COLD Barbara Elizabeth Miller - Pennsylvania Cold Case 1989

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Pennsylvania police tell PEOPLE they are hoping forensic testing will help determine whether or not a woman who vanished in 1989 was put through a wood chipper and then encased in a wall in the basement of a home where her ex-boyfriend’s sister once lived.

Sunbury, Pennsylvania, Police Chief Tim Miller says the department has already confirmed the presence of wood chips in a concrete wall at the residence in Milton, Pennsylvania. But investigators are waiting to find out if the remains of 30-year-old Barbara Elizabeth Miller are also entombed there.

“We are still plugging away and obviously trying to find answers,” says Miller, who is no relation to Barbara. Speaking to the Associated Press, he said it was “mere speculation if a wood chipper was or wasn’t used.”

Still, to PEOPLE, he says, “You have to imagine: We are working with these walls and [then] we find the presence of wood chips — it definitely raised the level of suspicion.”

The Henry C. Lee Institute of Forensic Science and the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility are testing pieces of the concrete, Miller says. But he doesn’t expect answers anytime soon, calling it “a very painstakingly slow process.”

Court documents show that authorities have long suspected Barbara’s ex-boyfriend Mike Egan, now 59 and a former Sunbury police detective, had something to do with her disappearance and death.

Barbara vanished in July 1989, and for years police investigated her as a missing person. In 2002, they began looking at her case as a homicide, though it remains unclear how and by whom she may have been killed.

Though Egan has not been charged in connection with Barbara, he “is and has been the lead suspect in this case since 1989,” according to a search warrant affidavit obtained by PEOPLE.

He did not return a call for comment, but he told the AP that investigators were “way off base.”

Missing Woman Was ‘Desperately Trying’ to Split from Suspect​

Barbara — then a factory worker, part-time bartender and mother of a 14-year-old son — disappeared after attending the wedding of some friends on July 30, 1989, according to authorities. After the ceremony, she met friends at a bar in Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania, and was last seen by them around 8 p.m. on July 1, 1989.

Police suspect she returned home to change clothes prior to heading out to another party — but she never made it to her destination.

According to the warrant affidavit, Egan reported Barbara missing five days later and allegedly told police that he last saw her in the early morning hours of July 1 getting into a car with two unidentified males “supposedly [en-route] to a motorcycle rally in Woolrich.”

Barbara’s son told police that Egan and Barbara — who had tried to end their relationship — allegedly fought before the wedding, and on the morning of the wedding Egan stopped by Barbara’s house while driving her car, the affidavit states.

Barbara’s son said the tires “were covered in a yellowish clay” that was “probably” from concrete work Egan had been doing, according to the affidavit.

When he briefly spoke to the AP, Egan rebuked this version of events, saying, “It was my car, not her car.”

According to the affidavit, the couple had broken up weeks before Barbara vanished, and she had contacted police several times about Egan’s behavior — alleging on-going harassment, terroristic threats and “observations of her estranged ex-boyfriend Mike Egan watching her through binoculars, and veiled threats in a desperate attempt at reconciliation.”

In the days before she vanished, Barbara began telling her friends that Egan “was going to kill her,” the affidavit states. “Miller was desperately trying to discontinue their relationship, according to numerous friends.”

New Developments in the Case​

Chief Miller says that police “did an enormous amount of interviews,” in connection with Barbara’s disappearance. “They followed leads,” he says. “The leads took them to different places, but none of those searches proved conclusively one way or another.”

He began to investigate the case himself in January, when he became the police chief. “People in the community would ask me to look into the case, and once I opened the binders I couldn’t put it down,” he explains. “I found some things that peaked my curiosity that I didn’t think were followed. I have been going where no one else has been going.”

Miller says he started a Facebook page on May 9 in an effort to generate new interest in what may have happened to Barbara. Six days later, Miller heard from a confidential informant who alleged that he spoke to Egan’s sister, Cathy Reitenbach, about a year after Miller’s disappearance, the warrant affidavit shows.

Reitenbach, who died in January, allegedly “became very upset and begin trembling, advising that she was one of the last people to see Barbara Miller alive,” the informant recalled, according to the affidavit.


“The [informant] thought that Reitenbach’s reaction was peculiar and wondered if Cathy Reitenbach was one of the last people to see Barbara Miller alive, if she was also one of the first people to see her dead,” the affidavit states.

According to the affidavit, this was not the only evidence that Barbara may have been buried inside a local residence:

In the course of his investigation, Miller located a 2004 police report claiming “Egan had put a body inside the wall of a home.” He also came across a police interview with someone stating Barbara was buried at Reitenbach’s home — and three people had told investigators, “Egan would get high on cocaine and drive by a home in Milton to ‘check on his old lady.’ ”

Another person allegedly told police that Miller’s body was buried in the walls of a home where Egan was doing construction work in 1989.

‘Highly Suspicious’ Discoveries​

According to the warrant affidavit, Miller and the chief of Pennsylvania’s Milton Borough Police Department went to Reitenbach’s former home and the new occupants gave them permission to search the basement, where they found “highly suspicious construction.”

“I observed a small room similar to a root cellar that was very peculiar,” Miller wrote in the affidavit. “The room had two interior walls that were built of what appeared to be thick concrete. The walls appeared to be out of place as they were the only solid concrete walls in the basement.”

“I discovered that the walls we seized were definitely not built with the home,” Miller tells PEOPLE. “They were not part of the original construction.”

What’s more, he says, “I have some very strong interest in the walls, due to their construction and the fact the amount of concrete used was extremely exorbitant. It doesn’t make sense for the weight it was bearing.”

In June, Miller brought in eight cadaver-sniffing dogs and all eight dogs alerted to human remains in the basement, he says.

“The odds of eight different dogs alerting and all of them being wrong would be virtually impossible,” he says.

Recently, Miller says he sought out forensic scientist and noted criminologist Dr. Henry Lee to help him with the analysis on the case. Lee previously helped investigate the murder of Helle Crafts by her pilot husband, Richard Crafts, who was later convicted of killing her and using a wood-chipper to dispose of her body in Connecticut.

Miller says he also has plans to travel out of state to deliver evidence to a lab and hopes to give Miller’s family and the community much-needed answers to the 28-year-old mystery.

“I think we are getting close,” he says. “I think my eyes will be the last ones to take a look at this case.”

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SUNBURY, Pennsylvania — Thirty years ago Sunday Barbara Miller went missing. The cold case is one that still haunts her friends and family members.

Barbara Miller was 30-year-old when she was last seen on June 30, 1989. That night she attended a friend’s wedding in Mifflinburg, Pennsylvania and was never seen again. Her boyfriend, former police officer Mike Egan, reported her missing five days later, according to police. She was declared dead in 2002 by Northumberland County President Judge Charles Saylor.

Several times over the past three decades there was hope the case was breaking open. In 2008, bones were discovered during the construction of a home in Northumberland County. That same year, caves outside of Sunbury, where Miller lived, were searched along with shale pits.


The case gained steam two years ago when a week-long dig at home garnered headlines. But it’s been mostly silent since.

Law enforcement personnel, including locals and those from the state’s Attorney General’s office, are quiet about the current status of the case.

“We continue to hope and pray that something will give,” Lynn Miller, a relative of Barbara Miller said. “We trust every law enforcement official and we can only hope this is still active. One way or another we just want to be able to have closure after all these years.”

Current investigation

Through the years investigators, including Northumberland County Detective Degg Stark, have worked the case in an attempt to solve the three-decade mystery.

The case most recently caught headlines in 2017 when then Sunbury Chief Tim Miller (no relation) reopened the investigation. That summer, Miller led a dig under a home in Milton, Northumberland County, where officials tore out the basement of a borough home after Miller said he received information Barbara Miller’s remains may have been entombed in cement walls inside the home.

For nearly a year the case remained active. Tim Miller left the department last year, and information regarding the status of the case has been limited or nonexistent since.

In 2018, the case was turned over the state Attorney General’s office. Sunbury Officer-in-Charge Brad Hare confirmed late last year state agents took possession of the Barbara Miller case files along with documents relating to the 1986 homicide of Rickey Wolfe, of Mifflinburg.

Continued attempts to get a comment about the status of the case have been denied by local law enforcement officials and state investigators, who said they do not comment on whether they are investigating a case or they are not.

Sunbury Cpl. Bremigen was named the lead investigator by Hare when Tim Miller left the department in 2018. Bremigen referred all questions to the Attorney General’s office when asked about the case last week.

“No comment,” Bremigen said. Hare gave the same answer. Tim Miller did not comment.

Barbara Miller’s sister, Susan Zimmerman, of Milton, said she trusts authorities, praised Tim Miller and is “OK” with the silence.

“Former chief Miller has done nothing but great things for our family,” she said. “I trust the entire process and I just know in my heart that we will get the closure we all need. I am not bothered by not hearing any news on this as it means, I believe, people are out doing their jobs.”

Most recent developments

During the 2017 investigation, law enforcement personnel were more than happy to speak about the case. In January 2017, Tim Miller began to interview individuals about the case and by June oversaw the near week-long dig.


At the time, Tim Miller said he would not comment on anything that was discovered but he was hopeful the case was moving forward.

Two months later, Barbara Miller’s former Penn Street home in Sunbury was searched in the middle of the night. Evidence was collected. A search of a pond saw police and Northumberland County Coroner Jim Kelley pull a barrel from the water.

That evidence, along with several tons of cement and soil collected from the Milton home, was shipped off to be tested by forensic scientists.

Tim Miller enlisted the likes of world-renowned forensic scientists Dr. Henry Lee, of West Haven, Conn., and Dr. William Bass, of Tennessee.

Lee is best known for his work on the O.J. Simpson murder trial and his work on a 1986 case where a Connecticut airline stewardess, Helle Crafts, disappeared. Lee was able to show jurors bone fragments and hair he discovered near a woodchipper Lee believed was used to murder Crafts. Her body was never found.

Bass is best known for his creation the “Body Farm” located at the University of Tennessee. The Body Farm is a place where forensic scientists study decomposing bodies.

Miller enlisted the help of the scientists after he said he believed he had “strong” information Barbara Miller may have been entombed in the wall of the Milton home.

Barbara Miller was officially added to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System (NamUs) database in 2017. There is a public section of the database where limited information is provided. Any new information that is gathered by investigators is confidential and only can be accessed by law enforcement.

Regional Programs Specialist Amy Dobbs refused comment earlier this week on any new information. Dobbs would not comment on whether any state investigators have been in contact with the federal agency.

“We never give up and always search and continue to search,” Dobbs said. “Everyone deserves to be returned to their families.”

For the past 12 months, deafening silence continues to Sunday’s anniversary.

“I believe we have a group of professionals out there helping us find answers,” Lynn Miller said. “I don’t think the lack of information means the case has fizzled out.” The only information released since 2018 was that wood chips were found in the cement walls dug out of the Milton home, according to police.

30 years of waiting

After Egan reported Barbara Miller missing to then-Sunbury Police officer Tom Garlock — who is the Selinsgrove Police Chief today.

Twelve days after Egan told police Miller was missing, a short brief appeared in The Daily Item (July 17, 1989) mentioning the case. “City police said they continue to seek information about a Sunbury woman who was reported missing on July 5. Barbara Ann Miller, 30, of 239 Penn St., was reported missing by a family member, police said. Police said reports they had reports that the woman has been seen in the region since her disappearance. There has been no evidence of foul play, police said. The woman has a 14-year-old son who has remained at home in the care of relatives, police said.”

Four months later, on Nov. 11, 1989, The Daily Item published a story headlined “Disappearance puzzles family.”

“I really think something terrible happened to her,” Barbara Miller’s mother Martha Stump, of Watsontown, told a reporter then. Stump passed away in 2016. She was quoted in the 1989 story as saying, “I cannot imagine my daughter going away and not contacting me or her son. I just can’t in my wildest imagination.”

The story noted Sunbury Police were still investigating the disappearance. In 1989, Police Chief Charles McAndrew called it a “difficult case because there is no evidence that a crime has been committed.”

 

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