by Amanda Lamb
“I thought there was a strong chance that Yvette Willard probably associated me with her husband’s suicide, probably blamed me for her husband’s suicide,” Morgan says. “Undaunted, I summoned all the charm and guile that I had and put in a call to Yvette Willard.”
She agreed to meet with Morgan the following Friday night after work. Dr. Michael Teague accompanied Morgan on the visit. Teague was there to observe, but he was also there for moral support. Morgan felt a little like he was treading on a dead man’s grave, but at the same time he knew it was something that had to be done.
Morgan figured that from Yvette’s point of view, her dead husband’s reputation hung in the balance, and nothing, including the arrest of Ann Miller, could bring that reputation back. In fact, the investigation would only continue to further tarnish Willard’s memory, something Morgan knew the mother of a young child did not want. He felt sorry for her. In his mind she was also one of Ann’s victims. From the little that he knew about Yvette Willard, Morgan honestly believed the woman had tried her best to be a good wife, had tried to keep her marriage and her family together, but Ann’s magnetic hold on Derril Willard was just too strong for Yvette to fight.
“I told her what I felt to be the truth. I felt like Derril was essentially a victim in this case, too,” Morgan says, recalling how he tried to find common ground with the grieving widow.
And then Morgan asked Yvette Willard the question detectives had asked her before. He asked her if Rick Gammon had really told her that her husband could be charged with attempted murder. She told him emphatically “Yes.”
Yvette Willard was the traction Morgan had been looking for.
THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
Who to call? Morgan knew he couldn’t call Tom Ford. He would get shut down faster than a bar at closing time. The more he thought about it, the clearer it became. There was certainly one person he was convinced would do the right thing: Deputy District Attorney Howard Cummings.
Cummings always spoke quietly, methodically, often without a trace of emotion in his voice or a hint of expression on his face. It was obvious that he chose his words cautiously. Cummings was a balding man with glasses and a dry wit, sometimes so dry that Morgan couldn’t tell when he was being serious or making a joke. Yet beneath his lack of affectation, it had always been clear to Morgan that Cummings paid attention to every word you said. When he listened, he really listened and thoughtfully processed what he heard.
“Howard [Cummings] never appeared to be overenthusiastic. He says, ‘Well I need to think about this and the possible implications,’ and from there Howard apparently took the bull by the horns and went directly to Colon,” Morgan says with admiration.
Morgan knew that District Attorney Colon Willoughby was the only one who could authorize taking the case to the next level. Willoughby was the pilot, while Cummings was his very able and steady copilot.
Willoughby’s boyish good looks belied his fiftysomething years. He spoke with a measured southern drawl, walked with an easy gait, and frequently flashed a mischievous smile. He was known as a bright and honest prosecutor whose conservative approach often reined in investigators looking for more immediate results.
Morgan was making one of his periodic checks on Ann Miller in Wilmington, tailing her to be exact, when he got the call that changed everything. It was rotten duty, but someone had to do it. Morgan had decided that even though he was now officially in charge of the unit, he still had to get his hands dirty. He was knee-high in muck when Willoughby called.
“I’ll always remember the exact words of our esteemed district attorney. He said, ‘Now, is this information that we’ve just uncovered or is this just something we just realized is there?’ ” Morgan imitates the D.A.’s words with an exaggerated southern drawl.
Willoughby was a smart man who would have made a great poker player. He rarely ever got ruffled. It was almost impossible to know what he was really thinking. But Morgan knew him well enough to realize that he wouldn’t be calling if he wasn’t very interested in pursuing this new angle.
Morgan told Willoughby that the information from Yvette Willard had been there all along, but that he had just put two and two together recently after reading the complete case file. He told Willoughby that he felt that this information was the key to getting a judge to compel Gammon to talk because it showed that Willard and Gammon had spoken about something substantial, something that might just solve the case. On the other end of his cell phone, there was silence as Willoughby listened intently to what Morgan had to say.
COURT OF PUBLIC OPINION
The more Morgan interacted with Eric Miller’s family, the more desperate he became to help them. In his heart he felt that Gammon was the key to pushing the case forward, and now, with Yvette Willard’s corroboration of what Gammon had said to her husband, Morgan felt as though it had to move forward. Either the D.A. would take it to the next level or Morgan would do so himself.
“I had to give this family something to hope for. I felt like I was essentially backed into a corner. I didn’t have a whole lot of ammunition, I didn’t have a whole lot to work with,” recalls Morgan. “I decided that our next-best strategy was to try the case in the court of public opinion.”
Using his contacts in the media, Morgan knew he could get an audience for this story. Just a few simple calls would get all of the local networks scrambling their cameras out the door at his beck and call if he chose to take that route. If the state wouldn’t go after Ann Miller, he felt sure that ordinary citizens hearing about the case would go after the state.
Confidentially, Morgan told the Miller family that he intended to have a press conference and reveal the details of the case if the D.A. didn’t do something by March 1, 2002. As part of what he called “Plan B,” Morgan lined up newspaper and television reporters to be on standby in case Willoughby wouldn’t, or for some reason couldn’t, pursue this new angle. Unlike other cops who had an innate fear of the media, Morgan knew how to use reporters like they used him. It was a mutually beneficial relationship. He wasn’t above exploiting it when it needed to be exploited.
“If Colon [Willoughby] had not taken the bull by the horns, he would have ended up sometime in early March with a hell of a public relations problem,” Morgan says. “If Colon wasn’t going to do the right thing, then I was going to essentially put him in a position where he was forced to do something.”
Luckily, it didn’t come to that. Willoughby informed Morgan that he would file a petition asking the court to compel Gammon to talk. Together, Morgan and Willoughby prepared an affidavit to attach to the petition. They included all of the major details in the case, just as they had done in the affidavit to search Willard’s house. But at this point in the investigation, more than a year after the crime, they had amassed many new details that made the case both stronger and more salacious.
Some juicy details, however, were deleted from the affidavit after Willoughby objected. For example, Morgan claims that on the weekend prior to the bowling outing, Derril Willard and Ann Miller had spent a weekend holed up at a Ritz-Carlton in Chicago. Yvette Willard had confirmed this clandestine rendezvous, which Morgan saw as Ann laying the groundwork for getting Willard to poison Eric. Morgan imagined that Ann and Willard had spent the weekend in bed as she tried to convince him to poison her husband. Ann had worked him for months, but it was in that bed, in that hotel room in Chicago, that she broke him. There was no going back.
Morgan says that Willoughby felt that releasing the information about the Chicago weekend would be showing too many cards at one time. Always the stone-faced poker player, he told Morgan that they had to hold something back and Morgan agreed. Morgan was so pleased to finally have Willoughby’s support that he would have agreed to just about anything at this point.
“Colon is a hero in this case,” praises Morgan with a shit-eating grin.
WHEELS OF JUSTICE
The Miller family had returned to Raleigh for the hearing on Willoughby’s
petition. While their previous trips to Raleigh had been bittersweet, this one was tinged with a hopefulness that Morgan hadn’t seen in them for months.
The courtroom was packed with media from all over the state, along with cops, lawyers, and gawkers. Morgan greeted Rick Gammon with what he called a “manly half hug.” Gammon was a small man, with a buzz cut, a neatly trimmed mustache, and an affable personality. He exuded confidence, the kind that let you know he was comfortable with just about anything you could throw at him. He always greeted people with a sincere smile and an easy handshake. Let the games begin, Morgan thought.
The judge presiding over the hearing was Judge Donald Stephens, the chief resident Superior Court judge for Wake County. He was a law-and-order judge who steered clear of politics and had gained the respect of the entire legal community. Because he was dedicated to strictly following the law as it was written, and not as many people wanted to interpret it, no one had ever been able to predict how Stephens would rule on any case until the words came out of his mouth. He would often stop witnesses and lawyers in midsentence to ask them pointed questions or to steer them away from a tangent that was going nowhere.
The white-haired, handsome jurist peered down at the courtroom from the bench with his wire-framed glasses perched as always on the tip of his nose. When he became annoyed, Judge Stephens would take the glasses off with one hand and knead his forehead with the other hand.
“There is no better judge that I’ve had the privilege to appear in front of, or that I know of,” Morgan says, echoing the sentiments of almost everybody who knew Donald Stephens. “I’ve always found him fair. I’ve always found him truthful and I’ve always found him to be a proponent of the law and of justice.”
One of Gammon’s attorneys, a bright, young, aggressive lawyer named Joe Zeszotarski, argued that compelling Gammon to tell the court what Willard had told him would forever tarnish the meaning of attorney-client privilege in North Carolina. Zeszotarski claimed that it would thereafter make it impossible for defense attorneys to gain the trust of their clients and adequately represent them. Morgan knew this argument would be raised, and that it was in fact a good argument. He held his breath and waited to see what Judge Stephens would do with it.
Stephens paused, as he often did, appearing to be in deep thought about what he had just heard. He looked up at the ceiling as if the answer could be hanging there from a low beam where he might just pluck it off. You could almost see his mind working on a counterargument to challenge the young attorney. He asked Zeszotarski whether, if someone had been convicted and sentenced to death and Gammon had information that could prove that person was really innocent, it would be prudent to hand the information over.
“Judge Stephens gave him that sort of halfway grin, halfway smile, and said: ‘Well, is that right?’ ” Morgan recalls.
It was over, for now at least. Stephens ordered Gammon to tell him everything he knew in the privacy of his own chambers, or in camera, to use the legal term. Morgan had no doubt that Gammon had something important to share, and that somehow, Judge Donald Stephens would find a legal way to get that information to investigators.
SEVEN
The impossible is often the untried.
—JIM GOODWIN
“We left that hearing in the Wake County Courthouse that day, myself and the Miller family, with a sense that things were finally on track,” Morgan says. “I don’t think any of us realized at that point and time just how slow the wheels of justice sometimes turn.”
It was clear that Rick Gammon was going to appeal the judge’s order mandating him to reveal what he knew about the Miller case. And on March 14, 2002, following proper legal protocol, he did just that. Word on the street was that the case would skip the Court of Appeals and go straight to the North Carolina Supreme Court, but no one knew for sure because this was such a unique case. It was a test of the attorney-client privilege that had the capacity to affect many other cases in the future. Given its gravity, most people close to the case felt it was a legal question which deserved to be heard by the highest court in the state.
In the meantime Morgan was nervous. He had made so many promises to the Millers, to the community, and to himself. If this didn’t work, he wasn’t sure there was anyplace else for him to turn. He would officially be at a dead end in this investigation, and the thought kept him awake at night.
“It was like I had written a very large check and wasn’t sure I was ever going to be able to get the funds in the bank to cover it by the time it had made it to the bank,” Morgan recalls.
But Morgan just kept hoping that the funds would be there. He prayed that a trip to the North Carolina Supreme Court would mean a big payoff for the Eric Miller case—a payoff in the form of the arrest of Ann Miller on murder charges.
As everyone waited for some kind of resolution to the legal wrangling, the media weighed in on the question of attorney-client privilege. Every night Morgan watched self-proclaimed experts on the evening news arguing that vacating the attorney-client privilege would be the worst thing that could happen in this case—that it would set a legal precedent that would have a permanently chilling effect on the attorney-client relationship. But while the pundits sided with the defense, Morgan observed the general public siding with the state’s position, that solving a murder trumped the attorney-client privilege of a dead man. Yvette Willard herself had weighed in on the debate, saying that she wanted Gammon to speak, that as the executor of Derril Willard’s estate, she gave him permission to do so. But under the law, her permission was still not enough for Gammon to vacate his oath not to share his confidential conversations with his client.
The Millers became media junkies as well, scouring the Internet every day for the latest news on the case. They also, like Morgan, became increasingly disturbed by the fact that so many lawyers were deciding the outcome of the case before the courts had a chance to even consider the question.
Morgan couldn’t understand it no matter which way he looked at it. He felt strongly that what the state was asking for was a narrowly defined exception to the attorney-client privilege in a case where the client was deceased. It wasn’t as if Derril Willard was going to sue. Morgan had always felt that the end result, getting a killer off the street, was worth whatever small breach of attorney-client privilege would result from this case.
“By that time in my career, like it or not, whether it was a good thing or not, I guess I had become something of a public figure,” Morgan says with bravado. “People recognized me. I’d be standing in line at the convenience store and people that I’d never seen before, didn’t know, would come up and say, ‘I think you all are doing the right thing and I just don’t understand why they can’t make that lawyer talk.’ ”
One late night Morgan stopped by a grocery store on his way home from work to pick up a few items. While he was standing in line a woman he didn’t recognize tapped him on the shoulder and identified herself as the wife of a prominent local attorney. She told him she thought he should keep pushing, that he was going in the right direction, that he was “doing the right thing.” She hugged him as she exited the store and left Morgan thinking he must be doing something right if the folks from the other side of the battlefield were wishing him well.
THE LETTER
The Millers were frustrated that there was little they could do to influence the courts. But they felt strongly that they had the ability to influence public opinion. So Verus and Doris Miller wrote a letter to the community at large and distributed it through the media. Morgan wholeheartedly supported their decision to make this painful and emotional public statement. He had been around long enough to know that while judges were supposed to ignore public sentiment when making their decisions, they, too, were human beings with feelings, human beings who read the newspaper and watched television news.
THE LOSS OF ERIC MILLER
LIFE WITHOUT ANSWERS. LIFE WITHOUT HOPE. AND WORST OF ALL— LIFE WITHOUT OUR SON ERIC.
; PLEASE STOP FOR JUST ONE MOMENT. THOSE OF YOU WITH SONS AND DAUGHTERS, STOP AND THINK OF LIFE WITHOUT YOUR CHILD. IT IS UNBEARABLE, AND I AM SURE THAT YOU DO NOT WANT TO EXPERIENCE THAT FEELING AGAIN.
OUR FAMILY HAS BEEN PATIENT, BUT WE ARE BEGINNING TO TIRE. IT HAS BEEN A VERY LONG AND PAINFUL 16 MONTHS. IS TRUTH AND JUSTICE FOR ERIC TOO MUCH TO ASK? WE HAVE PAID THE ULTIMATE PRICE AND JOINED A CLUB IN WHICH NO ONE WANTS TO BE A MEMBER. WE ARE WEARIED OF THE LACK OF ANSWERS AND WANT SOME PEACE AND RESOLUTION. SOME OF THE FACTS IN THIS CASE ARE ALL TOO CLEAR, BUT THE PRIMARY QUESTION, THE ONE THAT CAUSES US FITFUL, RESTLESS NIGHTS IS WHY? WHY DID ERIC HAVE TO DIE? IS THE COOPERATION OF EVERYONE WHO MIGHT BE ABLE TO HELP ANSWER THIS QUESTION TOO MUCH TO ASK?
THINK OF ALL THE SONS AND DAUGHTERS WHO HAVE GIVEN THEIR LIVES SO THAT WE CAN HAVE FREEDOM IN A COUNTRY WHERE TRUTH AND JUSTICE SHOULD PREVAIL. HAVE THESE LIVES BEEN LOST FOR NOTHING?
THE QUESTION REGARDING THE PRIVILEGE OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN AN ATTORNEY AND HIS CLIENT IS NOW MAKING ITS WAY TO THE APPELLATE COURTS OF NORTH CAROLINA. IT IS ONE OF A VERY DIFFICULT NATURE, WE FULLY UNDERSTAND THIS. WHILE WE ARE NOT LAWYERS OR JUDGES, WE PRAY THAT THE JUSTICES OF THE COURT OF APPEALS AND THE SUPREME COURT WILL GIVE THE MATTER DUE CONSIDERATION, IN A TIMELY MANNER. WE KNOW THAT DERRIL WILLARD’S FAMILY WANTS ANSWERS TOO.
WE SHOULD ALL COME TOGETHER WHEN A FAMILY NEEDS HELP, HELP IN FINDING ANSWERS. AFTER ALL, WE ARE ALL HUMAN BEINGS WITH FAMILIES AND LOVED ONES. WE APPRECIATE ALL OF THE CARING AND SUPPORT THAT OUR FAMILY HAS RECEIVED FROM THE RALEIGH COMMUNITY, AND WE PRAY THAT EVERYONE WILL BE DILIGENT IN HELPING US TO FIND ANSWERS AND TO SEEK JUSTICE FOR OUR SON ERIC. HE WAS A MAN OF GREAT WORTH AND GREAT LOVE FOR EVERYONE. WE ALL NEED TO KNOW WHY HE IS NO LONGER AMONG US.