Trial Begins in Fatal Road Duel From 1980

RIVERSIDE — In a mysterious death case so old that files and photographs of the investigation have long been destroyed, a Riverside County man is finally standing trial on a charge of murder in the death of a 44-year-old woman whom he allegedly ran off a dark two-lane road in 1980.

Among the prosecution’s key witnesses is Linda Parrott, who on Thursday tearfully harked back nearly 20 years to the fearful night when, she said, she was a passenger in a pickup truck that Richard Craig Miller used as a battering ram to win a deadly cat-and-mouse game with the woman who was killed.

After striking the car driven by Alma Nappier at least five times from behind, Miller struck it a sixth time, Parrott testified, so hard that it spun off the asphalt, flipped several times and ended upside-down in a drainage ditch.

Speaking in a soft, somber voice, Parrott said Miller ran down to the crushed car, peered inside and, with the strong smell of gasoline permeating the area, lit his cigarette lighter and ignited the vehicle.

Only after it burst into flames, Parrott said, did she and Miller realize that Nappier’s body had been ejected from the vehicle. Parrott said she checked Nappier for a pulse, but that Miller refused to check on the woman’s condition and instead ordered her back into his truck.

“He said we have to get the hell out of here,” Parrott told the jury.

Parrott’s testimony capped the first day of a trial in which the primary witnesses will finally testify to what they say they kept secret for 19 years. Miller, wearing a coat and tie, appeared emotionless as the testimony proceeded.

The day’s first witness was his former wife, Barbara Lunsford, who did not see the crash but said that Miller physically and emotionally abused her and threatened that if she complained, he would to do the same thing to her that he did to a woman he ran off a road.

Lunsford said she did not believe her husband--even after he offered details of that night of March 28, 1980--until she happened to see a local newspaper article about it nearly a year later that Miller apparently had saved.

For years, Lunsford said, she kept her knowledge of the incident secret. In 1996, however, she knew that Miller was to face a judge in San Bernardino for failing to register as a sex offender. Lunsford said she wrote a letter to the court--which ended up in the thick case file--in which she made reference to the 1980 car crash.

Steve Utter, a sex crime investigator for the state Department of Justice who had been tracking Miller, saw the letter in 1998 and followed up on it. It was then that authorities realized that Nappier’s death may have been a murder, not an unexplained single-car crash.

Utter talked to Lunsford, but needed an eyewitness to the crime, and ultimately tracked down the even more reluctant Parrott, who had been Miller’s date that night at the Winchester Inn, a local country and western bar not far from Hemet.

Parrott could hardly bring herself to look at Miller on Thursday as she told of that evening’s events.

Parrott said she and Nappier had gotten into a verbal confrontation that night over a game of pool--a fight that Miller later joined.

Ultimately, Parrott and Miller left the bar, she said, with a friend of Miller’s in a second car. Miller realized that Nappier was following them for some reason. Soon, the cat-and-mouse game was underway, all three cars changing positions at various times.

For at least half of the time, however, Nappier’s car was sandwiched between Miller’s, in the back, and Miller’s friend’s car, in the front, and they boxed her in while speeding down the narrow highway.

“They were the cats and she was the mouse and she had no way out,” Parrott testified.

In his opening statement, Michael Belter, Miller’s defense attorney, acknowledged the car duel, but said that Nappier was a willing participant. When Nappier braked suddenly at one point to avoid hitting the car in front of her, Miller could not avoid striking her vehicle, the attorney said.

He asked the jury, “Is that murder? Manslaughter? Is that guilty? Is that not guilty?”

Mark Ackerman, the other driver involved in the incident, is scheduled to testify as a prosecution witness on Tuesday, when the trial resumes in Riverside Superior Court.

Options open to the jury are to convict Miller of first-degree murder, which carries a sentence of 25 years to life, or second-degree murder or lesser charges--or acquittal.