Deadly Dose

by Amanda Lamb

  Morgan felt as if Assistant District Attorney Becky Holt had ridden into his office on a white horse to save the Eric Miller case.

  “She said, ‘I’m up here on the Miller case.’ I said, ‘That’s Ford’s case.’ She said, ‘Not anymore,’ ” Morgan recalls with sheer exuberance in his voice.

  Morgan couldn’t conceal his excitement. He liked and respected Holt very much and considered her to be a cops’ prosecutor. She was someone who valued the opinions of investigators and treated them as part of the prosecution team. She also informed him that Assistant District Attorney Doug Faucette would help her prosecute the case. Morgan viewed Faucette, who “looked like the boy who mowed my lawn,” as one of the brightest young stars in the district attorney’s office.

  “At that point I was saying, ‘Ann Miller, you don’t know what’s happened to you, girl, and you’re fixing to go down,’ ” Morgan states with vengefulness.

  HELL FREEZES OVER

  All of a sudden Morgan was having second thoughts again about his retirement. He knew that paragraph 12 would help Becky Holt take the case to the grand jury and that she would no doubt get an indictment, but he worried about what would happen after that. How would she prepare for a trial based on a four-year investigation without the help of the lead investigator?

  “I was really torn,” says Morgan.

  But he had made a decision, a very difficult decision, and he intended to stick with it. His last day on the job, May 31, 2004, started like any other day, except for the boxes stacked up in the corner of his office. His colleagues came in to say their good-byes and spend one more afternoon in his office talking junk. They traded stories and jabs. It felt good to know that he had developed such close relationships with his cop friends over the years. He would miss them, but he knew he would see them again. Morgan kept telling himself that this wasn’t an ending, but a beginning to a whole new chapter in his life, even if he didn’t know exactly where it would lead.

  Then Morgan got the call. It was Chief Perlov’s secretary, Pat Bridgers. She asked Morgan if he would be in his office because the chief wanted to pay him a little visit. Without hesitation, Morgan said he would be there and told her to come on down. He assumed Perlov was making a very generous gesture to come by and say farewell, to smooth over any rough patches they had experienced in their short tenure together. He actually thought it was very big of her. It was something he hadn’t expected, but something that he would accept humbly and with sincere appreciation.

  But Morgan could never have imagined what happened next. Chief Perlov, all business, entered Morgan’s office and sat down in a chair directly across from his desk. She nodded briefly to the other officers congregated in Morgan’s office and then turned her gaze to Morgan.

  She told him that Colon Willoughby had paid her a visit and relayed that Ann Miller was going to be indicted. She also told him that Willoughby wanted Morgan to stay with the Raleigh Police Department just a little bit longer in order to help the prosecution team put the case together.

  “I said, ‘Chief, are you asking me to stay?’ ” Morgan remembers asking coyly. “She said, ‘Yes, this is important. ’ ”

  Morgan says Captain Ken Mathias’s jaw literally dropped to the ground. The other officers looked just as shell-shocked. Two rivals who were worthy of a comic-book story line had made nice in the interest of justice. It was almost too much for Morgan to take in. It felt better than he ever could have imagined in his wildest dreams. It was like the Sally Fields moment at the Oscars—you like me, he thought incredulously, you really like me?

  “By the next day I was back, [a] sworn, never-retired, Raleigh Police officer,” says Morgan.

  GAME ON

  Morgan jumped head-on into the task of preparing the case. He began the tedious process of bringing prosecutors up-to-date on four years’ worth of work. It was painstaking, time-consuming, detail work, but Morgan was reinvigorated.

  “I was literally floating through the next several months because I knew that the end was in sight,” Morgan recalls. “I was finally going to retire in comfort with the knowledge that Ann Miller was going to be in jail where she belongs. That sustained me.”

  Morgan had always loved his work. It was never a chore for him, it was something that defined him as much as his family did. But this chapter in his career was the culmination of everything that had come before. It symbolized the success of a long, hard-fought battle to find justice for Eric Miller. It was a fight Morgan had never given up on, but one he’d often wondered if he would win.

  While Morgan and prosecutors were busy preparing their case, one of Ann Miller’s attorneys, Joe Cheshire, was busy doing damage control. As long as Morgan had known Cheshire, he’d been a defense attorney with no problem about coming out in public and proclaiming his clients’ innocence. The handsome southern attorney with his shock of curly hair, goatee, and wire-framed glasses had a way of wearing his righteous indignation on his sleeve without alienating people. When Joe Cheshire said his client was innocent, people believed him, even Chris Morgan. Above everything else, Joe Cheshire had integrity.

  “If he’s got a client that he actually thinks is innocent, he’s going to be out front in the face, all over the media, telling everybody who will listen to him that, ‘Hey world, my guy didn’t do it, he’s innocent.’ I mean Joe’s not a bit bashful about coming out and making those kinds of statements, ” Morgan says.

  Morgan noticed right away that Cheshire didn’t say Ann Miller was innocent in media interviews. He said things like she was “sad over the death of her husband,” “has very strong faith,” and “believes the truth will come out.” It made Morgan curious. And it made him wonder what Ann Miller had told Joe Cheshire.

  NINE

  There are tones of voice that mean more than words.

  —ROBERT FROST

  Morgan moved into a special role, where he was just working on the Miller case, and Lieutenant John Lynch took over the homicide unit. Immediately, this created friction within the department because Lynch and Morgan had decidedly different management styles. Lynch was a straightforward cop, a traditional investigator who got results through good old-fashioned police work. Morgan, on the other hand, had always marched to a slightly different beat.

  Even though by the summer of 2004, Lynch was technically in charge of the homicide investigators, Morgan says detectives continued coming to him for advice, playing the two men off each other.

  The situation intensified Morgan’s desire to finish his business on the Miller case and get on with his retirement and the rest of his life.

  “The time was coming when I was going to have to get out of there [both] for my own personal well-being and so the police department could carry on with their own very important work,” Morgan says.

  EVIL WAYS

  Morgan can talk for days about the motivation behind the criminal mind. In fact, if you don’t interrupt him and just let him go, chances are he will. He believes that most people, including investigators, expect a motive that is logical. But Morgan contends that the problem with this expectation is that there are certain kinds of criminals motivated by something that no ordinary person can truly understand— evil.

  In the Miller case no one could truly grasp Ann Miller’s particular motive for killing her husband. According to Morgan, prosecutors Becky Holt and Doug Faucette were having a tough time with this. Like anyone getting ready to try a case, they wanted it to be something clear and definite that they could explain to a jury. Was it another man (or men), was it money, was it the fear of losing her child?

  “She didn’t want Eric around as an ex-husband. She just wanted Eric gone,” Morgan says with conviction. “In order to fully understand Ann Miller and her motivations, you have to believe in the worst kind of perceptible evil that there is in the world. The worst evil in the world is the evil that exists in the minds of a psychopathic personality because it has no necessary rhyme or reason attached to it. Psychopaths, we know, exist o
nly to provide and to further their own wants and desires. They have no compassion, they have no empathy, and they have no concern with anybody other than themselves, and that’s where the crux of Ann Miller’s motive and therefore her evil come from.”

  Again, unlike conditions that psychologists term as “mental illness,” psychopathy is not a definable mental illness per se, but a group of behaviors associated certain personality disorders. Often people who exhibit these behaviors are still very high-functioning in society and, therefore, give no clear indication that there’s anything wrong with them.

  Morgan believes that for Ann Miller, risk taking was like a drug addiction. It was a thrill she couldn’t resist. In fact, he feels her obsession with taking risks was the only thing in her life that she was powerless to conquer. For example, Ann’s pattern of affairs, blatant affairs involving trips, frequent phone calls, and steamy e-mails; with each man, Morgan thought, Ann grew bolder and more cavalier in her belief that she would never get caught. He believes Ann’s plot to kill her husband was born directly out of that personality trait; a desire to push the envelope, to see just how far she could take it.

  “[Psychopaths are] not drooling trolls that live under a bridge. Most of them are well integrated into society. Most of them are neighbors, coworkers, friends,” Morgan explains.

  Verus Miller, Eric’s father, recommended a book to Morgan called People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck. It talks about psychopaths’ ability to mimic proper social behavior while staying focused on their only goal, pleasing themselves at any cost. Morgan read it and began to see major parallels between its subject and Ann Miller. He picked up a copy for Becky Holt at a used-book store at the beach and urged her to read it as well.

  Morgan sees Ann as someone who “played the role” of the devoted wife, as evidenced by her involvement in the couples-counseling class at church. He sees her as someone who “played the role” of a devoted mother, even though in the midst of her quest to get pregnant, she was having an affair with Carl Mackewicz. He also sees her as someone who “played the role” of a dedicated scientist, while her colleagues said she was more interested in attracting men in the office than paying attention to her work.

  Morgan believes all people have the potential to kill if sufficiently driven by anger or rage. But the difference with psychopaths is that they need no anger. He or she simply perceives that the victim is standing in the way of what he or she wants, and therefore that person must be removed. And the psychopath experiences no remorse, while the rage killer may be haunted or even internally tortured forever by what he or she has done.

  Morgan feels Ann Miller was without rage or remorse because she was and is a psychopath. But it was a hard pill for others, including the prosecutors, to swallow. He had been living with her in his head for four years. They were just getting to know her.

  “Most of the people who knew Ann Miller would have described her in any way other than being a psychopath,” concedes Morgan.

  Everyone wanted there to be something else—the suspicious death of a previous boyfriend maybe—but there was no evidence that Ann had killed before. Morgan believes Ann, like other psychopaths, was motivated by the specific opportunity of the situation, and he speculated that she probably wouldn’t kill again unless she was backed into the same dusty corner of her life.

  MAKING NICE

  Morgan had officially set his new retirement date for September 1, 2004. He felt like it was in the interest of justice for him to “bug out” of the Raleigh Police Department once and for all. He would still be around to help with the case, just not on the official payroll. Not being paid had never stopped him from working before, and it certainly wouldn’t make a difference now that the Ann Miller conviction train had left the station. He would be on it paycheck or no paycheck.

  But before Morgan left, he had some unfinished business to deal with—namely Dr. Thomas Clark from the medical examiner’s office.

  Morgan had not spoken with Dr. Clark in any depth since their tense meeting in the spring of 2001 when the autopsy report was released. But the ego clashing that had gone on between Clark and the original prosecutor, Tom Ford, did not bode well in Morgan’s mind for Clark’s relationship with the new prosecution team.

  Becky Holt also knew that Dr. Clark was going to be a key witness, and she had to have him on her side. So she asked Morgan to set up a meeting between Clark and the prosecution team in August 2004.

  Easier said than done—it took a while for Morgan (a phone person) to get through to Dr. Clark (an e-mail person) . When they finally connected, Morgan recalls Clark told him he had nothing to add to the case, that his autopsy report was complete, and that he was a busy man with no time for a meeting. But Morgan pleaded with him, saying that it was necessary to update the new prosecutors on the case. He confided that the case was finally going before a grand jury and they needed to get ready for trial, and Clark begrudgingly agreed to a meeting.

  It was a meeting that Morgan would never forget. Things started to go downhill almost from the beginning. Clark was late and clearly irritated about meeting with them, Morgan recalls. While Clark read the report from his laptop, he shielded his screen from their view. Prosecutors Becky Holt, Doug Faucette, Deputy District Attorney Howard Cummings, investigator Bill Dowdy, and Morgan looked on in amazement as the doctor sat silently waiting for questions and offering little information. Anyone looking at the scene would not have guessed they were all supposed to be on the same side.

  Morgan recalls feeling like a game-show contestant searching for the magic question to ask Clark, the one that would make him tell them what they needed to know.

  “It was like he wanted to keep everything that he knew, everything that he had done, to himself, and it was almost as if you had to ask him the right question to get the answer to the puzzle,” he says. But Morgan adds that Cummings wasn’t going to let Clark off the hook that easily. He kept asking the same question in many different ways until Clark finally answered it. He simply wanted to know what was the exact cause of Eric Miller’s death? The answer was a bombshell—and not what they wanted to hear. Dr. Clark declared that he couldn’t be sure anymore if the cause of death was definitely arsenic poisoning. According to Morgan, it was as if the air had suddenly been sucked out of the room, leaving everyone gasping for breath.

  Arsenic poisoning was their entire case. Without it, there was no crime. Without it, Ann Miller could never be arrested or convicted. Without it, Eric Miller’s murder could never be proven and might remain unsolved forever. The team left the meeting flabbergasted, deflated, and wondering what to do next.

  No one spoke until they were out of the building and in the car. Then, Morgan says, all hell broke loose. The usually unflappable prosecutors were pissed off and even talking about ways to charge Clark with some kind of obstruction of justice. They went around and around speculating why the medical examiner would suddenly back down from his original findings at the eleventh hour.

  For the first time in a long while, Morgan wanted to get as far away from the Miller investigation as he could.

  “I was trying to run for home, a beer, go out and sit in my shed and watch the news, do anything to take my mind off that meeting,” he remembers. “This was, I expected, going to be dynamite, a death knell for the entire investigation. ”

  Per Becky Holt’s instructions, Morgan had even shown Clark a copy of the Gammon affidavit in which Willard claimed that Ann had confessed to sticking a needle full of poison into Eric’s arm. Morgan recalls that Clark was particularly unimpressed by the document. As Morgan saw it, this was a standoff that needed to end peacefully in order to move forward with the case.

  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 me
eting 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.

  POWER TO THE PEOPLE

  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.