Deadly Dose (3 page)

“It was just very bizarre, almost, that Ann had gone in not to get a quick shampoo, maybe a little trim, but [that] she went in and told this hairdresser that she wanted to experiment with a new look,” Morgan says, shaking his head along with his words. “There’s something wrong with that. There would be something wrong with it if my wife did it. It’s not what would be expected of a normal spouse in this situation, male or female. It’s just not what people would do.”

It reminds Morgan, as this case would so many times later, of the Laci Peterson case. In December 2002, the eight-months pregnant California woman disappeared, and months later her body and the body of her unborn child, Conner, were found along the shores of San Francisco Bay. When investigators checked her husband’s computer, they learned that while Laci was missing, Scott Peterson (later convicted of his wife’s murder) had spent the time casually surfing the Internet rather than searching for her.

On the evening of November 18, the day Eric was moved to the ICU, Morgan says Dr. William Berry, a Rex Hospital cardiologist, began to suspect arsenic poisoning as a potential cause of Eric’s bizarre, undiagnosed symptoms.

Morgan was especially impressed with Dr. Berry for being the first person to go out on a limb and suspect something unconventional. Instead of simply labeling Eric’s symptoms the result of some kind of rare virus, Dr. Berry went back to his basic medical training and began looking for outside factors that could cause such symptoms.

On November 19, Dr. Berry ordered a heavy-metals test be performed on Eric Miller to see if his suspicion was accurate. The next day a preliminary test came back showing that Eric had .93 milligrams of arsenic in his blood—a “huge amount,” Morgan says.

Because his condition was continuing to deteriorate, on November 21, Eric was transferred from Rex Hospital to a medical facility with more resources, the University of North Carolina Hospitals in Chapel Hill. Morgan explains that the staff at Rex felt Eric needed higher-level care than they could offer him.

On November 22, Dr. Mehna Mohan, one of Eric Miller’s doctors at Rex hospital, called Dr. Paul Lawrence Wang, a third-year resident who had taken over Eric’s care at UNC. Morgan says Mohan wanted to fill Wang in on the results of the arsenic test taken on November 19. This, Morgan feels, is where a critical miscommunication occurred.

“Dr. Mohan is giving, or quoting, lab results to the doctors at Chapel Hill and what she is giving them is a blood level, but they hear it as a urine level and therein lies the problem,” says Morgan, shaking his head. “The reading she was giving him for a blood level was astronomical and toxic, deadly toxic. The readings, if you interpreted them as a urine level, were maybe toxic, but not anything fatal.”

Yet Morgan says his concerns about which tests were performed, how quickly they came back, and what was communicated to UNC Hospitals had nothing to do with the criminal investigation. He wasn’t a doctor, nor were his detectives. They didn’t have the medical background to judge what the doctors had or had not done. Could Eric’s death have been prevented if the arsenic had been zeroed in on earlier? Probably, Morgan thinks. But in Morgan’s estimation, the men and women who tried to save Eric Miller’s life were not responsible for his death.

In his heart Morgan believed a single person was responsible for Eric Miller’s murder. It became his mission to find out who had administered the deadly dose of arsenic that ultimately claimed the young scientist’s life.

The case really began to unfold when investigators started talking to people who worked with Ann and Eric. It was not necessarily what these interviewees said; it was more often what they did
not
say that aroused suspicions. A single thread leading from Ann to her husband’s death began to form. It took many twists and turns along the way; so many, Morgan probably would have turned around in the very beginning if he’d known what was coming down the road.

Morgan specifically remembers one interview with a coworker of Ann’s at Glaxo Wellcome named Liping Wang (no relation to Dr. Wang). Wang shared a cubicle with Ann and was also friends with Eric. She had once worked in Eric’s lab at UNC Hospitals, and subsequently, Eric had recommended her for a job with Ann’s pharmaceutical company.

“That first interview with [Liping Wang] was kind of strange,” Morgan says, a chuckle punctuating the end of his sentence. “Number one, it was one of the few interviews I had ever done with my shoes off.”

Morgan remembers how he and Detective Don Terry arrived at Wang’s home one evening and saw shoes lined up by the door. Morgan assumed the lush, clean, white carpet in the hallway was the reason for the shoeless protocol and directed Terry to follow his lead and remove his shoes as well. Morgan felt slightly silly sitting at Wang’s dining-room table in his three-piece suit, his fedora, and his socks. But as an investigator, he’d always had a “when in Rome” attitude. It was critical in order to gain someone’s trust and confidence. You had to earn it. You had to prove you could adapt to their rules when you were on their turf.

Wang served the detectives green tea in dainty china cups. Again, this was no coffee-and-donuts meeting in a Crown Victoria like most cops were used to, but they accepted Wang’s hospitality graciously. Morgan admits he actually kind of enjoyed the tea. Yet, given the nature of the investigation—
poisoning
—Terry was not thrilled at the idea of drinking unknown tea offered by a stranger.

Like any experienced investigator, Morgan asked the same questions over and over again, hoping to get to the truth of how Wang perceived Ann’s relationship with her husband. But over and over again, he says Wang gave them the same story, using slightly different words. She gushed about what a good marriage Ann and Eric had, about how they were perfectly suited for each other. Morgan feels that it may have been a story Wang had been telling herself repeatedly because the alternative was too difficult to comprehend.

“ ‘What a happy couple they were!’ ” Morgan says, mimicking Wang’s tone with fake exuberance. “Before it was over with, I said, ‘Something is not right here.’ ”

Morgan always trusted his gut, and his gut was telling him there was a lot more to this story than anyone truly understood, including him. But again, it was not his case. It was Jeff Fluck’s case. Morgan’s access to information was limited to what he heard around the watercooler and to specific assignments Fluck asked him to undertake. To put it bluntly, he had no control over the direction of the investigation in the beginning. Even though he was involved in the interview process, he was still a bit player. He ached to get off the bench and into the game.

To keep his growing curiosity at bay, Morgan sought information from people in the know, the people closest to the case. He hung out in the break room, near the coffeemaker, in the hallway, anywhere he could catch a detective who was working more directly on the case. He picked their brains, asked for their hypotheses, and drew conclusions of his own that he kept to himself.

He started to see a pattern of growing frustration among the investigators who were working diligently on the case. They shared with him their concerns that Ann Miller seemed untouchable despite their best efforts to see her. She seemed to create nothing but obstacles for detectives at every turn.

Morgan wanted to be involved in the case so badly he could taste it. It was all he thought about day and night. But police protocol dictated that he stay out of it. Luckily, Morgan was never a person who cared much for protocol.

The more he learned from his own interviews and from his coworkers, the more he was convinced that he knew what had happened; maybe not all of the details, but that would come later. He knew enough to know that a killer was roaming the streets, free and clear. A killer who might just get away with murder if something wasn’t done to turn up the heat on the investigation.

The biggest problem was the Raleigh Police Department’s lack of access to Ann Miller. Her high-powered attorney, Wade Smith, kept promising she would come down to the station for an interview, but Morgan knew it wouldn’t happen. Wade Smith was an unfailingly polite and gracious man. In jest, he often called himself a country lawyer, but had an uptown practice with a price tag to match. He spoke with an educated lilt that made him sound more like an Ivy League college professor than an attorney. It was Morgan’s understanding that Smith was going to try to get Ann Miller to come down to the station for another interview, but it never happened.

“I don’t really know what Ann told him,” Morgan says, always willing to give a star attorney like Smith the benefit of the doubt, “but I think she told him enough, even if she didn’t tell him the whole truth, so that he realized it would certainly not be in her best interest to actually cooperate with the police.”

People are often still naively unaware, even with today’s advanced technology, that almost anything you delete from a computer can be retrieved. But this lack of clarity about what is accessible and what is not serves investigators well. It allows them to gather information they would never have had access to before.

The e-mail trail that Ann Miller recklessly left in her wake was the first solid lead in the case. When her computer records started coming in, investigators got a better picture of what had
really
been going on in Ann Miller’s life. According to Morgan, a cop who was just learning how to maneuver around a computer himself, this information was probably the most damning circumstantial evidence he had ever come across in all of his gritty years in investigations.

Like most cops, Morgan worked off-duty security to make a few extra bucks. It was a practice the department not only allowed, but endorsed. After all, who could support a family on a cop’s salary? One night while on one of his off-duty jobs, Morgan grabbed a stack of the e-mails investigators had collected in the Miller case and started reading.

“What we found on Eric Miller’s computer was about as pure as the driven snow,” says Morgan, who’d expected as much. Eric’s e-mail communications were “vanilla” in nature, either work-related, or if they were personal, mainly focused on his baby daughter, Clare. There was nothing in Eric’s e-mail to suggest that he had problems in his marriage, nothing to suggest that he suspected his wife of infidelity. In fact there was nothing to suggest a conflict with anyone at all.

For Morgan this was a key element because it showed that Eric Miller never saw anything coming. He had no idea that someone had put a target on his forehead. That’s why, even when he lay dying in a hospital bed, he would never have suspected that someone had poisoned him.

In addition to searching Eric Miller’s computer, investigators searched his lab. There was no arsenic anywhere to be found. Clearly, this meant that the arsenic poisoning had not been the result of an accidental exposure. Something Morgan had always thought unlikely, but now the theory was finally disqualified.

As soon as Morgan began reading the records from Ann’s computers, however, he got a very different picture of the allegedly loving spouse and now grieving widow. He discovered that Ann had a fantasy life so rich, so well crafted, that it had almost replaced her real life. The more he read, the more the inner workings of this woman’s mind amazed him.

Ann had a flirtatious online correspondence with a coworker at Glaxo Wellcome named Derril Willard. There was nothing in the e-mails that jumped out and stated in black and white that Ann Miller and Derril Willard were involved in a romantic relationship, but according to Morgan, it was pretty clear from the tenor of the messages that one existed. He also knew that Ann was too smart to make her e-mails
too
obvious. Morgan said reading the exchanges was like hearing half of a conversation. The e-mails were filled with innuendo and private jokes that only the two of them could understand and clearly had to be based on earlier conversations the couple had had in person or over the phone.

It just so happened that Willard was also one of the three men who had accompanied Eric Miller to the bowling alley on November 15, 2000. That was the night Eric got violently ill and had to be rushed to Rex Hospital the first time after vomiting and complaining of severe stomach pains.

Morgan said investigators were hoping to find a “magic bullet” in these e-mail communications. They didn’t find it, but what they did find confirmed their suspicions that Ann Miller wasn’t the demure, conservative, religious woman she appeared to be. It wasn’t
magic,
but it was enough to begin to build a homicide case against her. Or so Morgan thought at the time. Little did he know just how rocky the road to justice would prove to be.

On November 15 at 10:15 a.m., just hours before the bowling outing that Eric would attend with Derril Willard, Ann Miller sent Willard an e-mail full of flowery prose worthy of a greeting-card writer. As she talked about feelings, it was almost like Ann was manipulating him with her sappy language—telling him that his “beautiful blue eyes” stirred her soul, urging him not to fear crying, that his tears were like a diamond necklace around her neck, and insisting that while occasionally confusing, “emotions are awesome.”
“I want to touch you in places that you knew not existed. Take you to places you’ve never been before. One thing I’ll never do is make you feel not wanted,”
she wrote.

Morgan strongly believed that Eric Miller got sick for the first time that fateful night at the bowling alley because someone gave him arsenic, probably in his beer. Given the apparent connection between Ann Miller and Derril Willard, it seemed likely that Ann had coerced Willard into participating in her evil scheme. In Morgan’s mind it was clear that in the e-mail Ann was greasing the wheel, buttering up Willard for what he was about to do, what she had asked and prodded him to do. Morgan believed even then, in the early stages of the investigation, that Ann used her power over Willard to rope him into a plot to kill her husband.