For decades, Tim Miller was the guy families called when someone vanished. The Guardian reports that the 76-year-old founder of nonprofit Texas EquuSearch—who has located hundreds of missing people or their remains—never stopped chasing the one case that haunted him most: the 1984 disappearance and murder of his 16-year-old daughter, Laura. That obsession grew out of what Miller saw as a bungled police response in League City, Texas, where Laura's body was eventually found in an oilfield that came to be known as part of the "Texas Killing Fields," a corridor tied to dozens of murdered or missing women and girls.
Journalist J Oliver Conroy traces Miller's long, often messy turn from grieving father to vigilante to key figure in a sprawling, decades-old mystery—and the phone calls that finally cracked things open. Four years ago, a tipster called the EquuSearch line three times and left rambling messages. Miller finally called back. The man was James Elmore and, upon meeting Miller, claimed he wanted to "come clean": He told him he had helped dispose of Laura's body and named Miller's longtime suspect, Clyde Hedrick, as her rapist and killer.
Over the course of four years, the two met at least 30 times, says Miller—in one chilling visit, he says Elmore asked him to drive to a cemetery where Laura used to walk and sit; Elmore pointed to a patch of trees and said Hedrick would hide there and watch her. Miller believes a $25,000 reward tied to the search for Laura's killer was what drove Elmore to reach out. Elmore eventually agreed to talk to police, which set off a chain of events including Hedrick's apparent suicide and a grand jury indictment of Elmore. Read Conroy's piece in full for much more on the case.
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