Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 3, 1993 TAG: 9310030042
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEVEN R. REED HOUSTON CHRONICLE
DATELINE: SULPHUR SPRINGS, TEXAS LENGTH: Long
The convictions were affirmed routinely before Robert Ardis, a court-appointed appellate lawyer, met either of the defendants. In 1991, Ardis drove to a Huntsville prison and told Miller that the convictions were final. But when he left for home, Ardis was troubled by what Miller had told him.
Miller said he did not know how his stepdaughter, April Tucker, had died, but he repeated what she had said to him in her final words: "Dogs did it."
It was the same explanation Miller had given to Rains County sheriff's deputies the night April died; to physicians at the Tyler hospital where April was flown for emergency treatment; and to his original defense attorneys.
Four years later, however, state District Judge Lanny Ramsay, who presided at the original trial in Sulphur Springs, has become convinced it was the truth. In a hearing prompted by Ardis, Ramsay concluded in May that the defendants should have been found innocent.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals received Ramsay's findings in June. But the court may take as long as it feels necessary to consider the issues. If the court eventually agrees with Ramsay, Miller and Loveless could be retried.
But now - as in 1989 - standing between the defendants and freedom are the Sulphur Springs prosecutor, who found a crime in what many medical experts believe was a tragic accident, and the Tyler pathologist whose testimony supported the prosecutor's theory.
From their respective prison units in Huntsville and Gatesville, Miller, 45, and Loveless, 35, recently recalled the events that took place on the five-acre farm they rented in Rains County, 50 miles east of Dallas, on Jan. 4, 1989.
Miller, a heavy-equipment operator, was dismantling an old house on the property adjacent to his rented farm. Loveless, his common-law wife, was helping. April was out of their sight and playing on the far side of the farm. April's sister, Amy, 7, was at school.
Twice Loveless called out to determine April's general location and to make sure she was all right. Each time the child responded. When she did not answer a third call a few minutes after noon, Miller and Loveless set out to find her.
Loveless said she first checked inside their home.
"When I came out the door, I looked up and the dogs were coming running over the hill," Loveless said. "When we got to them, they just turned around and went right back up the hill, and they led us to her."
Loveless and Miller said April was lying face down under an oak tree. They found her jeans, underwear, and a sock around her left ankle. She had a gash in her right leg.
Miller, who had been an emergency medical technician in their native Kentucky, told Loveless to call for an ambulance. He said he realized April was going into shock from loss of blood, and he used April's clothing to clean the wound superficially.
Miller said he asked April three times what had happened. "All three times she said, `Dogs did it,' " he said.
An ambulance carried April to the Rains County Fairgrounds, where she was met by the crew of a medical helicopter and rushed to Tyler. At 1:26 p.m., surgeons began working to save her life. At 8:32 p.m., April died.
In retrospect, there are facts that support the defendants' version of events.
The family had three dogs - two males and a Doberman-Lab mixed-breed female that may have been coming into her first reproductive cycle.
April's body was covered with scratches, claw marks and puncture wounds.
The skin around the large wound in her leg was torn unevenly, and there was grass, dirt, twigs and leaves in the wound.
But working against them at the time was the report of an autopsy conducted the morning after April died.
Dr. V.V. Gonzalez concluded the cause of death was "multiple traumatic injuries [battered child]."
"There are no injuries in the body that could be related to animal bites," he wrote.
If April's leg had been sliced open by a sadistic killer, prosecutors needed a knife. Miller gave them several. They also needed something that could have inflicted the scratches that covered the child's body. They settled on a curling iron.
A hunting knife and a curling iron became part of the evidence introduced into the November 1989 trial.
Even the defendants accepted the prosecution claim that April was murdered. Rather than present evidence of a dog attack, the defense team argued that April's human attackers were unknown.
Ardis said he was uncertain about the innocence of Miller and Loveless until he saw the autopsy photographs.
He circulated copies of the photographs and the hospital and autopsy reports to medical experts. Without exception, the experts concluded that April's wounds had been inflicted by dogs.
To his astonishment, Ardis learned that the original team of defense attorneys never received copies of the photographs nor had they sought the opinion of experts who might have countered Gonzalez's findings.
Ann Oliver, the state Child Protective Services worker assigned to the case after April's death, told Ardis she found no evidence of child abuse in the Miller-Loveless family.
But even more important, Oliver said the family dogs attacked her more than once on her visits to the Miller-Loveless farm. She urged someone to make paw imprint and tooth impressions of the dogs. No such action took place. She concluded the defendants probably were telling the truth - an opinion she shared with the prosecutor.
Rains County Assistant District Attorney Al Smith, however, "was very adamant that the dogs were not responsible," she said. "I could not get him to listen."
To bring these and other revelations to light, Ardis pursued the evidentiary hearing held last spring in Ramsay's court. The judge heard the opinions of Ardis' medical experts and of Oliver.
Ramsay concluded that Smith did not provide copies of the emergency room and autopsy photographs to defense lawyers as had been ordered by the court. The judge also said Smith "reneged" on an agreement to provide defense attorneys with access to Oliver and hospital personnel.
"Had the defendants had this testimony that the court finds to be true . . . the outcome of the trial very likely would have been `Not Guilty,' " Ramsay wrote in a "Findings of Fact" he forwarded to the Court of Criminal Appeals.
by CNB