Transcript of 15) Why JP Miller’s Story of Mica’s ‘Previous Suicide Attempt’ Does Not Add Up New

Hey, y'all.

It's Mandy Matney. If you're listening to Coerced, you already know that Micah Francis Miller's story runs so much deeper than what the world saw on Netflix. This week on True Sunlight, Liz Farrell and I are breaking down what Death of the Pastor's Wife left out. And trust me, it is a lot. Like JP's felon father, Reginald Wayne Miller, and how JP inherited the playbook from him. The manipulation, the lawsuit, the just-keep-preaching arrogance— straight from his daddy. Plus, we talk about the 2 Jane Doe lawsuits that Netflix barely touched, and we tell you a whole lot about JP's ex-wife that Netflix left out. Remember, Justice for Micah is a movement, not a moment, and the full story matters. So follow True Sunlight wherever you're listening right now. And check out episode 163, What Netflix Left Out of the Micah Francis Miller Story. Stay tuned, stay pesky, and stay in the sunlight. I spend most of my life following paper trails, so believe me when I say that I have done the math on my closet. And the pieces that I actually wear on repeat, they are all from Quince. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials from premium materials.

Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and washable silk. And here's the part I really respect: they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. You're paying for quality, not markup. It's not just apparel either— they bring the same approach to hotel-quality bedding, bath, and kitchen essentials. This fall, like last fall, my go-to will be my cashmere crewneck. I've reached for it basically every cool morning since it showed up, and nobody believes what I paid for it. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com/coj. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash C-O-J.

This is Coerced: The Devotion and Death of Micah Francis Miller, a Luna Shark Drop Feed. But before we begin, this episode discusses suicide in detail. If you or someone you know needs support, please call or text 988 or reach the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. And please take care while listening. My name is Grace. I'm a producer here at Luna Shark. Journalists Mandy Matney, Liz Farrell, and Beth Braden have been reporting on Micah's story for more than 2 years now for the True Sunlight podcast. Coerced is a Luna Shark production made possible by producers Kate Thomas, David Moses, and me. In April 2024, JP Miller told the world his wife was a very sick woman with a long history of suicide attempts. Over the last 3 episodes, you've heard what his own evidence and Micah's records actually show. This episode examines the one alleged attempt a record exists for: March 23rd, 2018, less than 4 months into Micah's marriage to JP, 3 months into an alleged diagnosis that she never stopped questioning. You'll hear what those months actually looked like from the inside. A 23-year-old fighting the side effects of a medication she didn't believe she needed, including a condition called akathisia, an inescapable full-body restlessness that clinical literature links to suicidal distress.

A young woman who went to exactly one therapy session where the clinician suggested JP should not be in the room. And then you'll hear Beth Braden do what this team does best— take JP's account of that March morning and test it against the clock, the map, the paperwork. His version requires gun store that opened at 9:00 AM, a felon's credit card, and a phone call at 10:00. The word you'll hear throughout this episode is alleged. By the end, you'll understand why we use it and why it matters that for 6 years, the system never asked these questions at all. Here's the show.

So just to catch you up from where we left off, Late in the summer, we had received a stack of Micah's psychiatric records from True Crime Ree, who is a TikToker connected to JP Miller. We've already told you about what was happening in December 2017, and we shared information from the reports from January, February, and early March of 2018. These were the first few months of Micah's marriage and the first few months of her first being diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. Again, Micah was 23 years old at the time. She had just had a breast augmentation surgery, which her family said she did because JP had pressured her to do so. JP denies that. He says it was Micah who wanted it. Regardless, Micah seemed to experience post-anesthesia psychosis, which is something that's known to be transient and lasts a few minutes, couple hours, up to At most a few days. She was also experiencing what seemed like a major infection from the surgery, according to statements from JP. The reports we've shared with you so far had several red flags that, while not necessarily red flags on their own, were made red flags by the context.

The context being that Micah's family and her legal team have published pages and pages of examples of alleged coercive control behavior From JP that they say contributed to Micah's death. Again, he denies all of that. The context also being, though, the stack of police reports we've seen and screenshots of text messages between JP and Micah, Micah and her friends, Micah and her family, JP and Micah's family. One of those red flags is that we were told by True Crime Re: that any handwritten marks on the records were from JP. And one of those marks turned out to be a redaction that didn't quite cover the text below it. When Beth Braden zoomed in, she could see that JP, or JP according to True Crime Re anyway, had tried to hide the part of Micah's March 8th, 2018 medical record where the doctor had written that, quote, patient and husband stop meds on their own. Or share each other's meds. This is significant because this was at a time when Micah was feeling desperate. She went from being a healthy young woman in November 2017 when, according to Micah's family and friends, JP had insisted that she secretly marry him ahead of their December 31st, 2017 wedding date so that Micah could move in with him and he could take care of her after her surgery.

After she moved in with him, her health began to fail. She was on new heavy-duty medication, including painkillers from the surgery and mood stabilizers, and she was subjected to what seemed like routine harassment for JP, or what seemed like harassment to us anyway. Imagine being 23 years old and moving in with the pastor you had known since you were 15, a guy you later accused of grooming you. A pastor who is also the man who broke up your first marriage because of an affair you had with him. A pastor who had 5 children and whose church was on the brink of financial ruin because of the affair. Then imagine having major plastic surgery where one of your breasts hardened because of an infection, according to JP. Imagine having no money and being entirely reliant on this pastor who is now your secret husband. Someone you can't tell people you're married to yet for some unknown reason. Imagine doing all that while also planning your wedding in the church where you had the affair. Think of the shame that Micah might have been dealing with at the time, or at least the stress of being the subject of gossip.

And think of the helplessness and the disillusionment. She believed that she was marrying her soulmate, and now this soulmate, the one that she had blown up her life to be with, was sending her long-winded emails about how disappointed he was in her within weeks of being married. And, and all this was within weeks of them being secretly married and weeks before their wedding. A husband who was weaponizing the Bible and establishing the terms for her on what being a godly wife was all about. Then add in that this man whom she had likely idealized and idolized up until this point was also her nurse. He was nursing her back to health. He was in charge of her care. But instead of recovering, Micah ended up with a mental health diagnosis and a long list of behaviors that JP found to be unacceptable, including Micah discussing ideas and wanting to learn new languages.

Another red flag is that Micah only went to one therapy session before her alleged suicide attempt on March 23rd, 2018. In those notes, the clinician mentioned that Micah was codependent and that the clinician had told Micah that it wasn't a good idea for JP to attend her sessions until maybe later when they could integrate some couples counseling into the mix. It seems like an indicator that JP had perhaps been ejected from the session or prevented from coming in. After this appointment, Micah opted not to return to the therapist but continued to see— Dr. Shady Duchaine. the psychiatrist, and the nurse practitioner Suzanne Harrow. JP appears to have attended most, if not all, of those appointments starting with Micah's first outpatient appointment in mid-January 2018 and extending through her alleged first suicide attempt in March 2018. In fact, another red flag is that Dr. Duchaine— Sometimes refers to Micah as they. As if she were seeing Micah and JP as one patient, or as if she was subconsciously understanding them as a unit. Could this have been a result of one being the patient and the other being the narrator of how the patient was actually doing?

It's a question we have to ask. We've told you about how Dr. Duchaine was an addiction specialist in Pennsylvania and lost her medical license for around 3 years in 2009 after pleading guilty to writing prescriptions for oxycodone to an alleged patient, a woman who was going to different pharmacies to fill said prescriptions. And we told you how in South Carolina there had been 2 complaints made against her with the State Department of Mental Health, one which included an accusation that Dr. DuChene, instead of merely reporting the facts of a patient's medical exam, Extrapolated that the patient was just trying to get disability. Both complaints appear to have been considered unfounded, and neither resulted in any disciplinary action against Dr. DuChesne. But this was notable to us because sources in the field have identified passages of Dr. DuChesne's narratives in the medical reports as appearing to be examples of countertransference, where the doctor was allowing her personal bias to affect how she was interpreting Micah's health. During this time period, Micah was struggling with the side effects of her medication, specifically a condition called akathisia, where your body feels the inescapable impulse to move. Like a more severe case of restless leg syndrome, but where you feel the need to get up and move around rather than just kick your leg and shake it off.

Micah was also exhausted and repeatedly mentioned a desire to return to work. And she felt sad in a way that she never had before. In addition, Micah truly did not believe she had bipolar disorder. At her first outpatient appointment that we have record of in January 2018, she expressed concerns about her diagnosis and her hospitalization in December, but the clinician did not expound on what those were. Within weeks of her initial appointments, she was reporting severe depression and even Suicidal ideation, where she would think about how she would do it, but said that she would not and could not kill herself. On February 1st, 2018, Micah was described in the medical report as being despondent and showing no emotion. In this appointment, she told doctors that she did not believe she had bipolar disorder but instead had a nervous breakdown in December 2017 when JP said that she was speaking gibberish. That gibberish, by the way, largely consisted of Micah talking about her job as a salesperson at a car dealership and wanting to learn Spanish so she could expand her client base, as well as stories from the Bible and theories about God and energy.

We have also shared with you the content of videos that got posted online by another TikToker whose aim seems to be to show that Micah did have bipolar disorder. To us and others, those videos show a young woman frustrated with her husband and feeling misunderstood, possibly persecuted. Frankly, they show a very young woman who was catching on to how her words and her behavior could be twisted and used against her. She was also catching on to the hypocrisy of her situation. When JP said something quirky or something philosophical related to the teachings of the Bible, He wasn't seen as crazy, but when Micah did it, it was suddenly time to call the doctors, right? And we'll be right back. Hey, y'all, it's Mandy Matney. If you're listening to Coerced, you already know that Micah Frances Miller's story runs so much deeper than what the world saw on Netflix. This week on True Sunlight, Liz Farrell and I are breaking down what Death of the Pastor's Wife left out. And trust me, it is a lot. Like JP's felon father, Reginald Wayne Miller, and how JP inherited the playbook from him. The manipulation, the lawsuit, the just keep preaching arrogance.

Straight from his daddy. Plus, we talk about the 2 Jane Doe lawsuits that Netflix barely touched, And we tell you a whole lot about JP's ex-wife that Netflix left out. Remember, Justice for Micah is a movement, not a moment, and the full story matters. So follow True Sunlight wherever you're listening right now and check out episode 163, What Netflix Left Out of the Micah Frances Miller Story. Stay tuned, stay pesky, and stay in the sunlight. I spend most of my life following paper trails, so believe me when I say that I have done the math on my closet. And the pieces that I actually wear on repeat, they are all from Quince. Quince makes elevated everyday essentials from premium materials: Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and washable silk. And here's the part I really respect: they work directly with ethical factories and cut out the middlemen. You're paying for quality, not markup. It's not just apparel either. They bring the same approach to hotel-quality bedding, bath, and kitchen essentials. This fall, like last fall, my go-to will be my cashmere crewneck. I've reached for it basically every cool morning since it showed up, and nobody believes what I paid for it.

Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com/coj. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. That's quiince.com/coj.

Anyway, this is where we were at when we last left off. The medical records really seem to show that Micah had this diagnosis thrust on her prematurely and With an influence coming from JP's account of her behavior. And the medical staff at the outpatient clinic didn't seem open to exploring her contentions with her. Now, all of that is our impression of the records, but nowhere in the early records do we see where anyone had ever asked Micah why she thought she might have been having a nervous breakdown and why she thought this wasn't bipolar disorder. Nowhere does it seem to give her account of what was going on at the time. Instead, Micah is depicted as defensive and defiant, and JP is depicted as the reasonable arbiter of her health, even after a doctor noted that JP was sharing his medication with Micah. In other words, it looks like no one was listening to Micah. Instead, they were all telling her, This is who you are now. And every time she protested, their response was, see, you're acting crazy. They appeared to be relying almost solely on JP's depiction of Micah, which they either got from JP himself, according to the records, or from Micah, who might have believed JP's interpretations at the time to some extent.

Or maybe Micah felt scared and dependent on her new husband, her pastor, who was 15 years older than she was. And didn't feel free to speak up because she wanted him there with her. Or maybe she didn't want to cause more trouble for herself by saying something that would upset JP. Whatever the case, it seems like Micah wasn't entirely free to speak her mind in a way that wouldn't result in more lengthy pontificating emails from JP. This is where the cycle started, or really the downward spiral. If Micah was misdiagnosed in December 2017, she spent the next nearly 7 years trying to accept it. and then extract herself from it. But once that diagnosis was put on paper, it became the lens that everyone who knew about it saw her through, and it legitimized JP's accounts. An example of this is in 2024, this year, when JP had Micah involuntarily hospitalized, which meant involving the police. Once he involved the police with that, with the notarized form from Waccamaw Center for Mental Health saying Micah was homicidal and suicidal, the police marked her in the system as 10 96, which is the call number for mental subject.

It's a label that can help save a person's life in that the police can immediately identify them as mentally ill and understand any unusual words or behaviors coming from them as related to that, as opposed to being signs of a threat to the police. But it's also a label that doomed Micah. It meant dispatchers would be more dismissive or dubious of her claims. It meant that police responded to her calls about being harassed with this in their heads. The involuntary hospitalization in February 2024 was the ultimate power move by JP. And if there's anything we've learned about him, it's that he doesn't seem to hesitate to use law enforcement as his own personal private security firm, meaning he's very aware of how the police can help him. Anyway, then it got worse, right?

Because when Micah's body was found in April, it looks like the medical examiner's office largely relied on these same medical records and Micah's alleged suicide attempt from March 23rd, 2018 to determine that Micah's death was by suicide. In other words, these same medical records that contain example after example of JP's involvement and influence on the medical staff were used to support their theory that Micah's death was by suicide. And from there, JP's narrative got to be that he was desperately trying to prevent her death, that he alone cared about Micah's mental health. By the way, in that same report we told you about, where JP appears to have tried to redact parts of the record where Dr. Duchaine noted that Micah and JP were stopping her meds, counter to her directions, and JP and Micah were sharing meds, Dr. Duchaine had suggested hospitalization. Suggested it. Micah was saying, yes, I have thought about killing myself and I can't live the rest of my life like this. And the doctor only suggested hospitalization. She didn't appear to even ask if there were any firearms in the home. This was a moment when hospitalization could have been justifiably Involuntary.

This was a moment when a trained psychiatrist maybe should have stepped in to say, something is not right here and I cannot let the patient's husband dictate the treatment plan here. But that's exactly what the doctor seemed to do because JP said, nope, I got this. I'm with her 100% of the time. I won't let her out of my sight. Which, knowing what the last 18 months of Micah's life looked like, And knowing what the chaos of the early days of her marriage looked like, that also seemed like a big red flag, right? He wouldn't let her out of his sight. They were together 100% of the time. We should note that other than the sole therapist's report, there is no evidence that clinicians asked to speak to Micah without JP present to suss out whether there were any relationship concerns. The age difference alone should have prompted that, in our opinion. Because was he smothering her with his presence? Was he giving her medication that wasn't prescribed to her because he thought it would help or because it further incapacitated her and made her his? Made it so that she couldn't leave him like his first wife did, right?

Needless to say, JP did. let Micah out of his sight, according to the records. On March 23rd, 2018, Suzanne Harrell noted that JP called her at 10 AM. Here's David with the rest of that narrative from her report.

He reported the client went to Dick's Pawn Shop this AM and purchased gun. She then went home and shot the gun into the ground to test the power. The neighbor heard her, and then client tried to shoot herself, and the gun locked up. Client presents with suicidal ideation with an attempt to harm self which was unsuccessful. She reports since December she has— and the rest of this sentence and the next are in all caps— HAS BEEN WAKING UP EVERY MORNING WITH THOUGHTS OF BUYING A GUN AND KILLING HERSELF. I can't get these thoughts out of my mind. Client is very tearful and states, I wanted it to work. She has been medication compliant and husband reports she had 2 good weeks once meds were adjusted in early March. Client remains actively suicidal.

At the bottom of the medical record, there's another note that states that a Dick's Pawn Shop employee Gave her a lesson on how to load the gun, and that JP was going to return the gun to the pawn shop. Now, this report says Micah wanted it to work, presumably it being the suicide, which could absolutely be what she said. But given the sloppiness of other parts of these reports and other things that Micah has said repeatedly about work during this time period, over the previous few months, We have to raise this question. Did she say, I wanted it to work, or I wanted to work? It might seem like a dumb question to ask here, but we know that Micah felt responsible for providing for her younger siblings at this time. She was very worried about not having an income, about not being able to go to work or being able to work because of the medication. Was she at a breaking point with how JP was treating her? It's just a question that we have to ask. Again, we don't know the answers, obviously, and again, it's 100% possible this report is accurate. But there are so many parts to this that don't make sense.

For instance, why did JP call the nurse practitioner and not the police? We've checked with Horry County Police Department and they do not have a record for getting a call from JP that day. Okay, so maybe JP didn't know how to handle this, right? That's understandable. Maybe he felt like calling the police was unnecessary. But it's interesting that JP seems to have no problem calling the police for the most minor of issues. We have years of reports from calls made from Solid Rock. Most are, for lack of a better term, pretty Karen-y. They're about things like kids playing in the parking lot or cars being parked there, or remember the one where the cops were called because someone had entered the church to ask for water? So maybe the neighbors would have called the police, right? No. There is no record of anyone calling the police about gunshots, a suicide attempt, a woman with a gun, or anything related to this incident on that day. And here's another inconsistency. This is JP's explanation of what happened on March 23rd, 2018, from his interview with NewsNation reporter Rich McHugh.

One other time when she tried it the same way, the bullet got lodged and then she moved the gun away and it shot off when the neighbors came out, you know, running and grabbing her. So I'd imagine she tried to make sure the gun works. Again, you have to imagine she wasn't depressed in this moment, like she was euphoric. She wasn't thinking, oh, life's horrible. She wasn't thinking— which this brings me peace because I know this about her. I know what happens when she gets this far. Um, into the mental illness, um, she wasn't, um, you know, thinking, I hate my life. She was thinking, oh, this is a great idea. This is what my mind's telling me to do. That's how psychotic that those diseases are.

She wasn't depressed, y'all. She was just euphoric. So again, another inconsistency. The medical reports seem to document someone who is desperate for help at that time because of this overwhelming depression she was feeling. And an email JP included in his probate case filing showed, allegedly, Micah sending an email to a doctor pleading for help with her depression. And yet here JP is saying she tried to kill herself because of Euphoria. Also, notice he didn't mention that she shot the ground first. He just says the gun jammed and indicated she was ambushed before she could fire off another shot. So That doesn't seem to match up either, right? Now here's JP's account of this incident to the TikToker named Flo in an interview JP did with him this past summer.

And so I didn't know any better, but I'd say, baby, you know, you're not going to do that. You're going to do great. I'm going to pray for you. You know, you're going to go to work and, and we're going to have dinner together and life's going to be great, you know. And, um, and that was around the time, I believe, if I'm getting this right, So many times, I believe that's one of the times where she got the gun from Dick's Pawn Shop before and, um, went out front in front of the house and tried to fire it, but it got stuck. And then she ended up firing it, and I heard it. The neighbor said it. We all came in and crashed her, you know, jumped her and took the gun, and I took her back to the hospital.

So it's interesting that he said, go to work, right? It's interesting that when she got into a suicidal frame of mind, JP is saying he would assure her By letting her know that life would be great, she could go to work, and they could get something to eat. Anyway, we're not making this up, this idea of Micah working seeming to be some sort of issue, especially for her. Or rather, it seems to come up a lot in conjunction with all of this. But again, there are inconsistencies here. Did you notice how in this account she's not shooting the ground first either? Before we ask our next question, let's have David read from the 2nd March 23rd, 2018 report. The doctor listed Micah's chief complaint as, quote, I just want to die.

Patient presented with husband on a crisis state due to suicidal attempt. She stole husband's credit card and went to Dick's Pawn Shop and bought a gun. This morning, prior to the husband getting out of bed, she went outside to kill herself. She decided to test the gun first by shooting it into the ground. When she tried again to her head, it jammed. The neighbors came and stopped her. Patient admitted that since she left the psych unit the first time, she has been entertaining the idea of buying a gun to kill herself. Every morning I wake up and immediately a huge sadness comes over me and I want to kill myself. Husband said that she was doing very well with no depression symptoms, but patient said it was very different inside her head. She also said, quote, I'm sorry to tell you that I am going to eventually kill myself, end quote.

Now, if I'm JP, I'm going to point to this report as evidence that Micah was always bound for a death by suicide. If I'm the medical examiner in North Carolina, I'm going to see this and think, oh, okay, that explains the empty casing on the riverbank. It explains why Micah shot the gun twice in April. If I'm the police, I'm going to look at that and think, ah, yes, a person with a history of suicidal tendencies has killed herself. Case closed. But here is the problem. We keep seeing cases where law enforcement immediately write off young women's deaths as suicide. And because of that, Evidence doesn't get collected or it gets destroyed. Until investigators look at the context of the victim's life leading up to the woman's death, they shouldn't be case closing anything at all. In Micah's case, her family immediately spoke out and brought the context to the attention of law enforcement. In Sarah Colucci's case, her family had to push and push for law enforcement to consider the context before her death was understood to be a murder and well before her husband was arrested. In Sandra Birchmore's case, who was the young pregnant woman from outside of Boston, her death was officially ruled a suicide, but her friends and family knew that that couldn't be true and federal authorities stepped in to investigate.

More than 3 years after her death, the local police officer who had allegedly groomed her since she was 14 years old and who was allegedly the father of her unborn child, was charged in her murder. Every day we are sent similar stories where murder victims are mislabeled as deaths by suicide, only for investigators to find out, oh yeah, the more you look into this, things don't add up. Now, we are not saying Micah was murdered. JP denies harming Micah. He denies abusing her. He denies everything negative that you could possibly say about him before you've even said it. So let's get that on the record. He's never been charged with harming her in any way. But from what we understand, the FBI is continuing to investigate Micah's death. That said, we strongly believe that no medical examiner should ever declare a woman's death a suicide until law enforcement has considered the entire context surrounding her death. This isn't to say that women don't ever choose to die by suicide. We are just saying great harm is done to a murder case by medical examiners trying to check boxes and investigators who simply do not want another open case to worry about.

No one should be able to kill their partners and stage it as a suicide with a reasonable expectation of getting away with it. But that is the world that we live in right now, even though this is a problem with a very easy solution. And we'll be right back. Hey y'all, it's Mandy Matney. If you're listening to Coerced, you already know that Micah Francis Miller's story runs so much deeper than what the world saw on Netflix. This week on True Sunlight, Liz Farrell and I are breaking down what Death of the Pastor's Wife left out, and trust me, it is a lot. Like JP's felon father, Reginald Wayne Miller, and how JP inherited the playbook from him. The manipulation, the lawsuit, the just keep preaching arrogance. Straight from his daddy. Plus, we talk about the 2 Jane Doe lawsuits that Netflix barely touched. And we tell you a whole lot about JP's ex-wife that Netflix left out. Remember, Justice for Micah is a movement, not a moment, and the full story matters. So follow True Sunlight wherever you're listening right now, and check out episode 163, What Netflix Left Out of the Micah Frances Miller Story.

Stay tuned, stay pesky, and stay in the sunlight.

So that's the spiral: a diagnosis Micah contested, a doctor writing about her patient as they, medication side effects no one seemed to weigh, and a husband positioned as both nurse and narrator. That's the context surrounding March 23rd, 2018. Now for the morning itself, because there is no police report from that day, no 911 calls that we know of. What exists is JP's account relayed to clinicians. So Beth Braden ran the timeline: the store hours, the drive, the background check, the credit card which wasn't Micah's and legally could not have been JP's. Keep in mind as you listen, federal prosecutors have already alleged in the indictment JP faces on trial this October that his statements to investigators about Micah can't be trusted. Here's Liz.

We don't know how deep Robeson County Sheriff's Office went in considering the allegations of prolonged abuse leading up to Micah's death, but the fact that the FBI stepped in does feel significant and like it might speak to that. Anyway, let's talk about that second report from March 23rd. So Beth Radin did a run-through, and imagining a scenario in which Micah had driven from her house to Dick's Pawn Shop on the morning of March 23rd, 2018, purchased a gun, received a lesson on how to use it, and returned home, shot the gun once, and then tried to shoot it again, all in time for JP to call the clinician by 10 AM. Why did she do that? Because Dick's Pawn Shop didn't open until 9 AM that day. Micah and JP live about 10 minutes from Dick's without traffic. But March 23rd, 2018 was a Friday, a workday. Myrtle Beach does not have mass transit in the way that other cities do. It's more of a transport service that brings in workers from other counties. But the city has also grown faster than its infrastructure could. So what I'm saying is the morning and evening commute times are known by locals to be a bit of a slog.

So, okay, let's assume Micah got up early, stole JP's credit card, and snuck out of the house without him noticing, even though she had expressed suicidal thoughts 2 weeks earlier and he had declined to have her hospitalized because he was going to keep a close eye on her. Let's assume Micah was at Dick's Pawn Shop when the doors opened at 9. On April 27th, 2024, the day of Micah's death, Micah walked into Dick's Pawn Shop at 12:12 PM and immediately went to the cash register. She didn't stop. She didn't shop. She appeared to already know what she wanted, and it appeared to be immediately available and ready to go. At that point in her life, Micah and JP appeared to have owned multiple firearms, so it's not a stretch to imagine that she knew her way around that store in April 2024. In 2018, Micah was 23, and JP was a felon who wasn't allowed to purchase or own a firearm. But stick a pin in that one. The April 2024 purchase, which Micah made with her own debit card, came with a so-called background check to make sure she was never involuntarily hospitalized for mental issues.

Which, hello, she had been hospitalized by a state agency with records of her hospitalization. On file with local law enforcement who had labeled her as 1096. It doesn't seem to get much more clear or easier than that. So we continue to have a big question about what repercussions might exist for Dick's Pawn Shop on this one. On the day of her death, Micah was in and out of the pawn shop within 22 minutes. According to a Dick's employee, a background check takes between 15 minutes and a couple of days. Micah was in and out of Dick's in 2024 without shopping for a gun, without even asking questions about which one she should get, maybe without being shown the difference between types of weapons, and without receiving a lesson on how to load the weapon. So is it reasonable to believe that in 2018, Micah was also in and out of Dick's Pawn Shop in 22 minutes and back home by 9:32-ish? I'm sure JP is nodding his head, but no, not really. In addition to the shopping, the presumed questions, the lessons from an employee, the 15-minute at least background check, Micah was using JP's credit card in 2018.

She was using the credit card of a felon to purchase a handgun. But fine, how is Dick's Pawn Shop supposed to know that, right? But it should have caused pause, right? It should have raised the issue of, one, this is a pawn shop and the person whose name is on the card isn't there. And 2, was this a straw purchase? Was the person buying the weapon for someone who was legally barred from purchasing or owning one? Those are questions that we think should have been asked. Maybe they weren't, but if they were, that would have added time to the transaction too. We also don't know if Micah had already changed her last name to Miller at that point. Her January 2018 intake form refers to her as Micah Francis still, meaning it's possible the last name on her ID didn't match the last name on JP's card at that time, right? That said, JP's account is that within an hour after Dick's Pawn Shop opened, Micah was able to choose a weapon, Get a lesson in how to load it. Have a 15-minute background check done. Fill out the ATF form. Purchase the weapon using a credit card that didn't have her name on it.

Return home through Myrtle Beach traffic. Shoot the ground and then attempt to kill herself. Or attempt to kill herself and then maybe not shot the ground. Then after that, neighbors came over and Micah was either stopped from killing herself by them or the gun jammed. 2 different stories there. Though maybe the neighbors prevented her from attempting again. Either way, we imagine there were conversations being had after JP woke up from the drama and came out to the yard. We imagine time had to have been spent on answering the question of what the hell is going on here. JP is basically saying all that occurred between 9 AM and 10 AM that morning. I mean, Maybe it happened that way, but it's interesting how often in this story we're finding circumstances like this where JP's accounts can never just stand on their own because there's always a moment that's like, wait a minute. A moment where things start to fall apart. Oh, another wait a minute moment? JP's apparent immediate mention of the neighbors hearing the gunshot. That could mean nothing. It could just be a detail that spilled out of him under duress. But in the business that we're in, we have learned that spontaneous utterances, the things a person says consciously or subconsciously in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event, can be very telling.

Remember Alex on the phone with 911 talking about how Paul was involved in a boat crash and there were people who were after him? Remember the second time Alex was on the phone with 911, and the first words out of his mouth weren't, I've been shot in the head. Instead, we got a backstory about his flat tire, which also turned out to be a lie. So experience has taught us to raise this question: did JP mention that detail about the neighbor's hearing to the clinician at 10 AM because he wanted her to believe it really happened the way he said it did? I realize how that sounds, by the way. We have 2 different clinicians documenting that Micah made statements about wanting to kill herself and then owned up to trying to kill herself. And we believe that's real, that the clinicians were writing what they were being told. But again, we're not always clear on what part is JP talking to clinicians and what part is Micah. We also don't know everything that was going on behind the scenes at that time. What was happening in their house on the morning of March 23rd?

We know what we know, though. Micah was being told who she was and what she was and why she was a broken person by JP and by the clinicians around that time, and no one seemed to be listening to her. We know everything we've seen of JP's behavior since November 2022, when Micah escaped him and fled to her sister's home 4 hours away Right up until today. We know that behavior started long before then. It was present in the very first moments of their marriage, and some of it was even present in his marriage to Allison, according to court records.

So, was Micah suicidal on March 23rd, 2018, because she was misdiagnosed and not on the right meds? Was she suicidal because she was being given medication that wasn't hers and randomly being taken off the medication by her husband, Dr. JP? Was she suicidal because of all of that plus the circumstances, the absolute chaos and stress she was dealing with at the time? Was she suicidal because of how she was being taken care of? Micah's list includes accusations of JP doing cruel things, Like preventing Micah from sleeping. So was she sleep deprived in March 2018? Was she eating? Within days of her being put on lithium, JP was already making notes in his emails to her about her weight gain and what he called poor eating habits and lack of exercise. Was she also trying to lose weight at the time of this incident? Micah stayed in the hospital for a week after this. On April 5th, she had her first outpatient visit. Between her hospitalization and this appointment, she had resigned from the car dealership and was working at a Christian coffee shop with the other pastors' wives, which was noted in the records. Her clinician advised her to keep stress levels low and noted that the gun had been returned to the pawn shop, something that we should note would be considered a self-report.

Without seeing the paperwork, we're not going to say for sure that it was returned. Remember, JP told the State Pardon Board in 2022 that he had forgotten he even had the felony charge on his record. The clinician also noted that Micah was more receptive to her diagnosis of bipolar. In April 2024, the public was told by JP that Micah was a very sick woman who had a long history of suicide attempts. This is the only alleged attempt that we have seen a record of, and we're saying alleged because there are red flags in the medical records. Pieces of JP's account of what happened on March 23rd, 2018 simply don't make sense. We've seen his emails to Micah from the first weeks of their marriage and, in our opinions, they contain evidence of coercive control tendencies. There is evidence that he was doing his own thing when it came to Micah's medications. He refused the doctor's recommendation for hospitalization when Micah was clearly under duress. This same man who wrote page after page of Micah's new diagnosis, who said he was warned that she would be repeatedly hospitalized for the rest of her life, this man was suddenly like, oh, I got this.

We saw this same thing again in November 2022 when Micah was in clear medical distress. JP wanted to cart her away from the hospital and getting admitted and was only stopped because police were called. We saw how he immediately sought to prevent this from ever happening again by drawing up power of attorney papers for Micah. We saw JP's In a text in November 2022, when he was furious at her for leaving, not one time did he mention her mental health, her alleged diagnosis, her medication, or any fears that she was having a break from reality. Not one time did he express a fear that she could be suicidal or on a path to harming herself. Instead, And he berated her and he threatened her over and over about how bad of a wife he thought she was. He made sure that she knew he was locked and loaded and on his way to come and get her. We're saying alleged because we have seen what Micah's life looked like in the months and weeks leading up to her death when she was trying to leave JP and He responded by deploying every tool he could to seemingly destroy her.

We're saying alleged because while we don't trust JP's account of anything, the system did. Over and over again. We have a lot more to share with you on that, including JP's recent interactions with local police that we have a lot more questions about. For now, stay tuned, stay pesky, and stay in the sunlight.

1 hour. That is the window JP's account requires for a gun purchase, a lesson, a background check, a drive home through Myrtle Beach traffic, and everything that allegedly happened after. Maybe it happened that way. But as Liz said, JP's accounts can never stand on their own. There seems to always be a moment where they start to fall apart. And this account, this one hour in March 2018, became the cornerstone of everything that followed. The history of suicide attempts JP announced to the world, the medical history box on a North Carolina medical examiner's report, and the decision that Micah's death needed no autopsy. A 6-year-old story told by one man who was load-bearing for all of it. And the system took his word over and over until finally someone didn't. Next time in our series, the FBI comes to JP Miller's door. The search, the November 2024 arrest, the federal indictment, and where everything stands now, one month before JP Miller faces a jury in Florence, If this episode was heavy for you, 988 is there around the clock, and so is the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Micah asked for help so many times, and if you need it, ask.

Please reach out. Someone is listening.

Coerced: The Devotion and Death of Micah Frances Miller is a Luna Shark production. With reporting from journalists Mandy Matney, Liz Farrell, and Beth Braden. Made possible by producers Kate Thomas, Grace Hills, and David Moses. Learn more about our mission and membership at lunasharkmedia.com.