Deadly Dose

by Amanda Lamb

  There was no doubt that the Miller case was headed to a grand jury first. Ann Miller would not be arrested until a group of North Carolina citizens gave the district attorney’s office the green light.

  In grand-jury settings, which were always confidential, the defense had no standing. Only the prosecution could offer testimony. Usually this involved just one person, the lead investigator on the case. He or she went into the grand-jury room alone and presented the evidence. The panel was permitted to ask questions. When the witnesses were finished, the grand jury voted about whether or not to indict the suspect. Then they called their next case. The list of true bills was returned to a court clerk at the end of the day. Only then did the information become part of the public record.

  Holt and Willoughby decided that Morgan would present the Miller case to the grand jury. While many other investigators had worked hard along the way, no one knew the intricacies of the case like Morgan. By this point Morgan was officially retired and had set up shop in a closet-size space in the district attorney’s office. He started crafting a script for the big day. The process was bittersweet, since Morgan knew that even if Ann Miller was indicted, he would not be the one making the arrest.

  “I had a recurring dream of exactly how it would go down.” Morgan laughs. “Keep Ann looking over her shoulder to see when the fat man in the hat was going to show up.”

  He had always imagined driving to Wilmington and plucking Ann out of her house, or her office, by surprise. But he knew that as a retired cop with no power of arrest, this wouldn’t be the case. Still, he hoped that the grand-jury indictment would be a surprise to her and that whoever ended up arresting her got a chance to catch her woefully off guard.

  But alas, there are no secrets in a courthouse. The elevators, the stairwells, the walls themselves seem to ooze information, just waiting for an eager reporter or perceptive lawyer to pick up on.

  “Ann Miller knew she was going to be arrested. Her lawyers knew she was going to be arrested. And I think that took a big load of wind out of my sails,” Morgan says bitterly.

  But he couldn’t afford to get sidetracked. Instead, he concentrated his efforts on making the best possible presentation he could to a grand jury. He knew he would have only one chance to do this. If he failed, the case would be over. The standard that had to be met in front of a grand jury to get a true bill returned was probable cause—the same standard needed for an arrest. Clearly, prosecutors Colon Willoughby and Becky Holt felt they had enough to prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt or they would not have taken it this far, but Morgan was still nervous about having the entire future of the case resting on his ample shoulders. It had all come down to this.

  With confidence, yet not without emotion, Morgan walked the grand jury through the Raleigh Police Department’s case against Ann Miller from the very beginning. He told them about all of Eric Miller’s hospitalizations and Dr. Thomas Clark’s subsequent findings that arsenic poisoning was the cause of death. He told them about Ann’s affairs with Derril Willard and Carl Mackewicz. He told them about his one and only conversation with Willard, about Willard’s suicide, and ultimately, about Willard’s confession to Rick Gammon regarding Ann putting poison in Eric’s IV at Rex Hospital. He walked out feeling like he had done his best.

  After Morgan read his notes to the grand jury, he went into the hall and waited. Approximately two minutes later jurors called in the next investigator to testify in the next case. Bingo, thought Morgan. They’d had no trouble deciding on a true bill; otherwise the lag time between the two cases would have been longer. He was ecstatic. But there was still the matter of where they could find Ann Miller when the warrant was finally signed and ready to be executed. He had waited too long for this day for her arrest to be a nonevent.

  JAILBIRD

  Within ten minutes of the signing of the warrant, Joe Cheshire called Becky Holt and told her that his client would turn herself in at the Wake County Public Safety Center. It was to be a civilized handover, not the kind of painful, embarrassing event Morgan had hoped for after all these years. Not only would it be civil, but Morgan would play no role beyond that of an idle spectator on the sidewalk in a big white hat.

  He was now, for the first time in his law enforcement career, on the outside looking in. He was no longer part of the show; he was just a civilian on the sidelines gawking like everyone else.

  “After all that time it was something of a bitter pill to swallow, but I swallowed it,” Morgan says matter-of-factly. “Essentially it was not my rodeo.”

  Morgan stood across the street and watched as Detectives Amanda Salmon and Justin Matthews placed Ann Miller in handcuffs in front of the jail. In an oversize sweater and tan cotton pants, her shoulder-length now strawberry-blond hair unfixed around her barely made-up face, Ann looked more like a schoolteacher than a cold-blooded killer. She seemed bewildered, as if she couldn’t imagine how this could be happening to her, as if a mistake had obviously been made. To Morgan, her demeanor, and even her choice of outfit, was calculated. He figured she wanted to look “mousy” so that people would feel sorry for her.

  “She was the prototypical psychopath in sheep’s clothing because she truly looked shell-shocked, vulnerable, meek,” recalls Morgan. “But I think I was able to see the real Ann as she was. She was just as evil as she’d ever been. She was doing what psychopaths often do. She was acting appropriately for the situation after behaving in a totally inappropriate manner. Ann looked very much the victim that day.”

  Detectives proceeded to put Ann Miller into a Raleigh police car to take her to the station for questioning. This caused her lawyers to go ballistic, insisting that she had turned herself in and did not need to be processed at the police station.

  The only ones who seemed to care that the former investigator in the white fedora was on the sidewalk that day were the media. They surrounded Morgan like hungry barracudas. They pounded him with questions peppered with phrases like “this must be a great day for you,” and “you must be happy.” While Morgan did experience a flood of emotions that day, happiness wasn’t one of them.

  “ ‘What have I got to be happy about? A good man is dead, two good men are dead. Two children who will never know their fathers as they grow older. There’s nothing to be happy about here,’ ” Morgan says, recalling his words to the media.

  The battle was not over. Far from it. It had only just begun. Ann Miller was finally behind bars, but now they had to keep her there.

  TEN

  Progress might have been all right once, but it’s gone on too long.

  —OGDEN NASH

  In his heart and in his head Chris Morgan fully believed that Ann Miller (by this time going by her new married name, Ann Miller Kontz, but Morgan just couldn’t bring himself to call her that) had convinced Derril Willard to give Eric poison that night at the bowling alley. He also strongly suspected that Ann had already experimented by giving Eric small doses throughout the summer of 2000. And after Eric managed to pull through the first hospitalization, Morgan believed that Ann went back to what was convenient—more arsenic.

  But this theory still was not sitting well with Dr. Marsha Ford (no relation to Tom Ford), who headed North Carolina’s Poison Control Division. According to Morgan, Dr. Ford remained unconvinced that a woman as educated as Ann Miller would have continued to use such a pedestrian poison when, as a scientist, she clearly had access to and knowledge of other dangerous chemicals. Especially considering that UNC Hospitals had already determined that arsenic was a factor in Eric’s first hospitalization, Dr. Ford felt Ann would not have been stupid enough to use it again.

  “She was just wrong about that,” Morgan says. “Ann wasn’t particularly smart. I mean, they got her school records from Purdue University. I know what she made on the SAT. I scored higher on the SAT than Ann Miller did . . . She wasn’t quite a genius. She was a long way from being a genius.”

  In October of 2004, Morgan and the prosecution team headed to C
harlotte to have a meeting with Dr. Ford. Unlike his experience with Dr. Thomas Clark, Morgan recalls that Dr. Ford was pleasant and cordial. He knew she was an eminently qualified toxicologist and that her testimony would be key to putting Ann behind bars. But they didn’t want her speculating about other poisons in front of a jury. Morgan was convinced that Dr. Ford, as brilliant as she was, was simply tripping over the fact that an educated scientist would use a generic poison to commit murder. He also felt there was a chance she’d been led down the garden path by the previous prosecutor in the investigation. The only way for Morgan to turn it around was to convince Dr. Ford that her assumption about Ann’s intelligence was incorrect.

  “Essentially [Dr. Ford] believed that criminals are smart. I mean the legend of the criminal mastermind who outwits the police, outwits prosecutors, outwits medical experts—certainly Ann’s occupation would lead you to believe she had that kind of talent,” Morgan says. But to Morgan, that was the stuff of made-for-television movies. This was real life, and in his experience, real-life criminals are just plain stupid.

  “By and large the myth of the criminal mastermind is just that . . . a myth. Most criminals, even psychopaths, are really not that smart. They can be clever, they can be good actors, but they’re not grossly overintelligent,” Morgan states. “If [Ann] had been a criminal genius, we probably would never have been able to lay a glove on her.”

  Morgan pleaded his case to Dr. Ford, explaining why he thought Ann Miller was just a typical criminal who happened to have a degree. He explained that she did what a lot of criminals do—she took the path of least resistance. In this case, arsenic.

  “I staked out my position and I thought I saw something glimmer in Dr. Ford’s eye by the time that meeting was over,” Morgan says, and sighs with relief. Dr. Ford ultimately agreed with Dr. Clark that Eric had died from arsenic poisoning and that he’d received the fatal dose prior to his final hospital stay.

  In a letter to Becky Holt dated April 14, 2005, Dr. Ford said: The fatal cardiac arrest sustained by Eric Miller on December 2, 2000, was the result of the first, and possibly the second dose of arsenic (as described in items 1 and 2 above), and no other etiology or addition toxin need be evoked.

  TEAM SCIENCE

  In the early days of the investigation Morgan hadn’t quite grasped just how important science would be to solving and proving this case. As he did with a lot of things he didn’t understand, he had simply shrugged it off. Looking back, he recalls a moment when he’d had just about enough science talk and mouthed off in front of a local newspaper reporter.

  “I popped off in the mouth and I said in front of Oren [Dorell], ‘People need to remember this is not a science project, this is a murder investigation,’ and it pretty much ended up in print,” Morgan laments.

  Upon reflection, Morgan realized that science was the heart of the case. Ann was able to kill Eric because she was a scientist who understood how to use a toxin to end someone’s life. So as they prepared for trial, Morgan was finally at peace with the complex science that would be the core of the case.

  But it wasn’t enough to have just one eminently qualified scientist on their side; Becky Holt told Morgan they would need a team of experts, not just Dr. Clark and Dr. Ford, to win this case.

  Holt was looking for someone who knew what they were talking about, someone who could testify in court, someone who would seal Ann’s fate.

  Early on, they heard that defense attorneys had retained Dr. R. Page Hudson, the former chief medical examiner of North Carolina, who had reigned over the office during the Velma Barfield case, and the Blanche Taylor Moore case, both high-profile arsenic poisonings that captured statewide attention and national headlines. So he was out. This was not good news for the prosecution team, but nonetheless they got to work looking for experts who could support their theory of Eric’s death. This was no easy task, since scientists, not unlike investigators and attorneys, don’t necessarily share the same opinions even when faced with the exact same set of facts.

  Dr. Ken Kulig was a toxicologist in Denver, Colorado, whom investigators interviewed by phone. Almost immediately after reading the clinical records and the test results, he appeared to be on board with what Morgan already knew.

  “One of the things that he did confirm for me in our very first conversation was that Eric Miller should, based on his clinical record, . . . have survived the arsenic poisoning that he got on the night of the bowling-alley incident, ” Morgan says. “You end up dead, or you improve—I mean, there’s very little middle ground.”

  Given the direction that Eric Miller’s health took— plummeting twice after he appeared to be getting better— Kulig agreed with Morgan that the theory of multiple poisonings appeared to be correct.

  “If anybody could weather the effects of this toxin, it should have been somebody like Eric because he had not only the strength to survive, but obviously, from everything in his clinical records, had an extremely strong will to survive and to overcome this poisoning,” says Morgan. “That sort of became a cornerstone of this case. Kulig said emphatically that something happened to Eric once he got home.”

  In a report to Becky Holt dated April 14, 2005, Dr. Kulig wrote:

  I reviewed the autopsy results very carefully to determine if Mr. Miller died from arsenic poisoning or from something else. The analysis of his clinical course during this time period, his arsenic levels in multiple tissue sites, and the autopsy findings, are unequivocal as to cause of death. I completely agree with the office of the chief medical examiner that the cause of death was arsenic poisoning, and that there were at least two and possibly more instances of arsenic dosing in this case.

  In the third scientist, Alphonse Poklis, Morgan found a kindred spirit and possibly the savior of the entire case. He was a big, burly, bearded toxicologist at the Medical College of Virginia who reminded Morgan of Shakespeare’s Falstaff, a jovial, gruff man who in one moment was effortlessly gregarious and, in the next, a total curmudgeon. Poklis was also a well-known expert on the topic of arsenic poisoning who probed the investigators as hard as they probed him.

  “He may be the definitive authority on arsenic poisoning in the world,” Morgan states with enthusiasm. “Essentially, poisoning and arsenic is his world. Very few people in the world know as much about it as he does because he has studied it so hard for so long.”

  Not unlike Kulig, Poklis immediately realized that the plunge that Eric’s health took after he was supposed to be getting better could mean only one thing: that Eric had been poisoned again.

  “[Eric] had taken a long time to get over it, but at his age, and in his [state of] health, he was on the road and he should have stayed on that road had not somebody am-bushed him with an avalanche of arsenic that ended up putting him back in the hospital and eventually killing him,” Morgan recalls Poklis’s take on the case.

  In a letter to Becky Holt dated April 16, 2005, Dr. Poklis wrote:

  I agree with the autopsy report that Eric Miller, a 30-year-old white male, died as the result of arsenic poisoning. Post-mortem toxicological testing of liver tissue demonstrated that the arsenic concentration was elevated beyond normal values.

  Morgan and Holt visited Poklis in Virginia, and at one point he came to North Carolina to pay them a visit. Morgan remembers the day Poklis walked into the grand-jury room at the Wake County Courthouse with vivid clarity. Morgan says Poklis was dressed in a college letterman jacket, a well-worn ski hat, and had a scruffy beard that looked like it was in desperate need of a trim. He recalls District Attorney Colon Willoughby at first thinking he was being tricked, that certainly this husky, disheveled man couldn’t be the preeminent scientist Morgan and Holt had been speaking about. But when Polkis started talking, everyone listened. It was clear that he knew his stuff.

  “He would have been a very powerful witness for us,” Morgan says wistfully.

  Would have . . . like many other witnesses in the case, Poklis would never get a chance to tell a ju
ry what he believed.

  ’TIL DEATH DO US PART

  One of the key unanswered questions as investigators and prosecutors prepared for trial was whether this case would be a death-penalty case. In every first-degree murder case the prosecutor must decide if the state will seek the death penalty, or simply ask a jury to sentence the defendant to life in prison. In North Carolina this decision is always made before a case goes to trial in what’s called a Rule 24 hearing in front of a Superior Court judge.

  In Morgan’s estimation, the death-penalty issue was problematic for several reasons. Although he personally believed a poisoning case certainly warranted the death penalty, from previous discussions with Eric’s family, Morgan knew that the Millers were very religious and probably not in favor of this type of punishment. He also knew that it might be harder to get a conviction if a jury had to consider putting the only remaining parent of a young child to death. But ultimately, the decision was up to the Wake County district attorney. Colon Willoughby would make the final call, and as long as the judge agreed with the decision, that would be it.

  In anticipation of this decision Willoughby asked Morgan to set up another meeting with the Millers. In November of 2004, Verus and Doris Miller, their two daughters, sons-in-law, and grandchildren, all traveled to Raleigh to participate in the discussion. Morgan didn’t purposely keep them in the dark about what Willoughby wanted to discuss, but he didn’t go into detail either. He figured no matter what he said, the outcome would be the same.

  They met in a conference room one evening at the brand-new Raleigh Police Department District 23 substation. Morgan couldn’t help but compare these swank digs with the dingy cubbyholes that he’d worked in for most of his career. But despite the bright new conference room, the topic of discussion was still destined to be dark.