The Ohio mother accused of drowning her 4-year-old son at Atwood Lake last month was released from a mental health facility and booked into jail on Monday.
Ruth Miller is expected to appear in court for a bond hearing on Friday. On Tuesday, Judge Nanette VonAllman ordered her to have no contact “with protected persons” but did not say who those persons were, WKYC reported.
In addition to her son, Vincen Miller, Miller’s husband, Marcus Miller, drowned in the lake on August 23, as CrimeOnline reported. Police were called to the scene later in the day when she 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.
The family was camping at the lake, Campbell said, and 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.
“Everybody that will comment or any witness that you encounter that saw her driving will tell you she was driving very dangerously,” Campbell said. “The children saw her leave with the 4-year-old, and then a while later she came back. She states that she went to the dock and that she threw the 4-year-old in because that’s what she needed to do as an offering to God.”
A short time later, she took the teenage children to the dock and had them do “ritualistic tasks.”
“They climb out of the lake and at one point, according to the children, she makes them all lay down on the dock with their hands in the water to pray for their little brother and father because they were gone and had gone to heaven,” Campbell said.
Next, she put the teens in the golf cart and drove it off a stone wall into the lake.
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.
The Tuscarawas County Sheriff’s Office prevously announced it had charged Miller with two counts of aggravated murder, two counts of domestic violence, and one count of endangering children, WKYC said. The county Prosecutor’s Office told the station that both counts of murder related to the young boy, one with a finding of “prior calculation and design” and a second with a finding that the child was under 13.
Campbell said previously that investigators believe Marcus Miller’s death was an accidental drowning brought on by “spiritual delusion.”
If convicted, Miller faces life in prison with parole after 20 years up to life without parole. The remaining counts are misdemeanors.
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]
