Deadly Dose (20 page)

“Just as Ann Miller should have been much more concerned than she was when she first heard the words
arsenic poisoning
,” Morgan says, wondering how killers can think they are going to get away with their crimes when their culpability is so obvious.

Again, Morgan lived by the adage that “the truth makes sense, and if it doesn’t make sense, it isn’t the truth.” Morgan hadn’t come up with this belief by accident—it was part experience, part history. He read about a medieval mathematician named Occam who preached that in the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the simplest solution is almost always the right solution. Morgan took this theory to heart.

Morgan took over in the interrogation room that night with Daniel Lang, not because his detectives weren’t doing a good job, but because he knew the truth, and he wanted Daniel Lang to
know
that he knew the truth. It was something he needed to do, for himself, and for Shirley Lang, and even in some small way that he did not completely understand, for Eric.

“ ‘You tell me the truth, you can go home. You don’t tell me the truth, we’re going to have a big problem, Daniel,’ ” Morgan recalls saying to Lang. “I decided, ‘Daniel Lang, you’re not leaving my police station unless it’s in handcuffs. ’ ”

They went around and around in circles, covering the same ground over and over again. Nothing made sense. Morgan knew this was his only chance, that if he waited even one day, Daniel Lang would get an attorney and the conversation would be over, just as it had been over with Ann Miller after that very first night at the Raleigh Police Station, just as it had been over with Derril Willard the day they searched his home.

Finally, after about two hours, Morgan got in Lang’s face. “I said, ‘Daniel, I think you killed your wife and I want you to tell me something that will prove me wrong,’ ” Morgan says through gritted teeth, imitating his tone that night.

And then the unthinkable happened. The circling became real instead of just metaphorical. Both men stood up and started rounding the table like wild animals readying for attack. Lang was a slight man, about 160 pounds, and Morgan weighed about a hundred pounds more than that. But Lang was obviously not deterred by Morgan’s formidable size. Suddenly he pounced, jumping across the table in an attempt to head-butt Morgan, but like a cartoon character, he literally bounced off Morgan’s large frame and fell backward. Morgan recalls it being almost comical. After a brief struggle between the two men, detectives waiting in the hallway ran into the room and subdued Lang. He was charged with assaulting an officer and placed under a one million dollar bond. It wasn’t a murder charge, but it was enough to keep him behind bars until they could make a case. Lang’s head butt turned out to be just what investigators needed to buy some time.

The next day Morgan sent one of his detectives, Mary Blalock, to the North Carolina Medical Examiner’s Office in Chapel Hill to observe Shirley Lang’s autopsy. Meanwhile, he was looking for anything short of a confession that would make a murder charge stick to Daniel Lang. He didn’t have to wait long.

Blalock called Morgan from the medical examiner’s office and told him that a note had been found stuffed down in Shirley Lang’s pants, and it appeared to have been written by her. Morgan could hear Blalock smoothing out the crumpled paper in the background as she prepared to read the note.

“The note said: ‘My husband and a man is trying to kill me, help.’ It was signed ‘Shirley Lang.’ That’s something that doesn’t happen every day,” Morgan says. “I’ve often wondered how many murder victims know the person responsible for their death. Eric, despite all of his good qualities and his high level of intelligence, was simply unable to comprehend
who
was trying to kill him.”

The note raised one troubling issue, however. Who was “the man” Shirley referred to in the note? Morgan said his squad spent days trying to find the other person who might have helped Daniel Lang kill his wife.

What they uncovered was that Daniel Lang, who was himself a nurse at the mental hospital, had been intimate with several patients, including a woman who had killed her children with a hammer and then set their house on fire. There was a dirty old mattress in the woods near where Shirley Lang’s body had been found where the patient said she and Daniel Lang had had sex. Morgan describes the woman as rather “manly,” and he always wondered if Shirley—in what must have been her traumatic dying moments—had mistaken the patient for a man; but for all of their countless hours of investigation, detectives could never determine for certain if there was anyone else involved in the murder.

The note was still enough, however, to convince Daniel Lang’s attorney, Johnny Gaskins, that his client should plead guilty. Lang was also charged with a first-degree sex offense against another mentally ill patient. The woman in that case had decapitated her three-year-old son and put his body in a closet in Fayetteville, North Carolina. It had been decided that she was not competent to stand trial, and so she’d been sent to Dorothea Dix Hospital, where she subsequently met Daniel Lang and became sexually involved with him.

While nothing surprised Morgan after so many years as a cop, he still couldn’t understand how people could be so cruel. Truth be told, he didn’t want to understand. If he ever did, it would mean he had something in common with them. The day he started understanding this was the day he needed to hang up his white fedora.

Ultimately, Daniel Lang was allowed to plead guilty to second-degree murder because he had prostate cancer and was not expected to live long (Lang died in prison on December 27, 2006). Morgan didn’t care what sentence Lang got, as long as he was never on the street again. But Ann Miller
was
still on the street, and Morgan was convinced now more than ever that she was a dangerous person. In Shirley Lang, Morgan saw Eric Miller, and every other innocent victim. He was reminded that he still had a lot of work to do.

“Their lives had all been ended by someone who thought they had the right to kill, to take that life before it was fully realized,” says Morgan angrily.

Prior to Eric Miller’s death, the last recorded arsenic homicide in North Carolina was that of a turkey farmer named Dorian Lanier on November 19, 1997. He died in a rural part of North Carolina at Duplin County Hospital in Kenansville. The poisoning was discovered when Dr. Corbett Quinn, the Duplin County medical examiner, performed an autopsy and found that Lanier had toxic levels of arsenic in his body. After a prolonged investigation, Lanier’s wife, forty-five-year-old Pamela Sanders Williams Lanier, was charged with her husband’s murder and arrested on January 5, 1999. It was also discovered that she had had a previous husband who had died some years earlier under suspicious circumstances, although she was never charged in connection with his death. He’d been a strong swimmer, yet had drowned in only three feet of water while checking his crab pots along the coast.

Because real life truly
is
stranger than fiction, it turned out that one of Dorian Lanier’s sisters just happened to live directly across the street from Ann Miller’s rental home in Wilmington. Another one of Lanier’s sisters contacted the Millers to offer her sympathy, saying that her family understood their ordeal and the suffering their son had gone through.

Lanier’s sister, who lived across farm Ann, joked about getting a petition up to throw her out of the neighborhood. But besides sympathy, she had one important thing she could offer the case: she agreed to keep tabs on Ann and tell the Millers anything they wanted to know about her comings and goings.

“Fate brought these two families together who had endured so much of the same heartaches. The main consistency—their [Ann and Pamela’s] ability to do these horrible things, to sit and watch somebody die a slow lingering death at their own hands,” Morgan says.

In many ways Morgan thought Dorian Lanier’s death was even more horrific than Eric Miller’s, because Lanier never sought medical help until the end. He was a good old boy, a farmer, and was skeptical about doctors. It pained Morgan to find out that close to the end of Dorian’s life, Pamela Lanier had merely put a plastic tarp on her husband’s bed because he could not control his vomiting or his bowels. At least as an educated man, a scientist, Eric had realized that he needed
some
medical intervention.

In Dorian Lanier’s case, prosecutors had finally been able to convict Pamela Lanier. She received a life sentence in prison, something the Millers could only dream about at this point for Ann.

Morgan felt like he was growing old waiting for the North Carolina Supreme Court to make a decision. The case was practically at a standstill, hinging on the legal issue of attorney-client privilege. And Morgan was painfully aware that this one small piece of evidence from Rick Gammon still might or might not crack the case wide open.

“I can’t arrest her. It became a situation of almost total frustration for me. I’ve never been very good at waiting,” Morgan admits, as if that might not already be obvious.

While he waited, Morgan began to notice that his colleagues, the guys he had gone through the police academy with, the guys he had patrolled the streets of Raleigh with for years, were starting to retire. In North Carolina cops must put in thirty years before they can retire with full benefits. With stored sick leave and vacation time, Morgan knew he had enough to follow his peers on their journey to a simpler life, but the truth was, he wasn’t ready to go. He had unfinished business. It had always been like this. Every time Morgan even
considered
retirement, there was always a case that pulled him back.

“The commitment I made was that Ann Miller was going to be locked up prior to me ever retiring,” Morgan says firmly.

August 22, 2003, was the one Friday that Morgan had a family commitment. It was the one Friday morning that he would not be able to check the computer the minute the North Carolina Supreme Court handed down its most recent decisions. But the commitment was too important to miss. One of his twin daughters, Laura, was starting her freshman year at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, and Daddy needed to help her move into her dorm room.
Surely,
Morgan thought,
the Supreme Court wouldn’t pick the last Friday in August to make this momentous decision in the Ann Miller case?
But of course, just like the traffic jam that always happens when you’re late for an important meeting, it turned out to be the day.

While he was on the road to Greenville, Morgan got a call from Verus Miller on his cell phone telling him that a decision had been made. In his heart Morgan felt like
he
was the one who should have been calling Verus, not the other way around. But life gets in the way of work, and work gets in the way of life. Quickly, Morgan cast off his guilt about not sitting diligently by his computer that morning and he started calling around to get more details about the decision. He found out that the court had handed down a very narrow order compelling Rick Gammon to tell Superior Court judge Donald Stephens what he knew in chambers. Stephens would then decide what part of the information, if any, investigators were entitled to. Under the court’s ruling, anything that Derril Willard told Gammon about a third party (presumably Ann Miller) that did not incriminate him (Willard) was fair game and did not violate attorney-client privilege.

“It’s almost exclusive to this particular case. Nobody’s rights were ever going to be disturbed, interrupted, lessened by what was written in that decision,” Morgan explains. “They didn’t like the idea of monkeying with attorney-client privilege any more than the law professors did, but they did the right thing for Eric Miller.”

As soon as the decision came down, the media went on a feeding frenzy, calling Morgan on his cell phone all day long. But he didn’t let it stop him with his most important task of the day—helping his daughter.

“I’d be moving another footlocker, or box of college-girl stuff, from the parking lot to the dorm, and it would ring again.” Morgan chuckles. He had a pat response for every caller. “ ‘We feel very encouraged by this. We’re still seeking truth and justice for Eric Miller. We’ve come this far and we keep going further and further, it can’t stop now.’ ”

Morgan knew this was an important legal step toward his goal of seeing Ann Miller locked up forever. For the first time in a long while he felt like he might even live to see it happen.

He also knew Judge Stephens well enough to be sure that he wouldn’t order Gammon to turn this information over unless he thought it might solve the case. Morgan still didn’t know what Gammon had, but he figured it had to be important. In his wildest dreams he could not have imagined just how important it would turn out to be.

Judge Stephens reviewed Gammon’s affidavit and ordered him to hand over the information to investigators on October 2, 2003. As predicted, Rick Gammon appealed and once again the case came to a grinding halt while Morgan and the Miller family waited for the North Carolina Supreme Court to hear the appeal.

The euphoria of the original Supreme Court decision was starting to wear off when Morgan found out that Ann Miller’s family was “circling the wagons.” First he learned that Dan and Nancy Brier had moved to Wilmington in the spring of 2003 to be closer to Ann and Clare. Then, on November 29, 2003, the Reverend Raymond Shepley married Ann Miller and Paul Kontz at the North Wilmington Community Church, of which they were members. Paul Kontz was the man investigators had seen with Ann during their intense surveillance of her. He was the electrician, the Christian rock musician, the man whose house she had spent eight hours holed up in while Morgan parked his big butt in an oleander bush.

Morgan also found out that Ann had bought a home in Wilmington where she, Clare, Paul, and Paul’s daughter were living. How had she managed to afford a nice brick house in a quiet suburban neighborhood? Morgan learned that she had been hired by another pharmaceutical company called PPD. It amazed him that while the highest court in the state was determining Ann’s fate, she was dusting off her résumé, investing in real estate, and taking another trip down the aisle. But then again there was one thing Morgan knew for sure about Ann—she was good at denial.
Very good
.