by Amanda Lamb
Willard had been found by his wife, Yvette, and their young daughter when Yvette returned from work. She’d opened the garage door, and there he was, still in his pajamas and slippers. He hadn’t even bothered to dress that day, and why would he? He’d obviously made a decision that he was going to exit the world, and it didn’t matter what he was wearing.
Crump and his photographer, who were staked out in front of the Willard house, also got a firsthand glimpse of the gruesome sight, much to their surprise. They had come to the house that day simply to follow up on the article in the newspaper about the search of the home and Willard’s possible connection to Eric Miller’s murder. Their goal had been to interview Willard. When no one answered the door, they’d waited, assuming that Derril and Yvette were probably at work. When Yvette Willard pulled into the driveway with her daughter, Kelcey, they moved in closer, hoping to get her to talk about the case. But as the garage door opened they were greeted by the horrible sight of Willard’s dead body.
As Ed Crump remembered it, they couldn’t make out at first that there was a body lying on the garage floor. To him it had simply looked like a pile of couch cushions from the end of the driveway, as Yvette’s car was partially blocking his view. She immediately closed the garage and went inside. But when the news team went to their live van and replayed their tape, they were horrified to see not sofa cushions, but the unthinkable, what should have been the most private of tragedies, caught on tape. Tape that would never see air, but would be etched in their minds forever.
Morgan admits he hadn’t lost too much sleep the night before the suicide worrying about Willard’s fate. In his mind there was nothing he could have done. His hands were tied. He was the one who’d wanted to arrest Willard on Sunday. Clearly, had Willard been arrested, he would not have been able to kill himself, at least not as easily, in a jail cell. It’s a thought that has taken over Morgan’s mind more than once in the years since. At the time it bothered him to his core. It sat on Morgan’s list of a thousand what-ifs that he would never be able to change. His list was longer than most, and the consequences of the choices made were greater.
But at the time Morgan had other things on his mind. As awful as he felt about the man’s death, he couldn’t afford to dwell on Derril Willard. “Jeff and his crew sprang into action [to handle the suicide]. I didn’t get invited along for the party and didn’t feel like there was a whole lot that I could offer,” Morgan explains. Since Willard lived in Wake County, not in the Raleigh city limits, the Wake County Sheriff’s Office was investigating the suicide.
Also, Morgan was getting ready to head to New York and Boston to interview witnesses in another case, the death of Beth-Ellen Vinson. This was the cold case that concerned a young girl from eastern North Carolina who had come to Raleigh with big dreams, only to have them snuffed out by a killer wielding a knife in a drainage ditch. Morgan had been assigned to reinvestigate the Vinson case, but because of his obsession with the Miller case, his focus had been diverted. It was time for him to get back on track. Unlike the Miller case, the Vinson case was a hundred percent his and he was determined to give it his all.
Still Morgan couldn’t shake the feeling that he could be, should be, doing more to help out in the Miller case. He stuck around the office, watched the news reports, and tried to be available in case the investigators working the case needed his help.
The big question, not only for investigators, but for the media, was whether or not Willard had left a suicide note. After all, this wasn’t just any suicide. It was the suicide of a man intimately connected with a suspect in a murder investigation. If a note had been left, it could possibly provide valuable clues to detectives about Eric Miller’s death. Reporters immediately grilled investigators at the scene about whether or not a note had in fact been left. The answer to the question was ultimately yes, Willard did leave a note, but like other key pieces of evidence, Raleigh police felt this was a fact too valuable to release for public consumption just yet.
That night Morgan said Wade Smith, Ann Miller’s attorney, called Detective Debbie Regentin and asked her if a note had been left. Clearly, he was concerned that if there was a note, it might implicate his client. Morgan says Regentin took the high road and told Smith she wasn’t able to give him that information because it was part of an ongoing investigation.
Ultimately, because the suicide wasn’t a Raleigh Police Department case, they had no control over the release of information. It was up to the Wake County Sheriff’s Office and Major Danny Bellamy. Reporters asked Bellamy about the existence of a note the day after Willard’s suicide. Morgan will never forget his answer.
“Danny told the reporters, ‘Yeah, we’ve got a suicide note, but I don’t think anybody is going to be solving any murders from the suicide note that was left by Derril Willard,’ ” Morgan recalls, appalled. “To this day I still don’t know why Danny Bellamy did that.”
It was a crushing blow for investigators scrambling to keep important evidence confidential. The more they released, the more the public speculated, and the murkier the water became. In a courtroom, in front of twelve jurors, murky waters equaled reasonable doubt, and in a case like this detectives couldn’t afford to leave even a shred of reasonable doubt. In his heart Morgan believes Bellamy simply didn’t consider the implications of releasing this information for the murder investigation. After all, he wasn’t living and breathing it as members of the Raleigh Police Department were doing.
In Morgan’s mind, releasing this information gave Ann Miller and Wade Smith exactly what they wanted—proof that there was nothing in the note to implicate her in her husband’s murder. But Morgan wasn’t so sure the note was benign.
The note was written in all block capital letters on a single sheet of paper tacked to the garage wall in plain view. Unlike Willard’s apparent lack of concern about his appearance, he seemed to have been very concerned that the note be found along with his body. In Morgan’s mind Willard had chosen each and every one of his words very carefully, and because of this, they deserved Morgan’s equally careful scrutiny. Over the coming years Morgan would read this note over and over, trying to read between the lines, looking for the real message that a dead witness was attempting to send from his grave. It was like a code Morgan was forever trying to crack, but without success.
THE NOTE
I AM SORRY TO LEAVE YOU, MY WIFE, MY BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER, MY FAMILY AND FRIENDS, LIKE THIS. THE PAST YEAR HAS BEEN FULL OF ANXIETY, SICKNESS AND PAIN. TODAY, I HAVE BEEN ACCUSED OF AN ACTION FOR WHICH I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE. I HAVE TAKEN NO ONE’S LIFE, SAVE MY OWN. THE WORLD LOOKS BLACK TO ME. ALL I CAN SEE IS THE SMEARING OF MY NAME, PAIN CAUSED MY FAMILY, PERSONAL HUMILIATION AND PROBABLE ECONOMIC RUIN. I DEEPLY REGRET MY MANNER OF LEAVING THE WORLD, BUT HOPE THE [SIC] ANY PAIN CAUSED WILL NOT LINGER—AT LEAST NOT IN THE FASHION THAT MY REMAINING HERE MIGHT ENGENDER. I HAVE BEEN BLESSED WITH A LIFE FULL OF LOVE AND CARING. I LOVE YOU, MY FAMILY. I LOVE YOU, MY DAUGHTER.
I LOVE YOU ALL—
KEEPING SECRETS
Morgan headed to New York undeterred by what appeared to be yet another roadblock in the Miller case—valuable, inside information handed to the defense counsel on a silver platter in the form of the evening news. Again, he had to keep telling himself that it wasn’t his case. But somehow he knew that if it ever did become his case, these obstacles would come back to haunt him. His gut was right. They did.
While he was driving to New York (because flying was his biggest fear) Morgan got a cell-phone call from Fluck. He wanted to know where the court order form asking a judge to seal an autopsy was located in Morgan’s filing cabinet. They wanted to have the details of Eric Miller’s autopsy sealed. This would mean that only investigators and prosecutors could have access to the information. No one else, including the victim’s family or reporters, could get to it. Morgan had had experience with this issue because Beth-Ellen Vinson’s autopsy report had been, and still was, sealed by the original investigators who worked on t
hat case. Immediately, Morgan had a bad feeling that sealing the autopsy was not the correct course of action in the Miller case.
“The more you try and keep a secret that’s usually public record, the more apt you are to make everybody suspicious about what’s going on,” Morgan says. “Sometimes suspicions like that can just derail an investigation.”
In Morgan’s opinion the Vinson case was a prime example of why not to seal an autopsy report. On one hand, keeping Beth-Ellen’s manner of death a secret was a way to root out the person who murdered her. Only her killer would know exactly how she died. This meant that the killer would be more likely to trip himself up during an interview and reveal something about the manner of death that only he or investigators could possibly know. On the other hand, the victim’s family members were left totally in the dark about their daughter’s manner of death, and as a result, they became suspicious about whether or not detectives were really doing their jobs.
Ultimately, when Vinson’s body was sent to the funeral home in Goldsboro, North Carolina, a small, tight-knit community in the eastern part of the state, the truth came out. It was clear from the condition of her body that she had been stabbed multiple times. It became something of a rural legend. Word traveled fast in Wayne County. The secret that investigators and the court had tried so hard to guard was out, despite their best efforts to control the situation.
In the Miller case there was a very different reason for keeping the autopsy report sealed. It was a reason that Morgan to this day can’t truly get his mind around. He could not at first for the life of him figure out why in the world Fluck and prosecutor Tom Ford wanted to seal it. It had been clear to him and everyone else involved in the case from the get-go that Eric Miller had been poisoned with arsenic. Morgan couldn’t imagine how making the details of the poisoning—which only a scientist could truly decipher—public would hurt the case.
But Morgan says that Fluck and Ford thought that another toxin, something other than arsenic, might also have been involved in Eric Miller’s death. Morgan figured they felt that an educated woman like Ann Miller wouldn’t just use plain old garden-variety arsenic over and over again, that surely she would mix it up a little, add in something else. In Morgan’s mind this was, and is to this day, faulty reasoning.
Thankfully no one disagreed at this point that Ann Miller was the most likely suspect in her husband’s murder, but they wanted more time to search for the mystery toxin.
Not unlike searching for another suspect in a murder case, looking at a different cause of death can steer you so far away from the truth that it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to get back. No one else shared this opinion about another toxin, including the medical examiner, Dr. Thomas Clark.
“It alienated the medical examiner’s office because they didn’t see the big mystery here,” Morgan says. “The impetus for sealing the autopsy in the Eric Miller case was something that would come to haunt us for years and years.”
In Morgan’s mind it was a simple case in many ways. On December 4, 2000, during the search of Ann Miller’s lab at Glaxo Wellcome, sodium cacodylate, an arsenic compound, had been discovered. Miller and Willard had had easy, unfettered, untraceable access to it. It was more than enough to kill Eric Miller several times over. End of story.
“It’s no big mystery, crime makes people stupid, even smart people,” Morgan says. “For the great [majority] of murderers who are neither intelligent, nor well educated, it makes them do just ridiculous things.”
Fluck had secured his own consultant, pathologist Andy Mason, who was a known expert on arsenic. He was a former employee of the North Carolina Medical Examiner’s Office located at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Morgan was concerned that Mason might share the opinion that another toxin might be involved. The prosecutor had also been talking to Dr. Marsha Ford from the North Carolina Poison Control Office in Charlotte. Morgan said she, too, seemed to have suspicions that there might be another poison involved in Eric’s death.
But against Morgan’s gut feelings that it should be released, the autopsy was sealed by a judge for three months so that investigators could sort out what some of them saw as a major potential conflict in the evidence. It was a relatively short time compared to some cases, in which the evidence was often sealed indefinitely, as it had been in the Vinson case. For Morgan his concerns were becoming less about the sealing of the autopsy and more about the wild-goose chase that he felt was about to begin as they speculated about a second poison.
MOTIVE OF A MURDERESS
One of the biggest stumbling blocks in the Miller case was figuring out Ann Miller’s motive. For the most part Morgan believes motive is usually pretty easy to discern—in short, he believes people generally kill for money or love. But money didn’t seem to play a role here, and because Morgan didn’t think Ann had the ability to really love, that she just toyed with the men in her life, he couldn’t imagine her killing for them. As much as she appeared to manipulate, control, and loathe some of the men in her life, why would she kill one man for another?
Morgan admits that as an investigator, you want to pinpoint a motive so badly that you occasionally try to jam a square peg into a round hole and attempt to convince everyone around you that it fits. But motive is not always obvious. In fact, sometimes it’s downright elusive. This bothered other investigators more than it did Morgan. For him, having a clear motive wasn’t necessary to solve a crime, because he knew that sometimes people just kill. Period.
“It’s kind of like peeling away the layers of an onion. It’s not something that’s readily apparent and readily understandable, ” Morgan says.
Investigators started peeling the onion. They began looking for something, anything, in Ann Miller’s history that might prove she had killed before.
In one interview investigators learned that a man Ann had known had jumped out of a helicopter at a football game and his parachute failed to open. He hit the ground at warp speed and died. Was Ann responsible? It seemed implausible, but they were desperate to find something that would give them ammunition, a pattern, a trail of dead bodies.
“There was a kind of fervor to show that Ann had been involved in prior murderess events. Nothing they uncovered actually led to that conclusion,” says Morgan.
As far as Morgan was concerned, if a person killed one time, it didn’t necessarily mean he or she had killed before, or would ever kill again. It simply meant that a set of circumstances had come together that allowed the person to get away with murder at least once, circumstances that might never have existed before, and might never exist again.
Fluck went back further and further. He interviewed people whom Ann had worked with, people she went to college with at Purdue, people who’d known her in every stage of her life. Sure, not everyone cared for her. There were those who had less than favorable things to say about Ann Miller. She was a “bitch.” She was “manipulative.” She was a “control freak.” She was “unforgivably ambitious.” But none of this made her a murderer. It simply made her a person whom others had strong opinions about one way or the other. Chris Morgan knows a little bit about this himself. Morgan is someone whom some people love and some people intensely dislike. Luckily he’s also someone who doesn’t give a damn which camp you belong to. But he sensed that Ann did care about what people thought of her. This is why, in his mind, she put up such a pretense of being a model wife and mother when in fact she was living on the dark side of humanity.
But Morgan felt investigators needed to cross the motive hurdle in order to move forward. They needed a reason that a well-educated, attractive young woman and mother would take her husband’s life in such a gruesome way, allowing him to suffer, and eventually deteriorate into death.
“Nobody ever believed Ann had any designs to live happily ever after with Derril Willard. It was fairly apparent from the very early stages of this case that we all assumed, quite rightly, that Derril Willard was simply a pawn, a tool that was used b
y Ann Miller,” Morgan says with obvious disgust.
Eliminating Willard as a motive left only one other known paramour, Carl Mackewicz. This was the direction in which detectives started to head at this point in the investigation, but it was a dead end to Morgan. Sure, Ann had had an affair with Mackewicz, that much was quite clear. But it didn’t seem likely that Carl, or any other one man for that matter, was enough for Ann.
As they dug deeper it became obvious that while Eric Miller’s past with women was squeaky-clean, Ann Miller’s past with men was at the far end of the spectrum—in a word, wild. It was commonly known that Eric had “saved” himself for marriage. It was just as commonly known that Ann had not. Apparently, according to some men who had known her in college, Ann was quite experienced in bed. Eric wouldn’t have been the first man to succumb to the savvy of a more sexually experienced woman. But Morgan believed Ann’s advanced sexual repertoire may have clouded Eric’s judgment to the point where he overlooked red flags in the relationship early on, and never saw with complete clarity, even on his deathbed.
DEATH BEHIND BARS
In Morgan’s mind the Miller investigation was like a train that had taken so many detours it was amazing that it ever reached its final destination. Every time he thought the train was rushing full-speed ahead toward an arrest, the track split and investigators took what he felt was the wrong path to a distant station. As a result of all the detours, it would take another couple of weeks to get back where they needed to be and begin all over again. It was a never-ending tail-spin.
In their desire to connect Ann Miller to another similar death, investigators looked into the lives of every person they could find who had known her. For months their focus settled squarely on her former college roommate at Purdue, Rene Hinson, who seemed to have an intimate knowledge of the real Ann, a knowledge that detectives hoped would help them develop leads in the case.
