20/20
Bad Romance: Love at First Click
Tue, 20 May 2025 07:00:00 -0000
From Default Workspace • No contributors
A mom uses sex, deception, and the Internet against her husband and lover. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What case is being discussed in this episode?
Hey, it's Brad Milkey. This week on the Crime Scene Weekly, we're talking about a mom who gained national attention for faking her own kidnapping. Sherry Papini is back in the spotlight, but now she's changing her story and trying to change her custody arrangement with her kids. Listen to the latest from the case on the Crime Scene Weekly.
Chapter 2: What is the warning about love at first click?
You can't believe everything you see on the internet. The one you think is the love of your life may turn out to be the death of you. And that's not just an expression here. Beware of love at first click. This is a story that is about manipulation, cheating, lust, You've got salacious emails. You've got X-rated videos.
Sheree Miller is accused of using sex, lies, and the internet to get men to do what she wanted them to do, even if it meant breaking the law.
Chapter 3: Who is Cherie Miller and what is her story?
So we need to add call. Tell me the number. So like that, right? Yeah.
All right.
Hi, is this Sheree? Yes. Hey Cherie, it's Juju Chang calling, how are you?
I'm good, how are you?
I'm on the phone with Cherie Paulette Kitley Miller, a mother from Michigan. And right now she's an inmate at the Women's Huron Valley Correctional Facility. But her attorney says she's only guilty of creating a complex online fantasy life.
Most of it was sex chat. It would get very graphic and very detailed about going through sexual encounters over the internet.
I spent hours upon hours online talking to people. It's sex. Like, I wanted to be in control of everything, obsessively in control.
You were an online sex addict.
Very much. It was like a video game in each Cherie's story begins in Flint, Michigan, once a vibrant center for the car industry. When I grew up, Flint was booming.
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Chapter 4: What led Cherie to online chat rooms?
It's a factory town. I think it's seen better days, but the people there are very resilient. Growing up where I grew up, it was like your normal middle-class neighborhood. Every summer, they sent us to Florida with my grandma and papa, where that was my safe space. She had a hard childhood, product of several divorces that her mom had, different men coming and going in her household.
She talks about being sexually abused.
How old were you when you were first sexually assaulted?
I want to say probably three or four. As kids, you take on, like, everything is your fault.
Well, she was a typical flint-wild child. Bars, karaoke, bowling alleys, just... partying. She moved out early. She got married when she was 17 to her first husband. They ended up getting a divorce. By the age of about 27, 28, she had been married twice and divorced twice.
Cherie is a single mom raising three kids, working multiple jobs to make ends meet. She's a sales rep for Mary Kay Cosmetics and works at a nursing home. She also starts doing the books at a local scrapyard, B&D Auto, owned by a man named Bruce Miller.
Bruce Miller was born and raised here in Flint, Michigan. He did what a lot of people did as soon as they got out of high school, went to work for General Motors. Always into cars. He traded a horse for his first car at 16, 17 years old, and was always into trying to race cars. He was a huge NASCAR fan.
He just was a hard worker, went to work every day. In fact, he stayed working on third shift, which is a hard shift to work 30, 40 years. He was really close to retiring from General Motors and he would have just had the junkyard to fall back on and do what he liked to do. To have a salvage yard with all those parts and all that stuff for him to play with was just his idea of heaven.
He also went through several marriages. He was married three times before. And he always told me he knew where the courthouse was. Bruce Miller was a lot older than Sherry, and he met her through the work at the salvage yard.
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Chapter 5: How did Cherie's relationship with Jerry Cassaday develop?
Cherie had a lot of screen names. There were over a dozen of them, and they were all like, look at me, I'm sexy.
Going into the sexual chat line, you're meeting other people that may have some of the same fantasy life that you have.
She wanted to be anything she could be. She used fantasy to escape the pain.
Bruce worked at the shop and he had his business, so he was gone a lot. So I spent hours upon hours online talking to people. That was such an addiction. It fed something in there that I did not understand.
During those hours-long chatroom sessions, a certain user piques Cherie's interest, JLC1006. The man behind the screen name is Jerry Cassaday. How much time were you spending online with Jerry and with other men, for that matter?
I didn't get out from in front of that computer.
Jerry Cassaday grew up in the Kansas City area, Missouri. He was the youngest of the four boys. He was competitive. At a young age, he actually became a police officer. He was promoted to lieutenant of the detective bureau.
Soon, Jerry is a father and a stepfather. He and his wife Barbara are parents to three boys, two from his wife's previous marriage and a younger son together named James.
I remember helping him get dressed in the mornings and watching him get his uniform on, and I was proud of my father. He was enamored by the sheriff and the undersheriff, but he started to see a lot of discrepancies. He believed the undersheriff had taken and falsified a document in a murder case.
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Chapter 6: What happened after Cherie claimed to be pregnant?
The weekend that she came into town, we all knew that she was coming in. And he was so excited. And not only does she meet him, but she sleeps with him. We knew the first time they spent the night together. I think the whole casino floor knew. The first night they spent together.
At one point, she sends a photograph of herself wearing the same clothes that she wore that night to Jerry and says, our first night together.
Cherie returns to Michigan, back to her real life with her husband Bruce, but... Cherie Miller starts sending pictures of her in different states of undress.
Not only does she send them pictures, she starts sending them videos of herself masturbating. She labels it for Jerry's eyes only, which is clearly something to keep his interest sustained.
Remember, Cherie and Bruce are newlyweds. And Cherie's making multiple trips to Reno, leaving her kids with her in-laws, Chuck and Judy Miller.
We were just wondering why she was making so many trips, and she just said she had a lot of people buying her Mary Kay stuff down there. Cherie Miller tells Jerry that she's pregnant, and this is just weeks after they had their first sexual encounter. She comes back after her first trip to Reno, after they made love for the first time.
Jerry receives photographs of this pregnancy wand showing that she is pregnant with his child. And of course, he's over the moon about it. They were making plans to get together, live together. He's elated. The woman he loves, he's going to have a baby with.
They're going to be rich. And then she dropped the hammer that she lost the baby. So Cherie tells Jerry that Bruce found out she was pregnant and that he beat her. I never thought I would ever tell you that he hits. I got in trouble because I was with you. She sends him a picture of her torso with alleged bruises all over her body. There was a lot of bruising. You would have to beat her a lot.
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Chapter 7: What alarming claims did Cherie make to Jerry?
When you broke the news that that baby was gone, what did you say?
I didn't tell him on the phone. I think I wrote him on a chat.
He was devastated. One minute he's the highest high, and the next it's like, What happened? You know, and you almost feel like you're scraping him off the floor. All of the turmoil involved in this relationship is hard on Jerry, who doesn't deal with it well. And one night, after getting off work at his casino, he goes to another nearby casino.
And he was playing blackjack and drinking. He got into some sort of a heated discussion. He gets belligerent, and finally they call security to usher him out of the casino. On the way out, he slams a door, which hits one of the security people, which causes the police to come and arrest him.
Got home from school that day. He wasn't there, which was strange. That's when I was able to message a friend of his that he worked with. His son called me, and he said, do you know where my dad is? And I'm like, The first phone call I called was the jail. And that's where he was.
So his family kind of gather around him and say, listen, Jerry, you're not doing well out there. Come back, be with family. I helped him move back to Missouri, moved into a basement apartment and stuff with my cousin. He's got to work on his alcohol addiction problems, and so he begins going to AA.
He was telling me he was going to church again, and it sounded like things were kind of coming back together for him. But he was, of course, still in touch with Cherie.
And Cherie is making alarming claims over email.
Well, she said that Bruce was involved with the mafia, was into money laundering.
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