Julie Adams Missed Class for the First Time. She Died the Night Before.

Every Thursday before trivia, Julie Adams sent the same group text, and her friends stopped checking whether she was coming and started checking whether the message had landed. On the evening of April fourteenth, 2016, it did not land. She had a Grand Canyon trip booked for August and a guided rim walk already paid for. Five days later a maintenance worker found her car at a coach lot with a parking permit face up on the dashboard, printed at 6:52 on a morning she never saw.

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Julie Adams, 48, taught seventh grade science at Wendell Middle School for nineteen years. She was found dead of head injuries in the kitchen of her home on Sycamore Creek Road on Thursday, April 14, 2016; the medical examiner placed her death late the previous night. Her Honda Accord was missing, and a parking stub recovered from its windshield carried a transaction timed to the morning after she died.

Warren Miller, 51, a regional sales director who had been part of her weekly trivia group for four years, admitted second-degree murder in a Hallett County courtroom and received twenty-two years. He had kept a replacement car key collected from a dealership on Julie's behalf, and her parking account had remained signed in on his laptop after an evening she spent at his house with friends.

Moorfield County then charged Miller with the murder of Patricia Oswald, 44, a dental hygienist found in a riverbed the previous February. He denied killing her, and denied knowing her beyond a single charity auction; her phone records, her messages ending his visits, and a pendant and blood recovered from his trunk said otherwise. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

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This episode is a work of fiction. The people, the counties, the investigation and every document described in it were invented for this series. The account follows only what the story itself establishes, from April 2016 through the trial the following spring.