Reckless Love

"She was a firecracker," says Donna Hartwell, Miller's boss at the Peebles clothing store in Dickson, where she'd been working for years. "She was a good kid, a sweet kid, but she'd tell you what was on her mind."

Miller would have become a senior at Creek Wood High if she'd lived another three months. She had dreams of one day practicing sports medicine and loved riding her horse up and down the wooded trails that crisscross Dickson County.

The word most often used to describe Caitlin is "feisty." She stood just 5-foot-3-inches, but according to Clabo, one of Miller's best friends, "She was filled to the top with piss and vinegar."

"She would give you the shirt off her back," says Sharp, Caitlin's mother. "But if you pissed her off, she'd get you down and take it off you.... She had a big heart but she could be very vocal."

Caitlin had a few boyfriends in the past, and being pretty and spirited, she never needed to settle.

"The boyfriends she'd had," says Sharp, "if they were wearing the wrong T-shirt, they were gone."

But not Chaz Green. From the beginning, he had a stronger hold on Caitlin than any boy ever had.

"I seriously don't know if you know how much I love you," Miller wrote in an undated love note to Green. "When me and you are getting along, we're happy—you have no idea how happy I am!"

Caitlin's mother has no trouble figuring out her daughter's singular attraction to Green. Colleen Sharp is petite and energetic like her daughter, with short, stylish dark hair and a penchant for rhinestone-studded sunglasses.

"He was a rebel, the one you don't take home to momma," Sharp says, sighing. Green also "had all the toys, the boat and the jet skis and the motorcycle and he had the four-wheelers and that truck that he took out and drove in the mud. He had all the toys to keep her entertained."

Miller's passion for him could turn jealous in an instant, especially when it came to Tara Weese, the mother of Green's child. In a note to a friend, Caitlin tells of snooping in Green's cell phone, noting the length of time that he spent on the line with Weese. "...It said that they talked for like 26 seconds!" she wrote. She also refers to other former girlfriends of Green's and constantly questions his fidelity. "I seriously don't want him to talk to Amanda," she writes one day, apparently referring to another one of Green's ex-girlfriends. In another missive she writes, "I don't trust him a lot."

Reading Miller's letters and talking with her friends, it seems that her jealousy stemmed from Green's past relationships and current behavior, rather than her own insecurities.

"I seriously just don't want to get hurt," she writes, stating it in many different ways throughout her correspondence.

Chaz was also jealous, but acquaintances say his envy could take the form of a green-eyed rage that seemed hard to control.

Shea Clabo says she saw these toxic emotions up close. Like Miller, Clabo is outgoing, an ultra-friendly Southern girl who says, "I could talk to a brick wall if I had to."

She recalls a time when Green and Miller were on the outs and Caitlin struck up a friendship with Cody Wilson, an attractive older guy that she knew from around town.

"Chaz found out about it," Clabo says. "[He] called the guy and basically threatened to kick his ass if he didn't leave Caitlin alone. The guy left her alone, so Chaz and her got back together.... He would run everybody off and even get jealous of her friends."

On more than one occasion, Green's anger was directed at Miller.

"Caitlin would come to work, saying how [she and Green] would wrestle," says Clabo. "He'd get mad and throw her down or choke her or something.... I actually saw bruises, fingernail bruises on her neck."

Clabo also told police that "Chaz has tried to run her off the road before and that she was scared of him."

Sometimes the couple's arguments spilled into public view, and on more than a few occasions, Green showed up at Peebles to continue arguments while Miller was working.

Once, Green hung around the business located in a strip mall at the Dickson exit of I-40 for two hours, following Caitlin between stints spent sulking in his truck.

"They had been fighting because he wanted to see her call list," says Miller's boss Donna Hartwell, referring to Miller's cell phone. Green kept walking in and out of the store and Miller tried to ignore him, folding clothes and taking care of customers. Whenever she would walk past Green, Hartwell says, "he would bump her, like with his shoulder."

This went on for about two hours, until Hartwell asked him to leave. "He puffed up a little," the manager recalls. "You could tell he wasn't a happy camper."

In a statement to police, another colleague of Miller's recalls incidents of Green "blowing up [Caitlin's] phone about every two to three minutes, yelling at her," and waiting for her in the parking lot after she got off so they could continue to argue.