Deadly Dose (2 page)

On the night of December 2, 2000, Morgan had stopped by the police station to pick up some paperwork for his presentation at the conference. He was optimistic that his colleagues at the meeting could help him come up with a new way to sell his theories to Willoughby, given the opportunity. But as it turned out, Morgan never made it to the conference. Instead, he became deeply embroiled in the murder of Eric Miller.

When Morgan walked down the hallway in the Major Crimes Division that night, he sensed a familiar energy. Something was going on. There was a buzz in the air, in the hushed tones, in the way his heart started beating faster. The buzz invigorated him. He wanted to know,
needed
to know, what was going on. His gut told him that it was not his shift, not his squad, not his problem. But he couldn’t resist. The gravitational pull of a new crime to solve was like a drug to Morgan. No matter how hard he tried to conquer the addiction, he kept coming back for more. And the more he had, the more he wanted. It was a vicious cycle that lasted until the day he retired, and many would say even beyond that.

He asked some questions and the other cops told him a scientist named Eric Miller had died of arsenic poisoning earlier that morning at Rex Hospital.

Initially, investigators cast a wide net looking for arsenic sources. They told Morgan they were looking at everything from environmental causes to suicide. Morgan wondered out loud how someone would get exposed to arsenic accidentally, since laws required strict guidelines in water systems and food sources in order to prevent contamination from toxic chemicals like arsenic. But after all, Miller
had
been a scientist, working in a laboratory where chemicals were present. Perhaps he’d been accidentally exposed to arsenic in his own lab. Considering how very rare arsenic poisoning is, it seemed like a plausible explanation.

Although suicide, as difficult as it can be to talk about, is one of the first things investigators must rule out in the early stages of a death investigation, detectives working on the case told Morgan that nothing in Eric Miller’s background or profile even mildly suggested any kind of emotional problems or depression that might lead to him taking his life.

Morgan sensed that investigators were reluctant to explore the next possibility after accident or suicide— murder. Maybe no one could believe that anyone would want to kill an all-around nice guy like Eric Miller. Maybe they just didn’t want to believe that his equally well-educated, attractive wife could have had anything to do with her husband’s death.

As Morgan listened to more about the case, his gut kept trying to tell him something. He kept going back to the image of Ann Miller he’d glimpsed just a few minutes earlier through the window of the interview room. Right then and there he had formed an opinion about Ann Miller: she had something to do with her husband’s death. It was an opinion that would stick with him, unwavering in its intensity. It was an opinion that would drive him to pursue this case relentlessly until Eric Miller’s killer was behind bars.

Morgan was flabbergasted when detectives told him that Ann Miller had come to the police station that night with her father in tow. He was still more flabbergasted when he learned that the sergeant in charge of the investigation had agreed to let Ann Miller’s father, Dan Brier, into the interview room with her because it was the only way she would agree to answer their questions. Certainly, the police would be at a disadvantage in this situation. The woman was obviously not going to come clean with her daddy by her side, and the police wouldn’t be able to really break her down and get to the truth as long as he was there to protect her. As Morgan saw it, the sergeant felt he’d had no choice if he wanted to talk to the dead man’s wife at all. But still, Morgan felt strongly that having her father there had tremendously chilled Ann Miller’s statement.

"I said: ’With her
daddy
?’ ” Morgan recalls. Who knows how differently things might have gone if detectives had been able to talk to Ann Miller by herself?

Detectives Randy Miller (no relation to Ann or Eric) and Debbie Regentin conducted that first interview with Ann Miller as her father sat hip to hip by her, monitoring every word. Ann told detectives that the entire family, including their almost-one-year-old daughter, Clare, had been sick with flulike symptoms, but that Eric had been hit the hardest.

“The day Clare got sick,” Ann said in the official police transcript of the interview, “we went to lunch in a restaurant. I don’t know where it was. I remember it was [called] Barry’s Café. Eric was giving her French fries because she liked them. She loved them and he had given them to her and she threw up. I got mad at him for giving her French fries. I told him her little tummy could not handle the grease yet,” she said as tears rolled down her pale face.

“It’s okay,” said Detective Regentin.

“I would let him feed her French fries every day if I could have him back,” Ann said, sobbing.

“I know,” Regentin said.

“I miss him so bad,” said Ann.

Detectives working on the case told Morgan that they had no reason initially to believe Ann Miller had anything to do with her husband’s death. They wanted to give her time to grieve, recalls Morgan, and decided to reinterview her after the funeral a few days later.

But Raleigh police never got another chance to talk to Ann Miller. Shortly after that first night in the police station, unbeknownst to investigators, Ann retained one of the top attorneys in North Carolina, Wade Smith. Smith had gained a national reputation after representing Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, the Fort Bragg Green Beret convicted of killing his entire family. Years later, Wade Smith would go on to represent a member of the Duke lacrosse team charged with raping an exotic dancer—a client who was later exonerated, many believed, in large part because of Smith’s expertise. Smith was also the attorney for the family of Cho Seung Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter who killed thirty-two people as well as himself. Smith was the quintessential southern gentleman, professional and charming in the courtroom despite the often unsavory charges his clients faced. Having him on your side was like having a monumental life insurance policy; it cost a lot, but it practically guaranteed that you would be covered no matter what came your way.

After Ann Miller’s initial interview with police, Wade Smith wisely shut the police out from further contact with his client.

“Usually, innocent people don’t need to go out and lay down the kind of money that it requires to retain the likes of Mr. Wade Smith,” says Morgan.

For Morgan, this was just another red flag in what would become a long series of red flags that made him pause and think about who Ann Miller really was. Morgan is a straight shooter. He knows criminals. He knows what they do, and what they don’t do. He also knows how innocent people act and how they don’t act. Most importantly, he knows the difference.

On that first night, no one asked Ann Miller the magic question:
Did you kill your husband?
The transcript doesn’t lie. According to Morgan, no one asked the direct question because the detectives did not yet consider her a suspect. They did not go where Morgan says every investigation needs to go—directly into the inner circle of someone’s life. This was, and still is, one of the aspects of the case Morgan just cannot shake. In Morgan’s opinion, not asking this question violated the most basic tenet of murder investigations. You always start close to the victim and then work your way out. He calls this a “universal truth” of homicide investigations. People’s lives are like a series of concentric circles. Most people are killed by someone close to them. Women are almost always killed by a husband or a boyfriend. When women kill, the victims are typically husbands, boyfriends, or children. Logically, investigators usually rule out family members and other people who have intimate relationships with the victim first before they look elsewhere for the killer. Rarely do you ever get to a far-reaching circle where a stranger or serial murderer lurks. Good investigators start at home, and then move on to the workplace, friends, and acquaintances.

Morgan claims that if he were murdered, he would expect the same protocol to be used in trying to find his killer.

“Whoever the investigator is, you’re
damn
right I want him looking at my wife, looking at my family, my children, even my brother,” he says, not hiding the anger as he strains his vocal cords and readjusts his large frame in his squeaky chair.

When it came to murder Morgan never worried about offending people or hurting their feelings. When he was in charge of a case, he always asked the tough questions. If the people he was interviewing were innocent, they would understand why you had to ask; if they were guilty, they would most likely become indignant.
Bingo,
you have your answer.

But for reasons Morgan cannot seem to pinpoint to this day, he felt his colleagues were looking away from Ann Miller instead of at her. It was not his case, it did not happen on his watch, but he could not shake the feeling that this woman might be about to get away with murder if he didn’t do something. He tried to stay out of it. But just like everything else Chris Morgan ever tried to stay out of, he seemed to stumble right into the middle of it.

“We know Ann Miller didn’t waste any time,” says Morgan. But, “I’m afraid
we
did.”

Morgan and the head of the squad handling the Eric Miller case, Sergeant Jeff Fluck, had always had different philosophies about police work. Morgan tended to move faster, with more bravado, taking more risks. Morgan describes Sergeant Fluck as more calculated. He was someone who dotted his
i
’s and crossed his
t
’s, who colored inside the lines, while Morgan was frenetically scribbling all over the page.

Morgan sees an equal need for these two very different styles of policing, though, and respected Sergeant Fluck for his thoroughness and attention to detail. In that first week of the investigation, Fluck’s team had begun immediately searching computers. They scoured Eric and Ann’s work and home computers for anything that might help them solve the case. While computer forensics takes time; documents the author thought had vanished into the black hole of cyberspace can be retrieved. Hence the famous adage about not writing anything down you don’t want someone to read applies to computers maybe even more than it does to paper and pen.

Finally, there was a carrot dangled in front of Morgan. Sergeant Fluck asked Morgan’s squad to interview doctors and nurses at Rex Hospital, where Eric Miller died. Morgan was eager to get involved in the case in any way he could, and he would soon find out that Eric Miller’s death at the hospital was neither where the case began nor where it would end.

While Eric Miller’s preliminary autopsy report did not show high levels of arsenic in his body at the time of his death, he’d been hospitalized earlier, in mid-November, and some of those test results from Rex Hospital were showing massive amounts of arsenic in him at that time. Everyone Morgan consulted with told him that the levels were simply too high to have been the result of an accidental or environmental exposure.

Experts also told Morgan that arsenic stays in the bloodstream for only a short period of time and then dissipates if the person is not exposed again in a short time frame. But more detailed tests, using hair samples, can reveal intermittent exposure to arsenic over a prolonged period of time.

Morgan says the staff at the hospital was cooperative and genuinely broken up about Eric’s death. “They were sorry this happened and they didn’t know what to make of it,” says Morgan. He was not going after them; quite the opposite. Morgan recalls that the attending physician, Dr. Mehna Mohan, seemed sincerely sad about Eric’s passing. He remembers Mohan as very emotional at the mere mention of Eric’s death. Unlike most doctors he knew, who preferred professional detachment, Mohan was not afraid to cry real tears when she talked about Eric and how he had suffered before he died.

Morgan suspected that no one at the hospital had ever had any experience with arsenic poisoning before. Why should they? Morgan himself had never personally come across an arsenic death in his quarter century of police work. Given the rarity, it was no surprise that arsenic was not immediately suspected by doctors as the cause of Eric Miller’s illness.

It was also no surprise that each interview included hospital attorneys, considering the litigious nature of the world today and how it has adversely affected medical institutions. The presence of the attorneys neither intimidated Morgan nor hindered his efforts. He was not someone easily ruffled by men in suits with bigger paychecks than he could ever dream of earning. But the lawyers let him do his job, and he let them do theirs.

“I guess they had already gotten the feeling there was a little bit of blood in the water; turned out they were right,” Morgan says caustically.

Morgan learned that Ann Miller first took Eric to Rex Hospital on the night of Thursday, November 16, 2000. Although Eric had been to the doctor’s office for minor symptoms over the past few months, this was his first visit to the hospital. On this night he complained of severe stomach pains following a bowling outing with a group of Ann’s colleagues the previous evening. Investigators learned that he then spent hours in the emergency room waiting to be seen, and it wasn’t until the early-morning hours of Friday, November 17, that he was finally admitted to a private room.

Doctors and nurses told Morgan that Eric’s condition continued to worsen after he was admitted. Given this turn of events, they made the decision to transfer him to the intensive care unit the next morning.

At 10 a.m. on Saturday, November 18, just two hours after Eric was sent to the ICU, Morgan says Ann decided to get her hair done. The appointment had originally been scheduled for Eric, but instead of sitting by her husband’s bedside, Ann decided to appropriate the appointment for herself.