Deadly Dose

by Amanda Lamb

  Morgan also went over the fact with Mackewicz that Ann had been pregnant during this tempestuous weekend, a fact that Mackewicz emphatically denied knowing at the time. Again, Morgan had a hard time understanding why a woman who had apparently had difficulty getting pregnant would so cavalierly jump into bed with another man during the first trimester of what could have been a difficult pregnancy.

  “How could she do this? It was just an example of her character, which I believe is a psychopathic character,” says Morgan with bravado.

  ADIOS FOR NOW

  Morgan put Carl Mackewicz on a plane back to California the next day. But he made it clear through e-mails and phone calls that Mackewicz would be subpoenaed to testify at trial. Mackewicz, as Morgan fully expected, was very apprehensive at the mere suggestion of going public with the affair. Morgan knew that once Mackewicz appeared in a Wake County Courtroom, all promises about keeping this sticky situation separate from the rest of his life were off. His name would be in the newspaper and on television for his boss and new wife to see. Yet, at the same time, Morgan felt that Mackewicz was a big boy and should have understood what he was getting himself into. (Ultimately, Carl Mackewicz’s name was revealed in open court—by Morgan.)

  “Don’t do the dance if you can’t pay the piper,” Morgan quips. “I felt mildly sympathetic for the guy, but I never lost any sleep over the fact of him being terribly embarrassed both professionally and personally by being compelled to explain his torrid affair with Ann Miller in open court.”

  TWELVE

  We do not remember days, we remember moments.

  —CESARE PAVESE

  Anyone who has ever tried to balance a personal crisis with a stressful job knows it can be a toxic combination. When bad things happen in our lives, the rest of the world doesn’t retreat, it just goes on.

  Morgan’s eighty-year-old mother, Mary-Jo Holder, had been diagnosed with kidney cancer in the summer of 2004, and her health continued to deteriorate while Morgan was pursuing the case against Ann Miller. He juggled his work schedule to accommodate doctors’ appointments and chemotherapy. But for Morgan, the crisis was less about the strain it caused in his family, and more about the devastating loss he was already beginning to feel.

  “It was one of those terrible times when I had my mother turning to me for advice and for guidance on something in her life. It had always been the other way around. Through the years I had come to count on my mother as not only my moral compass, but as kind of my oracle,” reveals Morgan.

  After consulting with many doctors, Mary-Jo, along with advice from her children including Morgan, decided not to have her kidney removed. It would have resulted in many months of hospitalization, ultimately decreasing the quality of what little time she had left. Even in her weakened state Mary-Jo lamented about Morgan spending too much time away from the Eric Miller case to take care of her.

  “My mother was a very strong woman. I always felt like she was spending a whole hell of a lot more time worrying about me not getting work done than she was worrying about what was going on in her own body, but it’s just the way she was,” Morgan says.

  Mary-Jo never probed him about any cases because she knew he had to keep things confidential, but she couldn’t help but weigh in on the Eric Miller case.

  “My mother always used the term phony and she said, ‘That woman [Ann Miller] is just a big phony, I can tell. She doesn’t mean anything she says.’ And I think that really irked my mother. My mother always hated for anybody to get away with anything. I mean she never let me get away with things as a child, and she didn’t believe people should get away with things, especially bad things,” Morgan says with a catch in his throat.

  In the spring of 2005, Mary-Jo continued her downward spiral. It was clear to everyone she was entering the last stages of the disease. She required round-the-clock care, and like many independent elderly people, she steadfastly refused to have a nurse. In April of 2005, Morgan boldly moved into Mary-Jo’s house to care for her. Because Morgan was technically retired (whatever that meant), he would take four or five nights a week and his siblings, who were still working full-time, would split the rest. He was thankful that he was able to be there for her.

  April was a blur to Morgan, and then came May, when everything came into sharp focus. Mary-Jo was going to die, it was no longer something in the distant future, and it was going to happen soon. As much as he had emotionally tried to prepare for it, Morgan wasn’t ready, not now, not ever. The family called in hospice to help them with Mary-Jo’s remaining days.

  The night Mary-Jo died, Morgan was spending his first night at home in two weeks. His sister had taken over care of their mother, and when she called Morgan in the middle of the night, he went immediately. Morgan, one of his brothers, his sister, and his oldest son, Daniel, just sat there on his mother’s front porch, not saying anything at all. Morgan continually reminded himself that he had known this was coming, but now that it had happened, he had no idea what to do.

  “That period of time was one of the more difficult times in my life. It was one of the few times when I felt like I was almost lost,” Morgan says solemnly.

  FAMILY TIES

  On one hand, Morgan had never been more optimistic about the case against Ann Miller. They finally had a trial date—January 2006—things were on track, on go, and Ann was securely behind bars. But between dealing with his mother’s death and a new family crisis—his son Gregory had been deployed to Iraq—things in Morgan’s personal life had taken a dark turn.

  Gregory had graduated from North Carolina State University in the spring of 2004. Following in his father’s rather large shoes, he was beginning a career as a Raleigh police officer when his National Guard unit got the call, and he was off. He was no longer a weekend warrior, but a full-fledged soldier in harm’s way.

  Gregory hadn’t complained about his deployment to his father or to the rest of his family. He took it in stride. He was a mechanic in the motor pool stationed at a large air base near Baghdad. Morgan knew that it was not as dangerous as other jobs his son could be doing in Iraq, but this still didn’t ease his mind. Gregory didn’t tell his father much about what was really going on, but Morgan knew secondhand that the base where his son was stationed was subject to mortar fire from the perimeter. It was a thought that kept Morgan awake at night, wondering if the phone would ring, wondering if something bad might happen to Gregory.

  “It was a time when I really needed to find something to take the edge off and get away from thinking about that,” Morgan recalls.

  In June of 2005, Morgan decided that one way to distract himself from the stress he was under was to move to the country, something he and his wife, Kay, had always wanted to do. While they had talked about it many times, for one reason or another their dream had never become a reality.

  The small house they’d been living in had served Morgan and Kay well for almost three decades. It was supposed to be a starter home, but somehow life got ahold of Morgan and the starter home had turned into the little castle where his children were born and raised.

  “It seems strange that we lived in that little cracker box with four kids living with us,” Morgan says jovially.

  Unlike many of Morgan’s colleagues, Morgan had not slowed down in the eleventh hour of his career. For most people, the final years of their jobs are marked by more money, more responsibility, but overall, less grunt work. Yet this had not been the case for Morgan. In his final years as a cop, he’d found himself running up the down escalator trying to tie everything into a neat bow before he retired. That’s one of the reasons why he and Kay had never moved.

  Morgan and Kay found a house that felt like it was in the country, but in reality still wasn’t too far from the city. Morgan wanted to have neighbors, but he just didn’t want to see them on a regular basis. For once in his life he wanted the peace and solitude he had always secretly craved. At first, he worried that the house might be too far out, recalling the days when he w
as always being called in to work in the middle of the night, but then Kay reminded him that he was technically retired. It was easy for Morgan to forget these days after so many years of running at a breakneck pace. Both Morgan and his wife were enthusiastic about the change and all it represented, a new beginning, a new chapter in their once frantic lives, but it would take some getting used to.

  RISKY BUSINESS

  In September of 2005, just when things seemed to have quieted down on the Miller case, Morgan got a call from A.D.A. Becky Holt. She told him they needed to have a meeting with the Millers to see if they would consider accepting any kind of plea deal in the case. She told him that the defense had not approached the state about a deal, but it was something D.A. Colon Willoughby felt they needed to consider in the event that the opportunity arose.

  “This wasn’t something that just happened out of thin air. We had been going at this case and preparing to go to trial. I was told and retold that nobody knew that the defense was going to be interested in any way, shape, form, or fashion in a plea bargain. It was almost a dirty word in a high-profile case such as this,” Morgan says.

  Morgan was once again given the task of setting up a meeting with the Millers. He called Verus Miller, and after getting up his courage, he worked the possibility of a plea deal into the conversation. Morgan felt bad about dropping this bomb over the phone. He had always been one hundred percent honest with Verus, but at this moment he felt like he was letting him down. Still, Verus’s reaction surprised him. Verus wasn’t shocked at all. It was almost as if he had expected all along that it might come down to this.

  As a result of the conversation, the entire Miller clan once again traveled to Raleigh and met with the prosecution team on a Saturday morning in early fall. Verus and Doris Miller were accompanied by Pam, Leeann, and their respective spouses. They toured the courthouse, visited the courtroom where the trial was expected to be held, and learned more about the process. But this was just the pregame show. The real reason for the visit was about to take place in the grand-jury room, a big open space bathed in the traditional North Carolina Indian-summer sunlight.

  Morgan remembers that the district attorney wasted no time in getting to the point. Willoughby told the Millers that he was still preparing to go to trial, but that the question might arise as to whether or not a plea bargain could or would be struck. He said he had not yet been approached by the defense team, but expected that it might happen.

  Morgan recalls both Doris Miller and her daughter Leeann becoming very emotional at the mere mention of a plea bargain.

  “I mean there were a couple of, well, there were tearful outbursts from both Doris Miller and from Leeann where they, you know, they emphasized they didn’t believe it would be right to come all this way and end up cutting any kind of a deal with Ann, and their outrage was pretty clear,” Morgan says.

  Assistant District Attorney Doug Faucette took control of the meeting by going around the table and polling each person on his or her views regarding this issue. It appeared to Morgan that Faucette was genuinely interested in finding out what everyone thought about the subject, from the Millers to each member of the prosecution team.

  Morgan considered the question very carefully. His concern about going to trial had to do with the strange power that Ann Miller seemed to have over people, especially over men. Morgan pictured her demurely dressed in a high-collared blouse, speaking just above a whisper from the witness box, in front of a jury. This image alone put a flashing neon “Reasonable Doubt” sign in his head. Throughout his many years on the investigation Morgan had interviewed dozens of people—men, women, neighbors, fellow churchgoers—who had been taken in by Ann’s charming ways. A number of women had staunchly defended Ann, telling Morgan that he was “barking up the wrong tree” if he even considered that she had something to do with Eric’s death.

  “I said, ‘Could a jury of twelve people, a majority or probably a good percentage of them being men . . . could she cast her spell on them from a courtroom, from the defendant’s chair in a courtroom?’ ” Morgan worried.

  People had adamantly supported Ann Miller to the point that Morgan was sure she had an almost mesmerizing power to convert people to her way of thinking. It was a power that had worried Morgan before Ann was arrested, and now it was a power that frightened him when he considered putting her in front of a jury of her peers.

  “Juries [often] ignore the facts and focus on the defendant’s personality, and with Ann Miller’s personality that really scared me, because really, all it would take would be one juror to be taken in by her ability to appear [as] something drastically different [from] what she was,” Morgan remembers telling Willoughby that day.

  Morgan felt confident that if there was a hung jury in the trial, Willoughby would opt to try Ann Miller again. But he knew that they would never go for a third go-around if the jury hung twice. Morgan also felt strongly that after all they had been through, the Millers could not emotionally handle multiple trials. He also knew that if the jury hung, and Ann got out of jail pending another trial, she would again have access to her daughter, Clare. This was something Eric’s family had tried to avoid at all costs. They wanted Ann to have nothing to do with Clare as long as they had a say in the matter.

  Morgan sat back and took stock in what he had invested in the case. It was like standing in line for a ride at a crowded amusement park; if you get out of line before the ride begins, all the waiting has been for nothing. Morgan wasn’t about to get out of line, even if it meant forgoing a trial in favor of a sure thing, a plea deal that would send Ann to prison for a long, long time. He also reminded himself once again that while he adored the Millers, he did not work for them; he worked for one person in every case. The victim. In his heart he felt that going for the sure thing, the plea deal, would be in the best interest of “his client,” Eric Miller.

  As they went around the table Doris Miller and Leeann emotionally reiterated their strong concerns about a plea deal. But when it came time for Verus Miller to voice his opinion, Morgan recalls the tone of the discussion changed. In Morgan’s mind, Verus truly understood Ann’s potential to deceive, and just how dangerous that trait might be on a witness stand. Verus restated Morgan’s point of view in more powerful terms. He, too, thought going to trial was risky business.

  Morgan says Verus’s priority, like his, was keeping Clare out of Ann’s hands as long as possible—since the arrest, Clare had been staying with Ann’s sister, Danielle Wilson, and her family in Wilmington, North Carolina— and that a plea deal was a good and definite way to achieve this goal. Clearly, Verus Miller wasn’t happy about this turn of events, but he could live with it.

  Morgan said Pam echoed her father’s sentiments, as did Doug Faucette, and investigator Bill Dowdy. Morgan said Becky Holt, on the other hand, looked like someone had punched her in the stomach. He knew that she had put a lot of work into the case and had expected it to go to trial. Morgan understood her anguish personally.

  Willoughby thanked everyone for their input and said he would work on a possible offer in the event the defense approached him about a deal. The range he said would be somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five years on a second-degree murder charge and conspiracy to commit murder. The best part of the whole thing in Morgan’s mind was that if Ann decided to take the plea offer, she would have to stand up in open court and admit that she had killed her husband. It was something Morgan had waited for for almost five years.

  CLOSURE FOR STEPHANIE

  Very little stayed the same in Morgan’s life, but every October there was one constant, the North Carolina State Fair. From corn dogs, to upside-down rides, to corny games on the midway, Morgan loved it all—the smells, the sounds, the people, and of course, the extra cash. For years Morgan had worked as a security officer during the weeklong event. Eventually, he had graduated into a position of managing the security detail of off-duty police officers.

  It was late October 2005. Unlike past
years Morgan was not worried about what he was missing at the police station, or whether he would be pulled from his moonlighting job to attend to more pressing needs at work. He wasn’t a police officer anymore. It was a new day. Morgan was free to wallow in the smells of onion rings mingling with the screams from the Tilt-A-Whirl. But even in the middle of this redneck paradise, he still couldn’t let the Miller case go. He knew that the case would now most likely end with a plea deal, a decision he second-guessed daily.

  “I think that riding around in late October under the blue beautiful North Carolina sky, it all started to come down on me in a way. It was a time, you know, when I had a lot of doubts. Had we done the right thing?” Morgan says.

  It was at this moment, under the same clear blue sky at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds, Morgan learned that another chapter in his cold-case file was nearing closure. He got a call from a police friend who told him that an arrest had been made in the Stephanie Bennett murder. It was something he had never expected, yet always hoped for.

  Detective Ken Copeland had been assigned to the Bennett case when Morgan left. Copeland had been working security at the state fair that week, but had been a no-show on several shifts because, he told Morgan, he had to deal with some issues at work. This was not uncommon for officers, and it hadn’t raised a red flag with Morgan, until now.

  The arrest was a bittersweet victory for Morgan. On the one hand, he had failed to solve the case despite what he thought was his best effort. On the other, he cared deeply for Stephanie’s family, and as with the Millers, he had become hopelessly entwined and invested in achieving justice for them in this case. The bitter part was really that no one had kept him in the loop despite the more than two years that he had worked on the case. Like a common civilian, he learned most of the details of the arrest from the television news.