Museum studies graduate students from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) help care for the recovered artifacts in a facility near Indianapolis where all the recovered artifacts were housed securely and temperature, humidity, and light levels were controlled. Students and highly trained IUPUI staff also helped prepare the artifacts for shipping for repatriation. Photo provided
SHELBYVILLE — The first tip the FBI received in 2013 about Don Miller’s artifact collection seemed outrageous.
The caller informed the bureau that the 91-year-old Rush County native and amateur archeologist had amassed around 200,000 items from all over the globe at his home near Waldron.
Tim Carpenter, then the head of the FBI’s Art Crime Team, spoke to the tipster and chuckled incredulously when the person alleged a beloved local resident and Christian missionary had a collection that rivaled some of the largest museums in the world.
“To say that I was skeptical is an understatement,” Carpenter said. “I was just like, there’s no way.”
But his interest was piqued, especially by photos provided by the caller showing a smattering of human remains in the collection. Carpenter called Miller and set up a visit to the homestead where he had lived nearly his entire life to fact check the claims.
When the FBI agent knocked on the door in 2014, Miller eagerly welcomed him into his home to show off the collection he had gathered over more than 60 years.
What Carpenter saw left him speechless.
Stacked floor to ceiling in a barn were ancient artifacts from every corner of the globe. Italian mosaics sat beside 3,500-year-old pottery pieces from Columbia. An Egyptian sarcophagus stood by a table of 2,500-year-old Chinese jewelry. Rare, ancient, museumquality artifacts filled every nook and cranny.
“It was like, Jesus, man, who does this?” Carpenter said.
With his knowledge of cultural artifacts and international law, it became clear to Carpenter within hours of his first visit that Miller had obtained many of the items under very suspicious circumstances. Miller admitted as much during their conversation, Carpenter asserted.
Over subsequent visits to the property, the FBI determined Miller had over 42,000 artifacts. It wasn’t the 200,000 alleged by the tipster, but still it added up to the largest private, single-owner collection the bureau had ever encountered. No other even came close.
But what pushed the investigation into disturbing terrain were the dozens of rotting cardboard boxes, trash bags and buckets filled with human remains that agents found hidden away all over the property.
The bureau eventually confiscated over 2,000 bones representing about 500 people – most of whom were Native American. Miller had spent decades raiding tombs and desecrating burial sites to fulfill what Carpenter surmised to be a dark fascination.
“I think he was just obsessed with death,” Carpenter said. “He was kind of a creepy old guy that was obsessed with human remains. … He told me that it had all become like a heroin addiction for him.”
Over a painstaking, six-day recovery process, the FBI and a massive team of experts ultimately determined Miller had illegally obtained about 7,000 of his items, including the human remains.
It marked the largest seizure of cultural artifacts in the FBI’s history, and is likely the largest in the history of U.S. law enforcement, explained Special Agent Dave Bass, a founding member of the Art Crime Team who today is still involved in the case.
“It was a big test and, in my opinion, we handled it well or better than we could have expected,” he said.
Over the last 10 years, the case has led the FBI on a massive international scavenger hunt involving nearly every country on earth to determine where Miller had stolen the items in an effort to repatriate them to their rightful nations.
Now, nearly all those artifacts are safely at home after resting for decades in a barn basement in rural Indiana.
HOMEWARD BOUND
During the six-day recovery process at Miller’s home, more than 100 archeologists, anthropologists, bureau agents and other experts worked around the clock to identify and catalogue his collection.
Carpenter, who retired in February, remembers walking into one of the rooms and seeing an archeologist weeping over a case of roughly 4,000-year-old Danish Celt stone tools in pristine condition. Carpenter asked the man what was wrong.
“He told me, ‘I’ve spent my entire career looking for just one of these, and Don’s got 40 of them.”
Many of the objects weren’t as easy to identify as the tools. Miller didn’t keep detailed records of where he obtained the items. Most came from ancient cultures that covered swaths of continents that don’t align with today’s national boundaries.
“As you can imagine, it’s been a 10-year slog,” Carpenter said. “These repatriations can take some time, particularly with the foreign stuff.”
The recovery effort was the first major test of the FBI’s art theft unit, which the bureau created in 2004.
The first order of business was deciding where to house over 7,000 artifacts, including human remains. The bureau ended up leasing a 5,000-squre-foot warehouse on the north side of Indianapolis and converting it to a secure area with controlled temperature, humidity and lighting.
A team of anthropology and museum graduate students from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis were enlisted to help curate the items and prepare them for shipping when repatriation occurred.
The bureau added a special room in the facility to house the human remains, and Native American tribes were invited inside to perform rituals and ceremonies over the bones of their ancestors, Carpenter noted.
The Art Crime Team slowly but surely began to repatriate portions of the collection, including 40 pieces to Columbia in 2018. Some of the items dated to 1,500 B.C.
Another large cache of more than 350 Chinese artifacts were returned in 2019, marking a major diplomatic success between the two countries, Bass explained.
“It was amazing how much appreciation there was for the return of those objects,” he said. “It was really a high point to see that all our work made that kind of difference.”
‘HAIR ON FIRE’
Still, by 2019, only about 15% of the illegal portion of Miller’s massive collection had been returned. Identifying many of the pieces proved to be outside the expertise available to the bureau, so Carpenter decided to bring the pieces to the experts.
The team created a first-of-its-kind, invitation-only website that contained information about all the recovered material. Experts from around the world could help identify the items and then guide agents to the right people to begin the repatriation process.
The bureau even enlisted the help of the United Nations to promote the website and find the best international experts for the job.
“It worked out really well,” Bass explained. “It was very innovative. We sort of figured it all out as we went along. (Carpenter) was a resourceful and aggressive case agent who came up with a lot of those ideas.”
In 2020, the agency returned to Haiti more than 475 items that Miller had looted over the years. It marked the first time a country had ever given cultural artifacts back to Haiti, and the items nearly tripled its national collection.
For Carpenter, who traveled there for the repatriation ceremony, it was the most profound
“It was amazing how much appreciation there was for the return of those objects. It was really a high point to see that all our work made that kind of difference.”
“When we showed up in Haiti, there were a lot of tears and a lot of hugs,” he said. “They were very happy to get this material back.”
By that time, it had been six years since the FBI had seized the artifacts. The agency was gaining momentum in identifying and returning the items to their rightful owners. Carpenter noted a large collection was ready to be repatriated to Papua New Guinea.
Then the pandemic hit and the world shut down.
“COVID thwarted us, just like it did the entire planet,” he said. “It just created a lot of challenges.”
When countries began to open up from lockdowns and quarantines, the FBI’s interest and ability to continue funding the repatriation process was waning, Carpenter explained.
Maintaining the warehouse- turned-museum was expensive. Questions were coming down from the agency’s top brass: Why are we still funding all this? Why is this taking so long?
“Those budgetary issues put some pressure on us to move quickly there at the end,” Carpenter said. “This last year was a hair-on-fire year for me.”
The final push mostly involved returning the remaining artifacts Miller looted from Native American sites, he noted. Those items have been shipped to FBI field offices in places like Albuquerque, where they are waiting to be returned.
Today, the warehouse storage area in Indianapolis has been shut down and just a handful of items remain in possession of the FBI. Bass said less than 5% of the collection remains. Those pieces have proved particularly hard to identify. Still, he anticipates the case will officially wrap up within a year.
AN ANGEL AND THE DEVIL
Miller spent nearly his entire life collecting artifacts. It’s a compulsion he developed in the 1940s when he worked at the top-secret Trinity test site in New Mexico helping develop the atomic bomb as part of the Manhattan Project.
(In a separate case in 2008, an FBI agent found a piece of depleted uranium Miller had obtained from the project, Carpenter noted.)
On weekends, Miller and others would scour the nearby desert for Native American pottery shards or arrowheads. At some point, his lust for artifacts turned toward human remains. The FBI determined some bones found on the property had been looted from the crypts in New Orleans.
Miller, who became independently wealthy as a researcher at Naval Avionics of Indianapolis, spent nearly all his vacation time traveling the planet in search of rare artifacts, many of which he stole from gravesites.
By the time the FBI searched his home, Miller was sick and knew he didn’t have long to live, Carpenter said. That likely played into his decision to cooperate and sign off on the bureau confiscating any items they determined had been illegally taken.
“I think that Don knew he had a foot in the grave,” Carpenter said. “I think he knew that what he had done was reprehensible, and he was just trying to make it right before he left this earth.”
Still, Miller sometimes pushed back against the FBI seizing his artifacts — especially the Native American remains. In one heated exchange, Miller approached Carpenter during the recovery process and asked why they were taking “all his Indians.”
“I think he was just conflicted,” Carpenter recalled. “He had the devil on one shoulder and an angel on the next. The angel’s telling him to do the right thing, to turn this stuff over and let the FBI take care of it. And then the devil was like, ‘You spent 60 years collecting this stuff, and these people are here to take it.’” “But in the end, he did the right thing,” he said.
Miller died the next year in 2015 at 91.
Even with the seizure of 7,000 items, Miller still retained around 35,000 pieces, some of which were rare cultural artifacts that the FBI couldn’t build a strong enough legal case to justify taking.
What’s happened to those? The FBI doesn’t know, and shouldn’t know, argued Bass.
“It remains their personal property,” he said. “He had a really exceptional collection of artifacts, so I have to guess it moved on to other collectors.”
It took Miller decades to amass his collection. In the end, items he illegally obtained were nearly all successfully returned within 10 years. For the small art theft unit that today has about two dozen agents on staff, that’s a win, Bass contended.
“By all reasonable standards, it’s been an amazing accomplishment,” he said. “But the strange thing about this is there’s no benchmark to compare it to.”
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