The Deck - Eula “Kay” Miller (10 of Diamonds, Texas)

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

Our card this week is Eula "Kay" Miller, the 10 of Diamonds from Texas.26-year-old Eula, who most people knew as Kay, was a strong and independent woman. She lived her life to the fullest – working hard and playing harder. But in the summer of 1970, that would all change when someone took her life,  and that someone is still out there… If you know anything about the murder of Eula “Kay” Miller in Odessa, Texas, in July of 1970, please contact Detective Gonzales, the cold case investigator for the Odessa PD, at 432-335-4926. If you prefer to stay anonymous, tips can be called into Odessa Crime Stoppers at 432-333-8477 or made at the Odessa Crime Stoppers website at three 333tips.org View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/eula-kay-miller Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org. The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AF Text Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!

Our card this week is Eula K. Miller, the 10 of diamonds from Texas. 26-year-old Eula, who most people knew as K, was a strong and independent woman. From what I can gather, she lived her life to the fullest, working hard and playing harder. But in the summer of 1970, that would all change when someone took her life. And that someone is still out there. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. It It was 2.30 in the afternoon on Thursday, July 16, 1970, when an assistant manager of the hilltop apartments made her way to apartment L1 with a woman named Brenda O'Neill by her side.

Brenda, who also lived in the building, had noticed some flies on apartment L1's windows. Now, it was hot, we're talking summertime in Odessa, Texas, so maybe flies alone wouldn't be alarming. But Brenda had also smelled a strong odor emanating from the apartment. Even more concerning, Brenda couldn't get anyone to answer the door. And this wasn't some random stranger.

Kay Miller, who lived in the apartment, was a close friend of hers. So I imagine both Brenda and the assistant manager knew that something was seriously wrong. But I'm not sure anyone could have prepared for what they found in that apartment. Here's Detective Lauren Gonzalez, who works cold cases for the Odessa PD. Kay Miller was on her bed at an angle with her feet hanging off the bed. She was completely nude and was already in a state of decomposition. The bed was unmade and there was bunched up sheets or bedding on the edge of the bed.

It looked like there was a very significant amount of blood soaked into the mattress. They couldn't even really tell what injuries she had just by looking at her at that time. They noted in the report that they didn't see any signs of a struggle in the apartment. An autopsy done that same day would reveal that she suffered six stab wounds to the face, chest, and neck area, with the most damaging being that neck wound,

which caused fatal hemorrhaging. As violent as this attack sounds, no defensive wounds were found on Kay's body. There was also no sperm detected either when they did a vaginal swab. But that doesn't mean sexual assault can be ruled out. Now they sent a knife and a pair of scissors that they found in Kay's apartment to be tested,

along with a bloody mattress cover. But remember, this is 1970, so the days of high-tech CSI and DNA were way off. This was going to take good old detective work to solve. And luckily, they did find one very interesting clue that gave them their first lead. As soon as they went into the apartment, there was a note on the floor right inside of the door. So, it was a folded piece of yellow paper, and it said, quote, just come on in, I'm in bed

and might not hear you, and was signed K. On the back of the note was the name and address of a Don Barnett, and he had written, write me soon. Police knew they needed to find Don. So they started the only way they knew how. They're at the crime scene and then working their way out. They canvassed the apartment building and began interviewing those who knew Kay, as well as those who didn't. And in doing so, the timeline of when Kay could have been murdered started to firm up. The assistant manager of the building told police that on Sunday the 12th, around 3.30 in the afternoon, she saw Kay in person when she'd come in to pay her rent.

But the next day, Monday the 13th, at around 10 a.m., that same woman had briefly gone into Kay's apartment and she thought she saw her sleeping, but now she realized what she may have actually seen. The manager had opened Kay's front door to let a man exterminate the apartment. And when she had gone in, she saw a woman laying on the bed and she was nude. So they immediately left the apartment and locked the door because she thought the victim was sleeping. They talked to that exterminator and he confirms the assistant manager's story. He was also able to see a corner of Kay's bed from the doorway, and he remembers thinking it was strange that there were no sheets on it.

He also thought it was odd that Kay didn't wake up, considering how loud the assistant manager knocked, but hindsight is 20-20. Now this was three days before Kay was officially found. And knowing that she had been alive just the day before on the 12th, Detective Gonzalez points out that Kay most likely wouldn't have been in a noticeable state of decay yet. So Kay was likely murdered sometime

between Sunday, July 12th, after she went to pay her rent, and Monday, July 13th, before 10 a.m. And the autopsy roughly confirmed that assumption. There was one account from a neighbor that added some confusion into the mix. This neighbor said that he saw a man visiting her apartment on the 13th, potentially the day she was murdered.

He was walking through the apartments to get to his apartment. He noticed a man at the door of apartment L1, which is Kay's apartment. And he stated the man was middle-aged, wearing a dark suit and tie, and he was approximately 5'7 or 5'8 tall, weighing about 140 to 150 pounds. And then he had two boxes from Church's chicken in his hands. He knocked on the door and he could hear a woman's voice from inside saying, who is it?

The man said, it's me, and the door opened. Police had pulled a fingerprint off a chicken box in Kay's apartment. So, I mean, this could be one of the last people to see Kay. But here's the problem. The neighbor told police that he saw this guy at around 1.30 p.m. And police already knew from that assistant manager and the exterminator that Kay was most likely deceased before then. So something wasn't adding up. And the neighbor ended up recanting his statement when the police brought him in for a polygraph. He told them that while he still believed he saw this guy, he now couldn't remember

the exact day. Police went and paid a visit to Church's Chicken, and they talked to the manager and one of the employees there, but oddly, they seemed to remember Kay buying chicken on the 12th, not a man. Now, sure, they could have misremembered. I mean, this was 10 days after the fact. But either way, police left with no new information about who this guy seen at Kay's apartment could have been.

In the meantime, police had discovered that Kay worked at the tempo club as a go-go dancer. So when they went there to talk to some of her coworkers, they learned that Kay had last worked the Saturday before, which would have been the 11th. It was a normal shift, she made about 250 bucks, which wasn't a bad night for 1970. But no one remembered anything out of the norm.

However, there was some talk from friends that Kay was dating multiple men, and that she was also a sex worker. Now who those men she was dating were, they didn't know. Doesn't seem like there were a lot of names being thrown around right away. But police did have one name. Dawn, written on that note in her apartment. And then the next day, July 17th, they got another name.

Lonnie. That approximately 3 a.m., an officer received a call from an unknown male that stated that a black male named Lonnie was trying to borrow a knife from him Saturday night. He did not state the time. The subject Lonnie played pool at the Caprice club on Andrews Highway and this is where he was supposed to have tried to borrow the knife. Now, this on its own might not have risen to the top of their priority list on day two. But when someone else reaches out to them that same day with the same name and tells them that Kay's friend Brenda had more information about Lonnie but was too scared to tell them what she knew,

well that caught their attention. Brenda had told this person that Kay had been working for Lonnie and that she owed him money. The sum of the amount that she owed him was believed to be $250. Police already knew Kay had made $250 at the club that week. Several witnesses also said Kay had talked openly about the money she had made and what she planned to spend it on. And now they had two tips about a guy named Lonnie that she might have owed money to. It's unclear if police ever asked Brenda about any of this, but they had to have wondered if Lonnie finally came to collect, or if Lonnie felt Kay was withholding what she owed him. I mean, it is a possible potential motive for her murder. But when they ended up finding Lonnie, it didn't bring all the answers that they were

hoping for. He said that he had shot Poole with her a few times and drank with her several times, but he had never been out with her or to her apartment. They administered a polygraph examination and the polygrapher expressed that he felt like Lani did not kill Kay Miller and was not involved with her in any way except the way in which she stated. So it seems like Lonnie was crossed off the list,

but he wasn't the only one with a potential motive. Pretty much anyone Kay had been in contact with or dated in the past was being brought to the attention of police. And because she worked at a club and was involved in sex work, their short list grew very long. One of the most promising leads they ran down came on July 18th. Police received a call from a guy who lived in Kermit, Texas, about 30 minutes from Odessa,

and he had something very interesting to tell them. He stated that he had found a billfold in the attic of his house, and that it belonged to the girl who had been killed in Odessa the other day. A driver's license in the billfold, aka wallet, identified it as belonging to Kay. Now how this guy gets Kay's wallet remained to be seen. So they send detectives to Kermit.

He said that he had been working in the attic on his, I guess, TV wiring when he found the billfold on top of the trap door that goes into the attic of his house. He said he didn't think much of it at first, but when he showed it to his wife, she said it belonged to that girl in Odessa that was killed. The man told police that he had just moved into the house recently, meaning whoever owned the home before him could be their killer. They ended up contacting a man who admitted that he had dated Kay Miller and she had at one point left her wallet in his car. And when he got back home to Kermit, he discovered it in the car, but he hid it in his attic so that his wife wouldn't find out that he had seen her.

They also discovered that Kay had replaced her driver's license and that there was a wallet of hers found in her apartment by police. So it all backed up this guy's story. But luckily, other tips were still coming in, giving police hope. Detectives were contacted at the Odessa Police Department by two individuals. They had told detectives that Kay had a boyfriend named Don that would call her long distance and give her money. Tuesday, which would have been July 14, 1970, Don had gone to the tempo club and sat down

in order to drink. He did not ask about Kay at all. So we're back to Don. And one of these two individuals thought it was odd that he didn't ask about Kay considering their relationship. Police couldn't seem to pin Don down though. I mean, he was clearly out and about, not hiding or anything, but police were having a hard time

getting a sit down with him. So they put most of their focus into chipping away at the list of Kay's dates and or clients. And the next name on their list was a guy named Michael. According to Detective Gonzalez, Michael had first met Kay just a day before she was possibly murdered. He says that on Saturday night, July 11th, he went to Odessa and went to the Stardust

Club. After he went there, he went to the Cow Palace, and then after he went there, he went to the Caprice Club. And it's here where he met Kay. Michael tells police that they left the club and went to her apartment at about 5 a.m., which made it Sunday, July 12th. He says they went to bed around 7 a.m. He gives a description of the clothing she was wearing, a red go-go suit with a black

skirt. He thinks she went to bed with red pants and a red bra on. They had sex and then they went to sleep until about 11 or 12. Michael told police they had sex several more times before he left her apartment at around 4 p.m. He didn't just give them details about his night with Kay. According to Detective Gonzalez, he continued to provide them with more information

about his whereabouts for the next day. But if Michael left Kay at around 4 p.m. on the 12th, and we know she was known to be dead at 10 a.m. on the 13th, this narrowed the window of when Kay could have been murdered. It also put a spotlight directly on Michael because police were not able to find anyone who saw Kay alive after he said he left her. So the police had Michael take a polygraph.

Several charts were run asking him questions about his story and when he left her apartment and if he knew anything about her death or if he killed her. In my opinion, Michael Taylor was truthful about his story and did not kill Cade Miller and has no knowledge of the murder. It seems like they were kind of clearing a lot of people from suspicion using polygraph examinations, which is really not a good practice that we know now. It does sound like police were also comparing fingerprints to the one found on the chicken box in Kay's room. But it's unclear how many of the people they interviewed they did this for,

like Michael, for instance, or Lonnie. And there were still two people that the police hadn't had a chance to talk to yet, Don and the mystery guy who brought Chicken to Kay's place. A man without a name is pretty hard to find, so it's no surprise that they got to Don first. The police are finally able to speak with him on August 4th, 1970. So he says that he had first met Kay Miller at the Tempo Club Odessa, approximately around the last week of May. Kay and Don hung out, but eventually he moved to Houston.

And after that, Van Horn. He said he'd come back into town on the 14th, the day after Kay was known to be dead. Don said he stopped by her apartment several times to contact her, but she wasn't home. He even saw that note on the door that Kay had left for someone about her being asleep and telling them they should come in, but he said that the door was locked. Eventually, he took that note off, wrote his information on the back of it, and slid it

under the door where police later found it. So this huge clue police had found day one really was nothing at all. I assume they looked at his prints, but I do know for sure that he did a polygraph and was cleared based on that. I think the general consensus was, if this guy did kill Kay, why would he leave his contact information

for police to find when they would have likely never gotten to him without that note? Now in December, police finally got back the test results from the knife and pair of scissors that were taken from Kay's apartment. But they determined that there was no blood on either of those. Although test results on the bloody mattress were a little more promising. They were able to recover some trace evidence, including pieces of skin, hair, and a small pebble. But they were unable to determine if the hair was of male or female origin.

And they pretty much wrote back that they would only be able to do hair comparisons if samples were sent for that. So if detectives had a clear suspect, they could make a hair comparison. Maybe promising to them in the 70s. Pretty dicey today, unless you're talking about using hair for DNA and not just eyeballing it. We asked Detective Gonzalez if they compared it to Kay's hair to rule her out. And what other people they might have compared it to, like Lonnie or Don or Michael. But she said there are no records of hair comparisons being done at the time, and it is possible that the hair might have belonged to Kay based on the description of it alone.

So at that point, all police could do was keep digging, hoping something would break their way. The police were even looking into other crimes committed in the neighborhood. Stuff like that. They were just really looking for leads, taking any tips that they could get. Ask and you shall receive. This is when a tip came in from a former employee of this guy named Ron. The former employee became concerned when Ron told him that he knew Kay, and another murdered woman named Ruth Maynard,

whose partially clothed body had been found in February of 1971. You see, there was something police couldn't ignore happening in Odessa, Texas at the time. So, starting in 1968, women were starting to go missing in Odessa. They would turn up bloated corpses in vacant fields and things like that. And they didn't even have that language serial killer back then, but yes, they were wondering if this was one person doing this. So there was a lot of speculation about it in the media and the public. And these were really big stories at the time.

Between 1968 and 1971, Kay was one of six women in Odessa and surrounding areas who were brutally murdered. Some found indoors, others found disposed of in remote areas outside. Looking at this case now, Detective Gonzalez doesn't think Kay's case is connected to any other. But back then, they didn't know if they were connected or not, or who was responsible for any or all of them. So in February of 1971, the police interviewed Ron. He admitted to dating Kay for a while, but he claimed that he had

broke it off when she allegedly said she wanted to marry him. He told police that the last time he saw her was at a club about a week before she was murdered. He also admitted to meeting the other woman, Ruth, through a mutual friend, but he said he'd only met her once. So Ron, like so many others police had talked to to could be involved in Kay's murder But there was still no smoking gun saying that he was or anyone was and any Consideration that maybe he was connected with Ruth's murder or that Ruth's murder was connected to Kay's Faded and then just got muddied and honestly kind of set aside when two men named Johnny Meadows and Tommy Ray Neeland were later convicted of two of the six Odessa murders.

Now, Johnny Meadows also confessed to murdering three other women, including Ruth Maynard. But that confession was eventually thrown out, leaving some of the murders, including Kay's and Ruth's, technically unsolved. The next big potential lead that came their way was in September of 1971. The police heard that a woman named Dorothy, who was one of the managers at the hilltop apartments

where Kay lived and her husband LT, who was like a maintenance man at the building, they had had a fight about LT being in Kay's apartment shortly before she was killed. And there was something else suspicious about Dorothy and her husband. They both left their jobs at Hilltop Apartments on July 17th, which would have been the day after Kay's body was found. Detectives went to Lubbock, Texas and interviewed Dorothy. And she denies ever catching her husband LT in Kay Miller's apartment or making any threats to her husband in reference to Kay Miller.

She also told police that her husband had a solid alibi for the timeframe of Kay's murder. She says she knew where her husband was on July 12th and 13th of 1970 because he and someone named George had gone to Lubbock and she had talked with him over the phone. While it doesn't sound like police interview LT, it does look like they were able to get fingerprints from him and Dorothy in an attempt to match them to the print on the box of chicken in Kay's room. But those prints weren't a match.

And while we're on the subject of the box of chicken once again, I'd like to just add here that that mystery man who brought the food to Kay's apartment, police have never been able to identify him. And here's the thing, even if they could, it doesn't mean that this was Kay's killer. But who her killer could be remained a mystery. Because over the decades, nothing led Odessa police to make an arrest. Looking at this case now, in 2024, Detective Gonzalez acknowledges that there are a lot of challenges in this case.

Just the sheer number of names alone makes it difficult. The original file on this case contained an envelope labeled photos of suspects, and it included 27 pictures of 27 different men. There are so many people that you have to check out, and I don't have information in the file showing that their alibis were confirmed. The large number of tips hasn't helped narrow things down either. Some are wilder than others, like the one that said Kay was killed because she had knowledge of a bank robbery.

But Detective Gonzalez is hopeful that technological advancements could finally lead to a break in this case. Things we're going to keep doing to continue the investigation is looking into what forensic evidence we might have, because we do have newer technology now. What, if anything, can come of further testing is unknown. Although at the time of this recording, Detective Gonzalez did inform us that the print from the chicken box was entered into APHIS, but unfortunately there were no hits.

And while trying to determine what other evidence they still had in their possession after all these years, including that bloody mattress cover and the hair and skin samples taken from it. Detective Gonzalez stumbled across something else. A piece of evidence not previously known to modern investigators was unearthed during our reporting that may open up new leads in the investigation. And this piece of evidence, it is literally so new that Detective Gonzalez didn't want to say anything

about it on the record, but it has made her hopeful that there are new investigative leads even all these years later. And there's something else that Detective Gonzalez is hopeful about. Despite how long this case has lingered unsolved, she thinks that time may help it in the long run.

The good thing about cold case investigations is sometimes the passage of time can give us the advantage and people change over time. Their lifestyles change, especially in cases like these, and they may be more forthcoming with the police later on. So that's kind of my hope in this case is that we'll have some people come forward and talk to us more about things they may have not wanted to communicate to police at the time. Specifically, Detective Gonzalez would love to talk to Kay's friend, Brenda O'Neill, if she's still out there somewhere. She believes Brenda could still hold information

that could help this case. While looking through the file, Detective Gonzalez couldn't locate any formal statement that the police had taken from Brenda. However, an ex-husband of Brenda's, who she was dating at the time, would later tell Detective Gonzalez that Brenda did give some kind of verbal statement

at the police station. Now Brenda and her ex were out of town when Kay was most likely murdered. So if there was a written statement, maybe investigators at the time didn't think it was all that important and it got lost over time. But there is also another possibility that her statement was never officially taken, which means police might not know everything Brenda knew at the time. So Brenda, if you're listening,

or if someone who knows Brenda is listening, please get in touch. And this goes for that mystery man with the chicken box too. Police would love to know who he was. For Detective Gonzalez, solving this cold case isn't just about getting justice for the victim. It isn't just about closing another case either.

It's also about honoring those who came before her. I want to solve this for Kay, but also for those investigators that worked so hard on this case for so long. If you know anything about the murder of Eula K. Miller in Odessa, Texas in July of 1970, please contact Detective Gonzalez, who is the cold case investigator for the Odessa PD. You can reach her at 432-335-4926. If you prefer to stay anonymous, tips can also be called in to the Odessa Crime Stoppers at 432-333-8477 or you can make it at the Odessa Crime Stoppers website at 333tips.org. The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.

To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?