One: The Accident
Three boys, best friends, went to dinner at the Santa Barbara Armory on the night of February 23, 1956. Ernest Dal Zuffo, Michael Perona, and Patrick Sheehan (not his real name) lived near one another and had known each other their whole lives. Ernest’s family, close-knit and Italian, owned a grocery store in town. His father, also Ernest—everyone called the boy Junior—and mother, Gia, were particularly protective of him and his younger brother. Mike’s family was also Italian, while Patrick was of Irish-American stock.
The event celebrated the end of a basketball tournament at which their school, Our Lady of Guadaloupe, had been the victor. When it was over, the three eighth-graders took sacks of popcorn and began the walk home.
It was dark. The streets were poorly lit. The road was still slick from the earlier evening rain. There were no sidewalks on Alisos Street, something residents had complained about for years. The boys ate the popcorn as they walked, venturing into the street because the muddy shoulder would ruin their shoes.
They didn’t hear or see the green Ford Tudor coming up behind them.
Junior and Mike were hit. Their bodies catapulted in the air, thrown seventy feet before landing. Junior was slammed, literally, out of his shoes. The Ford screeched its brakes and fled, but not before hitting a concrete wall. It left behind vicious, angry skid marks. Patrick, who’d only been grazed, ran for help.
The two boys were rushed to Cottage Hospital. Ernest dal Zuffo was dead on arrival. Michael Perona had a concussion and a fractured leg, and would stay in the hospital for weeks, remembering next to nothing about the whole ordeal, piecing information only from newspaper clippings and what his mother told him.
The green Ford Tudor kept on its mad, inebriated journey. A few miles away, at the intersection of Cota and Laguna, the car rear-ended a Buick, stopped with its parking lights on. The car, and its driver, spun more than sixty feet. The Tudor rolled left, then onto the roof, before resting on its right side.
A different boy witnessed what happened and ran into Mom’s Italian Village restaurant, shouting of an accident. A man, in the middle of a dinner for the city’s Safety Council, ran out. He found a sixteen-year-old girl sitting on a curb. Weeping and screaming and impossible to console.
Still, the man tried. He said car accidents could have happened to anyone.
“Yes,” said Linda Millar, “but God damn, what will I tell my parents?”
***
When the accident that killed Ernest dal Zuffo and injured Michael Perona happened in February 1956, Linda’s parents, Kenneth and Margaret Millar, were at professional inflection points. Margaret’s crime writing career began first, with the 1941 publication of The Invisible Worm, and found critical and financial success with the psychological thrillers The Iron Gates and Wall of Eyes. She’d most recently published Beast In View, a classic suspense chiller of madness and mendacity that would best Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mister Ripley for the Best Novel Edgar Award later that year.
As Maggie’s fortunes rose fast, Ken’s had taken longer to achieve liftoff. He’d been a frustrated novelist, before then a frustrated academic, teaching and toiling and reaping the benefits of his wife’s achievements. He published two non-crime novels under his real name and then the first Lew Archer detective novel, The Moving Target, in 1949, as John Macdonald. Subsequent Archers bore the name of “John Ross Macdonald” before a different crime writer, John D. got irritated at the confusion.
From then on it was just Ross. Dropping “John” also meant dropping the need to imitate hardboiled giants Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Ross Macdonald found his voice. From then on, his private eye novels focused more on family secrets, and the ensuing, multi-generational psychological damage, than on classic detective work. As Ross, Kenneth Millar would eclipse his wife by several orders of magnitude, endorsed by literary writers like Eudora Welty, emblazoned on the front page of Time and the New York Times Book Review, and given the multi-volume treatment by the Library of America.
But that was in the future. A future that owed in no small part to the troubles of their daughter, Linda Jane, born June 18, 1939, a year after the marriage of Kenneth Millar to Margaret Sturm in their native Kitchener, Ontario. Maggie had been bedridden for much of the pregnancy—a “heart ailment” of some kind—and the first months after birth. The official word was migraine. The more probable reason was a mixture of mounting debt and post-partum depression (Maggie had once been diagnosed with a “mild schizophrenic episode” and had, before her marriage, attempted suicide.)
Maggie had all these ideas about how to bring up a child. Namely, to withhold affection, ignore the girl’s need for love, to focus her attention on writing and on her husband. An exclusive love like hers for Ken simply didn’t have ample room for a third wheel. Unless that wheel could be mined creatively, as Linda discovered, to her detriment, when she started reading her mother’s books at a tender age.
For Ken, it was complicated, at times shameful, because life with Maggie was complicated and shameful. (It’s worth noting that he pronounced his last name as “Miller” and she went by “Mill-AR.”) Theirs was not a placid union. They shouted. They shoved and slapped one another. They competed for who had the worse temper of the two. Maggie once dropped a typewriter from a second-story window. Ken once threw one of Linda’s rubber dolls at his wife, and when the detachable head broke off, she accused him of deliberately breaking the toy. He hit her and cut her eye. Linda witnessed the whole thing.
As Tom Nolan wrote in his 1999 Ross Macdonald biography: “Millar sometimes shook or slapped Linda, in misplaced anger at her mother. Linda was the prize her parents fought for. The family was deranged somehow, and all three knew it.” Such a hothouse of anger, emotional neglect, competitive spirit, and manipulation could only end badly.
Most of all, for Linda, born and raised in the spotlight of two well-known authors, and whose existence was always eclipsed by them. Through details in Nolan’s biography, newspaper accounts, court records, and interviews—some of whom had never spoken to a reporter before—Linda’s story can finally stand on its own.
***
Sitting on the curb, the green Ford Tudor dented and damaged, Linda Millar continued to cry about what she would tell her parents. Another teenage boy had fetched a blanket from his house and draped it around Linda’s shoulders. She would not be calmed. Linda tried to get free, saying she would kill herself.
The boy put his arms around her and held her. Her sobs filled the air as the police arrived. The boy stayed with Linda in the patrol car, on its way to Cottage Hospital. He restrained her when she tried, unsuccessfully, to jump out of the car.
At the hospital, the same surgeon who had declared Ernest dal Zuffo dead examined Linda Millar. He gave her a dose of Luminal to calm her down. “It was all my fault,” Linda kept saying.
“What was?”
“The car,” she said. “It’s all smashed.”
But you’re lucky to be alive, said the doctor.
That didn’t register. Linda repeated that it was all her fault. That she was bringing shame upon her family. She’d already caused her parents so much trouble this month alone.
They’d gone on an out-of-state ski vacation and Linda, who’d never skied, melted down on the first try. Riding the chair lift caused her to freak out. Her father had slapped her on the last night of the vacation, when she’d gone out in the evening and returned wearing a coat that wasn’t her own. She responded by crying and running out, barefoot, into the snow.
On the long drive home, Linda’s mother let her take the wheel. She promptly headed in the direct path of a dust storm. They stopped off at Disneyland—still new in early 1956—where Linda terrified her father by going twice on Mister Toad’s Wild Ride, which emphasized driving recklessly. (He would later write witheringly of Disneyland’s “organized childishness and emptiness.”)
The last straw of the awful vacation happened in Long Beach, where they stayed overnight with relatives. Linda and a boy cousin around the same age went out for Cokes. They didn’t return home until 1 AM. Linda’s father had gone out searching for the pair. When she arrived back, he scolded her for her “indiscreet and dangerous behavior.” It’s not known if Linda’s father gave the same lecture to the cousin.
When the Millars returned to Santa Barbara, Linda’s father insisted to his friends that the vacation was a success. This was the kind of thing he did. Better to keep up appearances than let on how stressful it was to coexist with his wife and his daughter. Better to appear overprotective rather than alert people to his sense of hopelessness. Linda didn’t know what to do. She knew things weren’t working. She craved her parents’ attention and was livid at their inability to see how much trouble she was in.
Her father bragged that Linda never lied to him, but he had little clue of her smoking, her drinking, her sneaking off for secret sex with inappropriate boys, her crushing loneliness. He despaired of her long fingernails, short hair, and cheap makeup, failing to see that these appearance shifts, these premature vaultings into adulthood in look and in action, were a way for Linda to mask her own mounting despair.
It was easier to pretend they were a happy family. Linda was so smart, and kept up good grades at Santa Barbara High along with all the extracurriculars. But her need for love from those who withheld it was too consuming. She tried hard to make friends, only to be rebuffed, dismissed as too odd. Better to drink to escape, to forget. Better to discard thoughts of a terrible future, or any future at all.
Better to obliterate herself, and the car she drove, the green Ford Tudor that was her sixteenth-birthday present.
But she wasn’t obliterated. Linda Millar was still here. What would she tell her parents?
Two: The Court Case
At 9 PM, Linda was released into the care of her father and her aunt. The following afternoon, Santa Barbara district attorney Vern Thomas, who knew the Millars well because they frequently attended court proceedings for book research, arrived, along with two police officers, at the house. There was a state-wide alarm for the “hit-and run” killer, and authorities had diligently checked out dozens of late-model, metallic-green cars with damaged right front fenders and bumpers.
But they were fairly sure which car they sought, and to whom it belonged.
D.A. Thomas advised Linda of her rights. He asked what she’d done the previous evening. She said that a close girl friend had called, asking if Linda could come over and play cards. Her parents said yes—once she fed the dogs, did her homework, and washed the dishes. Linda left at six. She told her friend to expect her at seven. Ten minutes before the hour, Linda said she would be late, saying she had “business to take care of.”
Linda told the cops that she’d “driven around aimlessly” for ninety minutes after crashing the Buick. She said she’d been alone the entire time. When they asked about the hit-and-run on Alisos Street, Linda denied being there.
D.A. Thomas pressed her further: did she think a person involved in an incident in which a boy was killed and another injured should as an act of good citizenship stop and render assistance?
They certainly should, said Linda.
The district attorney asked Linda more directly about the accident. She denied it again.
The Green Ford Tudor was impounded. Ray Pinker, considered to be the most famous police chemist in the country (who had helped Ken Millar with research for the non-Archer novel Meet Me In the Morgue) matched paint particles from the concrete wall on Alisos Street to paint from the Ford’s bumper and headlight rim. Fabric patterns embedded in the bumper guard also matched Ernest Dal Zuffo’s pants.
Late Saturday night, police went back to the Millars’ house. They had a warrant for Linda’s arrest. Ken told them that Linda was sedated and under a doctor’s care. He promised to bring her to the station the following morning. Linda was arrested and charged with two felony counts of hit-and-run driving. Her father posted the twenty-five-hundred dollar bail. The Millars also retained Harris Seed to represent Linda, with criminal attorney John Westwick assisting.
On the day of Linda’s arraignment, Ernest Dal Zuffo was buried. The boy’s parents did not attend his funeral, too consumed with grief, and neither did Mike Perona, who wouldn’t be released from the hospital until after the school year was over. Perona, now 78 and a retired chemistry professor, told me: “I used to feel guilty going to the store across the street. I still feel guilty about surviving and him not surviving.”
More than five hundred and fifty people turned out for the funeral, with the procession said to be “one of the longest in many years.” The outpouring pitted the town against the Millars, seen as middle-class intellectuals with money, a schism that would take years to repair.
The judge in Linda’s case determined that she should be tried in juvenile court, because of her age, and ordered the Santa Barbara probation office to investigate. Linda, acting on the advice of her lawyers, kept silent with court-appointed doctors and the probation officers. But she did speak more freely with a local psychiatrist, one who also saw her parents as patients.
As part of her psychiatric evaluation, Linda was administered a Rorschach test. One image provoked a deep response. “That made me think of a half-built life—and of my parents. I was so mad when I thought they did not show me how to build up my life.” What also made Linda mad was being “forced to grow up—without help—I tried…but I didn’t do well.”
One court-appointed psychologist diagnosed Linda as a “Schizoid personality type” with “very superior intelligence.” She was prescribed sedatives. She stopped going to school but did get tutored at home. She continued to bare her soul to the psychiatrist she saw, but also performed disdain. The psychiatrist saw through Linda’s declaration that she was a murderer, a psychopath, a sadist, seeing the debilitating fear and anxiety underneath.
She felt increasingly bereft: “Nothing seemed to matter, I felt. ‘So what if I go to a reform school? It looked as if I might. I was so depressed about the night of the accident, and my bad life I wanted to hurt my parents and myself.” She slashed her wrists with a razor, and when Maggie entered her daughter’s bedroom, Linda held up her wrists and cried. “Look what I’ve done.” That prompted the Millars to commit Linda to a rest home, where she was prescribed Thorazine.
The Millar family, circa 1950s.
In May, Linda moved over to a group facility, and later would be sent to Camarillo State Mental Hospital, sixty miles away from Santa Barbara. But her case was no longer in juvenile court, because the judge was put off by her refusal to discuss the accident. As an adult, Linda could face up to ten years in prison. Legal bills were mounting for the Millars. Ken begged for the paperback advance on his most recent novel, The Barbarous Coast, and was able to get several thousand dollars to pay the expenses.
On the last Friday of the month, Linda returned to Santa Barbara to face the grand jury in a closed proceeding. When it was her turn to testify, she refused, and her time on the stand was swift. Then her father took the stand.
“What did the girl have to say about this collision?” asked D.A. Thomas.
“I refuse to answer.”
“You say you refuse to answer?”
“Yes, sir.”
“On what grounds, sir?”
“On the advice of Mr. Seed.”
And on it went. Even the threat of contempt of court didn’t budge Linda’s father. Her mother’s testimony was equally unhelpful. When asked if she had spoken with Linda about the accident, Margaret replied: “Her father took over all that. They were trying to—He has always spared me things, because I get upset.”
That night, the grand jury indicted Linda anew in adult court, the trial set for July 10, 1956. But then her lawyers surprised everyone by asking that the charges be judged solely on the basis of the grand jury testimony—which would revert the case back to juvenile court. The judge said yes. The next day, in a brief proceeding with less than a dozen present, the newly assigned judge, Ernest Wagner found Linda guilty. He noted that after having read the grand jury testimony several times “there can be no other logical conclusion” other than Linda’s guilt.
Linda’s lawyers requested probation. Judge Wagner said he’d need great cooperation from the long-recalcitrant Linda. The lawyers said there had been a “change of attitude”, and submitted a handwritten letter, in which she spelled out what really happened on the night of February 23. How she had decided to buy a thirty-nine cent bottle of wine at the grocery store before going to her friend’s house. Then she bought a second bottle under a different name.
“I then decided to go cruising some more, not realizing I was so drunk and incompetent to drive….I didn’t know what streets I was on….Suddenly the next thing I knew there were two boys—I wasn’t sure if it was one or two boys—right in front of me and a second later I ran into them. It was too late to do anything by the time I saw them. I saw a boy in a light-colored jacket fly up in front of me and I remember hitting him with the wheels of the car after he hit the ground. I don’t remember putting on the brakes or hitting the wall. I panicked and drove away from the scene of the accident without stopping.”
It was then, Linda wrote, that she decided to kill herself. “I drove around still not knowing where I was, and trying to think how to commit suicide.” Seeing the car with the parking lights on Linda decided to drive into it. Ultimately “The reason it happened was because I was driving recklessly and didn’t see them and the reason I didn’t stop was because I panicked.”
Linda’s statement became the final word on the matter. The judge sentenced her to eight years’ probation and imposed several conditions: her driving license would be revoked, she would be in the care of a psychiatrist, and she would “refrain absolutely from any intoxicating liquor.” Linda signed the agreement on August 27. She left Camarillo State Hospital and returned home.
Santa Barbarans were livid. Several called Judge Wagner with threats of physical harm. The newspapers quoted at length from Linda’s confession and other court documents, school records, and doctor’s summaries. Linda and her parents did not emerge very well. “Mr. and Mrs. Millar have failed to provide a normal home environment for Linda,” reported one doctor. “Linda has had considerable insecurity because her parents have used her as ‘material’ in their novels…She has been morbid in introspection and attitudes. By reading books of her parents, one may realize how such feelings materialize.”
The public outcry confirmed what Linda’s probation officer once wrote: “It has been obvious to all parties that the possibilities of Linda making any sort of adjustment in Santa Barbara is extremely remote.” The mounting legal bills didn’t help, exacerbated by the Dal Zuffos’ and the Peronas’ lawsuits against the Millars, which netted them in excess of $10,000.
Ken and Margaret Millar sold their homes and left Santa Barbara.
Three: The Disappearance
Northern California seemed like a good place for a fresh start. The Millars bought a house in Menlo Park, where Linda finished out high school at Menlo-Atherton High. “Things are working out better than we’d dared to hope,” her father told a friend in September 1956. “In the end there will be no scar on her. We can’t complain.” In the fall of 1957, Linda started college at the University of California, Davis, two hours northeast, a move her parents approved of in a bid to give their daughter some degree of space.
Kenneth Millar had also made a creative breakthrough, perhaps aided by the anguished, private memoir, “Notes of a Son and Father” that he’d written while keeping vigil by Linda’s bedside during the worst of the early months of 1956. He viewed The Doomsters, his next Lew Archer novel, as a “diary of psychic progress.” It drew considerably from the psychological toll of the accident and ensuring Linda’s well-being.
Her mother was at the beginning of her greatest run of suspense fiction. Margaret Millar followed up Beast in View with An Air That Kills (1957), a novel of ugly infidelity, an Ontario vacation house, and an untimely disappearance. Once more, fact and fiction and family blurred for the Millars, foreshadowing events in the not-too-distant future.
Linda Millar in 1957, the year she enrolled in UC-Davis.
Ken’s professed belief that the accident would not leave a scar on Linda proved untrue. She did well academically, as she had in high school, but violated UC Davis’s behavior code two months into her freshman year, when she was out late drinking and partying with two Air Force officers and returned after curfew. (“I can assure you that’s the last time I’ll ever miss my lockout,” she wrote her parents, giving them a more sanitized version of the story.) Linda was censured a second time for drinking in January 1958; she began to see a local psychiatrist.
But Linda took another downward turn in May 1959, with the approach of finals week. Someone spotted her drinking in a dorm stairwell; the school dean scheduled a disciplinary committee review hearing, which Linda took as a sure sign she would be expelled. Her psychiatrist warned the dean that if the hearing went forward, Linda would likely run away or kill herself. The Millars knew little, partly because Linda begged her psychiatrist not to share details, and partly because they preferred the fantasy that their daughter was thriving.
On May 30, Linda was invited by Tom Hudson, a 25-year-old dairy worker she was acquainted with, and his friend, 24-year-old Frank Cortijo, on a last-minute trip to Harrah’s casino at Stateline on the Nevada border, one hundred miles away from Sacramento. The men, both married, signed Linda out of the dorm; she offered a cover story that she was going into the city proper. The three drove off at 7 PM in a white Simca sports car, stopping off to buy two six-packs of beer.
Linda, Tom, and Frank reached Harrah’s just after 11 PM. By 11:30, Linda was getting anxious, knowing the lockout time was only three hours away. But Frank, the driver, was still gambling, and waved her off. Linda went to Tom and begged him to hot-wire the Simca and take her back. He refused.
“I’ve got to go. I’ve got to go. I’ll hitchhike back.” Linda walked away. It was the last time the two men saw Linda Millar.
When Linda hadn’t returned by the expected curfew of 2:30 AM, and when she still wasn’t back after sunrise, the house mother informed the dean of women students. Her parents also received a telephone call. At first everyone thought Linda had simply missed lockout again. But when there was still no sign of her on Monday, and then Tuesday—the Millars’ 21st anniversary—matters became more serious.
Maggie Millar spent the entire time in a state of nervous collapse at home. Ken Millar flew up to Sacramento, where he spoke with Linda’s friends. Then he drove to Nevada and searched around Stateline, Tahoe, Reno, and Carson City. He arranged to have someone check hospitals and local clinics. Millar didn’t allow himself to fear the worst, not yet.
He also arranged to hire Armand and Thelma Girola, a husband-and-wife private detective team referred by police and casino authorities. Armand was a colorful character, with a notable side hustle as an accordion player, his band playing local events until shortly before his 1975 death. (Thelma, 44, would be prematurely dead within a year, thanks to a brain tumor that had metastasized to the spine.)
Millar later transformed Girola into Lew Archer’s detective colleague Arnie Walters, described in The Zebra-Striped Hearse (1962) as “a short broad man in his early fifties who looked like somebody you’d see selling tips at a race track. But he had the qualities of a first-rate detective: honesty, imagination, curiosity, and a love of people. Ten or twelve years in Reno had left him poor and uncorrupted.”
Ken and Armand went back to Sacramento. The detective interviewed Tom Hudson, who told them what he had already told police. He also told them that they hadn’t started looking for Linda at Harrah’s until 5 AM. This, among so much, disgusted Linda’s father. He hoped to press charges, but there were more pressing matters.
Linda had now been gone for seven days. Ken pitched a fit at the Yolo County Sheriff’s office in Woodland at the lack of progress. He wanted more publicity. He talked to a local newspaperman and then to papers and television stations in Reno and Sacramento, and in Los Angeles and New York. A photograph of a haggard Ken Millar, holding a picture of his daughter, appeared around the country thanks to the wire services. It all sounded like a Ross Macdonald novel. More than one, in fact.
The blanket media coverage brought in lots of leads. One serious, but ultimately false one placed Linda in Los Angeles, when an employee of the Hollywood Ranch Market on Vine Street claimed to have cashed a check with Linda Millar’s name on Friday. Millar took the lead to heart and wept at the news. He also drafted a message to his daughter, broadcast throughout California and Nevada:
“Come home, dear, if you read this. You have nothing to fear from anybody. Everybody involved in this just wants to see you safe…Faith can move mountains, you know, but most of the mountains you may feel you have to climb alone are mole hills under a magnifying glass and you’re not going to have to climb them alone. I am one hundred percent for you and I wouldn’t trade you for any other daughter in the world.”
Leads mounted, and then evaporated. Ken hadn’t slept in well over a week. Millar went on the Los Angeles television station KTLA for one last appeal, one more chance to reach Linda. After he was done with his plea, someone handed Millar a message: call his wife at home, immediately. Margaret was in hysterics, but she had news: Linda had been located at The Stag, a Reno bar. She was there still.
Ken gave Armand Girola the details. Then he called the bar and spoke to his daughter, keeping her on the line until the detectives could fetch her. Linda would tell her full story later, but for now, she spent the night at Armand and Thelma’s house. Ken and a friend, Dick Lid, drove together to pick the girl up. There was more than an element of secrecy to the ordeal, because Linda’s disappearance triggered a probation violation, and she could be arrested if authorities got to her first.
They reached a forest preserve in Bishop, California, the meeting place arranged by the Girolas, before noon on June 10. Linda and Armand were already there. The detective and Ken spoke for a few minutes, and then he and Linda climbed into the backseat of Lid’s car. As Lid later recalled, “I must have driven close to a thousand miles that day.”
Linda spent ten days at UCLA Medical Center, undergoing psychiatric treatment. “She doesn’t remember anything well for a period of a week or more,” Millar told reporters. “She has a rather dim memory of wandering around.” He considered what happened to his daughter “some kind of psychic break”.
Linda went into considerably more detail about what happened in a written statement to the probation department. She swore she had never been in Los Angeles, even if she found herself getting confused at forming a coherent narrative of her disappearance. “I do know I tried my hardest to get back to Davis on time and I know I had every intention of returning. I was pretty upset…and I was panicky. I never even thought of phoning in. If I had been thinking clearly I would have.”
Sometime during the evening at Harrah’s, after Tom Hudson had rebuffed her plea to hot-wire Frank Cortijo’s car and go home, Linda met someone who “gave me some silver dollars.” Then she remembered being in the car of an elderly man. She may have asked him to take her back to Davis. She next remembered being in his cabin, somewhere along a lake, and quite isolated. “I think I was hysterical but I’m not sure. I think I remember being terribly afraid to return to Davis but this was after I’d failed to get a ride back.”
The man, Linda said, tried to have sex with her, but she said no, and he didn’t force the issue. The next morning he went away on business, and said Linda could have the run of the cabin. “I don’t know how long I was there—probably 4 to 6 days. It seemed as if I were in a dream or a nightmare there.” She didn’t remember thinking about anything: not home, not her parents, not her friends or school. “I was afraid to leave the cabin, because I kept thinking things were coming in after me.”
But the desire to leave was too great. Linda walked to a store and asked the owner for a ride to the state line. He took her to Carson City, and from there, “someone with dark hair took me to Reno.” There, Linda wandered around, in and out of places, the distinctive sound of slot machines accompanying her travels by foot.
At one point she said she met a blond young man whom she accompanied to a hotel room. “I was probably desperate for a place to sleep…he tried to make love to me that night but I refused to let him. I had a bad case of hysteria. I guess it was the next day that I let him make love to me. My resistance must have been down or I wouldn’t have.” The man left, and Linda stayed in the hotel room for another two days.
She was hungry, her strength ebbing, and Linda knew she had to find food. She wandered around Reno some more, in search of a meal, and in the process met a “nice old man.” He sensed she was alone, without money or friends, and bought her a room in his hotel. “It seemed as if I were there for a very long time but I think it was just for a few days.”
Then Linda heard her description on the radio. It didn’t seem real at first. Once it sank in that she was considered missing, and that people—including her father—were searching for her, she became upset. She told the man her real name and that she was missing. “I always knew who I was and that I was gone but it didn’t really seem real to me until I heard my description.”
The next morning, she saw a newspaper with a picture of her on the front page. “All of a sudden my mind cleared and it hit me: what was I doing alone in a room in Reno.” She thought of turning herself in to the police, but the old man felt it wasn’t a good idea. “He even offered to buy my plane ticket home but I thought it would be better to notify my parents immediately, tell them it was all right, and ask them how I should come home.” The nearest telephone was at The Stag, and after Linda called her mother, it set in motion her journey home.
“It’s hard for me to write this and I keep getting confused as to some of the things that happened…But I do know I didn’t do anything wrong while I was gone.”
Four: Adulthood
Linda tried to put the events of May and June 1959 behind her. At a brief probation hearing, the judge gave Linda a suspended sentence. He also modified her probation so that she could quit UC Davis, live in Los Angeles, work as an aide at a Santa Monica hospital, and continue treatment at UCLA.
In September 1961, she married 30-year-old computer engineer Joseph Pagnusat, whom she’d met the year before. She’d been dating someone else at the time, but Joe made his bid to see her more often, and she chose him. Linda also continued to see her UCLA psychiatrist until her probation was fully lifted—and her record expunged—in 1962. A son, James, nicknamed Jimmie, was born the following year, which delighted the Pagnusats as well as Linda’s parents.
Linda had confided a dark secret to Joe before their marriage: when she was around fifteen or sixteen, a man had raped her, stuck a knife into her vagina, and told her she had a choice: the knife, or him. “She was a very troubled girl,” Joe, now eighty-nine, told me. “I don’t want to brag but what she needed was a stable guy like me to help her. I was a computer engineer, so things were very logical.”
Marital stability, and a move to the suburb of Inglewood, could not fully vanquish Linda’s demons. She and Joe once went to a restaurant on Sunset Boulevard and Linda spontaneously burst into tears. She had trouble sleeping, and never without the Seconal prescribed to her. She subsisted on an orangey Sangria that she would drink all day long. It got to the point where she didn’t trust herself to take the pills on her own, so she relied on Joe to hold the bottle and administer the nightly dose.
Linda was also hospitalized in 1968 after a small stroke, attributed to a circulatory disorder. She’d had to quit her job as a medical assistant and went on disability. But she was well enough to travel with Joe and Jimmie to Santa Barbara to visit her parents. Linda, now thirty-one, seemed in better spirits than her father had seen her. “Life is so very good on certain days that one almost lives in fear of having to pay for it in full,” Ken wrote his editor at Knopf, Ashbel Green. “But life is by definition a free gift.”
For Linda, that gift would expire within days.
On the night of November 4, 1970, Linda had just fixed a sandwich for Jimmie. She said she was going to bed early, and took her nightly Sangria and Seconal. Once she was sound asleep, Joe took their son to MacDonald’s for hamburgers and french fries to take home. When they reached the house, Jimmie went to check on his mother. She was still asleep.
The next morning, Joe looked in on his wife. She never woke up. Linda was cremated, her ashes placed in the Santa Barbara Cemetery. Officially, the circulatory disorder was to blame for Linda’s death. Millar described it to people as a “cerebral incident.” But Joe Pagnusat wondered if Linda might have had later access to the bottle of Seconal, and taken a larger dose than normal that night.
Ken and Margaret Millar felt responsible for their daughter’s death. He wrote a friend a few days later: “You will understand me when I say she was a valiant girl, one of the great moral forces in my life and after Margaret my dearest love…There is some relief in the knowledge that Linda made a great effort and succeeded in it, though she died young.”
***
Kenneth Millar’s longtime friend Don Pearce told biographer Tom Nolan that he could not imagine a more lonely person. “[Ken was] looking for the person whom he could freely and without concentration be with, somebody who didn’t constantly keep him in a state of self-definition—in other words, a real affection or friendly relationship. I don’t think he ever had it. And don’t think he didn’t long for it. He did.”
Pearce wasn’t quite correct. Kenneth Millar did come close to what he longed for through his epistolary friendship with the Southern writer Eudora Welty. Their relationship might have developed into something more—but there was Maggie to look after, and then his own mental faculties began to diminish, diagnosed as Alzheimer’s, his death premature at the age of 68 in 1983. (Margaret Millar outlived him by eleven years.)
By then the damage had been irreversible, and inter-generational. Ken’s traumatic childhood of serial abandonment and abuse had merged with Maggie’s mental instability and bouts of jealous cruelty to produce Linda, as doomed a young heroine as one would find in the pages of the hardboiled detective novels that spurred Ken to become Ross Macdonald.
So caught up in the quagmire of their own individual lives and novels that the Millars failed to see the full effects upon Linda. If she had, as her husband attested, been raped prior to the hit-and-run accident, would Linda have felt comfortable telling her parents? When I posed that question to Joe Pagnusat, he was stunned. “I never thought of that all my life. Is it possible she was confiding in me and no one else knew about it? Oh my gosh!”
And Linda’s own premature death in 1970 passed the torch of trauma down further to her son, Jimmie. The boy, just seven when his mother died, was doted on by his grandparents. But he fell under the spell of drug addiction in his late teens, persisting even after his own marriage and birth of a son. It once caused Pagnusat to cut him off entirely. Jimmie was clean for a while but it never lasted. The cycle of addiction broke for good with a fatal overdose in 1989.
Much remains mysterious, and haunting, about the brief, tragic life of Linda Jane Millar. We can never know the full extent of her inner torment beyond what she herself recorded at the time of the accident. We can’t know, as her lawyer, Harris Seed long suspected, if she had lied to protect someone, and that Linda hadn’t been alone on the night of the accident. “She was a headstrong young lady,” Seed told Nolan, “[she] certainly had her own concepts and did things pretty much her own way.” And we certainly can’t know if her suicidal disposition on the night of February 23, 1956 was rooted in the trauma of sexual assault by a stranger—or someone she already knew.
What is clear is that Linda resented, rightfully, that she was the perpetual loser in the tug-of-war between her writer parents, who used her existence as grist for their respective creative mills. Even now, writing about her, it’s difficult not to think of Linda Millar as a daughter, instead of as a person. That, more than anything, was all she craved. The tragedy is that she could never shake that yoke. She could never tell her parents. When she came closest to true independence, it was too late.
