A retired Oregon City veterinarian is serving a life sentence for strangling the husband of a former employee he had been obsessively stalking for years, a case that ended not with a shooting but with blunt force trauma inflicted in an Intel campus parking garage in Hillsboro. Steven Neil Milner disguised himself and disabled security cameras before killing 56-year-old Kenneth “Kenny” Fandrich, then staged the body to look like a natural death, according to court and law enforcement records that lay out a starkly different sequence of events than some earlier reports suggested.
A Washington County jury found Milner guilty on January 22, 2025, of second-degree murder, stalking, and seven counts of violating a stalking protective order, according to the Washington County District Attorney's Office. He was sentenced on February 18, 2025, to life in prison with the possibility of parole after 25 years. Contrary to accounts describing pending charges or a shooting, court records show Milner had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced by the time those claims circulated, and an autopsy determined Fandrich died from blunt compressive trauma to the neck that broke his spine, as reported by AP News.
A Killing Staged to Look Like Natural Causes
Fandrich was found dead on January 27, 2023, positioned in the driver's seat of his Honda Civic inside the Intel campus garage, arranged by the killer to resemble a man who had simply died in his car. The tactic nearly worked, buying Milner time before investigators pieced together what had actually happened.
Security footage turned out to be central to unraveling the case. Intel camera systems captured Milner wearing a hard hat, tinted glasses, and a face mask, and using blue spray paint in an attempt to disable garage cameras — first as a test run in December 2022, then again during the actual murder the following month, according to CBS News. The paint did not fully block the recordings, leaving investigators with footage that helped tie him to the scene. DNA swabs taken from Fandrich's hands also matched Milner, giving prosecutors physical forensic evidence placing him at the murder alongside the surveillance video.
Years of Stalking Before the Murder
The case traced back to an affair Milner had with an employee at his Oregon City veterinary hospital, where he had practiced for more than two decades. The employee was married to Fandrich, and when she ended the relationship, Milner became fixated on the couple, according to reporting from Willamette Week.
That fixation escalated into a multi-year stalking campaign. The district attorney's office says Milner attached multiple GPS tracking devices to the couple's vehicles, trespassed on their property, purchased so-called burner cars through Craigslist, and followed Fandrich to work more than a dozen times. Fandrich had obtained a stalking protective order against Milner in March 2022, and Milner's seven separate convictions for violating that order stemmed from conduct in the months before the killing.
Widow Says Warnings Were Ignored
During Milner's sentencing, Fandrich's widow publicly criticized the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office, saying deputies repeatedly ignored the couple's reports of GPS tracking, trespassing, and explicit death threats before the murder occurred. The account, detailed in the same Willamette Week outlet's later coverage, has fueled lingering questions about whether earlier intervention by law enforcement could have prevented the killing.
The case drew renewed national attention in October 2025 when it was featured on CBS's “48 Hours” in an episode titled “Murder in the Parking Garage.” The broadcast included previously unreleased trial audio in which Milner claimed he had been trying to “save” Fandrich's wife, a defense narrative that stood in contrast to the years of documented surveillance and harassment prosecutors presented at trial.
Civil Settlement Closes Out Financial Chapter
Beyond the criminal case, Milner agreed in November 2025 to a $1.2 million civil settlement with Fandrich's estate, resolving a wrongful death claim filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court, according to Willamette Week. Milner personally paid $700,000 of that settlement, with an additional $500,000 covered by Farmers Insurance.
An earlier account of the case, published by Tippah News, described Milner as facing pending charges in connection with an alleged shooting and being taken into custody only recently. Court and law enforcement records instead show Milner was convicted and sentenced more than a year earlier, with the cause of death established as blunt trauma rather than a gunshot. The security footage and disguise tactics that outlet described did play a documented role in the investigation, though the underlying timeline and charges had already been resolved well before that report circulated.
