Mesa Murderer William Miller Found Guilty

Back in May we brought you the gruesome tale of a murderer who killed to cover up insurance fraud. The perpetrator, William Craig Miller, has now been convicted of this heinous crime.

According to The Arizona Republic, the case that took over five years to get to trial resulted in a jury that took less than three hours to find William Craig Miller guilty of slaughtering five relatives to cover up an arson-for-hire scheme.

Miller not only waived his right to be present during any questions that the jurors might have about the verdict or the aggravation phase of the trial, but he also waived his right to testify.

“His decision not to show up in court didn’t make it any more or less difficult,” said Eric Kessler, one of Miller’s defense attorneys. “It was his choice, and we had to live by it.”

Along with the five counts of first-degree murder, Miller was also found guilty of one count of burglary and four counts of solicitation of first-degree murder –for his four failed attempts at hiring hit men to do the job.

All four of those almost-hired hit men refused to participate in the slayings, but also never warned the victims. They supposedly thought that Miller was just bragging and would not carry out the murders.

The new job on Kessler’s mind is how to save Miller from execution. In the next phase of the trial, which started on August 30^th, the same jury will need to decide if there are enough aggravating factors to qualify Miller for the death penalty. So far, at least two of those factors have been established by the facts in the case –that there was more than one victim and that a child was murdered.

If jurors do find enough aggravating factors, they would decide again later on if Miller should be executed.

Miller was found guilty of shooting Steven Duffy, 30, and Tammy Lovell, 32, to death on Feb. 21, 2006, to prevent them from testifying against him in a Scottsdale arson case.

Jurors also believed in the prosecution when they argued that Miller also fatally shot Steven’s brother, Shane Duffy, and Lovell’s children, Jacob, 10, and Cassandra, 15, to eliminate witnesses.

Steven Duffy and Lovell had worked for Miller’s Scottsdale building-cleaning and -restoration business when he recruited Duffy to help torch his Scottsdale home as part of an insurance scam because he was in financial trouble.

Duffy eventually confessed his role to Lovell, who then persuaded him to go to police.

“This defendant was fixated on the deaths of Tammy and Steve,” prosecutor Kristen Hoffmeyer said during the trial. “He had a motive to kill Steve and Tammy. He believed if they went away, the arson case went away.”

Through a jailhouse interview in July of 2007, Miller admitted that he was responsible for the murders, but stopped before he let his confession of pulling the trigger slip. Those admissions were note enough to reach the definition of first-degree murder.

Miller stated at the time, “I’m confessing to being responsible for them, yes. It’s a loss of life. I sit there before I go to bed every night. I think about what could have been done differently.”

Previously, Miller pled guilty to the arson case after a judge ruled that secretly recorded conversations with the murder victims could be played at trial.

He is currently serving 16 years in prison for the arson charge.

The third phase of the trial, which is the penalty phase where Miller will finally be sentenced, will either send him to back to prison for the rest of his life or to death row.