Brad Hunter - Cold Blooded Murder: Shocking True Stories of Killers and Psychopaths

Brad Hunter is the national crime columnist for the Toronto Sun. Previously he worked for the New York Post and his work has been published in newspapers and magazines around the planet. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, in Canada and he likes pubs, hockey, baseball and spending time with his family.

Murder is the vilest crime known to man.

It is often triggered through love or money or sex. Those are the three big ticket items when it comes to homicide. But people are strange. They will kill for the most obscure and ridiculous of reasons. In thirty years covering murder in New York and Canada as a journalist, I have discovered every case has a distinctive flavour. The evil lurking within a seemingly ordinary man or woman stuns cops and friends alike.

In this collection of some of the most memorable cases Ive covered, you will meet serial killers, rich-kid monsters, football stars and wives in pursuit of hormone-charged high jinks. The very rich and the very poor. Successful lawyers and hotel executives. Southern belles who could melt butter with a come-hither wink and a sexy drawl. Daddys girls who have gleaming smiles and good grades but are possessed by the devil.

These are stories of all-American crimes and they stretch from coast to coast.

You will find serial killers, cheating husbands and wives so desperate for love that theyll kill for it.

Some of these crimes are well known, like the Dating Game Killer, responsible for up to a hundred murders. He was a man so sinister that, even though hes now rotting on death row, detectives are still trying to connect the dots of his murderous rampage, forty years after his last kill.

Others are not as well known.

Theres the AIDS researcher who was slowly poisoned by arsenic and died in agony. The prize for his cheating wife was a new man, a new life and lots of money.

Ultimately, these are the stories of humans, fatal and flawed, who for reasons often known only to themselves decided to solve their problems with murder.

In the course of my career I have also covered several mafia assassinations in New York City and Toronto. The difference between the professional hitmen and the killers in this collection is that when the mob kills, its never personal. Its strictly business. With the murderers in this collection, its always personal.

On 15 November 2000 Eric Miller came home after a night of beer and bowling with the boys. He was pale as a sheet. And he wasnt feeling well, which had been a common complaint of his lately. His concerned wife, Ann, told him to go to bed. Maybe it was something he had eaten?

Two weeks later, thirty-year-old Eric was dead.

Raleigh, North Carolina, was at one time a sleepy, southern university and government town known as the City of Oaks for its stunning trees. Its Grecian architecture had largely escaped the ravages of the bloody US civil war, most of the action bypassing the then, as now, state capital. Following the Second World War, the far-sighted municipal leadership turned the city into one of the fastest growing and most liveable cities in the US. It was a veritable economic dynamo. Driving the growth besides the multiple universities in the area was the Research Triangle Park, established in 1959. The aim of creating this area was to develop the employment of the future for the sleepy south, as it shed its rural yoke and racist past. Tens of thousands of high-paying, high-tech jobs were created in science, technology and health care. New people brought new ideas and new money to the area and the population exploded to total more than a million residents.

That kind of possibility and opportunity was what brought Eric and Ann Miller to the area. The brainy Millers met in a biology class at Indianas Purdue University in the early 1990s. Eric was an Indiana boy and grew up not very far from the school they would both attend.

I really think shes the one, Eric reportedly told his family of the blonde beauty. Shes everything Id dreamed my wife would be.

Ann Miller was born in Batavia, New York, near Buffalo in 1970 and had graduated from high school in Pennsylvania. On Valentines Day 1991, Eric proposed to her. The head-over-heels in love young couple were married at St Elizabeth catholic church in Cambridge, Indiana, before moving to Raleigh in 1993. They were both accepted into graduate programmes at North Carolina State University. Eric was a postdoctoral fellow at UNC Chapel Hills Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center, while Ann worked at GlaxoSmithKline in the Research Triangle Park.

They were always holding hands and happy. They came in the morning together, they left together. You know, they just seemed to be the perfect couple, said their friend Bernie Brown. Ann was, I think, the more dominant of the two in the relationship. She liked to call the shots.

Things were going swimmingly for the young couple. By 2000 they owned their own home in an expensive part of the city, two cars and even a boat. That same year, they also welcomed a baby girl, Clare, as the couple became a family. The Millers would also organise retreats for engaged couples at their church. Eric eventually earned a prestigious fellowship as a paediatric AIDS researcher and Ann accepted a high-ranking position at a powerful pharmaceutical company.

Eric told his friends: Life doesnt get better than this. I have everything a man could possibly want. But before the year was out, he was dead and the Millers seemingly perfect life lay in tatters. What or who killed Eric Miller? How could a devoted husband and father end up being killed by a bizarre mystery ailment? Ann, still only thirty, was shattered. She spent her time crying and her friends and family did their best to support her. She was the epitome of the tragic widow and nothing she did raised suspicions.

However, detectives began suspecting that something was amiss behind what they believed was nothing more than the facade of the ideal marriage. Anns story was not holding up well to their probings, cynical though the cops might have been. The night Eric became ill for the final time had been far from a one-off. His death in hospital marked the culmination of weeks of flu-like symptoms that doctors had been unable to figure out. Ann had already rushed him to the hospital once before. That time, he recovered and was sent home a few days later. This was before the final bout in the hours after his weekly bowling league, this one marked by particularly violent illness. When, days later, he died, his last moments on Earth had been marked by agonising pain.

The doctors at last dropped a bombshell on his parents, Verus and Doris, who were already grieving. Adding to their misery was something they would not have suspected in their wildest dreams. His blood was laced with arsenic, the doctor solemnly told them. The diagnosis matched the symptoms. Death by arsenic poisoning is one of the most horrific ways there is to die. It usually starts with headaches and confusion, followed by severe diarrhoea, then drowsiness. Acute poisoning leads to vomiting, then vomiting blood, blood in the urine, cramping muscles, hair loss, horrific stomach pains, and convulsions. Eventually, organs shut down and death soon follows. For Erics bewildered parents none of this made any sense and they were too grief-stricken at that moment to try and make sense of it.