At about 2:30 on the afternoon of Saturday, November 26, 1955, Dean May of Canton, Illinois, drove his wife Jeanne to the town's Graham Hospital to go on duty as a nurse there. At home were their three children: 15-year-old Bill (Willard), 13-year-old Jimmy, and eight-year-old Janice. Shortly afterward, Bill and Jimmy left the house to shoot hoops on the grounds of Kellogg School (now defunct), instructing Janice to remain at home until they returned. Before they could reach the school grounds, the brothers suddenly wondered whether Janice had finished doing the dishes from the family's late lunch (that morning, Jimmy and Janice had attended a live children's show at the town's now-vanished Capitol movie theater): they then returned home only to find her missing. About an hour later, when Janice failed to turn up, Jimmy set out to look for her. Arriving at the Chicago Burlington and Quincy Railroad right-of-way at Fourth and Hickory Streets, he heard a noise from under a group of disused mine cars. Thinking he saw an injured dog under one car, he went home and returned to the scene with Bill. What the brothers then found under the mine car was not a dog but their unconscious sister. Janice had been raped and her skull badly fractured: she died in hospital less than an hour after admission. Two days later, local cab driver Lloyd Eldon Miller Jr. was arrested in Danville. Four times divorced, he had fled Canton (taking a company cab without authorization) because his second wife, Sue Ann Williams, had threatened to prosecute him for defaulting on support payments for their then four-year-old son Steven. Taken to Springfield, the state capital, Miller was held incommunicado and questioned intensively in connection with Janice's death. 52 hours after his arrest, he signed, unread, an error-ridden confession to the slaying, his interrogators having told him that they had pegged him as mentally ill, and that signing the confession would send him to a mental hospital instead of the electric chair. On June 11, 1956, Miller went on trial in the Fulton County seat of Lewistown. Nine days later, however, Judge William Bardens declared a mistrial when only four jurors could be found who had not already decided that Miller was guilty. A new trial opened on September 10, again before Judge Bardens, in the Hancock County seat of Carthage. Prosecutor Blaine Ramsey and his special assistant Roger Hayes presented a case resting on three major elements: Miller's signed confession to the police; a pair of jockey shorts found a mile from the crime scene and supposedly stained with Janice's blood (the shorts were too small for Miller, who in addition only wore boxers); and the statement of waitress Betty Baldwin, whom Miller had occasionally dated and who had ridden in his cab on the night of the slaying, that Miller had made a separate confession to her. On September 28, Miller was convicted; on November 15, he was sentenced to death in the electric chair at Joliet State Prison. Over the next seven years, Miller's execution was set for a total of seven different dates, and was stayed a total of 10 times. The last stay, on August 22, 1963, came just seven and a half hours before the appointed execution time. On December fourth of that year, a U.S. District Court hearing opened in Chicago before Judge Joseph Sam Perry. The second day of the hearing saw Betty Baldwin (now Curry) recant her 1956 testimony about Miller confessing the slaying to her. Having lost both her job and her rented room within a week of the slaying for having dated a presumed murderer, she had been taken under the combined wing of police and prosecution and assisted with a hotel room, a new job and even money in exchange for testifying against Miller. In later sessions, it was revealed that Miller, who had worked nights, was asleep in his rented room at the time of the slaying; and that not only was the alleged blood on the shorts actually paint, but that this fact was known all along to the prosecution. On the 24th, Judge Perry set aside Miller's conviction, ordering either his release or retrial; this decision, however, was reversed the following February 15. Almost two years later, on February 13, 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Judge Perry's decision, finding that the prosecution had knowingly used false evidence to obtain a conviction: Miller was freed on March 20. On September 15, 1971, all charges against Miller were finally dismissed.