CRIME HUNTER: Did online sex chats drive wife to first internet murder?
· Toronto Sun
Bruce Miller was dead as a doornail.
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The cause? Someone had parked a bullet in his chest.
His brother and sister-in-law found the quiet, Nascar-loving man dead behind the counter of his Flint, Michigan B&D Auto Salvage yard. The twice-divorced Miller had been looking forward to a well-deserved retirement that would never come to pass.
Was the murder on Nov. 8, 1999, a robbery gone awry?
Cops talked to young wife
Homicide detectives spoke with the dead man’s young wife, Sharee Miller , who at 26 was two decades younger than her husband. She had started working as a bookkeeper at the yard and then things turned romantic between boss and his “vivacious” employee.
By April 1999, Bruce, 47, and Sharee had married, blending their two families, and he considered her to be the perfect wife.
“Just on the face, it had all the earmarks of an armed robbery,” retired Sherriff’s Det.-Lieut. Kevin Shanlian told Oxygen , adding that Miller was known to carry $2,000 in his shirt pocket. “Money was missing, his wallet was missing.”
For her part, Sharee fingered former co-worker John Hutchinson for the murder. The winsome blond confessed she had a sexual affair with Hutchinson in the days before she and Miller got hitched.
And “Bad blood” remained between the two men.
Ex-beau owed hubby $2,000
In addition to her own ample charms, she revealed that Hutchinson had borrowed $2,000 from Bruce Miller and hadn’t repaid it. Her husband also suspected his employee was stealing and playing fast and loose with VIN numbers.
Now, Hutchinson found himself under an unwelcome glare as the prime suspect.
As for Sharee, months before Bruce was murdered she had discovered the hedonistic glories of adult online chat rooms. The flaxen-haired beauty was looking for vacation spots when she hit the perverted pot of gold.
And she began living out her sexual fantasies with strangers online, using more than 20 aliases. Her handles included Horny 7241 and IWANTTOBELAID.
Miller grew up poor
Sharee grew up poor in a trailer park and all she had going for her to escape the grinding poverty were her looks — and skills of manipulation.
Jerry Cassaday was a former top-ranked Kansas City homicide detective who by 1999 was working a Reno casino and crashing on the shoals of a broken marriage. Sharee met Cassaday on a girl’s trip to Reno and that was that.
In her absence, she would send him sexually explicit emails and videos.
For his part, the former cop signed off with: “your fool for life, big daddy.”
She told the former cop that Bruce Miller physically and sexually abused her. One such beatdown led to her miscarrying Cassaday’s baby. He was a pigeon waiting to be plucked.
Conversation turned to murder
Who knows when, where and how the conservation turned to murder. But it did – and Sharee was adamant she wanted Bruce taken off the board.
Her husband was oblivious to both her sexual and murderous machinations.
“It was crazy that a person 800 miles away had been talked into coming up here, committing a murder, going back, and leaving no evidence,” Shanlian said. “How did she get him to commit this murder?”
For starters, Cassaday was a “fool” swallowing her canon of lies, hook, line and sinker. He even believed her when she claimed Bruce kicked her in the stomach, causing her to miscarry.
By February 2000, John Hutchinson was still the prime suspect. He had failed a lie detector test and investigators felt the end was near.
And then detectives in Michigan received a phone call from a Missouri lawyer. By now, Jerry Cassaday was dead by his own hand, courtesy of a bullet. His lawyer said he left a note instructing him to go to the police with a briefcase full of information. Letters explained why the decorated cop was topping himself.
Circumstantial evidence overwhelming
The haul included the sexxx-rated messages, a hard drive, directions to Bruce Miller’s yard and instructions from black widow Sharee. Then there were the raunchy, incriminating videos.
She told him: “Just do it and get the hell out of there.”
Sharee Miller – no shock here – denied everything. But as the evidence mounted, the murderous vixen began backtracking and confessed to an affair with Cassaday. He was obsessed. The tapes were blackmail. Her filthy exchanges had been hacked.
And when Bruce Miller pegged out? Sharee dumped Cassaday. And besides, she had a new boyfriend.
“I think she would have gotten away with it if she had not dumped her boyfriend a month later,” said Ives Potrafka, a Sheriff’s sergeant who worked the case.
Court TV offered gavel-to-gavel coverage and the case riveted the nation in December 2000. It was the first internet murder. Still, the case was largely circumstantial, even though Sharee was slated to get big social security and life insurance payouts.
And then she opened her mouth
All-in-all, the legal landscape didn’t look bad for Sharee – until she testified against the advice of her lawyers.
“Once again, that suggests her hubris. She thought she could get anyone to believe her. She thought she was going to sell that whole jury on her little innocent act,” Jury foreman Michael Thorp later said.
Sharee Miller was convicted of second-degree murder and conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and sentenced to life without parole in December 2000. She later admitted she wanted Cassaday to murder her hubby.
Sharee feared Bruce would discover her affair, ditch her and leave her broke.