Milestones

By Harriet Barovick, ELIZABETH L. BLAND, Logan Orlando, Elspeth Reeve

MARRIED. JENNIFER GARNER, 33, and BEN AFFLECK, 32, actors and full-time paparazzi bait; in a private ceremony; in Turks and Caicos. Reps for the Daredevil co-stars also announced that Garner, best known as the high-kicking spy on Alias, is pregnant. This is her second marriage and his first.

FILED FOR DIVORCE. TERRY MCMILLAN, 53, author who based her best-selling book How Stella Got Her Groove Back on her romance with JONATHAN PLUMMER, 30; after discovering he was gay; in California's Contra Costa County. "It was devastating to discover that a relationship I had publicized to the world as life-affirming and built on mutual love was actually based on deceit," she said in court papers. The revelation led her to suspect that the Jamaican she met at a resort a decade ago married her only to get his U.S. citizenship. Plummer maintains he didn't know he was gay when he moved in with her.

CONFESSED. DENNIS RADER, 60, serial killer whose self-coined nickname was BTK, for "bind, torture, kill"; to the first-degree murders of 10 people between 1974 and '91; in a courtroom in Wichita, Kans. In a chillingly matter-of-fact narrative, the former Boy Scout leader and church-council president recounted how he had comforted one of his victims by getting her a glass of water and provided a pillow for another, then killed them. Because Kansas had no death penalty at the time of the killings, Rader will probably be sentenced to life in prison.

DIED. LUTHER VANDROSS, 54, winner of eight Grammys whose heart-tugging ballads made him one of the most celebrated R&B singers of his generation; of undisclosed causes, two years after suffering a massive stroke; in Edison, N.J. In 1981, after years of backing artists like David Bowie and Roberta Flack, he released the first of 15 well-received solo albums, which included such R&B hits as Give Me the Reason, Here and Now and Love Won't Let Me Wait. But he longed for a chart-topping crossover and in 2003 achieved it with the starkly intimate Dance with My Father, an homage to the dad he lost at age 7.

DIED. JOHN WALTON, 58, entrepreneurial billionaire son of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton; after the tiny, home-built plane he was piloting crashed in Wyoming's Grand Teton National Park. Reluctant to work for the family business, the decorated Vietnam vet launched successful ventures in sailboat building and crop dusting and was a pivotal board member of the Waltons' philanthropic foundation.

DIED. JOHN FIEDLER, 80, and PAUL WINCHELL, 82, voice-over specialists who delighted young fans of the animated Winnie the Pooh films as two of Pooh's best pals, the ever anxious Piglet (Fiedler) and the peripatetically perky Tigger (Winchell); in Englewood, N.J., and Moorpark, Calif., respectively. Fiedler, a veteran character actor, played Mr. Peterson, the browbeaten therapy patient on The Bob Newhart Show, and Winchell, a popular ventriloquist, coined Tigger's trademark sign-off, "Ta-ta for now!"

DIED. SHELBY FOOTE, 88, Civil War historian who became a national celebrity--much to his befuddlement--after lending his courtly eloquence, encyclopedic expertise and honeyed Mississippi drawl to 89 appearances in the 1990 Ken Burns TV series on the war; in Memphis, Tenn. He wrote six novels, but his most famous book was a panoramic, three-volume history of the war, written over 20 years with an old-fashioned ink-dipped pen. A crackling storyteller and vivid portraitist, the onetime recluse wowed 40 million viewers of the PBS documentary, garnering critics' kudos and a slew of marriage proposals. "It's fun, I guess," he said of his stardom. "But I'm dead set against all the hoo-rah."