In the spring of 1982, the life of 17-year-old Margaret J. Miller was tragically cut short in Kansas City, Missouri. Her body was discovered in a vacant lot near 37th Street and Garfield Avenue on Sunday, May 9, 1982, by a teenager walking to his grandmother's house. An autopsy later confirmed that the cause of death was strangulation. At the time of her death, it was known that Miller was working as a prostitute on Troost Avenue.
Investigators noted that some of her personal items, including her underwear and a bra with a key attached, were missing from the scene.
For years, Margaret's murder remained unsolved, one of several cases of slain women that cast a shadow over the city. The break in the case would not come for over two decades, intertwined with the investigation into a string of similar homicides. Law enforcement eventually identified a suspect in these cold cases through the use of DNA evidence. This suspect was Lorenzo Gilyard, a man who would later be dubbed 'The Kansas City Strangler.' A blood sample taken from Gilyard in 1987 in connection with another investigation proved to be the key that linked him to numerous crime scenes.
Gilyard was arrested in April 2004, and authorities publicly named him as the suspect in the deaths of at least 13 women, including Margaret Miller, whose murders spanned from 1977 to 1993. The victims were often sex workers, and many were found strangled and left in secluded areas. Eight days after Margaret's body was found, Gilyard began serving a prison sentence for burglary, and the series of killings temporarily ceased, only to resume after his parole.
In March 2007, Lorenzo Gilyard stood trial for seven of the thirteen murders he was suspected of committing. Prosecutors presented a case built on the strength of DNA evidence connecting Gilyard to the victims. However, the charges related to Margaret J. Miller's death were not part of this specific trial. The prosecution chose to focus on a cluster of murders that occurred in 1986 and 1987. On March 16, 2007, Gilyard was convicted of six counts of first-degree murder and was subsequently sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. While he was not convicted for the murder of Margaret J. Miller, law enforcement remains confident that he was responsible for her death.
