Slouching Towards Bethlehem

by Joan Didion

  He ate alone that night, from a TV tray in the living room. Later the Millers watched John Forsythe and Senta Berger in See How They Run, and when the movie ended, about eleven, Cork Miller suggested that they go out for milk. He wanted some hot chocolate. He took a blanket and pillow from the couch and climbed into the passenger seat of the Volkswagen. Lucille Miller remembers reaching over to lock his door as she backed down the driveway. By the time she left the Mayfair Market, and long before they reached Banyan Street, Cork Miller appeared to be asleep.

  There is some confusion in Lucille Miller’s mind about what happened between 12:30 a. m. , when the fire broke out, and 1:50 a. m. , when it was reported. She says that she was driving east on Banyan Street at about 35 m. p. h. when she felt the Volkswagen pull sharply to the right. The next thing she knew the car was on the embankment, quite near the edge of the retaining wall, and flames were shooting up behind her. She does not remember jumping out. She does remember prying up a stone with which she broke the window next to her husband, and then scrambling down the retaining wall to try to find a stick. “I don’t know how I was going to push him out,” she says. “I just thought if I had a stick, I’d push him out.” She could not, and after a while she ran to the intersection of Banyan and Carnelian Avenue. There are no houses at that corner, and almost no traffic. After one car had passed without stopping, Lucille Miller ran back down Banyan toward the burning Volkswagen. She did not stop, but she slowed down, and in the flames she could see her husband. He was, she said, “just black.”

  At the first house up Sapphire Avenue, half a mile from the Volkswagen, Lucille Miller finally found help. There Mrs. Robert Swenson called the sheriff, and then, at Lucille Miller’s request, she called Harold Lance, the Millers’ lawyer and their close friend. When Harold Lance arrived he took Lucille Miller home to his wife, Joan. Twice Harold Lance and Lucille Miller returned to Banyan Street and talked to the Highway Patrol officers. A third time Harold Lance returned alone, and when he came back he said to Lucille Miller, “O. K …. you don’t talk any more.”

  When Lucille Miller was arrested the next afternoon, Sandy Slagle was with her. Sandy Slagle was the intense, relentlessly loyal medical student who used to baby-sit for the Millers, and had been living as a member of the family since she graduated from high school in 1959. The Millers took her away from a difficult home situation, and she thinks of Lucille Miller not only as “more or less a mother or a sister” but as “the most wonderful character” she has ever known. On the night of the accident, Sandy Slagle was in her dormitory at Loma Linda University, but Lucille Miller called her early in the morning and asked her to come home. The doctor was there when Sandy Slagle arrived, giving Lucille Miller an injection of Nembutal. “She was crying as she was going under,” Sandy Slagle recalls. “Over and over she’d say, ‘Sandy, all the hours I spent trying to save him and now what are they trying to do to me?’”

  At 1:30 that afternoon, Sergeant William Paterson and Detectives Charles Callahan and Joseph Karr of the Central Homicide Division arrived at 8488 Bella Vista. “One of them appeared at the bedroom door,” Sandy Slagle remembers, “and said to Lucille, ‘You’ve got ten minutes to get dressed or we’ll take you as you are. ’ She was in her nightgown, you know, so I tried to get her dressed.”

  Sandy Slagle tells the story now as if by rote, and her eyes do not waver. “So I had her panties and bra on her and they opened the door again, so I got some Capris on her, you know, and a scarf.” Her voice drops. “And then they just took her.”

  The arrest took place just twelve hours after the first report that there had been an accident on Banyan Street, a rapidity which would later prompt Lucille Miller’s attorney to say that the entire case was an instance of trying to justify a reckless arrest. Actually what first caused the detectives who arrived on Banyan Street toward dawn that morning to give the accident more than routine attention were certain apparent physical inconsistencies. While Lucille Miller had said that she was driving about 35 m. p. h. when the car swerved to a stop, an examination of the cooling Volkswagen showed that it was in low gear, and that the parking rather than the driving lights were on. The front wheels, moreover, did not seem to be in exactly the position that Lucille Miller’s description of the accident would suggest, and the right rear wheel was dug in deep, as if it had been spun in place. It seemed curious to the detectives, too, that a sudden stop from 35 m. p. h. —the same jolt which was presumed to have knocked over a gasoline can in the back seat and somehow started the fire—should have left two milk cartons upright on the back floorboard, and the remains of a Polaroid camera box lying apparently undisturbed on the back seat.

  No one, however, could be expected to give a precise account of what did and did not happen in a moment of terror, and none of these inconsistencies seemed in themselves incontrovertible evidence of criminal intent. But they did interest the Sheriff’s Office, as did Gordon Miller’s apparent unconsciousness at the time of the accident, and the length of time it had taken Lucille Miller to get help. Something, moreover, struck the investigators as wrong about Harold Lance’s attitude when he came back to Banyan Street the third time and found the investigation by no means over. “The way Lance was acting,” the prosecuting attorney said later, “they thought maybe they’d hit a nerve.”

  And so it was that on the morning of October 8, even before the doctor had come to give Lucille Miller an injection to calm her, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office was trying to construct another version of what might have happened between 12:30 and 1:50 a. m. The hypothesis they would eventually present was based on the somewhat tortuous premise that Lucille Miller had undertaken a plan which failed: a plan to stop the car on the lonely road, spread gasoline over her presumably drugged husband, and, with a stick on the accelerator, gently “walk” the Volkswagen over the embankment, where it would tumble four feet down the retaining wall into the lemon grove and almost certainly explode. If this happened, Lucille Miller might then have somehow negotiated the two miles up Carnelian to Bella Vista in time to be home when the accident was discovered. This plan went awry, according to the Sheriff’s Office hypothesis, when the car would not go over the rise of the embankment. Lucille Miller might have panicked then—after she had killed the engine the third or fourth time, say, out there on the dark road with the gasoline already spread and the dogs baying and the wind blowing and the unspeakable apprehension that a pair of headlights would suddenly light up Banyan Street and expose her there—and set the fire herself.

  Although this version accounted for some of the physical evidence—the car in low because it had been started from a dead stop, the parking lights on because she could not do what needed doing without some light, a rear wheel spun in repeated attempts to get the car over the embankment, the milk cartons upright because there had been no sudden stop—it did not seem on its own any more or less credible than Lucille Miller’s own story. Moreover, some of the physical evidence did seem to support her story: a nail in a front tire, a nine-pound rock found in the car, presumably the one with which she had broken the window in an attempt to save her husband. Within a few days an autopsy had established that Gordon Miller was alive when he burned, which did not particularly help the State’s case, and that he had enough Nembutal and Sandoptal in his blood to put the average person to sleep, which did: on the other hand Gordon Miller habitually took both Nembutal and Fiorinal (a common headache prescription which contains Sandoptal), and had been ill besides.

  It was a spotty case, and to make it work at all the State was going to have to find a motive. There was talk of unhappiness, talk of another man. That kind of motive, during the next few weeks, was what they set out to establish. They set out to find it in accountants’ ledgers and double-indemnity clauses and motel registers, set out to determine what might move a woman who believed in all the promises of the middle class—a woman who had been chairman of the Heart Fund and who always knew a reasonable little dressmaker and who had
come out of the bleak wild of prairie fundamentalism to find what she imagined to be the good life—what should drive such a woman to sit on a street called Bella Vista and look out her new picture window into the empty California sun and calculate how to burn her husband alive in a Volkswagen. They found the wedge they wanted closer at hand than they might have at first expected, for, as testimony would reveal later at the trial, it seemed that in December of 1963 Lucille Miller had begun an affair with the husband of one of her friends, a man whose daughter called her “Auntie Lucille,” a man who might have seemed to have the gift for people and money and the good life that Cork Miller so noticeably lacked. The man was Arthwell Hayton, a well-known San Bernardino attorney and at one time a member of the district attorneys staff.

  In some ways it was the conventional clandestine affair in a place like San Bernardino, a place where little is bright or graceful, where it is routine to misplace the future and easy to start looking for it in bed. Over the seven weeks that it would take to try Lucille Miller for murder, Assistant District Attorney Don A. Turner and defense attorney Edward P. Foley would between them unfold a curiously predictable story. There were the falsified motel registrations. There were the lunch dates, the afternoon drives in Arthwell Hayton’s red Cadillac convertible. There were the interminable discussions of the wronged partners. There were the confidantes (“I knew everything,” Sandy Slagle would insist fiercely later. “I knew every time, places, everything”) and there were the words remembered from bad magazine stories (“Don’t kiss me, it will trigger things,” Lucille Miller remembered telling Arthwell Hayton in the parking lot of Harold’s Club in Fontana after lunch one day) and there were the notes, the sweet exchanges: “Hi Sweetie Pie! You are my cup of tea!! Happy Birthday—you don’t look a day over 29!! Your baby, Arthwell.”

  And, toward the end, there was the acrimony. It was April 24, 1964, when Arthwell Hayton’s wife, Elaine, died suddenly, and nothing good happened after that. Arthwell Hayton had taken his cruiser, Captain’s Lady, over to Catalina that weekend; he called home at nine o’clock Friday night, but did not talk to his wife because Lucille Miller answered the telephone and said that Elaine was showering. The next morning the Haytons’ daughter found her mother in bed, dead. The newspapers reported the death as accidental, perhaps the result of an allergy to hair spray. When Arthwell Hayton flew home from Catalina that weekend, Lucille Miller met him at the airport, but the finish had already been written.

  It was in the breakup that the affair ceased to be in the conventional mode and began to resemble instead the novels of James M. Cain, the movies of the late 1930’s, all the dreams in which violence and threats and blackmail are made to seem commonplaces of middle-class life. What was most startling about the case that the State of California was preparing against Lucille Miller was something that had nothing to do with law at all, something that never appeared in the eight-column afternoon headlines but was always there between them: the revelation that the dream was teaching the dreamers how to live. Here is Lucille Miller talking to her lover sometime in the early summer of 1964, after he had indicated that, on the advice of his minister, he did not intend to see her any more: “First, I’m going to go to that dear pastor of yours and tell him a few things....When I do tell him that, you won’t be in the Redlands Church any more Look, Sonny Boy, if you think your reputation is going to be ruined, your life won’t be worth two cents.” Here is Arthwell Hayton, to Lucille Miller: “I’ll go to Sheriff Frank Bland and tell him some things that I know about you until you’ll wish you’d never heard of Arthwell Hayton.” For an affair between a Seventh-Day Adventist dentist’s wife and a Seventh-Day Adventist personal-injury lawyer, it seems a curious kind of dialogue.

  “Boy, I could get that little boy coming and going,” Lucille Miller later confided to Erwin Sprengle, a Riverside contractor who was a business partner of Arthwell Hayton’s and a friend to both the lovers. (Friend or no, on this occasion he happened to have an induction coil attached to his telephone in order to tape Lucille Miller’s call.) “And he hasn’t got one thing on me that he can prove. I mean, I’ve got concrete—he has nothing concrete.” In the same taped conversation with Erwin Sprengle, Lucille Miller mentioned a tape that she herself had surreptitiously made, months before, in Arthwell Hayton’s car.

  “I said to him, I said ‘Arthwell, I just feel like I’m being used. ’...He started sucking his thumb and he said ‘I love you....This isn’t something that happened yesterday. I’d marry you tomorrow if I could. I don’t love Elaine. ’ He’d love to hear that played back, wouldn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” drawled Sprengle s voice on the tape. “That would be just a little incriminating, wouldn’t it?”

  “Just a little incriminating,” Lucille Miller agreed. “It really is!’

  Later on the tape, Sprengle asked where Cork Miller was.

  “He took the children down to the church.”

  “You didn’t go?”

  “No.”

  “You’re naughty.”

  It was all, moreover, in the name of “love”; everyone involved placed a magical faith in the efficacy of the very word. There was the significance that Lucille Miller saw in Arthwell’s saying that he “loved” her, that he did not “love” Elaine. There was Arthwell insisting, later, at the trial, that he had never said it, that he may have “whispered sweet nothings in her ear” (as her defense hinted that he had whispered in many ears), but he did not remember bestowing upon her the special seal, saying the word, declaring “love.” There was the summer evening when Lucille Miller and Sandy Slagle followed Arthwell Hayton down to his new boat in its mooring at Newport Beach and untied the lines with Arthwell aboard, Arthwell and a girl with whom he later testified he was drinking hot chocolate and watching television. “I did that on purpose,” Lucille Miller told Erwin Sprengle later, “to save myself from letting my heart do something crazy.”

  January n, 1965, was a bright warm day in Southern California, the kind of day when Catalina floats on the Pacific horizon and the air smells of orange blossoms and it is a long way from the bleak and difficult East, a long way from the cold, a long way from the past. A woman in Hollywood staged an all-night sit-in on the hood of her car to prevent repossession by a finance company. A seventy-year-old pensioner drove his station wagon at five miles an hour past three Gardena poker parlors and emptied three pistols and a twelve-gauge shotgun through their windows, wounding twenty-nine people. “Many young women become prostitutes just to have enough money to play cards,” he explained in a note. Mrs. Nick Adams said that she was “not surprised” to hear her husband announce his divorce plans on the Les Crane Show, and, farther north, a sixteen-year-old jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge and lived.

  And, in the San Bernardino County Courthouse, the Miller trial opened. The crowds were so bad that the glass courtroom doors were shattered in the crush, and from then on identification disks were issued to the first forty-three spectators in line. The line began forming at 6 a. m. , and college girls camped at the courthouse all night, with stores of graham crackers and No-Cal.

  All they were doing was picking a jury, those first few days, but the sensational nature of the case had already suggested itself. Early in December there had been an abortive first trial, a trial at which no evidence was ever presented because on the day the jury was seated the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram ran an “inside” story quoting Assistant District Attorney Don Turner, the prosecutor, as saying, “We are looking into the circumstances of Mrs. Hayton’s death. In view of the current trial concerning the death of Dr. Miller, I do not feel I should comment on Mrs. Hayton’s death.” It seemed that there had been barbiturates in Elaine Hayton’s blood, and there had seemed some irregularity about the way she was dressed on that morning when she was found under the covers, dead. Any doubts about the death at the time, however, had never gotten as far as the Sheriff’s Office. “I guess somebody didn’t want to rock the boat,” Turner said later. “These were prom
inent people.”

  Although all of that had not been in the Sun-Telegram’s story, an immediate mistrial had been declared. Almost as immediately, there had been another development: Arthwell Hayton had asked newspapermen to an n a. m. Sunday morning press conference in his office. There had been television cameras, and flash bulbs popping. “As you gentlemen may know,” Hayton had said, striking a note of stiff bonhomie, “there are very often women who become amorous toward their doctor or lawyer. This does not mean on the physician’s or lawyer’s part that there is any romance toward the patient or client.”

  “Would you deny that you were having an affair with Mrs. Miller?” a reporter had asked.

  “I would deny that there was any romance on my part whatsoever.”

  It was a distinction he would maintain through all the wearing weeks to come.

  So they had come to see Arthwell, these crowds who now milled beneath the dusty palms outside the courthouse, and they had also come to see Lucille, who appeared as a slight, intermittently pretty woman, already pale from lack of sun, a woman who would turn thirty-five before the trial was over and whose tendency toward haggardness was beginning to show, a meticulous woman who insisted, against her lawyer’s advice, on coming to court with her hair piled high and lacquered. “I would’ve been happy if she’d come in with it hanging loose, but Lucille wouldn’t do that,” her lawyer said. He was Edward P. Foley, a small, emotional Irish Catholic who several times wept in the courtroom. “She has a great honesty, this woman,” he added,”but this honesty about her appearance always worked against her.”

  By the time the trial opened, Lucille Miller’s appearance included maternity clothes, for an official examination on December 18 had revealed that she was then three and a half months pregnant, a fact which made picking a jury even more difficult than usual, for Turner was asking the death penalty. “It’s unfortunate but there it is,” he would say of the pregnancy to each juror in turn, and finally twelve were seated, seven of them women, the youngest forty-one, an assembly of the very peers— housewives, a machinist, a truck driver, a grocery-store manager, a filing clerk—above whom Lucille Miller had wanted so badly to rise.