Ex-lovers implicate
woman in Holmesburg slaying

A jury is expected to decide later this week the guilt or innocence of a woman charged with killing another woman in a Holmesburg apartment last year.
The murder trial of Sarita Miller began with motions and jury selection on Aug. 11.
Miller, 36, of Williamsport, Pa., is charged with killing 56-year-old Rita Nagel as she sat at the kitchen table in her apartment on the 8000 block of Ditman St. The two lived in the same complex.
The defendant also is facing charges of robbery, burglary, forgery, conspiracy, trespassing, theft and fraud.
Nagel, a mother of four who was stabbed and beaten to death, was found by her ex-husband and her daughter on June 12, 2003. It is believed she was killed four days earlier.
The key evidence against Miller is a statement she gave to homicide detectives and the testimony of two ex-lovers — a man and a woman — who contend she confessed to them.
Miller has been jailed without bail since she was arrested a day after Nagel’s body was found. The victim was stabbed 24 times in the neck and elsewhere, with some of the wounds particularly deep. She also was repeatedly hit in the head with a hammer.
"She was hit so many times you could hear the blood hitting the floor," Miller said in her statement.
Assistant District Attorney Carmen Lineberger is presenting a case that shows Miller entered Nagel’s apartment after learning that she had come into some money following a relative’s death. The defendant needed the money, according to the prosecutor, to support her daily crack habit.
Defense attorney Mark Mungello has tried to suggest that Miller’s crack addiction had left her with a diminished capacity to know right from wrong.
Bolstering the prosecution’s case was testimony from Naomi Moten, Miller’s former lover, who told the court that the defendant confessed to the crime, stole Nagel’s Ford Escape and raided her bank account.
Another of Miller’s former lovers, Charles Custis, also testified that she confessed to killing Nagel and stealing her checks and credit card. Custis said Miller showed him Nagel’s body slumped over the kitchen table.
In her statement to homicide detectives. Miller claims that Custis was at the scene of the crime and that he inflicted most of the damage on Nagel. She claimed to largely be a spectator during the crime. "I watched her take her last breath," she said in her statement.
Miller insisted that the plan was simply to rob Nagel. "Rita was not supposed to die," she said.
Lineberger, however, does not believe Custis was involved in the murder. The prosecutor counts him merely as the defendant’s drug dealer who learned of the murder after the fact.
Custis, who lives in the Liddonfield Homes housing project, pleaded guilty last October to charges of forgery and receiving stolen property for his actions in stealing from Nagel after her death. He is in jail awaiting sentencing. oo