PAGOSA SPRINGS, Colo. — A 22-year-old suspect was taken into custody Thursday morning in Colorado after a multistate search for the Iowa man who is accused of murdering three women at separate scenes on Wednesday in southern Utah.
Ivan Miller was arrested in Pagosa Springs around 2:45 a.m. and told police he “needed money,” according to a newly obtained indictment. In subsequent interviews, Miller admitted to the Wayne County, Utah killings and said “it had to be done,” the indictment reads.
Two of the victims were found in a ditch, shot and stabbed to death, on Wednesday afternoon by their husbands on Cocks Comb Trailhead near Reef National Park. A third victim, an elderly woman, was later found dead inside a Lyman, Utah home, according to the indictment.
Deputies located the Lyman victim in her cellar. According to the indictment, Miller told investigators he had spent the previous night in the victim’s shed. When the elderly woman left her home, Miller entered, waited for her return, and remained inside until she came back.
When the woman returned home, Miller said he shot her in the back of the head as she watched TV, then cleaned up the scene and moved her body to the cellar, possibly using a wheelbarrow, according to court documents.
After the Lyman murder, Miller took off with the victim’s Buick LeSabre. Wanting a different vehicle, he drove to the Cocks Comb Trailhead, where he saw his next two victims get out of a Subaru Outback, the indictment reads.
According to the court documents, Miller told police that after parking the elderly victim’s Buick under a tree near the trailhead, he approached the two women and shot and stabbed them. Miller said in the indictment that he shot a younger woman in the chest first, and then shot an older woman twice, stabbing her multiple times in the heart after she continued moving.
After the shooting, Miller told police he dragged both bodies to a ditch and left with their Subaru. Investigators said they found 45-caliber shell casings, a 20-gauge shotgun shell, drag marks, and the abandoned Buick at the Cocks Comb Trailhead murder scene.
Shortly after the trailhead murders, police said one victim’s husband tracked the stolen Subaru’s movements—first to Farmington, New Mexico, then to Durango, and finally to Pagosa Springs—where the suspect was arrested and found with the victims’ cell phones and credit cards, the indictment says.
Miller, facing three counts of first-degree aggravated murder, told police he was in Wayne County because he hit an elk with his truck in Loa, Utah, and was staying at a local hotel.
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