officers - The Black Vault

TilE LAST ANGRY WO~~
and down a back stairwell by bailiffs whose
sense of urgency was palpable. "You could see
the stress in their faces," Miller says. "Even
they were shaking. One of them said, 'Now you
know what Bonnie and Clyde felt like.'
"I had no idea what to expect, but coming
r 1
out into the light to face the shouting and the
anger and the placards was a sho-ck. I remember
wondering how they had gotten the signs
prepared so quickly."
. Weary, dazed and emotionally spent, Miller
found herself confronted by KTTV reporter
Barbara Schroeder, who stuck a microphone in
•
tcrprctation. In this case, it lasted about20 minutes," Miller says.
Then they were told, "If you have any problem when you get
home, just call 911."
At the sheriffs station in Thousand Oaks, where the jurors'
cars had been parked throughout the week, Miller saw the TV
cameramen carefully filming their license plates as they drove off.
She arrived home in Ventura that afternoon to find the TV from
which she had so carefully insulated herself for weeks blaring
with reports of the violence. "!looked at the anger and the hatred
and the ignorance, and it made me physically sick."
Within 15 minutes, a reporter from the Los Angeles Times was
on her doorstep. "He was very polite. He-told me he'd-found me
through the DMV, and right then, I knew my privacy was at an
he system is set up to protect the police. if you discredit the police,
'' ~, ...
her face and, as Miller
recalls, snarled, "Are
you too ashamed to
look in our camera?
-Do you know that
because of you the city
will bum?" (Schroeder
denies using those
words, claiming: "I'm
a :very credible journalist,
with plenty of
Emmy Awards on my
shelf. What I did say
was -'Why will none
of you talk to us? Are
you ashamed?'-because
one juror was
covering his head.
And I did ask one of them, 'Are you gUys aware of what's going
on downtown?' I'm very persistent, and I ask the questions
the public wants to know. But in no way, shape or form would
I say it like that.")
What followed, Miller says as she recalls ·the sheriff's bus
taking off across an empty lot with the press in hot pursuit, was
like a slow-motion scene from a nightmare. "I could see the
mass of people running and the angry faces and hear the scream·
ing and the turmoil, and I thought, These people are going to attack
the bus. I'm going,tb die."
Back at the hotel, the jurors literally threw their belongings
into suitcases. There was no time to pack, no time for farewells.
"We hugged quiqkly like a college graduating class. Somebody
·hastily passed around a piece of paper for names and addresses,
and that list became my most treasured possession. I had never
spent so much concentrated time with,anyone as I had with these
people-not even my husband. I didn't care ifi left my suitcase
behind, but I kept that list on my body."
Before they left, a deputy said that ''under the circumstances,''
the judge had decided to "temporarily" seal the record of the
jurors' names. "That 'temporarily' turned out to be subject to in-
....
62 LOS ANGELES MAGAZINE
end." Indeed, the next morning, the phone rang. It was an old
friend from Kentucky. "Hadn't!, she demanded, seen where they
pulled the guy out of the truck and beat him? I went to the bath·
rOOil} and .threw ·Up."
The Ventura police came by the Miller house and advised the
family to leave for a few days. Neighbors, most of whom had
been unaware that Miller was even on the jury, came by to find
out why the black-and-white was· ·parked in their driveway.
"Paul wanted to stay and defend the house," Miller recalls.
"But I told him, 'This house doesn't mean anything to me.' I
went back in and took the baby pictures off the wall and col·
lected the dog." .
That weekend she went with her husband to his law firm's
annual retreat in the Santa Ynez Valley. Getiin'g out of her car,
the wife of one of her husband's colleagues asked, "Were the
jurors that stupid?" Says Miller, ''It was like a knife. I couldn't
look at anyone for the rest of the time."
She stayed in her hotel room all weekend perfecting a letter,to
her local newspaper, the Ventura Star-Free Press, whichvhad
published the jurors' names and places of work. "How could you
be so irresponsible?" her letter begged. "I hope the damage you
have inflicted upon these brave people will someday heal. Why
did you turn against them?"
The same paper had earlier published an angry reader's let·
ter that proclaimed: "I feel ashamed to live in the same county
as those jurors.''
In the days that followed, Miller continued to react like someone
in mourning. "I watched the fires and the funerals on television
and thought, God, I was part of what triggered that. I
couldn't go out-1 couldn't even take the kids to school. I
pleaded with Paul to move to Montana or Idaho or somewhere
far away. I told him, 'You can be a bartender, and I'll wait
tables.' He thought I was crazy."
Her children sat in chapel at St. Paul's Parish Day School and
heard a young minister tell them the jury was wrong and stupid
to do what they'd done. Her daughter burst into tears. Ev·
erywhere Miller went, she heard the jury condemned. "It was so
easy just to blame the jury, because they can't fight back," she
says with a trace of bitterness.
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