Lula Miller

RICHMOND — State Police say a woman missing from her home in Laurel since 1974 has been found living in a small town in Texas under an alias.

In a release, ISP says Lula Ann Gillespie-Miller, then 28 years old and shortly after giving birth to her third child, felt she was too young to be a mother and gave custody of her children to her parents in Laurel in 1974. She had not been seen by family since that day.

Detective Sergeant Scott Jarvis took the case in 2014, after the Doe Network, a web site that assists families with missing person’s investigations, contacted State Police at Pendleton. The site said they had been in contact with Lula Gillespie-Miller’s family, who said the last contact they had with Lula was a letter they received from her, postmarked in Richmond in 1975.

A deceased unidentified female was found in 1975. The female was buried in an unmarked grave in Richmond. A search warrant was obtained and a body was exhumed from an unmarked grave for DNA analysis. A DNA sample was also obtained from Lula Gillespie-Miller’s biological daughter, Tammy Miller, for comparison.

The DNA sample taken from Tammy Miller was also entered into a national database for missing persons, with no match found. While awaiting the DNA analysis on the exhumed, unidentified body, the investigation led Jarvis in a different direction.

“You think 40 years, you haven’t heard anything by now, the chances are slim,” her daughter Tammy told Eyewitness News in 2014.

Tammy was a little girl of just 2 years old at the time of Lula Miller’s disappearance. She has only a few pictures of her mother, who was 28 years old at the time she vanished.

“You sit and you analyze the picture. Do I have her eyes? Do I have her cheekbones? Do I look like her at all,” Tammy Miller said.

Tammy’s family never gave her concrete details about what happened when Lula vanished in 1974.

“One day in 2010 I googled her name and then all this stuff started coming up about how she was assaulted in Laurel and thrown over a bridge,” she said.

Jarvis began to investigate the trail of a woman with similarities to Lula Gillespie-Miller, who had lived in Tennessee in the 1980s, then later in Texas. Further investigation led Jarvis to a woman living in a small town in south Texas since the 1990s, possibly still living under an alias.

Thursday, Jarvis contacted Texas Rangers and had them go to the woman’s home. She admitted to the Rangers that her name is actually Lula Gillespie-Miller, now 69 years old, and originally from Laurel.

Police say Gillespie-Miller did not commit any crime by leaving her home in 1974.

Gillespie-Miller consented to Jarvis sharing her contact information with her daughter, Tammy, who hopes to make contact with the mother she has never known.

Source: WTHR