by Amanda Lamb
“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.
PRIVATE EYES WATCHING YOU
“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.
“People like Ann Miller have no remorse. It’s evident in her behavior every day. It’s evident to this day. She doesn’t feel sorry for what she did. She’s not even sorry that Eric’s dead, and I think that was one of the first tip-offs,” Morgan states definitively.
Morgan thought about cops he knew who, for example, had been involved in a completely justified suspect shooting, yet who had trouble sleeping at night for many years. He thought about what he calls “chicken-leg murders” where two people get into a confrontation fueled by alcohol at the dinn
er table, and one person ends up killing the other. In those situations, Morgan says, the killers almost always called 911 because the guilt was unbearable to their conscience. But not Ann Miller, no; she was the exception to almost every rule Morgan had learned to trust and rely upon over his years as an investigator. In her world rules didn’t seem to apply.
A MOTHER’S LOVE
Yet another red flag to Morgan was Ann’s relationship with her by then one-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Clare. One of Morgan’s detectives noticed repeatedly that while Ann was never mean or physically abusive to the child, she was also not outwardly loving or nurturing with her. This struck Morgan as particularly odd because he assumed that in a normal situation where a woman had lost her husband, she would be even more likely to cling to the child and smother her with love.
On one occasion, Ann took a stroll on the campus at the University of North Carolina in Wilmington with Paul Kontz. Detectives watching her used a video camera to document the encounter. Ann’s once mousy-brown hair was now in a chic, fully highlighted strawberry-blond pixie cut, and her loose-fitting tan pants, sneakers, and fashionable department-store tie-dyed shirt made her look as carefree as any college student walking across the campus.
Ann and Paul strolled and chatted along a tree-lined sidewalk while Clare (in a pink dress, leggings, and white sandals) played nearby. But unlike most doting first-time mothers, Ann seemed hardly to notice her seventeen-month -old daughter. In fact, she barely acknowledged the child’s presence. Ann’s smiles and laughs were reserved for Kontz, not her daughter. Kontz actually interacted with the child more than Ann did, picking Clare up in the parking lot on the way to the car, swinging her up into the air, turning her upside down until she giggled.
The most telling moment for Morgan came as Ann went to put her daughter into the backseat of the car. Instead of pulling the child to her chest to protect her tiny head as she leaned into the car, Ann held Clare several inches away from her as if she were holding a dirty diaper and then slung her into the backseat of the car like a bag of groceries.
In Morgan’s mind Ann’s apparent lack of feelings about her beautiful child once again reinforced what he thought of her—that she was a woman who was capable of loving no one but herself.
DIGGING DEEPER
“In the second week of surveillance we got a little bit of a shock,” Morgan recalls. Detectives had been sure that they were the only people following Ann Miller, but it turned out that this wasn’t the case at all.
Investigators were trading out cars and regrouping at nearby Ogden Elementary School, when they saw an NBC affiliate’s news van from Raleigh driving through the parking lot. Luckily, the news crew didn’t appear to notice the detectives. But the next day, as Morgan was pulling down Ann’s street to begin his evening stakeout, he noticed a black SUV parked in his usual, low-key spot. Unlike a real investigator, the driver of the car was chatting with someone in the backseat and occasionally picking up a pair of binoculars. Morgan knew right away they had to be members of the media. And as soon as Ann pulled into her driveway, a news crew jumped out of the SUV and approached her, microphone and camera in hand. Morgan sat back in the anonymous comfort of his undercover car and watched the circus unfold.
Ultimately, the TV news got nothing but Ann’s picture and a terse “no comment,” but still ran an exclusive story that night touting the fact they that knew where Ann Miller was now living.
“We were all getting tired of following Ann. We were getting tired of sleeping in a motel, decided that probably we needed to dig a little bit deeper, and that was the night we stole Ann’s garbage,” Morgan says.
Morgan is quick to point out that it is actually legal to search a person’s garbage; once something is put out on the street to be picked up, any expectations of privacy are forfeited.
Not unlike events in an episode of C.S.I., investigators drove quietly into Ann’s neighborhood under the cloak of darkness around 2 a.m. Prior to their arrival, they spent an hour disconnecting all of the interior lights in their rented Ford Expedition so that when they opened the door to grab the garbage no one would be able to see inside of the car. They never stopped the vehicle, just rolled by the house at a low speed, reached out, scooped up the bag, and dragged it into the back of the car. But unlike C.S.I., where the forensic team would go through the garbage in a lab with their rubber gloves, for the next few hours detectives used their bare hands to pick through dirty diapers and junk mail on the ground next to the Dumpster at the hotel.
Also unlike C.S.I., they found nothing useful in Ann’s garbage—no shredded love notes, no documents about arsenic, no photographs of her and other men. About the only interesting thing at all was a letter that had been torn in half, presumably by Ann herself, from the News and Observer reporter Oren Dorell, requesting an interview—the same reporter who had broken the story about the search of Willard’s home. Dorell had obviously discovered Ann’s new address, maybe even before the cops did. He was that good.
With the garbage just another dead end, investigators went back to simply watching Ann, hoping that she would give something away in a moment of weakness, something they might be able to use against her.
“Most of the time Ann was a very cool customer, she was very relaxed, she was very at ease with herself and her surroundings—which for somebody, once again, whose husband had just been murdered in such a horrible way, such a short time ago . . . I mean it just struck me as peculiar, ” emphasizes Morgan.
AUTOPSY GOES PUBLIC
While Morgan was watching Ann Miller in Wilmington, the official autopsy report went public in Raleigh. Morgan and Don Overman had received about a five-day advance notice of the release from Dr. Thomas Clark. But now it was out in the media, up for public consumption and public scrutiny.
Morgan had gotten up early that morning and picked up the first copy of Raleigh’s hometown newspaper, the News and Observer, which made its way slowly to the coastal town. He was eager to see how the results of the autopsy were being spun in print. At the same time he was preparing for another long day of watching Ann Miller. But he assumed this day would be different; on this day Ann Miller would finally know what investigators knew, that Eric Miller had been given several doses of arsenic before his death. Not only that, she would know that everyone else in North Carolina knew it, too.
Despite the release of the report, however, the day seemed like any other for Ann. She went to work on time, got home on time, and appeared to be acting normally. Late afternoon, around four, Morgan parked in Ann’s sister Danielle Wilson’s neighborhood to watch as Ann picked up Clare. There was one spot where he could sit and get a partial view of the Wilsons’ backyard and patio. Ann was in the habit of coming in through the back door, picking up Clare, and then walking her through the house and coming out the front door. Leaning back in his seat, fighting boredom, discomfort, and extreme fatigue, Morgan watched as Ann moved down the walk to the Wilsons’ home. Suddenly he sat up straight and grabbed the wheel, leaning closer to the windshield to get a good look. He noticed that Ann seemed to be marching toward the door in a very determined manner. Something had changed.
He saw that she was on the phone having a very animated conversation. It was the first time Morgan had seen Ann agitated. Adrenaline moved through his body like a double shot of espresso, his heart started beating faster as he leaned in to his windshield to get a closer look. Ann’s neatly pressed tan slacks and simple long-sleeved black sweater gave her a conservative, almost innocent appearance, which contrasted sharply with her wild demeanor.
“She was almost stomping around, stomping her feet. It was obvious that she was very upset about something. To this day I don’t know who she was talking to, but I’ve always felt in my own mind she was probably talking to one of her lawyers because the autopsy report made it look very, very bad for Ann,” Morgan recalls with a tinge of childlike glee in his voice.
Morgan felt like the complexity of the autopsy report had been simplifi
ed enough in the newspaper to give the impression to the general public that Ann was the most likely suspect in her husband’s murder. As Morgan points out, you didn’t need to be a scientist to understand the logic that whoever had killed Eric Miller had probably given him all, or most, of the doses of arsenic, and that person had to be someone who was close to the victim.
“She was shaking her fist while she was talking,” Morgan says. “She was enraged. She was animated. To be honest with you, that was probably the most emotion I’ve ever seen come out of Ann Miller.”
IN THE BUSH
”I like to always remember it as the day I spent in the oleander bush,” says Morgan of his last day in Wilmington.
It was the one day that Ann deviated from her routine, something any good investigator knows is an important clue. When people who usually follow a consistent pattern change it, something fishy is probably going on.
Ann dropped Clare off at the usual time at her sister’s house. Nothing out of the ordinary; she appeared to be dressed for work. But then, instead of heading out of the subdivision on her way to the office, she turned in to Paul Kontz’s driveway. From what Morgan knew about Ann Miller by this point, it was clear she didn’t have very many male friends who didn’t eventually turn into lovers. Morgan felt strongly that this was the day when investigators might find proof that Paul Kontz had graduated from friendship to Ann Miller’s bed. So Morgan posted up in the only cover he could find outside Kontz’s home—an oleander bush. And he waited, and waited, and waited.
“Is it being nosy? Yes. I plead guilty, but I needed to know,” Morgan says, half sounding like he’s trying to convince himself of this fact.