Riverbend Maximum Security Institution, where David Miller will be executed Thursday night.
When David Miller is finally seated in the electric chair on Thursday night, two of the women most deeply affected by his life and crime will be hundreds of miles away, wrestling with a complicated set of memories.
Neither Helen Standifer, the mother of Miller's victim Lee Standifer, or Stephanie Thoman, Miller's daughter, will be at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution during Miller's execution. Standifer lives in Chandler, Ariz. Thoman lives in Ohio.
Both Standifer and Thoman spoke to the Scene on Tuesday, two days before what is ostensibly the end of this story. How could it be, though? Both women will live on, and in some way, David Miller and Lee Standifer will live on with them. The best one can hope for them is that they are comforted by memories of happier times, rather than consumed by thoughts of the violent events that brought them here.
On May 20, 1981, Miller murdered Standifer, a mentally handicapped woman whom he'd been dating, by bludgeoning her with a fireplace poker before stabbing her dead body numerous times. He was 24, and she was 21. Miller's attorneys are asking Gov. Bill Haslam to spare his life, in large part because of his history of severe mental illness and childhood physical and sexual abuse. They have argued, with psychiatric experts backing them up, that the murder was directly related to that history and his mental illness.
The years that pass between a capital trial and an execution — nearly 37 in this case — have a strange effect. The victim is frozen in time, even as everyone else involved ages on.
When Helen Standifer answers her phone, she is effectively the 84-year-old mother of a 21-year-old woman who will never grow older.
“She was very positive," Standifer says of her daughter. "From the time she was a very small child she was a very happy and a very positive type person. She liked to do a lot of things. She loved school. And she had a learning disability, slight brain damage. She didn’t let that bother her. I think it bothered other people, but it didn’t bother her in the least.”
As a young girl, Lee was involved in 4-H and won a gold medal for swimming in an early state-level iteration of the Special Olympics. After the family moved to Knoxville, Lee briefly lived with her sister, who was a student at the University of Tennessee. She had a job at a local meat-packing facility, and her mother says she was well-suited for the repetitive nature of the job. She rode the bus to and from work.
Eventually, Lee moved into the YWCA. That's where she was living when she met David Miller.
Helen Standifer says the state of Tennessee has "been very good" about keeping her informed about the case's progress over the years, but she isn't interested in talking about what the past 37 years have been like for her.
"I don’t want to get into the soap-opera stuff," she says. "Of course, it’s been extremely difficult for the whole family, but that has nothing to do with — that’s not something that needs to be gone through with anybody else but me.”
She goes on, explaining why she has decided to speak to reporters as Miller's execution approaches.
“The only reason I’m doing this at all is because I know there’s no advocate there for her," Helen Standifer says. "And because it was so long ago, I’ve been startled when I talk to so many of you people back there — some of you were not even born at the time this happened.”
Although she says the family found wonderful friends in Knoxville, they didn't have roots in Tennessee, and most of those people are gone.
The family of victims are allowed to witness executions, but Standifer won't be in Nashville this week.
“I don’t see that it accomplishes anything at all," she says. "It’s immaterial. It doesn’t bring my daughter back, it doesn’t accomplish anything. Frankly, I don’t see any reason to be there.”
Asked whether she has any feelings about Miller's request for clemency, Standifer notes that Miller was sentenced and then re-sentenced by a separate jury, receiving the death penalty both times.
"Twenty-four people made a decision,” she says.
Her motivation, she says, was not to ensure that Miller be executed, but rather to guarantee he wouldn't victimize anyone else.
“All along my only reason for anything is that this could not happened to another, OK?" she says. "That’s the one thing that I’m very strong on is that he could never be out. At the time of the trial — and I have no idea, I have not been back there for many years, I don’t know whether that’s still the situation — but at the time of the trial, they basically said if they give you a life sentence it means about 13 years in jail before you’re out. That was not acceptable for me.”
Like Edmund Zagorski, who was executed in Tennessee's electric chair last month, Miller was convicted in the early 1980s. At the time, juries did not have the option to sentence someone to life without the possibility of parole. Studies have shown that juries who only had a choice between a life sentence with the possibility of parole or a death sentence were more likely to choose death. Today, every state gives juries the option of life without the possibility of parole.
Miller was sent to prison in 1982 when his daughter, Stephanie Thoman, was just 2 years old. She doesn't remember meeting him until she was 12.
“I remember meeting him," Thoman tells the Scene. "I was happy. I was glad to meet my father.”
Despite Miller's tumultuous and violent upbringing — which has been detailed in court records — and the brutal crime that sent him to death row, Miller's daughter describes him as a calm and reserved man.
“I think that he’s a kind person," she says when asked to describe her 61-year-old father as he is today. "He’s quiet. He kind of stays to himself. It’s hard to imagine him getting mad.”
Thoman has visited her father on a number of occasions over the years. Three years ago she made the trip from Ohio with her three children. In August, she came alone to see him for the last time. She says she's not sure if she'll be able to speak to him again before he dies.
“I talked to his lawyers today and told them to tell him that I love him,” she says.
Their final visit wasn't anything dramatic, she says. But it did give them a chance to bond, as it was her first time visiting him on her own.
“I’d never really just sat there and looked at him," she says. "And he did the same thing with me. He was like, ‘Are your eyes hazel?’ I’m like, 'Yeah.’ And he’s like, ‘Mine are too!’ I’m like, ‘Yeah, I think I have your eyes.’”
She says she hasn't followed the details of his case much until recently.
“No, I didn’t know much about it," Thoman says. "There’s so much stuff on the internet that I have read about what happened. But that was just maybe in the last couple years.”
“I feel bad for the [Standifer] family,” she adds.
As for what this week feels like, her answer is simple.
“Depressing," she says. "Kind of unreal that it’s actually happening.”
For Helen Standifer, the timing of the execution — in the middle of the holiday season — has added an extra weight.
“She loved the holidays, and I guess this makes it terribly tough, because she loved the holidays, she loved her family," Standifer says. "We always got a bit of a tickle out of the fact that she always had to — she started this when she was probably in grade school — she started putting jingle bells on her shoe laces around the holidays.”
As she shares the memory, her voice first swells with emotion before giving way to laughter.
“That’s one thing we do have — a lot of really wonderful memories," she says. "She was a lot of fun.”
