Myrle Evelyn Miller, center, appears in a mugshot; John Nichols, inset on the left, appears in his obituary photo. (Columbia County Prison; Obituary in The Daily Item)
A septuagenarian Pennsylvania woman will spend the rest of her life in prison for killing her third husband – after systematically stealing his substantial life savings over the course of several years.
Myrle Evelyn Miller, 78, was found guilty of numerous crimes related to the long-drawn-out swindling and fatal poisoning of John W. Nichols, 77, in April, including murder in the first degree, forgery, fraud, perjury, theft by deception, and dealing in proceeds of unlawful activities.
On Friday, the deceased man’s family harshly castigated the murderess in a series of victim impact statements delivered at the Union County Courthouse, according to NorthcentralPa.com.
There, Lehigh County Senior Judge Edward Reibman sentenced Miller to a mandatory term of life in prison for Nichols’ murder – along with an additional sentence, to be served consecutively, of between 148 and 294 months for the five additional theft-related felony offenses.
“Your soul is just too dark to feel anything.” Nichols’ daughter, Lori Hedding, reportedly said while looking in the condemned woman’s direction. “I believe, Myrle, you are the true definition of evil.”
Another daughter of the victim, Tammy Lawton, referred to Miller as an “evil thing,” the outlet reported – and at least three other victims also used the word “evil” to describe the convicted killer.
“Instead of leaving after taking all of his worldly possessions, you took his life,” Lawton said, according to NorthcentralPa.com.
The defendant and the deceased were married in December 2012.
Soon after that, Miller began a yearslong process of draining her then-husband’s coffers. Eventually, Nichols’ family members began to suspect the confidence scheme. In April 2018, the couple was visited by an agent with the Union-Snyder Agency on Aging – who was responding to complaints that Miller was committing fraud to steal and spend Nichols’ life savings, according to The Daily Item.
Nichols, who still believed his accounts were fine, agreed to an investigation, but quickly aimed to end to the inquiry at his wife’s request. Miller was overheard instructing the kibosh less than a week later, according to a grand jury report obtained by The Patriot-News.
“We spent a lot of money,” the killer testified during grand jury proceedings that saw her indicted for Nichols’ death – telling investigators she wrote out the checks which her then-husband signed.
At the time the short-lived investigation began, Nichols believed he had some $257,000 spaced across three separate investment accounts. Instead, Miller had drained those accounts, investigators found. She even took out a $19,000 loan against his life insurance.
An audit, already in progress at the time Miller tried to shut it down, would quickly reveal the perfidy.
Nichols died from heart problems on April 14, 2013, at the couple’s shared home on Lamey Road in Millmont, an unincorporated community near the southwestern border of New York State.
His obituary notes he was a union carpenter – and that the love of his life was his first wife, Edith Nichols, who he was married to for 41 years before she passed away in September 2000.
Soon after Nichols’ death, Miller married her fourth husband.
In 1986, Miller was accused of attempting to kill her first husband by poisoning his cocktails. She was acquitted in 1988.
An autopsy would show that Nichols had various drugs in his system when he died, among them a fatal amount of Verapamil – a blood pressure medication that had not been prescribed to him, but which, rather, Miller had prescribed to her. She obtained two 90-day supplies of the pharmaceutical in the three months before he died.
“The defendant was systematically emptying her husband’s bank accounts, and upon being found out, made the deliberate and intentional decision to kill him,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Michelle Henry said after Miller was convicted earlier this year, in comments reported by NorthCentralPa.com. “It is hard to fathom acts more cold, calculated, and self-serving.”
Miller herself did not testify during her trial.
Her defense was focused on the idea that Nichols knew about the spending – with Union County Public Defender Brian Ulmer telling jurors that none of the spending was on luxury items or expensive travel, but, instead, everyday necessities. The defense attorney also said that Nichols had been prescribed medication for dementia – in an apparent effort to muddy the waters about the various drugs in the victim’s system when he died. None of it was enough to convince a jury.
After initially being charged in May 2021, Miller was convicted following a one-week-long trial on April 23.
Union County District Attorney Pete Johnson led the prosecution. Following Miller’s conviction and sentencing, Johnson took the opportunity to criticize the stone-faced defendant – who declined to ever speak on her own behalf; other than once disputing the charges as “ridiculous” and “[not] true” during her arraignment.
“You saw the reaction of a sociopath to the verdict,” the DA said. “She was blank-faced.”
Johnson was assisted on the case by Senior Deputy Attorney General Jennifer Buck – who did not attend the sentencing proceedings. During the trial, she told jurors that the case was a “simple” matter of “greed, lies, and coldness of heart.”
The victim’s family agreed.
During the sentencing hearing, Nichols’ niece, Brenda Trytek, told the court she was not able to see her beloved uncle while she underwent cancer treatment over the course of nine months – because Miller forbade the dying man to speak to her, according to NorthCentralPa.com
“I was fighting for my life, and you were taking his life,” she said.
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