But at the Miller farm, three miles outside the village of Berlin, there was only silence.
Samuel Yoder noticed it first. Yoder, the Millers’ nearest neighbor, was accustomed to hearing the sounds of the Miller children playing in the yard, the clatter of Jacob Miller’s carpentry tools in his workshop, the rhythmic chop of wood being split. That morning, riding past the farm on his way to town, Yoder heard nothing.
“The silence struck me as wrong,” Yoder recalls now, thirty-three years later. “On an Amish farm, there’s always sound. Children, animals, work. But the Miller place was quiet as a cemetery.”
By mid-morning, Yoder’s concern had grown into alarm. He rode to the farm and found the gate standing open—unusual for Jacob Miller, who was meticulous about securing his property. The barn doors were unlatched. Horses remained in their stalls, clearly not yet fed that morning. Chickens scratched aimlessly in the yard, their feeding trough empty.
