Family seeks help in finding brother who vanished
The last day Charles David Miller spent with his sister, she took him fishing in Titusville and then to the beach, where the 55-year-old Air Force veteran splashed among the waves.
“He hadn’t been in the ocean in I think 20 years,” says Christine Rausch, a mail carrier in College Park for three decades. “He was so happy. And I told him, ‘Chucky, I’m retiring in just a few days. We’re going to find a house together on the water, and it’s going to be great.’ ”
Five days later, on June 16, Miller vanished.
Despite billboard ads the family has purchased along Interstate 4 and Orange Blossom Trail, despite plastering storefronts and telephone poles with fliers, despite radio ads and door-todoor canvassing and searching emergency rooms, morgues, rehab centers and dumpsters, Miller has yet to be found.
“We’ve been on a roller coaster,” says brother Jerry Miller, 59, Rausch’s twin. “When they found a body in Lake Lily two weeks ago, it was a white male who appeared to have been in the water for a while. I dropped what I was doing and went straight there. The time frame, everything, fit. So I told the whole family, ‘I think this is it.’ ”
When he called the medical examiner’s office the following morning, though, he learned that victim was 71 years old. Jerry Miller was relieved — yet still anguished.
In truth, Charles Miller was not the type of man whose disappearance would create a stir if not for the persistence of his family. Though he once trained Air Force pilots on high-altitude evasion and rescue techniques in the military, by age 30 he had developed severe bipolar depression and was medically discharged from the military.
He began drinking heavily to selfmedicate. The past 20 years, when he wasn’t living with his siblings, Miller was often homeless, in a hospital or in jail — usually for some minor, drunken offense. He was last seen outside his favorite Orange Blossom Trail bar, Station 441, a few blocks from the room he rented.
He was sitting on the curb, a beer in one hand, a trumpet in the other.
That was a Friday. When Rausch didn’t hear from him by Sunday morning — he typically called every couple of days — she started searching. A week later, she went to Orlando Police and filed a missing persons report.
Miller is now one of 118 adults reported missing to the department so far this year. He’s one of only three who haven’t been found.
Typically, the missing turn up alive, says Orlando Police Public Information Officer Michelle Guido. But for Miller, the department has no leads.
No one at his usual haunts — the bars or burger joints or convenience stores — has seen him. His bank account hasn’t been touched. He doesn’t have a car or a driver’s license.
“We joked about putting a [GPS] chip in him,” Jerry Miller says. “But he has always been accountable.”
Charles Miller was born the last of nine children in the Miller family, which moved from Fort Bragg, N.C., to Orlando when he was 8 — three years after his mother died. Old photos show a handsome, blondhaired teen with serious eyes who played Lake Brantley football and trumpet in the school band. He loved music, art and astronomy. He was, his siblings say, brilliant — and increasingly troubled.
Though he married twice and had a son, he hasn’t seen the young man in at least 15 years. They were planning a reunion late this month, Rausch says.
“He could have just a thousand-yard stare,” Jerry Miller says. “Every three or four days, he’d get down — I called it his miserable phase. But in between, he would be fine.”
Nights were the worst. Then, Rausch says, Charles Miller would remember and regret. Sometimes he would wail in emotional agony, crying for his long-dead mother. Other times, he would lament failed relationships or fumble around in the dark, having lost his keys, waking people up.
He lived with every family member at some point, Jerry Miller said, until the late-night yelling and crying and the near-constant chaos threatened their own jobs and families. They tried to put him up in motels or get him help from the Department of Veterans Affairs, but he never stayed long enough for it to stick. He has been hit by a car twice, beat up and robbed. And he disappeared once before — for five days — but that was 20 years ago.
“He never hurt anyone,” his brother says, echoing the bartender and food pantry workers who knew him.
“He was humble. He was honest. He was very good-hearted,” Rausch says. “Of all the haphazard things that have happened to him … the things he has overcome … it is like his heart and soul and body never gave up.”
Because her children are now grown, Rausch recently gave notice that she would retire early, in mid-June. She sold her house, planning to buy a place in the country with a separate residence for Charles. There, he could have his space, and she could keep an eye on him full time.
“I would fix it up with all the things he loved around him — his music and his trumpet and easels and his paintings,” she says.
His disappearance came just days before her retirement. She and her twin brother fear the worst. Sometimes they speak of him in the present tense; other times, in the past. Either way, they just want to know.
“My heart tells me that somebody hurt Chuck,” Rausch says, “and then they covered up the evidence.”