Tim Carpenter dreams 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. His dreams are someone else’s trips and memories that exist in weathered photos and grainy films, strung together in his mind like a phantom reel, images he’s looked at so many times—too many—that they’ve invaded his psyche.
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One evening years earlier, in October 2013, Carpenter—an FBI agent—heard his phone ringing at his home in Indianapolis. His supervisor was calling to tell him of an anonymous tip about a man in rural Indiana named Don Miller. The tipster said Miller was an amateur archaeologist who’d amassed a vast collection of artifacts, especially Native American items. Inside his home, the person claimed, were skulls, bones, and entire skeletons.
At the time, Carpenter was one of a handful of agents working for the FBI’s Art Theft Program, typically known for investigating fine art. Stolen Renoirs. Lifted Rembrandts. Fakes and forgeries. Heists famous and not so famous. He admits that agents who are aware the unit even exists think they’re just the guys who chase down Van Goghs. But the program investigates all kinds of cultural property crimes, including something as unusual as potential human remains inside a Midwestern home. Carpenter reached out to the tipster. They talked for an hour. The person, who’d seen the collection, kept referring to it as “huge.” For Carpenter, who’d worked art crimes for five years, including private collection cases, a large collection would’ve meant 100 items. So what’s huge? 200 items? 400? “No, man. A lot more than that,” he told Carpenter. “I think it’s about 200,000 pieces.”
Carpenter’s initial reaction was to dismiss it. Not possible. Either this person is a crackpot or has wildly overshot. “Nobody has 200,000 of anything,” Carpenter told me. “Hell, most large state museums don’t have 200,000 pieces.” So Carpenter pressed him. It can’t be that many. “Just trust me,” the person told him. “This stuff is everywhere.”
The tipster said Miller had acknowledged that some of the items in his collection were illegal, and that over the course of six decades Miller had dug much of it up himself. He said Miller had a bomb shelter and underground tunnels on his property, and put Carpenter in touch with someone else who’d seen the collection and taken photos. Carpenter saw them. There were skulls and bones. They were unmistakable.
At the Indianapolis field office, Carpenter ran Miller’s name through the FBI’s databases and discovered he’d been in touch with the agency five years earlier. In 2008, agents had received a tip that Miller had two spheres that looked like pits, the cores of nuclear weapons. When the FBI, along with Department of Energy officials, visited Miller’s home, they didn’t find pits but discovered a chunk of depleted uranium and a large bar of graphite Miller claimed was from the U.S.’s first nuclear reactor. Carpenter says the DOE seized the uranium, which he described as “not something you’d want to handle,” but left the graphite after deeming it inert and harmless. But clearly, agents had been in Miller’s house. They’d seen the collection. “It was documented in some paperwork in the past as a passing note, like, Oh, by the way, he had this really cool collection of Native American stuff,” Carpenter said. But the agents weren’t cultural property experts. They didn’t know what they were looking at.
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. Large antennas in the yard poked at the sky. Nearby sat multiple barns, outbuildings, garages. The agents, casually dressed, approached the front door and noticed a statue. A Chinese terra-cotta warrior, life-size, standing guard.
Miller opened the door. He was tall, thin, elderly, happy—eager, even—to invite them in. He seemed thrilled to have someone to talk to. Inside, his house was cluttered. Miller guided them through, talking about himself, his life, and his collection, and soon led them down a stairwell. As Carpenter descended, the room below felt as if it was expanding with each step, like a camera aperture widening and widening, until he finally reached the bottom. “I just stopped,” Carpenter said. “I stood there and looked around, like, You have got to be shitting me.”
Stretching out before him, arranged on row after row of collapsible tables, inside glass cases hand-labeled and lighted, Carpenter saw a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling private museum. One man’s life’s work, on exhibit. Over here, 2,500-year-old Chinese jewelry. There, an Egyptian sarcophagus. Here, a dugout canoe that traveled the Amazon River. There, dinosaur eggs, a Tibetan cowbell, a fossilized crocodile skull, pre-Columbian weapons, Ming Dynasty vases, shrunken heads, Nazi helmets, Aztec figurines, Celtic axes. In that brief, spiraling moment, Carpenter estimated 10,000 artifacts. Then he realized he was only seeing half the room—the rest was behind the stairwell—and remembered the multiple buildings surrounding Miller’s home. “It was a gut-wrenching, butterfly-in-the-stomach, ‘oh my God I think my life has just changed’ kind of moment,” Carpenter said.
They spent a couple of hours going around the room, Miller describing how he used metal detectors on battlefields and Native American reservations, telling them how he’d personally dug up each artifact; Carpenter trying to take it all in, looking for the bones and skulls he’d seen in photos; Miller’s wife, Sandra, coming down to offer them tea. Carpenter saw things that were almost certainly illegal: pre-Columbian artifacts protected by treaty, Chinese items that fell under the country’s wide-reaching patrimony laws.
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
show off his collection—but some objects he kept hidden. His basement museum included display cases packed with Chinese jewelry, dinosaur eggs, shrunken heads, Nazi helmets, Aztec figurines, Celtic axes, and more.
It all started, Miller told them, in New Mexico in the 1940s, when he worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory on the Manhattan Project, for J. Robert Oppenheimer himself, the father of the atomic bomb. In one of the glass cases, Miller showed Carpenter a photo of an orange mushroom cloud. Nearby sat a radio system Miller said sent the signal to detonate the very first nuclear device, Trinity. “Don claimed to have been the guy who fired the first atomic bomb,” Carpenter said. Miller told them he was so close to the explosion that he ran and hid in a bunker before the blast wave hit. But when he wasn’t working on the most profound scientific project of the 20th century, he combed the base for arrowheads.
After a couple of hours, the agents thanked Miller for having them over and drove back to Indianapolis. Carpenter knew that private collectors typically display about half their collection, and keep the rest in storage. Leaving Miller’s house that day, Carpenter—a Tennessee native who refers to his guesstimates as “Kentucky windage”—estimated 20,000 objects on display, putting Miller’s full collection around 40,000, less than the tipster’s estimate but still the single largest private collection Carpenter—or the FBI—had ever come across. Carpenter doubted everything was illegal, but it was possible the agency would have to seize it all. And how, exactly, do you seize 40,000 priceless artifacts?
But something else puzzled him. Carpenter had expected to find human remains, the bones and skulls he’d seen in the photos. The only bones he saw were a femur buried on a shelf and part of a skullcap sitting upside down like a shallow bowl. Miller told him the skull was from a Native American who’d died at Wounded Knee, where up to 300 Lakota were massacred by the Army in 1890. He showed them the bullet, a small ball, lodged in the skull. But that wasn’t in the photos. The bones weren’t there.
Frank Denzler was barely a teenager when his Boy Scout troop visited Miller’s home in the late 1960s. Miller, dressed in plaid and blue jeans, loved showing the kids around, always polite, never a braggart. He didn’t have kids of his own. He had his collection. “Knowing Don, I would say he was probably afraid that if somebody didn’t save these items, they’d be dug up, burned, built over,” Denzler said. “Something would happen to them and nobody would ever know.”
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.
Over the years, Miller often talked about his time there to friends, and even journalists. He told a reporter for the Rushville Republican that Oppenheimer, whom he called “Oppie,” picked him to head the test bomb’s firing squad, and claimed to The Indianapolis Star that he gave the signal to begin the countdown to the Trinity explosion.
After the war, Miller married his high school sweetheart, Sue, and received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois—graduating in the top 3 percent of his class—and a doctorate from Purdue University. In the early 1950s, he began working at a naval ordnance plant in Indianapolis, later named Naval Avionics, and started traveling extensively.
Back home, Miller was often at the Corner Restaurant in nearby Rushville, drinking coffee and eating pie. If somebody wanted to see his latest finds, he’d tell them to come on over. People knew about the collection—and his travels as a Christian missionary that also seemed to serve as archaeological digs. “He would go on these mission trips and uncover something, find something, and maybe stick it in his backpack,” Denzler said. “I don’t think anybody thought that he was stealing the stuff.”
After seeing Miller’s collection, Carpenter started reaching out to everyone he could think of—anthropologists, archaeologists, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Department of Justice. He researched the legal knot of treaties, foreign patrimony laws, state and federal restrictions, some more than 100 years old, that might apply. He was about to take on the biggest case of his career, only a year after arriving in Indianapolis.
When he was growing up outside Knoxville, Carpenter didn’t imagine he’d be tracking down lost artifacts and artwork. If anything, he saw himself becoming an artist. But he got sidelined by Desert Storm, when he became a bomb technician for the Air Force. In 2004, he joined the FBI, investigating terrorism cases before getting burned out and requesting a transfer to criminal work. A couple of art cases came his way, and by 2008, a spot opened up on the small Art Theft Program. Carpenter was its eighth member. Over the years, the program has recovered a 300-year-old Stradivarius violin, ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz, Cézannes and Monets worth millions, alongside sculptures, memorabilia, coins, and books—more than 20,000 items worth $900 million since 2004. But the FBI had never run across anything like Miller’s basement.
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. “ ‘You just went and pulled off the side of the road and went into somebody else’s land and dug these up?’ ” Carpenter asked him. Oh yeah, Miller said. He strapped them to his car roof and drove them over the border.
Miller said he and Sue, who died in 2000, often took long trips together in the summer, stopping at archaeological sites along the way. They’d dig, load up their truck, then drive it all back home. He said he usually found artifacts two ways: by talking to the locals or using ham radio.
Miller claimed to have fired the first atomic bomb, Trinity. The FBI seized a stack of passports with stamps from Cambodia to Canada, Iraq to Peru—but found no evidence of permits allowing digs.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY LEONARDO SANTAMARIA.In the 1970s and ’80s, Rick Bolt worked with Miller at Naval Avionics. In the mornings, Bolt remembers that he would see Miller sitting in his car, a dirty, utilitarian, metallic blue 1974 Chevrolet Malibu, engine running, the car plastered with antennas. “He’d be carrying on ham radio conversations with somebody in Southeast Asia or South America,” Bolt said. “He didn’t listen to the radio. He talked on it.”
Miller got his ham radio license in 1943, founded his own electronics company called Wyman Research, and helped develop slow-scan TV, a technology that transmits still images across high-frequency radio bands. In 1972, he was honored as Amateur of the Year by a ham radio convention and later helped get SSTV aboard the Mir space station, building the system that beamed back images of earth in December 1998.
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.
Miller often took a couple weeks’ vacation each year to go on a dig, Bolt says. One time, Miller told Bolt that he drove to Mexico with his wife and asked the locals about nearby ruins. While he was driving, he ran a red light, refused to pay the fine, and was jailed. After a day and a half, he and his wife waited until the main jailers were away, with only the lowest-ranking officer watching them. Miller’s wife faked abdominal pains, and when the officer checked on her, they threw him on their cot, locked him in their cell, got in their car, and drove off. “I suspect he’s still a wanted man down there,” Bolt said. Another time, Miller told Bolt he was traveling through western Egypt looking for ruins and ended up in eastern Libya, where he saw Libyan troops pop up over the hills. He said he’d been accused by Muammar Gaddafi’s government of being a CIA agent and was detained for a day before being released.
Amy Mohr accompanied Miller on one of those expeditions, a Christian mission trip to Haiti, where they traveled from one end of the country to the other helping build churches and schools. During the trip, they visited the Citadelle Laferrière, a 19th-century fort and UNESCO World Heritage site. On the way home, airport security stopped Miller. They found small musket shots in his carry-on luggage. “They took it and kind of made a whoop-de-do about that,” Mohr said. But they didn’t look in his checked bags, where Miller had packed a larger cannonball. He later told Mohr: If you can divert security on one item, you can get something else by them, something better. “He baited them,” Mohr said.
Late in 2013, Carpenter contacted Holly Cusack-McVeigh, an anthropologist he knew at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. Cusack-McVeigh has been interested in native cultures since elementary school, when she announced to her parents she was going to be an anthropologist. They laughed. You need a lot of degrees for that, they said. A few years later, when she was in middle school, she was walking through the woods near their cabin in Canada when she saw the bones of two young women and an infant in the dirt. “I saw them eroding out of the side of the embankment,” Cusack-McVeigh said. She’d inadvertently discovered a burial ground. They were Anishinaabe, a group of culturally related Indigenous peoples who often reside in the Great Lakes region. While other kids were at summer camp, Cusack-McVeigh was working with the Canadian government and tribal authorities on how to preserve the remains, and her parents realized their daughter might be serious about anthropology.
Cusack-McVeigh often works with tribes on repatriating Native remains that have been illegally excavated, a noxious practice that’s been occurring since the arrival of Europeans in the New World. White settlers were often curious about people perceived as the other, so curious that they sometimes dug up their bodies, mistreating sacred sites and burial grounds in the process. But the golden age of grave robbing began in the 1800s, when people increasingly compiled “cabinets of curiosities,” the stranger the items in their eyes, the better. “Indigenous populations were largely not seen as human,” Cusack-McVeigh says. “In some cases, they were seen as collectible.”
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. surgeon general ordered Army personnel to collect Native American skulls for the Army Medical Museum, later determining that “American Indians must be assigned a lower position on the human scale than has been believed heretofore.”
Around the turn of the century, another unfounded notion took hold: the “myth of the vanishing Indian,” a belief that Indigenous peoples in the Americas were dying out. Emerging museums and institutions rushed to compete for Native artifacts. Today, according to Smithsonian magazine, an estimated 500,000 Native American remains sit in museums around the U.S. A similar figure resides in museums across Europe, while the origins of roughly 116,000 sets of remains and 1 million funerary items in U.S. museums are unknown. Dr. Bill Billeck, head of the repatriation office at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, says that since the late 1980s a series of federal laws, along with shifting attitudes about the origins of some of its holdings, have pushed the museum to reexamine its Native American collection. Since then, roughly 220,000 artifacts and 6,300 human remains have been marked as available for repatriation. Two thirds have been returned.
But institutions weren’t the only ones amassing collections. After World War II, amateur clubs and state archaeology societies took off. Amateur archaeology, Carpenter says, became a kind of national pastime. “People would go out and have picnics and dig up Indian graves,” he says, without any true ethical examination of the practice. Too often, Cusack-McVeigh says, the person who dug graves for sport would also be the type to visit the cemetery after church and place flowers on the graves of their own ancestors.
In January 2014, with Cusack-McVeigh on board to help identify Miller’s items, Carpenter called Jake Archer, an FBI agent who’d recently joined the Art Theft Program. Archer describes himself as a “very proud Jersey boy” who grew up ambling the Jersey Shore while watching his grandfather, a local pen-and-ink artist, draw and sketch. Archer attended law school before joining the FBI, then went to graduate school at Rutgers University, studying art history, cultural heritage, and preservation. His thesis: the care of art and artifacts in the hands of law enforcement. He was exactly the person Carpenter needed.
Carpenter was driving back from Washington, D.C., having just briefed the FBI’s executive director about the case, when he rang Archer. He heard an excited, fast-talking agent from the East Coast on the other end. Archer heard Rocky Top Tennessee. Carpenter told Archer about Miller and the possibility that he possessed tens of thousands of artifacts. “That’s when I had a chill run up,” Archer said.
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. It’s survived earthquakes and natural disasters, was dug up thousands of years later, tossed in a truck, driven thousands of miles across the country and placed inside a basement for half a century, only to have the FBI come along and drop it in Miller’s driveway. The agents couldn’t walk in and start shoving things in boxes. They had to think through each artifact’s journey from Miller’s basement into the FBI’s hands before they even encountered it, all while taking into account temperature and humidity conditions, inclement weather, and ultimately where it would all be stored. Most collections when moved are allowed to slowly acclimate to environmental conditions. The FBI wouldn’t have that luxury. The agents would have to rapidly assess, collect, transport, and store a museum’s worth of priceless artifacts within a matter of days.
To prepare, Archer toured the Princeton University Art Museum back in New Jersey. But rather than examine its exhibits, he visited the museum’s storage. He walked through its long rows of gray, utilitarian metal shelving holding thousands of items, trying to envision what it would be like to encounter Miller’s collection in real time. He asked the museum’s directors how long it would take to move it all. Months, they told him.
One way they could speed up the process would be to obtain Miller’s consent, and Carpenter believed that he could convince Miller to voluntarily give up his life’s work. He thought Miller ultimately knew what he’d done was wrong, and that the items should be returned. If he refused to cooperate, the FBI would need a search warrant. But that presented its own problems. Some of the agency’s attorneys argued that Carpenter would need to establish probable cause on every single item, even though there were countless artifacts for which Carpenter hadn’t obtained evidence or even seen. Miller, for example, told Carpenter about an Anasazi pot Carpenter believed was illegal. But Miller had hundreds of Anasazi pots, and Carpenter didn’t have specific information on those, only the one. Establishing probable cause on each would be unreasonable and essentially impossible. Instead, Carpenter argued that Miller’s collection was “commingled,” meaning the FBI could seize a whole set of pots based on evidence of one. After back and forth with the Department of Justice, Carpenter won out.
The complicated web of laws applying to the collection was another matter, the oldest of which is the Antiquities Act of 1906, which restricts excavation of archaeological sites or gathering “objects of antiquity” to permitted institutions, like museums or universities. But that rarely stopped amateur diggers. It wasn’t until 1979 that Congress passed the Archaeological Resources Protection Act, specifically protecting artifacts on public and “Indian lands.” In 1990, Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, protecting Indigenous grave sites. But Miller’s collection was so vast that numerous other laws also likely applied: the Abandoned Shipwreck Act, protecting wreck sites; state laws, especially in the Southwest, that make it a crime to steal artifacts; the National Stolen Property Act, a federal law that applies to stolen items transported across state lines; and various patrimony laws in other countries that protect a nation’s own artifacts.
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. When they got close, the caravan staged at a truck stop while a handful of agents approached Miller’s house first. Carpenter carried the 100-page search warrant, hoping he wouldn’t have to use it.
They arrived around 9 a.m. Walking to the door, Archer looked up to see the life-size terra-cotta warrior. If something this big is out here, he thought, what am I going to find inside? Carpenter tapped Archer on the shoulder, snapping him back. “You’re the lawyer,” Carpenter said with a grin. “You’re in charge of obtaining consent.”
Miller opened the door. This time, Carpenter was in a suit, ringed by other agents. They sat down in Miller’s living room. Carpenter told him the FBI had reason to believe much of his collection was obtained illegally, and they wanted to take possession of his illicit items, especially any human remains. They brought up Miller’s time with the military, the story of his life he’d told people, stressing that his collection could jeopardize that legacy. They wanted to return the artifacts with his permission. Miller got his lawyer on the phone. After about an hour, he consented. They could take whatever they wanted. Carpenter told Miller there was a massive team down the road. It’ll look a bit scary, he said, and offered Miller and his wife the option to stay in a hotel. They declined.
As the caravan arrived, Miller gave the agents a full tour. He took them into the basement, where Archer saw the collection he’d been imagining for months. It made him dizzy. Then they entered the other buildings on the property. They started finding boxes of artifacts that appeared to have been sitting around for decades. Some were covered in dirt, others infested with mice, rats, insects, feces.
Then Miller took them into a locked room underneath the white farmhouse. Archer saw a brown shopping bag. Inside were eight skulls. Three more sat on a shelf. They found a garbage bag full of bones, and as they looked inside, a raccoon came flying out. Miller ushered them through a tunnel full of standing water that led to the Wyman Research building, where agents saw dozens of blue and green tote bins. They were full of human remains, many haphazardly thrown together. Some were infants and toddlers. On one shelf, a dozen skulls sat lined up, impacted with red soil in various states of repose. Miller said he’d excavated them five years earlier in New Mexico from an unmarked burial site. “He was so proud of those,” Carpenter said. It was his last dig, he told them. Carpenter noticed Miller only had the skulls and asked where the bodies were. We left those there, Miller said.
In the barn, agents found more bags of bones and skulls, some that had sat there for 50 years, never opened. Inside the main residence, in a basement closet, were two dozen more skulls on shelves, some with arrowheads sticking out of them. They also found a skeleton in a display case Miller said was Crazy Horse, the Lakota Native American who was buried in an unknown location. “He didn’t want anyone touching it,” Carpenter said. “It would not be seen by the Cub Scouts or the typical visitor. It was something extra, something special.” Miller, it seemed, was only comfortable showing off parts of his collection. “It was the parts that were PG,” Archer said.
Outside, the FBI constructed a small village. They unloaded generators, ATVs, and lumber from flatbed semis. Archer began setting up a series of climate-controlled, pressurized tents where items could be safely handled and processed. Agents, archaeologists, anthropologists, uniformed police, and tribal officials swarmed the grounds. Photographers shot everything in situ. And they found stuff everywhere. “You open up a kitchen drawer, and there’s a stone flint piece in there that just somehow made its way in there that he’s forgotten about for the last 30 years,” Carpenter said. In one room they found an old cigar box full of loose teeth.
As the outside experts took in the scope of the collection, some got emotional. Carpenter witnessed career anthropologists crying, some upset over the remains, others just overwhelmed. At one point, Carpenter was looking at a case of stone axes with an archaeologist who specialized in Celtic cultures. “He said, ‘I’ve spent my entire career looking for just one of these in this condition,’ ” Carpenter said. “ ‘And he has 50.’ ” Another expert told Archer that Miller’s artifacts from the Taino people in Haiti were better than the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s.
Meanwhile, Carpenter and Archer tried to get as much information out of Miller as possible. He told them that beginning in the 1950s, he and his first wife would go out looking for pot shards, often a sign that a burial ground was nearby. Then they’d start digging. The agents learned that Miller sometimes used his business, Wyman Research, to write off trips to places with ham radio operators, including countries like Haiti, where he would build churches the first part of the week, dig the second part, and write the whole thing off as a business expense. It allowed him to obtain visas to places that might’ve been difficult to enter otherwise.
In foreign countries, they learned Miller often gave locals a bottle of alcohol or carton of cigarettes in exchange for the locations of unmarked archaeological sites. “He would gain their trust and provide something,” Archer said. “In return, he would take from them their cultural property.” What started out as a hobby seemed to grow into something much bigger. A monster Miller couldn’t contain. “Don did tell me very specifically one day that this was a heroin addiction to him,” Carpenter said. “That he just couldn’t stop.”
The bulk of the FBI seizure began the second day. Archer, who developed a 102-degree fever from mold exposure in Miller’s waterlogged tunnel, kept a stopwatch. His goal was 500 items seized a day. Experts helped make rapid assessments of each. This looks Assyrian. This is Peruvian. These are Roman. For the items deemed illegal, Cusack-McVeigh’s graduate students helped write the description of each on an archival card, then carried it upstairs for packaging. The human remains skipped photography and were handled separately.
At one point, Miller got agitated and asked Carpenter, Why are you taking all of my Indians? Carpenter reminded him that the priority was locating and removing all of the remains. “He’s like, Yeah, yeah. Okay. I just don’t understand why you’re taking my Indians,” Carpenter said. He reminded Miller that these were people who he’d personally dug up and brought home, trying to convey the sensitivities of what he’d done while keeping in mind that the FBI was operating with Miller’s consent—which he could revoke at any time, potentially jeopardizing the entire operation. “He said, ‘Well, if it’s just a bunch of dead Indians that make you squeamish, then go ahead and take ’em,’ ” Carpenter told me. It was the only time Carpenter says he lost his cool. He told Miller if that’s how he felt, he wouldn’t mind if he visited the cemetery and dug up his grandparents. Miller got angry and walked away.
At the beginning, Carpenter says Miller watched the agents as they carted off his collection. But soon he got tired and wasn’t seen much. He stayed in parts of the house where the FBI wasn’t. After several days, agents believed they had seized all of the human remains, including the ones underneath the Wyman Research building, where they found roughly half of Miller’s collection of bones. “We pulled a couple hundred people out of that room,” Carpenter said.
As the last set of remains was removed, tribal officials from the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, the closest federally recognized tribe, performed a cleansing ceremony in Miller’s yard. They burned vegetation and said prayers for the ancestors whose spiritual journey had been disrupted. “I don’t know who you are yet, but you are going home,” Cusack-McVeigh remembers one of the elders saying. Miller didn’t attend.
On the sixth day, April Midwestern showers arrived and turned Miller’s yard into a giant puddle. Carpenter’s truck sank in the mud and a cold front was threatening. By then the FBI had seized 2,000 bones and 5,000 cultural artifacts and funerary objects out of a total collection of 42,000 items. “My Kentucky windage was pretty close,” Carpenter says. The agents believed they’d seized the majority of the obviously illicit items. So they dismantled their village, took down their tents, and packed up. Archer was the last to leave. As he walked to his car, he felt the cold front coming. He got in, shut the door, and sensed the change of air pressure, the compressed silence. He looked back at the terra-cotta warrior on Miller’s front porch. The FBI didn’t take it. It was granite, fake, nothing of real value. This time, it looked a lot smaller.
The FBI seizure made national news. Many in Rush County, especially those who knew Miller, weren’t happy. Amy Mohr calls the FBI operation an atrocity. “It was awful that they did that to him, and in his old age,” Mohr said.
Many people I talked to who knew Miller believed he had obtained his artifacts legally and often had permits to dig, or that he had excavated much of his collection before laws came on the books protecting those items. “I think a lot of people were offended,” says John Wilson, Rush County’s historian. He says many residents believed Miller was a good man who served his country and hadn’t done anything wrong.
Two months after the operation, the Shelby County Historical Society’s Grover Museum displayed some of Miller’s collection left behind by the FBI. “We’re just really fortunate to have our friend, Don Miller, loan us these things after all he went through,” Candy Miller, the museum’s director (and no relation to Don), told a reporter at the time. In 2015, the Indiana Archaeological Society awarded Miller a lifetime achievement award, saying Miller was the very definition of someone dedicated to archaeological advancement. Jeff Pyle, a society member who met Miller after the operation, told me he’d heard the reason the FBI showed up was to secure an atomic bomb detonator and that the artifacts seizure was merely to cover the agency’s tracks.
After the operation, Miller turned reclusive. Frank Denzler, then working as a reporter for the Rushville Republican, tried to interview him, but Miller never spoke about the seizure publicly. “You didn’t see him around town anymore,” Denzler said.
An hour north, in the Indianapolis field office’s parking lot, Miller’s former collection sat inside a 53-foot refrigerated truck in temperatures of 30 degrees below zero. Carpenter had reached out to several museums for help storing the items and freezing them to eliminate insects and pests, but none would talk to him. “Nobody had the facilities to support us for something this large,” he said. Eventually, the collection was moved to a commercial warehouse in an undisclosed location. Cusack-McVeigh’s graduate students were tasked with maintaining the items.
The agents, meanwhile, began sorting through a whole other collection they’d seized: 18,000 photos, hundreds of hours of home movies, and roughly 20 passports, trying to piece together more than 60 years of Miller’s travels. They were shocked by what they saw.
Videos and photos taken by Miller and Sue show the two of them digging in the Dakotas, Mexico, South America, and elsewhere, often in remote areas. In one video, Miller—with an ear-to-ear smile—is shoving a skull into a brown bag as other bones sit nearby. In South Dakota, Miller is lying in a recently dug grave. A photo from Mexico shows a child’s casket. Another photo taken in Papua New Guinea shows piles of bones and skeletons. A bulldozer can be seen in the background. In another, Sue is kneeling next to a giant pile of white and gray pottery shards. Another shows a skull near a father-daughter burial crypt in New Orleans Miller had excavated.
In one image, a skull is sitting inside a kitchen oven. Carpenter says Miller would clean the skulls, preserve them with varnish or shellac, and bake them so they would harden and turn brown. A video clip shows Miller and others at a burial cave on Easter Island, one of the world’s most famous archaeological sites, bringing out skulls and other remains, grinning while tossing the skulls into a bag. And in one of the most disturbing shots, a Native American skull cut in half is filled with yellow apples. Until now, the FBI has never shared any of these images. “I want to dispel the notion that Don was a responsible collector,” Carpenter says. “He was not. He was a grave robber.”
The passports—which had either expired over the years or been completely filled with stamps—showed Miller had visited about 100 countries, but Carpenter says agents didn’t find any evidence that Miller was ever permitted to dig. The FBI also examined the items with the more extraordinary backstories. Carpenter says the atomic bomb detonator Miller told people about was in fact a radio communications system, which wasn’t seized and has been cleared by the government. But Carpenter added that it appeared to be the same radio unit seen with Miller in photos at Los Alamos. The agents analyzed skulls pierced with arrowheads and determined that Miller hammered in those arrowheads himself. The skeleton Miller said was Crazy Horse was actually several people. Miller had taken pieces from other skulls, a different mandible, someone else’s teeth and bones, and glued it all together, Frankenstein-like. Miller, it turns out, was a stager. He thought less like an archaeologist and more like a storyteller. “Just like he created his entire persona,” Archer said.
Earlier this year, I asked the Los Alamos National Laboratory for any documents related to Don Miller’s time with the Manhattan Project. The laboratory found only one, a single-page form that describes Miller’s role as: “Assisted Higinbotham in the design of scaling integration discriminators. Built 10 channel discriminator for Trinity analysis levels.” Higinbotham is William Higinbotham, who headed the Manhattan Project’s electronics group and witnessed the Trinity explosion. An official at the National Museum of Nuclear Science & History, which preserves Manhattan Project records collected by the Atomic Heritage Foundation, told me it appears that Miller built equipment that gathered data from the Trinity test, which matches up with his work later in life building radio and communications devices. What the document did not say is that Miller fired the first atomic bomb, or sent the signals for it to explode. In fact, according to the foundation, the person who actually flipped the switch for Trinity was a man named Joe McKibben. And when I first reached out about Miller, the museum had no record of him.
Ayear after the operation, Miller waived title on the items seized by the FBI, essentially acknowledging he no longer possessed them. That prevented the FBI from litigating the material in court through forfeiture proceedings, speeding up the repatriation process by a decade. A few days later, Miller died. There seemed to be little will at the Department of Justice to prosecute Miller, who was 91, for what was tantamount to property crimes. But his death ended any possibility of criminal charges. The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Indianapolis declined to comment. Similarly, the FBI would not discuss whether his widow, Sandra, was under investigation. But it appears that Miller did not engage in illegal excavating while they were married, and Carpenter said she was cooperative during the operation.
For the last seven years, the FBI has been trying to repatriate the items it seized. The agency sent letters to every federally recognized tribe in the U.S. alerting them to the possibility that Miller owned artifacts or remains that might be theirs. Carpenter had difficult conversations with tribal officials, about arrowheads being hammered through skulls and bones in horrifying conditions.
It took anthropologists a year to separate the 2,000 bones and determine that they comprised about 500 people. Early on, experts determined through osteological analysis and items found with remains that some were from the MHA Nation, which includes the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara peoples. In 2016, Carpenter, Cusack-McVeigh, and FBI agent Drew Northern drove the remains to the Crow Creek Reservation in central South Dakota. The bones arrived wrapped in red cloth, an honor color, and were carried to a mass grave, where tribal elders sang prayers assuring their spirits would no longer be agitated and could return to their ancestral villages. They offered food to the dead: corn soup, fry bread, Juneberries. That day they reburied dozens of bones belonging to about 30 people that had sat in boxes in Miller’s house for years. Cusack-McVeigh and the two agents stood at the grave, along with Pete Coffey, an MHA Nation tribal official who helped repatriate them. Coffey told me he hopes his efforts in this life will aid him in the next one. All the people he reburied that day, he said, will be there to help him when his time comes.
Almost two thirds of the items seized have been returned to Canada, Cambodia, Mexico, Ecuador, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, Spain, and elsewhere. In 2019, more than 300 artifacts, including artwork, jewelry, and vases were repatriated to China, the largest-ever repatriation from the U.S. Last year, more than 450 items were returned to Haiti. Haitian officials told Carpenter no one’s ever repatriated anything to their country.
But so far, only some of the human remains have been returned, in part because it’s proven so difficult for the FBI and others to determine where they came from. The bones were often jumbled inside bags and bins, with few clues to their origins. In the end, the FBI will likely have 300 to 400 individuals, mostly Native Americans, who won’t be properly linked to a specific tribe or region. The Pokagon Band of Potawatomi has agreed to bury the Native remains in a mass grave in Indiana.
The seizure of Miller’s collection was the single largest recovery of cultural property in FBI history and the biggest case of Carpenter’s career. In 2016, he was promoted to lead the Art Theft Program in Washington, D.C. Carpenter says Miller got away with illegally digging for decades not only because he was highly intelligent and knew how to evade law enforcement but also because these types of crimes aren’t a priority in the U.S. It’s unclear how many human remains are in private hands today. Crimes related to Native American cultural objects have gone down starkly, Carpenter says, but it’s still an ongoing problem. He expects to hear about more problematic private collections over the years as they’re handed down to younger generations more troubled by them.
Miller is buried at the Moscow Cemetery, near the home where he first collected arrowheads as a boy, land once populated by the Delaware Tribe of Indians before they were uprooted and pushed west under the guise of science and progress, Divine Providence and manifest destiny. The back of Miller’s brown tombstone lists his accomplishments and hobbies as AMATEUR RADIO, ARCHAEOLOGY, TRAVEL.
Years ago, Amy Mohr’s parents died and were cremated, and she remembers that Miller disapproved. “He said, ‘You need to be buried and embalmed,’ ” Mohr told me. She doesn’t know for sure, but she suspects Miller was buried with part of his collection. “People need to be able to find you,” he once told her. “One hundred years from now.”
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