Willard Miller gives a statement before sentencing. (KCRG TV photo)
Willard Miller of Fairfield was sentenced to life with a chance for parole after 35 years Thursday for the killing of his Spanish teacher Nohema Graber in November of 2021.
Miller had pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and the sentence came after a sentencing hearing on the events leading up to the murder. DCI Agent Trent Vileta testified that Miller was identified as a suspect because of problems in Graber’s class. “We’d retrieved some school records emails that would show how Willard Miller was anguishing over how bad his grade was and how he didn’t feel it knowing that Graber was a good teacher,” he says.
Vileta says Miller was getting an “F” in the class and decided to kill Graber.
“It appears, according to Jeremy Goodale, that planning began roughly ten days to two weeks before her death when Willard Miller started asking people to help him with the murder,” Vileta says. He says they found evidence the two were keeping an eye on Graber when she went for a walk. “They were actually watching her to determine what her routes were. I think pretty early in their surveillance they were able to determine that almost every day or if not every day after school she would go to Chautauqua Park to walk,” he says.
Miller made a statement before his sentencing.” I would like to apologize for my actions first and foremost, to the family. I’m truly sorry for the distress that I caused you and the devastation I caused your family,” he says. He also apologized to the community, police, and his church.
“Coming here today, now at the end of this stretched out journey, I’m realizing just the magnitude of my actions. And I know it was wrong and I knew it was wrong, I’m yet I still carried through, I still did what I did,” Millers says.
Nohema Graber’s brother-in-law Tom was one of several people to give victim impact statements. “This case has had an enormous impact on Nohema’s family, Fairfield High School, and the Fairfield community at large,” he says. “Not only was Nohema robbed of 30 some of the best years of her life. Her murder deprived Paul Graber of the love of his life, and certainly hasten Paul’s own premature death.”
He says Paul had just endured more than five years of dialysis and received a kidney transplant and was looking forward to resuming travel with his wife.
“Paul was deeply and understandably depressed by the murder of Nohema — and his life ended last week in the ravages of a metastatic cancer that would have been caught and treated far sooner had Nohema been there,” he says.
Miller is now almost 18, but was 16 years old at the time of the killing, and state law requires that juveniles be given a chance for parole. Jeremey Goodale also pleaded guilty and his sentencing hearing will be in August.
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