Texas horse group to search 50 areas outside city for Lauren Spierer

When Lauren Spierer’s uncle called Texas EquuSearch last week, Tim Miller said he couldn’t help unless law enforcement asked him. Within a few hours, Miller received a call from police and booked the next flight to Indiana.

Spierer, a 20-year-old IU student, has been missing since June 3. Community members and investigators are in their second week of searching, and Miller said he and his group are just a small part of the search.

Texas EquuSearch started 11 years ago with only volunteers on horses searching for people reported missing. Slowly, people came to Miller saying, “I don’t have horses, but I have ATVs.”

Now the organization has more than 530 trained members in Texas and more than 1,400 members nationwide. Each member brings their own skills with them, allowing the organization to bring dive teams, aerial searches and other technical equipment with them to make their searches more effective.

“We know it doesn’t look good now, but we have to remember cases that we’ve given up on,” Miller said. “We have to remember Elizabeth Smart.”

Miller has spoken with the Spierer family, and he’s been there before. His daughter was missing for 17 months before she was found dead. Police thought his daughter ran away, so she was never mentioned in the newspaper or on TV, and he felt the effort to find his daughter was lackluster.

“I challenge anyone to be in my office and take a phone call when a family member is on the phone,” Miller said. “If they can tell them ‘no’ then they’re a different person than I am.”

Miller and his volunteers spent Monday driving around the area, looking for rural places to search. They decided on about 50 areas outside the city that they will send search teams to early Tuesday morning.

Miller said it’s essential that his volunteers don’t talk about their own lives or even theories about what happened to Lauren while on searches. It’s not a social gathering, he said. Everyone must remain focused.

Miller doesn’t disclose the location of where his volunteers will be searching until right before he leaves. He said he’ll be up late into the night making maps, and his team leaders won’t even know where they’ll be searching until they are briefed at 8 a.m. Tuesday.

Although Miller can’t make any promises to the Spierer family that he’ll find their daughter, he can offer experience. During the past 11 years, the organization has helped with 1,224 searches. There are volunteers helping Miller that helped him with the Natalee Holloway and Caylee Anthony cases. He has volunteers in Bloomington from Ohio, Minnesota, Texas and Missouri who have experience with these type of searches.

The small airplane they have flying over Bloomington can do the job of 300 ground searches, Miller said. Its cameras can capture tire tracks and grass that has been bent down.

Sharon White has been a volunteer with the organization for several years and is basically like a sister to Miller, she said. She began helping with a single search in Texas, and now she travels with Miller whenever she can.

“Once you do it, you’re hooked,” White said, who only slept three hours Sunday night.

Since Thursday, White said the organization recovered four bodies in Texas; three were drowning victims and one was murdered.

“We’ve been very successful, but we’re only as good as our next search,” Miller said. “And Lauren is our next search.”

Although the search for Miller’s daughter didn’t have a happy ending, he remembers taking a sigh of relief when she was found. He hopes he can give any type of relief to the Spierer family.

“I’ve been where Lauren’s family is. It was a long 17 months,” Miller said. “I know the loneliness a family goes through.”