Elizabeth Walters grew up with many families.
A foster child who was adopted at the age of 10, she split her time between her birth family and her adoptive family. Later, girlfriends at Catholic High School and co-workers and patrons at the neighborhood bar where she was a waitress also became like family to her.
It was her appreciation for the concept of family that prompted Elizabeth Walters to confront the married man with whom she was expecting a baby about what role he'd play in the little girl's life, friends and relatives said.
David L. Miller responded by shooting her in the head, killing her and their unborn child in a Parkville parking lot last year. Miller was sentenced yesterday in Baltimore County Circuit Court to life in prison without the possibility of parole in the first case to use Maryland's fetal homicide law to charge someone with the death of an unborn baby.
"She realized the importance of having family around you for love, support and backup. And family, to her, wasn't just the people you were born to or with," Vivian Walters, the mother who adopted her, told the judge at yesterday's hearing.
Judge Dana M. Levitz characterized the crimes as unexplainable in imposing the maximum sentence on the 26-year-old Parkville man. "It's hard to imagine a case that's more awful," he said. The judge later added, "How could somebody be so self-centered, so selfish, that they're willing to kill their own child and other people just because it would be inconvenient? It's very hard - and I spent a lot of time thinking about it - to conceive of it."
Miller was convicted in March of two counts of first-degree murder for the June 2007 deaths of Walters and the unborn baby she planned to name Olivia. Miller was also convicted of attempted murder for twice shooting the woman's best friend, Heather Lowe, who drove Walters to the defendant's Parkville home so that the pregnant woman could try to speak to him about the baby. He shot them in Lowe's car at a nearby shopping center.
At trial, Lowe took the witness stand and quoted Miller as saying, "I thought you got rid of it. You are not going to ruin my life."
Defense attorney Sherrie R. Bailey asked the judge to consider more than just the crimes of which her client had been convicted. She recounted stories of how, beginning at the age of 6, Miller took odd jobs - pumping gas, cutting grass, bagging groceries and selling items including clothing and candy bars - to help his mother and siblings afford rent and food.
