at the site.
    Mary Beth Sowers was still missing.
    * * *
    As with many non-domestic crimes of violence,
solving such crimes often takes a combination of painstaking police
investigative work and a bit of luck. In this instance, the luck
came with a license plate number taken down by a concerned friend
who thought it unusual that Craig Miller and his fiancée, Mary Beth
Sowers, would take off with strangers in the wee hours of the
morning of November 2, 1980 from the Arden Fair shopping center
parking lot, leaving her Honda behind.
    When the couple failed to return to the Honda
by that afternoon, the friend and fellow member of Miller's
fraternity reported them missing. Tracing the license number of the
car Miller and Sowers disappeared in, the police discovered that
the car—a silver 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass—was registered to Charlene
A. Williams or Charles Williams, her father. This was the second
big break.
    In the meantime, Miller's mother worried that
her usually dependable son and future daughter-in-law were missing.
A friend of Sowers had phoned Miller's mother early Sunday morning
looking for Miller. "I don't want you to worry," the friend had
said, "but something really strange is going on. Nobody has seen
Mary Beth or Craig since last night."
    When Miller failed to show up for his 10:00
A.M. shift at a paint store in Carmichael, his mother telephoned
police.
    * * *
    After learning from the Department of Motor
Vehicles that the Oldsmobile Cutlass belonged to Charlene A.
Williams or Charles Williams, Detective Lee Taylor and Detective
Larry Burchett drove to the home of Charles and Mercedes Williams
on Berrendo Drive in Arden Park.
    The parents told the detectives that the
Cutlass was their daughter Charlene's, and that she had left home
about 6:30 P.M. Saturday to go to a movie theater with