ABOUT scott
j miller
Scott J. Miller grew up believing that the truth eventually finds its way to the surface, even when a whole town has spent decades trying to keep it buried. That belief was tested more than once in his own life, and it became the driving force behind the investigation that would consume the next several years of his life.
Long before he was an author, Scott was simply a man with unanswered questions, questions that officials had closed the file on, that neighbors had quietly agreed not to discuss, and that he himself had almost given up on. But "almost" isn’t the same as giving up, and Scott’s refusal to let the case rest is exactly what led him down a path of old records, forgotten witnesses, and a truth that had been hiding in plain sight for 47 years.
For years, Scott carried the weight of a story that officially had no more chapters left to tell. The case was closed. The town had moved on. And yet, every time he passed a familiar street corner or heard an old name mentioned in passing conversation, the same nagging feeling returned, that something about the accepted version of events simply didn’t add up. Most people would have let that feeling fade with time. Scott didn’t.
What began as a quiet, private curiosity slowly turned into something far more deliberate. Late nights were spent combing through old newspaper archives on library microfilm machines. Weekends disappeared into courthouse basements, sorting through boxes of records nobody had touched in years. Phone calls to retired officers were often met with silence, hesitation, or a flat refusal to discuss “old business". But every closed door only confirmed to Scott that there was still something worth finding on the other side of it.
Piece by piece, the picture started to change. A detail here that didn’t match an old report. A name there that kept resurfacing in conversations, people quickly tried to steer away from. What Scott slowly uncovered wasn’t just a single overlooked fact; it was a pattern of decisions, made by multiple people over multiple years, that had quietly protected the wrong version of events for nearly half a century.
Scott has never described himself as an investigator by trade, and he’s the first to admit that he made mistakes along the way, approached the wrong people too soon, followed leads that went nowhere, and spent more nights than he can count questioning whether it was even worth continuing. But he also says that every dead end taught him something, and that persistence, more than any special skill, is what ultimately cracked a case everyone else had agreed to leave alone.
What started as a personal search for closure slowly turned into a full investigation, one meticulous enough to reopen a case the world had long since closed, and honest enough to name the people who had worked to keep it that way. Along the way, Scott became something he never set out to be: an advocate not just for his own family’s answers, but for anyone whose case had gone cold simply because it was easier for everyone else to stop asking questions.
Today, Scott splits his time between writing, public speaking, and working with organizations that support families of unresolved cases. He’s candid about the toll the years of digging took on him personally and just as candid about why he’d do it all again without hesitation. The Buried Truth is the result of that decade-long pursuit: not just a book, but the culmination of a life spent refusing to accept silence as an answer.
