Deadly Dose (23 page)

Ultimately, Cummings decided that this was a problem for District Attorney Colon Willoughby to fix, and one he would gladly hand over. Cummings asked that every moment of the meeting with Dr. Clark be documented by everyone involved so that Willoughby would know exactly what they were dealing with.

Willoughby set up a meeting with the chief medical examiner of North Carolina, Dr. John Butts. Butts was Clark’s boss, an affable man who had never seemed to have issues with prosecutors. After the meeting Willoughby returned to the office and told everyone, including Morgan, that they were going to be able to work it out. Morgan saw this as nothing short of a miracle.

“I have to give him the utmost praise and credit for how he dealt with this situation. Whatever he told Dr. Butts or whatever accommodations he arrived at, it was going to work,” Morgan says gleefully. “Dr. Clark eventually was coming around in spite of everything that had happened.”

Dr. Clark would stand by his original autopsy report from the spring of 2001, which said that Eric Miller had died of chronic arsenic poisoning; poisoning that had taken place over months, with arsenic that had eaten away at Eric’s organs until his body simply couldn’t take it anymore. Ultimately, one deadly dose of arsenic was administered on November 30, 2000, resulting in his death. It was the truth, and Dr. Clark was now prepared to assert it in a court of law. Whatever problems Clark had had with prosecutors, at the end of the day he was a doctor and he would tell a jury in his esteemed medical opinion what had
really
happened to Eric Miller.

“It became apparent that Dr. Clark was not going to become an impediment to justice. He was going to stand up and do the right thing,” Morgan confirms.

In North Carolina, but especially in Wake County, almost all felony cases went to a grand jury for indictment before they landed in criminal court. Even in cases where someone had previously been arrested, prosecutors were reticent to try any felony that had not been validated with a “true bill” (an indictment) from a grand jury. The grand-jury process was one of checks and balances that kept prosecutors from taking faulty cases to court.

There was no doubt that the Miller case was headed to a grand jury first. Ann Miller would not be arrested until a group of North Carolina citizens gave the district attorney’s office the green light.

In grand-jury settings, which were always confidential, the defense had no standing. Only the prosecution could offer testimony. Usually this involved just one person, the lead investigator on the case. He or she went into the grand-jury room alone and presented the evidence. The panel was permitted to ask questions. When the witnesses were finished, the grand jury voted about whether or not to indict the suspect. Then they called their next case. The list of true bills was returned to a court clerk at the end of the day. Only then did the information become part of the public record.

Holt and Willoughby decided that Morgan would present the Miller case to the grand jury. While many other investigators had worked hard along the way, no one knew the intricacies of the case like Morgan. By this point Morgan was officially retired and had set up shop in a closet-size space in the district attorney’s office. He started crafting a script for the big day. The process was bittersweet, since Morgan knew that even if Ann Miller was indicted, he would not be the one making the arrest.

“I had a recurring dream of exactly how it would go down.” Morgan laughs. “Keep Ann looking over her shoulder to see when the fat man in the hat was going to show up.”

He had always imagined driving to Wilmington and plucking Ann out of her house, or her office, by surprise. But he knew that as a retired cop with no power of arrest, this wouldn’t be the case. Still, he hoped that the grand-jury indictment would be a surprise to her and that whoever ended up arresting her got a chance to catch her woefully off guard.

But alas, there are no secrets in a courthouse. The elevators, the stairwells, the walls themselves seem to ooze information, just waiting for an eager reporter or perceptive lawyer to pick up on.

“Ann Miller knew she was going to be arrested. Her lawyers knew she was going to be arrested. And I think that took a big load of wind out of my sails,” Morgan says bitterly.

But he couldn’t afford to get sidetracked. Instead, he concentrated his efforts on making the best possible presentation he could to a grand jury. He knew he would have only one chance to do this. If he failed, the case would be over. The standard that had to be met in front of a grand jury to get a true bill returned was probable cause—the same standard needed for an arrest. Clearly, prosecutors Colon Willoughby and Becky Holt felt they had enough to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt or they would not have taken it this far, but Morgan was still nervous about having the entire future of the case resting on his ample shoulders. It had all come down to this.

With confidence, yet not without emotion, Morgan walked the grand jury through the Raleigh Police Department’s case against Ann Miller from the very beginning. He told them about all of Eric Miller’s hospitalizations and Dr. Thomas Clark’s subsequent findings that arsenic poisoning was the cause of death. He told them about Ann’s affairs with Derril Willard and Carl Mackewicz. He told them about his one and only conversation with Willard, about Willard’s suicide, and ultimately, about Willard’s confession to Rick Gammon regarding Ann putting poison in Eric’s IV at Rex Hospital. He walked out feeling like he had done his best.

After Morgan read his notes to the grand jury, he went into the hall and waited. Approximately two minutes later jurors called in the next investigator to testify in the next case.
Bingo,
thought Morgan. They’d had no trouble deciding on a true bill; otherwise the lag time between the two cases would have been longer. He was ecstatic. But there was still the matter of where they could find Ann Miller when the warrant was finally signed and ready to be executed. He had waited too long for this day for her arrest to be a nonevent.

Within ten minutes of the signing of the warrant, Joe Cheshire called Becky Holt and told her that his client would turn herself in at the Wake County Public Safety Center. It was to be a civilized handover, not the kind of painful, embarrassing event Morgan had hoped for after all these years. Not only would it be civil, but Morgan would play no role beyond that of an idle spectator on the sidewalk in a big white hat.

He was now, for the first time in his law enforcement career, on the outside looking in. He was no longer part of the show; he was just a civilian on the sidelines gawking like everyone else.

“After all that time it was something of a bitter pill to swallow, but I swallowed it,” Morgan says matter-of-factly. “Essentially it was not my rodeo.”

Morgan stood across the street and watched as Detectives Amanda Salmon and Justin Matthews placed Ann Miller in handcuffs in front of the jail. In an oversize sweater and tan cotton pants, her shoulder-length now strawberry-blond hair unfixed around her barely made-up face, Ann looked more like a schoolteacher than a cold-blooded killer. She seemed bewildered, as if she couldn’t imagine how this could be happening to her, as if a mistake had obviously been made. To Morgan, her demeanor, and even her choice of outfit, was calculated. He figured she wanted to look “mousy” so that people would feel sorry for her.

“She was the prototypical psychopath in sheep’s clothing because she truly looked shell-shocked, vulnerable, meek,” recalls Morgan. “But I think I was able to see the real Ann as she was. She was just as evil as she’d ever been. She was doing what psychopaths often do. She was acting appropriately for the situation after behaving in a totally inappropriate manner. Ann looked very much the victim that day.”

Detectives proceeded to put Ann Miller into a Raleigh police car to take her to the station for questioning. This caused her lawyers to go ballistic, insisting that she had turned herself in and did not need to be processed at the police station.

The only ones who seemed to care that the former investigator in the white fedora was on the sidewalk that day were the media. They surrounded Morgan like hungry barracudas. They pounded him with questions peppered with phrases like “this must be a great day for you,” and “you must be happy.” While Morgan did experience a flood of emotions that day, happiness wasn’t one of them.

“ ‘What have I got to be happy about? A good man is dead, two good men are dead. Two children who will never know their fathers as they grow older. There’s nothing to be happy about here,’ ” Morgan says, recalling his words to the media.

The battle was not over. Far from it. It had only just begun. Ann Miller was finally behind bars, but now they had to keep her there.

In his heart and in his head Chris Morgan fully believed that Ann Miller (by this time going by her new married name, Ann Miller Kontz, but Morgan just couldn’t bring himself to call her that) had convinced Derril Willard to give Eric poison that night at the bowling alley. He also strongly suspected that Ann had already experimented by giving Eric small doses throughout the summer of 2000. And after Eric managed to pull through the first hospitalization, Morgan believed that Ann went back to what was convenient—more arsenic.

But this theory still was not sitting well with Dr. Marsha Ford (no relation to Tom Ford), who headed North Carolina’s Poison Control Division. According to Morgan, Dr. Ford remained unconvinced that a woman as educated as Ann Miller would have continued to use such a pedestrian poison when, as a scientist, she clearly had access to and knowledge of other dangerous chemicals. Especially considering that UNC Hospitals had already determined that arsenic was a factor in Eric’s first hospitalization, Dr. Ford felt Ann would not have been stupid enough to use it again.

“She was just wrong about that,” Morgan says. “Ann wasn’t particularly smart. I mean, they got her school records from Purdue University. I know what she made on the SAT. I scored higher on the SAT than Ann Miller did . . . She wasn’t quite a genius. She was a long way from being a genius.”

In October of 2004, Morgan and the prosecution team headed to Charlotte to have a meeting with Dr. Ford. Unlike his experience with Dr. Thomas Clark, Morgan recalls that Dr. Ford was pleasant and cordial. He knew she was an eminently qualified toxicologist and that her testimony would be key to putting Ann behind bars. But they didn’t want her speculating about other poisons in front of a jury. Morgan was convinced that Dr. Ford, as brilliant as she was, was simply tripping over the fact that an educated scientist would use a generic poison to commit murder. He also felt there was a chance she’d been led down the garden path by the previous prosecutor in the investigation. The only way for Morgan to turn it around was to convince Dr. Ford that her assumption about Ann’s intelligence was incorrect.

“Essentially [Dr. Ford] believed that criminals are smart. I mean the legend of the criminal mastermind who outwits the police, outwits prosecutors, outwits medical experts—certainly Ann’s occupation would lead you to believe she had that kind of talent,” Morgan says. But to Morgan, that was the stuff of made-for-television movies. This was
real life,
and in his experience, real-life criminals are just plain stupid.

“By and large the myth of the criminal mastermind is just that . . . a myth. Most criminals, even psychopaths, are really not that smart. They can be clever, they can be good actors, but they’re not grossly overintelligent,” Morgan states. “If [Ann] had been a criminal genius, we probably would never have been able to lay a glove on her.”

Morgan pleaded his case to Dr. Ford, explaining why he thought Ann Miller was just a typical criminal who happened to have a degree. He explained that she did what a lot of criminals do—she took the path of least resistance. In this case,
arsenic.

“I staked out my position and I thought I saw something glimmer in Dr. Ford’s eye by the time that meeting was over,” Morgan says, and sighs with relief. Dr. Ford ultimately agreed with Dr. Clark that Eric had died from arsenic poisoning and that he’d received the fatal dose prior to his final hospital stay.

In a letter to Becky Holt dated April 14, 2005, Dr. Ford said: The fatal cardiac arrest sustained by Eric Miller on December 2, 2000, was the result of the first, and possibly the second dose of arsenic (as described in items 1 and 2 above), and no other etiology or addition toxin need be evoked.

In the early days of the investigation Morgan hadn’t quite grasped just how important science would be to solving and proving this case. As he did with a lot of things he didn’t understand, he had simply shrugged it off. Looking back, he recalls a moment when he’d had just about enough science talk and mouthed off in front of a local newspaper reporter.

“I popped off in the mouth and I said in front of Oren [Dorell], ‘People need to remember this is not a science project, this is a murder investigation,’ and it pretty much ended up in print,” Morgan laments.

Upon reflection, Morgan realized that science
was
the heart of the case. Ann was able to kill Eric because she was a scientist who understood how to use a toxin to end someone’s life. So as they prepared for trial, Morgan was finally at peace with the complex science that would be the core of the case.

But it wasn’t enough to have just one eminently qualified scientist on their side; Becky Holt told Morgan they would need a team of experts, not just Dr. Clark and Dr. Ford, to win this case.

Holt was looking for someone who knew what they were talking about, someone who could testify in court, someone who would seal Ann’s fate.

Early on, they heard that defense attorneys had retained Dr. R. Page Hudson, the former chief medical examiner of North Carolina, who had reigned over the office during the Velma Barfield case, and the Blanche Taylor Moore case, both high-profile arsenic poisonings that captured statewide attention and national headlines. So he was out. This was not good news for the prosecution team, but nonetheless they got to work looking for experts who could support their theory of Eric’s death. This was no easy task, since scientists, not unlike investigators and attorneys, don’t necessarily share the same opinions even when faced with the exact same set of facts.