Editor's note: This story by Pete Shellem was first published in the Patriot-News on April 30, 2000. Joseph Daniel Miller, 51, was charged with first-degree homicide today by Swatara Township police in connection with the death of a woman whose skeletal remains were found along Chambers Hill Road in 1997.

There's no question that Steelton's Joseph Daniel Miller is one of the most vicious killers in state history.

In a five-year span ending in 1992, Miller raped and killed at least four women and attacked two others.

In one case, a Harrisburg woman survived after she was stabbed in the head 25 times with a screwdriver and left for dead in a wooded area in Perry County.

Another survivor was able to describe Miller's attack -- he raped her, bound her in duct tape, beat her on the head with beer bottles and told her no one would be able to identify her body when he was done with her.

But there's also a pathetic side to Miller, an illiterate, retarded fourth-grade dropout whose drunken father disciplined him by beating him and chaining him to a bed.

Miller's upbringing included watching his retarded brother being forced by his parents to eat under the table like a dog, his uncle making him perform oral sex and being introduced to alcohol at age 6.

It was a home where sexual abuse was so rampant that his niece is also his sister.

Those two images of Miller -- monster vs. wretch -- will clash this week as the state prepares to execute him on Thursday.

Miller, who sports tattoos of both Jesus and the grim reaper, has alternately asked to be executed and to have his sentence changed to life in prison.

He apparently is refusing to cooperate with his attorneys in federal appeals that would automatically halt the lethal injection.

They have asked the state courts to stop the execution, saying evidence of the extent of his brain damage and childhood abuse should be presented to a jury.

His trial attorneys weren't able to present the full picture in part because Miller's family wouldn't cooperate, but his home life and mental state were exposed in subsequent appeals.

Meanwhile, Dauphin County prosecutors are pressing to carry out the execution, pointing to Miller's own requests to be killed and to justice for the victims and their families.

Reveling in murder

At a time when Pennsylvania's death penalty is coming under fire, in part because of racial bias, Miller's execution may seem politically correct.

He is white and his victims were all African-American. He told former Chief County Detective Thomas Brennan he frequently got the urge to pick up a black woman to rape and kill.

And his crimes were appalling enough to make even the most ardent death-penalty abolitionist think twice.

Four women weren't as lucky as the survivors at the beginning of this story.

Three -- Selina Franklin, Stephanie McDuffey and Jeannette Thomas -- were bludgeoned to death after being raped in a Swatara Twp. landfill.

A rope found around an ankle of McDuffey's skeleton led investigators to believe she was tied up before she was raped and beaten to death. She was 23 years old and eight months' pregnant.

Miller repeatedly ran over Kathi Novena Shenck when she bolted from his car at a roadside dump in Perry County.

Miller had gotten away with the four murders and didn't know police had already identified him in the June 30, 1992, screwdriver attack when he abducted another Harrisburg woman a week later and tried to kill her on Conrail property in Susquehanna Twp.

If not for a chance encounter with a Conrail security officer, that woman would be dead and more victims might have fallen prey.

Brennan, who was trained at the FBI Behavioral Science Unit during his career with the state police, knew exactly what he was dealing with when he came to the Conrail property crime scene.

Miller had a "murder kit" in the trunk of his car, which included a knife, duct tape, a cooler of beer and mats to lay the victim on, Brennan said.

During his confessions, Miller seemed proud of his crimes and would appear to be reliving them while recounting the attacks, Brennan said.

"You could see the veins on his neck pumping," Brennan said. "It was almost like he was working out in a gym."

He pointed out that Miller would visit the site of the McDuffey and Franklin slayings and scatter the bones, apparently reveling in his crimes.

"What our society has to learn is that there are individuals out there who commit these kind of crimes for no other reason than they like it," Brennan said. "They enjoy seeing the fear that they place in the victim and the control that they hold over that victim. And finally, they really enjoy that Godlike feeling of taking a life."

While the surviving victims and the others' families have declined to talk about the planned execution, Dauphin County District Attorney Edward M. Marsico Jr. said any sympathy for Miller is misplaced.

"This is not a case where an innocent man is facing a death sentence," Marsico said. "There is no doubt that Joey Miller committed these horrible crimes, selected vulnerable women and brutally killed them. I have no sympathy for him."

Despite Miller's contention that he confessed because his conscience was bothering him, Brennan says Miller only gave up the slayings he knew he had to.

Brennan said there may be more out there.

"What bothers Joe Miller is the fact that he thought he could manipulate the system but couldn't," Brennan said. "The only thing Joe Miller is afraid of is that final moment."

A lifetime of abuse

The horrific lab that was Miller's home created the predator that now sits on death row making feeble demands, his few advocates say.

It took a mentally retarded, brain-damaged child and introduced him to hatred, sexual abuse, violence, alcohol and crime.

"You're not born a killer," said a relative who asked not to be identified. "Joey never had a chance."

Throughout his life, Miller has consistently tested at or below the level for mental retardation. That coupled with other neurological damage made him think differently from others, psychiatrists in the case said.

He doesn't learn from his mistakes. And when he drinks or abuses other drugs, he becomes violent, the psychiatrists said.

Miller also grew up in a home that was described by one judge as "a den of incestual sexual abuse."

His sister testified that she was sexually abused by their father for two years before becoming pregnant.

When she told her mother about the situation, she said her mother attacked her with a kitchen knife. She ran away when she was 15 and Miller was 5.

Her daughter, who is both Miller's niece and sister, testified that Miller's father, three brothers, two uncles and a half brother regularly sexually abused other members of the family, including Miller.

By the time he entered Steelton Elementary School, Miller was already out of control.

Speaking with a clipped lisp as the result of a childhood accident and showing up to school dirty and disheveled, the diminutive Miller was the subject of ridicule from his peers.

Before he reached his teens, he was involved in arsons, thefts, assaults and even armed standoffs with police.

After being beaten by a group of youngsters at age 12, Miller went home and grabbed a shotgun to confront his attackers. A Steelton police officer had to fire his gun in the air before Miller would drop the weapon.

His attorney, Robert Dunham of the Philadelphia Defenders Association, said one of the defining moments for Miller was when he was raped in a juvenile facility when he was 14. Dunham said Miller suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of that attack and subsequent assaults by prison guards.

He said Miller's demands to be executed are a result of his deteriorating mental state under the pressures of death row conditions.

"Everything that Joey does has to be viewed through the prism of a mentally retarded, brain-damaged person with the mental age of a child and the crippled emotional state of a kid who's experienced a lifetime of serious abuse," Dunham said.

"That's why you have someone who clearly states that he wants to live and thinks his death sentence should be reversed but says he'd rather die than spend more time on death row," he said.

No more crayons

From the time he was 11, Miller rarely spent more than a year outside some sort of incarceration. He committed mostly petty crimes, usually under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

According to court records, his father began giving him alcohol when he was 6 and he began drinking daily, sometimes before breakfast, when he was 19.

He also began experimenting with marijuana and cocaine and once overdosed on pills on a dare.

A former employer said he fired Miller because he suspected him of breaking into a home they were working on. The woman who owned the home, an elderly widower, reported seeing a man standing over her bed with a knife.

Miller begged for his job back, but shortly after the employer agreed to give him a second chance, Miller burned down a garage where the employer stored equipment.

Working menial jobs, Miller began raising a family a few years before he started killing people. His wife was pregnant with his third child when he was arrested.

His wife divorced him after his convictions and is living with one of his brothers, Dunham said.

Functionally illiterate, Miller still kept in touch with his children by drawing them pictures.

But the Department of Corrections took away his crayons in 1998, which was one of the reasons he cited when he told others he was willing to accept the death penalty to get off death row.

"Not being able to draw pictures with crayons led him to the point where he was not sure he wanted to live," said Jeff Garis, executive director of Pennsylvanians United to Abolish the Death penalty. "That's a horrific commentary on the state of Pennsylvania that this is who we kill in this state."

"The people of Pennsylvania have to understand one thing and they have to understand it very clearly," Dunham said. "If there comes a time that Joey Miller is executed, the state will be executing a mentally retarded man. And that's just a simple fact."