Joseph D. Miller was convicted of killing three woman and confessed to killing another in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now he is charged with the death of yet another woman, whose partial remains were found in 1997 in Swatara Township.

All were young women. Little is known about a few of them, with most attention at the time devoted to their killer, rather than them. Several had made mistakes in life, but should have had years ahead of them to correct and overcome those errors.

Instead, police say, they became victims of the man District Attorney Ed Marsico called "the most prolific serial killer in Dauphin County history." These are their stories:

Selina Franklin

Selina Franklin was 18 and hanging out with friends on North Sixth Street, near Peffer Street, on May 15, 1987. As was their habit, the group of girls tried to flag down a ride - something they did even if they didn't know the driver. Joseph Miller was willing to drive them around.

Selina, said her friend, broke their rule of sticking together and stayed with Miller after he dropped the other girls off at their home. She was never seen again.

More than four years later, her body was discovered in a Swatara Township landfill.

She was the daughter of Louise Franklin and Leonard Brown, both of Harrisburg, and had attended Harrisburg School District. She had a brother, Jeffrey, and a sister, Rochelle, who wrote this poem for her memorial service:

She was always different than my brother and me.

As you know she is the youngest of us three.

She brought us joy, laughter and tears

For just 18 years.

We really don't have much else to say,

but our love for her will never go away.

Stephanie McDuffey

Stephanie McDuffey, 23, was last seen leaving her Bellevue Street home on Nov. 13, 1989, saying she was going to see a man she had recently met.

She was eight months' pregnant at the time.

It was later learned that Miller picked up McDuffey and drover her to a Swatara Township landfill. Miller told police had had sex with her, then beat her to death with a metal pipe and covered her body with wood, shingles and tires.

Kathi Novena Shenck

Kathi Novena Shenck was part Sioux and part French Canadian and began life on a Sioux reservation in Manitoba, Canada, one of 16 siblings.

It was a family life troubled by alcohol abuse and neglect, which led to her being put up for adoption when she was 5, along with her 6-year-old sister, Roxanne.

For the next 13 years, her life was a succession of foster homes -- seven of them -- and three institutions. She grew into an adult who, a relative said in 1993, "couldn't believe she was lovable."

At 18, she married Robin Scott Shenck, a New Bloomfield-area man. They had three children, but the marriage faltered and they divorced. Shenck, who had custody of the children, kept in touch with his ex-wife, who he said struggled with a drinking problem.

He told The Patriot-News in 1993 that she would spend time at the Bethesda Mission, lived with a boyfriend for a year and a half, worked as a housekeeper and wound up spending her last few weeks in what he called "a flophouse"

That's where Miller apparently picked her up and drove her to to an illegal dump along the Susquehanna River south of Duncannon. When she tried to flee his sexual advances, he struck her with his car, then ran over her again and again.

"He literally crushed the last breath from her body," said then-Perry County District Attorney R. Scott Cramer in 1993.

Jeanette Thomas

Jeanette Thomas, 25, who had addresses in Hall Manor and on Carnation Street in Harrisburg, was last seen Jan. 8, 1990. She was reported missing Jan. 11. Her bludgeoned body was found in the old Swatara Towship landfill weeks later.

When Miller in 1992 confessed to her killing, however, another man had been convicted of the crime. William Kelly Jr., who was mentally disabled, had confessed to causing her death.

When Miller led police to the bodies of two other women in the same landfill, police reopened the case against Kelly.

Sperm found in Thomas' body was matched to Miller. And witnesses who originally identified Kelly as the last person seen with Thomas now said they were mistaken and identified Miller as that person.

A psychiatrist found that a combination of manic depression, chronic alcoholism and a history of blackouts made Kelly susceptible to being unable to distinguish what he may have done.

Kelly was freed from prison in January 1993.

Kelly Ann Ward

Kelly Ann Ward, 25, of Harrisburg, disappeared in 1986. Skeletal remains found in Swatara Township in 1997 were not identified as hers until April 13, 2016, when investigators announced new homicide charges against Joseph Miller and disclosed her name publicly for the first time.

Next to nothing is known about how Ward may have met up with Miller, but two things are clear: Like many of Miller's victims, she had had a tough time growing up. And she had loving family members who never gave up the search for her.

Ward's mother died of lupus when she was 11. She never had a relationship with her father. By the time she died, drugs and prostitution had cast a further shadow over her life. Investigators say in court documents that she may have been walking the streets of uptown Harrisburg, an area where Miller was known to seek his prey, when she vanished..

"I will never meet or have another relative like her," her cousin, Faun Ward, says of her. "She was my sister, brother and my dad. She fought for me."

It was Ward who went to police in 2007 and had her missing persons case reopened.

Although Miller was convicted of murdering Franklin, McDuffey and Schrenk, and he confessed to killing Thomas, he denies killing Ward.