Deadly Dose (6 page)

“The whole situation started to very much fall under ‘the truth makes sense,’ ” says Morgan. “If it doesn’t make sense, it’s probably not true. It had a smell about it. It had a slight smell that first night. As time went on, the smell got even more and more pronounced.”

“I searched your house and in the trash can I found a note that you wrote,” Detective Debbie Regentin stated to Ann in that first and only interview with her. “Do you know when it was written?”

“No, I don’t remember. Eric always kept them. I would tear them up,” Ann said matter-of-factly.

“In another note I found you had written that Eric was wanting you to give up a friend. I know you guys are professional people. Do you remember the note?” the detective countered Ann’s dismissal of the issue.

“Eric was overly jealous,” Ann said of her dead husband. “Ninety percent of the people I work with are men.”

“Like my work,” Detective Regentin responded without judgment.

“He has a hard time with that. I have a very good friend at work. I have a lot of friends at work. I think the friend was a guy in California. I worked on a project with him. He showed me around while I was there. Eric asked me not to spend so much time with him,” Ann said with a hint of annoyance in her voice.

“You were just friends?” the detective asked.

Ann Miller never answered the question. But investigators would soon learn the answer. The letter was about Carl Mackewicz, and based on what they learned, he was much more than just a
friend
to Ann Miller.

Early on in the investigation, Chris Morgan felt that detectives should focus on whether or not Ann had had help killing Eric, even if her accomplice may not have been part of the final act. Clearly, she had questionable relationships with multiple men. Carl Mackewicz or Derril Willard
might
have been in on her plan. But even if neither of them physically helped her, it’s unlikely that she kept her evil deeds entirely to herself. In Morgan’s experience, killers often felt the need to tell someone what they had done. The catharsis of telling even just one person was often the key to solving the case. In Morgan’s mind that one person might just be Derril Willard.

As investigators looked at the events surrounding the night at the bowling alley on November 15, 2000, the night Eric became violently ill and was first hospitalized, it became clear that he must have received a dose of arsenic in his beer. Eric had told the men he was with that the beer tasted funny and almost immediately afterward started having violent stomach pains. Ann Miller, the good wife, the concerned wife, took her husband to Rex Hospital early in the morning on November 16.

“Within two hours of arriving at the bowling alley, he was throwing up in a bag, in a garbage can, while he was still trying to bowl,” says Morgan. “Within two hours of drinking that beer, the symptoms of arsenic poisoning started to fully manifest themselves in Eric Miller.”

“He started throwing up about eleven,” a tearful Ann told the detective. “And then he was throwing up until the wee hours, and he always, it makes him mad when I say this, but Eric always gets sick worse than Clare and I. He always gets it harder,” Ann said, sobbing.

“He got up every hour on the hour at three like he had thought maybe he should go to the hospital but he didn’t want to wake Clare, so at six he said I’m not going to be okay. I got dressed and I got Clare and we went to the emergency room that morning.”

The detective went on to ask Ann Miller whether or not her husband ate or drank anything at the house before going to the hospital. She told him that she gave Eric a Coke.

“They admitted him. They said he had that stomach flu,” Ann told the detective. “Two or three nurses had gone home from it. And it comes from something you eat and then he got very distended and he said help me because he wanted, he wanted to be helped. He went back in X-ray. He had fluids around his heart and then they left him in the ER. They told him he was going to get a room for his stomach flu. He was in the ER for thirty hours. I came back. I’m getting mad at the ER because he is still there. He said, ‘You go home,’ ” Ann said, pausing for a moment. “He said, ‘You go home and get some rest,’ and I came back the next morning and he was still there,” she said, sobbing again. “He was still looking pale in the ER and he couldn’t sleep and nobody called me because he was all alone and all that noise. The doctor came in and she got really mad. She said the nurses are terrible, and the doctor got really mad he was still there.”

Morgan was mad on so many levels. He was mad that Eric Miller had died. He was mad that Eric Miller might not have had the best care at the end of his life. He was mad that the woman Eric Miller trusted the most, his wife, might be responsible for his death.

Morgan wanted to know more about the group Miller went bowling with, particularly Derril Willard, in light of the romantic e-mails Willard had exchanged with Ann and Eric’s sudden illness at the bowling alley. If Willard had helped Ann, even if he had had second thoughts when the notion of killing an innocent man became too much for him to bear, then he was still the investigators’ best bet for getting someone to turn on Ann. If Willard knew something, if they could get him to talk, the case would be solved, over, done. But these were a whole lot of ifs.

Phone records started to dribble into the police department in mid-December after police made official requests to the wireless carriers. Like the e-mails, they showed an unmistakable pattern of communication between Ann and Willard. They revealed that Willard and Ann had called each other more than one hundred times between October 30, 2000, and December 2, 2000, the day of Eric’s death. Ann called Willard seventy-nine times. He called her just thirty-eight times. They talked for a total of an astounding 576 minutes. These were all just numbers, but important numbers to Morgan, numbers that added up to two things: an ongoing romantic affair, and possibly an accomplice in Eric Miller’s death.

They called each other at all hours of the day and night and talked for long periods of time. One twenty-four-minute call came just two hours before Eric Miller died. Then the calls abruptly stopped. In Morgan’s mind either Willard knew Ann had killed her husband and ended the communication himself, or more likely, Ann ended it because she had no more use for him.

It didn’t take a brilliant scientist to figure out this one. Morgan presumed Ann had been having an affair with Willard in order to gain his trust so that he would in turn help her kill Eric. Again, as Morgan believed that Ann never did anything without a purpose, he felt there had to be a core motivation behind the affair other than pleasure or insecurity. After all, she already had Carl Mackewicz, and who knows how many other men. Did she really need another lover?

And there was more—police found two hundred milliliters of an arsenic compound called sodium cacodylate in the lab where Ann and Willard worked at Glaxo Wellcome. They were told that this was a typical amount for the lab to stock on a daily basis. After consulting with experts, investigators learned that this amount of the compound was easily enough to kill someone. Although such evidence was all still circumstantial, proving that Ann and Willard had access to the poison that killed Eric it was
very strong
circumstantial evidence. In addition, investigators discovered that at the time Eric was killed there was no routine inventory taken, nor was there a system to monitor who was taking what from the lab.

All three of the men who attended the bowling outings were colleagues of Ann’s from Glaxo Wellcome. Very quickly investigators were able to catch up with two of them and interview them. Randy Bledsoe and Tom Councilor talked to the police; only Derril Willard proved elusive. To be honest, though, police were not exactly chasing Willard down. A month after Eric’s death, Sergeant Fluck told Morgan they were still trying to set up an interview with Willard and had left messages at his office, but hadn’t done anything else to pursue a face-to-face meeting. Morgan was astounded that they had not tried harder to pin Willard down.

“In my way of thinking, it was a mistake,” Morgan says. “I would have been sitting with my fat butt on Willard’s car every day.” And he means it.

Not unlike the way he got to know his victims, Morgan wanted to learn everything he could about Derril Willard so that he might understand how the man was caught up in Ann Miller’s complicated web of deceit. In his gut he suspected that Willard might be a victim as well, a victim of Ann Miller’s charm and powers of seduction, an unwitting partner in a plot to kill a good man. Morgan needed Willard’s help to unravel the web.

In late January, the men in charge of the investigation, Sergeant Jeff Fluck and Lieutenant Gerald Britt, were out of town. Captain Donald Overman was left to tend to the case in their absence. After meeting with Eric Miller’s family on January 19, 2001, Morgan said Overman became concerned that the investigation was lagging— that Derril Willard could be holding the key to the entire case, yet no one had made any real effort to get him to talk.

Morgan reasons that Fluck probably didn’t want to push Willard because he might have gotten scared and “lawyered up,” an expression for hiring a lawyer and shutting out the police. But still, it was clear to Morgan that without Willard the case could not move forward. Yet he knew that Fluck was right; Willard was a bright scientist, and chances were he was smart enough to know that his relationship with Ann had gotten him into real trouble.

“We got to get a statement from this guy, even if he lies,” Morgan said. “You have to expect that he’s going to lie, but you have to nail him down and stake him out.”

Again, it still wasn’t officially Morgan’s case. But as luck would have it, he was on duty that week, and Captain Overman needed a supervisor to oversee a search of Willard’s home. This is how Morgan says he got “pulled into the investigation through no fault of his own.” But it wasn’t like he put up a fight.

Detective Randy Miller drew up a search warrant in order to obtain legal probable cause from a judge to enter Willard’s home. At the same time, Morgan was strategizing about how to approach Willard. Even more of a concern was knowing that as soon as the search warrant was returned to the Wake County Magistrate’s Office, the media would get a hold of it. Key details of the case that investigators had been keeping under wraps for several weeks would suddenly become part of the public record.

This thought would stick with Morgan for years like gum that he couldn’t scrape off the bottom of his shoe. He knew that a talented local newspaper reporter for the
News and Observer
, Oren Dorell, was a well-known “search-warrant grazer,” who would find the information and put it on the front page of the newspaper above the fold for everyone to see.

The search warrant contained information about the bowling outing, what was thought to be arsenic in the beer, and the romantic relationship between Ann and Willard. Specifically, it stated that the two other men at the bowling alley that night saw Willard purchase the beer and pour cups for everyone with the exception of one man who did not drink. This meant that the cup of beer that Eric drank from went directly from Willard’s hands to Eric’s lips. While the warrant didn’t spell it out, the obvious conclusion that anyone reading the warrant would draw was that Willard must have put the arsenic in Eric’s beer.

Based on this information, Morgan wanted to arrest Willard for attempted murder. It occurred to Morgan that if the police had enough probable cause to search Willard’s home, they had enough probable cause to arrest him. In fact, Morgan considered this the right thing to do. It would put Willard where they wanted and needed him—behind bars, in their custody, and hopefully willing to bargain for his freedom with the truth. But again, his wishes fell on deaf ears. Morgan says the assistant Wake County district attorney handling the case, Tom Ford, did not believe there was enough evidence to charge Willard and that a premature arrest could irrevocably damage the case.

“To say that I perceived Tom Ford as a developing problem in this case is a huge understatement. I mean Tom Ford
was
the problem in this case initially,” states Morgan.

Investigators in Wake County were used to working closely with prosecutors. With few exceptions, cops didn’t make arrests in serious cases without the approval of the district attorney. Prosecutors also had a different standard; probable cause wasn’t enough. Before an arrest in a high-profile case, they wanted to make sure there was enough to convict someone beyond a reasonable doubt in front of a jury. Morgan didn’t always like the process, but he understood how it worked and had come to accept it. Morgan was beginning to worry that a case might never be made against anyone in Eric Miller’s death.

Morgan believes that part of Ford’s reluctance stemmed from having difficulty dealing with the medical examiner, Dr. Thomas Clark, who seemed to be perpetually putting Ford off. Clark was in charge of Eric’s autopsy, and would be the key witness if the case ever went to trial. Dr. Clark would be the one to testify as to Eric’s cause of death. But at this point, Morgan says, neither investigators, nor Ford and his colleagues at the D.A.’s office, had been able to get straight answers from the medical examiner.

“He [Clark] played with them, he put them off. And Jeff [Fluck] and even more so Tom Ford could not believe he was actually treating them this way,” Morgan said. “I’ve dealt with Clark before and I knew how he was. The thing is he likes to play that game. He likes to make sure that you know he’s smarter than you are, which you know in my case, I was perfectly willing to admit.”

Morgan says Ford was not as willing to play Clark’s game, and as a result, a standoff that almost derailed the investigation occurred early on.