Woodburn “Baldy” Miller and Jean Bush

The shooting

Jean was found on her back outside a one-room cabin, killed by a 12-gauge shotgun. The gun lay nearby with two live shells, and investigators noted tracks and marks in the sand. Miller was found critically wounded in the chest. Police considered his injuries self-inflicted and said the shotgun was his; he insisted an unknown soldier fired through a cabin window, killing Jean and wounding him. Jean’s father said he had warned local girls to avoid Miller.

The OCR indicates Jean left home with Miller at about 10 a.m. to visit a doctor, reached Pemberton, and then went toward another physician, but this portion is badly interleaved with neighboring columns and needs verification. Miller had reportedly worked nights at a Pemberton lumber yard.

Prior offense, escape, and capture

Miller had been paroled from Rahway Reformatory about ten months earlier after serving roughly a year for abducting Beatrice DeCamp, the wife of a soldier, and forcing her to remain with him in abandoned cabins for eight days before state police rescued her.

After the Bush shooting, murder charges were filed. Miller periodically received hospital treatment for his wounds. On December 7 he escaped from Burlington County Hospital after asking to visit a sister in the maternity section; he was later seen driving a stolen car toward Pemberton. He remained in the woods for 27 days and was captured without resistance at another sister’s home, Mrs. Helen Chard’s near Chatsworth, by State Police Detective Frank Long and Trooper Lester Johnson of Columbus. Sheriff Johnson suspected others supplied him with food and shelter. Miller claimed to have lived on deer, rabbits, and squirrels.

Miller’s father, William Miller, 65, a laborer familiar with his son’s haunts, assisted the search. Deputy Sheriff W. Roland Warrick accompanied the arresting officers. The prosecutor sought a prompt indictment and trial; the source collection capture does not give the outcome.

A cemetery-record newspaper index

A Find a Grave memorial for Jean Bush, sourced to a Mount Holly Herald death-notice index rather than to the clipping used elsewhere in this entry, gives her birth date as October 1, 1928 — meaning she was 13, not 14, when she died on August 31, 1942, and would have turned 14 that October. It confirms her burial at Pemberton Baptist Cemetery in Pemberton and cites two further Mount Holly Herald items not otherwise available here: “Miller is jailed in murder [charge]” (November 13, 1942, sec. 1, p. 6, col. 1) and “Still Seek Miller” (December 11, 1942, sec. 1, p. 1, col. 8), the latter matching this entry’s account of his hospital escape and the manhunt in his native pine woods. Neither indexed headline states a trial date or verdict, so the case’s ultimate legal outcome remains undocumented here.

Miller traced to 1971

A separate Find a Grave memorial, “Woodburn ‘Wood’ Miller” (1920–1971), records a Woodburn T. Miller born March 13, 1920, in New Jersey — consistent with the 22–23 age reported in 1942 — who was divorced, worked as a truck driver in the building trade, and lived at Medford Farms, Vincentown, New Jersey. Its list of siblings includes a Helen Chard, matching this entry’s Mrs. Helen Chard of Chatsworth, at whose home Miller was captured after his escape; that shared, uncommon name makes the identification probable, though it rests on the sibling’s name alone. The memorial names his parents as Harry Miller and Elsie Jess, which does not match the “William Miller” named as Miller’s father in the 1942 clipping — a discrepancy left unresolved here, since either could reflect a reporting error or a stepfather/other relative. The memorial records his death on March 8, 1971, at age 50, and burial at Quindaro Cemetery in Kansas City, Wyandotte County, Kansas. If the identification holds, Miller was not executed and outlived the 1942 case by nearly three decades, whatever its legal resolution; since nothing on the memorial ties it to that case, the point is offered as probable rather than settled. It gives no cause of death and does not mention the Bush case.