by Amanda Lamb
PAM: Yeah.
ANN: And I’m, like, what do you think Clare—what, Clare’s going to go on the Internet, she’s going to pull up newspapers and she’s going to see, and she’s going to know that this tension has existed between our families and stuff, too, that’s going to be—that’s going to be harder on her than any of it, I think, don’t you think?
PAM: I think—I don’t—it’s going to be hard on her, that’s why I asked the question, you know, um, ’cause what is she—what are we going to tell her?
ANN: You know, if she asks where her grandparents were or why, you know, why there was no communication really between the families, that in and of itself is going to be one the hardest things to talk to her about.
PAM: No, we’re—we’re working on it now, but it’s difficult to get through. [Pam speaks with obvious restraint. ]
ANN: You know.
PAM: Yeah.
ANN: It’s just—it’s just painful and it’s painful that—she is just such a jewel and I just—I just wish you guys had more faith in me and what I feel.
PAM: Well, Ann, we’d like to but it’s just hard with the stuff that we read and then when we do ask you about it—
ANN: So many other people have faith in me. So many other people have faith in me. And there are people that have faith in me that I would have expected that you would have had faith in me before—no, even, so, you know, it’s just, I struggle with that and it’s just really hard for me, so . . .
PAM: Ann, I did have faith in you and I sat in that police department and I defended you when they started asking me questions and that was back in December after Eric died. And then we kept seeing, you know, you wouldn’t go talk to them and you wouldn’t cooperate with them and then this stuff comes out— [Pam’s tone turns angry.]
ANN: Don’t think it was because I didn’t want to, it’s because I was told not to. You have to understand that, it’s not because I didn’t want to, it’s always been because I was told not to.
PAM: So after a while we kept getting this other data and we don’t get the information from you and it’s hard to keep that faith. So I just want you to understand our side of it, too.
ANN: Yeah, but there’s other people, too, that don’t have a hard time with it.
PAM: Who, your immediate family? [Pam’s growing annoyance is evident.]
ANN: No, I have friends and I have a lot of people that— [Ann’s voice drops off midsentence.]
PAM: But you’ve got to understand, too, Eric was my brother.
ANN: I understand that, he was my husband. And I loved him very, very, very, very, very much.
PAM: Then why don’t you go and try to help find out what happened?
ANN: Because I have a lawyer who has told me not to. I’m trying; I want to know what happened. I have a lawyer—
PAM: Well, I just don’t understand his technique then, Ann. Because it sounds like your life is pretty crappy right now.
ANN: It is really crappy.
PAM: And if he’s doing such a good job, why is your life so crappy? So, well, hey, thanks for calling me back. I know you’ve got to take care of Clare. [Pam wraps up the conversation with resignation. It doesn’t appear that Ann is going to break, not now, not ever.]
Morgan insists he never instructed the family to make the calls or to tape them. Verus Miller did the same, calling Ann’s sister Danielle and mining her for anything that might help the case. In the end the tapes were just more pieces of the puzzle that Morgan hoped to use to help convince the D.A., and ultimately a jury, that Ann was guilty of murdering her husband. In his opinion they showed a woman in total denial who dodged the truth at every turn.
“I think it gave us all a preview what her likely defense would be,” Morgan says cryptically.
DEATH OF AN ANGEL
Every victim was important to Chris Morgan. He did not categorize their worth based on gender, age, race, or education. To him each one of them was unique, with their own set of individual qualities that made them memorable. He had no hierarchy when it came to murder victims, but some victims, like Eric Miller and Beth-Ellen Vinson, had managed to gain a foothold on Morgan’s heart, a grip so intense even he couldn’t explain it.
In the spring of 2002, Morgan added Stephanie Bennett to that list of victims he couldn’t forget. The small-town girl from Virginia, a recent college graduate, had just started her life in Raleigh. It was a life full of promise and potential. On May 21, 2002, Stephanie was found raped, tortured, and murdered in her apartment. The killer left his DNA all over the crime scene as if to thumb his nose at investigators and say “catch me if you can.” Despite looking at hundreds of DNA samples that were already on file with the state, looking for a match, Raleigh police came up with nothing.
“It was the tragic murder of a young innocent victim [who] through no fault of her own had ended up dying a horrible tragic death,” Morgan remembers, his voice heavy with remorse.
Soon after Bennett’s murder, on June 28, 2002, Morgan got word that the Miller case had bypassed the North Carolina Court of Appeals and would go straight to the North Carolina Supreme Court for consideration. This was great news, since it meant that things were finally moving ahead. But it was bittersweet. Morgan was one step closer to finding justice for Eric Miller, and yet he felt like he kept taking three steps back in the Stephanie Bennett case.
The main difference between the Bennett case and the Miller case was the amount of concrete physical evidence. Morgan knew that if he could only make a DNA match, he could solve the Bennett case. There would be no argument with the district attorney about the strength of the case or the evidence. This case was a winner, a slam dunk. But unlike the Miller case, he didn’t have a suspect.
“Concrete, hard evidence that is irrefutable doesn’t come along like that every day,” Morgan laments.
But concentrating on the Bennett case had a downside. The case was hot, and Morgan felt like he had to stay on top of it. He had given Eric Miller everything he could for the moment, and the future of the case now rested in the hands of the North Carolina Supreme Court. So he went all out on the Bennett case. This, in turn, concerned the Millers and made them feel like he was putting Stephanie before Eric, while in Morgan’s mind they were both angels in heaven on an equal footing who both deserved his focus, but not always constant attention.
Morgan recalls one typical bright and sunny Carolina summer day when he got a call from Verus Miller on his cell phone. Naturally Verus wanted to know why he had not heard from the investigator recently. Morgan was at a loss to explain to his now dear friend why Eric’s murder had taken a temporary backseat.
“You always have a situation where they feel like you’re their detective, that this is your job and that, ‘What are you doing working on somebody else’s case? You’re my detective. You don’t need to be working on somebody else’s case; you need to be working on my case,’ ” Morgan explains with sympathy.
Morgan was committed to getting justice for Eric Miller and Stephanie Bennett. There were not enough hours in the day to make it all happen quick enough, but he would make it happen, somehow, some way.
48 HOURS
Morgan was a friend to the local media. He very rarely turned down interviews, and often solicited their help in cases where he needed it. He saw his relationship with reporters as mutually beneficial. He knew when to use them and how to do it without saying too much. Many of his colleagues were afraid of this kind of attention, afraid of saying the wrong thing, afraid of saying too much. It was a delicate balance. To Morgan it was an art.
“It can also be, as I’ve seen in numerous cases, a terrible, terrible detriment to doing your job if you don’t try to learn how to work with the media instead of trying to work against it,” Morgan admits.
When a producer for 48 Hours, Chuck Stevens, first contacted him about the Eric Miller case, Morgan was cautious. But at the same time he saw the value in putting the case in the national spotlight, where everyone, includi
ng the district attorney and the North Carolina Supreme Court, could not ignore it.
In hindsight Morgan realizes that he should have told his supervisors, especially Chief Perlov, and probably also the D.A. about his plan to go national. But he moved forward with a single-minded goal, to take all of the bits and pieces that had been previously reported in the Miller case and put them together in a nice neat package that the public could digest.
Morgan knew that Ann Miller’s attorneys, particularly Joe Cheshire, a veteran defense attorney and media spin doctor, would soon be jumping on the media train themselves, spinning their version of the story.
So in the midst of working ten to twelve hours a day on the Bennett case, Morgan agreed to take part in the 48 Hours segment about the Eric Miller case.
Be careful what you wish for, Morgan would think to himself years later. He anticipated a small crew, maybe two or three people, not unlike the local media he was used to dealing with on a regular basis. Having experienced only local television coverage, he expected the whole thing would take about an hour of his time. He was not familiar with the overabundance of resources and demands that accompanied the national media.
As he walked into the police station on the day of the shoot, Morgan noticed people unloading a tractor trailer full of equipment at the front door. He thought nothing of it until he got off the elevator on the fourth floor and saw the media circus unfolding before him. They had turned the Major Crimes Squad Room into a full-blown television studio, complete with scorching bright lights, big fancy cameras, lots of wires, and bodies everywhere. As he sauntered through the hallway to his office, Morgan received a lot of sideways glances and jeers from his coworkers, who were not impressed by what they perceived as Morgan’s grandstanding. Clearly, they were more than just a little perturbed by the disruption.
Later that same day, after hours of interviews inside the station, the news crew converted Morgan’s unmarked police car into a television studio on wheels. They took all of the junk from his backseat so that the reporter could interview Morgan while he drove with a camera lens just inches from his face in the front seat.
“Very good people, very nice people, very interested and invested people, but they were also people with an agenda, a schedule, and an awful lot of equipment,” Morgan recalls with a chuckle and a tinge of embarrassment for the haranguing he got from the other cops.
Russ Mitchell, the reporter, had interviewed the Miller family in Indiana before he came to see Morgan. He knew a great deal about the case and impressed Morgan with his thorough research and preparation.
Naturally he asked Morgan the question: “Why haven’t you made an arrest in this case?” It was a question that the local media had already asked him hundreds of times. It was a question he’d asked himself every day since Eric Miller’s murder. It was a question that, in his heart, he truly had no answer for, but when a television camera was pointed in his direction, he was forced to come up with something. So he rambled on about “making progress in the case” and about “working closely with the district attorney’s office.” Anyone who read between the lines would know that he was implying that his hands were tied and that he was waiting for an okay from the D.A. in order to move forward.
When Morgan told District Attorney Colon Willoughby about the news segment, Willoughby was less than enthusiastic about the prospect of the story making national headlines. Willoughby was a conservative D.A. who took his oath not to speak about an ongoing case in specific terms very seriously. He didn’t like loose cannons, especially loose cannons who could possibly jeopardize a case with loose talk. But Morgan assured Willoughby that he had not crossed any lines.
“I kind of looked at the 48 Hours deal as an insurance policy, a little added motivation in my quest for justice for Eric Miller,” Morgan says with a snicker. “It’s hard to duck a story or hope it will go away once it’s been on a national news program.”
Morgan wasn’t as prepared for the interview as he should have been, nor was he prepared for the fallout later when the segment aired. Again, he had been used to the local media but not the national spotlight. He had figured a camera was a camera—what was the big deal?
“Looking back on it, I probably should have gotten a better haircut.” Morgan laughs. “I think in the end probably my lack of consideration, preparation, and planning—I hope that I came off just as I hoped I would, as somebody who was honestly doing the best that he could in a very difficult quest for justice for Eric Miller.”
One thing Morgan tried to stress in the interview was the hundreds of hours of work put in by his detectives. Some people thought Morgan took too much credit for solving cases. He was fully aware of this perception. When you have a bigger-than-life personality, people either love you or hate you, and Morgan had experienced his fair share of hate. But he truly respected and admired the work his squad had done on the case and wanted that to be known in this interview. Morgan’s gut told him a lot, but without all of the grunt work done by his detectives, none of his cases would ever have seen their way into a courtroom.
“The work that I did was tenfold done by them [detectives] , I mean they did ten times the actual nuts-and-bolts work I did,” Morgan states matter-of-factly. “They’re a dedicated bunch of men and women who deserve all the credit in the world. I don’t think I mention that often enough.”
THE HIGH COURT
Finally, on October 15, 2002, it was time for the North Carolina Supreme Court to hear arguments on the Gammon issue. Morgan had never been to the Supreme Court and was duly impressed with the upscale surroundings. He was used to disposable cups, a packed audience in T-shirts and cutoffs, and the constant din of attorneys passing in front of the bench trying to settle cases.
Instead, he walked into a room full of grace and quiet elegance. The stately, historic courtroom with its high ceilings, oil paintings, and freshly polished dark wood was a far cry from a tired Wake County Superior Courtroom. He marveled at the fact that each of the justices had his or her own crystal goblet full of not just water, but ice water.
“It’s a different world. I tried to go in there with as much dignity as I could wearing my best black fedora,” says Morgan humbly.
Colon Willoughby and Bud Crumpler from the North Carolina Attorney General’s Office argued for the state. Morgan felt their arguments were strong and impressive. But Gammon’s attorneys had equally strong arguments.
“ ‘Isn’t this going to have a chilling effect on the ability of lawyers to represent people effectively?’ ” Morgan recalls one of the justice’s asking. “ ‘If we give you this, isn’t the confidentiality of what someone tells his lawyer always going to be in question?’ ”
But over and over, Morgan says Crumpler and Willoughby answered these questions simply and directly. They told the justices this was a narrowly defined contingency for this particular case and would not affect state law in a broad and sweeping way.
Every Friday after the North Carolina Supreme Court met regarding the case, Morgan logged on to their Web site to scan the decisions, hoping the judges would hand down something in the Miller case. Back in Indiana, the Miller family was doing the same thing. But every time they checked, there was nothing. It was as if the case had been heard and then poof, it simply vanished off the radar screen. The court had no legal mandate to consider the case in a specified amount of time. So Morgan and the Millers waited, and waited, and waited.
“I kept thinking, what in the hell is taking them so long with this?” Morgan says.
GOING NATIONAL
On December 11, 2002, viewers across the country learned details about the Eric Miller case courtesy of Chris Morgan on 48 Hours. While the story was about Eric Miller, the CBS producer had built the segment around Morgan and his bigger-than-life persona. As it was told through Morgan’s eyes, a compelling and passionate backdrop, viewers connected more readily with the case in North Carolina, far away from where most of them lived. Morgan made them care about Eric Miller.
On the night the segment aired, Morgan’s family gathered in the den to watch. Morgan himself retreated to his makeshift office in an old shed behind the house to watch alone. He wanted to see for himself whether or not he had screwed up, and he didn’t need his family by his side pointing out his blunders.
While it was tough at moments to hear things he wished he hadn’t said, or wished he had said differently, he was not disappointed with the results. In the end he had done exactly what he’d set out to do, to put Eric Miller’s face on the national map, and to put Ann Miller squarely in the national hot seat.
“If I had thought about it a little bit more, I probably would have never done it. But in retrospect I felt like it was just as an essential part in this process in seeking justice for Eric Miller as anything else we had done in the case,” Morgan says. Morgan had always been hot on Ann Miller’s trail. She knew it, the D.A. knew it, and now the rest of America knew it.
EIGHT
Beware the fury of a patient man.
—JOHN DRYDEN
The day after his fifteen minutes of fame aired, Morgan was in line at the snack bar in the municipal building getting his usual, a tuna-fish sandwich to go. Everyone was talking about the 48 Hours segment. Some people ribbed him, others gave him a pat on the back, and others snickered about it behind his back. But at least they were talking about it, and that’s what he had hoped for. He wanted people to keep talking about the Eric Miller case because that was the only way to keep it alive.