Teenager Elizabeth Ann Miller went jogging 36 years ago Friday in Idaho Springs and disappeared into the thin mountain air.
The 14-year-old girl’s bones have not been found even though volunteers have searched thousands of gold and silver mine shafts in the area.
It’s a mystery that has been investigated by scores of law enforcement professionals including Clear Creek County sheriff’s deputies and Colorado Bureau of Investigation and FBI agents.
“That’s a tough case,” Undersheriff Bruce Snelling of the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office told The Denver Post in a previous interview about the case. “We have received a ton of tips. That case is always perused by us.”
Over the years, many suspects have been identified but without the body it’s tough to charge anyone, Snelling has said.
The following is a compilation of accounts from the missing girl’s friends, family members and law enforcement officers gleaned from dozens of local news stories over the span of decades.
Beth, who was 5-feet-4 inches tall and weighed 105 pounds, had hazel eyes. The Clear Creek Secondary School freshman was wearing a blue T-shirt, white shorts and jogging shoes the last day she was seen. Beth had told family members in the past that people would follow her sometimes, older people around 21.
That afternoon Beth wasn’t home and hadn’t left a note when her mother, Ilene Miller Taylor, returned from working as a clerk at the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office. Beth’s family began searching for her that night.
Witnesses would tell investigators that they saw a man in his 30s the previous weekend driving a small red pickup truck, a faded red Ford Courier, with a white camper shell and out-of-state license plates.
The man was flirting with Beth. He became angry when Beth refused to carry on a conversation with him. The pickup had black or blue lettering and a foot-wide brown strip along both sides. Her friends said he gave his name as Claude.
A search was organized the day after Beth’s disappearance. More than 200 volunteers knocked on every home in the town of 2,800 people. Men in hiking gear were calling “Beth, Beth,” as they combed nearby stream beds, mountainsides, trails and lovers’ lanes while two helicopters hovered overhead. Store owners put up missing persons posters in their windows. Many stores closed as the owners joined the frantic search. Beth wasn’t the type of girl who would run away from home.
“When you have a daughter missing, you just sit here thinking what might have happened to her,” Taylor told a former Denver Post reporter at the time.
Beth’s father, Michael Miller, who had spent 13 years in law enforcement in South Dakota, made a televised appeal urging “anyone who has seen anything that would help us locate Beth.”
That Saturday, four days after Beth’s disappearance, officials were so desperate they were following leads by six psychics. Dorothy “Dotty” Bevard of Denver started a campaign in December of 1983 to send 32,000 reward posters around the country. People were picking the posters up at four Denver radio stations and putting them up.
A man with a small red Ford Courier pickup and a white camper shell went into a Fort Morgan gas station and noticed a stack of 100 posters about Beth’s disappearance. He suddenly snatched the posters and bolted. The gas station attendant took down a license plate that turned out to be a cancelled Denver plate.
By the following summer, 100,000 missing persons posters had been distributed across the country. Beth’s name was on thousands of bumper stickers.
On Aug. 9, 1984, a story by Rocky Mountain News identified a person of interest.
Robert Arnold Storm, 18, was then being held in the El Paso County Jail, charged with the May 5 fatal shooting of Shawna Webb, 17, a co-worker at a movie theater.
Storm had signed graffiti on a wall in Colorado Springs that asked whether police wanted to know where Beth’s body was buried. It said that her body was near a King Soopers. But Storm denied writing the message. He also said he knew another girl named Beth Miller, the article said.
Over the years, Beth’s parents had to endure numerous false sightings of their daughter at truck stops and shopping malls in Arkansas, Georgia, Utah, North Carolina and Florida. Some appeared promising, only to lead to disappointment.
“Parents came home with nothing – but tears,” said a Denver Post headline on Feb. 21, 1985, after a fruitless trip to Tampa. Police had detained a girl who claimed to be Beth. But she wasn’t.
When Beth’s sister, Lynn Miller Granger, was 26 in 1990, she joined the Idaho Springs police force, saying that her decision to become an officer was spurred by her sister’s disappearance.
On the 10-year anniversary of Beth’s disappearance in 1993, investigators pursued a tip that had been circulating the past seven years that a man named Edward Apodaca had killed Beth and buried her body in a wooded area.
By then, Apodaca’s wife, Anne, and her mother Frizelle Aguilar had killed Apodaca and were serving a prison term for the murder.
An independent witness had reported that they had seen Apodaca talking to Beth while they were both sitting in a red or rust-colored pickup truck with a camper shell and New Mexico plates on Aug. 13, three days before she vanished. A license plate with some matching numbers was later found on Apodaca’s property.
At one point, authorities dug in an area near Idaho Springs where a witness said she was buried near a tree. But no remains were found. A judge ruled Beth legally dead in 1994.
New generations of sheriff’s deputies, FBI and CBI agents and Idaho Springs police officers have looked at new suspects. Their efforts were hampered by lost files.