by Amanda Lamb
The blinds were closed, the doors shut, and no one could be seen moving about the house. Morgan remembers sitting in that “damn bush” for eight hours or more. It was hot, uncomfortable, and endlessly boring. Very few people could sit in a scratchy bush on a warm spring day and not be uncomfortable, but for a man of Morgan’s stature, there was really no way to make it better. He was also getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. The only thing he had for entertainment was his handheld police radio. He listened to his fellow detectives banter back and forth about the stakeout as they speculated what might be taking place inside the house.
“When detectives get really bored, their minds usually go like most other people’s minds: they think dirty thoughts, and this case was no exception,” says Morgan with a chuckle.
Morgan was relieved when Ann finally left the house because it meant he could finally get out of the bush. She left alone, just in time to act as if she’d come from work, and went back to her sister’s house to pick up Clare.
To Morgan, Ann’s impassive face showed no signs of what had taken place inside. A marathon sex session? Tearful confessions about killing her husband? Who knew. But either way Morgan was convinced that Paul Kontz was heading down a very dangerous path, right into the clutches of a woman who would no doubt control him as she had all the others.
The stakeout was over. They had learned everything they were going to learn by watching Ann. Captain Don Overman summoned the team back to Raleigh. It was time to lay the entire case on the table, and see who was brave enough to take it on.
POINTING FINGERS
When Morgan returned from Wilmington, he saw that things had gotten worse between the medical examiner, Dr. Thomas Clark, and the prosecutor, Tom Ford.
“This was something that, in my experience, was unheard of,” Morgan says of the ongoing feud.
There was even talk from Ford of filing formal charges against Clark for hindering the investigation says Morgan. Although it ultimately never happened, this kind of talk was something completely unorthodox in Morgan’s experience with criminal investigations.
“I had known this case was in trouble for months, but I didn’t realize how much trouble it was in until that point,” he says, shaking his head.
Amid the heat of this battle, Eric Miller’s family was eager to find out what was going on with the investigation on the heels of the autopsy results. In the summer of 2001, they were invited to come once again to Raleigh and be briefed on the status of the case. Eric’s parents, Doris and Verus Miller, came from Indiana, and his sisters, Pam Baltzell of Kentucky, and Leeann Magee of Pennsylvania, also attended the meeting.
Morgan was invited to come to the meeting because of his recent surveillance of Ann, and to share whatever information they found, or as it turned out, had not found.
“I told them, ‘She’s not looking over her shoulder, she’s not worried about anything, she’s not worried about someone coming to kill her and her daughter, guess why? Because she killed her husband,’ ” Morgan says, matter-of -factly recalling his words to them.
As expected, Ford told the family he had just received the paperwork from investigators and had not had time to review it. This was a no-win situation for investigators, because this time Ford was right. Morgan had been the one who had pushed to get the case file copied and sent to Ford, but it was so voluminous there was no way Ford could possibly have pored through and digested the whole thing by this time.
Ford and Morgan could not have been more different. The prosecutor was a slight, studious-looking man with wire-framed glasses and long blond hair brushed back behind his ears. In the seventies he might have been the laid-back hippie type, but now he was the lawyer sitting across the table and holding all of the power in his hands.
What happened next turned Morgan’s stomach in a way that he will never forget.
“Tom Ford took a very adversarial stance with the Millers. It was almost like he treated the Millers as a suspect’s family as opposed to the victim’s family. He said, ‘We’ve got to do a little further examination of Eric’s life, nobody’s this clean and good,’ ” Morgan says, recalling the gist of Ford’s words. “And to this day I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody say anything quite so outrageous. It was just a reprehensible [approach] for anybody to take face-to-face with the victim’s family.”
After the autopsy report was released, the Millers had expected that something was going to happen soon. They’d hoped that something would be the arrest of the person responsible for Eric’s murder. They did not expect to get beaten up like this.
Morgan recalls Ford also lamenting about how much work it was going to take to get the case ready for trial, that it would take him away from his family, and that it would not be worth it for a case he wasn’t sure he could win.
“I was almost dumfounded by what he says at that particular moment,” Morgan seethes, not hiding his disgust. “I tried to pretend that I didn’t hear it. I think that most of the law enforcement people all around the table all want to pretend that we didn’t hear it because it just sounded awful. I mean, there’s no way to defend that. It was like saying your son, your brother, isn’t worth a year of my time unless I’ve got an ironclad case that I know can’t lose.”
Thinking back on his own career, Morgan can’t even count the number of birthdays, holidays, and other family events that took place without him because he was working at the police department. And during those times he never knew if what he was doing would contribute to the ultimate success of a case, or if it would be a wasted effort that meant another Thanksgiving dinner missed, another child’s birthday party unattended, another Christmas Eve without Dad for no good reason.
All of the detectives, including Morgan, had worked furiously on the Miller case, and they had all given up precious moments in their personal lives to pursue justice for Eric.
“It was a slap in the face to all of us. And it was a slap directly in the face of the Millers,” Morgan says bitterly. “I saw a look come over Verus Miller’s face that I will never forget. I mean it was just pure rage.”
From what he’d learned about Eric’s father, Verus Miller, Morgan knew he was a man who’d worked hard all of his life to provide for his family, even if it meant missing things that he really wanted to do. He was not a man who would easily understand an unwillingness to work as hard as possible, especially not by someone in a position of authority, someone like a prosecutor on his son’s homicide case.
The Millers would remember Ford’s comments for years to come, often bringing them up to Morgan as a turning point in their view of the case. After hearing the prosecutor’s perspective, they realized that there might be no justice for their son after all. It was then that Morgan decided he would spend every ounce of energy he had, every waking hour, pursuing justice for Eric if that’s what it took to solve this case and restore this family’s dignity.
“It was a tough, tough situation. And it was even going to get tougher before we were done,” Morgan says.
MOVING UP, MOVING OUT
For cops, moving up in rank often means moving out of the unit where they have been working and trying something new. The Raleigh Police Department was no exception to how the law enforcement career ladder functions.
For years Morgan had refused to throw his hat into the ring for a promotion to lieutenant. Truth was, he never even tried, never even filed the paperwork. He liked his job in homicide. He didn’t want to move on, not yet, maybe never.
“There has to be an advocate, there has to be somebody looking out for the dead. They can’t speak for themselves and their families often are ill equipped and unable to speak effectively for them,” Morgan says.
But this time around the pressure was too great. The interim chief, John Knox, had made it clear to Morgan that he was leaving homicide whether he became a lieutenant or not. Morgan said Knox told him he was a natural leader and he needed him to lead the police department in another area. So like a good soldier, in the f
all of 2001, Morgan put in his paperwork for the promotion, anticipating leaving homicide.
Around the same time, in September of 2001, the city of Raleigh hired a new police chief, a woman named Jane Perlov from New York City. The shock around the department was twofold: not only was she a woman, but like the mocking salsa ads, the word around the station when they heard the news was, New York City?
The first time Morgan met Perlov he was on the phone with a reporter from the Goldsboro News Argus talking about the Beth-Ellen Vinson murder, another one of his cold-case obsessions. He covered the receiver just long enough to say a polite hello and then continued with his call. After all, he was a busy man, one who couldn’t be bothered with chitchat and pleasantries when there were murders to be solved. This brief meeting would foreshadow the relationship between Morgan and his boss for the next several years.
“Turned out that Perlov and I would have a stormy, to say the least, relationship,” Morgan says with a certain fondness as he recalls their professional sparring.
Soon after Perlov arrived the 9/11 terrorist attacks happened on the World Trade Center in New York. Morgan remembers it as an incredibly unsettled time for everyone in law enforcement, especially their new leader, who had many friends directly affected by the violence. For a time, albeit a short time, Ann Miller did not take center stage in anyone’s life. She had been kicked to the curb by a much greater threat: terrorism.
“There was a terrorist under every rock and a new threat every time you turned around,” Morgan says with exhaustion in his tone.
But Morgan had his first real run-in with Perlov as soon as the aftershocks of 9/11 subsided in Raleigh. It was the first of many times when the two strong personalities would bump heads.
Oren Dorell, the Raleigh News and Observer reporter, had written an article that week quoting Morgan about creating a cold-case squad on the police force. It detailed how Morgan thought it would be beneficial to dedicate focused resources specifically to unsolved murders. Morgan claims the quotes were actually taken from an interview he’d done with the reporter earlier in the year, way before Perlov took over. Nonetheless, as soon as the article appeared, Morgan was summoned to Perlov’s office.
“I think her intention was to chew my ass . . . she thought I was undercutting her,” Morgan says like a kid who’s been sent to the principal’s office for the first time.
Morgan told Perlov that he couldn’t possibly inform her about every case he was working on, or about every interview he did with a reporter. He also told her that he thought they did need a cold-case unit. At the time they had seventeen unsolved homicides dating back to the unsolved shooting death of hotel clerk Clyde Sykes in 1981 (eventually solved with DNA in June 2007). Not a lot compared to most cities, but these cases were not getting attention as long as new ones kept coming in. Morgan felt that every victim deserved his attention.
According to Morgan, “She viewed it as a personal attack; this would set the tone for my interaction with her over the next three or four years.”
Despite his rough start with the new chief, however, Morgan was still somehow miraculously promoted to lieutenant and permitted to stay in homicide. This was the break he had been waiting for, not just in his career, but in the Ann Miller case. All homicide cases now fell under his jurisdiction. Now he finally had the power to push the Miller investigation in the direction he saw fit. His first order of business was to get the keys to the filing cabinet so that he could read every last piece of paper that had anything to do with the case.
“Nobody was going to exclude me anymore,” Morgan says triumphantly.
SIX
A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.
—FRANK CAPRA
Even though he finally had the keys to the kingdom— unfettered access to all of the files in the Eric Miller case— it would still be weeks before Chris Morgan had a chance to read them. With his new promotion came new duties. Around this time another murder case fell into his lap. A ninety-one-year-old woman named Beulah Dickerson had been murdered in her home, beaten to death in an apparent robbery attempt. It irked Morgan to no end that someone could take the life of an elderly woman and just simply walk away, free as a bird, unscathed, unconcerned. Frankly, it irked him that anyone could take anyone’s life, but when it came to older people, he had a soft spot in his heart the size of Texas.
For now the Miller case would have to take a backseat. There were too many pressing issues at hand. The Dickerson case was weighing heavily on his mind and his shoulders. Morgan believed that a young woman from the neighborhood had killed Dickerson with a tire iron that had been discovered in a bush near the home. The motive—plain old robbery. The clincher was that the tire iron they’d found was specific to a very small number of General Motors cars made between 1978 and 1979, and the neighbor, they discovered, drove one of those models. Unfortunately, this alone was not enough to charge the young woman, and Morgan’s gut feelings about the case were definitely not enough to get the D.A. to okay an arrest.
“The most frustrating cases that I’ve ever had to deal with were always cases where you knew who was responsible, but you weren’t able to put a case together sufficiently to eliminate reasonable doubt,” says Morgan, traveling a road in his mind he’d gone down many times before.
Even with efforts to keep everything separate, Morgan began to see parallels between Beulah Dickerson and Eric Miller. They were two very different people from two very different worlds, but they had one very important thing in common: they left a trail of loved ones in their wake who needed answers. And at this point Morgan felt he was one of the few people in a position to provide those answers if he only worked hard enough.
“I kept thinking about how tragic it was, when tragic things like this happen to good, decent people. With every victim there is always a secondary group of victims—their family, their friends, their loved ones,” Morgan explains. “Eric Miller was the paradigm case . . . a man who had had a profound impact on everybody he had touched through his life.”
In November of 2001, the police department held its official grandiose promotion ceremony at the BTI Center, the city’s performing-arts facility. Morgan was finally going to be crowned a lieutenant after years of resisting the change. Dickerson’s family attended to show their gratitude for the hard work Morgan had done on the case, despite not being able to make an arrest. It was almost too much pressure for Morgan to take—looking out into the audience, seeing the desperate family, a family not unlike the Millers, yearning for truth and justice. It made his promotion bittersweet; it made him wonder if he really deserved it when he could not solve the murders that constantly screamed out for his attention. It made him doubt, a feeling that had always been Morgan’s biggest enemy.
In the weeks following his promotion, Morgan was overwhelmed with his new role as a lieutenant in the Homicide Division. For the first time in his career, he had a paper trail to follow and keep up with. Morgan was a talker, not a note taker; he was a shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy, not a pencil pusher. Day after day he sat at his desk thinking, This is not why I became a cop, to do this, to sit here while everyone else is out on the street preventing and solving crimes.
“The fears that I had always had about being a lieutenant were instantly realized. I was deluged with paperwork and with jobs that had absolutely nothing to do with putting bad people in jail,” Morgan says with resignation.
At the same time Morgan was also overwhelmed by the need to solve the Dickerson case. Detectives finally brought in the former neighbor for questioning, but no matter how hard they tried, they could not get her to say anything that connected her to the murder. In the end they had to let her go. To this day Dickerson’s case remains a cold case, and one that Morgan could not, and will not, ever let go of. Like every unsolved case, Morgan carries it with him wherever he goes. No matter how many cases he solves, the unsolved ones always stay with him.
“It was one of the great failures—that I s
till have to wrestle with every night—in my career. We should have broken her. We should have gotten her to confess. We tried our best. I tried my best, and we failed,” Morgan says with resignation.
COMING TO THE TABLE
Shortly after the promotion ceremony in the late fall of 2001, another meeting was set up between the Miller family, investigators, and the Wake County District Attorney’s Office. Morgan approached this meeting with a sense of “foreboding,” considering how poorly the last meeting with the Millers had gone. Since that time little had changed and Morgan could see no good coming out of a sit-down with a grieving family who wanted and needed answers that the investigative team was still in no position to provide.
According to Morgan, Tom Ford and Jeff Fluck were still convinced that the autopsy results were wrong, that there was another toxin involved that had yet to be discovered. Without the clear scientific evidence to back this theory up, Morgan says Ford was unwilling to pursue the case any further, end of story. Again, Ford made it clear to the Millers that he wasn’t willing to pursue the case at that point, as if he hadn’t been clear enough in their earlier meeting. Morgan’s heart sank.
“I felt like I was in a really bad position. I couldn’t really give these people a whole lot of hope. I couldn’t really do a whole lot for them in any direction because it just appeared that we had a big mess,” he recalls.
For Morgan, it was the moment he realized he had no choice but to work as hard as he could on the Millers’ behalf to find some way to take this case to court despite Ford’s reluctance. He knew that in the absence of some kind of concrete justice, the Miller family would live the rest of their lives tormented by the knowledge that someone had gotten away with Eric’s murder. It was a thought that he couldn’t live with.
Eric’s family “had the look of people who were experiencing their own sort of death on the inside,” Morgan says.