by Amanda Lamb
Being the streetwise investigator that he was, Morgan just happened to have Gammon’s number programmed into his cell phone, and he allowed Willard to use it to call Gammon. He was investing in the good-karma bank on the off chance that this gesture might at some point soften Willard’s resolve. Morgan left Willard alone in the car so that he could have privacy. Ironically, it was this same privacy that Morgan would seek to breach years later in order to solve the case.
Morgan paced, as quickly as a large man can pace, around the perimeter of the car, ruing his misfortune and wishing he could hear what Willard was saying to Gammon behind the tinted windows of the Crown Vic. Why had all of the players in this case suddenly retained the best lawyers money could buy in Raleigh, North Carolina? He could come to only one conclusion: they had something to hide.
Morgan knew that innocent people also hired lawyers when pressured by police. But Willard had clearly hired Gammon prior to any police pressure. Investigators would later learn that Willard had retained Gammon on December 8, 2000, just six days after Eric Miller’s death. Morgan felt certain Willard had hired a lawyer because he was guilty of something; but at this point Morgan didn’t know if Willard was guilty of doing something, or simply knowing something.
When Willard was done with his phone call, he told Morgan he and his family would leave the house at Gammon’s advice while investigators conducted their search. Morgan was disappointed, but expected nothing less of a man represented by Rick Gammon. Gammon was a first-class attorney, someone who played by the rules, and knew how to advise his clients in tough situations. From what Morgan could tell, it didn’t get any tougher than this.
COMING CLEAN
At the very same time, across town, another uncomfortable visit was taking place. Detectives had been instructed to go to the home Ann had shared with Eric in West Raleigh and speak to Verus and Doris Miller about the case. The Millers were staying with Ann as part of their January visit to celebrate Clare’s first birthday.
It was decided that the time had come for the police to fill the family in on their suspicions about Ann and her possible involvement in Eric’s death. Up until this time, Morgan says, the Millers had become indignant at any insinuation that Ann might be responsible for murdering their son. They defended her as strongly as they cherished Eric’s memory. It was as if blaming Ann would make Eric a fool for loving her, and that was another pain the family could not bear to face.
But Captain Donald Overman decided it had to be done. He assigned detectives Debbie Regentin and Randy Miller, the same investigators who’d conducted the first interview with Ann, to go to the house and speak with Eric’s parents about what police had learned so far. Regentin and Miller were the lead investigators on the case at this point, and Regentin later gave Morgan a play-by-play of what had happened at the Miller house while Morgan was on the other side of town executing the search warrant at Willard’s house.
When the detectives went to the house, Doris Miller, Eric’s mother, opened the door to them, but Ann, Regentin told Morgan, ran upstairs and locked herself in the bathroom with her cell phone, saying she had to call her attorney. Despite requests from Doris to come out of the bathroom, Ann vehemently refused.
Morgan was not surprised by Ann’s reaction to a visit from the Raleigh police. This behavior would become a pattern with Ann when things got hard. She would go into hiding and try to wish her problems away with the “magical thinking” that allowed her to deny that she had done anything wrong. But as far as Morgan was concerned, the pressure Ann was feeling from him and the rest of the investigators would only intensify.
Investigators told Doris and Verus Miller about their suspicions—that Ann was a serial adulterer and might have had something to do with their son’s death. It was an important conversation. It had to be done right. It was time to bring the Millers into the loop, to make them aware of what was going on, and at the same time solicit their help with the investigation. It was something Morgan would continue to do for years after their son’s death as he forged a close bond with the family.
“I think the Millers were just aghast,” Morgan said about revealing the news that Ann might be involved in Eric’s death.
After several weeks of defending their daughter-in-law, it was like someone had sucked all of the oxygen out of the room and left them gasping for air. They quickly packed their belongings, left the home their dead son once shared with his now-suspect wife, and went to a hotel. Ann’s parents, Dan and Nancy Brier, who lived in Raleigh, arrived to take care of Clare since Ann was still locked in the bathroom.
Ann Miller’s carefully constructed fantasy world was beginning to crumble, and Morgan was smack-dab in the middle of the destruction with a pickax. But it would take years to make that one big crack that would completely open and divide that stone of fantasy.
THE BROKEN MAN
As Ann Miller’s world unraveled in her bathroom, Morgan was concentrating on Derril Willard.
The thirty-seven-year-old scientist was the one person among his immediate and extended family who had actually “made it.” He was the only member of his immediate family to go to college, and certainly, the only one who became a scientist, of all professions.
“He was a source of great pride to his family,” says Morgan.
Derril Willard was the one who escaped his small town in the foothills of the Ozarks with his sharp mind and talent, a talent that might have been buried in other people born under the same circumstances. He was the one who followed his dreams and made everyone he knew back home honored to know him.
Willard was born in 1963 in Mountain Home, Arkansas, into a strict Baptist family. He was the brightest kid anyone knew, graduating first in his class of 160 students at Batesville High School. Unlike his classmates, Willard put school, not partying or girls, first. It paid off. His good grades landed him where no one in his family had ever dared to venture before—college.
“He was the big success of his family,” says Morgan.
Willard studied zoology and graduated with a master’s degree from the University of Arkansas in 1988. He met his future wife, Yvette Babb, in college. They married and moved to Philadelphia, where Willard was offered a job with a pharmaceutical company. In 1990, he began working for Glaxo Wellcome in Research Triangle Park, just outside Raleigh. It was here that he met the woman who would ultimately destroy his life—Ann Miller.
THE SEARCH
In all his years of doing police work, Morgan had never gotten used to searching people’s homes. Even though he believed the need to do it far outweighed the invasion of someone’s personal space, it was still uncomfortable for him.
“There’s just something strange about tearing through somebody else’s life,” Morgan admits.
They were looking for anything that might connect Ann and Willard to each other, or to Eric’s death. Primarily, they searched Willard’s home office, taking out bags of paperwork and two computers. They also searched the guest room, where it was clear that Willard had been staying. Morgan would later find out that Willard had voluntarily moved out of the master bedroom after Yvette became aware of his affair with Ann.
In addition, they searched for books or magazines that might relate to arsenic or poisoning. They found nothing, but for Morgan, the primary goal of the operation had been to meet and confront Willard face-to-face. He’d achieved that, even though there wasn’t much to show for the encounter. Morgan’s secondary goal was to get in and out as fast as they could without leaving the house trashed.
Investigators found three guns on a closet shelf in Willard’s home. They were stored properly, out of reach of the child. At the time Morgan didn’t think much about it; after all, they were looking for arsenic, not weapons. By law, if the warrant did not state that the police were looking for guns, and the guns had nothing to do with the crime, they could not be confiscated. But in hindsight, Morgan wishes he had paid more attention to this seemingly minor detail.
“The guns being th
ere, [I] didn’t really think too much about it,” Morgan says. “Like I say, in retrospect I wish I had. Maybe I could have found a way—I should have just seized them.”
GOOD-BYE
Derril Willard called Morgan and asked if the search was completed. Morgan told him they were almost done and he and his family could return in fifteen or twenty minutes. When Willard pulled into the garage, Morgan met him with a list of the items they had seized and explained the search in detail. Willard thanked Morgan and his officers for being so professional and not tearing the house apart.
“The pain and the angst and the fear in Derril Willard’s eyes had increased,” Morgan says. “He looked very much like a man on the edge to me.”
For some reason Morgan could not push the memory of that meeting with Willard in the garage out of his mind. It was an unfinished garage with exposed beams in the ceiling and a small stairwell leading into the house. All Morgan could think about as he pulled away from the home that day was how easy it would be to hang yourself from a beam and jump off those steps.
“I don’t know what it was, but there was something about the look in Derril Willard’s eyes and something about standing there and meeting him in his garage,” Morgan said with a thousand miles of unmistakable regret in his voice.
THE GOOD DOCTOR
On his way back to the police station Morgan replayed his last image of Derril Willard in his head over and over again, trying to see something that might give him more insight into Willard’s subsequent behavior. He couldn’t shake it. So he did what he always did in these situations. He called his colleague and good friend, police psychologist Michael Teague.
Even though Morgan refers to a lot of what Teague says as “psychobabble,” he respects Teague’s opinion and had sought it out frequently over the years. He especially sought it out in complicated cases like this one, where the events had taken a severe psychological and emotional toll on all of the people involved.
“I said, ‘Teague, I’m not going to be a bit surprised if we find this guy dead in his garage tomorrow.’ ” Morgan recalls his chilling words. “Teague said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘He looks like he’s beat, he looks like he’s got no way out. He’s scared and there’s just nothing he can do.’ ”
This conversation would be one that both Morgan and Teague would remember for years to come. More than a hypothesis, it was a premonition, one that Morgan now wishes he had taken to heart.
“There’s no doubt in my mind [that Willard has] been used as a pawn by this woman, Ann Miller,” Morgan went on to say to Teague. “I said, ‘There’s really nothing we can do at this point.’ ”
CHANGE OF HEART
Morgan checked his voice mail on the way back to the police station. To his surprise, one of Ann Miller’s colleagues, whom he had interviewed earlier in the investigation, had left him a message. It was Liping Wang. She sounded upset and told him she needed to speak with him “desperately,” that it was “important.”
Detective Debbie Regentin was just back from speaking with the Millers at Ann and Eric’s West Raleigh home. She had been filling Morgan in on Ann’s behavior, how she had locked herself in the bathroom. When Morgan told her about the message from Wang, they both decided not to wait, but instead to race out to Wang’s house while her desire to talk was still urgent. They realized she just might have key information that could push the case another step forward. Any step at this point would help. If they waited, Wang might change her mind.
On the way to Wang’s house, Morgan recalled his first interview with her; how he’d felt that she was holding back, keeping something from him. He trusted his gut, and now it looked like his gut might be right. This time Wang told Morgan a very different story from the one she’d told at their first meeting.
“She thought something definitely untoward was going on between Ann and Derril,” Morgan said. “She told us she and a lot of other people at Glaxo were scared to death because they realized that something was going on.”
Wang told Morgan they were scared because of the implications of the affair combined with Eric’s death. If the pair had killed one person, could they kill again? She told Morgan about an ongoing fight that Willard and Ann seemed to be having in the lab since Eric’s death. She said that when they were around other people, they did not talk to each other. They glared in each other’s direction; their icy stares were an indication that something had gone terribly wrong between them. But when everyone else left the work space, Wang told Morgan that she and her colleagues could hear the pair arguing. The exact words were not audible, but Wang told Morgan the fighting went on for hours. Two of the fights had occurred recently—one on January 17, the other on January 19.
Wang also told the detectives that Ann Miller was not the hard worker she had described her as being during their first interview. She told Morgan Ann needed a lot of hand-holding and prodding to get her work done.
“ ‘She spends more of her day trying to look good for the men she works for and works with than she does actually doing any work,’ ” Morgan says Wang told him.
Wang also told Morgan she had not been lying the first time, but merely “leaving things out.” That since Eric’s death everyone in the lab had been concerned about their own safety around the pair whom they thought might actually be murderers. For that reason, Morgan said, they were reticent to share what they knew.
Morgan called Ann’s behavior at work after Eric’s death her “postoffense behavior.” He said it’s a way investigators categorize what people who were close to the victim do after the murder. The behavior may not give them a clue as to who is responsible for the death, but at the very least it can shed some light on who the victim was and what they meant to a particular person.
After a murder, Morgan said, family members experience a range of divergent emotions. Some people become catatonic, others mad, others are humbly able to find peace in sharing positive memories of their loved one. But the one thing they rarely do is act completely normal, which was exactly what Ann Miller did. Nothing.
Morgan often wondered why Ann Miller didn’t try to play the I’m-looking-for-my-husband’s-killer card. Like O. J. Simpson, or Scott Peterson. He wondered why she didn’t bang on the police-station door and demand answers.
“She knows that her husband was killed, that his life was taken, that she and her daughter have been deprived of him for the rest of their lives and she never calls any detective, never wants any information,” Morgan says with unparalleled incredulousness in his voice.
“They want to know why aren’t you working harder, why aren’t more detectives working on this case,” Morgan says, recalling what victims’ families had said to him over the years. “We never got that from Ann Miller, we got nothing from her, and when you get nothing it makes you wonder why.”
In hindsight, Morgan always felt this lack of responsiveness on Ann’s part was due to a sense of entitlement, that magical thinking again, a feeling that she was smarter than the police, that she wasn’t going to waste her precious time and breath dealing with them, that she was above their little murder investigation. It was a sign, a telling sign, to Morgan that investigators were on the right track.
There was one anecdote Wang told Morgan that he couldn’t shake. It embodied everything he was learning about Ann and then some. Soon after Eric’s death, Wang told Morgan and Regentin, Ann’s colleagues, herself included, had taken Ann to a local restaurant for lunch. Wang told Morgan that Ann, who seemed to be in good spirits, ordered a large hamburger and onion rings, which she ate voraciously. This had struck Wang as unusual behavior for a grieving widow. It struck Morgan the same way. He imagined Ann chowing down on a juicy burger and crispy onion rings, delicately dabbing the ketchup on the corners of her mouth with her napkin without a care in the world.
“It confirmed a lot of suspicions I had about Ann Miller,” says Morgan.
THE DAY AFTER
As Morgan suspected, the information from the search warrant detailing
what was taken from Willard’s house was on the front page of the News and Observer Monday morning, January 22, 2001.
In addition to listing what was taken from the home, the article talked about how Eric Miller might have received arsenic in his beer at the bowling alley, and highlighted the apparent romantic relationship between Ann Miller and Derril Willard. Not surprisingly, the enterprising reporter, Oren Dorell (who now works for USA Today), had connected the dots and pointed the finger as far as he could in the direction of Willard’s potential role in Eric’s death without actually coming out and saying it.
In Morgan’s mind this article would ultimately be the crushing blow, the final straw on Willard’s already heavy back. Willard could no longer hide from the fact that he was involved with Ann, and that he might have played a role in Eric’s murder. It was on page 1A for the world to see. Derril Willard had run out of time.
FOUR
Conscience is the inner voice that warns us someone may be looking.
— H . L . MENCKEN
Morgan learned about Willard’s death in the worst possible way: on the television news. He remembered Jeff Fluck running into his office and excitedly flipping on the five-o’clock local news program. A veteran reporter by the name of Ed Crump, who had worked for the local ABC affiliate for many years, was standing in front of Willard’s house doing a live shot, and before Morgan even heard one word come out of his mouth, he knew, he knew that his gut had been right about Derril Willard’s state of mind.
“It appeared that strange nagging feeling I had had the day before was probably well founded, because it was quickly reported that Derril Willard had been found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot [wound] in his garage,” said Morgan, his voice full of regret and remorse.