Judge orders murder trial

“We were friends and we had a friend missing so I went to console him,” Parker said about their initial discussion at Miller’s residence in Arcata shortly after Dickson was reported missing. “He said he was the last one to see Michelle and he was the number one suspect ... I said I was really worried about Michelle and he said, ‘Me too.’”

According to Parker, Miller said he met Dickson at the Crescent Beach picnic area off Enderts Beach Road around 10:30 p.m. on July 15 to buy about 3.5 ounces of marijuana from her for $850. After that Miller told Parker that he started to drive back to Arcata.

Parker said Miller recounted how his truck broke down just south of Trinidad as he was coming home and that he walked the rest of the way to Arcata. But over time, that story evolved.

“Instead of his truck breaking down in Trinidad, he said it broke down in Crescent City,” Parker said, “and he hitched a ride with some hippies in a Volkswagen bus.”

In each version of Miller’s story that witnesses told the court about, he arrived at his residence in Arcata around 1:30 a.m. on July 16, which is about four hours before Dickson’s car was found on fire near U.S. Highway 101 and Sand Mine Road.

But a witness from the Del Norte County Sheriff’s Office said Miller was videotaped on a surveillance camera in Crescent City just before 5 a.m.

Detective Bob Barber said the video showed Miller buying gasoline at a station near the corner of U.S. Highway 101 and Elk Valley Road.

“It was about 20 minutes before her car was found by the deputies engulfed in flames,” Barber said.

He added authorities have been told that Miller was wearing different clothes on the video than what he had on a few hours earlier.

There were also various accounts of what happened to the upholstery in Miller’s truck. When authorities arrived at his house to interview him the day Dickson’s car was found, they noticed the vehicle had been recently washed and had several sections of the upholstery cut out.

Parker said he also saw this when he was at Miller’s house, and noted it seemed a little odd considering how his friend typically cared for his truck.

“It seemed to have been freshly washed when I got there,” Parker said. “I hadn’t known him to wash it since I’ve known him.”

Parker said Miller told him that he cut the upholstery out of the truck several days beforehand because a cat urinated inside of it. He also said it might have been vandalized.

After authorities executed a search warrant and seized the vehicle, along with some of Miller’s clothing that was found inside his washing machine, they discovered what was believed to be trace evidence of blood inside the truck. Parker said when that information was reported in The Daily Triplicate, he confronted Miller about the story he told him.

“He said that it was her blood, it was Michelle’s,” Parker said, adding that Miller said Dickson cut her hand while sitting in his truck. “He told me that morning before the cops came he cut the seats out, the upholstery out, because he was freaking out about the blood on his seats.”

Parker said he asked Miller why he was lying to him about what actually happened on July 15 and 16, but he “just didn’t have a good answer” for the discrepancies.

“I told him that I thought he’d done it,” Parker said. “He said, ‘Please, no,’ ... He wanted me to believe him.”

While authorities have said that Miller’s disjointed timeline of events helped make him a suspect in Dickson’s death, they have also said DNA evidence will play a large role in the case.

At Tuesday’s hearing, a senior criminologist with the California Department of Justice testified about some of the DNA evidence that has been collected so far, and said there is only one sample out of four that has been positively identified so far.

From blood that was collected in the parking lot of the Crescent Beach picnic area, Deanna Kacer said she was able to find two people’s DNA. The primary “contributor” of that DNA, she said, was Dickson, and the other detected sample comes from an unknown male.

“It was a mixture of more than one person’s DNA,” Kacer said. “Josiah Miller was excluded as the minor male contributor.”

That contributor might have been someone who simply spit on the ground, she said.

Officials are still waiting on her office to do DNA testing on other samples that are “presumptive positive” for blood, and were taken from inside Miller and Dickson’s vehicles, as well as under Miller’s fingernails.

Miller is scheduled for an arraignment Friday, where he will likely enter a plea and a trial date will be set.