Kansas’s 36th attorney general was infamous for popping out of trunks, inciting gunfights on buses, and going toe-to-toe with other lawmen and politicians. It was this unabashed, brash approach to law enforcement that earned Vern Miller the nickname “Lawman of the State.”
“He was just kind of a cowboy who did things his way,” says Jim McLean, senior correspondent with KCUR’s Kansas News Service. “The narrative of the state of Kansas where you had these marshalls, sheriffs, of these Wild West communities, that would take matters in hand and clean up the town, right? Well, there’s a certain amount of that to Vern Miller.”
But Vern Miller was not a Wild West sheriff. Miller wielded much of his power between the 1960s and the 70s, a socially and politically tumultuous time in Kansas and across the country.
Growing up in a hardscrabble community outside of Wichita, Miller worked at a dairy farm and got into a lot of fights as a kid.
“There was a lot of scrappin’ going on,” says Miller, now 91 and living in Phoenix. “Everybody scrapped at that age.”
After serving in Korea in the 1950s, Miller returned to become a road patrolman in the sheriff’s office. And he quickly became known for physical altercations.
One legend says that, as a traffic officer following a high-speed chase, Miller whipped a man in the face and dragged him through the car window.
As another story goes, Miller fought his boss — the sheriff — in the sheriff’s own home, ultimately costing him his job. In 1964, in a twist of irony, Miller won the race for sheriff of Sedgwick County, the state’s most populous county at the time.
Not shy about his new role, Miller traversed the county, busting folks for any and every possible infraction. He even went so far as to tell churches to suspend their cash bingo games.
“A lot of old ladies in town didn’t like that,” Miller remembers. “They like to play bingo.”
With a long history as a prohibition state, Kansas still had restrictive drinking laws at the time, which prevented the sale of liquor by the drink.
“Kansas for so long hadn’t had any laws enforced, along those areas,” Miller says. “I wanted them to know what the law was, and tell them they need to obey the law. And if they didn’t… then there’d be trouble about it.”
Besides bingo and drinking laws, Miller made headlines in the summer of 1968 for inciting a deadly gunfight on a bus in Wichita in order to nab two men suspected of murder in Missouri. And in 1967, he veered dangerously close to starting a mini-civil war in Kansas after making disparaging comments about officials in Leavenworth County. Miller was subpoenaed by the Leavenworth County prosecutor, who threatened to arrest him. In turn, Miller threatened to kill the men who came to arrest him. What resulted from that incident was the passing of Miller’s Law, which makes it illegal to resist an unlawful arrest.
Despite these controversies, or maybe because of them, Miller became a popular force during the social and political upheaval that dominated the 1960s, so much so that Democratic Gov. Bob Docking asked him to run as attorney general. It was Docking’s hope that Miller would turn out Democratic voters in populous Sedgwick County. Miller felt reluctant; a Democrat had not held the attorney general position in 80 years, and Miller had planned on going into private practice (he earned his law degree in Oklahoma by flying back-and-forth in a private plane).
“And I told ‘em, ‘I don’t know nothing about being attorney general,’” Miller recalls.
