Meantime, David Miller had taken his new wife and her parents to Europe in June despite his financial burdens. It is unclear how he paid for the trip. Vince Bertolini, also a former United Chambers of Commerce president who had worked with Miller, said he happened to run into his old friend June 26in the lobby of a hotel in Rome.

“It was very strange,” Bertolini said. “He told me he was representing the Kuwaiti government, resolving issues from the Persian Gulf War. It was kind of off the wall.”

Bertolini said Miller also acknowledged that he was having financial difficulties and said the experience taught him that “you really know who your friends are.”

After returning from Europe, the marriage of David and Jayne Miller foundered. Police said the two separated after repeated fights and each sought restraining orders against the other. Jayne Miller said in court documents that her husband had repeatedly threatened to kill her.

Suspicious of her husband’s dealings and debts, Jayne Miller next hired private detective Bob Brown to make inquiries. Brown said Jayne Miller told him her husband had claimed to be a tax attorney in California who moved to Florida to work at Disney World.

Brown made routine computer checks and found David Miller’s name linked with the name Dorothy Miller on car and house titles and tax rolls. He found no record of the couple being divorced.

“I told Jayne that it looked like this guy already had a wife,” Brown said. “It looks like he had two houses, one here and one in California. He had evidently been commuting back and forth between wives.”

Using Brown’s information and old phone records left behind by her husband, Jayne Miller tracked down Dorothy Miller in Pennsylvania and the two confirmed each other’s existence. Dorothy Miller said Jayne Miller told her that she was determined to confront their shared husband and expose him by going to the media with the story of the high-profile bigamist.

“I told her he was dangerous and warned her to stay away from him,” Dorothy Miller said.

Brown said he gave his client the same warning. And her friend Bowen sent her a plane ticket so that she could move back to California.

But Jayne Miller would never take the flight. On Sept. 15, according to Sanford police records, Jayne Miller called her husband and told him she was removing his property from a self-storage locker and that he would have to come and pick it up.

Brown believes his client planned to empty her husband’s property out of the locker and then leave before he arrived. She may also have felt less fear of her husband because a month earlier she had insisted that he turn a handgun he owned over to police for safekeeping and he had agreed to do so.

However, Jayne Miller was still at the storage facility when her husband arrived. According to police, the couple began arguing about Miller’s other wife and he struck Jayne Miller in the face. When she walked to her car, saying she was going to call the police, David Miller calmly walked back to his car and got a handgun, police said.

Miller walked up to his wife’s car and fired six times through the driver’s side window at her, police said. He then walked around to the other side of the car and fired once more into the car, police said. Two cabdrivers who had been called by David Miller to help him take away his belongings said they witnessed the shooting and tried to aid Jayne Miller, but she was dead. They also held her husband and the gun until police arrived.

Sanford Police Chief Steven Harriett said the gun Miller used to kill his wife was the weapon he had checked in at the police station Aug. 27for safekeeping.

However, Miller had reclaimed the weapon three days later. Harriett said the department had no authority to keep the gun from him. “We had no basis to know what he was going to do with it,” the police chief said.

Brown said he doubted his client knew her husband had retrieved the gun before going to the storage locker.

“She would never have gone there if she knew he had the gun back,” he said. “She made a mistake and paid for it.”

Harriett said that while his investigators are aware of the accusations of bigamy and fraud surrounding Miller, they are not actively investigating the suspect’s activities before the killing. “It’s interesting and intriguing, but not pertinent to our case,” he said.

Some who knew Miller believe that more will remain unknown about him than what is known.

“It’s so frustrating,” said Dorothy Miller, who is now living on welfare. “David did a lot of things nobody can explain or that they thought he would never have been able to do… He’s a bad person and what he did wasn’t right.”

There is also at least some frustration and guilt in the Valley. The woman who worked with David Miller on Chamber of Commerce functions said she believes that there are many who knew him who now wish they had voiced suspicions about his previous marriage and financial problems.

“I firmly believe that all of us knew it, but nobody wanted to take responsibility,” she said. “No one wants to be connected with it now. They just say he was a nice guy and they are shocked. Nobody wants to open up and say we should have told poor Jayne.”

note: A Florida jury later rejected David Russell Miller’s insanity defense and found him guilty of murdering his wife. He was sentenced to life in prison.

MAN CHARGED IN 1982 DEATH MAN CHARGED IN 1982 DEATH ALLEGES POLICE VENDETTA

LOS ANGELES TIMES

February 25, 1991

Jonathan Karl Lundh says he feels like a character in a suspense novel – an innocent man accused of a heinous crime and left to use his own wits to clear himself.

“It’s like a cheap dime-store novel – I can’t believe what they are doing to me,” Lundh said from behind the bars of Los Angeles County Jail.

The 39-year-old Minnesota man pleaded not guilty last week to a charge he strangled a Cal State Northridge staff member nine years ago. Charges of robbery and rape in the case were dismissed because the statute of limitations for those crimes had expired.

Lundh appears bright and educated and can seemingly quote case law like an attorney. In fact, he has chosen to defend himself against the charges, although he said he quit Harvard Law School before getting a degree. He is soft-spoken and reserved. He has a young wife and friends who share his astonishment and outrage at the murder charge against him.

But authorities say it is the picture of Lundh as an innocent victim of the justice system that is fiction. They contend that he is a skilled con artist and killer who fabricates much of what he says about his life and hides the rest.

“There is no doubt that he is very bright,” Los Angeles Police Detective Larry Bird said. “But I don’t know whether I would believe anything he said… He is a con man.”

Police and prosecutors said that beneath Lundh’s calm, articulate demeanor is a dangerous man who stalked women. It is a characterization that Lundh, who is being held without bail, said he finds as aggravating as his loss of freedom.

“I am not some mad dog cruising the streets, looking to prey on women,” he said during a recent interview.

“Anybody who would do that to a woman should be put away.

“But it’s not me. I am innocent!”

Lundh is accused of murdering Patty Lynne Cohen on April 27, 1982, in a case that received wide attention in Los Angeles.

Cohen, 40, an assistant to the dean of CSUN’s School of Arts, was abducted from the garage of a Holiday Inn in Burbank, where she had attended a self-improvement seminar. Her nude body was found in the trunk of her car in a North Hollywood alley five days later.

Lundh, who according to court records has nine aliases and records of arrests for nonviolent crimes in at least five states, became a suspect less than two weeks after the slaying. He was later convicted of assaulting another woman outside the hotel just minutes before Cohen disappeared.