How the FBI Discovered a Real-Life Indiana Jones in Rural Indiana

Tim Carpenter dreams of places he’s never been. He’ll find himself somewhere deep in China, gazing at a Buddhist temple, posing as if he’s being photographed. Or sometimes he’s on Easter Island, near its carved human figures with oversized heads, outside centuries-old burial caves, almost like he’s unearthing something. Then he wakes and realizes none of it was real. He’s never visited China, never seen Easter Island. His dreams are someone else’s trips and memories that exist in weathered photos and grainy films, strung together in his mind like a phantom reel, images he’s looked at so many times—too many—that they’ve invaded his psyche.

One evening years earlier, in October 2013, Carpenter—an FBI agent—heard his phone ringing at his home in Indianapolis. His supervisor was calling to tell him of an anonymous tip about a man in rural Indiana named Don Miller. The tipster said Miller was an amateur archaeologist who’d amassed a vast collection of artifacts, especially Native American items. Inside his home, the person claimed, were skulls, bones, and entire skeletons.

At the time, Carpenter was one of a handful of agents working for the FBI’s Art Theft Program, typically known for investigating fine art. Stolen Renoirs. Lifted Rembrandts. Fakes and forgeries. Heists famous and not so famous. He admits that agents who are aware the unit even exists think they’re just the guys who chase down Van Goghs. But the program investigates all kinds of cultural property crimes, including something as unusual as potential human remains inside a Midwestern home. Carpenter reached out to the tipster. They talked for an hour. The person, who’d seen the collection, kept referring to it as “huge.” For Carpenter, who’d worked art crimes for five years, including private collection cases, a large collection would’ve meant 100 items. So what’s huge? 200 items? 400? “No, man. A lot more than that,” he told Carpenter. “I think it’s about 200,000 pieces.”

Carpenter’s initial reaction was to dismiss it. Not possible. Either this person is a crackpot or has wildly overshot. “Nobody has 200,000 of anything,” Carpenter told me. “Hell, most large state museums don’t have 200,000 pieces.” So Carpenter pressed him. It can’t be that many. “Just trust me,” the person told him. “This stuff is everywhere.”

The tipster said Miller had acknowledged that some of the items in his collection were illegal, and that over the course of six decades Miller had dug much of it up himself. He said Miller had a bomb shelter and underground tunnels on his property, and put Carpenter in touch with someone else who’d seen the collection and taken photos. Carpenter saw them. There were skulls and bones. They were unmistakable.

At the Indianapolis field office, Carpenter ran Miller’s name through the FBI’s databases and discovered he’d been in touch with the agency five years earlier. In 2008, agents had received a tip that Miller had two spheres that looked like pits, the cores of nuclear weapons. When the FBI, along with Department of Energy officials, visited Miller’s home, they didn’t find pits but discovered a chunk of depleted uranium and a large bar of graphite Miller claimed was from the U.S.’s first nuclear reactor. Carpenter says the DOE seized the uranium, which he described as “not something you’d want to handle,” but left the graphite after deeming it inert and harmless. But clearly, agents had been in Miller’s house. They’d seen the collection. “It was documented in some paperwork in the past as a passing note, like, Oh, by the way, he had this really cool collection of Native American stuff,” Carpenter said. But the agents weren’t cultural property experts. They didn’t know what they were looking at.

Carpenter decided he needed to see the artifacts for himself and thought up a way in: He would tag along on a follow-up visit with one of the agents who’d been to Miller’s house before. “A bit of a ruse,” Carpenter told me. On November 1, the two agents drove an hour south past farms and cornfields to Moscow, a tiny, unincorporated township in Rush County. They pulled into Miller’s driveway. Just past its curve sat a large, two-story beige stone home. An old white farmhouse stood out back. Large antennas in the yard poked at the sky. Nearby sat multiple barns, outbuildings, garages. The agents, casually dressed, approached the front door and noticed a statue. A Chinese terra-cotta warrior, life-size, standing guard.

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