Deadly Dose (25 page)

“We would like for Ms. Miller to [be] out on bond because it would be good for her,” Ann’s lawyer Wade Smith said in his polite deferential tone. “But Mr. Cheshire and I need her desperately to be on bond because we’ve got thousands and thousands of pages of material that [we] need her to help us with and that’s just the truth, it’s just the truth, and I don’t know how we do it at the Wake County Jail.”

The Wake County Jail was supposed to offer temporary housing for people awaiting trial, but like most county jails in growing cities, it had become almost unbearably overcrowded. The visiting space for attorneys and clients was very limited and rarely available.

Always the southern gentleman, Wade Smith could out-polite just about any lawyer in the courtroom. With his shock of white hair, wire-framed glasses, bow tie, and diminutive stature, he looked more like someone’s kindly grandfather than a force to be reckoned with, but in the world of defense attorneys, he was the guy you wanted on your side.

“She has extraordinary close family ties, a remarkable family that will stay in touch with her; they will be together at all times. There’s no way that’s she’s going to hurt herself. There’s no way that’s she’s going to run away. She is absolutely loved by her family and they will look after her,” Smith asserted.

Smith called Ann Miller a “church worker” who lived for God and her family. He pointed to the dozens of letters of support in a stack on the table in front of him. It was almost too much for Morgan to take, but even as the disgust welled up inside of him when he heard people talk favorably of Ann Miller, he was still enjoying the show. In his heart he felt sure Judge Stephens wouldn’t buy in to the farce that was being played out in his courtroom.

“While we would never use this point, we don’t have the child here, we would not do that, we don’t make the argument on the child to try to twang Your Honor’s heartstrings in some way, the child is important because the child gives her [Ann] life force. There’s every reason for this woman to want to live,” Smith said forcefully.

“For years she has known this was coming,” he continued. “She did not run away. And when it came, the day had arrived, she came to Raleigh to present herself.
Remember
that, Your Honor, she’s a marvelous candidate [for bond].”

But just as Morgan had expected, A.D.A. Becky Holt had some fireworks of her own planned for the bond hearing. That nagging feeling that he had had all week that something was in the works was right. Holt wasn’t going to let defense attorneys, even the top defense attorneys in the state, outdo her with character witnesses.

Boldly, Holt asked Judge Stephens’s permission to read the Gammon affidavit into the record. This was the first time anyone outside of the attorneys, the investigators, and the judge had ever heard the contents of Derril Willard’s statement to Rick Gammon. It was more than likely that paragraph 12 would never make it into the trial court as evidence because of the legal hurdles the D.A. would have to cross, but now it would be in an even more influential court in Morgan’s mind: the court of public opinion.

Stephens allowed Holt to proceed with the verbatim reading of paragraph 12 while the audience leaned forward and hung on every word. Television cameras zoomed in to make sure they captured the moment in its entirety. Morgan beamed and exchanged hopeful glances with the Millers. Now the information was finally out there for the entire world to know. Even if it were never admitted at trial, it was now public record. Ann’s dirty little secret was out. She could deny all she wanted to, but to Morgan, paragraph 12 was the evidence that confirmed her guilt
beyond a reasonable doubt
.

Morgan knew it by heart, but still listened intently to Holt’s reading of Ann’s evil deed, her admission to Willard that she had taken a syringe and inserted it into Eric’s IV while he was a patient at Rex Hospital, and that she’d told Willard the substance was some type of poison.

In Morgan’s mind it was irrefutable evidence that would show the world what he had known about Ann Miller all along: she was a cold-blooded killer.

Holt also read Willard’s suicide note out loud and into the court record, another document that had been kept under lock and key for four years. In it, Willard denied any responsibility for Eric’s death. It was a statement that Morgan now truly believed after learning more about Willard and his relationship with Ann.

“I’m sure Wade Smith and Joe Cheshire were both totally apoplectic. They were in a much bigger state of shock than I was, and I was shocked,” Morgan admits.

Judge Stephens said that he had prepared the bond order the night before, but left the terms blank because he wanted to wait and see what transpired at the hearing. He told the court that he had never set bond in a poisoning case before, and needed to take the matter under advisement for a few minutes before he made a decision. He left the courtroom and returned twenty minutes later with his decision.

“I have decided in my discretion to set bond, but I will set a bond appropriate to the nature and circumstances of the charge and the evidence that the state thus far [has shown] as well as the defendant’s situation and her local ties and family support,” Stephens said, peering over the top of his glasses at the order on the bench in front of him. “I’ve just signed the order. It reads as follows: ‘Upon review of all of the evidence presented, the court in its discretion sets the bond in the amount of three million dollars secured to be approved by the undersigned judge. It’s further ordered that the defendant shall reside either in Wake or New Hanover County and shall remain therein unless traveling to court, or to meet with counsel. The court finds that the nature and the circumstances of the alleged offense and of the defendant’s situation are such that this bond is necessary to assure the defendant’s presence at trial.’ ”

Morgan exhaled. “It was [a bond] that was impossible for any person who was not a well-connected Colombian drug dealer to make,” he says.

In Morgan’s mind they had already won the case. Clearly, with a $3 million bond, Ann wasn’t going anywhere. And now with paragraph 12 solidly in the court record, he couldn’t imagine a jury that would let her off.

“The Millers were looking at me, I was looking at the Millers, my mouth was open, I looked at Becky [Holt], she grinned at me,” Morgan says.

The case was definitely beginning to take shape, but Morgan had to keep reminding himself that it wasn’t a done deal yet.

He personally didn’t see anything that was insurmountable, but he also knew that cops and lawyers were different creatures who approached situations in very different ways. What he saw, and what they saw, might be two completely divergent scenarios.

“Lawyers are always concerned, and they’re always looking three steps ahead. Cops act on impulse, in large part; even the most seasoned amongst us are typically not great thinkers,” says Morgan with a belly laugh.

He knew it was the prosecutors’ job to be skeptical, to ask the tough questions, to play the devil’s advocate. So like a good soldier, he went along with it for the good of the case. He didn’t get his feathers ruffled when Becky Holt and Doug Faucette went over and over points they had already discussed with him a million times. He tried to give them all of the information they needed to build the best possible case against Ann because they had a common goal: putting her away.

They went back to the nuts and bolts of the case, reinterviewing people they hadn’t talked to in years. Morgan concentrated on the hospital staff. While they all remembered Eric Miller and his painful death, unfortunately they had little to say about Ann. Morgan had been hoping to find someone who remembered her behaving inappropriately during her husband’s hospital stay, or had seen her show some sort of crack in her rock-hard veneer, but while he found glimmers of this, he heard no real evidence that she had given herself away to anyone.

One thing did stick in Morgan’s mind, though, after the interviews. Typically, big-time defense attorneys conduct their own parallel investigations in order to be able to refute whatever the state said about their client. They interview the same witnesses. In most cases involving fancy lawyers and deep pockets, the attorney interviews are often conducted long before the police get to these same witnesses. The goal, Morgan imagined, is to take rock-solid witnesses and confuse them, leaving the cops hoping for some tidbit hidden deep down inside their subconscious. But in every interview Morgan conducted in preparation for Ann’s trial, when he asked the witnesses if they had been contacted by defense investigators, every time the answer was “no.”

“For a while I worried about it. Are we missing something? ” Morgan remembers wondering.

The defense team had also not contacted Morgan himself for an interview even though they knew he would be a key witness in the case. This seemed highly unusual to Morgan. Most defense-team investigators were retired cops themselves, who called on officers testifying for the prosecution and tried to pick their brains about the case. But he hadn’t gotten a single call.

Finally, in A.D.A. Becky Holt’s office, during the early spring of 2005, Morgan simply blurted out the conclusion he had come to.

“I said, ‘Becky they’re going to try and cut a deal, they’re not going to trial,’ ” Morgan recalls.

Everyone told Morgan he was crazy, that there was no way that after evading arrest for so many years, this woman would roll over so easily. But Morgan was convinced something smelled funny. Top attorneys like Wade Smith and Joe Cheshire left nothing to chance. This wasn’t their first rodeo. They knew exactly how to play the game. If they weren’t interviewing witnesses, there was a reason, a very good reason.

It was time to tie up loose ends. Since they didn’t know what the defense team was up to, the prosecution team continued to prepare their case thoroughly. And there was still one very key player who needed to be brought in—forty-four -year-old Carl Eddy Mackewicz, Ann Miller’s former lover from California.

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.