by Amanda Lamb
He knew that nothing he did would bring Eric Miller back, and that there was no such thing as “closure” despite the term being grossly overused by the media to describe what victims’ families were rewarded with when someone was arrested and subsequently convicted in their loved one’s murder.
“These cases are never ever closed for the victim’s family, ” Morgan says angrily. “They’re closed for the police department, they’re closed for the court system, they’re closed for the prosecutors. The lawyers say they’re closed, but there’s never any closure from the death of your brother, your sister, your wife, your husband, your daughter, your son, you know, your best friend. You never get closure in a case where somebody is murdered. It will always be a gaping, festering wound that will haunt you forever.”
Truth was, Morgan couldn’t offer them or anyone “closure. ” He might be able to offer them justice, that he just might be able to do, but closure—that would be far too arrogant for Morgan or anyone other than God to take on.
But in order to find justice for the Millers, Morgan knew he would have to do more than simply find a way to get this case into a courtroom; he had to find a new captain to steer the ship. His gut told him that Tom Ford wasn’t that person, and would never be that person. But like so many other things that Morgan wanted, this decision wasn’t up to him. It was up to the Wake County district attorney, Colon Willoughby.
AN OPENING
Morgan was well aware that shortly before Derril Willard’s suicide, he had consulted with the well-known defense attorney and former cop Rick Gammon. Morgan remembered Willard sitting inside the Crown Vic, having a confidential conversation with Gammon on Morgan’s cell phone. God how Morgan wished he could have been a fly on the wall during that conversation; or for that matter, any conversation between Willard and Gammon.
It struck Morgan that Gammon was probably one of the only people besides Ann Miller who had concrete information about Eric Miller’s murder. He asked Ford whether there was any way to get at that information.
“The more I pondered the question, the more important it had become to me to find out, what did Rick Gammon know?”
Morgan recalls that Ford became almost hysterical at the mere mention of this idea, arguing that there was no way to get at that information, no matter how vital it might be to the case, because it breached the sanctity of attorney-client privilege. Morgan remembers Ford telling him it would violate all of the ethical tenets of Gammon’s legal responsibilities to his client. Not being a lawyer, Morgan could only concede that this was another instance where Ford, as much as Morgan hated to admit it, was probably right.
But like everything else Morgan ever felt in his gut, the idea was not going to dissipate easily. He filed it in the back of his mind for the moment, but in his heart he refused to let go of it. In some ways he probably knew then that it could ultimately be the key to unraveling what had become a very complex murder mystery.
TURNING POINT
Like so many other things in Morgan’s career as a homicide detective, one case often helped him gain a footing in another.
It was a Friday night, October 26, 2001. Christopher Holden was teaching his young wife, Sharon Holden, how to load and unload a handgun he had purchased for self-defense. Somehow, the gun went off, shooting Christopher in the chest and killing him. It was up to Morgan’s team to decide whether or not the shooting had been an accident or a homicide.
Investigators interviewed Sharon Holden at length. Morgan remembers her as being consistent with her story and appropriately remorseful. Over and over again they asked her whether she meant to kill her husband, or if it was an accident. Every time the answer was the same— that it was an accident. While Morgan was a skeptical man by nature, he also considered himself pretty perceptive about people and their motives. He believed the woman and her story.
“One paradigm that I’ve always lived by is that the truth makes sense. As far as life, and particularly as it relates to police work,” Morgan says bluntly, “if it doesn’t make sense, it’s not the truth.”
In this case it made sense that Sharon Holden had accidentally shot and killed her husband. Interviews with people she knew showed that she appeared to be very much in love with her husband and that there was no evidence of infidelity on either spouse’s part.
Morgan called Wake County deputy district attorney Howard Cummings to discuss the case. Cummings was someone Morgan had grown to trust and respect in the D.A.’s office. In short, Morgan felt that Cummings was a person he believed would ultimately do the right thing, not necessarily the politically correct thing, or the popular thing. These traits made the prosecutor a kindred spirit, someone Morgan admired, someone he could speak with honestly about the facts of a case without fear of being criticized.
And unlike so many other attorneys Morgan had dealt with over the years, Cummings had one important quality that stood out—he listened to what you had to say without interrupting.
After hearing Morgan’s theory about Christopher Holden’s shooting, Cummings agreed that there were no grounds to prosecute Sharon Holden. With the D.A.’s approval, the shooting would be ruled an accident by the Raleigh Police Department. This should have been the end of the case. There was nothing more to say or do. The woman was free and clear. But there was still one more unexpected installment, which had very little to do with this case but very much to do with the Miller case. It would blow the Miller case wide open.
THE PHONE CALL
It’s amazing how in police work, as in life, one moment can change everything. A man finds a love note and discovers his wife is having an affair. A routine gossip session at work gets you fired. One too many drinks before getting behind the wheel of your car lands you in jail.
In the Miller homicide there was something missing that could turn the dead-end case into a slam dunk. For Morgan it was as simple as a phone call. It was a routine night, a routine phone call that put something totally out of the ordinary into Morgan’s head, something that had never been done. Afterward, instead of sailing into the wind, all of a sudden he was smoothly gliding along with the current again and could see the horizon for the first time in months.
It was close to Thanksgiving in 2001. Morgan was working the night shift. He got a message to page defense attorney Rick Gammon. Morgan scratched his head and tried to recall whether the police department had any open cases that Gammon was involved in at the moment. He couldn’t come up with any. Defense attorneys didn’t usually call the police, even when they had a preexisting relationship as Gammon and Morgan did, from their days as beat cops. If they did call, it was usually during business hours, not at night. Morgan was intrigued. He paged Gammon, and Gammon called him back almost immediately.
Gammon told Morgan that he represented the owner of the restaurant where Sharon Holden worked. Gammon went on to describe Sharon as a dedicated employee, and said that his client was concerned about her well-being.
Morgan assured Gammon that the police were ruling the shooting accidental. He told him that Deputy D.A. Howard Cummings was on board with the decision, and that there was nothing more to be done with the case. Morgan recalled that even after this was said, Gammon hung on the line and asked a few more questions. Morgan saw an opening; not a big opening, but an opening.
“I said, ‘Rick, while I’ve got you on the phone, let me ask you something, buddy: when are you going to tell us what Derril Willard told you?’ ” Morgan says, knowing full well that even their old police ties wouldn’t be enough to make Gammon elaborate. “And to this day I think that was probably one of the true bellwether moments of the Eric Miller investigation because Rick Gammon told me at that point and time, he said, ‘I’m never going to be able to tell anybody what I know unless a judge orders me to.’ And I stood there for a moment with my mouth open.”
Morgan realized that whether he’d done it intentionally or not, Gammon had given him the answer. He’d let him know in a read-between-the-lines manner that in fact
there was a way to get the information, that it was not impossible, as Tom Ford had led him to believe.
The wheels started turning. Morgan knew that Gammon was bound by the ethics of his profession and the guiding principles of attorney-client privilege, but he still pressed on. He wanted to learn as much as he could from Gammon before he hung up the phone. Morgan wanted to know how to kick-start the legal process of getting to the information that Gammon had.
“He knew something that I needed to know, we all needed to know, and I kept feeling very strongly that maybe we’d turned the corner,” Morgan says with enthusiasm. “Maybe this case wasn’t in the shambles that I once thought it was.”
So Morgan did what any good investigator would do. He looked for common ground, an area where Gammon might feel comfortable enough to throw him a bone for old times’ sake. He harkened back to their days as beat cops walking the streets of downtown Raleigh together. He reminded Gammon of an old furniture store with a dirty plate-glass window. Depending upon where you stood, you had only a partial view of the inside of the store. The dirty window obstructed certain areas inside the building. He told Gammon to imagine that they were looking through that window again, checking to see if anything untoward was going on in the back of the closed store.
“ ‘Rick, can you tell me, are you seeing more than what I’m seeing?’ And he said, ‘Oh yeah, I’m seeing a whole lot more than what you’re seeing,’ ” Morgan says emphatically. “And at that point I knew, I knew how the Eric Miller case would fall down. I knew how it would come together and how we would eventually end up solving it. Rick Gammon was the key.”
FINDING THE HOOK
Morgan is very clear to point out that Gammon never crossed the line in that phone call, that he is a stand-up guy who takes his professional ethics and responsibilities very seriously. They had known each other for thirty years, but not even their friendship was enough to make Gammon violate his sacred oath to protect his client.
“I think he [Rick] found a way to straddle the line, staying on the side of doing what was right and what was ethical under his professional guidelines, but he was still able to convey to me what needed to be done,” Morgan theorizes. After hanging up, Morgan sat and stared at the dusty pale blue wall in his office for a very long time, trying to sort out the whole conversation.
Morgan didn’t know then, and doesn’t know to this day, if Gammon planned the opportunity for Morgan to ask him about Willard, or if it all just happened by coincidence. But in the end it really didn’t matter. Morgan had caught the pass; now he just needed to figure out how to get to the end zone.
Morgan knew by Tom Ford’s exaggerated reaction to the simple mention of the idea in the meeting with the Millers that it could not be raised again in the same context. He needed something more, a heavy-duty hook to hang the big picture on. He needed something to convince a judge that Gammon had critical information that would solve the case, and that it was in the best interest of justice for him to permit Gammon to violate attorney-client privilege this one time.
The answer was actually at Morgan’s fingertips, locked away in the stacks of files in a large metal filing cabinet that he still hadn’t read completely. His gut had been gnawing at him to read the files, read the files. But with everything going on—the promotion, the other murders—he just hadn’t had time. Morgan didn’t even have time for his family, another pressing issue that was gnawing at him.
But this Christmas, the Christmas of 2001, would be different. For a change, Morgan spent it with his family, and mulled over the Miller case, carefully deciding which road to go down next. What he needed was something to give his idea “traction.”
Traction came at an unlikely time, during a winter storm that completely shut down the city of Raleigh in January 2002. Like most southern cities, Raleigh has very little snow-removal equipment, leaving vehicles paralyzed by the weather (as was law enforcement), but the wheels in Morgan’s head were spinning furiously as he took the opportunity to read the complete Miller file.
Morgan cloistered himself in his office and read every document, every medical record, every page, and every note that was in the Miller file. It was in this reviewing of the facts that he had heard so many times, in this tedious exercise in redundancy, that he found what he was looking for, the little kernel of truth that could have been buried had he not bothered to look a little closer. Thank God for snow, he thought, thank God.
“While I did have my gut feelings, there was a whole lot more to this case than my gut telling me Ann Miller was guilty, was a murderer,” states Morgan, recalling just how much evidence investigators had already amassed against the woman.
One of the things Morgan homed in on was multiple interviews with people who’d known Derril Willard. They repeatedly told investigators that Willard’s attitude, his outlook on life, had changed drastically in the fall of 2000. This coincided with the time when it appeared Willard began his affair with Ann Miller.
According to the files, Ann’s and Willard’s colleague, Randy Bledsoe (who was also one of the men from the bowling outing where Eric had first gotten sick), told investigators that Willard had appeared almost clinically depressed during the summer of 2000. Like most of his coworkers, Willard was apparently very concerned about the merger taking place at their company. But Bledsoe said Willard took it harder than the rest of them, that he appeared to be almost suicidal, a situation that deeply concerned his colleagues. But in the early fall of 2000, Bledsoe told investigators, Willard’s behavior changed dramatically, that he was practically a different person once Ann started paying attention to him.
Bledsoe told police that Ann’s flirtation with Willard lifted him out of his funk. His coworkers were so relieved by Willard’s turnaround that they overlooked Ann’s obvious pursuit of this vulnerable man.
This made it very clear to Morgan, “crystal clear,” that Ann had used Willard as an instrument, a tool, someone she could manipulate in order to accomplish her goal— Eric’s death. Ann was the aggressor and Willard was her pawn. Willard’s colleagues told investigators that the whole thing was very out of character for Willard, who tended to be quiet and reserved.
When Morgan started to match the time line of Ann’s relationship with Willard along with the autopsy information showing that Eric had been poisoned throughout the summer of 2000, he realized that Willard could not have taken part in it since he hadn’t been in the picture at that time. To Morgan, this meant that all the little “preview” doses of arsenic Dr. Clark said Eric had received over the summer had to have come from Ann.
Medical records contained in the file also piqued Morgan’s interest. They contained Eric’s clinical diagnosis during each hospitalization. Most of it was Greek to Morgan, but after poring over it time and time again, he got the point. In Morgan’s mind what it boiled down to was that although Willard may have tried to kill Eric Miller that night at the bowling alley, the dose he gave him was insufficient to do so, it was not a deadly dose. The dose of arsenic that killed Eric Miller came later, a dose given to him by Ann alone.
“On that night it was like the stars lined up. Eric’s parents were out of the house, he was there alone with Ann and baby Clare,” Morgan elaborates. “Ann prepared food for Eric that night. It was the only time that had happened since he had been released from the hospital. It was just too much to be a coincidence. Ann Miller gave Eric that last dose of arsenic the night before he went back into the hospital for the final time.”
This scenario fell right in line, as far as Morgan was concerned, with Willard’s suicide note disclaiming any responsibility in taking Eric’s life. He may have tried to kill Eric at one time, but he failed. Derril Willard didn’t kill Eric Miller. He was being honest in his last words to his family and friends.
“The big thing was [that] Ann was alive, Derril was dead. And I still maintain that Ann is at least morally liable for Derril’s death. When Ann intervened in his life, she essentially signed his death warrant,” Morgan s
tates.
There was another part of the file that recounted interviews detectives had done with Willard’s wife, Yvette, on three separate occasions. This ended up to be the gem that Morgan had been looking for, a clue that had not been discarded, but had been lost beneath a pile of other information. Yvette had told investigators that her husband had not only admitted the affair to her, he’d also specifically told her that he’d had no part in Eric’s death. She’d told them she knew that her husband had gone to see Rick Gammon for legal advice. Yvette said that Gammon told her husband he could be charged with attempted murder.
“I kept saying, ‘This is it! Why hasn’t anybody told me about this before?’ ” Morgan says incredulously. “I suddenly realized I had found my in.”
Morgan’s hunch had been right all along. Willard had poisoned Eric Miller that night at the bowling alley. But since Miller didn’t die that night, Gammon had told his client he could be charged with attempted murder, not murder, or conspiracy to commit murder. To Morgan this distinction made perfect sense. Willard was a gentle soul who had been led so far down the garden path by his lust for Ann Miller that he attempted to kill the man he perceived to be his romantic rival. But then he quit. It was up to Ann to finish the job.
Morgan knew Gammon was a straight shooter, a good lawyer, one of the best, and that he wouldn’t have given Willard bad advice. Gammon didn’t tell Willard he could be facing a murder charge because Willard must have told him the whole truth, that Ann had given Eric the deadly dose. This meant that Rick Gammon knew Ann was guilty. But it was a secret still locked up tightly in the vault of attorney-client privilege.
THE WIDOW
Morgan is a tough guy with a soft heart. The next step in this case was something he dreaded with a passion, but he knew he had to do it. Before this thing went any further, he needed to talk to Yvette Willard face-to-face, not just read about what she had said to other investigators. He needed to see her for himself, see her expressions, judge her truthfulness, hear the words attempted murder roll off her tongue. So he called upon all of his manly courage and made the call.