Podcast Detectives: To Catch A Killer

Police in Florida create a true-crime broadcast hoping listeners will help solve the 1996 murder of 18-year-old Victoria Rose Miller

Shortly before noon on May 11, 1996, a rider on horseback reported seeing a body in the brush behind the Fraternal Order of Police lodge in Boynton Beach, Florida. The victim – blonde, blue-eyed, 18-year-old Victoria Rose Miller, mother of a 2-year-old daughter – had been reported missing by her mother the previous day.

Police learned she’d attended a party two nights earlier in nearby Lake Worth, but what happened there or after she left became an enduring 25-year mystery. “Her death seems to be that defining moment where my memories really began,” says her sister Alexis Miller, who was 8 years old at the time. “I have two daughters of my own, and I try not to be overprotective. But that shadow of my sister and what happened to her is always present.”

Police, too, felt the burden of the unsolved crime, agonising through the decades over being unable to bring answers to the Miller family – or Victoria’s killer to justice. But now they hope they’ve found a way to unlock the cold case.