Miller and Bailey returned hours later with a blue Explorer and a plan to rob the King Soopers on Smoky Hill Road. Perry could see something stirring under the cargo screen in the back of the Explorer. It turned out to be a 37-year-old employee of the Cherry Cricket, who'd been taken hostage in the carjacking. Perry asked him if he was okay and got a muffled affirmative.
They left her alone in the back seat, a few inches from the hostage, while they stopped to pick up Ateba's two young friends, who seemed excited about knocking off a grocery store. The five of them managed to shoot up the place, including Perry's firing into the ceiling, and to assault a couple of employees — all for nothing. They fled before getting any cash. Back in the Explorer, Perry realized that their captive had freed himself and slipped away while they were gone.
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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Miller drove like a maniac. He berated one of Ateba's friends, whom he accused of being too eager to take off. He had Ateba take the wheel while he turned around and began to beat the traitor with his pistol. Ateba told him to stop.
They dropped off the bloodied henchman and his pal at Ateba's place and decided to make tracks for the state line. But they'd gone only a few blocks when Ateba said he couldn't leave; his family needed him. Miller let him out.
Miller and Perry said little as they drove through the night, headed east.
*****
It ended like a scene out of Badlands — but without the film-school artiness. A third of the way across Kansas, Miller spotted a state trooper in his rear-view mirror and decided to exit the highway at the town of Ellis, then hop back on after the law had passed by. But the trooper had run the plates on the Explorer, and there was no way to get back on the interstate except to return the way they came. Within minutes they were in a high-speed chase through the dead-end town, then in a head-on collision with a police car.
Miller hit the ground running. The last a dazed Perry saw of him was the white soles of his athletic shoes. She eyed the 9-millimeter he'd given her, sitting on the dash of the wrecked Explorer, and thought about killing herself. But before she could act, a trooper reached through the window, pulled her out of the vehicle, and threw her to the ground.
They took her to a basement command post. Miller had grabbed two male hostages and was holding them in a house nearby. They had the place surrounded, with a helicopter and snipers and SWAT. Just like in the movies, they wanted to put her on the phone with him and persuade him to give up. She agreed to try.
Miller's voice was calm. "You know I'm dying today," he said.
Perry told him to let the two men go. He said he wasn't going to hurt them. He told her how much he loved her, that he'd hurt so many people but never wanted to hurt her. Knowing that the law was listening in, he talked about how he "made" her go on the robberies with him, trying to give her an out.
He talked at length about how much he hated McCalmant. Knowing that Pops would soon get the good news of his demise saddened him beyond words. He described what it was like, going around with the detectives and telling the mothers of those boys what Pops had done, how one of them had slapped his face for not stopping him sooner, and how guilty he felt about that. But seeing Pops hauled into court in handcuffs had been the happiest day of his life.
The conversation went on for three hours. At one point he rang off and called her mother at the Kings Inn, to let her know that Tara had been arrested. Lombardi, who'd heard nothing from her daughter for days, wasn't in any mood to console Randy Miller.
"He said he was in a house with two old men and was pointing a gun at them," she recalls. "I said, 'Take the gun off them. I know you're just going to use it on yourself. Just do it.'"
Back on the line with Perry, Miller asked her, "Does God forgive you for everything?"
"God does forgive you for everything," she said.
"Everything?"
"Everything."
"Even for being gay?"
"Yes."
"I love you," he said.
The gunshot was deafening, like an explosion in her own skull.
*****
A year and eighteen days after Miller's death, Robert "Pops" McCalmant was found guilty on a hundred counts of sexual assaults on children and received the longest prison sentence ever imposed in Colorado: 1,338 years. He died in a prison infirmary in 2006, the full extent of his crimes still unknown.
"I believe we only scratched the surface," says Aurora police captain Terry Brown, one of the lead investigators on the case. "We identified twelve victims by the time it went to trial, but there may have been several others."
