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Fate determines many things no matter how we struggle.

--OTTO WEININGER

The longer you live, the more you realize that while first impressions may not always be right, they usually are.

From the moment Investigator Chris Morgan saw thirty-year-old Ann Miller through the window of the interview room at the Raleigh Police Department on December 2, 2000, he knew something was wrong. Her image from that night is etched into his mind with the crystal-clear clarity of a black-and-white photograph. It has a timeless quality about it that never fades, never gets grainy, never curls or turns yellow around the edges. Indeed, it became only sharper as the years went by.

"I got that funny little feeling in the back of my mind," Morgan says, recalling his peek at Ann through the interview-room window that cold winter night. It was a feeling that had served Morgan well in his twenty-nine years as a cop. He spent most of the last decade investigating

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murders, but this case stayed with him like a bad rash that wouldn't go away.

Ann Miller, a scientist at the then-named pharmaceutical giant Glaxo Wellcome, was wrapped in an afghan and huddled against her father in a small waiting room. She was waiting to be interviewed by investigators about the death of her husband, Eric Miller. Thirty-year-old Dr. Eric Miller, a pediatric AIDS researcher at the Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center at UNC Hospitals, had died at Rex Hospital in Raleigh, North Carolina, at 2:50 a.m. that morning. The cause--arsenic poisoning. He took his last breath never knowing what hit him.

Eric was a tall, thin, handsome man, with a head full of thick brown hair and a smile for every camera lens. Morgan still looks at Eric's pictures often, and is surprisingly comforted by them. They show a man full of life, full of promise, a man who was not supposed to die young. A man Morgan would have liked to have known.

Morgan himself is a large, imposing man with sprigs of white hair and a worn face that reveals the time he spent in the trenches as a homicide investigator. He walks slowly, and speaks slowly, letting each thought roll off his tongue with a combination of southern redneck and unlikely academic thrown in. He usually wears a white fedora, and beneath the brim, if he tips his hat, you might catch a glimpse of twinkling blue eyes indicating a man full of curiosity.

"Something just wasn't ringing true," says Morgan of that night when he first saw Ann Miller. Ann was not a tiny woman--at five feet five inches and 140 pounds, she was average by most standards--but there was something about

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her highlighted mousy-brown shoulder-length hair, her soft blue eyes, and the way she leaned in to her father for comfort that made her look more diminutive and frail than she really was. In Morgan's estimation, the helpless-little-girl look was part of her power, her control over others. It made people want to take care of her. And it worked.

"The more I thought, the more I flashed back to seeing her sitting there looking the way she did. Like I say, she was prim, proper. The more I thought this isn't an accident, this isn't any suicide. This is a murder."

STUMBLING INTO THE CASE

In 2000, Morgan was a sergeant heading up one of two squads of the Major Crimes Task Force for the Raleigh Police Department. On the weekend of December 2, 2000, he wasn't scheduled to work, but instead was preparing to head to the western part of the state for a homicide conference to present information he had collected in a 1994 cold case of a young murder victim named Beth-Ellen Vinson.

Morgan had been asked to reinvestigate the unsolved murder by police chief Mitch Brown. For a year, Morgan had poured his heart and soul into reworking the cold case. Not unlike every other case he doggedly pursued, Morgan took an emotional and intensely personal interest in Beth-Ellen and her family. He had brought his findings, complete with a detailed PowerPoint presentation, to Wake County district attorney Colon Willoughby. But Willoughby felt he still needed

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more evidence to get a conviction in a courtroom. Dejected after putting so much effort into what he thought was a solid case, Morgan hoped his colleagues at the conference could help him come up with a different approach to pitch the case again to district attorneys. Still, this disappointment clouded his opinion of the Wake County District Attorney's Office and would set the tone for his future dealings with local prosecutors.

On the night of December 2, 2000, Morgan had stopped by the police station to pick up some paperwork for his presentation at the conference. He was optimistic that his colleagues at the meeting could help him come up with a new way to sell his theories to Willoughby, given the opportunity. But as it turned out, Morgan never made it to the conference. Instead, he became deeply embroiled in the murder of Eric Miller.

When Morgan walked down the hallway in the Major Crimes Division that night, he sensed a familiar energy. Something was going on. There was a buzz in the air, in the hushed tones, in the way his heart started beating faster. The buzz invigorated him. He wanted to know, needed to know, what was going on. His gut told him that it was not his shift, not his squad, not his problem. But he couldn't resist. The gravitational pull of a new crime to solve was like a drug to Morgan. No matter how hard he tried to conquer the addiction, he kept coming back for more. And the more he had, the more he wanted. It was a vicious cycle that lasted until the day he retired, and many would say even beyond that.

He asked some questions and the other cops told him a

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scientist named Eric Miller had died of arsenic poisoning earlier that morning at Rex Hospital.

Initially, investigators cast a wide net looking for arsenic sources. They told Morgan they were looking at everything from environmental causes to suicide. Morgan wondered out loud how someone would get exposed to arsenic accidentally, since laws required strict guidelines in water systems and food sources in order to prevent contamination from toxic chemicals like arsenic. But after all, Miller had been a scientist, working in a laboratory where chemicals were present. Perhaps he'd been accidentally exposed to arsenic in his own lab. Considering how very rare arsenic poisoning is, it seemed like a plausible explanation.

Although suicide, as difficult as it can be to talk about, is one of the first things investigators must rule out in the early stages of a death investigation, detectives working on the case told Morgan that nothing in Eric Miller's background or profile even mildly suggested any kind of emotional problems or depression that might lead to him taking his life.

Morgan sensed that investigators were reluctant to explore the next possibility after accident or suicide-- murder. Maybe no one could believe that anyone would want to kill an all-around nice guy like Eric Miller. Maybe they just didn't want to believe that his equally welleducated, attractive wife could have had anything to do with her husband's death.

As Morgan listened to more about the case, his gut kept trying to tell him something. He kept going back to the image of Ann Miller he'd glimpsed just a few minutes earlier through the window of the interview room. Right then and

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there he had formed an opinion about Ann Miller: she had something to do with her husband's death. It was an opinion that would stick with him, unwavering in its intensity. It was an opinion that would drive him to pursue this case relentlessly until Eric Miller's killer was behind bars.

Morgan was flabbergasted when detectives told him that Ann Miller had come to the police station that night with her father in tow. He was still more flabbergasted when he learned that the sergeant in charge of the investigation had agreed to let Ann Miller's father, Dan Brier, into the interview room with her because it was the only way she would agree to answer their questions. Certainly, the police would be at a disadvantage in this situation. The woman was obviously not going to come clean with her daddy by her side, and the police wouldn't be able to really break her down and get to the truth as long as he was there to protect her. As Morgan saw it, the sergeant felt he'd had no choice if he wanted to talk to the dead man's wife at all. But still, Morgan felt strongly that having her father there had tremendously chilled Ann Miller's statement.

"I said: `With her daddy?' " Morgan recalls. Who knows how differently things might have gone if detectives had been able to talk to Ann Miller by herself?

THE INTERVIEW

Detectives Randy Miller (no relation to Ann or Eric) and Debbie Regentin conducted that first interview with Ann Miller as her father sat hip to hip by her, monitoring every

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word. Ann told detectives that the entire family, including their almost-one-year-old daughter, Clare, had been sick with flulike symptoms, but that Eric had been hit the hardest.

"The day Clare got sick," Ann said in the official police transcript of the interview, "we went to lunch in a restaurant. I don't know where it was. I remember it was [called] Barry's Caf?. Eric was giving her French fries because she liked them. She loved them and he had given them to her and she threw up. I got mad at him for giving her French fries. I told him her little tummy could not handle the grease yet," she said as tears rolled down her pale face.

"It's okay," said Detective Regentin. "I would let him feed her French fries every day if I could have him back," Ann said, sobbing. "I know," Regentin said. "I miss him so bad," said Ann. Detectives working on the case told Morgan that they had no reason initially to believe Ann Miller had anything to do with her husband's death. They wanted to give her time to grieve, recalls Morgan, and decided to reinterview her after the funeral a few days later. But Raleigh police never got another chance to talk to Ann Miller. Shortly after that first night in the police station, unbeknownst to investigators, Ann retained one of the top attorneys in North Carolina, Wade Smith. Smith had gained a national reputation after representing Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, the Fort Bragg Green Beret convicted of killing his entire family. Years later, Wade Smith would go on to represent a member of the Duke lacrosse team

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charged with raping an exotic dancer--a client who was later exonerated, many believed, in large part because of Smith's expertise. Smith was also the attorney for the family of Cho Seung Hui, the Virginia Tech shooter who killed thirty-two people as well as himself. Smith was the quintessential southern gentleman, professional and charming in the courtroom despite the often unsavory charges his clients faced. Having him on your side was like having a monumental life insurance policy; it cost a lot, but it practically guaranteed that you would be covered no matter what came your way.

After Ann Miller's initial interview with police, Wade Smith wisely shut the police out from further contact with his client.

"Usually, innocent people don't need to go out and lay down the kind of money that it requires to retain the likes of Mr. Wade Smith," says Morgan.

For Morgan, this was just another red flag in what would become a long series of red flags that made him pause and think about who Ann Miller really was. Morgan is a straight shooter. He knows criminals. He knows what they do, and what they don't do. He also knows how innocent people act and how they don't act. Most importantly, he knows the difference.

On that first night, no one asked Ann Miller the magic question: Did you kill your husband? The transcript doesn't lie. According to Morgan, no one asked the direct question because the detectives did not yet consider her a suspect. They did not go where Morgan says every investigation needs to go--directly into the inner circle of someone's

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