He hunted for his daughter’s killer for 40 years. Then he got a phone call

Tim Miller’s teen daughter disappeared in 1984, tied to a series of deaths in the Texas ‘killing fields’. After decades, he received a tip that unlocked everything Tim Miller is good at finding missing people – or rather, their bodies. Four years ago, a stranger called him and left a rambling message claiming that he had important information about an unsolved murder case. Miller, who lives in Texas and runs a non-profit search-and-recovery organization called EquuSearch, did not treat the message as a high priority. The caller sounded as if he might have been drunk or on drugs. Although tips are vital to EquuSearch’s work, the tip line brings a certain number of hoaxes, cranks and innuendo. Some of the people who leave messages, Miller told me, “probably ought to get their medication checked”. Miller’s teenage daughter, Laura, disappeared in League City, Texas, in 1984 and was found murdered two years later. His zealous efforts to find out what happened to her, and his frustration with what he viewed as an inadequate police investigation, led him to develop a certain expertise in locating people or their remains. He founded EquuSearch, in 2000, as an outgrowth of t