Mystery on a moonlit road

Keith Morrison Correspondent • Profile

She was crying when it happened. Must have been. And hungry. That's why the father told the mother he'd run out to the store. Get some milk. It was night. September. Still warm. The moon was out in the neighborhood that hugged the big Marine base at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Marine Sgt. Bill Miller - just back from the war - drove past a series of pawn shops, tattoo parlors, honkytonks. The last things he'd ever see. They found his body alongside the road. Two bullet holes. Who did it, or why, no one knew.

Or so the story went.

Wendy is the youngest one in the middle.

Wendy Miller-McGee: I don't have any memories. None.

And here is Wendy now. A grown woman, married, with 2 children of her own. Her father's murder was 36 years ago. But it might just as well have been last week.

Wendy Miller-McGee: Because that's part of-- that's part of me. That's part of my history. That's part of my kids' history. And we were all robbed of it. And for what? I don't know.

Doesn't know because her father's killer - or killers - were never found.

Her mother remarried, twice. The stepfather who raised her was kind. Life continued. The truly shocking truth, like her father, buried. Almost.

Wendy Miller-McGee: I often wondered what happened to my real father. Why he was killed.

Keith Morrison: Were you ever able to find out much about him?

Wendy Miller-McGee: No. Being a little kid and you're asking something like that, it's, kind of, it's almost uncomfortable. 'Cause I want to know these things. But I can, kind of, get the sense that it just really wasn't a subject that you talk about for some reason.

Time, of course, becomes an accessory in any murder case. Evidence is lost, memories fade, witnesses die. And it was even more difficult in a place like Jacksonville, home to Camp Lejeune. Marines, by the very nature of the service they perform, are often rootless. Anyone connected with her father's murder would surely be long gone by now. So many years ago.

The house Wendy lived in as an infant, just beyond the gates of camp Lejeune, now an abandoned wreck. The deserted road where her father was murdered is a four-lane expressway now, peppered with a string of chain restaurants. Anyroad, U.S.A. Just another unsolved murder, abandoned by time.

And then one day in 2007, Wendy took a trip with her family.  And they stopped here at Arlington National Cemetery. Wendy looked up her dad's name on the register, and found the spot where his body lies.

Wendy Miller-McGee: It's really funny. We hit the gates and I started crying. I mean, it was just very-- it was hard. I-- I cried a lot-- a-- a lot.

That's Wendy to the right with her husband Dave and daughter, Ashley. A simple, sad, family portrait. But it’s not just that. Right here in this moment, a woman grieving for a man she never knew has launched the final act in the mystery, even though she herself is unconscious of it, as if the answer to the buried secret is rising from the tomb. There are people - still alive - who remember, who still have information to share.

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