Prosecutor Mike Gmoser told a packed courtroom Miller went to Boyd’s home at the Woodridge Glen apartments at around 9 a.m. April 18, knowing she had prescriptions of Oxycodone for pain from recent surgeries. Boyd was an avid BINGO player and that’s how she befriended Miller. He hit her on the head twice with a 10-pound dumbbell, causing “deep lacerations to her skull,” then he proceeded to slash her wrist in an attempt to make her death look like suicide.
He said blood spurted from the wrist wound, indicating she was still alive for the second attack. Police tracked Miller down and found blood on him. One of Miller’s own attorneys, Rick Hyde, told the judge officials also found blood in his car and a “matching dumbbell weight was found in his residence,” explaining why they agreed to take the plea.
“The death penalty was a distinct possibility in this case,” Hyde said. “So that was the basis of the recommendation. Mr. Miller is smart enough and intelligent enough to understand that.”
Hyde said they consulted with Miller’s family on a number of occasions about taking the guilty plea and there were many people in court supporting Miller. He told the judge he regretted his actions.
“I just want to say I apologize to Carol’s family and I know no matter how many times I apologize it won’t change anything,” he said. “And I thank my family.”
Boyd’s two daughters were also in court. Gmoser said they absolutely approved of the plea because they didn’t want to go through the “torment” and years of appeals if a jury heard the case and sentenced Miller to death.
“I’m happy with the result, that this is taken care of for my mom,” Boyd’s daughter Latoya Henderson said. “And that justice was served.”
Before imposing the life without parole sentence Oster let the defendant know what he thought of his acts.
“This was a cold, callous and calculated crime,” the judge said. “A life was taken, a future, smiles, memories to be made in the future and memories of the past, these things were taken without reason.”
Gmoser said he offered the plea deal to Miller for many reasons, including statistics that show life without parole has become the new death penalty. He referred to a Middletown case where Victor Gantt drove a hatchet into an elderly man’s head and then tried to set the house on fire to cover the crime. A jury accepted mitigating evidence that he had a bad childhood and declined to impose the death penalty.
“The statistics show that when given the option of life without parole, unless it is an exceptional case, and there are those that are out there, when there are exceptional cases the death penalty still stands with jurors,” he said. “But in many, many instances, and we’ve seen it here in Butler County, life without possibility of parole is the new death sentence.”
Rather than take a chance that Miller could get less than life without parole, Gmoser agreed not to present the grand jury the death penalty specification, in exchange for Miller accepting the next harshest sentence.
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