76. The Theology of Submission and the Death of a Pastors Wife

Monte Mader (0:00)

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Monte Mader (1:00)

At 2.54 in the afternoon on April 27th, 2024, the Robeson County E911 Communication Center in North Carolina received a call from an 843 number. The woman asked whether her phone could be located. She said, I'm about to kill myself and I just want my family to know where to find me. The line went dead and the dispatcher was not able to call her back. Deputies were dispatched to Lumber River State Park at 3.03 and arrived at 3.31, searching the banks with State Park Rangers while the Sheriff's Aviation Division put a drone over the water. A man who had been fishing brought detectives a bag he'd found on the ground with a driver's license inside. He told them he had heard someone crying and then a gunshot. At 4.23, a kayaker called 911 to report a body in the water. Her name was Mica Miller. She was 30 years old and according to her own obituary, she was a Solid Rock Church worship leader, graphics designer, youth leader, women's ministry leader and the pastor's assistant. She was also married to that pastor.

Two days earlier, John Paul Miller had been served with separation papers. That morning, she had walked into Dick's Pawn Shop on Mr. Joe White Avenue and purchased a 9mm Sig Sauer and a box of ammunition. Robeson County Medical Examiner Dr. Richard Johnson ruled the death of suicide by self-inflicted gunshot wound and the ruling stands right now. But how did it get here?

How does a pastor's wife, a woman who had led worship in that building nearly every Sunday since she was 13 years old, end up alone on a riverbank in another state in the middle of a Saturday afternoon with a gun she bought two hours before?

The answer we're going to try to find lives in police reports, dispatch logs, diaries, probate and family court filings, two civil complaints and a federal indictment. Her tires were slashed twice in one week with a purchased tire deflation device. Two tracking devices were recovered from her car. She was involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility for 48 hours on her husband's word. And while she was locked inside her car, her phone, her laptop, her purse, her keys and her notary seal all disappeared. And federal prosecutors allege he then used at least one of her accounts to send messages that recipients believed were coming from Mica. She told a 911 dispatcher he had put his hands around her throat a week beforehand. He contacted her more than 50 times in a single day. A nude photograph of her was posted online without her consent. Between February 7th and April 15th, 2024, she contacted law enforcement at least 14 times.

She also said out loud to multiple people exactly how she expected it to end. Sitting in her friend Bruna Paben's living room, she said, I don't want to die. He's going to put a bullet in my head and then tell everybody I killed myself. In a sworn affidavit, her sister Sierra quoted her and said, quote, if I end up with a bullet in my head, it was not by me, it was JP, end quote.

She is the second person connected to John Paul Miller to die in circumstance. His own congregation could not explain. On the morning of September 6th, 2021, Chris Skinner, a veteran paralyzed from the neck down, dependent on a wheelchair, was found in a community pool on Yorkshire Parkway. His sister says he had confronted his pastor roughly two weeks earlier about the affair the pastor was having with his wife, Susie Skinner. That wife is now married to John Paul Miller as of June 1st, 2025 and now leads worship at the church. Miller has never been charged in connection with Mica's death. A federal grand jury indicted him on December 17th, 2025 on cyber-stalking and statements. He pleaded not guilty and goes to trial next month. Almost everything done to Mica Miller was technically legal. The submission theology she was raised in is legal. Preaching from a stage that a wife cannot refuse her husband sexually is legal and he did it on video multiple times. Coercive control is not a crime in South Carolina and the bill to make it one died in committee this year without a vote. Under South Carolina law, a husband can only be charged with raping his wife if he used a weapon or force of a high and aggravated nature. And only if she reports it within 30 days. The maximum is 10 years.