Our card this week is Donna Martin, the 8 of Hearts from Florida. Donna Martin was stabbed and killed in her own home in south Florida back in 1999. And police believed that the man who may have killed her was the very same man who had turned Boca Raton into a hunting ground. But police have been unable to pin Donna’s murder on him. That suspect even went to prison for other crimes, but now he’s a free man. And police believe solving Donna’s murder could help save other women in Florida. If you were attacked in the Boca Raton, Delray Beach, or Deerfield Beach areas in the 1980s or 1990s, and you think you may have been a victim of David Miller, you can call Crime Stoppers of Palm Beach County with tips at 1-800-458-8477 or reach out to Sgt. William Springer at [email protected] are also interested in speaking with anyone who believes they may have had something stolen by David Miller that could have been recovered in the search of his property or who may have seen Miller around Donna’s apartment complex the evening of her murder.View source material and photos for this episode at: thedeckpodcast.com/donna-martin Let us deal you in… follow The Deck on social media.Instagram: @thedeckpodcast | @audiochuckTwitter: @thedeckpodcast_ | @audiochuckFacebook: /TheDeckPodcast | /audiochuckllcTo support Season of Justice and learn more, please visit seasonofjustice.org.The Deck is hosted by Ashley Flowers. Instagram: @ashleyflowersTikTok: @ashleyflowerscrimejunkieTwitter: @Ash_FlowersFacebook: /AshleyFlowers.AFText Ashley at 317-733-7485 to talk all things true crime, get behind the scenes updates, and more!
Chapter 1: Who was Donna Martin and what happened to her?
Our card this week is Donna Martin, the Eight of Hearts from Florida. Donna Martin was stabbed and killed in her own home in South Florida back in 1999. And police believed that the man who may have killed her was the very same man who had turned Boca Raton into a hunting ground. But police have been unable to pin Donna's murder on him.
That suspect even went to prison for other crimes, but now he's a free man. And police believe solving Donna's murder could help save other women in Florida. I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. When Donna Martin hadn't shown up for work by lunchtime on Tuesday, January 12th, 1999, her colleagues at ADT Security Services were pretty worried.
She had relocated to join the company in Boca Raton, Florida, less than two years before. And they knew her well enough to know that it wasn't like her to go AWOL. So one of her co-workers volunteered to stop by Donna's apartment and check on her. It was 11.45 a.m.
when she made it to Donna's apartment and from the very first moment she saw the front door slightly ajar, she knew that whatever kept Donna from work wasn't good. She pushed the door open to reveal a quiet living room. Too quiet. She made her way toward the kitchen and reached for the light switch to better see, but when the bright light washed over the kitchen, she saw a horrifying sight.
Donna was on the floor next to the fridge, covered in blood, and still wearing the green suit she'd worn to work the day before. Frantic, the colleague called for help, but when paramedics arrived, they quickly realized there was no hope of reviving Donna. Retired Detective John Van Houten, who everyone on the squad calls Hootie, was the lead detective on Donna's case for many years.
I mean, even starting from day one. He told our reporters that when he first entered Donna's apartment, it was clear that she'd been stabbed. And he was pretty sure he knew with what. And that theory came from the fact that a knife in her kitchen was missing.
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Chapter 2: What evidence was found at Donna Martin's crime scene?
The knife was taken from a butcher block, which was on top of the refrigerator. And I don't remember if we found the knife, Bill.
We never found the murder weapon.
No. That second voice you heard was Sergeant William Springer, who also worked on his case for the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. You'll hear both men talking back and forth quite a bit throughout this episode.
It was one of the larger knives. And if I remember right, the wound was down between her collarbone. It went down, hit the aorta, and she bled out right there.
Although paramedics had moved Donna from the kitchen to the living room by the time police arrived, the pool of blood in the kitchen made it clear where the stabbing had taken place. And both detectives agree that the evidence pointed to a surprise attack.
She has nylons on, underwear, bra, everything, and everything is intact. In my opinion, and the observation, there was no signs of a struggle. She never saw it coming.
And she was a petite woman. She was a small-framed woman. And so she just folded. It was a very cold-blooded thing.
The rest of the apartment revealed little else. A sliding glass door had been left partially open, but detectives believed Donna had left it that way herself to allow her cat to come and go. There was a missing pillowcase from one pillow in Donna's bedroom, but the bedroom itself appeared otherwise undisturbed.
Detectives gathered as much evidence as they could, taking knives, clothing, sampling blood smears in the apartment and dusting for prints. But none of the evidence gave them any leads. There were no unidentified fingerprints and all the blood that they found was Donna's. But there was other evidence at the scene that helped investigators at least establish a timeline.
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Chapter 3: What was Donna Martin's last known movements and who was the man she met?
We don't know her eating patterns, so it could have been just for her and she kept some in the refrigerator for lunch the next day, or she could have ordered for two.
There were two clean plates found on her living room floor, possibly knocked down from her coffee table when paramedics got to the scene. So did she have company? And if so, who was joining her? Detectives got a lucky break when they found out the bartender actually remembered the name of the guy who danced with Donna. Or his first name, at least. David.
They got an even bigger break when another Palm Beach County detective named Rich Carl told Van Houten and Springer that he felt like Donna's case had some striking similarities to another case that he'd worked just a few months before. And it just so happened that one person of interest in that case was named David.
This other attack Detective Rich Carl remembered had happened less than four months before. That would have been in September 1998. And a lot of what we know about that attack comes from a deeply reported article by Lisa Ocker for Boca Raton magazine. A young woman named Kristen Anderson, or Christy as most people knew her, had returned home after work to walk her dog.
When she got back to her apartment, she saw her front door was slightly open, but she just assumed that she'd forgotten to close it when she left. So Christy went inside and was listening to voicemail messages in her kitchen when all of a sudden someone grabbed her from behind and pressed a knife to her neck before stabbing her eight times.
Christy screamed so loud and so much that she later told reporters she thought it scared off her attacker, giving her the ability to call for help. Now, Christy survived and was able to tell police that while she hadn't seen her attacker, she had this strong feeling that she might know who the suspect was. Someone who'd been watching her walk her dog a week or two before.
Now, she didn't have an interaction with the guy. She just remembered him glaring at her in a way that made her so uncomfortable it stuck with her. And here's the really interesting part. Yes, he had attacked her from behind, and that's part of the reason she didn't see his face. But she had an opportunity to look at him after he attacked her as he was running out the door.
But even then, she couldn't tell anything about his facial features because covering his head was a pillowcase. When Detective Carl compared this with what he knew about the crime scene at Donna's home, he immediately recognized the parallels. A blitz attack stabbing in a Boca Raton apartment, a missing pillowcase from each scene, with no apparent sexual assault on either woman.
The scarier thing about these two attacks was that it wasn't just those two. Detective Carl believed them to be part of a disturbing pattern of crimes. Home invasions, assaults, women being punched and choked, and even one seven-year-old girl being taken from her home at night. It was all in the relatively small, safe, and wealthy area of Boca.
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Chapter 4: What similarities exist between Donna Martin's case and other attacks in Boca Raton?
She was like, you know, I was so afraid when she moved to Boca because, you know, I just had this horrible feeling when she went there, she wouldn't be prepared to deal anymore. with city life, you know, just way too friendly and way too open. She never met a stranger. She always saw the good. She met this guy one time that I already knew and I just He was just a person.
She came home and said, oh, I met so-and-so today. And would you believe, he's the president of this club. And just telling me all these wonderful things about people that I never knew. Everybody she met, she just saw only the good.
When Donna died, she was 53. And she was in management. So I doubt she was a totally naive and impressionable person. But someone had clearly taken advantage of her kind heart and good nature. And when Dawn first got the news about her sister's murder, she didn't have the first clue who it could be. I mean, she struggled to even come to terms with her new reality.
I mean, just the week before, she had talked to Donna on the phone and now...
And I remember just crying my eyes out, pumping gas, and people just kept riding by. And I was like, how can people just go on driving by, riding in their cars when my sister has been murdered? How can people do that? How can I be pumping gas when my sister has been murdered?
Dawn and her family wanted more answers, so they flew down to South Florida to meet with Springer and Van Houten. By the time they arrived, Dawn was told by investigators that they'd already ruled out some of the usual suspects, ex-boyfriends, for instance, and in particular, her two ex-husbands, one of whom also lived in South Florida.
He was an iron worker. And I think they did look at him, but immediately he had an alibi. I'm sure it wasn't him and nobody would ever have convinced me.
Dawn remembered investigators telling her that they had even looked into the female colleague that discovered Donna at the home. But when we talked to them, they said that she had never been a serious suspect. Which only left David missing. And while the bartender at the Porter House might not have caught a last name, Detective Rich Carl knew it all too well.
So did three other law enforcement departments in the area around Boca and West Palm Beach.
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Chapter 5: Who is David Miller and what is his criminal background?
David Miller was a person of interest in Christy Anderson's attack, the stabbing from the previous September. Police records don't reflect exactly how he was connected with Christy's case, but we do know that he had been on the radar of law enforcement for years. For starters, he had two previous convictions for violent crimes in Florida.
The first was an attack on a woman in 1984, not long after he'd moved to Florida from Illinois. David, who was 29 at the time, had been arrested in Deerfield Beach, which is just south of Boca Raton. In that case, Miller had snuck into a woman's home when she had left to do some laundry, leaving her sliding glass door unlocked.
And when the woman came back inside, David had overpowered her and forced her to the floor, pulled off her shorts, and used the cord of an electric razor to whip her. Whatever he planned to do next was interrupted when the woman's sister and her boyfriend arrived. And the boyfriend chased David down and was able to hold on to him until police arrived.
For that attack, he was convicted of sexual battery and aggravated battery. A judge sentenced him to four years in prison, but he was released early for good behavior, getting out in the spring of 1986. The second conviction he had is from 1989, when he was pulled over for driving with a broken taillight. It was the early hours of the morning in Delray Beach, which is just north of Boca this time.
This incident is described in detail in Boca Magazine. When the police officer walked up to the car, he found a six-year-old girl in the passenger seat. When the officer asked David Miller what was going on, David said that he had found the child out walking by herself and that he was trying to take her home.
Now his story didn't add up and no part of his story would explain why they also found rubber gloves, a knife, nunchucks, and a small revolver in his car. So police arrested David Miller and he was charged with armed burglary, kidnapping a minor, carrying a concealed firearm, and carrying a concealed weapon. But in the end, most of those charges didn't stick.
Prosecutors dropped all but the firearms charges. Boga Magazine says that was because, quote, the little girl couldn't explain how she was taken from her bed or by whom, end quote. But even with the most serious of the charges dropped, Miller was convicted of a felony of possessing a firearm as a felon and sentenced to nine years.
This criminal behavior that we see in Florida wasn't even new for David Miller. He had a record of violence against women even before coming to Florida. Along with charges over the years for having a concealed weapon and drunk driving, some of which were dropped, he also was charged with battery in 1977 after he was arrested for breaking into a hotel room and assaulting the two women inside.
Those also dropped. So he was free two years later in 1979 to attack another woman. David Miller was arrested again and convicted of sexual assault and attempted rape. He was sentenced to six years in prison, but didn't end up serving all of it.
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Chapter 6: Why is David Miller considered a prime suspect in Donna Martin's murder?
Chapter 7: What was the involvement of Donna Martin's family in the investigation?
I mean, just the week before, she had talked to Donna on the phone and now...
And I remember just crying my eyes out, pumping gas, and people just kept riding by. And I was like, how can people just go on driving by, riding in their cars when my sister has been murdered? How can people do that? How can I be pumping gas when my sister has been murdered?
Dawn and her family wanted more answers, so they flew down to South Florida to meet with Springer and Van Houten. By the time they arrived, Dawn was told by investigators that they'd already ruled out some of the usual suspects, ex-boyfriends, for instance, and in particular, her two ex-husbands, one of whom also lived in South Florida.
He was an iron worker. And I think they did look at him, but immediately he had an alibi. I'm sure it wasn't him and nobody would ever have convinced me.
Dawn remembered investigators telling her that they had even looked into the female colleague that discovered Donna at the home. But when we talked to them, they said that she had never been a serious suspect. Which only left David missing. And while the bartender at the Porter House might not have caught a last name, Detective Rich Carl knew it all too well.
So did three other law enforcement departments in the area around Boca and West Palm Beach.
Rich Carl says, we need to look at David Miller.
David Miller was a person of interest in Christy Anderson's attack, the stabbing from the previous September. Police records don't reflect exactly how he was connected with Christy's case, but we do know that he had been on the radar of law enforcement for years. For starters, he had two previous convictions for violent crimes in Florida.
The first was an attack on a woman in 1984, not long after he'd moved to Florida from Illinois. David, who was 29 at the time, had been arrested in Deerfield Beach, which is just south of Boca Raton. In that case, Miller had snuck into a woman's home when she had left to do some laundry, leaving her sliding glass door unlocked.
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