by Amanda Lamb
The whispers didn’t bother Morgan; he’d experienced it all before. What did worry him, however, was running into Chief Jane Perlov. When he saw her in line at the snack bar, he assumed that she’d probably seen the segment and would have a strong opinion about it one way or the other. Perlov, not unlike Morgan, seemed to have a strong opinion on just about everything.
In contrast to Morgan, Perlov was a petite woman with short blond hair, the kind of woman people referred to as a “pistol” or a “firecracker.” Unlike her predecessors, she always dressed in uniform, a throwback to her days as a beat cop. Morgan supposed that by dressing in uniform, she was trying to send the message that she was one of them, yet there was something about her that could strike fear in the heart of even a large man like himself.
If she didn’t say anything, Morgan knew it probably meant she disapproved of the segment. He swallowed hard and decided to face her head-on, to get it over with. He figured eventually her opinion would make its way back to him. He’d rather hear it straight from the boss than have it filtered through layers of cops with their own agendas. To Morgan’s surprise, she broached the topic immediately.
“She said, ‘I had to hold my breath when they asked you that question about why hasn’t the case been proceeding, why hasn’t somebody been charged?’ She said, ‘I saw that little snicker on your face when you leaned back in the chair and made that comment about we’re continuing to work with the D.A.’s office.’ She said, ‘That was the best thing you could say,’ ” Morgan recalls with relief.
Chief Jane Perlov was not a person who freely gave compliments, especially not to Chris Morgan. It was no secret that the two strong personalities had locked horns on several occasions. Morgan felt like her reaction to the show was about as close as he was going to get to an “atta-boy,” and he gratefully accepted it.
BURNING BRIDGES
At this point in the investigation Morgan realized he had probably taken too many risks and burned too many bridges. He and Tom Ford were now on opposite sides of a raging river without even so much as a stray log to bridge the ever-widening gap. Morgan had a lot of animosity toward Ford for not having moved forward with what Morgan had felt was a very viable case. He knew that his own actions, going around Ford to Howard Cummings and Colon Willoughby, would forever cast him as a trouble-maker in Ford’s eyes, but he just didn’t care anymore. It wasn’t something he could afford to waste precious energy worrying about.
While Morgan continued to wait for the North Carolina Supreme Court to make its decision, life and death went on in Raleigh. Murders continued to happen, murders that needed Morgan’s attention.
Around this same time Chief Perlov was working on decentralizing the investigative unit. The idea was to have detectives in each district investigating crimes in that district instead of having them all based out of headquarters. The other objective of Perlov’s plan was to concentrate more on quality-of-life crimes, such as petty theft or car break-ins, which affected the largest number of people. By comparison, there were only a small number of murders every year, and thus they affected a relatively small number of people. This philosophy irked Morgan to his core. In his mind there is no greater crime than murder, and in his opinion, murders clearly affect people much more deeply than the theft of a bike or stereo. There was no comparison.
To Morgan, this new agenda meant fewer resources would be allocated toward murder investigations. Because each district would have just a handful of detectives to investigate its own crimes, there would no longer be a large team of detectives at the central office handling every homicide.
“Let the damn car break-ins, stuff like that, fall by the wayside. When somebody takes a life, it can never be replaced, ” says Morgan disgustedly. “My heart and my time will still largely be focused on people’s whose lives have been stolen.”
But the decentralization was going to happen whether Morgan liked it or not.
BUMPER DEATH NOTIFICATION
Fifty-five-year-old Robert Sanchez Saiz was a Raleigh Public Utilities worker who’d been robbed at gunpoint and killed in the winter of 2002. A group of robbers burst into the break room and demanded everyone’s wallet. Saiz tried to slip out the back door and was shot. Many hours after Morgan and his detectives started working the case, he realized that no one had notified Saiz’s wife, Debra, that her husband was dead. Morgan decided he would go with Detective Amy Russo to Cary, a suburb of Raleigh, where the man had lived with his family, and break the awful news himself.
Over the years Morgan had taken on the nickname “Bump” or “Bumper” after a character in Joe Wambaugh’s book The Blue Knight. A fellow cop dubbed Morgan “Bump” in the late 1970s because the real name of the character in the book was William Morgan (Chris Morgan’s full name is William Christopher Morgan). Like Chris Morgan, William Morgan was a large cop with an even bigger personality. As nicknames have a way of doing, this one stuck like glue to Morgan. Cops got so used to calling Morgan “Bump” that some didn’t even know his real name. He accepted the moniker with humility and just a smidgen of pride on account of the fact that his colleagues had bothered to name him after a colorful character torn right out of a classic tale.
It was a cold November night when Morgan and Russo headed to Saiz’s home. Morgan slipped on his best white felt fedora and his overcoat as he got out of the car. He and Russo walked solemnly to the door of the apartment and knocked. It wasn’t the first time Morgan had made a “death knock,” but it was the first time in a long while. A slight Hispanic woman in a robe answered the door. It was Debra Saiz, Robert Saiz’s widow.
“Immediately she broke down and said, ‘Oh my God, he’s died, he’s dead,’ before we ever said one word,” Morgan says, sounding somewhat stunned as he recalled the woman’s reaction. “From that point on, me going to the front door in a hat became known as a ‘Bumper Death Notification.’ ”
Morgan had become so well known as the detective in the hat on television who investigated murders that his mere presence was enough to let someone know a loved one had died. It was an unexpected side effect of his new-found fame, and one he wasn’t sure he liked.
SHIRLEY LANG
On Wednesday, January 29, 2003, the body of a forty-four-year -old nursing student was found on the grounds of the Dorothea Dix Hospital, a local public mental institution. A cop on foot, chasing a suspect who had committed an unrelated assault with a machete, practically stumbled over Shirley Lang’s body in the woods just off a path on the edge of the property. While the body had no connection to the assault, the officer called it in on his radio. When Morgan arrived at the scene, he was appalled by the sight of Lang’s body, and equally amazed that at this point in his career anything could still appall him.
“It was a brutal murder. She was cut and slashed repeatedly about the head, and neck, and face. It showed a lot of emotion. It was one of the first things that stuck with me in that case,” says Morgan, shaking his head.
Morgan strongly believes that in order to get close enough to cut someone with a knife, to kill someone in such a savage way, you have to know the person. A stranger doesn’t want to have any physical connection to someone’s death, which is why strangers generally use guns and stay farther away from their victims. But rage, rage came from a deep dark place that was inextricably entwined with the killer’s relationship to the victim.
Lang had been partially disrobed, and she’d had a tree branch forced down her throat. The scene made Morgan sick to his stomach, and at the same time even more determined to find Shirley Lang’s killer.
And like every other case by that point, he looked at it in the context of Eric Miller. These days Eric Miller’s case was the lens that every new case passed through.
“It seemed like every case I got, every new case that came in, I somehow ended up comparing it to Eric Miller. Eric was fast becoming the focal point of my life,” Morgan admits. “It was kind of like the anchor I was holding on to.”
What if Eric’s ki
ller had left clues as Shirley Lang’s killer had done? What if Eric’s killer had been sloppy and emotional? But none of these what-ifs would do him any good now. In contrast to Shirley Lang’s murder, Eric’s death was cold, sterile, without obvious traces of emotion. Eric’s killer had managed to cover her tracks. There was no crime scene to speak of where detectives could have gathered clear forensic evidence.
In Shirley Lang’s case, Morgan expected justice to be much more swift. He dove into it headfirst hoping to get some immediate gratification in a way he couldn’t get from the languishing Miller case. Shirley Lang had been a hard-working, churchgoing woman who’d been missing for three days. Besides having raised two children, Lang was a nursing student at Wake Technical Community College and an intern at the Dorothea Dix Hospital, a state psychiatric facility. Her husband, fifty-five-year-old Daniel Lang, had not reported her missing until she had been gone for thirty-six hours. Yet when he was interviewed by police, he showed no concern about the fact that his wife was gone, that she had missed church, that friends had been asking questions. It didn’t take a seasoned investigator to realize that Daniel Lang was hiding something. Yet Lang appeared to be as little concerned about the perception that he might be involved in a murder as he was about his wife’s disappearance and her death.
“Just as Ann Miller should have been much more concerned than she was when she first heard the words arsenic poisoning,” Morgan says, wondering how killers can think they are going to get away with their crimes when their culpability is so obvious.
Again, Morgan lived by the adage that “the truth makes sense, and if it doesn’t make sense, it isn’t the truth.” Morgan hadn’t come up with this belief by accident—it was part experience, part history. He read about a medieval mathematician named Occam who preached that in the absence of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the simplest solution is almost always the right solution. Morgan took this theory to heart.
Morgan took over in the interrogation room that night with Daniel Lang, not because his detectives weren’t doing a good job, but because he knew the truth, and he wanted Daniel Lang to know that he knew the truth. It was something he needed to do, for himself, and for Shirley Lang, and even in some small way that he did not completely understand, for Eric.
“ ‘You tell me the truth, you can go home. You don’t tell me the truth, we’re going to have a big problem, Daniel,’ ” Morgan recalls saying to Lang. “I decided, ‘Daniel Lang, you’re not leaving my police station unless it’s in handcuffs. ’ ”
They went around and around in circles, covering the same ground over and over again. Nothing made sense. Morgan knew this was his only chance, that if he waited even one day, Daniel Lang would get an attorney and the conversation would be over, just as it had been over with Ann Miller after that very first night at the Raleigh Police Station, just as it had been over with Derril Willard the day they searched his home.
Finally, after about two hours, Morgan got in Lang’s face. “I said, ‘Daniel, I think you killed your wife and I want you to tell me something that will prove me wrong,’ ” Morgan says through gritted teeth, imitating his tone that night.
And then the unthinkable happened. The circling became real instead of just metaphorical. Both men stood up and started rounding the table like wild animals readying for attack. Lang was a slight man, about 160 pounds, and Morgan weighed about a hundred pounds more than that. But Lang was obviously not deterred by Morgan’s formidable size. Suddenly he pounced, jumping across the table in an attempt to head-butt Morgan, but like a cartoon character, he literally bounced off Morgan’s large frame and fell backward. Morgan recalls it being almost comical. After a brief struggle between the two men, detectives waiting in the hallway ran into the room and subdued Lang. He was charged with assaulting an officer and placed under a one million dollar bond. It wasn’t a murder charge, but it was enough to keep him behind bars until they could make a case. Lang’s head butt turned out to be just what investigators needed to buy some time.
The next day Morgan sent one of his detectives, Mary Blalock, to the North Carolina Medical Examiner’s Office in Chapel Hill to observe Shirley Lang’s autopsy. Meanwhile, he was looking for anything short of a confession that would make a murder charge stick to Daniel Lang. He didn’t have to wait long.
Blalock called Morgan from the medical examiner’s office and told him that a note had been found stuffed down in Shirley Lang’s pants, and it appeared to have been written by her. Morgan could hear Blalock smoothing out the crumpled paper in the background as she prepared to read the note.
“The note said: ‘My husband and a man is trying to kill me, help.’ It was signed ‘Shirley Lang.’ That’s something that doesn’t happen every day,” Morgan says. “I’ve often wondered how many murder victims know the person responsible for their death. Eric, despite all of his good qualities and his high level of intelligence, was simply unable to comprehend who was trying to kill him.”
The note raised one troubling issue, however. Who was “the man” Shirley referred to in the note? Morgan said his squad spent days trying to find the other person who might have helped Daniel Lang kill his wife.
What they uncovered was that Daniel Lang, who was himself a nurse at the mental hospital, had been intimate with several patients, including a woman who had killed her children with a hammer and then set their house on fire. There was a dirty old mattress in the woods near where Shirley Lang’s body had been found where the patient said she and Daniel Lang had had sex. Morgan describes the woman as rather “manly,” and he always wondered if Shirley—in what must have been her traumatic dying moments—had mistaken the patient for a man; but for all of their countless hours of investigation, detectives could never determine for certain if there was anyone else involved in the murder.
The note was still enough, however, to convince Daniel Lang’s attorney, Johnny Gaskins, that his client should plead guilty. Lang was also charged with a first-degree sex offense against another mentally ill patient. The woman in that case had decapitated her three-year-old son and put his body in a closet in Fayetteville, North Carolina. It had been decided that she was not competent to stand trial, and so she’d been sent to Dorothea Dix Hospital, where she subsequently met Daniel Lang and became sexually involved with him.
While nothing surprised Morgan after so many years as a cop, he still couldn’t understand how people could be so cruel. Truth be told, he didn’t want to understand. If he ever did, it would mean he had something in common with them. The day he started understanding this was the day he needed to hang up his white fedora.
Ultimately, Daniel Lang was allowed to plead guilty to second-degree murder because he had prostate cancer and was not expected to live long (Lang died in prison on December 27, 2006). Morgan didn’t care what sentence Lang got, as long as he was never on the street again. But Ann Miller was still on the street, and Morgan was convinced now more than ever that she was a dangerous person. In Shirley Lang, Morgan saw Eric Miller, and every other innocent victim. He was reminded that he still had a lot of work to do.
“Their lives had all been ended by someone who thought they had the right to kill, to take that life before it was fully realized,” says Morgan angrily.
STRANGER THAN FICTION
Prior to Eric Miller’s death, the last recorded arsenic homicide in North Carolina was that of a turkey farmer named Dorian Lanier on November 19, 1997. He died in a rural part of North Carolina at Duplin County Hospital in Kenansville. The poisoning was discovered when Dr. Corbett Quinn, the Duplin County medical examiner, performed an autopsy and found that Lanier had toxic levels of arsenic in his body. After a prolonged investigation, Lanier’s wife, forty-five-year-old Pamela Sanders Williams Lanier, was charged with her husband’s murder and arrested on January 5, 1999. It was also discovered that she had had a previous husband who had died some years earlier under suspicious circumstances, although she was never charged in connection with his death. He’d been a stron
g swimmer, yet had drowned in only three feet of water while checking his crab pots along the coast.
Because real life truly is stranger than fiction, it turned out that one of Dorian Lanier’s sisters just happened to live directly across the street from Ann Miller’s rental home in Wilmington. Another one of Lanier’s sisters contacted the Millers to offer her sympathy, saying that her family understood their ordeal and the suffering their son had gone through.
Lanier’s sister, who lived across farm Ann, joked about getting a petition up to throw her out of the neighborhood. But besides sympathy, she had one important thing she could offer the case: she agreed to keep tabs on Ann and tell the Millers anything they wanted to know about her comings and goings.
“Fate brought these two families together who had endured so much of the same heartaches. The main consistency—their [Ann and Pamela’s] ability to do these horrible things, to sit and watch somebody die a slow lingering death at their own hands,” Morgan says.
In many ways Morgan thought Dorian Lanier’s death was even more horrific than Eric Miller’s, because Lanier never sought medical help until the end. He was a good old boy, a farmer, and was skeptical about doctors. It pained Morgan to find out that close to the end of Dorian’s life, Pamela Lanier had merely put a plastic tarp on her husband’s bed because he could not control his vomiting or his bowels. At least as an educated man, a scientist, Eric had realized that he needed some medical intervention.
In Dorian Lanier’s case, prosecutors had finally been able to convict Pamela Lanier. She received a life sentence in prison, something the Millers could only dream about at this point for Ann.