In April 2014 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the family farm of Don Miller, a ninety-year-old electrical engineer and amateur archaeologist, and seized thousands of artifacts, skulls, and other bones that he had stolen from indigenous burial grounds and cultural heritage sites across the globe. Miller had hoarded his plunder in his house, his barns, and a disused fallout shelter in Rush County, Indiana.

Investigators found that he had also created eccentric and morbid displays: “arrowheads hammered into a skull for dramatic effect, a baby’s skull repurposed as an apple bowl.” Bones were mixed with animal remains, “strewn across shelves and stuffed into tote bags…. They were filthy with grime and black mold, infested with silverfish.” Mice were nesting in skulls. In a locked room, there was a nearly complete skeleton laid out on red felt cloth in a glass case labeled “Sioux Warrior, 19th Cent.,” which Miller claimed was the remains of Crazy Horse, the famous Lakota leader of a rebellion against the US military. Miller was so attached to it that he told his friends, “I want you to bury me with my Indian.”

The Grave Robber: The Biggest Stolen Artifacts Case in FBI History and the Bureau’s Quest to Set Things Right is an account of discovering this lone nonagenarian’s crimes by Tim Carpenter, the lead investigator on the case. Carpenter, a law enforcement veteran who also worked in combat zones as a bomb technician, had seen plenty of gruesome crime scenes and mass casualty events, but “this was something else entirely,” he writes. Miller had an astonishing 42,000 items, including some two thousand human bones that investigators later learned belonged to more than five hundred people.

Carpenter first got wind of Miller’s unusual trove in 2013 when he was working at the bureau’s Indiana office and got a call from an anonymous tipster who said that Miller had bragged to him about digging up Native American remains. He did an FBI file search and found Miller’s name in an unrelated report about uranium that the agency had discovered at his farm a few years earlier. (Miller had worked as a technician on the Manhattan Project while in the army.) One of the agents on the case had made a side note in his report about Miller’s unusual possessions. Carpenter followed up with the tipster, who said that Miller probably had 200,000 artifacts—more objects than many museums hold.

Miller did not seem suspicious when two FBI men showed up and asked for a tour. He incautiously lavished time on them, explaining how he had used a metal detector to locate burial sites and then dug them up himself. His pride in his Indiana Jones–style adventures came through in his embellished and self-aggrandizing tales, which gave Carpenter enough information to justify seeking a warrant. The case lasted more than a decade, involved dozens of agents, and cost the bureau millions of dollars. Carpenter’s aim was not to see Miller punished so much as to ensure that justice was done through the repatriation and reburial of Native remains.

The Grave Robber isn’t a true crime thriller, as its title suggests. Miller’s hunt for artifacts is glimpsed only once, briefly, when Carpenter recounts how Miller and his first wife, Sue, met another couple and their children for a picnic at a bucolic spot at the intersection of two rivers in Oacoma, South Dakota, in July 1961. While the children chased butterflies and played on a sandbar, the parents dug into a sacred burial ground. There are hardly any other flashbacks that bring Miller’s bizarre activities to life for the reader. His acts of spoliation are mostly revealed as Carpenter’s team sorts through Anasazi pots from the American Southwest, a skull from a Vodou temple in Haiti, Celtic stone axes from Denmark, and Ming Dynasty artifacts from China. But how Miller traversed the globe to acquire all these objects remains a mystery.

Instead, The Grave Robber is part FBI procedural, part memoir, focused on Carpenter’s supervision of an enormous seizure and repatriation effort. It also begins to seem a project of documenting his career as his fledgling art theft department grows into the FBI’s Art Crime Team, thanks in large part to his diligent and persistent work on the case. There is too much description of the tedious bureaucratic hurdles that made the case challenging: forms to be filled out, superiors to convince of the investigation’s merits, and the logistics of transporting artifacts from one storage space to another.

The writing is littered with law enforcement jargon, like “escalate the request up the management chain,” and “sign off on the documentation.” The interoffice politics of the bureau may remind readers of John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker’s Mindhunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit (1995), about the creation of its criminal profiling division, which was adapted into a 2017 Netflix series. The stakes in The Grave Robber are significantly lower—no lives are immediately in danger—but the nitty-gritty elements of FBI procedure are similarly at the center of the story.

More importantly, Carpenter’s book makes clear that tremendous resources, time, effort, and cost—around $300,000 per year after a substantial initial investment—are needed to undo looting on this scale. Repatriating everything Miller stole was akin to shutting down a major natural history museum, removing all the objects in a single week, and deaccessioning each one, piece by piece, over subsequent years.

Because of the vast scope of the collection, Carpenter’s team had to navigate numerous local, federal, foreign, and international laws and treaties to determine culpability and manage returns, including some obscure ones like the Abandoned Shipwreck Act and the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.

They also had to determine the origins of all the skeletal remains and try to coordinate reburial with dozens of affected Native American nations and clans; in 2013 there were 566 federally recognized tribes, each with its own burial practices and beliefs. Early on in negotiations with Native communities, Carpenter made a pledge that out of respect for the remains his team would never subject them to invasive testing.

Without the option of using DNA testing or radiocarbon assays, the forensics specialists had to rely on comparative osteology, an old-fashioned system of measuring skulls and bones that has a dark history intertwined with scientific racism. To help determine the ancestry of Miller’s supposed Crazy Horse skeleton, for example, they used Howells Craniometric Data Set, a set of cranial measurements based on a collection of 2,500 skulls from around the world collected for museums, often under highly dubious circumstances.

Grave robbing in pursuit of scientific study or morbid spectacle goes back centuries in Western culture. The sixteenth-century anatomist Andreas Vesalius, who revolutionized the study of the human body, broke into tombs to procure dead bodies and collected the corpses of convicts from the gallows and the gibbet. Anatomical lessons in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century, depicted in paintings by Rembrandt and other Dutch masters, used the bodies of executed criminals. Up until the mid-nineteenth century the law largely turned a blind eye when American medical students conducted so-called resurrections from cemeteries to provide cadavers for medical dissections.

But the looting of graves of Native Americans and other indigenous people is a particularly heinous chapter in the history of Western expansionism. The Pilgrims robbed Native graves upon arriving in North America in 1620, and Thomas Jefferson, among many others, continued the practice, writes the Native historian Amy Lonetree in Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (2012). This activity dramatically increased in the nineteenth century, when archaeologists and anthropologists who espoused racial theories of cultural evolution sought out human specimens to support them. In the 1860s the US Army Medical Museum urged field doctors to collect indigenous remains for scientific research, and some 4,500 crania were delivered to the museum, many of which were transferred to the Smithsonian Institution in the 1890s.

“To the physical anthropologist, human skulls provided a means to scientifically define the races,” writes David Hurst Thomas in Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (2000). “By conflating cultural differences with disparities in human intelligence, scientific racism created a global cultural hierarchy.”

The anthropologist Franz Boas, who established several important Northwest Native collections at the American Museum of Natural History in the late nineteenth century, began his career as a grave robber. In May 1888 he traveled to British Columbia on a contract with the British Association for the Advancement of Science and the Canadian government to conduct a “general survey” of the local Native populations, which required that he bring home a collection of skulls and skeletal parts for study. “It is most unpleasant work to steal bones from a grave,” he wrote. “But what is the use, someone has to do it.”

Desecration of tribal graves was normal practice for ethnographers. Such body snatching continued unabated for another hundred years, until Congress passed the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990. By then museums, federal agencies, and private collectors in the US held anywhere between 300,000 to 2.5 million Native bodies, according to Lonetree.

Yet even in 2013, when Carpenter first got wind of Miller’s collection, it was still unusual for the US government to concern itself with indigenous gravesite desecration. He saw the case as “an opportunity to turn a page on the FBI’s relationship with tribal communities and to send a clear message that this kind of criminal behavior would not go unanswered.” In The Grave Robber, Carpenter describes Miller’s impunity about robbing graves as part of a “Manifest Destiny ideology,” referring to the nineteenth-century belief that white Europeans were divinely ordained to expand US dominion across the North American continent. He doesn’t, however, delve much deeper into the roots of that ideology or explain its origins.

The anthropologist Chip Colwell’s excellent book Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits (2017) gives a better introduction to the legacy of Manifest Destiny and the handling of Native remains. As American settlers advanced westward, more and more military forces were dispatched to “pacify” the tribes that lived there, which often involved massacres, scalping, and collection of Native body parts as proof of conquest. “Americans newly settled in the West welcomed, even begged for, the wholesale slaughter of all Indians,” Colwell writes. Under orders from the federal government, Native American bodies were collected from massacre sites and battlegrounds before they could be buried:

Over decades, thousands of bodies and funerary objects were amassed from battlefields, prisoner camps, cemeteries, hospitals, and archeological sites—all part of a national project to gather Indian bodies in the name of scientific progress. This formal project of collecting Indian bodies merely extended a longer American tradition. Since the first European settlers arrived in North America, they understood their new country was covered in graves and earthworks of ancient peoples.

During the FBI’s search operation at his farmhouse, Miller, who granted the team access, was allowed to stay and watch. He hovered behind the agents as they picked through his cupboards, and he often eerily played the pipe organ in another room while they worked.

At one point, Miller objected that agents were removing so many bones. “Why are you taking all of my Indians?” he demanded. “I thought you were here for the pots.” Carpenter at first tried to patiently explain why some might be offended by his grave robbing. Then “Miller sneered, ‘If it’s just a bunch of dead Indians that make you squeamish, go ahead and take ‘em.’”

In a rare moment when Carpenter was unable to hold back his anger, he snapped back, “Okay, Don, if that’s how you feel about it, then you won’t mind if I go down to the cemetery and dig up your dead grandparents and take them home to put them on my mantel?” Miller made no attempt to respond. Carpenter describes Miller’s “emotional and cognitive dissonance” as a psychological problem that lies

at the core of his sixty-plus years of desecration and abuse of human remains. It wasn’t ignorance. It was deliberate refusal to see Native ancestors, or any Indigenous peoples for that matter, as deserving of the same dignity and reverence he claimed for his own.

Nonetheless, Carpenter was mostly courteous and lenient with the old man in order to secure as much cooperation as possible. The district attorney agreed that given Miller’s age, he should not be prosecuted. “Prosecution would also stop repatriation work cold because it would involve a lengthy forfeiture process, with an appraised value required for every artifact before a court awarded judgment to the government or Miller,” Carpenter writes. “Even if Miller passed away, the government might be locked in litigation with his estate for years before cultural affiliation work could begin.” In exchange for immunity from prosecution, Miller and his second wife, Sandra, agreed to voluntarily relinquish ownership claims to the materials the FBI had seized. He died a year later, on March 22, 2015.

In spite of this remarkable leniency, there were still people who felt that Miller had been treated unfairly. Many of his supporters continued to maintain that he had never done anything immoral or illegal. A few months before his death, the Indiana Archaeological Society honored him with a Lifetime Achievement Award for having “given unselfishly…to the advancement of not only the Indiana Archaeological Society, but amateur archaeology in general.”

Carpenter doesn’t explore the ways in which Miller’s crimes were connected to the long legacy of anthropology and archaeology that was the basis of the collections in so many American and European ethnological and medical museums. He argues that “the Miller case was at the forefront of a global shift in attitudes toward the return of cultural patrimony,” and that is certainly the case, as far as popular opinion goes, especially in relation to illegally obtained objects.

But considering how much resistance Carpenter seemed to face within the FBI while handling the case, one is left to wonder how committed the bureau would be to taking on a similar case again, especially given the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion and its “anti-woke” agenda. As for turning a page on the FBI’s relationship with tribal communities, we don’t hear enough from those communities in Carpenter’s account to know their views on the matter. His sense of personal investment in ensuring the return of the stolen artifacts and reburial of human remains is demonstrated by his results, however: by the time he retired in 2024, his team had successfully repatriated 92 percent of what had been seized from Miller’s collection to communities in the US, Canada, Cambodia, Ecuador, Mexico, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, and Spain.