Deadly Dose

by Amanda Lamb

  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.”

  INVESTIGATION UNDER WAY

  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.

  MEDICAL MINDS

  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.

  THE TRAIL

  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.

  “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.

  LAB MATES

  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.’ ”

  SIDELINED

  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.”

  THE E-MAIL TRAIL

  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.