Donald Miller illegally collected thousands of Native American bones, FBI says - The Washington Post

By all accounts, the amateur museum that Donald C. Miller ran out of his home in the cornfields of central Indiana wasn’t exactly a secret. Newspaper reporters, Boy Scout troops and residents of the rural farming community of Waldron, Ind., were all invited to drop in and look around in his basement, where glass cases covered most of the walls. Tens of thousands of rare cultural artifacts were on display — including pre-Columbian pottery, Ming Dynasty jade, an Egyptian sarcophagus and a dugout canoe that had traveled down the Amazon River. And the eccentric nonagenarian collector was part of the attraction.

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But when the FBI’s art crime detectives showed up and began sifting through Miller’s extensive collection in April 2014, suspecting that many of the relics carefully laid out in the cabinets had been obtained in violation of antiquities laws, they came across something that horrified them: about 2,000 human bones, nearly all of which are thought to have been taken from ancient Native American burial sites.

“To the best of our knowledge right now, those 2,000 bones represent about 500 human beings,” Tim Carpenter, who heads the FBI’s art theft unit, told CBS News in an interview that aired Tuesday. “It’s very staggering."

Miller, a Christian missionary and ham radio operator who claimed to have worked on the Manhattan Project, died at age 91 in 2015, nearly a year after the FBI raided his home and seized about 42,000 items whose cultural value was said to be immeasurable. Until this week, officials had provided little information about the case, and had declined to go into detail about exactly what the art crimes detectives had found inside the prolific collector’s home.

Donald Miller illegally collected thousands of Native American bones, FBI says - The Washington Post