Felon flees before GPS is attached

Sex offender with HIV disappears before being fitted with monitor

By Jim Redden

The Portland Tribune, Nov 4, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Kenneth Lee Miller Ñ an HIV-positive sex offender with a history of intentionally exposing women and girls to the deadly virus Ñ disappeared last month while Multnomah County parole officials were working on getting him into their experimental global positioning system monitoring program.

Miller has been sentenced to prison twice for sex-related crimes and jailed three additional times for violating the terms of post-prison supervision. He disappeared once already this year but was out of jail around nine weeks before vanishing again in late October.

The most recent time, Miller fled while county officials were trying to coordinate running a phone line into the Estate Hotel, which houses the downtown transitional housing program where he was staying.

The line Ñ which costs around $100 to install Ñ was needed for the “base unit” that sends the GPS signal to the officials.

“We were still making arrangements between the hotel, the phone company and the people who run our GPS program when, unfortunately, Mr. Miller decided to abscond,” said Robb Freda-Cowie, policy manager for the Multnomah County Department of Community Justice.

Freda-Cowie admits Miller is one of the most challenging people under his department’s supervision.

“The people we deal with tend to be very antisocial, and many of them have extensive criminal records and are not happy to be on supervision. But this level of noncompliance is out of the ordinary,” Freda-Cowie said.

On June 3, Miller agreed to wear a GPS monitoring device. At the time, he was serving a 75-day jail sentence for violating his supervision conditions by having contacts with minors. But even though Miller was released from jail Aug. 19, officials did not attach a monitoring device to him before he disappeared because the hotel where he was staying did not have a spare phone line.

According to Freda-Cowie, the same problem exists at many, if not most, of the other transitional housing programs used by parolees.

“When parolees are transitioning back into the community, they frequently stay in single-room occupancy hotels or other facilities that do not have enough phone lines for the system,” he said.

Freda-Cowie said department officials did not immediately realize the lack of phone lines in transitional housing programs was a significant problem when they first began experimenting with the GPS monitoring system earlier this year. The Multnomah County Commission approved $100,000 to electronically monitor an average of just 30 parolees a day during its 2005-06 fiscal year. In contrast, the department is responsible for monitoring thousands of people on post-prison supervision, including more than 190 predatory sex offenders. Many Ñ including chronic drunken drivers who qualify for the program Ñ already are living in situations where spare phone lines are available.

“We’re just now beginning to understand all of the obstacles and technical issues that we need to deal with,” Freda-Cowie said. He does not know how much it would cost to upgrade enough transitional housing units to monitor all people on supervision who should be tracked.

Since Miller disappeared, arrangements have been finalized to add enough new phone lines to the hotel to handle four people wearing GPS monitoring devices, Freda-Cowie said.

A long rap sheet

Miller has a history of endangering the health of women and young girls by intentionally exposing them to HIV. According to law enforcement officials, Miller has a pattern of meeting his victims at parties and in bars, then engaging in unprotected sex with them.

Miller was first convicted of sex crimes in Multnomah County in December 1993. He already was HIV-positive at that time.

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