O/T I don't care if my wife slipped poison in my potatoes!
Billie
By Stephanie Doster
INQUIRER SUBURBAN STAFF
When Kevin Miller arrived at the state police barracks in Dublin in April and
heard that his wife had been charged with a murderous plot to poison his
shepherd's pie, he demanded her release, he said. And he has stood by her ever
since.
After all, he said, the plan hatched by Heather Marie Miller wasn't really a
homicidal scheme but a cry for help in a marriage that lacked communication.
The case "is really a domestic situation that got totally out of hand and got
complicated with the problems she's dealing with on her own," Miller, with
three of the couple's four children, said in a recent interview.
Heather Miller, 26, was sentenced Monday to 41/2 to 10 years in state prison,
leaving her husband to care for their two sons, ages 2 and 5, and two
daughters, ages 3 and 8.
"The visits will still be made," he said. "The kids will still have contact
with her."
Judge David W. Heckler said he would recommend that Heather Miller's sentence
be served at Cambridge Springs, a state prison for women in northwestern
Pennsylvania.
A Bucks County jury convicted Miller in September of concocting a scheme to
kill her husband by lacing his mashed potatoes with poisonous belladonna. She
was found guilty of attempted homicide, solicitation to commit homicide,
aggravated assault, and simple assault.
Although she testified that she abandoned the plan shortly before she was set
to mix the herb into her husband's meal, prosecutors said she would have gone
ahead and poisoned the potatoes had neighbors not first revealed the plan to
the police.
"I know what she did was wrong," Kevin Miller, 32, of Richlandtown, said,
adding that he also knows that his wife had been having affairs and that there
had been another alleged plan to kill him, in a mosh pit at a concert.
The belladonna plot, though, he said, was "simply nothing more than my wife
acting out with her problems . . . just another way of her showing her
unhappiness." In fact, he said, she continued cooking his meals while she was
free on bail.
But Michelle Henry, who prosecuted the case, said she thought that Kevin Miller
seemed frustrated with his wife's conduct while she was out on bail and that he
felt that she needed to go to prison. She stressed, however, that he continued
to support his wife and that he seemed at times reluctant to cooperate with the
commonwealth.
Heather Miller's attorney, John Fioravanti, said he planned to appeal. He said
the specifics of the Millers' marriage, deemed inadmissible in court by the
judge, were relevant to his client's state of mind as she hatched the plot in a
bizarre case that has involved black magic as well as infidelity and attempted
murder.
The jury, Fioravanti said, would have understood that his client never intended
to kill her husband if only it had been allowed to hear the gritty details of
the Millers' turbulent relationship.
Fioravanti added that his client was suffering from a post-traumatic stress
disorder caused by childhood emotional, physical and sexual abuse.
Kevin Miller said that he met his wife seven years ago while working at the
Seafood Shanty in Quakertown and that they quickly struck up a friendship. They
married in 1995, and about a year later, he adopted her daughter, now 8.
The problems began, he said, about four years ago. The couple had recently
bought a new car and settled on a house when he lost his job. A week later, his
wife, a stay-at-home mother at the time, learned that she was pregnant.
"The financial stress was bad," he said.
He acknowledged that he yelled at his wife and called her names. He described
his behavior as "a barrage, almost like a temper tantrum."
He said he would come home after working a 16-hour day at two jobs, as a
computer-systems manager and a manager at Wal-Mart, to find that his wife had
done nothing around the house.
"I'd go into a tirade," he said last month. "Then, later, I came to find out
she was dealing with severe depression."
Testifying for the defense during his wife's trial, he admitted that the
marriage had been "turbulent."
Despite that, he continues to believe that it will survive.
He will wait for his wife, he said.
"The D.A. said she was cold, methodical and calculating," Kevin Miller said.
"No. You just don't know what went on in my house."
~~You're just jellus because the voices are talking to me and not you!~
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blueyes
killing her husband? I mean I know she told the neighbors,
but she didn't even make an attempt. I see another movie
like "I love you to death" coming on.
Crystal
Billie <pusss...@aol.com> wrote in message
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