Cold case progress: Boise man charged in 1994 killing of North End woman

A Boise man charged in early January with first-degree murder in the 1992 death of a Washington state woman has now been charged in the long-unsolved killing of Boisean Cheryle Barratt in 1994.

On Friday, the Boise Police Department announced that Lee Robert Miller, 54, was charged with second-degree murder in the death of Barratt, who was 49 when she was fatally stabbed in her North End home in April 1994.

Miller was arrested last month when DNA collected from a cigarette butt matched DNA found at the scene of 57-year-old Marilyn Hickey’s death and Barratt’s death. He is being held at the Kitsap County Jail in Washington on a $2 million bond. He was arrested in Idaho and held at the Ada County Jail in the Hickey case before being extradited to Kitsap County.

Floyd E. Parker Jr. was initially charged with murder in Barratt’s death and he spent two months in jail in 1994. The case was dismissed that July after it was determined that there was not enough evidence to go to trial. DNA evidence taken from under Barratt’s nails was tested in Nevada two weeks after the dismissal, but it “provided no information about the killing,” according to previous Statesman reporting.

According to a statement of probable cause from Bremerton, Washington, police, Hickey was found in her studio apartment with injuries “indicative of manual strangulation” in September 1992. Semen was also found at the scene at the time, though it was unable to be matched.

That case “went cold” after a few months; no arrests were made and a few pieces of evidence were found at the scene. The case was reopened in 2006, when unknown DNA found at the scene of Barratt’s killing matched the unknown DNA from the Hickey slaying, though neither belonged to a national database.

Bremerton Police Detective Martin Garland, who authored the statement of probable cause, wrote that he opened Hickey’s death as a cold case in 2017, as did Boise police on the Barratt case.

Boise police were able to obtain a sample of Miller’s DNA on Feb. 1, 2018, from a cigarette butt, according to the statement of probable cause. Miller’s DNA was submitted to the Idaho State Crime Lab and was found to match the DNA at both scenes.

The death of Barratt had been one of at least 21 unsolved homicide cases in the Treasure Valley since 1980.

This story was originally published February 1, 2019 at 2:23 PM with the headline "Cold case progress: Boise man charged in 1994 killing of North End woman."