RealChoice: July 9, 1976: First of two clients dead at John B. Miller’s hands

Thursday, July 09, 2026

July 9, 1976: First of two clients dead at John B. Miller’s hands

Grok AI illustration of how the actual site might have looked in 1976

Norma Bernstein was a 19-year-old student when she went to the office of Dr. John B. Miller, a general practitioner, at 3307 N. Piedras Street in El Paso. Miller described Norma as "healthy as all get out." I can find little information about Norma other than that her father, Leonard, was a veteran and that Norma had been in El Paso's Irvin High School's Spanish Honor Society as a sophomore in 1973.

Norma was petit, a little over 5 feet tall and weighing 120 pounds, with light brown hair and blue-grey eyes.

Sources aren't clear on whether Miller gave Norma general anesthesia when he did the abortion. It was completed at around 10:00 am. Miller said that Norma walked to the recovery room and seemed to be doing well until she had a seizure. He inserted a breathing tube and began artificial respiration but did not perform CPR.

Norma was declared dead on arrival at R. E. Thomason General Hospital at 10:30 am. An autopsy confirmed that Normal had been, as Miller had said, a healthy woman. Very little unusual was found in her autopsy is that her uterus was enlarged and the interior surface was "coarsely granular and hemorrhagic." There was no perforation of the uterus. For some reason, Norma was wearing a tampon. She had Demerol in her system, but not enough to cause an overdose. According to a Grok review, some likely mechanisms to cause death might have been an amniotic fluid embolism, a sudden reaction to lidocaine, or a cumulative effect of multiple small reactions to the procedure and medications.

During an investigation into Norma's death and the later death of 20-year-old Sylvia Ramos, Miller admitted that he didn't have an actual nurse working at his office, he considered his two assistants -- his wife and his daughter -- well qualified. Miller admitted that neither woman was trained in CPR, but defended them vociferously: "My nurses have worked for me better than three years. They are chosen because they like people, and then are taught to perform our services. We have many emergencies every month, and my nurses do exceptionally well in helping take care of them."

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