Original subtitles

That night, Banyan Street was just as lonesome as could be.

Help! Help! Help me! Help!

Help me! Help!

So Lucille Miller was the only person who would ever see that horrifying

The brightness of the fire against the darkness of the night.

The rush of flame.

The metal screaming.

And the most awful thing of all.

A man trapped inside the car.

Just lays and burns where Lucille's husband Cork had been when she ran for

There was no person left.

The accident happened on a very dark, small, little country road. Orange

on both sides of the road.

On one side, the groves were set down.

There are no streetlights.

And my mother would not have known where the nearest house was.

And in fact, the nearest house was a long ways away.

Operator. San Bernardino Sheriff's Department.

Tell them to hurry, please.

Lucille arrived about 1 .45 a .m.

Are they coming? Are they coming? Yes, they're coming.

She's smudged. She's dirty.

There's the smell of burnt hair.

He's all burnt.

What do I say to the kids?

What do I tell them?

She's confused about the events, but she knows the last time she saw her

husband, he was black in the car, burning.

She's hysterical, and she says, what am I going to tell my children?

There can't be a casket.

There's no person.

Okay, ma 'am, I'm going to need to ask some questions about the accident.

My mother is brought back to the scene, and the fire department has arrived

there, and there are sheriffs there, and my father's in the passenger seat of

the car.

Prior to the accident, where were you coming from?

Yeah, we needed milk.

So my mother tells the police, the kids had gone to sleep.

Cork had a migraine, something which he suffered from for many years.

Do we have any hot chocolate?

Oh, yeah, I'll make you some.

Thank you.

And that's when she learned that they were out of milk, not only for the hot

chocolate, but for the kids' breakfast in the morning. They really needed that.

My mom came in to tell me that they were going down the hill to get milk and to

go and get anything.

It was like a five or ten mile trip to do that.

And he wanted to go along with her.

My mother drove because my father was sick.

My mother recalled reaching over and locking the door.

Because she was concerned that my father leaning against it, I think, might open

it. So she wanted to make sure that he was secure.

So Cork and Lucille leave the house. It's about 11 .30 p .m.

The first store that we went to was closed.

So we decided to come all the way out here.

So now they had to go to the next place that they knew would be open, which was

across town.

They went to a Mayfair market there that was, I think, a 24 -hour store.

San Bernardino was growing in the 60s, but it was still small enough that

knew each other.

So when the woman with the milk walked by me that night, she was a familiar

face. I didn't know her name was Lucille until later.

Lucille pops in, gets the milk.

Cork has remained in the vehicle. She comes back out, gets in the car, and

they're going to head home again.

We were just driving down the road, and the car just pulled to the right.

Lucille tells police that as she's driving up the windy road, she's going

35 miles per hour.

And the car just jerked to the right and jerked off the road. She didn't know

what happened.

And the next thing she knew, there were flames.

She doesn't... know how they started she's not sure how long they were there

before she recognized them she runs to his side of the cart

and i realized that cork was asleep and his door

was locked and so i um i went and i found a rock to break the

window

But it's so hot at this point, she can't reach in and even open the car door for

him.

She looks around. She finds a stick.

She thinks, maybe I can put that through the open window and somehow push my

husband out of the car.

But he's got 60 pounds on her. She's not able to help him at all.

And worse yet, he's covered in a blanket, which is starting to

I just ran to get help.

The police get closer and take a look, and what they see corroborates Lucille's

story.

The milk cartons are in the back seat.

There had been a rock thrown through the window, as she said it was.

Nearby, police find a four -foot -long branch that was partially burned that

corroborates that she tried to use this to push her husband out of the vehicle.

There were skid marks in the gravel along the side of the road.

And the car wheels were turned in the direction that she said that the car

turned off to the right.

And there's a nail embedded in the front right tire.

Eventually, it was christened the Inland Empire.

But back in 1964, the miles of desert scrub rolling down from the San Gabriel

Mountains was just starting to become another suburb in the Southern

sunshine dream.

A place that was all about the new, the possible, the future.

But it wasn't about those things on this morning.

I can only imagine how awful that night must have been, seeing a man, your

husband, die like that.

Look at that.

But in the morning, things took an even darker turn, because that's when the

police discovered a hole in Lucille's story.

One that might mean this was all much uglier than just a terrible accident.

The suspicion really sets in when they see the gas can.

The sheriff's department was still sifting through the smoldering mess and

picking through the shell of the burnt -out car.

when they let Lucille Miller leave the site of the accident.

She's taken her back home around 6 a .m.

I wake up that morning of the accident.

And there was a police car there.

So I walked across to the other side of the house, and there she was, in the

middle of her bed, in a fetal position.

Your father's dead.

I can't.

I can't talk.

Can you just give me a little quiet?

My sister had gone in and my brother had gone in. By the time that I came into

her bedroom and my mother was sort of tangled up in the sheets of her bed and

her face was puffy and she had been crying and she was out of it.

And it was a very strange moment because I had no idea what had happened.

My brother just said daddy's dead

And

I still have a few questions that I need to ask so once you get cleaned up

coming out of the living room

If you look at the Miller family in 1964, they were a very upwardly mobile

family. These need to stay in the front of the house. I want the furniture to go

ahead and get into the back of the house. That way we can unpack boxes and

that. Kids, come on, come on, come on over here, come here.

Cork made a really good living as a dentist. He made something like $25 ,000

year, which would have been $200 ,000 a year by today's standards.

My father was handsome, and he was funny.

Lucille! What? Come on, come on, come on. No, come on, come on. I just want to

get a quick shot.

I'm coming, I'm coming.

Okay.

My mother thought he was talented and she thought he was beautiful.

Okay. Here we are.

She had energy.

Life was exciting to her and meant to be lived.

Here, honey, you get in, get in.

Okay, everybody.

Right there. Right there, okay.

From what I understand, The Millers had been on the same climb upwards that we

all were trying for.

A beautiful family, a bigger house, a dream life.

Oh, oh, oh, I broke it.

She wanted to do well and be part of the community.

My mother was a small -town girl, but she didn't perceive herself

as a small -town girl.

She wanted to build a house.

The farther up into the hills you are, the wealthier you are.

And I think that's what she was partly aspiring to.

My mother had a big window put in the living room that you could sit in and

out. She loved the view. She loved the lights.

Lucille suffers from something that I think of as being a particularly

California affliction.

This antipathy to the old. You can't just have a different house. You can't

another house. It has to be a new house that nobody's ever lived in before. All

the appliances are untouched.

So we built this house, and it was a big house for us.

Bigger than anything we had lived in.

Beautiful dreamer, still lost in your dream.

Mrs. Miller, can you tell me how long you've had the car?

Oh, only a few months. It was basically brand new.

I don't know what I'm going to do.

This has just been such a terrible year.

You know, my dear friend Elaine just died.

We were very close with the Haydens, Arthwell and Elaine.

And Elaine Hayden, who was one of her best friends, died earlier that year.

And that kind of rocked my mother.

Before that, we were in this really awful car accident, Debbie and I.

About four months before my father died, my sister and my mother had been

driving on Banyan, the very same road, and they got into an accident, the car

that ran a stop sign, and my sister went through the windshield, and I believe

my mother broke her jaw.

I was bleeding profusely. My mother thought I lost my eye because it sliced

eyelid. I just can't stop thinking about it.

It's going to be fine, okay?

The accident really shook up Debbie, and she fixated on this windy road and how

dangerous it was.

And I said, Daddy?

Are there the statistics that anyone in our family would ever have an accident

on Banyan again?

The odds have to be one in a million.

I hope so.

I know so.

Something in my little heart felt we were hurling towards something terrible.

And it was less than six months when he died on that same street.

So at the scene, the police are looking at things.

And it doesn't quite add up to the story that my mother had told them.

You have this gas can in the backseat that did topple over.

However, the milk cartons are in the backseat, but they're upright.

They see the skid marks, but puzzlingly, they're straight.

They're not the kind of swerve you would imagine.

They start to think that this wasn't an accident.

But this was, in fact, Lucille's plan.

The theory that they arrive at is that my mother has put my father to sleep.

Driven him out into the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night

And pulled the car off the

road and got out and poured gasoline on it and There was a drop -off there

Their idea was she was trying to get the car to drive over it to make it look

more authentic The problem they think is that She couldn't push the

car over the embankment.

She was a small woman.

At this point, she's kind of panicked. She might be seen.

She has to do something.

They see this long branch that they think was a torch.

That wasn't something that she had picked up to try to help her husband.

And so she sets the fire herself.

Mr. Miller, I think we're going to continue this guy at the sheriff's

Okay.

Your first interview is with Detective Patterson.

How does it make sense that you were driving in first gear?

You told the officers at the scene that you were driving at a pretty good clip.

I don't know. What gear are you supposed to be in when you're driving up a road?

She was a dingbat.

She'd run out of gas.

She wouldn't put oil in the car. The car started smoking, and my dad was

furious, and it was her fault.

He would ask me if I thought I killed him, and I said no.

There will probably be moments when I'll think yes,

because I was driving the car, you know.

There will probably be moments.

You know how you do.

But I believe in being philosophical if you can about things rather than killing

yourself with them, you know.

She says some rather damning things about herself during that interview that

just as a person don't make her look very good.

If you have any explanation as to what might have caused that fire.

I really, I don't know. I don't know.

I mean, I was constantly running out of gas.

Cork had me buy a gas can and put it in the back of the car so that I wouldn't

run out anymore.

Am I going to be able to go home soon?

Keep talking.

She's very naive because she believes it's over. She has no idea what's going

on.

Police arrest Lucille at around 12 .30.

That's a mere 12 hours after the accident.

Looking into the purchase of a gas can that may have been made here, it would

have been a woman about 35 years old, shoulder length, brown hair. Do you

remember anything like that?

You know, a couple days ago, actually, this is where the timing becomes

because she only purchased the can of gas a few days before the accident.

The fire had burned so big and bright, any gas inside the car had certainly

helped it along.

But now the question for those policemen was, have you still helped each other?

Cork Miller was just 39 years old when he died in that horrible car accident.

Burned alive.

It was too awful to think about.

The police had arrested his wife, Lucille, for murder.

But just as soon as they start building their case against her, they discover

facts about Cork Miller that begin to undermine it.

Hello, Mrs. Myers.

How are you today?

They learned that he had a history of depression.

He was a guy who felt a lot of family pressure to be a dentist.

He really wanted to be an airline pilot.

That was his dream.

But he had too many responsibilities.

Everybody, we have a little performance ready for you. These are the hula hula

dancers, and we are ready to go.

And a one, two, three. We are going.

To a luau.

To a luau.

My mother was very extroverted, and my father very introverted.

I think that my father might have married my mother to bring the joy and

into his heart that he lacked.

He thought she would make up the difference, and he didn't have it to

Did you get that Miller bank statement for me?

But Cork and Lucille's disappointments with each other weren't the only kind of

problems they had under their roof.

The exterior of this successful dentist actually hid the fact that they were in

debt for $64 ,000.

which by today's standards would be about half a million dollars.

Women didn't work, and so my father, the responsibilities on his

shoulder were too much for him.

Ah, yeah, this is Detective Shoemaker.

After his death, the police talked to a lot of people around town who knew Cork,

and they learned that all those pressures, the debt and the family

responsibilities, were building up inside him.

My father was suffering from his depressions and his migraines.

Now we're all used to the idea that depression is a disease you can treat.

in 1964.

The only solutions really are barbiturates, sedatives, and Court

basically sedating himself into as much oblivion as he can get.

It was in the summer before my father died.

He took my brother and I up to this power station, and he sat us down.

You know I love you guys, right?

Yeah.

I promise you.

We're going to be together in heaven.

He was so sad.

And so maybe that was just in case a suicide happened.

As Cork thinks about his own really desire to exit life, how would he

for his family?

There was one night that I actually experienced

him trying to leave the house.

Debbie, Debbie, get the keys. Go into your bedroom, lock the door, and don't

him in.

I knew what grab the keys meant.

It wasn't a family secret that he didn't want to live.

And he always said he was going to make it a car accident.

The insurance payout was something like $123 ,000

because... In fact, he did die in an accident.

So those investigators must have wondered, was this some kind of suicide?

Could Cork have arranged everything so that he would die, but Lucille would

still get out alive?

But he was in the front seat asleep, and she was driving.

It seems almost impossible that Cork would have been able to pull this off by

himself

the

seal explained that the fire was an accident police believed it looked like

murder but when you heard about the millers lives you could piece together a

third possibility a plan between the two of them if someone you loved was in

that much pain maybe you'd finally agree to help them end it

But then the police discovered that Lucille might have had a more selfish

for one of her other dreams to come true.

I wonder if you could tell us, how long have you worked for Dr. Miller?

The police continue to talk to more people around town.

Did you ever notice anything unusual with the family?

Well...

It was this one thing.

And they realized that Lucille was harboring a deeper secret.

One that may have given her an entirely different motive.

The police talked to the woman who ran my father's office, and I believe that

she is the one who told them that my mother had been having an affair.

There's my little Hawaiian mess America.

Come on, you're such a flatterer. Where do you learn those moves?

I don't know. Let me tell you, we are going to take those moves to Hawaii next

year, and nobody needs to know.

After my mother's arrested, one

of the things they turned up is that she was having an affair with a prominent

attorney in San Bernardino, the man I knew as Uncle Art, Arthwell Hayden, the

good friend of the family.

His wife, Elaine, had been one of my mother's best friends, but she had

died.

To the police, this affair became the motive, and that's the direction they

started to go.

There were motel records. There were lunch dates. You know, it wasn't the

-kept secret.

My father lacked joy and warmth.

And that caused her a lot of tension and anger and pain.

The Beckmans down the street just closed on their house.

30 % markup, they bought it two years ago.

Wow. It was a desperation, I think.

Arthwell was the way out.

He was very affectionate with her. He complimented her. He laughed and played

and was fun.

And he was everything that she didn't have in her marriage.

The police think she saw him as, you know, that should be my husband.

That's who I should be having a life with.

They question Arthwell.

Were you involved with her romantically?

He admits the affair, but says it's been over for about six months.

If my mother had fallen in love and perhaps projected some future for the

them, Arthwell had not.

What time did he leave?

No,

thank you. I'll try back.

As they're breaking up, there were dozens and dozens and dozens of phone

I've already left two messages.

So he's going to be gone all weekend?

Hi, sweetie.

It's Aunt Lucille at your daddy home.

Lucille says no man has ever rejected me and you're not going to be the first.

I think the police take that as Lucille.

It's not over at all.

And they believe...

She wants Martha, but the problem is that she's married to Cork.

I can understand a little of what Lucille might have been thinking.

If I can just get this one thing that I want, then I'll be happy.

There was a lot of that in our part of California back then.

We really thought there could always be a fresh start.

Did you ever talk it over with friends, the idea that maybe you didn't love your

husband anymore?

Maybe I shouldn't have said that.

What do you have for a personality like mine?

When you have them, you think you don't love them.

When you don't have them, you feel faint or something.

Far from hiding the secret, she was actually very open with the police that

she'd had this affair with Hayden and says it's been over for about six

Take it from me, in those days, an affair didn't always mean the end of a

marriage. The SEAL even explained to police that Cork knew about the affair

that in the end, it had been hard, but they'd worked through it.

And there was a very good reason to believe her.

Mommy could use a little treat.

And then she revealed that she and Cork had seen a marriage counselor and that

they had actually decided to have a fourth child.

My mother is pregnant with her fourth child when she's arrested.

The fact that it was a planned pregnancy.

It's always sort of seemed to me that they were working things out.

So the motive is starting to fall apart here. Why would Lucille dart more of a

family with Quark if she was planning to kill him? It didn't really add up.

But by this time, the story had been in the papers for months.

There was no backing down.

And the prosecution, it turns out, had another damning story they were just

waiting to roll out.

A shocker about how far they thought Lucille had gone to realize her dream.

It had been just three months since Cork Miller had died in that fiery wreck on

Banyan Street.

And in that short time, the district attorney built a case to bring his

Lucille Miller, to trial for murder.

The idea is that my mother has a grand scheme.

And that is to ultimately get Arthwell Hayden.

According to the prosecution, if she could just get Cork out of the way,

Arthwell would come back to her, and it would all work out.

The prosecution maintained it had to be arson.

And they had an arson expert recreate the accident.

And there were a lot of things that looked very bad for Lucille.

All the suspicious details of that night, the skid marks.

The gas can.

A long branch with a burnt end.

The defense agreed that she spent a lot and that she had this affair.

But they didn't think that added up to a murder.

They thought that was a woman who got into a bad marriage young, was a little

flighty, but it didn't mean she had ice water in her veins.

The arson experts for the defense said that actually the fuel line had dripped

fuel onto the carburetor, and that was the explosion.

But really, and Lucille's lawyers pointed this out, How could anyone come

with such an elaborate scheme and think they could pull off all the details of

that night?

It doesn't make a lot of sense. It seems like too complicated of a plan.

Why did she wake up her daughter to alert her that they were leaving the

if she had a plan to murder her husband?

Neither side seems to add up in the way it should.

But there's just this question, can we believe Lucille?

Just what kind of woman was she?

Up in that big new house on the hill?

Lucille, who didn't want a little life.

And then the prosecution pulled a move outside the courtroom.

They got a story in the papers about Lucille.

Wasn't evidence, but I have to admit, it really turned our heads and made you

wonder, what was this woman capable of?

The prosecution leaked that Arthwell Hayden's wife, Elaine, had died under

suspicious circumstances.

And that, in fact, the last person with Elaine before she died

was Lucille.

Arthwell Hayden had taken his boat to Catalina.

The next morning, Elaine is found dead in her bed.

Once the story's out there, it's in everyone's mind.

But, in fact, Elaine Hayden had been ill and may have just died naturally.

They don't have a prosecutor for Elaine's murder. The prosecutor got that

there and then moved on and just left it alone.

But I believe it did have the effect he was hoping for.

So would Cork's death been Lucille's plan?

A murder.

Maybe even a mercy killing.

Or was she a victim?

A woman devastated by the death of her husband in a terrible accident, and then

accused of causing it.

However many uncertainties hung in the air, it was finally time for an end, at

least in the eyes of the law.

Lucille was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

But depending on how you looked at it, well, you could believe that wasn't

either.

Based on the physical evidence, I do think it was too circumstantial.

They didn't have an eyewitness.

If I were on that jury, I would not have convicted her.

My conclusion is that she was capable of it.

I think there was something really deeply fractured inside her.

I think that whole...

Between her rational thought and her instinct, her desire was immense.

My mother maintained her innocence till the end of her life.

She never wavered about that. She never slipped.

I try to add up the person that I knew that was my mother.

I just don't know.

She may have been a sneak, but a killer is just one of the things she wasn't.

And I think the prosecution...

has an easy case to make because it's a story of greed and infidelity gone

wrong.

But we're all in debt.

We all have dreams that aren't becoming fulfilled.

And I don't think that that was presented on her side.

The complexities of a life weren't shown.

But the simplicity of a murder was.

We'll never get more facts or details about what happened out on Lonesome

Street in 1964.

So all you're left with is a complicated story about Cork and Lucille Miller and

the dreams they dreamed for a while.

And you can wonder, did all that sunshine and possibility turn desire

something dangerous and deadly?

She's the only one who knows the truth of what happened that night.

It's complex and it is ambiguous.

And she was good and bad.

And she maybe was a bad woman who didn't commit a murder.

I don't need to look at her as guilty or innocent anymore.

She's just my mom.

And I loved her.

So I don't need to know anymore.

Followed by the moonlight.