Cold Case: Dad Claims He Solved Daughter’s ‘Killing Field’ Murder

LEAGUE CITY, TX — Almost as soon as 16-year-old Laura Miller was kidnapped and murdered in 1984, her case went cold. The League City teen probably ran away, police initially told her father, Tim Miller. She had a history of suicide attempts, they reminded the worried dad. He asked police: Could Laura’s disappearance be connected to the murder of Heidi Fye, a waitress whose body was discovered in the desolate oil field off Interstate 45? Both were last seen at the same gas station, both used the same payphone, and they lived within three blocks of one another. Didn’t it make sense to at least look at a serial killing?

That added up to some big coincidences, even if circumstantially. Miller says police brushed all of it aside and dropped the investigation, dismissing his daughter as probably a runaway or suicide and Fye as probably a drug addict.

Miller decided if he was going to catch his daughter’s killer, he would have to do it himself. Now, nearly 35 years later, he may have done that.

Along the journey, Miller has helped identify the remains of some 200 people through the nonprofit mounted search and recovery he founded after his daughter’s disappearance from League City, located in north Galveston County, Texas, on Sept. 10, 1984. She was using the payphone to call her boyfriend. The Miller family was new to town and their phone hadn’t been hooked up yet.

Miller, now 71, was correct about his hunch that Laura might have been killed in the rugged wasteland between the oil fields and I-45 that has become synonymous with missing women and girls. A couple of years after Laura disappeared, boys riding their dirt bikes on the rough terrain of the area smelled something foul and discovered a woman’s body propped to a tree. That led investigators to Laura’s skeleton. Both women’s bodies had been dumped in the same area where Fye’s body was found.

From the 1970s to the 2000s, the bodies of 30 women and girls have been discovered in what came to be known among locals as “the killing fields” and later, as the as the “Texas Killing Fields,” the title of a 2011 movie starring Sam Worthington that is loosely based on the cases of missing girls between Galveston and Houston.

A few of the oil field murders have been solved, but Laura Miller’s case went cold — except for the dogged refusal to give up by her father, and the help of his Texas EquuSearch Mounted Search and Recovery team.

Miller told The Guardian he believes the killer may be Clyde Hedrick, who is serving a 20-year sentence in a Texas prison for the murder of a woman in 1984, the same year Laura was killed. Hedrick was long suspected of killing Ellen Beesen, whose body was found near the oil fields, but wasn’t arrested for her murder until 2013.

Hedrick originally claimed Beeson had drowned while they were skinny-dipping together, and he panicked and hid her body. The autopsy was inconclusive, and Hedrick was convicted of abusing Beeson’s corpse and served a short stint in jail. Almost three decades later, a new examination of Beeson’s body showed she died of blunt force trauma to the head, leading to Hedrick’s arrest and eventual conviction.

Hedrick has denied any involvement in the deaths of Laura Miller, Heidi Fye and a woman identified as Jane Doe, whose bodies were all found in the oil fields around the same time. All three bodies had been ritualistically propped against a tree with their faces pointed toward the sky. A fourth body was later discovered face down. Investigators have said they have two different suspects.

The League City Police Department hasn’t named Hedrick a suspect or person of interest in either case. Miller and the local police department have had an acrimonious relationship, and he has accused police of incompetence and botching the investigation. Patch has reached out to the League City Police Department for comment, and we’ll update this post if we hear back.

Miller has said his daughter’s boyfriend can connect Hedrick to Laura. Before the Millers moved to League City, he was a neighbor and sometimes talked with Laura when she walked by. Given the crowd the troubled teen was running with at the time of her death, she could certainly have had more than a passing acquaintance with Hedrick, Miller told The Houston Press three years ago. The boyfriend told Miller Laura and some of her friends went to Hedrick’s house to buy pot, according to The Guardian’s report.

As prosecutors were building a case against Hedrick in Beeson’s murder, several women they interviewed implicated him in the oil field murders. The witnesses included a woman who said she was with Hedrick when he dumped Beeson’s body, kicking it to ensure she was dead. She eventually led investigators to Beeson’s body, despite Hedrick allegedly having threatened to kill her and her children if she went to police.

Even if police weren’t, Miller was convinced enough of Hedrick’s involvement that he named him as a defendant in a lawsuit filed in 2015, shortly after Hedrick was convicted in Beeson’s death.

Gary Ratliff, who is still the League City Police Department’s assistant chief, said at the time that he told Miller that he "is not helping our criminal case at all.”

“I can tell you that Tim Miller wasn't there the day that these bodies were discovered, was not present at the time when evidence was collected,” Ratliff said in 2015. “So it's hard to take anything that he says with relevance when I know that he is a grieving father that is still grasping to make amends to get this cleared up — as we are.”

For his part, Hedrick said Miller has a crusade against him and that he’s the latest in a string of people he has accused in the past.

“Miller got a lot of people to think I’m the League City Killing Field Serial Killer,” Hedrick told The Guardian. “I’m the fourth man he said got to be the one. All of us caused his daughter’s death. Come on.”

(Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)