As they went around the table Doris Miller and Leeann emotionally reiterated their strong concerns about a plea deal. But when it came time for Verus Miller to voice his opinion, Morgan recalls the tone of the discussion changed. In Morgan’s mind, Verus truly understood Ann’s potential to deceive, and just how dangerous that trait might be on a witness stand. Verus restated Morgan’s point of view in more powerful terms. He, too, thought going to trial was risky business.
Morgan says Verus’s priority, like his, was keeping Clare out of Ann’s hands as long as possible—since the arrest, Clare had been staying with Ann’s sister, Danielle Wilson, and her family in Wilmington, North Carolina— and that a plea deal was a good and definite way to achieve this goal. Clearly, Verus Miller wasn’t happy about this turn of events, but he could live with it.
Morgan said Pam echoed her father’s sentiments, as did Doug Faucette, and investigator Bill Dowdy. Morgan said Becky Holt, on the other hand, looked like someone had punched her in the stomach. He knew that she had put a lot of work into the case and had expected it to go to trial. Morgan understood her anguish personally.
Willoughby thanked everyone for their input and said he would work on a possible offer in the event the defense approached him about a deal. The range he said would be somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-five years on a second-degree murder charge and conspiracy to commit murder. The best part of the whole thing in Morgan’s mind was that if Ann decided to take the plea offer, she would have to stand up in open court and admit that she had killed her husband. It was something Morgan had waited for for almost five years.
CLOSURE FOR STEPHANIE
Very little stayed the same in Morgan’s life, but every October there was one constant, the North Carolina State Fair. From corn dogs, to upside-down rides, to corny games on the midway, Morgan loved it all—the smells, the sounds, the people, and of course, the extra cash. For years Morgan had worked as a security officer during the weeklong event. Eventually, he had graduated into a position of managing the security detail of off-duty police officers.
It was late October 2005. Unlike past years Morgan was not worried about what he was missing at the police station, or whether he would be pulled from his moonlighting job to attend to more pressing needs at work. He wasn’t a police officer anymore. It was a new day. Morgan was free to wallow in the smells of onion rings mingling with the screams from the Tilt-A-Whirl. But even in the middle of this redneck paradise, he still couldn’t let the Miller case go. He knew that the case would now most likely end with a plea deal, a decision he second-guessed daily.
“I think that riding around in late October under the blue beautiful North Carolina sky, it all started to come down on me in a way. It was a time, you know, when I had a lot of doubts. Had we done the right thing?” Morgan says.
It was at this moment, under the same clear blue sky at the North Carolina State Fairgrounds, Morgan learned that another chapter in his cold-case file was nearing closure. He got a call from a police friend who told him that an arrest had been made in the Stephanie Bennett murder. It was something he had never expected, yet always hoped for.
Detective Ken Copeland had been assigned to the Bennett case when Morgan left. Copeland had been working security at the state fair that week, but had been a no-show on several shifts because, he told Morgan, he had to deal with some issues at work. This was not uncommon for officers, and it hadn’t raised a red flag with Morgan, until now.
The arrest was a bittersweet victory for Morgan. On the one hand, he had failed to solve the case despite what he thought was his best effort. On the other, he cared deeply for Stephanie’s family, and as with the Millers, he had become hopelessly entwined and invested in achieving justice for them in this case. The bitter part was really that no one had kept him in the loop despite the more than two years that he had worked on the case. Like a common civilian, he learned most of the details of the arrest from the television news.
Ultimately, Drew Planten, a chemist with the North Carolina Department of Agriculture, had been linked to Stephanie’s murder through DNA. There was already talk that Planten might be a serial killer who had left victims in other parts of the country.
Reporters called to congratulate Morgan. This was uncomfortable because he had to make it clear that he had played no part in solving the case. Instead, he gave the detectives, Ken Copeland and Jackie Taylor, their proper due, saying they had picked up the ball and run with it where he, Morgan, had left off. They solved the case, not him.
Carmon Bennett also called Morgan and thanked him for everything he had done. Morgan reiterated that he had nothing to do with solving the case, but Carmon’s thanks were less about the arrest and more about the shoulder Morgan had offered to a grieving father over the years.
Copeland called Morgan to say that he was sorry for not keeping him in the loop, but that he had been told to keep everything close to the vest because of the sensitive and high-profile nature of the case. He thanked Morgan for allowing him to work on the case. Morgan, in turn, said he wished Ken had been on the case from the beginning, because if he had, it might have been solved years earlier.
At the end of all of the conversations it was still just Morgan alone with his tortured soul, tooling around the North Carolina State Fairgrounds on a golf cart under a perfect blue sky. For the first time in a long while he had a feeling of contentment, a feeling that all the arduous steps he had taken in his career had finally led to this day. Maybe things hadn’t turned out exactly the way he had planned, but either way there would be justice for Stephanie Bennett and Eric Miller.
THE FINAL CHAPTER
When Becky Holt called a few days later to say that Ann Miller would take the plea and spend a minimum of twenty-five years in prison, it was anticlimactic. Morgan had known from the day he met with the prosecution team in the grand-jury room that Ann Miller would never go to trial. It was a conclusion he had made peace with. Holt told him Ann would formally enter her plea and be sentenced at a hearing in November.
At the same time Morgan learned that his son, Gregory, would be returning from Iraq. It was almost as if the stars were aligning for the first time in his crazy life. His boy was coming home and Ann Miller was going away.
Holt and Willoughby asked Morgan to prepare a summary of the case to read in open court at Ann’s sentencing. Unlike his grand-jury testimony, Morgan knew this speech would not change the outcome of anything that happened in the courtroom. It was merely an opportunity for him to look Ann straight in the eye and tell her he knew
exactly
what she’d done and how she’d done it. He had known for years, and now the world was going to know as well.
“I remember walking into court that morning certainly with mixed emotions,” Morgan says, still wishing in some ways that the journey to that day had ended in a trial instead of a plea.
As always, it was Ann’s appearance that got to Morgan. Her hair was longer this time, straight and shiny, full of blond highlights. When she leaned forward, it obscured her delicate features. She was dressed like a stylish librarian in a black sweater that hugged her petite frame and a wool pleated schoolgirl skirt. As she entered the courtroom she looked down at her feet bashfully, more like a woman on her way to the gallows than on her way to make a deal. But at one point she turned back to look over her shoulder at her family with a sheepish and inappropriate grin, and that’s when Morgan saw the real Ann Miller. For a moment he’d almost been taken in by her demure appearance.
Almost.
“She didn’t look like she could hurt a flea, let alone poison her husband to death with arsenic,” says Morgan.
“Mrs. Kontz, did you and Derril Willard conspire to commit the first-degree murder of Eric Miller by means of poison?” Judge Stephens asked Ann, who was now standing in between her attorneys, Wade Smith and Joe Cheshire, at the defense table in front of the bench.
“Yes, sir,” she said barely above a whisper.
“Ma’am?” he asked again, as if reading Morgan’s mind. Morgan wanted to make sure everyone in the courtroom heard her answer.
“Yes, sir,” she said a little bit louder.
“Mrs. Kontz, did you with malice, unlawfully, and intentionally participate in causing the death of Eric Miller?” asked the judge.
“Yes, sir,” Ann said.
And then it was Morgan’s turn to get on the stand and read the findings-of-fact that he had prepared for this day. In his crisp white shirt and smart yellow tie, he felt like he was on top of the world, but his real feeling of power came when he looked over at Ann and realized she was looking down. She couldn’t listen to what he was saying. Morgan assumed it was shame, not guilt, that made his presentation so uncomfortable for her to hear.
The following is the script that Morgan read from in open court that day:
At 2:50 AM, December 2, 2000, Dr. Eric Dewayne Miller died at Rex Hospital in Raleigh. Dr. Miller had been taken to Rex Hospital in the early morning hours of December 1, 2000, for severe gastro-intestinal symptoms, (nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea). In the late afternoon of December 1, 2000, doctors treating Dr. Miller were informed of test results, from an earlier hospitalization at UNC Medical Center, which clearly indicated that Dr. Eric Miller was a victim of arsenic poisoning. Officials at Rex Hospital subsequently notified the Raleigh Police Department and Officer Ford was sent to the hospital. At the time of Dr. Miller’s death a homicide investigation was begun by the Raleigh Police Department.
Eric Dewayne Miller was a 30-year-old post doctoral research scientist employed at the Lineberger Cancer Research Center at UNC Hospitals. Eric was married to Ann Brier Miller, also 30 years old, and employed as a research scientist at the former Glaxo Wellcome Company (now GlaxoSmithKline) at Research Triangle Park. The Millers had been married in 1993. They met while they were both students at Purdue University. They had one child, Clare, born in January of 2000. They were residing in a single family residence at 804 Shady Maple Lane in Raleigh.
On November 16, 2000, Eric Miller went to the Rex Hospital emergency room, suffering from extreme nausea, cramping in the abdominal region, vomiting and diarrhea. The onset of his symptoms began after a bowling outing with three of his wife Ann’s co-workers at the AMF Bowling Center on Delta Lake Drive in Raleigh. He had gone home and his symptoms continued to worsen to a point where his wife accompanied him to the hospital in the early morning hours of November 16.
During his hospitalization the cause of his symptoms remained a mystery to the doctors attending him. It was suspected that he had some sort of viral infection, but this could never be confirmed. His symptoms continued to worsen and he was transferred to UNC Hospitals from Rex after several days. Shortly before his transfer to UNC Hospitals, a heavy metals test was run on his blood, as one of the doctors treating him thought his symptoms might be as a result of exposure to arsenic. This testing was done at an out-of-state lab and the results were not communicated to the Rex lab until after Dr. Miller had been transferred to UNC Hospitals. The doctors at Rex did contact UNC Hospitals with the results, but a miscommunication resulted in the arsenic levels being understood to be urine levels, rather than blood levels. The reported levels in a urine specimen would not have been a cause for great concern. While at UNC Hospitals, Eric gradually began to improve. On November 24, 2000, he was discharged from UNC Hospitals and sent home to recuperate. Prior to his discharge, a urine sample was obtained from Dr. Miller and sent to an out of state laboratory for heavy metals analysis.
In the following week Eric showed slow but steady signs of improvement according to his parents and doctors. Dr. Drossman at UNC Hospitals, who saw Eric Miller on the morning of November 29, 2000, described his condition as “much improved” from what he had observed of Eric’s condition during his hospitalization. Dr. Furman, Eric’s family physician, saw Eric on the morning of November 30, 2000, for a follow-up appointment, at which time Eric reported he was feeling better and his appetite was improving. Dr. Furman noted that Eric had no complaints of gastro-intestinal symptoms at the time of this examination. By the afternoon of Thursday, November 30, he felt well enough to go out for a short walk around the cul-de-sac in front of his house with his father; this was his first walk outside in over two weeks. That evening at approximately 5:45 PM, Eric’s parents, who had been helping care for him, went out for dinner, leaving Eric at home with his wife Ann and their infant daughter Clare. Ann Miller later reported, in her only statement to Raleigh Police detectives, that she and Eric ate together that night and had a chicken and rice dish that some friends from their church had brought over. Eric’s parents returned to the home at approximately 7:15 that evening.
Later that night, at about 11:00 PM, Eric began having terrible cramps, nausea, diarrhea and vomiting. He was again taken to the Rex Hospital emergency room around 4:00 A.M. on Friday, December 1, 2000. His condition continued to worsen during the day and into the evening. During the afternoon, doctors at Rex treating Eric were contacted by doctors at UNC Hospitals and informed that the results of testing done on the urine sample taken from Eric on his discharge from UNC Hospitals on November 24, 2000, had been received. The lab results showed Eric had extremely high levels of arsenic in his system at the time the sample was obtained.
Doctors at Rex Hospital subsequently called the police and a very brief statement was taken from Eric, who was in a very poor physical condition. He was asked if he knew anyone who might be responsible for poisoning him, or if he had taken poison himself. He told the officer who interviewed him that he had not taken any poison and did not know of anyone who might have given him poison.