As the caravan arrived, Miller gave the agents a full tour. He took them into the basement, where Archer saw the collection he’d been imagining for months. It made him dizzy. Then they entered the other buildings on the property. They started finding boxes of artifacts that appeared to have been sitting around for decades. Some were covered in dirt, others infested with mice, rats, insects, feces.
Then Miller took them into a locked room underneath the white farmhouse. Archer saw a brown shopping bag. Inside were eight skulls. Three more sat on a shelf. They found a garbage bag full of bones, and as they looked inside, a raccoon came flying out. Miller ushered them through a tunnel full of standing water that led to the Wyman Research building, where agents saw dozens of blue and green tote bins. They were full of human remains, many haphazardly thrown together. Some were infants and toddlers. On one shelf, a dozen skulls sat lined up, impacted with red soil in various states of repose. Miller said he’d excavated them five years earlier in New Mexico from an unmarked burial site. “He was so proud of those,” Carpenter said. It was his last dig, he told them. Carpenter noticed Miller only had the skulls and asked where the bodies were. We left those there, Miller said.
In the barn, agents found more bags of bones and skulls, some that had sat there for 50 years, never opened. Inside the main residence, in a basement closet, were two dozen more skulls on shelves, some with arrowheads sticking out of them. They also found a skeleton in a display case Miller said was Crazy Horse, the Lakota Native American who was buried in an unknown location. “He didn’t want anyone touching it,” Carpenter said. “It would…
