Donna Martin (8 of Hearts, Florida)

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Speaker 1 Our card this week is Donna Martin, the Eight of Hearts from Florida. Donna Martin was stabbed and killed in her own home in South Florida back in 1999.

Speaker 1 And police believed that the man who may have killed her was the very same man who had turned Boca Raton into a hunting ground. But police have been unable to pin Donna's murder on him.

Speaker 1 That suspect even went to prison for other crimes, but now he's a free man.

Speaker 1 And police believe solving Donna's murder could help save other women in Florida. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is the deck.

Speaker 1 When Donna Martin hadn't shown up for work by lunchtime on Tuesday, January 12th, 1999, her colleagues at ADT Security Services were pretty worried.

Speaker 1 She had relocated to join the company in Boca Raton, Florida, less than two years before, and they knew her well enough to know that it wasn't like her to go AWOL.

Speaker 1 So one of her coworkers volunteered to stop by Donna's apartment and check on her. It was 11.45 a.m.
when she made it to Donna's apartment.

Speaker 1 And from the very first moment she saw the front door slightly ajar, she knew that whatever kept Donna from work wasn't good.

Speaker 1 She pushed the door open to reveal a quiet living room.

Speaker 4 Too quiet.

Speaker 1 She made her way toward the kitchen and reached for the light switch to better see, but when the bright light washed over the kitchen, she saw a horrifying sight.

Speaker 1 Donna was on the floor next to the fridge, covered in blood and still wearing the green suit she'd worn to work the day before.

Speaker 1 Frantic, the colleague called for help, but when paramedics arrived, they quickly realized there was no hope of reviving Donna.

Speaker 1 Retired detective John Van Houghton, who everyone on the squad calls Hootie, was the lead detective on Donna's case for many years. I mean, even starting from day one.

Speaker 1 He told our reporters that when he first entered Donna's apartment, it was clear that she'd been stabbed, and he was pretty sure he knew with what.

Speaker 1 And that theory came from the fact that a knife in her kitchen was missing.

Speaker 4 The knife was taken from a butcher bar, which was on top of the refrigerator. And I don't remember if we found the knife, Bill.
We never found the murder weapon. No.

Speaker 1 That second voice you heard was Sergeant William Springer, who also worked Donna's case for for the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office.

Speaker 1 You'll hear both men talking back and forth quite a bit throughout this episode.

Speaker 4 It was one of the larger knives.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 if I remember right, the wound was down between her collarbone. It was down, hit the A order.

Speaker 4 And she bled out right there.

Speaker 1 Although paramedics had moved Donna from the kitchen to the living room by the time police arrived, the pool of blood in the kitchen made it clear where the stabbing had taken place.

Speaker 1 And both detectives agree that the evidence pointed to a surprise attack.

Speaker 4 She has nylons on, underwear, bra, everything, and everything is intact. In my opinion, and the observation, there was no signs of a struggle.
She never saw it coming. And she was a petite woman.

Speaker 4 She was, you know, small-framed woman. And so she just folded.
It was a... Very cold-blooded thing.

Speaker 1 The rest of the apartment revealed little else. A sliding glass door had been left partially open, but detectives believed Donna had left it that way herself to allow her cat to come and go.

Speaker 1 There was a missing pillowcase from one pillow in Donna's bedroom, but the bedroom itself appeared otherwise undisturbed.

Speaker 1 Detectives gathered as much evidence as they could, taking knives, clothing, sampling blood smears in the apartment and dusting for prints, but none of the evidence gave them any leads.

Speaker 1 There were no unidentified fingerprints, and all the blood that they found was Donna's. But there was other evidence at the scene that helped investigators at least establish a timeline.

Speaker 1 For one, Donna's body was in full rigor, and lividity had set in when she was found, suggesting that she'd been dead for at least six hours.

Speaker 1 They also found a styrofoam clamshell container filled with wings open wide on the counter on top of a plastic bag, along with a receipt for the wings showing that they were picked up on Monday from a local spot that Donna was known to frequent after work called Porter House Bar and Grill.

Speaker 1 All of this suggested to investigators that Donna was likely killed sometime in a short window Monday evening after getting home from the bar, but before she could dig in and eat.

Speaker 1 The Porterhouse bartender told Van Houghton he remembered seeing Donna the night before on Monday. She'd sat at the bar, and he even remembered her talking to another customer, a man.

Speaker 4 He just said that they danced. He saw cards exchanged.

Speaker 1 Business cards, that is. The bartender said Donna left at around 10.45 p.m., wings in hand, but the man had left a few minutes ahead of her.

Speaker 1 He didn't know what they talked about or if they were planning to rendezvous after leaving the bar, but it's a possibility detectives considered.

Speaker 1 Even if it wasn't this guy, they wondered if Donna planned on sharing those wings with someone.

Speaker 1 Because though you can't clearly see the number of wings in the container from the crime scene photos, we were told that there was a large number ordered.

Speaker 4 We don't know her eating patterns, so it could have been just for her, and she kept some in the refrigerator for lunch the next day, or she could have ordered for two.

Speaker 1 There were two clean plates found on her living room floor, possibly knocked down from her coffee table when paramedics got to the scene. So, did she have company? And if so, who was joining her?

Speaker 1 Detectives got a lucky break when they found out the bartender actually remembered the name of the guy who danced with Donna, or his first name, at least, David.

Speaker 1 They got an even bigger break when another Palm Beach County detective named Rich Carl told Van Houten and Springer that he felt like Donna's case had some striking similarities to another case that he'd worked just a few months before.

Speaker 1 And it just so happened that one person of interest in that case was named David.

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Speaker 1 This other attack, Detective Rich Carl remembered, had happened less than four months before. That would have been in September 1998.

Speaker 1 And a lot of what we know about that attack comes from a deeply reported article by Lisa Aucker for Boca Raton magazine.

Speaker 1 A young woman named Kristen Anderson, or Christy, as most people knew her, had returned home after work to walk her dog. When she got back to her apartment, she saw her front door was slightly open.

Speaker 1 but she just assumed that she'd forgotten to close it when she left.

Speaker 1 So Christy went inside and was listening to voicemail messages in her kitchen when all of a sudden, someone grabbed her from behind and pressed a knife to her neck before stabbing her eight times.

Speaker 1 Christy screamed so loud and so much that she later told reporters she thought it scared off her attacker, giving her the ability to call for help.

Speaker 1 Now, Christy survived and was able to tell police that while she hadn't seen her attacker, she had this strong feeling that she might know who the suspect was.

Speaker 1 Someone who'd been watching her walk her dog a week or two before. Now, she didn't have an interaction with the guy.

Speaker 1 She just remembered him glaring at her in a way that made her so uncomfortable, it stuck with her. And here's the really interesting part.

Speaker 1 Yes, he had attacked her from behind, and that's part of the reason she didn't see his face. But she had an opportunity to look at him after he attacked her as he was running out the door.

Speaker 1 But even then, she couldn't tell anything about his facial features because covering his head was a pillowcase.

Speaker 1 When Detective Carl compared this with what he knew about the crime scene at Donna's home, he immediately recognized the parallels.

Speaker 1 A Blitz attack stabbing in a Boca Raton apartment, a missing pillowcase from each scene with no apparent sexual assault on either woman.

Speaker 1 The scarier thing about these two attacks was that it wasn't just those two.

Speaker 1 Detective Carl believed them to be part of a disturbing pattern of crimes.

Speaker 1 Home invasions, assaults, women being punched and choked, and even one seven-year-old girl being taken from her home at night. It was all in the relatively small, safe, and wealthy area of Boca.

Speaker 1 These crimes were public, even printed in the local papers.

Speaker 1 But since none of the women had been able to successfully identify their attacker, police hadn't publicized the connections that they suspected.

Speaker 1 Most of the short blurbs mentioning an attack ended with a request for anyone with information to call law enforcement.

Speaker 1 So it wouldn't be surprising that locals, Donna included, would be unaware that there might be a predator among them.

Speaker 1 Her sister, Dawn Edwards, who you'll hear in a moment, remembers how excited Donna was to move there.

Speaker 1 I mean, she'd just gone through a divorce and was starting a second career after retiring from a government job in her 50s.

Speaker 1 She was ready to leave northern Florida where she grew up and to start a new life. Less Florida country girl, as Don puts it, and more posh professional living by the water.

Speaker 1 And so she found this great job at ADT. She was their compliance administrator for the whole, for all of ADT, national and international.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 she was excited about moving, making a new life. And the job, she was a work, work, work, work.
She always got excellent reviews on her work. When she moved to Boca,

Speaker 1 we had this favorite aunt, Aunt Garnet.

Speaker 1 She was like, you know, I was so afraid when she moved to Boca because, you know, I just had this horrible feeling when she went there, she wouldn't be prepared to deal with city life, you know, just way too friendly and way too open.

Speaker 1 She never met a stranger. She always saw the good.

Speaker 1 She met this guy one time that I already knew, and I just,

Speaker 1 he was just a person. She came home and said, oh, I met so-and-so today.

Speaker 1 And would you believe, he's the president of this club and just telling me all these wonderful things about people that I never knew.

Speaker 1 Everybody she met, she just saw only the good.

Speaker 1 When Donna died, she was 53 and she was in management. So I doubt she was a totally naive and impressionable person.
But someone had clearly taken advantage of her kind heart and good nature.

Speaker 1 And when Dawn first got the news about her sister's murder, she didn't have the first clue who it could be. I mean, she struggled to even come to terms with her new reality.

Speaker 1 I mean, just the week before, she had talked to Donna on the phone and now.

Speaker 1 And I remember just crying my eyes out pumping gas and people just kept riding by. And I was like, how can people just go on

Speaker 1 driving by, riding in their cars when my sister has been murdered? How can people do that? How can I be pumping gas when my sister has been murdered?

Speaker 1 Dawn and her family wanted more answers. So they flew down to South Florida to meet with Springer and Van Houten.

Speaker 1 By the time they arrived, Dawn was told by investigators that they'd already ruled out some of the usual suspects, ex-boyfriends, for instance, and in particular, her two ex-husbands, one of whom also lived in South Florida.

Speaker 1 He was an iron worker. And I think they did look at him, but immediately he had an alibi.
I'm sure it wasn't him, and nobody would ever convince me.

Speaker 1 Dawn remembered investigators telling her that they had even looked into the female colleague that discovered Donna at the home.

Speaker 1 But when we talked to them, they said that she had never been a serious suspect, which only left David.

Speaker 1 And while the bartender at the Porter house might not have caught a last name, Detective Rich Carl knew it all too well.

Speaker 1 So did three other law enforcement departments in the area around Boca and West Palm Beach.

Speaker 4 Rich Carl says, we need to look at David Miller.

Speaker 1 David Miller was a person of interest in Christy Anderson's attack, the stabbing from the previous September.

Speaker 1 Police records don't reflect exactly how he was connected with Christie's case, but we do know that he had been on the radar of law enforcement for years.

Speaker 1 For starters, he had two previous convictions for violent crimes in Florida. The first was an attack on a woman in 1984, not long after he'd moved to Florida from Illinois.

Speaker 1 David, who was 29 at the time, had been arrested in Deerfield Beach, which is just south of Boca Raton.

Speaker 1 In that case, Miller had snuck into a woman's home when she had left to do some laundry, leaving her sliding glass door unlocked.

Speaker 1 And when the woman came back inside, David had overpowered her and forced her to the floor, pulled off her shorts, and used the cord of an electric razor to whip her.

Speaker 1 Whatever he planned to do next was interrupted when the woman's sister and her boyfriend arrived. And the boyfriend chased David down and was able to hold on to him until police arrived.

Speaker 1 For that attack, he was convicted of sexual battery and aggravated battery.

Speaker 1 A judge sentenced him to four years in prison, but he was released early for good behavior, getting out in the spring of 1986.

Speaker 1 The second conviction he had is from 1989, when he was pulled over for driving with a broken taillight. It was the early hours of the morning in Delray Beach, which is just north of Boca this time.

Speaker 1 This incident is described in detail in Boca magazine. When the police officer walked up to the car, he found a six-year-old girl in the passenger seat.

Speaker 1 When the officer asked David Miller what was going on, David said that he had found the child out walking by herself and that he was trying to take her home.

Speaker 1 Now, his story didn't add up, and no part of his story would explain why they also found rubber gloves, a knife, nunchucks, and a small revolver in his car.

Speaker 1 So police arrested David Miller and he was charged with armed burglary, kidnapping a minor, carrying a concealed firearm and carrying a concealed weapon.

Speaker 1 But in the end, most of those charges didn't stick. Prosecutors dropped all but the firearms charges.

Speaker 1 Boca magazine says that was because, quote, the little girl couldn't explain how she was taken from her bed. or by whom, end quote.

Speaker 1 But even with the most serious of the charges dropped, dropped, Miller was convicted of a felony of possessing a firearm as a felon and sentenced to nine years.

Speaker 1 This criminal behavior that we see in Florida wasn't even new for David Miller. He had a record of violence against women even before coming to Florida.

Speaker 1 Along with charges over the years for having a concealed weapon and drunk driving, some of which were dropped, He also was charged with battery in 1977 after he was arrested for breaking into a hotel room and assaulting the two women inside.

Speaker 1 Those also dropped. So he was free two years later in 1979 to attack another woman.
David Miller was arrested again and convicted of sexual assault and attempted rape.

Speaker 1 He was sentenced to six years in prison, but didn't end up serving all of it.

Speaker 4 Because every time he ever got in trouble, I think it was his mother or his parents always got him an attorney. So he never really talked that much because he knew he was going to get an attorney.

Speaker 4 And they had money.

Speaker 1 Like mom drives a Rolls-Royce money.

Speaker 1 Various reports say that either his father or possibly stepfather was a property developer both in Illinois and South Florida during a lucrative period for developers.

Speaker 1 After he got out on parole in 1983 is when the South Florida Sun Sentinel reports he moved down to Florida to join his parents. He pretty quickly met a woman who would become his first wife.

Speaker 1 But no one was gonna make a good man out of this guy. Less than a year after his move to Florida, he's sneaking into that woman's apartment in Deerfield Beach.

Speaker 1 So by 1985, Miller had been convicted of five serious crimes in two states and had been sentenced to a total of 19 years, but served just five of them.

Speaker 1 In 1993, Miller was once again released and he again settled in the Boca area where he remained through the rest of the 90s.

Speaker 1 So when an uptick of attacks similar to what David Miller had been convicted of previously started in 1996, it is no wonder that he was at the top of investigators suspect list and therefore a very likely candidate to be the mystery David from the Porter house who was dancing with Donna the night she died.

Speaker 1 There was only one way to be sure though. Van Houten and Carl took a photo of Miller to the bartender and asked him if he recognized David.

Speaker 4 And he came in and they said, oh yeah, that's him.

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Speaker 1 Manhouten didn't have to worry about making any quick moves to get David off the streets. Broward County Sheriff's deputies took care of that for him.

Speaker 1 You see, there had been an attack on a different woman two days before Donna was killed. It was almost identical to the incident that led to David Miller's first conviction in Florida.

Speaker 1 I mean, down to the apartment complex. An article in the South Florida Sun Sentinel outlined the similarities between the two attacks.

Speaker 1 In the exact same apartment complex in Deerfield Beach, a 17-year-old woman had left her apartment to do laundry, just like the young woman did in 1984.

Speaker 1 And just like that previous survivor, this woman had returned to her apartment to encounter a stranger who snuck in through an unlocked door.

Speaker 1 The assailant wrestled her to the floor and tried to remove her clothing.

Speaker 1 Now, sadly, this young woman did not have a sister and boyfriend show up to help her, although she did manage to struggle and scream loudly.

Speaker 1 And that shout sent her attacker running, but not before he punched her so hard he broke her jaw and knocked out a tooth.

Speaker 1 Broward County became aware of David as quickly as Van Houten had, and they were able to arrest him after the woman in Deerfield Beach identified him in a photo lineup. So he was safely put away.

Speaker 1 at least for the time being, which gave police in the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office more time to look into him for Donna's murder. And they started by talking to him directly.

Speaker 1 Although, that wasn't much help.

Speaker 4 What had happened was, and I remember this all the time. So we were interviewing him and he had his legs crossed and his arms were crossed, meaning he's not talking to us.

Speaker 4 And I asked him nicely, Put your legs down, sit up straight and act right.

Speaker 4 And I said to him, you started to hurt these women because your mother wasn't here to protect you. And he started shaking his head.
Remember that?

Speaker 4 He shook his head. Yes.
He actually said, have you been hurting these women? And he shook his head yes.

Speaker 4 And then he put his head in his hands, looked up and said, I want my psychiatrist and an attorney. So he knew he had mental issues.

Speaker 4 And when he said that, we were kind of, you know, when you want an attorney, we're dumb.

Speaker 1 Even though they didn't make headway with David Miller himself, the arrest paved the way for something else, a warrant to search David Miller's property.

Speaker 1 Police were able to recover a number of things from David's apartment and storage unit, including sheets, pillowcases, and other bedding.

Speaker 1 They also found a pair of women's underwear, a bikini top, a bra, and a pair of silver earrings, along with a jean jacket that had suspicious-looking stains on it.

Speaker 1 There was also a shot glass from a local bar called Polyester's.

Speaker 1 And they were pretty sure that these items meant something and likely corresponded to other crimes, but none of it connected to Donna

Speaker 1 or any of the other women who had survived attacks in Boca.

Speaker 1 The most troubling discovery was David's stash of pornography. Not so much that he had it, but that he had done some amateur editing.

Speaker 4 You'd have to watch every tape. I think there was 40 something tapes.
And in between these movies, then it would be spliced in of an attack of a female. He spliced two movies.
He had an X-rated video.

Speaker 4 And I don't know if you ever saw a movie with Sally Fields in. I'm just going to say that

Speaker 4 she is.

Speaker 4 On the phone with her daughter, who is at home. They're getting ready for a party.
The guy breaks in and starts viciously stabbing and attacking her daughter.

Speaker 4 And Sally Fields is going crazy because she can't get to her daughter. And that is spliced in the middle of this film.

Speaker 4 And then after you watch maybe 15 minutes of it or 20 minutes of it, all of a sudden pop comes this Sally Fields movie. with her daughter being viciously stabbed and in her house.

Speaker 1 When David miller's arrests began making news in january it brought other women forward who said david attacked them one was a woman named noelle culhane and she had a very specific story about being attacked and stabbed in her home by david miller after he followed her home from the porter house

Speaker 1 at the end of that january police organized a live lineup bringing in a number of women who'd been attacked in and around boca over the last few years including one one woman named Tamara Parks and Christy Anderson, who we've talked about before.

Speaker 4 And then we took each one individually

Speaker 4 and had them talk.

Speaker 4 And let me tell you, when David Miller said something, you could see the fear on a lot of their faces just by looking at him talking.

Speaker 4 And most, well, the three of them positively identified Miller as the suspect who attacked them.

Speaker 1 The case against David Miller was getting stronger with these victims' IDs, and they'd been making headway in Donna's case too.

Speaker 1 Turns out, David Miller had lived just across the street from where Donna worked at ADT. So Van Houten and Springer come up with a theory.

Speaker 1 Maybe he'd seen or even stalked her before exchanging cards with her that night at the Porter house. It wouldn't be necessary, but based on what they knew about his pattern, it made sense.

Speaker 1 They know that Miller left the bar before Donna, and they believe that he followed her home when she left.

Speaker 1 Then it would be simple for him to make a show of pretending to run into her in the neighborhood or in her apartment complex, or maybe all of this is wrong and she invited him back to her place and was expecting him to show up.

Speaker 4 I think he was invited in. I truly think he was invited in.

Speaker 1 People,

Speaker 4 they get judgmental and they say, well, maybe she invited him home and she shouldn't have invited him home. Well, you know what? She's a single female.

Speaker 4 And if she wants to invite some man home, then that's her prerogative. She's not doing anything wrong.

Speaker 4 But people will become judgmental and they'll type their little nasty notes because they can get away with it because nobody knows who they are.

Speaker 4 Tell me to my face that the woman was wrong if she invited him home or if she invited him in because she's not.

Speaker 4 She's no different than anybody else if i was single and i met some young lady and i wanted to bring her home with me and have wings and i'm not doing anything wrong so you know if she invited him home she had no idea he was a murder and bastard excuse my language i'm sorry

Speaker 1 there is also option number three Maybe he slipped in the open sliding door like he was known to do and surprised her from behind. I mean, remember, her pillowcase was missing after all.

Speaker 1 And in Christie's case, the pillowcase was used to hide her attacker's face. Why hide your face if you were invited in?

Speaker 1 At the beginning of February, while David was being held without bail, the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office named him as a suspect in Donna's murder.

Speaker 1 Before the year was up, David Miller had been identified in another lineup by Noel Colhane, and a trial started for the attempted second-degree murder of Tamara Parks.

Speaker 1 No amount of money or fancy lawyers could beat the case against him, though. A jury returned a guilty verdict in just four hours.
And here, finally, Miller was given a substantial sentence.

Speaker 1 A judge sentenced him to 40 years in prison with a mandatory minimum of 30 years.

Speaker 1 Prosecutors also moved forward with Christy Anderson and Noelle Colhane's cases, trying them together in the summer of 2000.

Speaker 1 Donna's sister, Dawn, attended that trial, and she remembers vividly how Christy described her assault.

Speaker 1 Kristen Anderson, she told me herself, he started at her elbow and cut her arm to the bone. Slow.

Speaker 1 Just stood there and cut her arm to the bone.

Speaker 1 David Miller was found guilty of two counts of attempted first-degree murder, as well as two charges of burglary. The judge in this case sentenced Miller to two consecutive life terms.

Speaker 1 And in a statement to the press, the state attorney made a point that this would not include any option for parole. And that could have been the end of it.

Speaker 1 But somehow it's not. Because again,

Speaker 1 David Miller was able to get his sentence reduced. And now he is a free man.

Speaker 1 He was released last November.

Speaker 1 Local news reports that on appeal, David Miller and his lawyer challenged the witness identification that landed him in prison.

Speaker 1 Miller was able to get the charges for two of these three cases reduced through a combination of appeals and plea deals.

Speaker 1 The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported that a court upheld the mandatory minimum sentence of 30 years in Tamara Parks case, but that by pleading guilty to the others, Miller was able to get the two life sentences reduced to 30 years as well, served concurrently.

Speaker 1 And that dropped the total amount of time in prison from the rest of his life to just 28 years, because he was able to get two additional years shaved off for time already in custody.

Speaker 4 He needs to be back in prison because I really truly believe he will offend again.

Speaker 1 There is still, of course, Donna's case for which no charges have ever been brought. If he were tried and found guilty of of her murder, it could put him back behind bars.

Speaker 1 But due to a lack of evidence that would prove any theory beyond a reasonable doubt, no one has ever been charged with her murder, including the only suspect they've ever had in the case, David Miller.

Speaker 1 Here's our reporter, Madison, speaking with Springer.

Speaker 1 Are you confident that David Michael Miller is likely Donna's killer?

Speaker 4 Let me put it this way. My previous supervisor who taught me everything, John Kianka, would say, do not get tunnel fishing.

Speaker 4 So if somebody come along and said, well, it wasn't David Miller, it was John Smith, then I'm going to look at John Smith. I'm not going to throw that away and think, well, it's David and I'm done.

Speaker 4 No, I never do that. David's the prime suspect, a person of interest that we cannot exclude.
My job as a detective is to exclude.

Speaker 4 So if I I get information on David Miller, my job is to try to exclude him. And once I get him excluded, then I'm great.
But if I can't get him excluded, then he continues to be a potential suspect.

Speaker 4 So is it possible that there's two David Millers out there running around?

Speaker 4 I would say there's always that possibility. But it's awful funny.
When David Miller, went to prison, we had no more females that were attacked in their apartments and viciously stabbed.

Speaker 4 If there are, then they haven't come forward and we're not aware of it.

Speaker 1 Perhaps the most troubling part about David Miller's release is that the Department of Corrections has placed him in a temporary housing facility in Tallahassee, near Florida State University.

Speaker 4 Like it's a stone's throw to the college. I think the area he stays in is called Collegetown.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 4 there's a laundromat a block away from where he's staying and it's a 24-hour laundromat. Well, that's his M.O.
They put him right back where he does everything. And so it's like, this is unbelievable.

Speaker 1 When our team reached out to David Miller to see if he wanted to comment on Donna's case or speak to us, we didn't hear back.

Speaker 1 Donna's sister, Dawn, sees David Miller's recent release as perhaps the most pressing issue now, even more than getting a definite answer on what happened to her sister.

Speaker 1 A long time ago, I was like, I need closure. I need money.
No, that is not my thing anymore. I just want him not to be able to do this to anybody else.
That's all I want.

Speaker 1 Van Houten, Springer, and Don all agree. Miller should not be free.
And they're hoping that there is a way to connect him to old cases and get another conviction to stick.

Speaker 4 I would just like to be able to put him back in jail for another

Speaker 4 attack on somebody.

Speaker 4 Whether we'll ever be able to connect him to Donna Martin, I don't know. I never promise to solve cases.

Speaker 4 I never tell family I'll solve your case. I will tell you I will work diligently and do everything possible on the case.

Speaker 4 It may not come out to what you expect, but at least we'll keep working it.

Speaker 1 Springer is still the investigator assigned to Donna's case, and he hasn't given up hope that the evolving science could mean that there are new tests that could reveal a missing piece of the puzzle.

Speaker 4 In 2004, we formed our cold case unit. So every time we got a grant, we would go through all our open cases, which were probably 300 back then.

Speaker 4 And we would look at all the different evidence and see what we could do.

Speaker 4 So it's been a progression over the years.

Speaker 4 And I know Don thought that we're probably not working on

Speaker 4 Donna's case. But through the years, we had worked on it here and there.
We just never could come up with anything good because

Speaker 4 when they did the rape exam and they did everything, they never found semen, never found anything. So we were kind of in a dead-end thing.

Speaker 4 Her clothes, the problem with with her clothes,

Speaker 4 if he was dancing with her at the porterhouse, then you can assume that he may have shed some hair on her, maybe he rubbed up against her, maybe they're slow dancing.

Speaker 4 So if we got his DNA on anything like that,

Speaker 4 we're still dead in the water because the court, the defense attorney is going to say, well, he was dancing with her, so you would expect his DNA to be on her.

Speaker 4 So it's, you know, it's one of those cases that you have to find something in the apartment exclusive that you could put his DNA there. And so far, let's put it this way, we haven't got lucky yet.

Speaker 1 Springer had no comment on our question about any additional testing that could be done now that DNA testing has progressed. And the department has expanded their access to it.
We know that much.

Speaker 1 But he believes that there is significant potential that there are other crimes that could be connected to Miller.

Speaker 1 And he hopes that anyone who was assaulted in Boca Raton, Deerfield, or Delray Beach will come forward now.

Speaker 4 I think there's other people out there, other victims that, you know, that never came forward for one reason or another. If they're out there, they need to come forward.

Speaker 4 What bothers me, to me, and this is overall, to me, the human life is a precious, precious thing. And everybody deserves to live their life to the fullest and enjoy the things in life.

Speaker 4 And when you have somebody that takes a human life, they have now taken away the joy that I have got to see.

Speaker 4 My family grow, my grandkids, my great-grandkids, and a whole gamut of things that they took away from Donna

Speaker 4 that she can never enjoy.

Speaker 1 Dawn, of course, knows that more than anyone.

Speaker 1 I will say this.

Speaker 1 She lived more in her 53 years than a lot of people live that get to be 90. She really lived her life.

Speaker 1 She was just so alive.

Speaker 1 Let me tell you, she was brave. She always had a lot of plants, flowers and plants outside.
And I came home one day and she said, let's go out and water the plants.

Speaker 1 And she had them hanging on a bar. Her husband had set up bars and she had hanging plants everywhere.
And she started watering. She screamed bloody murder and get me the hoe, get me the hoe.

Speaker 1 There was a black snake in there. Now, if it had been me, I'd have run.
She chased that thing and he would turn and chase her. But she chased that snake down and killed it.

Speaker 1 And when she was done, I was like, God, Dee D, you are so brave. She said, I wasn't about to let that snake get in there and get there where I was afraid to water my plants.

Speaker 1 She was just, she was going to hit it head on, whatever it was. She was not one to back away from anything that would take her freedom away.
She was a blast. I'm telling you.

Speaker 1 If you were attacked in the Boca Raton area, Del Rey Beach area, or Deerfield Beach area in the 1980s or 90s, and you think that you might have been a victim of David Miller, you can contact those police departments with that information.

Speaker 1 Police are also interested in anyone who believes that they may have had something stolen by Miller.

Speaker 1 Like if you're missing things that could have been recovered by the search of his property, they also want to speak to anyone who may have seen David Miller around Donna's apartment complex on the evening of her murder.

Speaker 1 If so, you can call Primestoppers of Palm Beach County with tips at 1-800-458-8477.

Speaker 1 And we'll have contact information for all of the departments we listed in the show notes.

Speaker 1 The deck is an audio Chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis. To learn more about the deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

Speaker 1 So what do you you think, Chuck? Do you approve?

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