A retired Oregon veterinarian has been arrested and charged with the murder of a man whose wife he had an affair with years ago.
Steve Milner, 55, is charged with second-degree murder, stalking, and violating a stalking order, Willamette Week reported.
The paper said that an autopsy ruled that 56-year-old Kenneth Fandrich died from blunt force trauma to his neck and that the manner of death was homicide.
Fandrich’s wife, Tanya Fandrich, told Willamette Weekly that she and her husband had spent years trying to get Milner to stop harassing them.
“Milner was interjecting himself into our lives before this stalking order—before we had anybody listening to us. We rarely ever went anywhere alone. We always tried to stay together,” Tanya Fandrich said.
She said her husband stopped returning calls Friday night and that she used Find My Phone to direct officers to him in a parking garage on the Intel campus where he worked.
“I never thought this would happen. Never. I thought he was just being an asshole,” she said.
Fandrich told police that his wife and Milner had an affair when she worked at his veterinary clinic many years ago, even bailing her out of jail when she was arrested during a domestic dispute with her husband. But, Tanya Fandrich said, they hadn’t had any contact since.
Kenneth Fandrich filed a lawsuit against Milner early last year, among other things accusing him of planting a GPS device on his car. In March, he said, Milner was following him to work. A police officer pulled Milner over at that time and warned him to stop, but the officer said Milner wasn’t “receptive’ to the warning.
Fandrich got a stalking order a few weeks later, and Milner was arrested for violating it. He was released and ordered to have no contact with the Fandriches, with a trial set to begin in March, KGW reported.
Milner was arrested on Tuesday with court records saying he had been “engaging in repeated and unwanted contact” between December 13 and the day Fandrich’s body was found.
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[Featured image: Surveillance video from Kenneth Fandrich’s home, allegedly showing Steve Milner attaching a GPS device to Fandrich’s car/Multnomah County Circuit Court]
