After 30 years of searching, a Texan sent to jail a suspect in the murder of his daughter

It seems that the personal history of the search for justice for Tim Miller has come to an end, but he still helps the police to investigate complex cases.

Фото: Depositphotos

“Highway to Hell” is the name of the I-45 in Texas among police and detectives, which stretches from Dallas in the north to southern Houston. It was there that over the years they found bodies that sometimes could not even be identified. Journalists and police believe that from 1970 to 2000 in this area, at least 30 women and girls were abducted, raped and killed.

Many crimes have not been solved, including the murder of 16-year-old Laura, whose father has been looking for the culprit for more than 30 years. In parallel with this, Tim Miller (Tim Miller) became the main assistant to local police in finding other missing. He developed serious search skills, and it was with their help that he could finally restore justice to his daughter. Miller story told edition The Guardianthe translation of which provided TJournal.

Motorway Location

For many years, Tim Miller has been working with the police to find the missing. He takes on seemingly hopeless deeds, organizes volunteers and answers challenges throughout the country. He is addressed with various requests: to find elderly people with dementia, lost children, find out what happened to the plane that disappeared from the radar, or investigate a murder.

In 2000, Miller founded a non-profit search organization. Texas EquuSearch to search for the missing: during their work, the volunteers found more 400 people and about 238 bodies. Rivers, lakes, swamps, moorings, sewers - the Miller team works in any territory. Once, in search of the remains, the head of the organization unearthed the foundation of the house, but under the ground he found only a small depression in the shape of the body.

Over the years, 71-year-old Miller has earned a reputation as a responsible professional who brings things to the end. However, precisely the crime, due to which he came to volunteering, was not formally solved.

10 September 1984, 16-year-old Laura went to the nearest parking lot to call: Millers just moved to League City, and they haven’t yet had a telephone line. The girl was planning to contact her boyfriend, but this did not happen. No one else saw her alive.

Laura suffered from epileptic seizures, so when she did not return home on time, her parents first called the nearest hospitals. Then Tim and Janet went to the police, but there they suggested that the girl ran away from home or killed herself. At that time, none of the investigators noticed that over the 11 months before Laura’s disappearance, another woman had disappeared in the same parking lot.

The last time the 23-year-old waitress Heide Fe had seen was the live 10 of October 1983 of the year. In April of the following year, the couple from League City noticed that their dog was playing with something strange in the backyard. It turned out to be a human skull, which the dog brought from the thickets near the I-45 highway. Soon the police found other remains of Fe in the same place - judging by the injuries, the girl was beaten to death with a blunt object. The detectives did not have any leads, and soon the case was removed to the far shelf.

When Miller came across the story of Fe and pointed out her resemblance to the disappearance of Laura, the police shook it off. The father of the disappeared demanded that the investigators check the field where they found the body of the waitress, but they ignored him. He asked for permission to independently verify the territory, but the investigators refused.

Two years later, several boys rode bicycles near the very same highway. They felt an unpleasant smell that came from the still relatively fresh, but already decaying body of a young woman. Her body with bullet wounds (they were the cause of death) lay approximately 45 meters from the place where Fe's remains were found. The girl’s identity was never established, but it was then that the police discovered the skeleton of Laura Miller.

The reluctance of the police to listen to Miller’s advice and check the place where Fe was killed told important information to detectives — when the remains of Laura were found, it was impossible to determine the cause of death. As with the two bodies described above, the skeleton of the girl was leaning against a tree, and her head was raised to the sky, as if to make it easier to find.

At that time, Miller had already matured the thought of who could be responsible for what happened - Clyde Headrick (Clyde hedrick), who lived next door to Millers in Dickinson. In the year of Laura’s murder, this friendly and attractive young man went to prison for a very strange incident. In July, 1984, he met in a bar with 29-year-old Ellen Bisson (Ellen beason) and later left with her.

When the girl did not come to work the next day, the police interrogated Hedrick. He admitted that he and the girl went to the lake and she accidentally sank, after which he panicked and hid her body. The medical examiner was unable to determine the cause of the girl's death, so Hedrick was given only a year in prison for abusing his body (the survey showed signs of penetration after death).

From a friend, Laura, Miller found out that Hedrick talked with his daughter, drove past her house several times and once sold marijuana to her and her friends. When the father of the deceased reported the information to the police, the investigators did not give her special attention and did not continue the investigation.

Miller was tired of enduring: he accused the city police and forensic scientist of incompetence and began his own investigation. The Texan found the owner of abandoned oil fields and persuaded him to allow him to rent the area for 10 dollars a year. After that, Miller assembled a team of volunteers and completely walked around the whole area - soon the whole territory was covered with pits, but no new clues were found.

Then the police finally found the first suspect in the case. They were not Clyde Headrick, but 60-year-old Robert Abel - a former NASA engineer who owns a ranch near the oil fields.

“Shy” NASA employee

The modest and calm Abel was at NASA right after the university - he helped create the Saturn series of rockets that delivered Apollo teams to the moon. In 1990, the designer left the office, bought the land and built a ranch. When the police first came to him with questions, he was very enthusiastically interested in the details of the investigation, offered any possible help and lent the search team of horses.

But something confused detectives in the behavior of a man. The third former wife of the engineer contacted the lead investigator Gary Bittner (Gary Bittner) and said that sometimes the spouse suddenly fell into fits of anger and cruelty. He never beat the girl, but she saw him beat the horses. With another wife, Abel broke up after 41 a day after marriage: according to the girl, a former NASA specialist was furious because of the refusal to have sex with him.

Robert Abel. Shot from the report channel CBS

The FBI convinced the judge to issue them a search warrant for the house and ranch, but only for 12 hours. During this time, investigators confiscated a golden tooth from the house, a collection of photographs and weapons. All this somehow could have connected Abel with the murders, but the results of the research yielded nothing. The golden tooth belonged to Abel, the bullet from his pistol could not be compared with the one from which an unknown woman was killed, and the photographs did not show anything remarkable.

The police retreated, but Miller did not want to give up. He firmly believed Abel guilty and began to regularly park the car at his house, not hiding surveillance. “I came to his house so often that it seems crazy. Two or three times a day, ”Miller recalls. In addition, he sent threatening letters to Abel.

The engineer obtained in court a decision that forbade Miller to approach him. This did not stop the Texan - he continued shadowing and once sent a man a letter in which he promised to kidnap him and bury him alive in the Nevada desert.

According to the former wife of Abel, when their livestock died, the man did not bury him, but left him lying in the sun to be eaten by birds.

Desperate Miller did not fulfill the threat, but instead came home to Abel and put a charged revolver “Magnum” 357 caliber to his head. The man demanded that he confessed to the murder of Laura, but then turned around and left. It seemed that this was all over.

In April, 1997, a new murder occurred - a body of an 12-year-old girl was found in a pond near the city of Pasadena (Texas). Four months later, an empty 45-year-old Jessica Kane (Jessica cain), but there was no trace of it anywhere. As soon as Miller found out what had happened, he assembled a team of volunteers and, along with them, without a warrant and the permission of Abel, dug up his ranch in search of bodies. They found nothing.

Abel committed suicide in 2005. He stopped his all-terrain vehicle on the railroad tracks and waited for the train to arrive. Looking back, Miller does not believe that the engineer is guilty of the murder of his daughter. Shortly before the suicide, the persecutor accidentally met Abel. At that time, he was already living alone on a broken and neglected ranch - Laura’s father approached a man and asked him for forgiveness for his misdeeds. Then the men burst into tears.

Killer in one case and suspect in another

In 2010, Miller appealed to the sheriff of Galveston and the FBI to verify Clyde Hedrick’s involvement in Laura’s death. This time, the man, who has already earned a good reputation with the police, managed to convince investigators to help. First, they began to study the old case of Ellen Bisson, who allegedly sank in 1984 year. Detectives ordered a new survey and found that the first forensic scientist poorly cleaned the bones of the deceased and did not pay attention to the deep crack in the skull.

A study of the remains in the 2012 year confirmed that such a wound requires a powerful, targeted blow, after which the case was retrained into a “murder”. In April, 2013, after 28 years since Bisson’s death, Hedrick was charged with murder. Shortly before the trial, investigators told Miller that Hedrick confessed to his cellmates not only in the attack on Bisson, but also in the murder of Laura and the waitress Fe. He boasted that he had raped Laura before he killed her.

Additional witnesses against the man were his former wives and partners. According to the investigators' document presented in court, from 1991 to 1993 years, Hedrick, according to his ex-wife, sometimes returned home and said that he “did it again”, and in 1996 came with a bloodied knife and asked his wife to get rid of him.

Clyde Headrick in court. Shot from the report of the TV channel ABC

Miller attended every trial of the Bisson murder case. Sometimes he and Hedrick looked at each other for a long time - one from the dock, the other sitting on a chair in the hall. "We often arranged" peepers ", and I, ***** (hell - approx. Tj), won every time, ”says Miller. Although the investigation failed to prove Hedrick’s guilt in the intentional murder of Bisson, in 2014, the court sentenced him to 20 years in prison for manslaughter.

In 2018, Hedrick goes on to say that he never killed anyone, but Miller set him up. He especially rests on the fact that if he really wanted to kill Bisson, he would not do it on the day when he walked with her with a dozen witnesses. In addition, the convicted argues that he hid the body of the deceased not for the purpose of concealing the crime, but from fear. Hedrick's wife is on his side: she visits her husband with her daughter in prison and blames Miller for ruining her life. According to the woman, the spouse always took care of her and never raised a hand to her.

After the sentence, Hedrick Miller continued to work as a volunteer, which he plans to do next. According to the 71-year-old Texan, now he only dreams about the sincere recognition of Hedrick. If he confesses to the rape and murder of Laura, he faces the death penalty.

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