Deadly Dose

by Amanda Lamb

  Carl Mackewicz had become a focal point early on in the investigation for several reasons. First were the multiple trips to the West Coast that Ann had orchestrated, financed by Glaxo Wellcome in the guise of doing business. But the real motive had been for Ann to see Mackewicz.

  During an early search of the Millers’ home, Detective Debbie Regentin had spotted a cryptic note in a trash can. It had apparently been written around Valentine’s Day 2000, shortly after Clare was born. In the note Ann was trying to explain her relationship with Carl to Eric.

  “She essentially said, hey, you know let’s kiss and make up. We don’t need to let this get blown out of proportion. You know I’ve got my friends; you’ve got your friends. We both work in high-contact jobs with the opposite sex. And, don’t be concerned, I love only you,” paraphrases Morgan.

  And then there were the e-mails and phone-call records demonstrating a persistent connection between Ann and Mackewicz spanning years. This included the short story Ann had written that seemed to describe a real romantic interlude that she and Mackewicz had shared in the mountains. Even though it was filled with flowery, fantasy-driven language, Morgan thought he could see it for what it was, reality masquerading as fiction. This fit into Ann Miller’s pattern. As far as Morgan was concerned, Ann Miller herself was fiction masquerading as reality.

  All of these things had led Jeff Fluck to send a detective to San Francisco in the early phases of the investigation, to drop in on Carl M. Detective Doug Brugger had made the California cold call. Overall, Brugger learned little from the visit, according to Morgan, beyond the fact that Carl Mackewicz was a typical middle-aged California surfer dude who also happened to have a Ph.D.

  “He had steadfastly denied any romantic relationship with Ann Miller,” Morgan reiterates.

  But as more e-mails and phone records started to surface, investigators came to the conclusion that Mackewicz had not told Brugger the truth.

  “We reached a point where we realized that Carl had lied to us horribly. I mean, it was obvious that there was history there,” Morgan says.

  Once the evidence mounted to the point that the affair could no longer be denied, Brugger called Mackewicz, who ultimately confessed that he had been having a romantic relationship with Ann for many years.

  The couple had first met when Mackewicz, a scientist at the University of California in San Francisco, came to North Carolina to collaborate with Glaxo Wellcome on an antiviral project. At that first meeting on January 17, 1997, he met with a Glaxo biochemist and his then technician, Ann Miller. Mackewicz told police that upon reflection, he barely remembered having met Ann at all. But at some point, after Mackewicz had made multiple trips to North Carolina, Ann started to engage him in flirtatious e-mail exchanges.

  On September 2, 1997, Ann e-mailed Mackewicz and thanked him for “beautiful sunsets shared” in San Francisco. He responded by e-mail on September 5 by saying “Guess Who?” and referring to their last meeting as having been like an “awkward” second date. On the same day, about an hour later, Ann responded with “Guess Who Back” and talked about their having spent more than eight hours straight together in their last visit. A week later Mackewicz sent Ann an e-mail letting her know that he was going to be coming to Raleigh the following Monday.

  “Carl [Mackewicz] pretty much fessed up: ‘Hey, you know maybe there was something more between me and Ann than what I told you before. It kind of took me aback when you came out here from North Carolina and I didn’t tell you the truth. Here’s the real truth. Yeah, we’ve been lovers for a couple of years now,’ ” Morgan says of Mackewicz’s confession. Mackewicz had been reticent to come clean because he had since gotten married and didn’t want his new wife dragged into his past.

  The timing of Ann Miller and Carl Mackewicz’s last sexual encounter raised eyebrows among the investigators, and pointed to another possible motive behind Eric Miller’s murder. In the late spring of 1999, Mackewicz came to North Carolina again. But this time, instead of coming for business, Morgan says it seems that Ann and Mackewicz went to the Outer Banks (a coastal resort), to a house Ann had rented while Eric was attending a conference in another city.

  “We all started counting on our fingers, trying to calculate the possibility that Carl [Mackewicz] could have been the father, in fact, of Clare Miller,” says Morgan.

  After more investigation, the math didn’t add up; in fact, it became clear that Ann actually was already pregnant when she and Mackewicz met for their last romantic weekend. It wasn’t a surprise either—Morgan later learned that Ann and Eric had already begun telling people their good news prior to that romantic interlude.

  “She knows that in her womb she is carrying Eric’s child, but still she is traipsing all over the Outer Banks of North Carolina and having sex with this individual,” says Morgan with disdain.

  But that wasn’t what made Morgan home in on Mackewicz as a key player in the case; it was the timing of one particular e-mail that caught his eye. On Thanksgiving day in 2000, during Eric’s stay at UNC Hospitals, Ann Miller went into her office and sent Mackewicz an e-mail. It was an odd note. She told him that her husband was deathly ill, that her in-laws were driving her crazy, and that she would like to buy Mackewicz a house at the beach and throw a party. At the end of the note she asked him to call her at home during the day, and that her in-laws were oblivious to who called. Morgan thought it was a bizarre message for the supposedly doting wife of a sick husband to write.

  Morgan wondered if Carl Mackewicz was the magic bullet—could he be the motive they had been looking for all along?

  “Derril Willard was a patsy, he was treated like a patsy [by Ann],” says Morgan. But Ann’s relationship with Mackewicz was different. Ann had seemed truly taken with him. No one in the police department had talked to Mackewicz since the summer of 2001. Morgan knew that it was time to have a face-to-face meeting with the man who just might unlock the motive.

  FEET ON THE GROUND

  Assistant District Attorney Becky Holt agreed with Chris Morgan that it was time to get back in touch with Carl Mackewicz. Her solution was simple—let’s fly out to the West Coast and reinterview them. But the proposition wasn’t that simple for Morgan.

  “I was peculiar about a lot of things, but one of things I was probably most peculiar about is I don’t fly. I have never flown. As far as I know today, I will never fly,” Morgan states without apology.

  Morgan isn’t afraid of dark alleys, mass murderers, or blood-soaked crime scenes, but flying—that is simply not in his repertoire. Dr. Michael Teague even offered to hypnotize Morgan to help him get over his fear, but he would have none of it.

  Morgan recalls Holt’s firm response to his statement that he wasn’t getting on an airplane for anyone. “It wasn’t a request, it wasn’t a suggestion. She was saying, ‘You’re going to San Francisco, big boy, we’re both going to San Francisco, and we’re going on a big silver bird,’ ” Morgan says with an anxious chuckle.

  Morgan’s solution to the quandary was to drive to California. He told Holt he would get a police car and drive across the country in record time to do the interview. He promised that he would start a few days ahead of her, and even be there in time to pick her up at the airport. Morgan guessed that he could probably find some sucker willing to take the cross-country trip with him so that he wouldn’t have to do it alone. But Holt wasn’t buying it.

  So Morgan came up with an alternative. He suggested that it would be easier for everyone if Mackewicz just came to Raleigh. Morgan recalls that Holt laughed and told him it would never work, that Mackewicz would not willingly travel three thousand miles to put himself smack-dab in the middle of a murder case.

  “I said, ‘Becky, never underestimate the power of a man who has never been on an airplane to continue his record of not getting on one,’ ” says Morgan.

  REELING HIM IN

  Morgan was always up for a challenge, especially when it came to convincing other people to do things and making t
hem think that it was their idea in the first place.

  He went down to his cubbyhole-slash-office and got to work. He left an open-ended message on Mackewicz’s voice mail saying that he needed to talk with him at length and was planning a trip to California to do so. He added that he was willing to do the interview at Mackewicz’s office or his house, whichever location was more convenient for him. Deference was one of Morgan’s strengths, when he chose to pull it out and dust it off.

  “When you need to get someone to cooperate, the easiest way to do that is to start edging around their home life,” says Morgan, recalling how quickly Mackewicz called him back.

  When he was involved with Ann, Carl Mackewicz had been happily single, free to dabble. But he was now married, and it was clear to Morgan that he did not want to involve his new wife in this mess. He was also still working as a research scientist at the University of California in San Francisco, which was another part of his life that he desperately wanted to keep separate from his involvement in Eric Miller’s case.

  In the telephone conversation with Mackewicz, Morgan continued to allude to the trip that he and Holt would be taking to California to meet with him. Morgan’s plan was simple. It involved no trickery or masterminding. He just made it clear to Mackewicz that if he and Holt went to the left coast, he wouldn’t be able to keep the situation from Mackewicz’s family and friends. The more Morgan talked about the potential of having to corroborate Mackewicz’s story with other people in his life, namely his coworkers, the more he could feel Mackewicz’s anxiety level growing exponentially through the telephone receiver. Morgan could almost picture the poor man leaning back in his swivel chair at his desk, one hand on his forehead, contemplating how what he’d thought was a benign romp in the hay had now landed him in the middle of a nightmare.

  When Morgan sensed that Mackewicz was becoming desperate to find an escape hatch, he slowly pitched the idea that Mackewicz might be able to take a few days off from his busy schedule and come east so as to avoid mixing this sticky situation with his personal and professional life. Morgan painted this as a relatively painless option compared to the Raleigh Police Department invading the West Coast with their shiny badges, accusations, and probing questions.

  In the end, just as Morgan had anticipated, Mackewicz agreed to make the trip to Raleigh. Morgan thanked him and told him he would be in touch soon with details.

  Morgan returned to Holt’s office with the good news like a little boy who had just won the spelling bee. He delivered the message in a singsong voice with a sheepish grin and told Holt that Mackewicz would be on their turf in just two weeks, ready and willing to cooperate.

  At moments like this, Morgan often wondered out loud if he actually should have been a used-car salesman instead of a cop. Maybe that would be his next career.

  WEST MEETS EAST

  On February 13, 2005, the day that Morgan was scheduled to pick up Carl Mackewicz at Terminal A of the Raleigh/ Durham Airport, he made a sign for him and placed it on the dashboard of his unmarked Crown Vic. The idea was that Mackewicz would be able to spot him when Morgan pulled up to the curb. As it turned out, though, Morgan didn’t need the sign. He plucked Mackewicz out of the crowd based simply on Detective Brugger’s very accurate description.

  “I picked Carl Mackewicz out from fifty yards away with absolutely no problem. He looked very California. Everything about him said: ‘Hey, I’m from California and I’m a surfer dude,’ ” recalls Morgan.

  Carl had long black hair, a goatee, and a mustache. He wore slightly tattered jeans, a jean jacket, and a peasant blouse peeking out beneath the jacket. Morgan thought he had a laid-back-cool appearance that didn’t give the impression that he tried too hard.

  “Even though it was still fairly chilly outside, Mr. Mackewicz arrived in Raleigh, North Carolina, wearing leather sandals,” exclaims Morgan, shaking his head as if that was a detail he’d never forget.

  THE UNRAVELING

  After a pleasant ride from the airport, complete with harmless chitchat, Morgan and Mackewicz went to the Wake County Courthouse to begin the interview a little after ten o’clock that morning. Not unlike peeling the layers of an onion, Morgan needed to unravel the relationship between Mackewicz and Ann Miller layer by layer to see what relevance it might have to Eric Miller’s murder.

  One point emerged early in the interview. It became crystal clear to Morgan that while Mackewicz may have been a major player in Ann’s life, she was simply a bit player in his.

  “Obviously Ann was much more infatuated with him than he was with her,” says Morgan knowingly. Carl told him that while the sex between them had been fine, okay, nothing spectacular, nothing to write home about, Ann had turned the relationship into something much more substantial than it really was.

  On September 25, 1997, at 1:47 p.m., Ann e-mailed Mackewicz and told him she wished she could go to California. “I really miss it—or maybe what I miss is someone? ” she wrote, not unlike a coy teenage girl. She also playfully accused him of blowing her off, which he denied in a one-sentence e-mail later that same night. On September 26, at 9:27 a.m., she said in response: “Thank You Oh God, I love your e-mails. Do you have any clue what they do to me?”

  “Ann lived a rich fantasy life, she could make up just about any scenario she wanted to, and in some ways for her it became real,” Morgan says, explaining his impressions of Ann based on Mackewicz’s vision of their affair.

  On October 16, 1997, Ann e-mailed Mackewicz and described her day as having been a “thinking a lot about Carl” day. On December 8, 1997, she e-mailed him saying: “I have always been told that I have a very WILD imagination—trust me, you have not even begun to learn what my mind is capable of . . . !!!!”

  Morgan found Mackewicz honest and straightforward in his statements. Mackewicz made it clear to him that he was not proud of what he had done, but that he had never honestly sought out a relationship with Ann. He told Morgan that she was the initiator and the aggressor, and that he was simply the foolish follower who figured he had nothing to lose.

  The investigator for the Wake County District Attorney’s Office, Bill Dowdy, delved further into Ann’s fantasy life when he questioned Mackewicz about the short story she had written, “96 Hours.” Dowdy is bald, stout, and serious, and Morgan recalls the sight of an old-school, by-the-book cop asking an old hippie about fantasy and sexual innuendo as probably one of the only truly comical times in the entire investigation.

  “You have to know him as I do to love him as I do,” says Morgan with a Cheshire-cat grin.

  But Dowdy persevered and got to the information by doing what he always did, asking thorough questions without reacting in any way to the responses. In Morgan’s opinion Dowdy became a top investigator when he was an officer because he didn’t reach for anything or try to insert his own interpretation into the equation. He simply went through the short story line by line and made it clear that fantasy was not something he was ready to accept at face value.

  In Ann Miller’s “96 Hours,” in the entry dated Friday, July 31, 1998, she describes the couple in the story planning their day together in Tahoe. The woman, who speaks in the first person, tells the man that she simply wants to be with him no matter what they are doing. “I enjoyed his company. Why I had come was beginning to become so obvious,” Ann wrote. In the entry dated Saturday, August 1, they discuss “trust” and the male protagonist’s difficulties in maintaining relationships. “I began to get upset and frustrated,” she wrote.

  On Sunday, August 2, 1998, as the trip is winding down, the couple experiences tension and the female protagonist becomes “terrified” that the man might be upset with her. “I explained that I wanted nothing more from him as a friend than what he was willing to give,” she wrote. “Friendships are so hard for me.”

  “He [Bill Dowdy] almost got red in the face on several occasions. He just couldn’t understand, what are these people doing?” Morgan chuckles.

  But the tone of the interv
iew turned serious when they talked with Mackewicz about his and Ann’s May 1999 trip to the Outer Banks. At this point Morgan learned more about the kind of woman Ann really was than even he already knew.

  Even before the trip, there had been little cracks in the affair; to Morgan it was clear that Mackewicz had been having reservations about what in his mind was supposed to be no more than a casual fling. It had turned into much more than he had bargained for.

  On March 31, 1999, at 5:15 p.m., Ann e-mailed Mackewicz and talked about their plans for the relationship. It was clear that she felt like he was trying to end things and she was not happy about this prospect. “[Do you] mean that you have already grown tired of our ‘relationship state’—is my 2 years up? Please don’t tell me that!” she wrote, going on to say that if he just wanted to be friends, she would grudgingly accept this in order to keep him in her life.

  Morgan remembers that when investigators interviewed Mackewicz about the May 1999 Outer Banks trip, he dropped a “small bombshell.” Mackewicz told them that he would never have made the trip if Ann hadn’t agreed to bankroll everything from the plane ticket to the house rental. It simply didn’t mean that much to him. Mackewicz left Morgan with the impression that unless it had been free, he wouldn’t have been interested.

  Morgan knew that around this same time frame, Eric Miller had borrowed money from his father to take care of some bills that had become dangerously past due. From conversations with Eric’s parents, Morgan knew that it had been hard for Eric to ask for the money. While Doris and Verus Miller were always willing to help their children, they struck Morgan as people who expected their kids to make their own way in the world. He suspected that money wasn’t loaned lightly in a family that believed in hard work and taking financial responsibility seriously. Given this fact, Morgan couldn’t believe that Ann had plunked down what probably amounted to several thousand dollars for Mackewicz’s plane ticket and the beach-house rental.