An Ohio woman accused of killing her 4-year-old son at a Tuscarawas County lake in August has been deemed competent to stand trial.
Ruther Miller, 40, had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity in the death of Vincen Miller during a family weekend at the lake. She was sent to mental health facility after her plea, but was released and held without bail, WKYC reports.
Miller’s attorney had moved to have a sanity evaluation excluded from the trial, set to begin on March 4, but Judge Michael Ernest denied the motion on Wednesday.
She is charged with aggravated murder, murder, felonious assault, endangering children, and domestic violence.
Miller’s husband, Marcus Miller, also drowned at the lake that weekend, as CrimeOnline reported. Police were called to the scene August 24 when Ruth Miller allegedly drove a golf cart carrying her three other children — a 15-year-old girl and twin 18-year-0ld boys — into the lake. Those children were not physically harmed and walked out of the water themselves.
Police said the saga began at about 1 a.m. on Saturday, the husband and wife went to a dock and jumped into the lake, believing that God was talking to them and giving them tasks to carry out to prove their faith.
“What she says is that she and her husband went to this dock, and they jumped in the water because God was speaking to them and telling them to do things,” Tuscarawas County Sheriff Orvis Campbell said. “Things to prove their worthiness to God, to show their faith is complete. And they didn’t do very well in those. Some of them were bizarre, some of them were just swimming exercises. The most bizarre was that God told her to allow herself to be swallowed by a fish, as bizarre as that sounds.”
When they returned to their campsite, she told detectives, Marcus Miller said that he was disappointed in himself for failing the tests “because he didn’t have enough faith.” He said he was going back to the lake to swim to a sandbar a lengthy distance from the dock. He left at about 5:30 a.m., Ruth Miller told investigators.
“For the longest time, we weren’t sure if that was true. We didn’t know if we could believe her statement,” said Campbell.
But a witness corroborated her statements, saying they saw the husband at the dock around an hour later. At about 8 a.m., witnesses say they saw the mother put the 4-year-old into a golf cart.
After speaking with Ruth Miller, investigators began looking for the missing boy and his father. The boy’s body was found at about 6 p.m. on August 23. Divers had to stop searching for Marcus Miller in the darkness, but located his body about 50 yards off a dock at about 8:30 a.m. the next morning.
Miller’s family and church issued a statement saying the family were members of the Old Order Amish Church.
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[Featured image: Ruth Miller/Tuscarawas County Sheriff’s Office]
