Skip to main content
Steve Milner, the former Oregon City veterinarian accused of murdering the husband of a former employee, has been denied bail and will be held in Washington County Jail pending trial.
Circuit Judge Erik Buchér announced the decision following a three-hour hearing in which a Hillsboro police detective laid out the state’s evidence connecting Milner to the killing of another Oregon City man, Kenneth Fandrich, in a parking garage on Intel’s campus in Hillsboro where Fandrich worked.
“It’s very, very strong,” Judge Buchér said. “It’s an easy ruling.”
The morning of the killing, a man in a yellow hard hat and tinted safety goggles spray-painted eight security cameras in the parking garage. He drove a blue Buick sedan, prosecutors say.
Later that day, a maroon minivan parked next to Fandrich’s Honda. The footage was obscured by the paint, but there appears to have been movement between the two vehicles shortly after Fandrich left work. Thirty minutes later, the minivan drove away.
Police later found Fandrich dead in the driver’s seat of his car after his wife, Tanya, reported him missing. His spine had been broken. Traces of Milner’s DNA was found on both of Fandrich’s hands.
Hillsboro police interviewed Tanya Fandrich, who reported that Milner had been stalking her and her husband for years. Indeed, Kenneth Fandrich had applied for a pair of stalking orders in an attempt to keep Milner away.
Tanya Fandrich worked in Milner’s veterinary clinic for two decades before the two had a brief affair and Kenneth Fandrich found out about it. After that, the veterinarian began harassing Fandrich, his widow alleged.
Milner had been pulled over previously by Hillsboro police last year after he was caught following Fandrich to work. At the time, Milner told the officer that he believed Fandrich was going to kill Tanya.
Fandrich admitted to the officer that he and his wife had marital problems, although he pointed out that Tanya had been arrested for domestic violence, not him. The officer let Milner go with a stern warning: Leave the Fandrichs alone, or face jail.
After Fandrich’s death, police suspected Milner, prosecutors said today. The cops seized his car and extracted its location history from the car’s GPS. It led police to an Oregon City Home Depot, where security footage of the parking lot captured someone hopping between three vehicles throughout the day, prosecutors say.
Those three vehicles are at the center of prosecutors’ case. For nearly two hours today, they presented the court with evidence that Milner used the Home Depot parking lot as a home base to switch between vehicles and cover his tracks while making trial runs into the Intel parking garage.
Two of those vehicles—a Dodge minivan and a Buick sedan—were later found abandoned in North Portland in locations that had also been visited by Milner’s car’s GPS. The former owner of the minivan said a man using Milner’s phone number had purchased it from him under the name “Jerry Lee.”
At today’s hearing, defense attorneys attempted to shed doubt on the state’s case. They said Fandrich had a history of domestic violence and implied that Tanya’s relationship with Milner had extended long after the affair supposedly ended. They also noted another unidentified man’s DNA was found in blood on Fandrich’s steering wheel.
The video of the crime was obscured, attorney Amanda Thibeault said. “We have no idea what was happening in that footage at the time.”