Margaret Stevens’s testimony confirmed this account—she’d seen both the buggy and Benton’s truck that night.
The family reached their contact, transferred to a covered wagon, and made the journey to Indiana over several days. They arrived in Elkhart County in late July 1992, exhausted, traumatized, and grateful to be alive.
“We thought we’d only stay a year or two,” Ruth says. “We thought maybe after Benton forgot about us, we could go home. But years passed. The children grew. We built a new life. And Jacob was afraid that if we ever went back, Benton would find us.”
So they stayed. Joseph and Rebecca Miller raised their children, worked hard, attended church, and never spoke about Ohio or their former life.
“The guilt was terrible,” Ruth says, crying. “We’d abandoned our community, our church, our families. We’d left under false pretenses, living under false names. The Amish don’t do such things. We’re honest people. But Jacob said it was better to be alive and ashamed than righteous and dead.”
When Jacob died in 2001, Ruth considered returning to Ohio and confessing everything. But by then, her children had built lives in Indiana. Aaron was married with children of his own. Sarah had joined a Mennonite church and was teaching school. David was apprenticing as a blacksmith. They’d all survived the trauma of their childhood, built healthy lives, and Ruth didn’t want to disrupt them.
“I thought I’d take the secret to my grave,” she says. “I thought it was better that way. But when the detective came to my door and said they’d found the hidden room, I knew God was telling me it was time to tell the truth.”
