Deadly Dose Read Free Page B

next morning.
    At 10 a.m. on Saturday, November 18, just two hours after Eric was sent to the ICU, Morgan says Ann decided to get her hair done. The appointment had originally been scheduled for Eric, but instead of sitting by her husband’s bedside, Ann decided to appropriate the appointment for herself.
    “It was just very bizarre, almost, that Ann had gone in not to get a quick shampoo, maybe a little trim, but [that] she went in and told this hairdresser that she wanted to experiment with a new look,” Morgan says, shaking his head along with his words. “There’s something wrong with that. There would be something wrong with it if my wife did it. It’s not what would be expected of a normal spouse in this situation, male or female. It’s just not what people would do.”
    It reminds Morgan, as this case would so many times later, of the Laci Peterson case. In December 2002, the eight-months pregnant California woman disappeared, and months later her body and the body of her unborn child, Conner, were found along the shores of San Francisco Bay. When investigators checked her husband’s computer, they learned that while Laci was missing, Scott Peterson (later convicted of his wife’s murder) had spent the time casually surfing the Internet rather than searching for her.
    On the evening of November 18, the day Eric was moved to the ICU, Morgan says Dr. William Berry, a Rex Hospital cardiologist, began to suspect arsenic poisoning as a potential cause of Eric’s bizarre, undiagnosed symptoms.
    Morgan was especially impressed with Dr. Berry for being the first person to go out on a limb and suspect something unconventional. Instead of simply labeling Eric’s symptoms the result of some kind of rare virus, Dr. Berry went back to his basic medical training and began looking for outside factors that could cause such symptoms.
    On November 19, Dr. Berry ordered a heavy-metals test be performed on Eric Miller to see if his suspicion was accurate. The next day a preliminary test came back showing that Eric had .93 milligrams of arsenic in his blood—a “huge amount,” Morgan says.
    Because his condition was continuing to deteriorate, on November 21, Eric was transferred from Rex Hospital to a medical facility with more resources, the University of North Carolina Hospitals in Chapel Hill. Morgan explains that the staff at Rex felt Eric needed higher-level care than they could offer him.
    On November 22, Dr. Mehna Mohan, one of Eric Miller’s doctors at Rex hospital, called Dr. Paul Lawrence Wang, a third-year resident who had taken over Eric’s care at UNC. Morgan says Mohan wanted to fill Wang in on the results of the arsenic test taken on November 19. This, Morgan feels, is where a critical miscommunication occurred.
    “Dr. Mohan is giving, or quoting, lab results to the doctors at Chapel Hill and what she is giving them is a blood level, but they hear it as a urine level and therein lies the problem,” says Morgan, shaking his head. “The reading she was giving him for a blood level was astronomical and toxic, deadly toxic. The readings, if you interpreted them as a urine level, were maybe toxic, but not anything fatal.”
    Yet Morgan says his concerns about which tests were performed, how quickly they came back, and what was communicated to UNC Hospitals had nothing to do with the criminal investigation. He wasn’t a doctor, nor were his detectives. They didn’t have the medical background to judge what the doctors had or had not done. Could Eric’s death have been prevented if the arsenic had been zeroed in on earlier? Probably, Morgan thinks. But in Morgan’s estimation, the men and women who tried to save Eric Miller’s life were not responsible for his death.
    In his heart Morgan believed a single person was responsible for Eric Miller’s murder. It became his mission to find out who had administered the deadly dose of arsenic that ultimately claimed the young scientist’s life.

LAB MATES
    The case