Deadly Dose

Table of Contents

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DEADLY DOSE

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY
Berkley mass-market edition / June 2008

Copyright © 2008 by Amanda Lamb

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Investigator Chris Morgan leans back slowly into the crevices of his worn leather recliner like he’s sinking into a hot bath. The dark brown material is stretched and broken from years of abuse, like a snake skin left by the side of the road in the scorching sunlight. The chair sticks to his large bare arms and surrounds him like an old familiar blanket. Over the years, his wife has begged him to get rid of the ugly old chair. But no other chair fits his ample frame quite like this one. It is here, in his chair, in the darkness of his study, in his room, that he tells the story that almost consumed the latter part of his life.

For Morgan there are two kinds of murderers. There is the impersonal murderer who kills for money. Often, the victim dies quickly and suffers little at the hands of this killer. But then there are murderers who revel in watching people die. They get joy and power from seeing their victims suffer. Ann Miller watched her husband, Dr. Eric Miller, die a thousand small deaths over a period of months before his heart finally stopped at 2:50 a.m. on Saturday, December 2, 2000, at Rex Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina.

To die from chronic arsenic poisoning is to be slowly tortured. Morgan has read everything he can find on the subject. He learned how arsenic attacks all of the tissues in your body and severely limits your ability to function. The first symptoms are flulike—nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. Early on, the damage can be reversed if the exposure stops. But if it continues, the toxic chemical attacks your nerves, your stomach, your intestines, and your skin. You feel excruciating pain and eventually become psychotic. It is as if your body is slowly deteriorating, being eaten away, and one day, one painful day, it finally gives out for good.

North Carolina is no stranger to high-profile arsenic poisonings. Most often, the details are the stuff made-for-television movies are fashioned from. Forty-six-year-old Velma Barfield did it to her lover, Stuart Taylor, just before they dressed up in their Sunday best and went to see a visiting evangelist at the local convention center. Investigators soon learned many people close to Barfield had died under “suspicious circumstances.” She was ultimately convicted of killing Taylor and put to death in 1984.

Blanche Taylor Moore sits in a North Carolina prison condemned to death after being convicted of poisoning her boyfriend, Raymond Reid, with arsenic in 1986. In addition to Reid, investigators determined that Moore’s first and second husbands were also poisoned with arsenic. Her first husband died, yet Moore was charged only in Reid’s case. But it took only one case to put her on death row.

As many times as he has gone over it in his mind, Morgan can’t comprehend why a promising thirty-year-old pediatric AIDS researcher had to die this way. Eric Miller was the kind of man no one disliked. Morgan never knew him when he was alive, but after hundreds of interviews with people who did know Eric, Morgan now counts him as a friend.

Morgan readjusts his formidable frame and eases a little bit deeper into the comfortable chair, so deep he fears it might collapse beneath his ample weight. The house is quiet without his four children living at home. In the distance his dog barks manically from the yard. Morgan hears his wife, Kay, scolding, trying to usher the pet back inside. He takes another pinch of chewing tobacco. His story will take time to tell. It cascades out of his mouth in long, deliberate run-on sentences, like a poet searching for the right cadence.

Ann Miller was an attractive woman, a well-educated scientist, a mother, an active church member. Not the kind of woman anyone would’ve suspected of killing her husband; no one except perhaps Chris Morgan. Yet over the five-year period following Eric Miller’s death, Ann Miller left a string of lies, and a history of manipulation, hypocrisy, and more death in her path. Despite her prim and proper appearance, Ann Miller was serially unfaithful to her husband. Morgan always felt she had an uncanny power not only to lure men into her web of seduction, but to then cast them aside when she no longer needed what they had to offer.

For years Ann Miller remained free and seemingly un-flustered by the deaths she left in her wake. During this time Morgan refused to give up the fight to put her behind bars. As a leader of the Major Crimes Task Force, he was on her heels day and night. From the beginning he suspected that Ann Miller was the killer. He pressured the district attorney almost daily to take the case to court.

Crusader
is not a word to be used lightly. But in this case it fits. Chris Morgan is a crusader in every sense of the word.

This is his story, as told from an old recliner in a small, comfortable ranch house somewhere in rural North Carolina. It is getting dark now as the late-winter sun sets in the distance, sending only a small shaft of light across his weathered face. He has traveled many miles to get to this day. He is ready.

The longer you live, the more you realize that while first impressions may not
always
be right, they
usually
are.

From the moment Investigator Chris Morgan saw thirty-year-old Ann Miller through the window of the interview room at the Raleigh Police Department on December 2, 2000, he knew something was wrong. Her image from that night is etched into his mind with the crystal-clear clarity of a black-and-white photograph. It has a timeless quality about it that never fades, never gets grainy, never curls or turns yellow around the edges. Indeed, it became only sharper as the years went by.

“I got that funny little feeling in the back of my mind,” Morgan says, recalling his peek at Ann through the interview-room window that cold winter night. It was a feeling that had served Morgan well in his twenty-nine years as a cop. He spent most of the last decade investigating murders, but this case stayed with him like a bad rash that wouldn’t go away.

Ann Miller, a scientist at the then-named pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Wellcome, was wrapped in an afghan and huddled against her father in a small waiting room. She was waiting to be interviewed by investigators about the death of her husband, Eric Miller. Thirty-year-old Dr. Eric Miller, a pediatric AIDS researcher at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at UNC Hospitals, had died at Rex Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina, at 2:50 a.m. that morning. The cause—
arsenic poisoning
. He took his last breath never knowing what hit him.

Eric was a tall, thin, handsome man, with a head full of thick brown hair and a smile for every camera lens. Morgan still looks at Eric’s pictures often, and is surprisingly comforted by them. They show a man full of life, full of promise, a man who was not supposed to die young. A man Morgan would have liked to have known.

Morgan himself is a large, imposing man with sprigs of white hair and a worn face that reveals the time he spent in the trenches as a homicide investigator. He walks slowly, and speaks slowly, letting each thought roll off his tongue with a combination of southern redneck and unlikely academic thrown in. He usually wears a white fedora, and beneath the brim, if he tips his hat, you might catch a glimpse of twinkling blue eyes indicating a man full of curiosity.

“Something just wasn’t ringing true,” says Morgan of that night when he first saw Ann Miller. Ann was not a tiny woman—at five feet five inches and 140 pounds, she was average by most standards—but there was something about her highlighted mousy-brown shoulder-length hair, her soft blue eyes, and the way she leaned in to her father for comfort that made her look more diminutive and frail than she really was. In Morgan’s estimation, the helpless-little-girl look was part of her power, her control over others. It made people want to take care of her. And it worked.

“The more I thought, the more I flashed back to seeing her sitting there looking the way she did. Like I say, she was prim, proper. The more I thought this isn’t an accident, this isn’t any suicide. This is a
murder
.”

In 2000, Morgan was a sergeant heading up one of two squads of the Major Crimes Task Force for the Raleigh Police Department. On the weekend of December 2, 2000, he wasn’t scheduled to work, but instead was preparing to head to the western part of the state for a homicide conference to present information he had collected in a 1994 cold case of a young murder victim named Beth-Ellen Vinson.

Morgan had been asked to reinvestigate the unsolved murder by police chief Mitch Brown. For a year, Morgan had poured his heart and soul into reworking the cold case. Not unlike every other case he doggedly pursued, Morgan took an emotional and intensely personal interest in Beth-Ellen and her family. He had brought his findings, complete with a detailed PowerPoint presentation, to Wake County district attorney Colon Willoughby. But Willoughby felt he still needed more evidence to get a conviction in a courtroom. Dejected after putting so much effort into what he thought was a solid case, Morgan hoped his colleagues at the conference could help him come up with a different approach to pitch the case again to district attorneys. Still, this disappointment clouded his opinion of the Wake County District Attorney’s Office and would set the tone for his future dealings with local prosecutors.