THE NETFLIX TRUE crime documentary can be a strange beast. The streamer knows that viewers lap up these stories, but sometimes the resulting shows don’t quite hit the mark.

They might be too drawn out, or, like the recent Idaho Murders documentary, leave the viewer with more questions than they sat down with. And yet when they are good, they help to make public a story that needs to be told.

The latest Netflix true crime hit is Death of the Pastor’s Wife, which is riding high in the Netflix Top Ten here in Ireland.

But is the three-part documentary worth your time?

What it’s all about

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Death of the Pastor’s Wife is about the death of Mica Miller, wife of the pastor JP Miller. They met after Mica moved with her family to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, in her teens and joined the Solid Rock church. 

At Solid Rock’s head was JP, who was 15 years older than Mica and a charismatic, popular and enthusiastic pastor. Mica was a talented singer who got heavily involved in the church. She married a fellow member at 18, but a few years later it was revealed she and JP had been having an affair. They both split up from their respective spouses and got together officially.

To the outside, they looked – despite the obvious drama – to be an ideal God-loving couple. At church sermons, Mica would sing and JP would preach to a gathering of committed Solid Rock members. The pair’s lives were dedicated to God and spreading the word of their religion.

But as the documentary opens, the tragic ending of Mica’s life is revealed: she was found dead, aged just 30, at Lumber River State Park, in North Carolina. From this grim moment on, the documentary unspools the story of the Millers. This is not the story of a love affair but instead a tale of a husband who preached from the pulpit about wives submitting to their partners, and a wife who appeared to have been controlled by him, to a devastating extent.

Shocking story

harlotte Korn and Mica Miller COURTESY OF NETFLIX COURTESY OF NETFLIX

JP Miller does not appear in the documentary (aside from archive footage). The details of how JP treated his wife are uncomfortable, depressing and ultimately extremely shocking to hear. There is copious footage of him preaching at the pulpit about wives needing to submit to men, backed with comments from Mica’s friends and family about pressure JP put on her sexually.

The story is relatively leanly told across three episodes, with the details getting more and more disturbing the further into the documentary we go.

The intent with Death of the Pastor’s Wife seems to be to tell Mica’s story and allow her loved ones, rather than JP, to have the final say in the circumstances leading up to her death. Connected to this is their ongoing call for coercive control to be added to domestic violence legislation in South Carolina, because throughout the Millers’ marriage Mica’s complaints to the police about stalking and harassment were not considered a crime as she was reporting her husband. 

There is always the question with true crime documentaries of whether the public needs to be told all the gory details about the death of a person who is no longer here. Victims like Mica Miller can end up having the darkest moments of their lives raked over by strangers (and indeed, TikTok sleuths took to investigating the case, with some suggesting JP was responsible for his wife’s death).

The idea of strangers speculating over Mica’s life and death must surely be uncomfortable for her family. But there is the sense with this particular documentary that the reason they took part was to speak out for her when she could not. Their aim was to show the extent of her treatment by JP Miller, the gaps in the law that failed her, and perhaps to also show women in similar marriages that what happened was unacceptable.

While it isn’t fully discussed in the documentary, there is a question here about the role of the Millers’ religion in how she was treated by JP, and what it really means to ‘submit’ to one’s husband. It’s understandable that this wasn’t the right time necessarily to discuss this angle, but it is something to note. Since the documentary has aired, it’s been reported that both JP and his father, Reginald Wayne Miller, have been accused of sexual impropriety.

If you are a true crime aficionado, the story told in Death of a Pastor’s Wife will be familiar fare to you. It is made in a respectful way, and one gets to know Mica enough to see that she was a vibrant, warm and intelligent woman. But there is always the lingering sadness after watching a documentary like this in knowing that what we have watched was not fiction. Mica was a real woman who suffered.  

If a change in law does occur in South Carolina, and women are able to find justice after coercive control, then at least there will have been one positive outcome from this tragic story.

The Death of the Pastor’s Wife is streaming on Netflix now.