Deadly Dose (12 page)

“People like Ann Miller have no remorse. It’s evident in her behavior every day. It’s evident to this day. She doesn’t feel sorry for what she did. She’s not even sorry that Eric’s dead, and I think that was one of the first tip-offs,” Morgan states definitively.

Morgan thought about cops he knew who, for example, had been involved in a completely justified suspect shooting, yet who had trouble sleeping at night for many years. He thought about what he calls “chicken-leg murders” where two people get into a confrontation fueled by alcohol at the dinner table, and one person ends up killing the other. In those situations, Morgan says, the killers almost always called 911 because the guilt was unbearable to their conscience. But not Ann Miller, no; she was the exception to almost every rule Morgan had learned to trust and rely upon over his years as an investigator. In her world rules didn’t seem to apply.

Yet another red flag to Morgan was Ann’s relationship with her by then one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Clare. One of Morgan’s detectives noticed repeatedly that while Ann was never mean or physically abusive to the child, she was also not outwardly loving or nurturing with her. This struck Morgan as particularly odd because he assumed that in a normal situation where a woman had lost her husband, she would be even more likely to cling to the child and smother her with love.

On one occasion, Ann took a stroll on the campus at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington with Paul Kontz. Detectives watching her used a video camera to document the encounter. Ann’s once mousy-brown hair was now in a chic, fully highlighted strawberry-blond pixie cut, and her loose-fitting tan pants, sneakers, and fashionable department-store tie-dyed shirt made her look as carefree as any college student walking across the campus.

Ann and Paul strolled and chatted along a tree-lined sidewalk while Clare (in a pink dress, leggings, and white sandals) played nearby. But unlike most doting first-time mothers, Ann seemed hardly to notice her seventeen-month -old daughter. In fact, she barely acknowledged the child’s presence. Ann’s smiles and laughs were reserved for Kontz, not her daughter. Kontz actually interacted with the child more than Ann did, picking Clare up in the parking lot on the way to the car, swinging her up into the air, turning her upside down until she giggled.

The most telling moment for Morgan came as Ann went to put her daughter into the backseat of the car. Instead of pulling the child to her chest to protect her tiny head as she leaned into the car, Ann held Clare several inches away from her as if she were holding a dirty diaper and then slung her into the backseat of the car like a bag of groceries.

In Morgan’s mind Ann’s apparent lack of feelings about her beautiful child once again reinforced what he thought of her—that she was a woman who was capable of loving no one but
herself.

“In the second week of surveillance we got a little bit of a shock,” Morgan recalls. Detectives had been sure that they were the only people following Ann Miller, but it turned out that this wasn’t the case at all.

Investigators were trading out cars and regrouping at nearby Ogden Elementary School, when they saw an NBC affiliate’s news van from Raleigh driving through the parking lot. Luckily, the news crew didn’t appear to notice the detectives. But the next day, as Morgan was pulling down Ann’s street to begin his evening stakeout, he noticed a black SUV parked in
his
usual, low-key spot. Unlike a real investigator, the driver of the car was chatting with someone in the backseat and occasionally picking up a pair of binoculars. Morgan knew right away they had to be members of the media. And as soon as Ann pulled into her driveway, a news crew jumped out of the SUV and approached her, microphone and camera in hand. Morgan sat back in the anonymous comfort of his undercover car and watched the circus unfold.

Ultimately, the TV news got nothing but Ann’s picture and a terse “no comment,” but still ran an exclusive story that night touting the fact they that knew where Ann Miller was now living.

“We were all getting tired of following Ann. We were getting tired of sleeping in a motel, decided that probably we needed to dig a little bit deeper, and that was the night we stole Ann’s garbage,” Morgan says.

Morgan is quick to point out that it is actually legal to search a person’s garbage; once something is put out on the street to be picked up, any expectations of privacy are forfeited.

Not unlike events in an episode of
C.S.I.,
investigators drove quietly into Ann’s neighborhood under the cloak of darkness around 2 a.m. Prior to their arrival, they spent an hour disconnecting all of the interior lights in their rented Ford Expedition so that when they opened the door to grab the garbage no one would be able to see inside of the car. They never stopped the vehicle, just rolled by the house at a low speed, reached out, scooped up the bag, and dragged it into the back of the car. But unlike
C.S.I.,
where the forensic team would go through the garbage in a lab with their rubber gloves, for the next few hours detectives used their bare hands to pick through dirty diapers and junk mail on the ground next to the Dumpster at the hotel.

Also unlike
C.S.I.,
they found nothing useful in Ann’s garbage—no shredded love notes, no documents about arsenic, no photographs of her and other men. About the only interesting thing at all was a letter that had been torn in half, presumably by Ann herself, from the
News and Observer
reporter Oren Dorell, requesting an interview—the same reporter who had broken the story about the search of Willard’s home. Dorell had obviously discovered Ann’s new address, maybe even before the cops did. He was that good.

With the garbage just another dead end, investigators went back to simply watching Ann, hoping that she would give something away in a moment of weakness, something they might be able to use against her.

“Most of the time Ann was a very cool customer, she was very relaxed, she was very at ease with herself and her surroundings—which for somebody, once again, whose husband had just been murdered in such a horrible way, such a short time ago . . . I mean it just struck me as peculiar, ” emphasizes Morgan.

While Morgan was watching Ann Miller in Wilmington, the official autopsy report went public in Raleigh. Morgan and Don Overman had received about a five-day advance notice of the release from Dr. Thomas Clark. But now it was out in the media, up for public consumption and public scrutiny.

Morgan had gotten up early that morning and picked up the first copy of Raleigh’s hometown newspaper, the
News and Observer,
which made its way slowly to the coastal town. He was eager to see how the results of the autopsy were being spun in print. At the same time he was preparing for another long day of watching Ann Miller. But he assumed this day would be different; on this day Ann Miller would finally know what investigators knew, that Eric Miller had been given several doses of arsenic before his death. Not only that, she would know that everyone else in North Carolina knew it, too.

Despite the release of the report, however, the day seemed like any other for Ann. She went to work on time, got home on time, and appeared to be acting normally. Late afternoon, around four, Morgan parked in Ann’s sister Danielle Wilson’s neighborhood to watch as Ann picked up Clare. There was one spot where he could sit and get a partial view of the Wilsons’ backyard and patio. Ann was in the habit of coming in through the back door, picking up Clare, and then walking her through the house and coming out the front door. Leaning back in his seat, fighting boredom, discomfort, and extreme fatigue, Morgan watched as Ann moved down the walk to the Wilsons’ home. Suddenly he sat up straight and grabbed the wheel, leaning closer to the windshield to get a good look. He noticed that Ann seemed to be
marching
toward the door in a very determined manner. Something had changed.

He saw that she was on the phone having a very animated conversation. It was the first time Morgan had seen Ann agitated. Adrenaline moved through his body like a double shot of espresso, his heart started beating faster as he leaned in to his windshield to get a closer look. Ann’s neatly pressed tan slacks and simple long-sleeved black sweater gave her a conservative, almost innocent appearance, which contrasted sharply with her wild demeanor.

“She was almost stomping around, stomping her feet. It was obvious that she was very upset about something. To this day I don’t know who she was talking to, but I’ve always felt in my own mind she was probably talking to one of her lawyers because the autopsy report made it look very, very bad for Ann,” Morgan recalls with a tinge of childlike glee in his voice.

Morgan felt like the complexity of the autopsy report had been simplified enough in the newspaper to give the impression to the general public that Ann was the most likely suspect in her husband’s murder. As Morgan points out, you didn’t need to be a scientist to understand the logic that whoever had killed Eric Miller had probably given him all, or most, of the doses of arsenic, and that person had to be someone who was close to the victim.

“She was shaking her fist while she was talking,” Morgan says. “She was enraged. She was animated. To be honest with you, that was probably the most emotion I’ve ever seen come out of Ann Miller.”

”I like to always remember it as the day I spent in the oleander bush,” says Morgan of his last day in Wilmington.

It was the one day that Ann deviated from her routine, something any good investigator knows is an important clue. When people who usually follow a consistent pattern change it, something fishy is probably going on.

Ann dropped Clare off at the usual time at her sister’s house. Nothing out of the ordinary; she appeared to be dressed for work. But then, instead of heading out of the subdivision on her way to the office, she turned in to Paul Kontz’s driveway. From what Morgan knew about Ann Miller by this point, it was clear she didn’t have very many male friends who didn’t eventually turn into lovers. Morgan felt strongly that this was the day when investigators might find proof that Paul Kontz had graduated from friendship to Ann Miller’s bed. So Morgan posted up in the only cover he could find outside Kontz’s home—an oleander bush. And he waited, and waited, and waited.

“Is it being nosy? Yes. I plead guilty, but I needed to know,” Morgan says, half sounding like he’s trying to convince himself of this fact.

The blinds were closed, the doors shut, and no one could be seen moving about the house. Morgan remembers sitting in that “damn bush” for eight hours or more. It was hot, uncomfortable, and endlessly boring. Very few people could sit in a scratchy bush on a warm spring day and
not
be uncomfortable, but for a man of Morgan’s stature, there was really no way to make it better. He was also getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. The only thing he had for entertainment was his handheld police radio. He listened to his fellow detectives banter back and forth about the stakeout as they speculated what might be taking place inside the house.

“When detectives get really bored, their minds usually go like most other people’s minds: they think dirty thoughts, and this case was no exception,” says Morgan with a chuckle.

Morgan was relieved when Ann finally left the house because it meant he could finally get out of the bush. She left alone, just in time to act as if she’d come from work, and went back to her sister’s house to pick up Clare.

To Morgan, Ann’s impassive face showed no signs of what had taken place inside. A marathon sex session? Tearful confessions about killing her husband? Who knew. But either way Morgan was convinced that Paul Kontz was heading down a very dangerous path, right into the clutches of a woman who would no doubt control him as she had all the others.

The stakeout was over. They had learned everything they were going to learn by watching Ann. Captain Don Overman summoned the team back to Raleigh. It was time to lay the entire case on the table, and see who was brave enough to take it on.

When Morgan returned from Wilmington, he saw that things had gotten worse between the medical examiner, Dr. Thomas Clark, and the prosecutor, Tom Ford.

“This was something that, in my experience, was unheard of,” Morgan says of the ongoing feud.

There was even talk from Ford of filing formal charges against Clark for hindering the investigation says Morgan. Although it ultimately never happened, this kind of talk was something completely unorthodox in Morgan’s experience with criminal investigations.

“I had known this case was in trouble for months, but I didn’t realize
how much
trouble it was in until that point,” he says, shaking his head.

Amid the heat of this battle, Eric Miller’s family was eager to find out what was going on with the investigation on the heels of the autopsy results. In the summer of 2001, they were invited to come once again to Raleigh and be briefed on the status of the case. Eric’s parents, Doris and Verus Miller, came from Indiana, and his sisters, Pam Baltzell of Kentucky, and Leeann Magee of Pennsylvania, also attended the meeting.

Morgan was invited to come to the meeting because of his recent surveillance of Ann, and to share whatever information they found, or as it turned out, had not found.

“I told them, ‘She’s not looking over her shoulder, she’s not worried about anything, she’s not worried about someone coming to kill her and her daughter, guess why? Because she killed her husband,’ ” Morgan says, matter-of -factly recalling his words to them.

As expected, Ford told the family he had just received the paperwork from investigators and had not had time to review it. This was a no-win situation for investigators, because this time Ford was right. Morgan had been the one who had pushed to get the case file copied and sent to Ford, but it was so voluminous there was no way Ford could possibly have pored through and digested the whole thing by this time.