Deadly Dose (19 page)

One thing Morgan tried to stress in the interview was the hundreds of hours of work put in by his detectives. Some people thought Morgan took too much credit for solving cases. He was fully aware of this perception. When you have a bigger-than-life personality, people either love you or hate you, and Morgan had experienced his fair share of hate. But he truly respected and admired the work his squad had done on the case and wanted that to be known in this interview. Morgan’s gut told him a lot, but without all of the grunt work done by his detectives, none of his cases would ever have seen their way into a courtroom.

“The work that I did was tenfold done by them [detectives] , I mean they did ten times the actual nuts-and-bolts work I did,” Morgan states matter-of-factly. “They’re a dedicated bunch of men and women who deserve all the credit in the world. I don’t think I mention that often enough.”

Finally, on October 15, 2002, it was time for the North Carolina Supreme Court to hear arguments on the Gammon issue. Morgan had never been to the Supreme Court and was duly impressed with the upscale surroundings. He was used to disposable cups, a packed audience in T-shirts and cutoffs, and the constant din of attorneys passing in front of the bench trying to settle cases.

Instead, he walked into a room full of grace and quiet elegance. The stately, historic courtroom with its high ceilings, oil paintings, and freshly polished dark wood was a far cry from a tired Wake County Superior Courtroom. He marveled at the fact that each of the justices had his or her own crystal goblet full of not just water, but
ice water.

“It’s a different world. I tried to go in there with as much dignity as I could wearing my best black fedora,” says Morgan humbly.

Colon Willoughby and Bud Crumpler from the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office argued for the state. Morgan felt their arguments were strong and impressive. But Gammon’s attorneys had equally strong arguments.

“ ‘Isn’t this going to have a chilling effect on the ability of lawyers to represent people effectively?’ ” Morgan recalls one of the justice’s asking. “ ‘If we give you this, isn’t the confidentiality of what someone tells his lawyer always going to be in question?’ ”

But over and over, Morgan says Crumpler and Willoughby answered these questions simply and directly. They told the justices this was a narrowly defined contingency for this particular case and would not affect state law in a broad and sweeping way.

Every Friday after the North Carolina Supreme Court met regarding the case, Morgan logged on to their Web site to scan the decisions, hoping the judges would hand down something in the Miller case. Back in Indiana, the Miller family was doing the same thing. But every time they checked, there was nothing. It was as if the case had been heard and then
poof,
it simply vanished off the radar screen. The court had no legal mandate to consider the case in a specified amount of time. So Morgan and the Millers waited, and waited, and waited.

“I kept thinking, what in the hell is taking them so long with this?” Morgan says.

On December 11, 2002, viewers across the country learned details about the Eric Miller case courtesy of Chris Morgan on
48 Hours
. While the story was about Eric Miller, the CBS producer had built the segment around Morgan and his bigger-than-life persona. As it was told through Morgan’s eyes, a compelling and passionate backdrop, viewers connected more readily with the case in North Carolina, far away from where most of them lived. Morgan made them care about Eric Miller.

On the night the segment aired, Morgan’s family gathered in the den to watch. Morgan himself retreated to his makeshift office in an old shed behind the house to watch alone. He wanted to see for himself whether or not he had screwed up, and he didn’t need his family by his side pointing out his blunders.

While it was tough at moments to hear things he wished he hadn’t said, or wished he had said differently, he was not disappointed with the results. In the end he had done exactly what he’d set out to do, to put Eric Miller’s face on the national map, and to put Ann Miller squarely in the national hot seat.

“If I had thought about it a little bit more, I probably would have never done it. But in retrospect I felt like it was just as an essential part in this process in seeking justice for Eric Miller as anything else we had done in the case,” Morgan says. Morgan had always been hot on Ann Miller’s trail. She knew it, the D.A. knew it, and now the rest of America knew it.

The day after his fifteen minutes of fame aired, Morgan was in line at the snack bar in the municipal building getting his usual, a tuna-fish sandwich to go. Everyone was talking about the
48 Hours
segment. Some people ribbed him, others gave him a pat on the back, and others snickered about it behind his back. But at least they were talking about it, and that’s what he had hoped for. He wanted people to keep talking about the Eric Miller case because that was the only way to keep it alive.

The whispers didn’t bother Morgan; he’d experienced it all before. What did worry him, however, was running into Chief Jane Perlov. When he saw her in line at the snack bar, he assumed that she’d probably seen the segment and would have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. Perlov, not unlike Morgan, seemed to have a strong opinion on just about everything.

In contrast to Morgan, Perlov was a petite woman with short blond hair, the kind of woman people referred to as a “pistol” or a “firecracker.” Unlike her predecessors, she always dressed in uniform, a throwback to her days as a beat cop. Morgan supposed that by dressing in uniform, she was trying to send the message that she was one of them, yet there was something about her that could strike fear in the heart of even a large man like himself.

If she didn’t say anything, Morgan knew it probably meant she disapproved of the segment. He swallowed hard and decided to face her head-on, to get it over with. He figured eventually her opinion would make its way back to him. He’d rather hear it straight from the boss than have it filtered through layers of cops with their own agendas. To Morgan’s surprise, she broached the topic immediately.

“She said, ‘I had to hold my breath when they asked you that question about why hasn’t the case been proceeding, why hasn’t somebody been charged?’ She said, ‘I saw that little snicker on your face when you leaned back in the chair and made that comment about we’re continuing to work with the D.A.’s office.’ She said, ‘That was the best thing you could say,’ ” Morgan recalls with relief.

Chief Jane Perlov was not a person who freely gave compliments, especially not to Chris Morgan. It was no secret that the two strong personalities had locked horns on several occasions. Morgan felt like her reaction to the show was about as close as he was going to get to an “atta-boy,” and he gratefully accepted it.

At this point in the investigation Morgan realized he had probably taken too many risks and burned too many bridges. He and Tom Ford were now on opposite sides of a raging river without even so much as a stray log to bridge the ever-widening gap. Morgan had a lot of animosity toward Ford for not having moved forward with what Morgan had felt was a very viable case. He knew that his own actions, going around Ford to Howard Cummings and Colon Willoughby, would forever cast him as a trouble-maker in Ford’s eyes, but he just didn’t care anymore. It wasn’t something he could afford to waste precious energy worrying about.

While Morgan continued to wait for the North Carolina Supreme Court to make its decision, life and death went on in Raleigh. Murders continued to happen, murders that needed Morgan’s attention.

Around this same time Chief Perlov was working on decentralizing the investigative unit. The idea was to have detectives in each district investigating crimes in that district instead of having them all based out of headquarters. The other objective of Perlov’s plan was to concentrate more on quality-of-life crimes, such as petty theft or car break-ins, which affected the largest number of people. By comparison, there were only a small number of murders every year, and thus they affected a relatively small number of people. This philosophy irked Morgan to his core. In his mind there is no greater crime than murder, and in his opinion, murders clearly affect people much more deeply than the theft of a bike or stereo. There was no comparison.

To Morgan, this new agenda meant fewer resources would be allocated toward murder investigations. Because each district would have just a handful of detectives to investigate its own crimes, there would no longer be a large team of detectives at the central office handling every homicide.

“Let the damn car break-ins, stuff like that, fall by the wayside. When somebody takes a life, it can never be replaced, ” says Morgan disgustedly. “My heart and my time will still largely be focused on people’s whose lives have been stolen.”

But the decentralization was going to happen whether Morgan liked it or not.

Fifty-five-year-old Robert Sanchez Saiz was a Raleigh Public Utilities worker who’d been robbed at gunpoint and killed in the winter of 2002. A group of robbers burst into the break room and demanded everyone’s wallet. Saiz tried to slip out the back door and was shot. Many hours after Morgan and his detectives started working the case, he realized that no one had notified Saiz’s wife, Debra, that her husband was dead. Morgan decided he would go with Detective Amy Russo to Cary, a suburb of Raleigh, where the man had lived with his family, and break the awful news himself.

Over the years Morgan had taken on the nickname “Bump” or “Bumper” after a character in Joe Wambaugh’s book
The Blue Knight
. A fellow cop dubbed Morgan “Bump” in the late 1970s because the real name of the character in the book was William Morgan (Chris Morgan’s full name is William Christopher Morgan). Like Chris Morgan, William Morgan was a large cop with an even bigger personality. As nicknames have a way of doing, this one stuck like glue to Morgan. Cops got so used to calling Morgan “Bump” that some didn’t even know his real name. He accepted the moniker with humility and just a smidgen of pride on account of the fact that his colleagues had bothered to name him after a colorful character torn right out of a classic tale.

It was a cold November night when Morgan and Russo headed to Saiz’s home. Morgan slipped on his best white felt fedora and his overcoat as he got out of the car. He and Russo walked solemnly to the door of the apartment and knocked. It wasn’t the first time Morgan had made a “death knock,” but it was the first time in a long while. A slight Hispanic woman in a robe answered the door. It was Debra Saiz, Robert Saiz’s widow.

“Immediately she broke down and said, ‘Oh my God, he’s died, he’s dead,’ before we ever said one word,” Morgan says, sounding somewhat stunned as he recalled the woman’s reaction. “From that point on, me going to the front door in a hat became known as a ‘Bumper Death Notification.’ ”

Morgan had become so well known as the detective in the hat on television who investigated murders that his mere presence was enough to let someone know a loved one had died. It was an unexpected side effect of his new-found fame, and one he wasn’t sure he liked.

On Wednesday, January 29, 2003, the body of a forty-four-year -old nursing student was found on the grounds of the Dorothea Dix Hospital, a local public mental institution. A cop on foot, chasing a suspect who had committed an unrelated assault with a machete, practically stumbled over Shirley Lang’s body in the woods just off a path on the edge of the property. While the body had no connection to the assault, the officer called it in on his radio. When Morgan arrived at the scene, he was appalled by the sight of Lang’s body, and equally amazed that at this point in his career anything could still appall him.

“It was a brutal murder. She was cut and slashed repeatedly about the head, and neck, and face. It showed a lot of emotion. It was one of the first things that stuck with me in that case,” says Morgan, shaking his head.

Morgan strongly believes that in order to get close enough to cut someone with a knife, to kill someone in such a savage way, you have to know the person. A stranger doesn’t want to have any physical connection to someone’s death, which is why strangers generally use guns and stay farther away from their victims. But rage, rage came from a deep dark place that was inextricably entwined with the killer’s relationship to the victim.

Lang had been partially disrobed, and she’d had a tree branch forced down her throat. The scene made Morgan sick to his stomach, and at the same time even more determined to find Shirley Lang’s killer.

And like every other case by that point, he looked at it in the context of Eric Miller. These days Eric Miller’s case was the lens that every new case passed through.

“It seemed like every case I got, every new case that came in, I somehow ended up comparing it to Eric Miller. Eric was fast becoming the focal point of my life,” Morgan admits. “It was kind of like the anchor I was holding on to.”

What if Eric’s killer had left clues as Shirley Lang’s killer had done? What if Eric’s killer had been sloppy and emotional? But none of these what-ifs would do him any good now. In contrast to Shirley Lang’s murder, Eric’s death was cold, sterile, without obvious traces of emotion. Eric’s killer had managed to cover her tracks. There was no crime scene to speak of where detectives could have gathered clear forensic evidence.

In Shirley Lang’s case, Morgan expected justice to be much more swift. He dove into it headfirst hoping to get some immediate gratification in a way he couldn’t get from the languishing Miller case. Shirley Lang had been a hard-working, churchgoing woman who’d been missing for three days. Besides having raised two children, Lang was a nursing student at Wake Technical Community College and an intern at the Dorothea Dix Hospital, a state psychiatric facility. Her husband, fifty-five-year-old Daniel Lang, had not reported her missing until she had been gone for thirty-six hours. Yet when he was interviewed by police, he showed no concern about the fact that his wife was gone, that she had missed church, that friends had been asking questions. It didn’t take a seasoned investigator to realize that Daniel Lang was hiding something. Yet Lang appeared to be as little concerned about the perception that he might be involved in a murder as he was about his wife’s disappearance and her death.