HOUSTON – Charges have been filed in a decades-old cold-case double murder, Harris County investigators announced Thursday.
Donald Wayne Miles, an inmate serving time in Louisiana for narcotics trafficking, has been charged with capital murder in the 1990 shooting deaths of Robert Holley and William Migues.
According to court documents, Miles and a second suspect killed the victims after arranging a fake drug deal with them in Houston.
The victims, who lived in Florida, came to Houston in September of 1990, thinking they were going to buy several hundred pounds of marijuana, court documents state.
But investigators said Miles and the second suspect didn’t have any pot to sell the victims.
Still, they let the men believe the deal was going to go down and met them at a Holiday Inn in the Greenspoint area on September 12, 1990, investigators said.
In a jailhouse interview with deputies, Miles reportedly told them that he and the second suspect took the victims to a storage facility in the 4300 block of Spring Cypress.
Miles said the second suspect shot Migues in the back of the head, and shot Holley multiple times.
Holley did not immediately die, but Miles said the second suspect handed him a gun and told him to kill the wounded man.
After the men were dead, Miles told investigators he and the second suspect loaded them into the trunk of their rental car and drove them to a pair of pre-dug graves near the Hardy Toll Road. They buried the bodies, washed the car, dumped it at a nearby apartment complex and then set the storage unit on fire, Miles said.
The victims’ bodies were not discovered until February of 1991, by a cable worker.
The Harris County Cold Case Unit reopened the investigation after receiving information about Miles’ alleged involvement from his prison in Louisiana.
Once he confessed, charges were filed on April 3, 2012.
This case brings the number of murders solved by the HCSO Cold Case Unit to 12, since it was reconstituted in 2009 by Sheriff Adrian Garcia.
