Deadly Dose
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN - Some things have to be believed to be seen.
TWELVE
EPILOGUE
Acknowledgements
About the Author
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DEADLY DOSE
A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author
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Berkley mass-market edition / June 2008
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PROLOGUE
We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.
—KONRAD ADENAUER
Investigator Chris Morgan leans back slowly into the crevices of his worn leather recliner like he’s sinking into a hot bath. The dark brown material is stretched and broken from years of abuse, like a snake skin left by the side of the road in the scorching sunlight. The chair sticks to his large bare arms and surrounds him like an old familiar blanket. Over the years, his wife has begged him to get rid of the ugly old chair. But no other chair fits his ample frame quite like this one. It is here, in his chair, in the darkness of his study, in his room, that he tells the story that almost consumed the latter part of his life.
For Morgan there are two kinds of murderers. There is the impersonal murderer who kills for money. Often, the victim dies quickly and suffers little at the hands of this killer. But then there are murderers who revel in watching people die. They get joy and power from seeing their victims suffer. Ann Miller watched her husband, Dr. Eric Miller, die a thousand small deaths over a period of months before his heart finally stopped at 2:50 a.m. on Saturday, December 2, 2000, at Rex Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina.
To die from chronic arsenic poisoning is to be slowly tortured. Morgan has read everything he can find on the subject. He learned how arsenic attacks all of the tissues in your body and severely limits your ability to function. The first symptoms are flulike—nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Early on, the damage can be reversed if the exposure stops. But if it continues, the toxic chemical attacks your nerves, your stomach, your intestines, and your skin. You feel excruciating pain and eventually become psychotic. It is as if your body is slowly deteriorating, being eaten away, and one day, one painful day, it finally gives out for good.
North Carolina is no stranger to high-profile arsenic poisonings. Most often, the details are the stuff made-for-television movies are fashioned from. Forty-six-year-old Velma Barfield did it to her lover, Stuart Taylor, just before they dressed up in their Sunday best and went to see a visiting evangelist at the local convention center. Investigators soon learned many people close to Barfield had died under “suspicious circumstances.” She was ultimately convicted of killing Taylor and put to death in 1984.
Blanche Taylor Moore sits in a North Carolina prison condemned to death after being convicted of poisoning her boyfriend, Raymond Reid, with arsenic in 1986. In addition to Reid, investigators determined that Moore’s first and second husbands were also poisoned with arsenic. Her first husband died, yet Moore was charged only in Reid’s case. But it took only one case to put her on death row.
As many times as he has gone over it in his mind, Morgan can’t comprehend why a promising thirty-year-old pediatric AIDS researcher had to die this way. Eric Miller was the kind of man no one disliked. Morgan never knew him when he was alive, but after hundreds of interviews with people who did know Eric, Morgan now counts him as a friend.
Morgan readjusts his formidable frame and eases a little bit deeper into the comfortable chair, so deep he fears it might collapse beneath his ample weight. The house is quiet without his four children living at home. In the distance his dog barks manically from the yard. Morgan hears his wife, Kay, scolding, trying to usher the pet back inside. He takes another pinch of chewing tobacco. His story will take time to tell. It cascades out of his mouth in long, deliberate run-on sentences, like a poet searching for the right cadence.
Ann Miller was an attractive woman, a well-educated scientist, a mother, an active church member. Not the kind of woman anyone would’ve suspected of killing her husband; no one except perhaps Chris Morgan. Yet over the five-year period following Eric Miller’s death, Ann Miller left a string of lies, and a history of manipulation, hypocrisy, and more death in her path. Despite her prim and proper appearance, Ann Miller was serially unfaithful to her husband. Morgan always felt she had an uncanny power not only to lure men into her web of seduction, but to then cast them aside when she no longer needed what they had to offer.
For years Ann Miller remained free and seemingly un-flustered by the deaths she left in her wake. During this time Morgan refused to give up the fight to put her behind bars. As a leader of the Major Crimes Task Force, he was on her heels day and night. From the beginning he suspected that Ann Miller was the killer. He pressured the district attorney almost daily to take the case to court.
Crusader is not a word to be used lightly. But in this case it fits. Chris Morgan is a crusader in every sense of the word.
This is his story, as told from an old recliner in a small, comfortable ranch house somewhere in rural North Carolina. It is getting dark now as the la
te-winter sun sets in the distance, sending only a small shaft of light across his weathered face. He has traveled many miles to get to this day. He is ready.
ONE
Fate determines many things no matter how we struggle.
—OTTO WEININGER
The longer you live, the more you realize that while first impressions may not always be right, they usually are.
From the moment Investigator Chris Morgan saw thirty-year-old Ann Miller through the window of the interview room at the Raleigh Police Department on December 2, 2000, he knew something was wrong. Her image from that night is etched into his mind with the crystal-clear clarity of a black-and-white photograph. It has a timeless quality about it that never fades, never gets grainy, never curls or turns yellow around the edges. Indeed, it became only sharper as the years went by.
“I got that funny little feeling in the back of my mind,” Morgan says, recalling his peek at Ann through the interview-room window that cold winter night. It was a feeling that had served Morgan well in his twenty-nine years as a cop. He spent most of the last decade investigating murders, but this case stayed with him like a bad rash that wouldn’t go away.
Ann Miller, a scientist at the then-named pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Wellcome, was wrapped in an afghan and huddled against her father in a small waiting room. She was waiting to be interviewed by investigators about the death of her husband, Eric Miller. Thirty-year-old Dr. Eric Miller, a pediatric AIDS researcher at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at UNC Hospitals, had died at Rex Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina, at 2:50 a.m. that morning. The cause—arsenic poisoning. He took his last breath never knowing what hit him.
Eric was a tall, thin, handsome man, with a head full of thick brown hair and a smile for every camera lens. Morgan still looks at Eric’s pictures often, and is surprisingly comforted by them. They show a man full of life, full of promise, a man who was not supposed to die young. A man Morgan would have liked to have known.
Morgan himself is a large, imposing man with sprigs of white hair and a worn face that reveals the time he spent in the trenches as a homicide investigator. He walks slowly, and speaks slowly, letting each thought roll off his tongue with a combination of southern redneck and unlikely academic thrown in. He usually wears a white fedora, and beneath the brim, if he tips his hat, you might catch a glimpse of twinkling blue eyes indicating a man full of curiosity.
“Something just wasn’t ringing true,” says Morgan of that night when he first saw Ann Miller. Ann was not a tiny woman—at five feet five inches and 140 pounds, she was average by most standards—but there was something about her highlighted mousy-brown shoulder-length hair, her soft blue eyes, and the way she leaned in to her father for comfort that made her look more diminutive and frail than she really was. In Morgan’s estimation, the helpless-little-girl look was part of her power, her control over others. It made people want to take care of her. And it worked.
“The more I thought, the more I flashed back to seeing her sitting there looking the way she did. Like I say, she was prim, proper. The more I thought this isn’t an accident, this isn’t any suicide. This is a murder.”
STUMBLING INTO THE CASE
In 2000, Morgan was a sergeant heading up one of two squads of the Major Crimes Task Force for the Raleigh Police Department. On the weekend of December 2, 2000, he wasn’t scheduled to work, but instead was preparing to head to the western part of the state for a homicide conference to present information he had collected in a 1994 cold case of a young murder victim named Beth-Ellen Vinson.
Morgan had been asked to reinvestigate the unsolved murder by police chief Mitch Brown. For a year, Morgan had poured his heart and soul into reworking the cold case. Not unlike every other case he doggedly pursued, Morgan took an emotional and intensely personal interest in Beth-Ellen and her family. He had brought his findings, complete with a detailed PowerPoint presentation, to Wake County district attorney Colon Willoughby. But Willoughby felt he still needed more evidence to get a conviction in a courtroom. Dejected after putting so much effort into what he thought was a solid case, Morgan hoped his colleagues at the conference could help him come up with a different approach to pitch the case again to district attorneys. Still, this disappointment clouded his opinion of the Wake County District Attorney’s Office and would set the tone for his future dealings with local prosecutors.
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 al
l. 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?
THE INTERVIEW
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.