When I met Rodney Miller, I was shocked to find him
wearing blue jeans and a turtleneck. From all I’d heard, I expected
him to be dressed in spandex tights and a cape, because people who knew
Miller promised me he was a superhero. I was doing some preliminary research on our local
Goodwill Industries, whose two top officials had just signed plea deals to
avoid prosecution for Medicaid fraud. Miller had spearheaded that
investigation, and other state officials had high praise for his work. Maryam Mostoufi, a former bureau chief with the state
Department of Human Services’ Division of Developmental Disabilities,
credits Miller with picking up the case after it had languished more than a
year, piecing together the details and packaging them perfectly for
prosecutors to present to the grand jury. “He was like a translator,” she gushes,
“an evidence translator.”
Mostoufi was particularly impressed with how Miller
understood the impact of what could have been dismissed as a petty
financial scam. “He was a humanist,” she insists. “He was
really trying to ensure that people with disabilities — the most
vulnerable people in our society — were going to have a better life
by the time he was done with this case.”
I desperately wanted a copy of his final report on
Goodwill, but Miller refused to talk to me. Goodwill was in his rearview
mirror; he had moved on to another case, and it was a doozy. Miller had been appointed “case agent in
charge” of the apparently unofficial reinvestigation of the 1986
Paris double homicide of newlyweds Dyke and Karen Rhoads. Not only was this
one of the most notorious crimes in Illinois history, it’s also one
of the biggest scandals to hit the Illinois State Police. Randy Steidl, one
of the two men convicted of the crime, was released from prison in May 2004
after a judge ruled that he would probably not have been convicted if the
jury had heard all the evidence. A year later, retired ISP Lt. Michale
Callahan won a lawsuit against his former bosses, whom he accused of
impeding his reinvestigation of the case. Despite the fact that these two cases were completely
unrelated, Miller suspected that I was using Goodwill as a Trojan horse in
an attempt to get info about the Paris investigation. It took many messages
sent by way of a third party before he would even return my phone call. The
delay was frustrating, but I soon realized that that was just how Miller
was: fanatical about preserving the integrity of his cases. He eventually coughed up his Goodwill report —
bringing it to my office and leading me through it page by page, reviewing
his witness list, telling me what each person would or could say. I was
struck by his intelligence and his passion for his work, and we chatted off
the record about some other cases. We didn’t discuss the Paris
investigation, but I felt certain that here was the man who would finally
unearth the truth. I later learned that he had even earned the
endorsement of the toughest critic — Callahan himself.
“Sometimes politics is bigger than the truth, but I knew Rodney would
always do the right thing,” Callahan told me. “He was a very
honest cop, beyond reproach.”
The last time I talked to Miller was when I called to
tell him I had turned my Goodwill file over to another staff writer, Bruce
Rushton (his compelling investigative feature “Ill will” was
published April 27). We had a long, funny conversation in which Miller
tried to get me to admit that reporters treat sources in the same way
narcotics agents treat informants. “You’re just loaning me to
this Rushton guy, right?” he joked. It doesn’t matter. Last Friday, we all lost
Miller. He was killed in a car wreck as he drove home from work. He was
only 40. His kids are just 11 and 9. And his work here wasn’t nearly
done. ISP Special Agent Jeff Marlow says the news hit him
“like a horse just kicked you in the stomach,” and he
hasn’t felt right since. “You can’t say nothing.
There’s nothing that fits,” he says. Ten years Miller’s senior, Marlow was outranked
by Miller and outpaced by his energy. “He walked, talked, and thought
way too fast,” Marlow wrote in a poignant tribute to Miller posted on
an ISP blog. Their bond developed as they worked together on the
case that, Marlow suspects, Miller is still investigating. “He has
now talked to Dyke and Karen,” Marlow wrote on the blog. “He
ain’t going to rest, he just shifted to another gear.”
This article appears in May 18-24, 2006.
