Don Miller was beloved by his community, hosted the boy scouts, and claimed to have detonated the first atomic bomb. Then the FBI discovered an entire museum—and thousands of human remains—in the 90-year-old’s basement.
of places he’s never been. He’ll find himself somewhere deep in China, gazing at a Buddhist temple, posing as if he’s being photographed. Or sometimes he’s on Easter Island, near its carved human figures with oversized heads, outside centuries-old burial caves, almost like he’s unearthing something. Then he wakes and realizes none of it was real. He’s never visited China, never seen Easter Island.
Carpenter decided he needed to see the artifacts for himself and thought up a way in: He would tag along on a follow-up visit with one of the agents who’d been to Miller’s house before. “A bit of a ruse,” Carpenter told me. On November 1, the two agents drove an hour south past farms and cornfields to Moscow, a tiny, unincorporated township in Rush County. They pulled into Miller’s driveway. Just past its curve sat a large, two-story beige stone home. An old white farmhouse stood out back.
An anonymous tip led Agent Tim Carpenter of the FBI’s Art Theft Program to investigate. He couldn’t believe what he found inside. Miller was always eager to Miller was well-known throughout his community, living almost his entire life in Rush County. He was born in 1923 and grew up in the white farmhouse behind his home. During World War II, he attended Ohio State University’s Army Specialized Training Program, a partnership with the military that trained students in fields helpful to the war effort. Miller studied engineering, then got shipped off to New Mexico.
Carpenter decided he needed to see the collection again. This time, he showed up unannounced and asked more pointed questions. Miller told him about a Native American effigy pot his first wife, Sue, unearthed in the Southwest, a carronade from a Gulf of Mexico shipwreck he’d obtained after hiring a local diver to haul it up, a pair of mastodon tusks from Canada he’d excavated on a road trip.
Bolt remembers Miller as a walking, talking encyclopedia, fond of green-checked sport jackets and a giant ceramic coffee cup emblazoned with a Navy seal. At lunch, they’d talk about how societies evolved, history, civilizations, or Miller’s own expeditions. The practice coincided with the emergence of racist scientific theories asserting that behavioral attributes could be discovered through physical characteristics, like skull size. In the early to mid-1800s, Samuel Morton, considered the father of American anthropology, collected and analyzed a vast number of skulls he said proved that cranial size was a marker of intelligence, with whites at the top, Blacks at the bottom, and Native Americans in the middle. By 1867, the U.S.
Miller said that he dug up each artifact personally. Miller told a friend: If you can divert security on one item, you can get something else by them, something better. “He baited them.”Archer became Carpenter’s partner, tasked with developing a plan for seizing the items. One of the primary concerns was damage. Take, say, a clay-fired pot, buried 4,000 years ago in a tomb.
The morning of the operation, Carpenter and Archer showed up at the Indianapolis field office to see their plan in physical form: semi trucks, mobile RVs, generators, tents, evidence recovery teams, outside experts, dozens of agents, and even tribal authorities—more than 100 people altogether. They left the office in a snaking caravan and drove south. “We looked a little bit like an army,” Carpenter said.
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