Deadly Dose (10 page)

But Morgan felt investigators needed to cross the motive hurdle in order to move forward. They needed a reason that a well-educated, attractive young woman and mother would take her husband’s life in such a gruesome way, allowing him to suffer, and eventually deteriorate into death.

“Nobody ever believed Ann had any designs to live happily ever after with Derril Willard. It was fairly apparent from the very early stages of this case that we all assumed, quite rightly, that Derril Willard was simply a pawn, a tool that was used by Ann Miller,” Morgan says with obvious disgust.

Eliminating Willard as a motive left only one other known paramour, Carl Mackewicz. This was the direction in which detectives started to head at this point in the investigation, but it was a dead end to Morgan. Sure, Ann had had an affair with Mackewicz, that much was quite clear. But it didn’t seem likely that Carl, or any other
one
man for that matter, was enough for Ann.

As they dug deeper it became obvious that while Eric Miller’s past with women was squeaky-clean, Ann Miller’s past with men was at the far end of the spectrum—in a word,
wild
. It was commonly known that Eric had “saved” himself for marriage. It was just as commonly known that Ann had not. Apparently, according to some men who had known her in college, Ann was quite experienced in bed. Eric wouldn’t have been the first man to succumb to the savvy of a more sexually experienced woman. But Morgan believed Ann’s advanced sexual repertoire may have clouded Eric’s judgment to the point where he overlooked red flags in the relationship early on, and never saw with complete clarity, even on his deathbed.

In Morgan’s mind the Miller investigation was like a train that had taken so many detours it was amazing that it ever reached its final destination. Every time he thought the train was rushing full-speed ahead toward an arrest, the track split and investigators took what he felt was the wrong path to a distant station. As a result of all the detours, it would take another couple of weeks to get back where they needed to be and begin all over again. It was a never-ending tail-spin.

In their desire to connect Ann Miller to another similar death, investigators looked into the lives of every person they could find who had known her. For months their focus settled squarely on her former college roommate at Purdue, Rene Hinson, who seemed to have an intimate knowledge of the
real
Ann, a knowledge that detectives hoped would help them develop leads in the case.

Morgan describes Rene as a goodtime girl who was “attractive enough” and a “big hit with men.” After college, Morgan says, Rene was looking for a job when Ann and Eric invited her to come to Raleigh. Rene lived with the newlyweds in their house in Holly Springs for several months as she tried to get her foot in the door somewhere. Ann tried to get her friend work at Glaxo Wellcome, and Eric successfully found her a job at North Carolina State University, where he was working on his doctorate. Rene worked at the University for a short period of time, but nothing permanent materialized for her in North Carolina. Ultimately, she headed home to West Virginia, where she married a man with what Morgan called a “speckled past.” Henry Hinson, Rene’s husband, was into drugs and weapons, and he ended up doing time in federal prison. As a dutiful wife, Rene visited her husband behind bars, and in August of 2000, after one such visit (accompanied by Henry’s grandmother), Henry dropped dead of an apparent heart attack.

But Morgan says the grandmother was not convinced that the death was natural. She went to the West Virginia State Police and told them that Rene had smuggled in a fast-food sandwich to her husband, and that she, the grandmother, was convinced the sandwich contained a poison that killed Henry.

Clearly, this theory intrigued investigators in Raleigh. Two best friends from college whose husbands both died under suspicious circumstances? There
had to be
a connection, or so they assumed. Morgan was not so quick to draw a parallel.

“This caused all sorts of bells and whistles to go off,” Morgan says with a chuckle as he recalled the theories. “I would agree on first glance, it’s a very strange set of coincidences. ”

But Morgan didn’t think the facts supported this theory. Henry Hinson had a long history of drug use and obvious blockages in his arteries. According to the West Virginia medical examiner, his death was simply the result of a heart attack, case closed.

“Never let the facts get in the way of a good conspiracy, ” quips Morgan. “There was nothing to connect Henry Hinson’s death with poisoning. It’s not a question of why did he die, it’s a question of why did he live so long with that much blockage in his heart?”

Sergeant Jeff Fluck sent detectives Debbie Regentin and Randy Miller to visit Rene Hinson in West Virginia. Once again, Morgan was out of the loop, on the fringes of the investigation. But he hung on every word shared by the detectives when they returned from this particular trip. It was an anecdote that would later add up to little more than a good story, but at the time investigators thought Rene might play an integral role in the case.

Detectives told Morgan that when they entered Hinson’s apartment, the song emanating from her CD player was “Earl’s Gotta Die,” the smash hit by the Grammy-winning country band the Dixie Chicks, about a woman who kills her abusive husband. According to Morgan, this strange coincidence helped sway detectives again toward the theory that Rene had poisoned her husband in prison. Yet Rene denied any involvement in her own husband’s death, or for that matter any knowledge of how Eric Miller was killed. Rene said she was friends with both Ann and Eric and didn’t believe Ann had anything to do with Eric’s death.

But this didn’t deter investigators. Morgan says they continued to be sure that Rene was lying as the eerie song, which Rene told them was her “favorite,” wafted through the apartment in the background like a funeral dirge.

Morgan eventually got his own crack at Rene Hinson, though by that time, like many other close associates of Ann Miller, she had changed her tune. Too much had been reported at that point about Ann Miller’s involvement in Eric Miller’s death for Rene to afford to ignore it. Ultimately, no one wanted to be connected with Ann Miller or her actions.

“Initially she was very supportive, but eventually Rene became part of a number of people who wanted to see Ann get what was coming to her,” Morgan says smugly.

But beneath the surface of the slow, plodding pace of the investigation in early 2001, a violent storm was brewing within the Raleigh Police Department. After Eric Miller’s autopsy report had been sealed for several months, it was finally time to release it. Even though they knew it was coming, this wasn’t sitting well with investigators or the prosecutor. In addition to this development, Morgan felt there was bad blood developing between the medical examiner assigned to the case and the investigative team. As usual, he stepped right into the middle of it.

The battle over whether or not another toxin had been used in Eric’s murder created what Morgan termed a “bitter divorce.” Assistant District Attorney Tom Ford was still looking for an additional toxin, while the medical examiner, Dr. Thomas Clark, was sure that arsenic alone killed Eric. According to Morgan, the two had exchanged heated letters until eventually communication broke down completely. In general, it’s helpful for the medical examiner, investigators, and the prosecutor to form a partnership in a criminal case. Morgan said there was no partnership here—quite the opposite, the relationship was “acrimonious on all parts.”

Unfortunately, Morgan wasn’t briefed on this background when he was asked to accompany Captain Donald Overman to pick up the autopsy report at the medical examiner’s office in Chapel Hill. Their goal was not only to obtain the report, but to get a firsthand briefing from Dr. Clark himself. It was supposed to be a routine meeting, one Morgan had had many times before in other murder investigations, but he had no idea what he was walking into.

“Don Overman and I walked into a storm at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of North Carolina,” Morgan says, remembering the chilly reception they received.

When Morgan and Overman asked Dr. Clark to walk them through the report, the mood got even colder. But while Morgan agreed that Clark was the doctor and he himself was just a detective, he was a pretty quick study and figured it was Clark’s job to give them the report in layman’s terms, the same terms that a jury would require. Undaunted, Overman and Morgan insisted on a clear rundown of the report from Clark, and they got it.

Morgan says Clark explained that it looked like Eric had been poisoned the night of November 15, 2000, the night he went bowling with Derril Willard. This presumably happened when Eric drank beer laced with poison, again, presumably given to him by Willard.

The results also appeared to show that Eric had been poisoned
while
he was at Rex Hospital—during his first stay there immediately after the bowling incident. This was determined not just from test results, but from clinical records. They showed that Eric’s condition had worsened at Rex and continued to deteriorate in the first few days after being transferred to UNC. How he would have received the arsenic in the hospital was still unclear. In his food? In his water? From whom?

Clark also told detectives that shortly before Eric’s second and final hospitalization, he again came in contact with arsenic at home. Investigators theorized that Ann had put the arsenic in Eric’s food, which had been prepared by friends from their church.

Clark also explained to the detectives that after analyzing Eric’s hair, which allowed for an almost exact footprint of how much arsenic had been received and when, he had been able to determine that Eric had been given many small doses over a period of months.

The amount of arsenic Eric had ingested over the summer hadn’t been enough to make him gravely ill, but was enough to keep him out of work, and enough that friends and family had noticed how Eric always seemed to be under the weather. One dose coincided precisely with a July family reunion in Indiana where everyone thought Eric had gotten food poisoning. They were half right, Morgan thought, about the poisoning; but it wasn’t rancid potato salad that made him ill: it was
arsenic.

Morgan and Raleigh Police Department psychologist Dr. Michael Teague continued to wrestle with the issue of the multiple doses throughout the investigation. Clearly, Ann Miller was smart enough and well versed enough in science to do the math and to figure out how much arsenic would simply make Eric sick, and how much would kill him. The previous small doses had made Eric sick, but the last dose—the deadly dose, the one that investigators thought had been placed in Eric’s last meal and fed to him by Ann—actually killed him.

Teague hypothesized to Morgan that perhaps Ann had been punishing Eric with smaller doses of arsenic for not doing what she wanted, for not satisfying her needs, material needs such as a bigger house, a fancier car, and exotic vacations. Morgan, on the other hand, thought Ann might have been experimenting initially, fine-tuning the dosage to see how Eric’s body reacted to the poison, to make sure he wasn’t immune, or didn’t have some sort of unusual tolerance. But eventually, to Morgan’s mind, the most likely scenario was that Ann had been giving Eric prior doses in order to create a history of sickness in the months leading up to his death.

He recalled how, during the first and only interview between Ann Miller and Raleigh police, she’d portrayed Eric as sickly, almost as a hypochondriac. Morgan thought this was her way of setting the stage to explain that her husband had died after a long illness, not after someone put a lethal dose of poison in his chicken and rice.

“ ‘There’s where he got poisoned, there’s where he got poisoned, there’s where he got poisoned, when are you going to arrest her?’ ” Morgan recalls the doctor saying to him.

Morgan had no good answers for him.

But something good
had
come out of the meeting. In his mind the autopsy was clear—Eric Miller had been poisoned at least three times, and Ann Miller was the most likely suspect on at least two of those occasions. Even if Derril Willard had put arsenic in Eric’s beer, he’d likely done so at Ann’s bidding, and this ultimately wasn’t the dose that killed him. But not everyone saw it Morgan’s way, or at least didn’t feel his version could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a courtroom.

Morgan assumed prosecutors would look at the autopsy report and immediately order the arrest of Ann Miller, but it didn’t happen that way; in fact it wouldn’t happen for many years to come. Morgan never imagined that in many ways this was just the beginning of his lengthy crusade for justice on Eric Miller’s behalf. Like so many long journeys, if he had known in the beginning how rough the trip was going to be, he might never have taken that first step; but also like so many long journeys, the farther you go, the harder it is to turn back. And Chris Morgan was definitely not a person to turn back from anything, especially the truth.

Morgan knew Eric Miller’s story, or at least the pieces that he felt were important, but to really understand why Eric had died, Morgan also needed to know Ann Miller’s story. He needed to know who she was before she met Eric, and who she was while they were together. To Morgan, the couple was living out two very different stories, two very different lives, simultaneously.

Members of the class of 1988 from her high school days in Spring Grove, Pennsylvania, remembered Ann as smart, popular, and pretty—not a girl anyone would have pegged as a future murderer. Future scientist, future wife, and future mother, maybe, but definitely not a future killer.

But Morgan always viewed this “perfect” facade as the window dressing that hid Ann’s psychopathic tendencies. As he saw it, it was something she had perfected throughout her adult life, the ability to appear one way on the outside, but to be something totally different on the inside.