Missing woman found in Texas after 41 years; daughter could meet her for first time this weekend

An Indiana woman may finally get a chance to meet her mother after she went missing 41 years ago.

Thursday, an Indiana State trooper investigating the missing woman’s case from 1974 was able to locate her living in Texas.

Lula Ann Gillespie-Miller left her home in Laurel, Ind. in 1974. The 28-year-old had given birth to her third child at the time, and she had decided to turn all three over to her parents to raise since she felt she was too young to be a mother.

After she left, Lula’s family never saw her again.

Then, in 2014, Indiana State Police Detective Sergeant Scott Jarvis was contacted by the Doe Network about Lula’s disappearance. The organization operates a website and assists families with missing person investigations.

They explained Lula’s family had given them a letter from her postmarked in Richmond, Ind. in 1975.

Jarvis checked with the Richmond Police Department Records Division and found a 1975 case involving an unidentified deceased woman. She had been buried in an unmarked grave in the Earlham Cemetery in Richmond.

In December of 2014, police were able to exhume the body to collect DNA for comparison to Lula’s daughter’s DNA. The daughter, Tammy Miller, had never met her mother but was assisting police in locating her.

Checking every option, authorities entered Miller’s DNA into a national database for missing persons. However, no match was found.

While waiting for the DNA analysis results from the body in Richmond, Jarvis chased down a lead he had found concerning a woman with some similarities to Lula.

She had lived in Tennessee in the 1980s and later moved to Texas. This led Jarvis to a small town in south Texas to a woman he suspected had been living under an alias there since the 1990s.

On Thursday, Jarvis asked Texas Rangers in the area to go to the woman’s home. When they got there, the woman admitted to being who they were looking for.

Although Lula, now 69 years old, could offer no explanation as to why she left her Indiana life behind in 1974, she did give consent to Sergeant Jarvis for her contact information to be given to her daughter, Tammy.

This Easter weekend, Tammy is hoping she’ll be able to make contact with her mother for the first time in her life.

Lula Gillespie-Miller did not commit any crime by leaving her home in 1974 and still reserves the right to remain anonymous.