Toward the end of his prison stretch, writing from a cell in the administrative-segregation unit at the Territorial Correctional Facility, Miller told Perry that he'd reached a momentous decision. He hinted darkly at secrets he could no longer carry on his own. He was paroled on February 23, 1999, and sat her down that night to tell her everything.
"You can't tell anyone," he began, "but I finally did it."
Brian Stauffer
During her sophomore year of high school, Perry kept secret her relationship with convict Randy Miller — who had dark secrets of his own.
Watch a video interview with Perry.
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He told her that he had gone to the Aurora police about Pops. Pops was pure evil. Pops had started molesting him when Miller was eleven years old. He had used him and put him on the path to prostitution. And he'd sexually assaulted at least five or six other boys. McCalmant, he said, was a rich man who stayed at the Kings Inn simply to prey on runaways, plying them with drugs and booze and using force if necessary. An investigation was under way, and Pops was going to be arrested soon.
"He told me that he'd had male relationships in prison and was coming to an acceptance that he was bisexual," Perry recalls. "He said that the only thing he ever wanted was to turn McCalmant in, that he loathed him. And he said, 'Stay with me.'"
Perry was stunned. She had never seen anything sinister in McCalmant's generosity, never picked up on the hatred and fear that the sight of the old man stirred in Miller. But now that it was out, it made a terrible kind of sense. And she knew she would stay with Miller. She had never been with a boy before, wasn't used to being with anybody. But none of that seemed to matter now.
"Randy was my first boyfriend," she says. "I didn't date at school because then I would have to explain my life to them. With Randy, I didn't have to fear rejection."
*****
Perry's mother wasn't thrilled to discover that her sixteen-year-old daughter was moving in with an adult felon. But she knew she'd lost control of Tara long before that. "I didn't know him, and I didn't like it at all," Lombardi says. "But there was no way I could stop them."
Teresa thought her sister was undergoing a personality change under the influence of her new boyfriend. "She just kind of lost herself and started doing things that weren't normal for her," she says. "She stopped going to school, to soccer, to church. I knew he wasn't the best person. He just kind of seemed like the boss, and I didn't dig that."
Miller was possessive and domineering, increasingly restricting Tara's ability to visit family and friends. When Miller barked that it was time to go, she would jump up and head for the door. Her sister and mother both suspected that he was abusing her; Teresa remembers Tara showing up at the motel in the middle of the night a couple of times, presumably after a fight with Miller. But when Lombardi confronted her daughter about a bruise on her arm, she said that Miller was simply teaching her how to "street fight."
In fact, Perry's new life had become a bruising domestic drama almost from the outset — a cycle of arguments and beatings, followed by tender makeup scenes, then more outbursts of violence. "He was sexually and emotionally abusive right away," Tara remembers. "He shoved me around a lot. He was emotionally controlling and very coercive, sexually aggressive. I was getting isolated from other people, but at some level I liked the attention.
"At one point I thought they were going to send him back for violating parole, but they didn't. I was thinking I needed to separate from him. I almost came out of my delusion. But I couldn't detach from him. He'd say, 'You're the only one I can talk to,' and I became obsessed with his turmoil."
Detectives working the McCalmant case tried to keep Miller, their chief witness, calm and out of trouble while they tracked down and interviewed other victims. But McCalmant's arrest that spring, far from bringing Miller relief, seemed to make him only more bitter and depressed; putting his tormentor away, he realized, wasn't going to give him back what had been taken from him. He began cutting himself and using heroin.
"He kept talking about guns, about crimes and suicide by cop, about going out in a blaze of gunfire," Perry says. "He had obtained a handgun and was basically setting up events to make his suicide happen."
He lost one job at a Waffle House when money turned up missing. His parole officer told him he was running out of free passes. Then he lost another position as a restaurant worker at Denver International Airport, amid other theft allegations. On Tuesday, May 18, the parole officer called to tell him to report to his office the next day.
"I'm done," Miller told Perry after he hung up. "I'm not going back to prison."
The next evening, he said he needed to get some groceries before his parole curfew and suggested they walk to the store. He took a route that brought them to the edge of an upscale apartment-hotel complex called the Holtz Executive Village. Spotting an open back door at the complex's offices, Miller abruptly pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt, grabbed Perry's wrist and plunged through the doorway, drawing his 9-millimeter handgun at the same time.
