By Kristine Thomas
As a teenager growing up in Silverton, Jim Miller spent some time riding in police cars.
“I was always in trouble,” he said. “Mostly, I got in trouble for MIP (minor in possession) or curfew violation.”
He said the police officers let him ride in the front seat and dreaded taking him home where they knew his mother, Sophie Miller, would give him an earful.
Despite his frequent encounters with the law, he said the Silverton police officers always treated him with respect. He learned that enforcing the law is not personal, that you can be friendly and fair while doing your job – something he remembered throughout his 40-year career.
“They told me the same thing my parents did,” he said. “That someday I would have to grow up.”
At Silverton High School he was a member of the wrestling and track teams. After he graduated in 1966, he joined the U.S. Navy Seabees and served three tours in Vietnam.
“When I joined the service, I knew they weren’t playing around and I knew I had to grow up,” he said.
In Vietnam he was responsible for building bridges and other construction projects.
“Once you go to war, nothing surprises you,” he said. “When I was serving in Vietnam, people were trying to kill you all the time.”
Completing his service, he went to California to visit his grandparents and decided to take a construction job. He recalls working on an apartment building and looking down to see a police car and thinking that a police officer’s job had to be more exciting than what he was doing.
“My dad told me I would spend one-third of my life at work,” he said. “He told me I should get a job that I wanted to get up in the morning to do.”
He credits his dad, Jim Miller, for teaching him his work ethic. “He was the hardest working person I knew and he had a great sense of humor. He never looked down on what I did, even if I got in trouble,” he said.
His dad served in Vietnam as a Navy Seabee. He died in 1985 at the age of 57 of cancer, determined to have been caused by Agent Orange.
“He was in frequent contact with it while building roads in Vietnam,” Miller said.
Realizing he needed a job that wasn’t “boring,” he asked to go for a ride along with the Manteca, Calif. police department, which turned out to be “pretty exciting with an armed robbery, fights and a weapons violation.”
Six hundred people applied for three jobs with the Manteca department, he said. His test scores were the second highest.
Subsequently Miller worked as a patrolman, a training officer, a detective, canine handler and narcotics officer. In 1980, he got a job with the Salem Police Department and moved back to Silverton.
With 40 years in law enforcement, Miller has plenty of intriguing stories to tell from his days as a patrolman to his work as undercover officer busting heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine dealers.
What he loved about his job, he siad, was that he felt he was making a difference in people’s lives.
Miller, 65, retired in 2010 after spending 30 years with the Salem police and 10 years with Manteca.
Needing to get away and clear his head, he rode his motorcycle from Silverton to Portland, Maine to visit a friend he had served with in in the Navy who was dying of cancer. Along the way he met people – from clergy to Hells Angels – who restored his faith that most people are good and decent. “Everywhere I went, people were all nice, polite and helpful,” he said.
The greatest challenge he faced after retirement was lack of purpose. For 40 years he had felt he had a useful purpose in life, Miller said. “When I retired, all of a sudden I didn’t. I wanted to continue to do something to make a difference in someone’s life.”
In July 2011, he received a phone call from the Salem Police Department asking if he would like to volunteer on cold cases, which are unsolved homicides. On Jan. 12, 2012, he began investigating the unsolved murder of Terri Lee Monroe, who was found dead on Feb. 13, 1981.
During the course of the investigation, he uncovered a link to convicted serial killer William Scott Smith. Smith was already in prison for the murders of three women, serving three life sentences. Miller noticed Monroe was murdered in the same way as Smith’s three victims.
“Using his signature method of operation, he briefly stalks his victims before kidnapping, beating, raping, and strangling them to death with a rope, a piece of clothing or some other device. After killing them, he places his victims in a body of water, usually a river or stream,” Miller said.
Miller learned Smith had attended Silverton High, where he was a member of the wrestling and football teams as a freshman. Miller copied pages from a yearbook with photographs of Smith. He wrote Smith a letter asking if he could visit him and discuss the Monroe murder.
On Feb. 28, 2012, Miller and Salem Detective Jamie Vasas interviewed Smith at the Washington State Penitentiary.
“When I got there and asked him about the murder of Terri Monroe, he said he didn’t know anything about it and had never been in that bar,” he said. “I told him I knew he was there at the Museum Tavern and that he was responsible.”
It took a bit of bantering with the 6-foot, 3-inch, 300-pound man.
“I told him that I knew Jack Berger and that he was my wrestling coach too,” Miller said. “I told him I knew he was fifth in state for wrestling as a freshman for his weight and got hurt playing football the next year and his life spiraled downhill because he couldn’t participate in sports.”
Miller gave Smith the yearbook pictures.
“He told me, ‘OK I will tell you about it.’ And he confessed to the murder,” Miller said. When he asked Smith why he didn’t confess right away since he was already in prison, Smith told him that he wanted somebody to talk with.
“And he wanted to see how much I knew,” he said. “He is a sociopath with no emotions.”
In a letter to the Statesman Journal, Viola Moore thanked Miller for solving the murder of her “beloved 21-year-old daughter” – a case that took 32 years to solve.
“Jim and detectives like him work after retirement on a voluntary basis to bring answers to people like me,” she wrote. “Jim was so kind and I appreciate the hard work that he put into finding my daughter’s killer. Thank God we have people like him who give their personal time to provide answers to crime victims.”
By solving a cold case, Miller said, he brings “vengeance for the victim’s family. There is a satisfaction knowing the person who killed their loved one didn’t get away with doing it.” He is continuing to work on cold cases from the late 1970s and the 1980s.
He understands given his teenage years his parents or friends could have given up on him. But they didn’t. And because they didn’t he eventually found a way to make a difference.
“No matter how mediocre I was as an athlete or student, my dad always gave me encouragement and made me feel special,” Miller said.
“It wasn’t until I was in the military that I began to feel that I did a little better job than the average person. And when I became a police officer I found that I had better than average skills to do the job.”
