Mica Miller's Church Chose JP Miller Over Her

Tony Brueski (0:01)

This is Hidden Killers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke.

Tony Brueski (0:09)

JP and Mica Miller, if you've watched The Death of a Pastor's Wife on Netflix, you probably got some questions and you probably got some thoughts. I'm going to guess if you were a living, breathing human being who absorbed anything in that documentary and what a documentary that was. MicaMiller's death was officially ruled an S, but the public conversation refuses to let JP Miller off the hook because there's a lot of stuff here and federal charges against him for the events leading up to that S. Between the constant GPS tracking, slash tire allegations, church gossip campaigns and bizarre pulpit declarations, this case exposes a terrifying reality of coercive control. What it is, what it means, what it looks like. I think a lot of people don't have any idea what coercive control looks like because they've been around it for so much of their life. And putting a name to shitty behavior that's just always been a norm by a lot of the people in your world, especially family and things of that nature is kind of a weird thing to do. You mean that's wrong? You mean there's something to that? It's not just this being that. We're digging into the psychological end of this, the psychology of psychological erosion, where domestic abuse hides in plain sight, how a tight-knit community looks the other way. And what happens when someone is systematically driven to the edge? Your questions, you've been dropping them in our many videos about this. So thank you for that. We're going to go to some of those today in a Q&A segment.

With Robin Dreeke, retired FBI Special Agent, Chief of the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program and my co-host.

Yeah, this is one of those cases.

Robin Dreeke (1:57)

Pages and pages of notes is what this is.

Tony Brueski (2:00)

I am so glad there's finally a massive spotlight on this case, because for so long it was a bunch of us with flashlights, pointing and going, hey, look, look, everybody. And then you get a bunch of people looking, and then it kind of fades away, because nobody, well, someone's dead. But I know some will say it was a murder, but technically it was not a murder, but someone is dead. And there's actually a lot of people that are dead. The more you dig into this, especially if you've been watching the coverage of this over the last few years. Let's jump into our first question from the audience. It says, watching JP preach at her memorial service and talk about her body like a piece of property was chilling.

Robin, from a behavioral perspective, what's going on the head of a guy who turns his wife's ass into into personal theater, which is observationally, I would say, what a lot of people feel he did?

Robin Dreeke (3:01)

Yeah. And what I meant by got a lot of notes on this case is because there's a lot of personality crap going on with this guy. I mean, there's so, cause it's never just one event with him. It's not just like he takes one action for one specific outcome.

It's multi-layered because he's trying to control the narrative of his former wife, his deceased wife. He's trying to exercise control of that narrative both before she did herself in and then after.

And it's also about controlling the narrative for his commune, for his cult. He's trying to mitigate any kind of criminal responsibility by what he puts out there. And then at the same time, he's trying to service his own selfish needs for his really weird perversions he has. So it's so multi-layered on so many different fronts that it's hard to really pin the one action on one outcome he's seeking. But in that moment, I'd say he is just shedding light on the fact that he objectifies women. He uses his religious background to justify his actions and rationalize them away and keep the cult involved and support him in it. Because that's exactly what he was doing in that moment. As well as controlling the narrative of how she deceased because he doesn't want to pin on him. Because he's got future wives just sitting in his audience.

Tony Brueski (4:27)

I mean, does... And if you look at the pattern of this guy's control, I mean, literally, he officiated Mica's first wedding.

And there had been allegations that there might have been something going on between them prior to this. We don't know, but their allegations are what they are. He certainly knew her, was part of the church community there from a very young age. Ends up hiring her as his babysitter or nanny.