Deadly Dose (11 page)

“She wasn’t remorseful, she wasn’t scared, she was just what she was: confident, cool, collected,” Morgan said.

Psychopathy is often incorrectly confused with psychosis, but in reality psychopathy is not an official medical or mental condition. According to the dictionary, it is derived from the Greek words
psyche,
which means “soul,” and
pathos,
which means “to suffer.”

The American Psychiatric Association believes that psychopathy is an outdated word used to describe someone who suffers from antisocial personality disorder. These people lack empathy, are highly manipulative, and cannot control their impulses. In short, they lack a conscience. Because people with these traits are often high functioning and very successful in today’s competitive world, they are not always recognized by our society as being deviant.

Former Raleigh Police Department psychologist Dr. Michael Teague saw these behavioral traits as fitting in perfectly with his theory of magical thinking. The way Teague saw it, in her mind Ann could do no wrong. She was quick to blame others for her problems and her transgressions. Because psychopaths have no real concern for others, the only way that they function in society is by mimicking what they know is considered acceptable behavior. Teague felt this described Ann Miller exactly. He was careful to point out, though, that someone who is psychopathic is not mentally ill in the traditional sense—that such a person is still totally competent, aware of, and legally responsible for her actions.

People who knew Ann and Eric saw their differences, but still didn’t question the image of the loving couple they portrayed to the world. Ann and Eric were active members of their Catholic church in Raleigh, even leading marriage workshops and organizing retreats for other young couples. But despite their appearing as role models of a good marriage, trouble was already brewing in paradise, even if Eric didn’t know it at the time.

Morgan says Ann met Carl Mackewicz on January 17, 1997, exactly three years to the day before she would give birth to her daughter, Clare, at Rex Hospital. Throughout those three years Ann saw Carl Mackewicz often, e-mailed back and forth with him, and called him frequently.

Investigators uncovered evidence that the two met in San Francisco, where Mackewicz lived. They also discovered that the pair had taken romantic jaunts to places like Lake Tahoe, New York, and the Outer Banks of North Carolina. But apparently Eric had been oblivious to the relationship, or if he was aware of it, he didn’t know it was sexual. Ann had portrayed it to others as a work friendship, nothing more.

Ann received an in vitro fertilization treatment on April 20, 1999. Soon after the fertility treatment, unbeknownst to Eric, Morgan said Ann spent five days with Mackewicz on the North Carolina coast. On May 8, 2000, she sent the following e-mail to Carl remembering their trip from the previous year:

When Ann and Eric’s daughter, Clare, was born on January 17, 2000, Ann should have been elated. She had finally gotten what she claimed she’d wanted. For most women the birth of their first child is the beginning of something beautiful and quite unlike anything they’ve experienced before. But for Ann, Morgan believed her foray into motherhood may have been one of the things that pushed her past the edge of reason. After all, putting someone else’s needs before her own was not her forte. In addition, having a baby usurp her spot as the center of attention in her home would not have been palatable to a woman who craved the spotlight.

Dr. Teague strongly believes that Ann may also have suffered from postpartum depression. She would often leave the baby in Eric’s capable hands so that she could have some time to herself. Part postpartum depression, part egocentricity, was Teague’s professional assessment. He described Ann as a woman who possessed a “toxic level of narcissism.”

For Morgan,
understanding
Ann Miller was never his goal. Honestly, he didn’t want to get that close to the woman. He simply wanted to find something that would give her away, something that would give investigators the evidence they needed to arrest her. But it was hard to learn more about Ann, or her behavior, because in the spring of 2001, she moved out of the Raleigh area, away from the watchful eyes of investigators.

Ann left her job at Glaxo Wellcome after Derril Willard’s suicide and moved to Wilmington, a coastal city in North Carolina about two hours east of Raleigh. It was assumed that she went to Wilmington because her younger sister Danielle lived there with her husband and children. Initially, Ann and Clare stayed with Danielle’s family, then in April 2001, Ann rented her own home.

It wasn’t as if she’d moved to Mexico, but Ann was just far enough away to be out of the Raleigh detectives’ easy reach. This frustrated Morgan to no end. Little did he know he would soon get his chance to be her shadow.

Despite the damning autopsy report that seemed to point directly at Ann Miller, it was clear to Morgan that Assistant District Attorney Tom Ford was still not going to authorize her arrest.

“Tom, I think, over the years sort of got gun-shy,” Morgan theorizes.

Morgan and Ford had originally come to Raleigh around the same time. But while Morgan grew more passionate about his work over the years, he felt that Ford had gone in the opposite direction. For many people the district attorney’s office is a stepping-stone to bigger things, but for Ford it had become a career ender, a place where he was the top dog and enjoyed a certain amount of power and freedom.

Morgan decided it was time for him to do whatever he could to nudge Ford in the right direction. With Sergeant Jeff Fluck and Lieutenant Gerald Britt out of town again, he felt it was up to him to take the ball and run with it. He started trying to figure out what had, and had not, been done in the investigation. One of the first big problems he uncovered was the existence of a great big file cabinet full of information that had never been transmitted to the district attorney’s office. While Sergeant Fluck had been keeping Tom Ford updated via phone calls, Ford had not yet actually seen a single document from the reports that investigators had been compiling for months.

Morgan immediately asked Detective Hervoline Faulkner to spend every waking moment making a copy of the files for Ford. The entire case was organized neatly into binders and sent over to the district attorney’s office.

“Naturally, Tom Ford was chuckling on the sidelines because he knew he had the perfect out,” Morgan recalls. Morgan knew that Ford could simply say he wasn’t ready to make an arrest because he had only just received this voluminous file—and he’d have a point.

The next thing Morgan realized was that a time line was missing from the investigation, a chronological history of events from the case put down on paper for everyone to see and refer to, including events leading up to, surrounding, and following Eric Miller’s murder. Nothing was too insignificant to include.

So Morgan and lead detectives Randy Miller and Debbie Regentin sat down and created it, in the belief that it was critical to any complex criminal investigation. Their situation could be compared to that overwhelming feeling you have when you dump out a five-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle on your kitchen table and try to imagine how you could ever possibly assemble it, but somehow you do it. Morgan started with the edges of the Ann Miller puzzle and worked his way into the center until he started to see the image that he was looking for. Without this kind of organization, he could never hope to put the pieces of the puzzle together in a coherent manner.

Since Morgan had been kept out of the loop for so many months, he wanted to pick the brains of all of the investigators who’d worked on the case to see what they knew and what they still needed to find out. Creating a time line was the perfect way for him to fill in the gaps.

One of the things that Morgan discovered from these discussions was that no one had yet asked for the visitors’ logs from Rex Hospital and UNC Hospitals. Because Dr. Thomas Clark was convinced that Eric Miller had been poisoned during his first hospital stay at Rex, getting this information was critical.

As it turned out, that very same day a news crew from the local ABC station had asked Rex Hospital for the very same logs. Hospital administrators denied them access to the information, but Morgan was embarrassed that it had taken so long for his team to make the same request that the media made.

At last, the team was making progress, in part thanks to Morgan’s pressure to do whatever they could to make their case a stronger one. It was time to lay their cards on the table. Morgan went first and told his colleagues how far he thought they had come and where he felt the investigation needed to go next.

“I don’t think Ford can stall too long,” Morgan recalls saying. “I think we’ve got ample probable cause to make an arrest. And I think we should plan within the next couple of weeks on making that arrest so we can bring this thing to an end.”

Morgan will never forget what came next. As usual he spoke without censoring himself, or thinking about what he was going to say. This had become a distinct pattern in his life, and one that at his age wasn’t likely to change.

“I would later come to regret opening my big mouth once again,” Morgan rues, “as I have so often over the years.”

It was May 2001—a full six months after Eric Miller’s murder. Morgan told his colleagues that they really didn’t know anything about Ann Miller’s life
now.
They knew she had moved to Wilmington to be closer to her family, and it made total sense for Ann to go where her support system was. But that’s about all they knew. They didn’t know where she worked, or whom she was spending time with. Morgan pointed out that maybe after getting out of Raleigh, where she had been watched, Ann would feel safer, safe enough to talk to someone and maybe tell him or her something about the case. Out loud, Morgan speculated that just maybe, if that someone did exist, he or she might be willing to talk to police.

“If this were my case, I would have her on round-the-clock surveillance,” Morgan said vigorously to the group of assembled investigators.

No sooner had the words escaped his lips than Morgan realized exactly what he was in for. If he was eager to tail Ann Miller, then the Raleigh Police Department would grant his wish.

“ ‘Since you’ve got such a brilliant idea there, pack your bags, you’re moving to Wilmington,’ ” says Morgan, remembering the day his bosses gave him his marching orders.

“It was an interesting case, she was an interesting woman, and I felt like it was something that was important,” Morgan insists, trying to put his assignment in the best light possible.

Morgan rounded up a team of half a dozen or so detectives. As luck would have it, the stepmother of one of his detectives lived on the very street in Wilmington where Ann Miller had rented a house. This gave them a way to begin their undercover surveillance without being noticed.

In May 2001, the team checked in to the Comfort Inn in Wilmington, donned their Bermuda shorts and golf shirts, and started watching Ann Miller’s every move.

“It’s kind of creepy because you’re actually
trying
to watch people, I mean there’s a tinge of voyeurism in it,” Morgan says unapologetically.

Investigators discovered that Ann was working at an interior-design store near Wrightsville Beach, a resort community just outside of Wilmington. Her routine was fairly consistent. She would drop Clare at her sister Danielle’s house in the morning, go to work, pick Clare up in the afternoon, and then return to her rental home.

“Her appearance was far from someone who was devastated, ” Morgan scoffs. “She was in control, she was up-beat, and she carried herself with an air of confidence . . . She wasn’t what I expected. She wasn’t someone who was fearful, somebody who was scared, or somebody who was anxious, or somebody who was depressed. She was just somebody who was going about business and doing her everyday thing. Outwardly, at least, without a care in the world.”

At this point the public speculation had clearly tilted toward Ann being responsible for Eric’s death. While the police hadn’t actually come out and said this, they danced around the issue in the media just enough to make everyone aware that Ann was the focus of the investigation. Given this, Morgan thought it was unconscionable that Ann could walk around as if nothing were going on. In his mind this was just more proof of her “psychopathic personality. ”

Morgan recalls that one of the hardest aspects about following Ann Miller was her “chameleon car.” She had traded in her big-payment Chevy Suburban for a more modest used Acura Integra. It was a strange color that in some lights looked blue, and in others black or purple, which made the car hard to follow and easy to lose.

Investigators quickly noticed that Ann had a male friend who was hanging around and visiting her house in the evenings. He lived in her sister Danielle’s subdivision and seemed to be friendly with the entire family. It immediately piqued Morgan’s interest that Ann would be entertaining a gentleman friend so soon after her husband’s death.

Investigators learned that the mystery man was named Paul Kontz. Kontz had been born in October 1961 in Queens, New York, to Henry and Patricia Kontz. Unlike Ann, he had no advanced degrees, not even a college degree. He was a sometime electrician and a sometime musician in a Christian rock band.

To Morgan the relationship between the two
appeared
to be romantic, based on the amount of time they were spending together, but since they had not made any public displays of affection in front of the cops, the theory was still up in the air. But if it was in fact a budding romance, it would raise a huge red flag for Morgan. For almost anyone suffering through the loss of a spouse, it would have been too soon. Six months, Morgan thought, was clearly not enough time to get over your husband’s murder and jump into someone else’s bed. But Ann Miller was not most people.