PAPERBOY PREDATOR
“GOODNIGHT, Dad,” Geoff Gough heard as son Stuart went upstairs to bed.
“Goodnight, son,” he replied. He was so proud of him. While his friends were playing out late on Saturday nights, 14-year-old Stuart was tucked up, ready for his early morning paper round.
It wasn’t much money but it gave him independence, and in Hagley, the little village in Worcestershire where he delivered, everyone knew and liked him.
“Goodnight, Dad,” were the last words Geoff ever heard his son say.
EVIL Victor Miller preyed on the vulnerable. He was a predatory paedophile who targeted paperboys to sate his sick lust. It was a lust he could not control – a lust that led to MURDER. In 1998 the computer programmer, from Wolverhampton, killed 14-year-old Stuart Gough. His tragic death was the culmination of a 15-year-long spate of attacks on teenage boys by Miller that only came to an end when the 59-year-old was jailed and told he will die behind bars…
That Sunday morning on February 15, Stuart arrived at the newsagent’s, picked up his papers and set off in the bright winter sunshine to deliver his first load.
Two hours later he was dead, the final act in sick paedophile Victor Miller’s 15 years of terror.
His speciality was attacking and sexually assaulting teenage boys.
Describing why, the evil pervert said: “It was an ideal set-up really. It was an ideal time when nobody is about and they are boys of the age I go for.”
Tragically, Stuart fitted that bill.
He didn’t show up to pick up his second load of newspapers and the newsagent called the police.
Manhunt
It set in motion a huge manhunt with dogs, helicopters and hundreds of searchers. But it was all in vain. Stuart had been taken at knifepoint, the sharp edge of the blade pressed into the flesh of his neck as he was blindfolded and bundled into Miller’s silver car.
After a 50-mile drive, Miller parked near a drainage ditch by the M40 and Stuart was pulled out and stripped
before being raped. For the next 20 minutes Miller decided what to do next – torn between letting Stuart live and taking his life.
As Miller weighed up his options Stuart was left, naked and crying, not knowing what was going to happen. Miller chose murder. He tried to strangle his victim with a shoelace, and when that failed he picked up a rock and started to beat the boy he had kidnapped and raped.
He hit him over and over, fuelled by a vicious rage, until Stuart was so battered the only way police could identify his body was by matching the fingerprints from his school desk.
The final moments of Stuart’s life still haunt his dad.
“My mind keeps going back to what Stuart was saying in his last few minutes,” he recalled.
“Was he shouting for me to help him? I can’t get it out of my mind and I don’t think I ever will.”
PREDATOR: Miller attacked dozens of teenage boys
Explaining why he had chosen to take the young boy’s life, Miller says he did it for love, to protect his boyfriend Trevor Peacher, a fellow sex offender he’d met in jail while serving time for kidnapping a 13-year-old boy.
He said: “I was in a lot of turmoil. If I had been on my own I would have taken him back, but there was Trevor.
“If I was caught for this he wouldn’t cope with the mortgage and everything.
“He’s the one person who loves me, the dearest person I’ve got in my life.”
Two days before Stuart’s murder another teen boy had been kidnapped and forced at knifepoint into a silver car.
Richard Holden was driven to an orchard in Wellington, near Hereford, and forced to strip naked – but the 18-year-old fought back.
He kicked his attacker in the crotch and then managed to escape.
When Stuart was reported missing police knew the two incidents were linked.
They placed Richard under hypnosis and he was able to describe the attacker and his car.
Miller matched the description and he was quizzed, but his sex offender boyfriend gave him an alibi.
Ten days after the murder and Stuart’s body had still not been found. Police arrested Miller and Peacher again.
This time Miller confessed and led the police to Stuart’s body, buried under a pile of leaves.
On his first appearance before Magistrates in Hereford, Miller made a statement.
He said: “I have been charged with the murder of Stuart Gough and I do not intend to defend the charge.
“I can never make up for taking Stuart from his family. But I would ask, and indeed trust, that justice will be done and that I will receive the maximum sentence available.”
He got his wish and was jailed for life, and his crimes were judged so horrific that he has been told he will never be freed from prison.
Peacher was sentenced to three years for perverting the course of justice.
But that is cold comfort for Stuart’s dad, who added: “I have no mercy for an adult who kills a child. If I can get my hands on him I’d break his neck.
“I go to bed every night, mentally and physically shattered. I see Stuart every morning when I go up the road to the spot where he was kidnapped, and every day it gets worse. I wish I could turn the clock back. I pray every night to die so I can be with him.
“His last words haunt me. He said, ‘Goodnight, Dad,’ when he went upstairs to bed on the Saturday night.
“He was always in bed early because of his paper round.”
Police believe that Miller may have been responsible for at least 28 more attacks, and would have killed again had he not been caught.