Disappearance of Idaho Springs girl in 1983 still a mystery
Teenager Elizabeth Ann Miller went jogging 36 years ago Friday in Idaho Springs and disappeared into the thin mountain air.
The 14-year-old girl’s bones have not been found, even though volunteers have searched thousands of gold and silver mine shafts in the area.
It’s a mystery that has been investigated by scores of law enforcement professionals, including Clear Creek County sheriff’s deputies and Colorado Bureau of Investigation and FBI agents.
“That’s a tough case,” Undersheriff Bruce Snelling of the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office told The Denver Post in a previous interview about the case. “We have received a ton of tips. That case is always perused by us.”
Over the years, many suspects have been identified, but without the body it’s tough to charge anyone, Snelling has said.
The following is a compilation of accounts from the missing girl’s friends, family members and law enforcement officers gleaned from dozens of local news stories over the span of decades.
Beth was 5-foot-4, weighed 105 pounds and had hazel eyes. The Clear Creek Secondary School freshman was wearing a blue Tshirt, white shorts and jogging shoes the last day she was seen. She had told her family in the past that people would follow her sometimes, people about age 21.
That afternoon, Beth wasn’t home and hadn’t left a note when her mother, Ilene Miller Taylor, returned from working as a clerk at the Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office. Beth’s family began searching for her that night.
Witnesses would tell investigators that they saw a man in his 30s the previous weekend driving a small red pickup truck, a Ford Courier, with a white camper shell and out-of-state license plates.
A search was organized the day after Beth’s disappearance.
More than 200 volunteers knocked on every home in the town of 2,800 people. Men in hiking gear were calling “Beth, Beth,” as they combed nearby stream beds, mountainsides, trails and lovers’ lanes while two helicopters hovered overhead. Store owners put up missing persons posters in their windows. Many stores closed as the owners joined the frantic search. Beth wasn’t the type of girl who would run away from home.
“When you have a daughter missing, you just sit here thinking what might have happened to her,” Taylor told a Denver Post reporter at the time.
Beth’s father, Michael Miller, who had spent 13 years in law enforcement in South Dakota, made a televised appeal urging “anyone who has seen anything that would help us locate Beth.”
Over the years, Beth’s parents endured false sightings of their daughter at truck stops and shopping malls in Arkansas, Georgia, Utah, North Carolina and Florida. Some appeared promising, only to lead to disappointment.
When Beth’s sister, Lynn Miller Granger, was 26 in 1990, she joined the Idaho Springs police force, saying that her decision to become an officer was spurred by Beth’s disappearance.
On the 10th anniversary of Beth’s disappearance, in 1993, investigators pursued a tip that had been circulating for seven years that a man named Edward Apodaca killed Beth and buried her body in a wooded area. By then, Apodaca’s wife, Anne, and her mother, Frizelle Aguilar, had killed Apodaca and were serving a prison term for the murder.
An independent witness reported they had seen Apodaca talking to Beth while they were sitting in a red or rust-colored pickup truck with a camper shell and New Mexico plates on Aug. 13, three days before she vanished. A license plate with some matching numbers was later found on Apodaca’s property.
A judge ruled Beth legally dead in 1994.