January 11th, of 1974 Detective Terrell was investigating a residential burglary. During his investigation, he subsequently arrested a young man by the name of William Ted Wilhoit. He was able to tie Wilhoit to the burglary through a license plate number that had been obtained by a store where Wilhoit had used a stolen credit card to pay for furniture. That stolen credit card was just one of the items stolen from the residential burglary that Terrell was working. When Terrell ran a background check on Wilhoit, he found that he’d been arrested on other unrelated crimes. One specific arrest jumped out at Terrell, an attempted rape charge on August 27th, of 1973.

Terrell says “That night after I arrived home, I phoned Wilhoit and advised him that he was a suspect. We talked for a short time and he agreed to meet me the next morning outside the police building. When he arrived, he had an item or two with him, which had been taken in the burglary. He also brought with him the stolen credit card. On the way to my office, we stopped in the coffee shop. While we were there, I asked him about the attempt rape case he was charged with. He admitted to the offense, but said the details were not as reported. He would later be acquitted by a jury of the charge.”  

The alleged rape that Wilhoit was later acquitted of was of a young college student named Janelle. Janelle happened to be moving into the house next door to Wilhoit and his wife Marcia. Marcia and Wilhoit were in the process of moving out when Wilhoit went to Janelle ’s door, introduced himself and welcomed her to the neighborhood. Janelle testified that she invited Wilhoit in and he attacked her. That was Wilhoit’s twenty-first birthday.

Detective Terrell filed his burglary case and Wilhoit got a five year probated sentence. Wilhoit didn’t cross Terrell’s mind again .. until Carla’s murder. When it hit Terrell that Carla’s abduction occurred just a short distance from Wilhoit’s home, he immediately talked to Claude Davis – the homicide detective assigned to Carla’s murder case (he’s also the detective that filed the criminal attempted rape charges against Wilhoit).

After Janelle’s attack from which she nearly died, she started talking to detectives about the incident, including Claude Davis. Terrell kept up with the water cooler talk as well as newspaper articles and talk around the precinct. He took note of the fact that Jenny’s description of her attacker “closely matched that of William Ted Wilhoit.” He went to Davis again and “pointed out that Wilhoit was a member of the Church of Christ, which was located next door to Janelle’s apartment.”

Terrell went back to his own duties but his interest in Carla’s case never left him.
Later on, Terrell obtained a copy of the offense report and learned that a neighbor had reported seeing a car pass about the time of the attempted rape. The description of the car matched Wilhoit’s car. Janelle, the victim of the attempted rape told Terrell that she too had called and suggested Wilhoit as a good suspect. Terrell learned later that Wilhoit was never once questioned about Janelle’s attack.

There was a reason, an ulterior motive by investigators for not interviewing Wilhoit. They’d already picked their own prime suspect. According to Terrell, anytime detectives showed Janelle Kirby mug shots, they always included one photo in particular. She figured out pretty quickly that they were looking at this man very hard and finally identified that man as the man that had shot her.

There was one huge problem with that – Kenneth Leslie Miller, the man that Janelle had identified as the man who’d shot her, had recently filed a lawsuit against the department, specifically against the narcotics division. Miller was arrested on the same day that he was scheduled to testify in the hearing against the officers. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

Terrell says “There was speculation that Miller was arrested to offset the charges that he had made against the officers. During the hearing, Miller failed to identify one officer who had drastically altered his appearance. It would seem that this fact would change the case against the officers, and made it unnecessary to charge Miller with the Kirby offense. This is one aspect of the investigation, which remains a puzzle; and to which I can offer no explanation.”  

The only thing that I can offer to this: they went ahead with the charges on Miller for one reason and one reason only, if they’d of dropped the charges against him, it sure would have given him a fully loaded gun going into another civil suit. They had no choice but to go ahead and send an innocent man to prison for something that he didn’t do to cover their own collective asses.