(Radio Iowa via KCRG-TV) – Willard Miller, of Fairfield, was sentenced to life with a chance for parole after 35 years Thursday for the killing of his Spanish teacher Nohema Graber in November of 2021. Miller had pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and the sentence came after a hearing on the events leading up to the murder that showed he wanted to kill Graber because he was failing her Spanish class. Miller made a statement before his sentencing. “I would like to apologize for my actions first and foremost, to the family. I’m truly sorry for the distress that I caused you and the devastation I caused your family,” he says. He also apologized to the community, police and his church.

“Coming here today, now at the end of this stretched out journey, I’m realizing just the magnitude of my actions. And I know it was wrong and I knew it was wrong, I’m yet I still carried through, I still did what I did,” Millers says. Nohema Graber’s borther-in-law Tom was one of several people to give victim impact statements.

This case has had an enormous impact on Nohema’s family, Fairfield High School and the Fairfield community at large,” he says. “Not only was no amo robbed of 30 some of the best years of her life. Her murder deprived Paul Graber of the love of his life, and certainly hasten Paul’s own premature death.” He says Paul had just endured more than five years of dialysis and received a kidney transplant and was looking forward to resuming in travel with his wife.

Willard Miller sentencing (KCRG-TV photo)

“Paul was deeply and understandably depressed by the murder of Nohema — and his life ended last week in the ravages of a metastatic cancer that would have been caught and treated far sooner had Nohema been there,” he says. Miller is now almost 18, but was 16 years old at the time of the killing, and state law requires that juveniles be given a chance for parole.

Jeremey Goodale also pleaded guilty and his sentencing hearing will be in August.