A woman missing from her home in Laurel, Ind., since 1974 has been found living in a small town in south Texas under an alias.
According to a release from the Indiana State Police, Lula Ann Gillespie-Miller was found Thursday, and this Easter weekend, her daughter, Tammy Miller, hopes to make contact with the mother she has never known.
Shortly after giving birth to her third child in 1974, Gillespie-Miller — then 28 years old — felt she was too young to be a mother at the time and signed her children over to her parents in Laurel.
She then left home, never to be seen again by her family.
Detective Sgt. Scott Jarvis took the case in January 2014 after the Doe Network — a website that assists families with missing person’s investigations — contacted the Indiana State Police at the Pendleton Post.
The site advised they had been in contact with Gillespie-Miller’s family. The family had told the site the last contact they had with Gillespie-Miller was a letter they received from her, postmarked in Richmond, Ind., from 1975.
Jarvis checked with the Richmond Police Department Records Division and found they had a case of a deceased unidentified female found in 1975.
The female was buried in an unmarked grave in the Earlham Cemetery in Richmond. A search warrant was obtained in December 2014, and a body was exhumed from an unmarked grave for DNA analysis. A DNA sample also was obtained from Gillespie-Miller’s biological daughter, Tammy Miller, for comparison.
The DNA sample taken from Tammy Miller also was entered into a national database for missing persons, with no match found. While awaiting the DNA analysis on the exhumed unidentified body, the investigation led Jarvis in a different direction.
He began to investigate the trail of a woman with similarities to Gillespie-Miller, who had lived in Tennessee in the 1980s, then later in Texas. Further investigation led Jarvis to a woman living in a small town in south Texas since the 1990s, possibly still living under an alias.
On Thursday, Jarvis contacted Texas Rangers in the area and had them go to the woman’s home. She admitted to the Rangers that her name is actually Lula Gillespie-Miller — now 69 years old — and originally from Laurel, Ind.
Gillespie-Miller did not commit any crime by leaving her home in 1974, and still reserves the right to remain anonymous.
Although Gillespie-Miller could offer no explanation as to why she left her Indiana life behind in 1974, she did give consent to Jarvis for her contact information to be given to her daughter, Tammy Miller.
