Texas has much to recommend it. Friendly people, a robust economy, no state income tax, etc. It's easy to see why someone would want to settle down here. That goes for ordinary, law-abiding citizens, and it goes for cold-case murder suspects from Pennsylvania.
Twice in the past six months (and two counts as a trend, right?), law enforcement officials have tracked down suspects in decades-old Pennsylvania slayings living on the rural fringes of Dallas-Fort Worth.
In October, it was 67-year-old Richard Keiper, who moved to Wise County after allegedly killing a steel executive in 1968. Upon his arrest 45 years later, he told investigators that he'd moved there to join a traveling carnival but wound up marrying and starting a family.
He was working at the wastewater treatment plant in Boyd when Texas Rangers showed up.
On Monday, U.S. marshals arrested a disabled 78-year-old living in the East Texas town of Mineola under the name of Roy Eubanks, an alias for Joseph Lewis Miller, a man wanted in the murder of a Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, man in 1981.
According to The Associated Press, he'd arrived in town in the 1980s and established himself as an upstanding member of the community, marrying twice, becoming a deacon in his church and serving on various town boards and commissions.
He told his wife about the killing, saying it was an accident that happened when he was "trying to help his brother." It's unclear whether he mentioned the life sentence he received for a 1959 murder of another Harrisburg man, a sentence that was later commuted.
U.S.marshals told the AP that Eubanks/Miller confessed to the 1981 killing upon his arrest Monday.
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