A Pastor’s Wife’s Death Captured TikTok. There’s More to the Story

By CT Jones

CT Jones

On April 27, 2024, 30-year-old Mica Miller dialed 9-1-1. When dispatchers answered, the pastor’s wife asked if they could track her phone. Then, she said she was going to kill herself. 

Police found Mica’s body in North Carolina’s Lumber River State Park, face down in the water. The death was ruled a suicide and attributed to Mica’s history with mental health issues, but as Mica’s family and friends began to speak up, investigators unraveled a mountain of abuse and harassment allegations against Mica’s estranged husband, John-Paul “JP” Miller. (Miller has denied these allegations and has not been charged in connection to Mica’s death.) So began a winding story that captured the internet’s true crime communities. 

Now, Netflix’s new three-part docuseries, Death of the Pastor’s Wife, builds the timeline of Mica and JP’s contentious marriage using first-person interviews with Mica’s family and friends, as well as never-before-seen footage and personal passages from Mica’s journals. Directed by Mike Gasparro (American Murder: Gabby Petito) and Julia Willoughby Nason (LuLaRich, Fyre Fraud), Death of the Pastor’s Wife builds a picture of Mica that goes further than her online legacy and explores the religious expectations that keep women in church settings from asking for help. 

“What stayed with us about Mica’s story was how hard she seemed to be fighting to be heard,” Nason and Gasparro told Tudum. “We felt it was important to look closely at what she was experiencing and give the people who loved her the space to tell the story of the woman they knew. We made this series to ask difficult questions, listen closely to Mica’s own voice, and make sure that what she was trying to say is not forgotten.”

Here are six things we learned from Death of the Pastor’s Wife

Mica started going to Solid Rock church at 13. She and her family were looking for community. They found Miller. 

In 2007, Mica and her family began attending services at Solid Rock Church in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. They quickly became regulars, with Mica and her sisters joining the worship team. By the time she was 16-years-old, almost all of Mica’s life revolved around church, a devotion exacerbated by her parents’ divorce.  She was promoted to worship leader, a job typically held by an older member of the church. She met her high-school sweetheart Jeremy at the church, and were married by 19. Miller officiated the ceremony. 

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As a pastor at Solid Rock, Miller and his then-wife Ali operated as spiritual mentors and friends to Mica and Jeremy. But only two years later, Miller took the pulpit one Sunday to reveal he’d had “a moral failing” in his marriage. The church quickly found out that he and Mica had been having an affair. He was 36. She was 21. The two divorced their spouses and began a public relationship. 

Mica’s family was stunned by the news and let her know they did not approve of the relationship. One of her sisters, Sierra Francis, was especially horrified by Miller’s possessive nature. A few weeks after the pair went public, Mica’s sisters discovered she had gotten Miller’s signature tattooed on her side. The news of the relationship almost ruined the church, which quickly began hemorrhaging members. The board brought in Pam Muise, a pastor who knew Miller as a child, to help preach some sermons. The tension remained, but membership eventually steadied — which church members say in the documentary is a credit to Mica’s warm personality and open nature as the worship leader. 

“I did not want to like Mica. I saw her then as the problem,” Muise says. “That did not last for long. It was very easy to like Mica. It was very easy to see her abilities.” 

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Mica’s mental health problems started after complications from a breast augmentation surgery 

According to Sierra, Mica’s sister, Mica’s relationship with Miller was clouded by her own physical insecurities. She decided to get a breast augmentation, which she said she felt she needed in order for her and Miller to be together. 

But a poor reaction to her recovery medication kicked off a psychotic episode. She began spiraling, making delusional and hyper-religious statements. The docuseries shows several incidents Miller videotaped where Mica is anxious and hyperverbal. In one, she claims she’s learned Spanish and sign-language in 24 hours, all to make sure her future family has land. 

Mica’s family and Miller disagreed on a course of action. Miller had Mica institutionalised, where she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder — an issue her doctors believed manifested late in life due to a period of stress. Her family claims they were not allowed to visit her without Miller being present, and his behavior during the experience turned them against the two getting married. 

She left the hospital with prescriptions for lithium and seroquel and was instructed that deviating from the regime could cause more incidents. “She looked so broken,” Sierra says. “Like she was feeling defeated.” When Miller and Mica married a few months later, Mica’s family was in attendance but all expressed hesitation at the match. 

“I attended just to be there for Mica, but I did not support their marriage,” Sierra says. “I was very worried for her.”

“I thought something was very wrong,” Abigail Francis, Mica’s sister, adds. “I thought something was going on and I just didn’t agree with any of it.” 

Church members and friends of Mica describe Miller’s relationship with Mica as controlling — emotionally and sexually 

As the first lady of Solid Rock Church, Mica was considered a welcoming face in the congregation and often sought out friendships and personal relationships with new members. When Charlotte Korn and her family began attending the church, she says in the documentary that she and Mica became good friends, but she was immediately concerned by some of Miller’s behaviors. 

Korn says that Mica discouraged her from calling or reaching out before 11 a.m. “John Paul does not like it if I get out of bed before him. So just don’t call me,” Korn recalls Mica telling her. “I was like, ‘That’s weird and unhealthy.’” Mica was also prevented from leaving the house for longer than three hours. Korn says that Miller would call at the two hour mark, then 20 minutes later, and in decreasing intervals until Mica was home. “If she wasn’t leaving when he wanted her home or needed her, he’d show up,” she says. 

Bruna Pabon, another congregation member who built a close friendship with Mica, says that she  often confided that Miller expected sex at least four times a day, and would wake her up and prevent her from sleeping if she said no. At one point, Mica told friends she took testosterone at Miller’s encouragement to increase her sex drive, even though it altered and strained her singing voice. 

In public sermons played in the docuseries, Miller says that a wife denying sex is a type of sexual immorality akin to “rape and sex trafficking.” But Pabon adds that Miller weaponized this belief against Mica, pressuring her into sexual acts. According to Pabon, Mica told her that Miller would pay unhoused people to do sexual things to her against her will, like grope her breasts or ejaculate on her skin. 

When Mica went to her sister Sierra’s home to avoid these situations, Miller allegedly threatened to show up at the house armed. “You can’t treat someone like this and then leave,” he wrote in a text message, which is shown in the documentary. “I need you to act like a godly wife this one time and prioritize your marriage over your family, friends and feelings. What you’ve done in our marriage this time is totally unacceptable and no man would put up with it. But I’m willing to give you one more chance.” 

Mica tried multiple times to save her marriage. The whole time, Miller was allegedly unfaithful

Desperate to save the marriage, Mica started seeing a biblical counselor, Laura Hucks. In the docuseries, Hucks says that Mica began her sessions guarded and “not free” to be herself. She would only explain herself through Miller’s eyes and often pulled out her phone and said “He wants to make sure I tell you this.” 

Mica revealed to her close friends that Miller was having affairs. His latest was allegedly  with a congregation member Suzie Skinner. Her husband, Chris Skinner, was a paraplegic who also attended the church. According to Chris’s sister, Tamra McDermott, when Chris discovered the affair he was distraught. On Sept. 6, 2021, Chris was found dead at the bottom of the community pool. Police ruled his death an accident, but McDermott said her brother had had such a “mental health decline” that she believes he killed himself after finding out about the affair. 

Mica accused Miller of relentless harassment after she filed for divorce

When Miller allegedly continued the affair, Mica left the marriage. But her friends and family say he did not want her to go. 

At one point, Miller called Mica’s doctors and said she was no longer taking her medicine and she had threatened to kill herself. She was institutionalized for three days, during which Miller took her phone, laptop, and car, before psychiatrists told police it was a “marital issue” and released her. When Mica began to tell her friends what was going on, congregants began leaving the church. 

“Bruna told me the horrific things Mica had told her had happened to her. I was just sick,” Erica Rahr, a former Solid Rock Church member, says in the docuseries. “I was just sick. The level of depravity is unimaginable. There was not going back. I couldn’t have gotten away from [Miller] faster. I told my daughters that if they ever saw him again, they needed to run away as fast as they could.” 

According to Mica’s sisters, Miller would call her upwards of 60 times a day, leading her to change her number multiple times. She filed multiple police reports, and said she found razor blades in her tires and tracking devices in the tire well of her vehicle. Miller would follow her to work, show up when she was out of town. When nude photos of herself were posted to Facebook, Mica blamed Miller. 

Mica’s friends and family believe Miller is responsible for her death. That’s why they want North Carolina to adopt Mica’s Law

After Mica’s death, Mica’s family said that Miller publicly blamed them for her death, using the pulpit to say they kept her from her much-needed medicine. He also sent them a text: “This is what happens when you encourage someone to divorce the person they love and tell them they don’t need medicine and that they’re not ill when they are.” 

But even though they had  separated before her death, Miller  tried to gain access to her belongings. He reached out to Hucks, Mica’s counselor, and asked for her records. “He is trying to take access of every communication she could have possibly had with any person so he can end her narrative and start his narrative,” she says in the docuseries. 

When Miller held a funeral at Solid Rock Church, no members of Mica’s family attended. 

“I believe that he could have pushed her to a point where she felt there was no way out,” Pabon says in the docuseries. “All that torture and abuse is what lead her to her death, because he couldn’t let her go.” 

“The only person who’s responsible for that day, regardless of who pulled the trigger, is John Paul,” Korn adds. “It’s his fault she’s gone.” 

Friends and family of Mica believe that the 30-year-old would still be alive if there were better legal protections in the state for victims of abuse. Because most of Miller’s alleged harassment and controlling behavior did not rise to physical abuse, and because it occurred while the two were legally married, police said numerous times that there was nothing they could do. Mica’s death breathed new life into proposed legislation that would make coercive control, a pattern of harassment and intimidation often employed by abusive partners, a felony offense. People in South Carolina now refer to it as Mica’s Law. 

Miller has not been charged with anything related to Mica’s death. In 2025, the Federal Bureau of Investigations indicted Miller for “cyberstalking and making false statements to federal investigators.” While he was awaiting his arraignment, he married Suzie Skinner. In Jan. 2026, Miller pleaded not guilty to the charges. His trial has not started. 

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