Sharee Miller: A Beautiful Ending

Bruce Miller was a General Motors worker in Flint, Michigan, who also owned B&D Auto, a scrapyard in nearby Mt. Morris. In April 1999 he married his bookkeeper, Sharee Kitley, in Las Vegas. That summer Sharee began an online affair with Jerry Cassaday, a former Missouri lawman working at a Reno casino. She told him Bruce abused her and had Mafia ties, faked two pregnancies and blamed Bruce for both losses.

On November 8, 1999, someone shot Bruce dead at his desk in the yard office and took his wallet. Suspicion fell first on a business partner, and the case stalled. In February 2000 Cassaday took his own life in Missouri. His family found a briefcase holding his letter admitting the killing and naming Sharee as a planner, plus printed instant messages in which she gave him directions, parking advice and a phone signal. Call and AOL records matched.

Billed as the country’s first internet murder case to reach a jury, the trial ended in December 2000 with Sharee convicted of conspiracy and second-degree murder. She was sentenced to life plus 54 to 81 years. A federal judge set the verdict aside in 2008 over the suicide note, and she was freed on bond in 2009, but the conviction was reinstated in 2012 and upheld in 2014. In a 2016 letter she admitted her role.