Lula Gillespie-Miller: Woman’s Tragic Tale of Escape and Evasion

By now the story of Lula Gillespie-Miller‘s discovery, after missing for 42 years, has been all over the news. Why did she hide for so long? The answer to that question may be revealed in a 2014 web posting from her daughter.

After she had been interviewed by Texas Rangers, an Indiana State Police statement, alludes that the runaway mom felt the pressures of being a young mother at the time, and gave her children to her parents”. Scott Jarvis, an Indiana State Police sergeant, discovered her whereabouts after originally pursuing a lead of an unidentified woman found in a shallow grave in 1975. After that lead didn’t pan out, he got information about a woman similar to Lula and that information led him to discover her whereabouts in Texas, according to the statement.
Was Lula Gillespie-Miller a young woman overwhelmed with the responsibilities of motherhood? On the website

justiceforjasonbolton.com, in a post dated December 10, 2014, her daughter gives a different picture.

In her posting the daughter says, ‘Lula Gillespie-Miller’s husband, Joe Gambill, was killed in a car wreck in 1969 and so she was a widow and very young with four children. In addition, Lula was out one night in 1973 when she was attacked, raped, beaten and left to die. Lula’s mother, Emma Gillespie, called the police and made a statement in which Lula named the men who attacked her. The report was never filed. The next day Lula left and was never heard from again.

This 2014 story from the daughter has not been mentioned in the current coverage of Lula’s discovery and it has not been verified. The daughter claims in her posting that everyone in Laurel knows this story.

Does Lula’s disappearance reveal a criminal coverup, or is the daughter’s story a misunderstanding of her mother’s lengthy absence?