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Herbeauty
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Yoder immediately sought out the bishop and other church elders. By noon, word had spread through the Amish community that something was very wrong at the Miller farm. By 2 PM, Holmes County Sheriff Richard Lawson was standing in the Miller kitchen, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
“In twenty years of law enforcement, I’d never seen anything like it,” Lawson, now retired, tells me. “No signs of struggle. No blood, no overturned furniture, no broken windows. No note, no explanation. Just an entire family—six people ranging from a baby to adults—gone. Vanished.”
The Miller family consisted of Jacob, thirty-nine, a farmer and skilled carpenter known throughout the community for his furniture-making; Ruth, thirty-seven, renowned for her beautiful quilts and gentle manner; and their four children: Aaron, fourteen; Sarah, twelve; David, eight; and Mary, just eighteen months old.
“They were as solid a family as you’d find,” recalls Bishop Eli Hochstetler, who led the church district the Millers belonged to. “Jacob was quiet, a hard worker. Ruth was kind, always helping others. The children were well-behaved, respectful. There was no indication of any problems, any reason they would leave.”
But they had left. Or been taken. Or met with some accident so complete it had erased all six of them without a trace.
The investigation was about to begin. It would take twenty years to solve.
The Search
Sheriff Lawson’s first assumption was the most hopeful: the family had gone somewhere and would return with a logical explanation. Perhaps a family emergency in another community. Perhaps they’d traveled to a neighboring county for some reason and been delayed.
But as hours turned to days, that hope faded.
