A decades-old murder mystery in Saginaw

Chris Hansen Correspondent • Profile

SAGINAW, Mich. - On the shores of Lake Huron, in a picture-postcard town, in the home of a prominent family, two newlyweds were celebrating their honeymoon.

But a secret unknown both would soon haunt a city, police detectives, and families for decades.

It was the summer of 1974.

Patty Hearst had just been kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the Watergate scandal was near its peak.

And an hour’s drive from that lakefront honeymoon cottage, in the gritty factory town of Saginaw, Michigan lived a beautiful young woman named Cheryl Miller. She was 21, popular, and she had her own motorbike. She’d just moved into an apartment with a roommate, and worked part-time at a bakery to make ends meet while attending college art classes.

Donna Duquette, Cheryl Miller's aunt, remembered Cheryl as a caring and considerate person. "I thought she was the perfect person," says Duquette. "She had all the qualities that I think that most people wish they had. She was a shining star."

But on a rainy Saturday morning, Cheryl Miller’s roommate returned to this home from a night of partying to find Miller murdered. An autopsy would conclude that she had been raped and strangled. Time of death was between 5:30 and 6 a.m.

For Cheryl's family, it was painful and unimaginable. "I felt like somebody had just shot me with a scatter gun in the stomach," says Duquette.

Now-retired Police Detectives Ron Herzberg and Tom Reeder worked the case.

In the days after the murder, a clear picture of a suspect emerged: An exchange student from Iran, a former boyfriend named Abbass Esfehani.

Ron Herzberg, Saginaw police detective: The first thing you think of is, of course, probably someone that knows her. We interviewed the parents, and they’d had a conversation with their daughter a couple days before this homicide that she did not want to see him anymore, and that she was scared of him because of his temper.

Two critical pieces of evidence linked Esfehani to the crime scene: his fingerprint on a rail leading upstairs to the room where the body was found, and dark hairs left on Cheryl Miller’s body... judged to be similar to those found on a hairbrush belonging to Esfehani.

However, Saginaw police never got the chance to interview Esfehani. Days after Cheryl Miller’s murder, Esfehani had sold his car, left many of his belongings in Saginaw, and a week ahead of schedule, got on an airplane in Detroit and flew home to Iran. A warrant was issued; Esfehani was arrested. Although he denied committing the murder, hair samples were sent from Iran to Michigan.

The hair samples said to come from Esfehani sent by the Iranian police were examined and found not to be similar to the hairs found on the victim’s body. But something strange was going on— because the hairs said to be Esfehani’s did not even match the hairs taken from his own hairbrush, left behind in his hasty departure from Michigan.

Hansen: Did that seem fishy to you?

Herzberg: I would’ve rather been there when the hair samples were taken from Mr. Esfehani. But when he’s in Iran and we’re here, you do the best you can.

Because the hairs didn’t match, and police had little other evidence against him, five months after Cheryl Miller’s murder, Abbass Esfehani was no longer considered the prime suspect by authorities. He never returned to the United States.

It was, according to Detective Herzberg, "very frustrating." "To actually have him probably would have shortened the investigation quite a bit."

During the next two years, Saginaw Police would offer rewards for tips on the Miller murder case. They’d question more than 150 people. And the list of past and present suspects would expand to three: in addition to Esfehani, Antonio Alverez, a cousin of the victim’s roommate. He’d lived at the house for a time. And the dark hairs found on the body were also found to be similar to his hair.

Newly-wed Gabriel Ferris
Then there was suspect number three, Gabriel Ferris. 27-year old Gabriel Ferris had come from a well-to-do family in Saginaw, but had spent time in prison on drug charges. Ferris had dated the victim. 

Detective Reeder met with Ferris several times. And something about the guy didn’t seem right. His instincts told him Ferris was nervous, which made him really suspicious of him.

Although he didn’t have dark hair similar to what was found on the victim’s body, other pieces of the puzzle seemed to fit. Ferris admitted having a sexual relationship with Cheryl Miller, up to the week before her murder. And police found Ferris’s fingerprints on a dresser near Cheryl Miller’s body.

Still, Ferris seemed to have an alibi as solid as any imaginable: He said the night of the murder, he was 65 miles away in a cottage by Lake Huron, celebrating the first night of his honeymoon, making love to his new wife.

According to Detective Reeder, he went to the prosecutor with all of his evidence and laid out the whole case. "He said, 'Bring me one more piece of evidence that we can come up with and we will definitely issue a warrant. Just give me one more piece,'" says Reeder. He was unable to find that one extra piece of evidence.

Cheryl Miller’s murder would soon enter the cold case files. And it would stay there, for nearly two decades until 1994, when police detectives in Saginaw reopened the case. They quickly zeroed in on a suspect. It was not Abbass Esfehani or Tony Alverez… but the man who seemingly had a rock-solid alibi, the man who was on his honeymoon, Gabriel Ferris.

Hansen: Give me a sense for the relief that the family felt when  there was an arrest in the case finally after 20 years?

Duquette: It gave me a certain amount of peace I can tell you that. I think it did my sister. We didn’t know it at the time but she was already sick…

Hansen: Your sister sadly died of cancer. Do you think she was more at peace because when she died she knew there had been an arrest?

Duquette: Oh yes.

The arrest of Gabriel Ferris would begin a strange trip through Michigan’s justice system that’s still going on today.

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