Jury convicts man and daughter of stalking and tormenting wife after Alness marriage breakdown; case heard from more than 20 witnesses at Inverness Sheriff Court
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A FATHER and his daughter have been convicted by a jury of stalking and tormenting his wife after their marriage ended.
Kevin Miller and his daughter Lauren were found guilty by a jury of engaging in a course of conduct which caused Linda Miller fear and alarm between May 2017 and and April 2019.
Miller was also convicted of an assault on his wife in 1994.
Jurors heard nearly three weeks of evidence from more than 20 witnesses during the trial at Inverness Sheriff Court.
They heard in evidence from Mrs Miller how the 1994 assault happened at an address in Obsdale Gardens, Alness, before their marriage.
She described how she had arrived home after a night out with her sisters went to bed and was sick.
Miller came into the bedroom shouted and swore at her and assaulted her before she fled the house wearing only a coat only to be found by a neighbour who took her back home.
The couple met in 1989 and married in 1995.
Mrs Miller ran a car sales firm and her husband a tyre business in a unit at Evanton Industrial Park.
She said she got home about midnight after a night out with her sisters in 1994. She was feeling sick and went to bed.
"The next thing I remember was getting beaten so hard it jolted me awake. He was beating me on my back and my bottom. He grabbed me round the wrist and swung me against the wardrobe and broke my nose. I grabbed a coat. I'd no clothes on and ran to get out of the house."
But Mrs Miller said a neighbour took her back home and her partner made a joke and said she had walked into a wardrobe and made a fool of her. The two men went for a drink in the living room and she then fled the house in her bare feet to her mother's home half a mile away.
Miller was cleared of further charges of assault against his wife on in 1998, 2011 and 2013.
His wife in her evidence described years of verbal and physical abuse at the hands of her husband.
Miller (50) and his daughters Lauren (24) and Courtney (22) had denied 14 charges of stalking, including assaults, attempting to pervert the course of justice and threatening behaviour.
Eleven charges were dropped by the prosecution at the end of the evidence and Courtney was cleared on all charges. Jurors then spent a day and half deliberating on the remaining charges, the assault in 1994 and two charges of stalking covering multiple incidents over many different dates by Kevin and Lauren Miller between 2017 and 2019.
Jurors returned a majority verdict on the assault charge but were unanimous with their verdict on the stalking which included allegations of visiting Mrs Miller at addresses when she fled the family home, sending her flowers, asking friends where she was living and telling her family members she no longer wanted to contact them.
The jury heard how when Mrs Miller ran off with one of her own cars and sold it to a dealer in Aberdeenshire. Miller posted a picture on social media claiming the car had been stolen to track his wife down to the address she had moved to in Lossiemouth.
On another occasion in front of his daughters and his wife he placed a cable tie around his neck and tightened it threatening to kill himself and his wife had to use scissors to release the cable tie.
Mrs Miller said she wasn’t allowed to contact her own family. “I had to regard them as all being dead. I was gutted because I would never see my family again."
She re-established contact with her family when she moved out of the family home two months after the incident in May 2017.
Sheriff Eilidh Macdonald remanded Kevin Miller and bail was continued on his daughter until they are sentenced on December 12.
