BY Mara Bovsun
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS
If anyone should have known better, it was Dr. John Lind.
As a forensic psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth\’s Hospital, a governmental asylum in Washington, D.C., Lind had probed the minds of the criminally insane for more than three decades.
He had seen first-hand what can happen when passion overwhelms reason.
But all that knowledge didn\’t stop the 57-year-old widower from playing with emotional fire. He got involved with another man\’s woman.
She was Marguerite Kane Miller, 42, the wife of one of the city\’s most flamboyant, well-connected citizens, Robert Miller.
A top criminal defense attorney, Robert Miller, too, was no stranger to the dark side of the human soul.
In 36 years of practice, he had a remarkable record for taking and winning tough cases. His sobriquet was, \”Judge, Not Guilty,\” and he boasted that he won acquittals by simply having his clients tell the truth.
Miller, 67, would have a chance to test his theory and his skill during a trial for his life in the slaying of his rival.
Angry words, then shots
The murder happened in broad daylight, at lunchtime on Feb. 21, 1944, on a busy street in front Woodward & Lothrop\’s, one of the city\’s largest department stores. Marguerite had gone there to exchange a pink brassiere, and walked out to a car waiting at the curb. Lind was at the wheel.
She had just slipped into the passenger seat when Miller appeared. The men began to argue, and Miller leaned into the car. Then there were gunshots.
Two bullets hit Lind, one in the temple and the other in the chest; either was enough to kill.
Her mink coat splattered with blood, Mrs. Miller screamed and leaped out of the car, which rolled out of control down the street.
\”I told him to stay away from my wife,\” Miller shouted as police led him away.
It looked very much as if the killing was a matter of jealous rage, the fury of a man whose wife had been cheating on him for months. But Miller later told reporters that he killed in self-defense. Lind, he insisted, had made the first threatening move.
\”I saw Dr. Lind with my wife in the automobile,\” he said. \”I\’d warned him to keep away from her. I went up to remonstrate with him. He pulled a pistol from his pocket and tried to shoot me. I wrested the gun from him, and it went off.\”
Good story, but the problem was that, despite the street being jammed with people, no one saw exactly what happened. Witnesses offered several versions of the events, each differing in key details.
It\’s true that a gun was found in Lind\’s car. It was in a white envelope, next to him on the seat. No one could say for sure whether Lind had reached for it. One witness insisted he saw Miller toss a white package into the car just moments before the shooting, leading to speculation that the doctor hadn\’t been carrying a gun at all, and that Miller had planted it to support his self-defense story. Others described a \”hunching\” motion of the victim\’s shoulder, which could have been the action of a man reaching for a gun, right before the shooting.
By the trial\’s opening date – May 16, 1944 – it was not clear how Miller\’s attorneys planned to defend this master of the art.
Self-defense seemed risky, since there were so many discrepancies in the eyewitness accounts. The other option, temporary insanity, seemed more plausible, a fit of rage brought on by the infidelity of the woman he loved.
Mrs. Miller had met Lind at least a year earlier, when she had sought the services of a psychiatrist to help her cope with problems surrounding her 16-year marriage to Miller. Much of her dissatisfaction, friends said, was over the dingy Victorian house that Miller insisted on inhabiting, despite his wife\’s pleas for a brighter home in a more upscale neighborhood.
At some point, a love affair blossomed between doctor and patient.
Catting around in public
Apparently the pair made little effort to conceal it. Lind\’s grown daughter, for example, was well aware of what was going on, and she did not like it one bit. \”I warned my father to stay away from that woman,\” she told the Washington Post the day of the shooting.
\”I offered him my advice, but he never took it.\”
Miller knew too, and he confided to friends and colleagues. He had also taken the first steps toward a divorce.
Witnesses saw him confront Lind on several occasions. One time, Miller threatened to tell the hospitals ethics board about Lind\’s dalliance with a patient. \”I\’ll have you disbarred,\” Lind snarled, and stalked away.
As the affair dragged on, the once sharp, flamboyant lawyer became distracted, disheveled, morose and superstitious. He even started to lose cases.
\”Every morning after he came into the office, he lighted the blessed candle. Then he walked around the room with the badge of the Sacred Heart in his hand and a rosary,\” his secretary testified at the trial.
\”I had been told why he was so troubled.\”
Threatening remarks
But worry over his wife\’s infidelity was not the only thing making Miller crazy. Several people testified that Lind\’s behavior had driven the lawyer into a state of terror. In the months before the shooting, Lind had been frequently heard making death threats.
\”I am perfectly confident I can handle a gun better than he can, and if anyone around here is going to get killed, it won\’t be me,\” Lind was quoted as saying. One time, when Miller had gone home sick, Lind told an acquaintance, \”I hope he dies and won\’t we have a good time dancing on his grave.\”
In a surprise move, the defense called Mrs. Miller for more insight into her lover\’s character. She told the court that Lind had been taking money from her all through their affair. Most came from her husband\’s pocket, but one time she cashed in an insurance policy, to give Lind money to get another girlfriend to go away.
On the stand, Miller wept when he talked of his wife\’s infidelity, and told his version of what had happened. He had followed her to the department store, watching as she shopped. When she got into the car, he tried to grab her and pull her out. He heard Lind saying, \”Don\’t get out of the car. I\’ll blow that old gray-headed bastard\’s brains out.\”
Miller said he thought he saw Lind reaching for a gun, so he shot first.
After a two-week trial, it took the jury of 11 men and one woman an hour and 20 minutes to decide on a verdict of not guilty.
Miller\’s wife fell into his arms, and they left the courthouse together. Two days later, the lawyer was back in court, this time defending a woman charged with larceny. He won the case.
The couple apparently smoothed out their differences, and when Miller died nearly two decades later, at the ripe old age of 86, Marguerite was by his side.