Robert Lee Miller Jr.

You have seen several cases from the Oklahoma City area from me lately. Sometimes that happens due to how I make my list of cases and whether they grab my interest when I am going through the list. This all started with the case of Curtis McCarty, a man who was sentenced to death three times but later released from prison. Often when I read about one case others are mentioned and that was such the situation with McCarty. Much of the information on his case centered around the local prosecutor at the time, a man named Robert “Cowboy Bob” Macy and a lab technician named Joyce “Black Magic” Gilchrist. In the process several other cases, such as this one, relating to Robert Lee Miller Jr. was mentioned, as questionable cases.

Robert Lee Miller Jr. was convicted and sentenced to death in the murders of eighty-three year old Anne Fowler and ninety-two year old Zelma Cutler. Both of the elderly women had been raped and murdered in their homes. Anne Fowler had been found in September of 1986 and Zelma Cutler had been found on January 10, 1987.

Miller was known to be a drug user and apparently somewhat of a police informant. In February of 1987 investigators went to his home to allegedly ask for assistance in solving the murders of the two women. It was said at the time of the “interview” he was under the influence of PCP. It would later be said that Miller was interviewed for more than 8 hours and in the end it was said that Miller would tell investigators that what had happened to the women “came to him in a dream.” In the end it was Miller who was charged with the murders of the two women.

Robert Lee Miller Jr. went on trial in May of 1988. He was charged with two counts of first degree murder, two counts of first degree rape, two counts of first degree burglary and one count of attempted first degree burglary for another crime in which he was charged. It is unclear whether Robert Macy personally conducted the trial but he was the District Attorney at the time. It is clear that Joyce Gilchrist would testify at the trial. DNA was not available at the time and so only comparisons of blood types and the like were available. Gilchrist would testify that hair and semen found at the crime scenes were consistent with Robert Miller. Adding this to the “dream story,” despite the fact that the defense pointed out that Miller got more “wrong” than right with the known evidence, he was convicted. He was given two death sentences for the murders of the two elderly women and a combined additional 725 years for the other charges.

In the meantime while all of this was going on there was another man in the criminal system named Ronnie Lott. Ronnie Lott was arrested in May of 1987 on charges of rape and burglary after two other elderly women were attacked in early 1987. He had left fingerprints at the scene and was apparently promptly found, arrested, charged and pleaded guilty in those crimes. He would be given a twenty-five year sentence.

It seems unclear as to why Lott was never looked at in the murders of Anne Fowler and Zelma Cutler other than the fact that the prosecutors believed they had their man in Miller. For the next several years after Miller's conviction the appeals court upheld the conviction and sentence. But, as DNA began to emerge the defense was granted the right to have evidence such as hairs and semen from the scenes tested. In 1995 the results from the DNA testing came back and they did not point to Robert Miller, but showed that Ronnie Lott had at the very least been involved in the crimes. Soon after Miller's conviction was overturned and a new trial was ordered.

Authorities would charge Ronnie Lott in the murders of Anne Fowler and Zelma Cutler but for whatever reason they would then drop the charges. It would be March of 1997 before they would re-charge him. And, during this time Robert Miller remained in prison awaiting a new trial. Prosecutors would attempt to argue, at least through the media that they believed that Lott and Miller had committed the murders together despite the fact that they could not find any evidence that showed the two men even knew each other.

A month before Ronnie Lott was re-charged for the murders a judge dismissed the charges against Miller. However, prosecutors appealed and the ruling was overturned. Robert Miller's attorney went to the media when Lott was charged and blamed Robert Macy for not dropping the charges against Miller. Macy, who by all accounts had an ego bigger than all of Oklahoma, would not take that comment laying down. Macy told the media that “it will be a cold day in hell” when he let the defense attorney decide what cases he would file and not file. He went on to say “two judges and a jury all found Robert Miller knew things about the murders only someone who was there would have known. It's my job to bring that case to trial.”

It is unclear exactly when the courts overturned the lower courts decision to dismiss the charges against Miller, but despite that it was not long before the assistant district attorney on the case, Ray Elliott, himself would ask for a dismissal. He would later say that he still believed that Miller was guilty for the crimes but that he felt he had no choice when the courts ordered that the attempted burglary charge, from an entire different incident was to be severed from the charges involved in the murders of the women. In my opinion this made no sense at all and I believe that comment was just a way of “saving face” instead of admitting they had absolutely nothing against Robert Miller. After spending eleven years in prison, seven of those on death row, Robert Miller was released on January 22, 1998.

Ronnie Lott would eventually be convicted in the murders of the women and like Robert Miller, he was sentenced to death. The state of Oklahoma would execute Ronnie Lott in December of 2013. While the prosecutors apparently still refused to admit that Robert Miller was not involved in the crime it does seem that at least Anne Fowler's family felt differently. Her son, Jim stated that before the murder and even after Miller's conviction he was a proponent of the death penalty. After everything that occurred in the case he would later say that he no longer felt that way and feared that innocent people were at risk of having their lives taken.

In 2001 the state of Oklahoma would execute a man named Mark Fowler. He was the grandson of Anne Fowler. He had been convicted in a 1985 triple murder. With all of the things the family had seen as well as all of the information that would come out about Robert Macy and Joyce Gilchrist it appears the family had their own questions about how things were done in the area.