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‘I Sat There And Watched It’ — Woman Describes Helping Boyfriend Suffocate His Wife
Ludonna Yoder confessed to helping her boyfriend, Robert Miller, suffocate his wife with a pillow after Michelle Miller threatened to leave him.
While speaking with investigators from Tom Green County, Texas, in 2017, Ludonna Yoder laid out in gruesome detail how she helped her boyfriend, Robert Miller, murder his wife more than a decade before.
At the time of the slaying, Yoder was in an open relationship with Robert and Naomi Michelle Miller and living at the couple’s San Angelo home. Although the arrangement seemed to work out for a while, the Millers’ marriage soon became strained, and Michelle threatened to leave Robert and take their two young children with her.
To stop Michelle from taking custody, Robert enlisted Yoder to help kill her, later telling friends and family that his wife had run off with another man in the middle of the night.
What really happened on the evening of Dec. 3, 2005, according to Yoder, was that all three of them went to bed around 10:30 or 11 p.m. Once Michelle fell asleep, Robert turned to Yoder and told her it was time to kill Michelle.
“I didn’t kill her. He wanted me to, but I couldn’t kill her. I couldn’t do it,” she said in an interview with Texas Ranger Nick Hanna and Tom Green County Sheriff's Office Sgt. William Fiveash, which aired as part of Oxygen’s “Criminal Confessions.”
“He told me, ‘All you have to do is put the damn pillow over her face and I’ll hold her down,’” Yoder continued. “When she turned her head, I looked at him [and] said, ‘I can’t do this s**t.’”
Robert then took the pillow and “smash[ed]” it over Yoder’s face, suffocating her. Yoder told investigators she “ran out of the room as soon as [Michelle] was dead.” She confessed that they had multiple conversations about killing Michelle, and that even though she did not “take her last breath away,” she “sat there and watched it.”
After the murder, Robert and Yoder buried Michelle’s body under the house, and they later brought her remains to a local racetrack that the couple operated. It was there on March 8, 2017, that Michelle’s body was unearthed, wrapped in a blue tarp and duct tape.
Both Robert and Yoder were arrested and charged with murder, to which they ultimately pled guilty. Robert was sentenced to 38 years in prison, while Yoder was sentenced to 35.
To hear more about the investigation and how authorities made their first break in the case, watch “Criminal Confessions,” airing Saturdays at 6/5c on Oxygen.
