16-Year-Old Laura Miller Disappeared After Using A Pay Phone To Call Her Boyfriend And Was Found Murdered One Year Later, So Her Dad Decided To Take The Case Into His Own Hands
On November 29, Netflix released its third installment of a true crime documentary series, Crime Scene. The first two installments focused on The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel and The Times Square Killer.
But Netflix’s third release, The Texas Killing Fields, highlights the four unsolved murders of young women. Each woman’s remains were found along the interstate that connected Houston to Galveston, also known as The Texas Killing Fields.
This region witnessed over thirty female bodies turning up between 1971 and 2006, with each victim being between twelve and twenty-five years old. One of those victims was Laura Miller.
Laura Miller’s Case
Texas EquuSearch – pictured above is Laura
In 1984, Laura Miller was known to be a musically gifted teen who had many big dreams. But, the sixteen-year-old also began struggling in high school after she started experiencing debilitating seizures.
According to her father, Tim, Laura missed school often and even had to leave the choir due to her medical struggles. In turn, the teen did struggle a bit socially.
On September 10, though, after Laura and her family relocated to League City, she asked to visit a payphone to call her boyfriend– since her family’s home line had not been connected yet.
So, Laura’s mother gave her a ride to a payphone not far from home, and the teen planned to walk the mere half-mile back afterward.
Later that day, though, both Laura’s parents and her boyfriend arrived at her new home. Meanwhile, she was nowhere to be found.
The Millers did contact the police, but law enforcement considered Laura a runaway and reassured them that she would phone home.
As months passed by, though, it became clear that Laura was not returning home on her own. So, Tim began reading up on similar murders in the region and even started to conduct his own searches.
“I knew in my heart that Laura wasn’t coming home alive. I was afraid she was never going to be located,” he said to the FBI.
Laura’s Body Was Discovered
Then, over a year later, Laura’s body was discovered in a patch of land close to Calder Road– the same region where the remains of another young woman, Heidi Fye, were found in April of 1984.
This obviously devastated Tim and the rest of Laura’s family. But as time continued to pass, he only became more frustrated– because Laura’s killer was never found or brought to justice.
He had also voiced his upset with law enforcement and believed investigators were not doing enough to track down his daughter’s killer. So, in 2000, Tim decided to take the case into his own hands.
Texas EquuSearch (TES) Is Born
That year, he established a volunteer organization known as Texas EquuSearch (TES) with the sole mission of helping families locate missing loved ones. He could not bear to imagine another family going through the same turmoil he had after Laura’s disappearance and murder.
“At that moment, I made a promise to God that I would never leave a family alone,” Tim told the FBI.
Since its inception, TES has helped work on over two thousand cases. The organization has also discovered over four hundred living people and over three hundred bodies.
What Came Of Laura’s Case?
Even while working on TES, Tim never stopped thinking about his daughter’s case. Moreover, he believes he knows who was behind her murder: Clyde Hedrick, his next-door neighbor.
In the death of twenty-nine-year-old Ellen Rae Simpson Beason, Hedrick was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter. However, he has vehemently denied having any involvement in Laura’s disappearance or subsequent death.
Yet, Beason’s body was discovered in July of 1984– just two months before Laura Miller disappeared. At that time, Hedrick was also convicted of abusing a corpse– earning him a one-year jail sentence.
In 2014, though, Beason’s death was finally ruled as a homicide. In turn, Hedrick was then convicted of involuntary manslaughter– serving out eight years of a twenty-year sentence. Then, he was released via good behavior.
Hedrick did have a long history of violent crimes and has allegedly admitted to killing four or five women in the past, per ABC13.
And Tim Miller believed that his daughter, Laura, had been one of those victims. In 2014, he filed a wrongful death lawsuit against next-door neighbor Hedrick. And this past July 2022, Tim won the suit and was awarded twenty-four million dollars in damages and liability.
Apparently, the motion was granted by default after Hedrick failed to appear in court despite receiving notice of the hearing.
Even after winning that civil suit, though, Hedrick has never been formally charged with Laura’s murder.
According to Tim, that lawsuit was also about way more than the money. It was about a father ensuring that his daughter and what happened to her were never forgotten.
“I filed the wrongful death suit to let Clyde Hedrick know that, ‘Clyde, I’m still here, I am still here, and I’m not going to quit until the day I die,” Tim said to the press following the hearing.
“I want to let Clyde know that ‘I know what you did to my daughter, and I am not going to let you rest until we have you where you need to be for the rest of your life,'” he continued.
“As time goes by and the more information I get and the more information I am continuing to get, I have no doubt in my mind Clyde Hedrick is responsible for Laura’s murder.”
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