One Demeaning From Murder

One D.O. From Murder Martin MacNeill A “D.O.” is a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine, a licensed physician who takes a whole-body approach to medicine. It’s based on the idea that all the body’s systems are interrelated and so they treat the whole body rather than focus on treating specific symptoms. Michele Marie Somers was born in 1957 and grew up in Concord, California. She was popular, athletic, played the violin. She was a cheerleader, homecoming queen, she modeled, and was a beauty queen. She was a straight-A student and very involved in her LDS church. She met Martin MacNeill at an event for Mormon young adults. They quickly eloped when she was 21 and he was just 22. Michele met aspiring doctor, Martin MacNeill at an event for young Mormon singles. They married when she was 21 and quickly started a family. Michele gave birth to 4 kids in 5 years. 3 girls and a boy. The family moved to Pleasant Grove, Utah. Michele and Martin were very loving and involved parents. Martin was an osteopathic doctor and worked as the medical director for the Utah State Development Center. He also had a law degree, though he was not a practicing lawyer. He never missed an opportunity to let people know he was both a doctor and a lawyer. And he taught Sunday school at their church. Michele and Martin felt they had more love to give and over the next few years they adopted 4 more children, all little girls from Ukraine. People felt like Michele and Martin were opposites. While Michele was pretty, quiet, always well-dressed, polite, Martin was arrogant, haughty. He always had to be the main presence in the room. He had to dominate conversations. And he could be quite rude to those who he felt were below his superior intellect. His daughters idolized him in many ways, but they were aware that people didn’t like him, and they were always apologizing for him or making excuses for his behavior. In 2006 when Martin turned 50, he went through what appeared to be a mid-life crisis. He became obsessed with his appearance and began exercising and going to tanning salons. It was so extreme that he was known to drop and do push-ups in the middle of a conversation. Michele found his new behavior odd, and when he started disappearing for hours, she grew suspicious. Finally, she confronted Martin and asked if he was having an affair. He turned around and accused her of not caring enough about her own appearance. Michele was a beautiful woman but had never been overly concerned about her looks. Martin suggested she get a face-lift, and Michele reluctantly agreed. Which was shocking as she had never mentioned a desire to get any type of plastic surgery done before. Although she had just turned 50, Michele already looked the like the after photo of a successful face lift. Martin wanted to schedule the surgery right away, but Michelle suggested she wait for the summer when their daughter Alexis, who was in medical school in Nevada, would be home on summer break to help care for her mother. But Martin was adamant the surgery be done right away. He and Michele and Alexis he had everything set up to do it the following week when Alexis would be home for Spring Break. Michele had surgery on April 3rd, 2007, just 2 weeks after Martin suggested the surgery to Michele. Martin insisted that Michele be prescribed several post-op drugs – painkillers and sedatives – to aid with her recovery due to her low tolerance for pain. Drugs that were not typically prescribed for this type of procedure. And knowing that Martin was a doctor, the surgeon complied. Alexis was surprised, knowing that her mom was actually very sensitive to medications. Michele was given Valium, Ambien, Phenergan (fen-er-gan), Percocet, and Lortab, medications that are not to be taken at the same time. Michele was in a lot of pain that first night after her surgery. And Alexis was shocked when her father told her to leave, he would care for his wife that night and give her all her meds. When Alexis wanted to stay, he said he needed her to get some rest, so she could care for her mom the next day. The next morning when Alexis returned her mom was completely sedated. It took 24 hours for her mom to regain consciousness and talk. Michele said Martin kept giving her pills to take. When Alexis asked her dad about it, he just kind of blew it off saying, “Oh, I must have done something wrong.” He said Michele had thrown up and he assumed she threw up the medicine and gave her more. Alexis insisted she take over her mom’s care & medications. Michele had eye patches and couldn’t see. She asked Alexis to give her the pills 1 at a time so she could feel them with her fingers, that way she’d know if Martin tried to give her something else.” Which Alexis found odd. But she complied. She cared for her mother for the next 4 days and Michele was improving. Then Alexis was helping her mom wash her hair when Michele started to cry and said, “if anything happens to me, make sure it wasn’t your dad.” Alexis was floored but Michele wouldn’t elaborate. Alexis went with to Michele’s follow-up appointment with the surgeon. He was happy with how Michele was healing, she was looking better and feeling better. They all went out to dinner that night and then they drove Alexis to the airport to go back to school. The next morning Martin went to work and the younger kids went to school. He picked up their youngest daughter, Ada, 6 years old, at 11am like normal. When they got home, he asked Ada to go upstairs and check on mommy. Ada found her mother unconscious in the bathtub. Martin called 911, sounding frantic he told the dispatcher his wife had fallen in the bathtub and was unconscious and underwater. When asked if he got her out of the tub, he said he couldn’t lift her so he just let the water out. He said he was a physician (of course) and the dispatcher asked if he knew how to do CPR, he said he was already doing it and hung up. He hadn’t given a clear address to the dispatcher, she had to call back twice. Martin sent Ada, next door to get their neighbor for help. The neighbor, Christy Daniels, followed Ada back to the MacNeill’s home and to the bathroom where Martin tells her, “I’ve already called 911, I need a male’s help to lift her out of the tub.” And told her to get her husband, Doug. So Christy runs home to grab Doug. Once Doug arrived, they lifted Michele out of the tub. Martin started CPR but then stopped to yell “Why? Why? All for a stupid surgery!” He did this several times. As though he was blaming Michele. Then Martin’s phone rang and he stopped to answer it. It was Alexis calling to check on her mom. Martin tells her “She’s in the tub, not breathing. I called an ambulance” and then hangs up. Alexis’ first thought was “omg, he killed her.” And she dropped everything and headed to the airport. ***BREAK*** Police did arrive on the scene, but it Michele’s death appeared to be an accident. No evidence was taken from the scene. They interviewed Martin, who was known as a well-respected doctor in the community, and he said that he believed Michele passed out while preparing a bath. Alexis when Alexis arrived home, she confided in her older sister, Rachel, that she was confident that this was no accident, their father murdered their mother. And hearing that her father had hung up on the 911 dispatcher and needed another man’s help to lift Michele out of the tub, Rachel agreed something wasn’t right. Alexis asked her father where her mother’s pills were. She wanted to know exactly what her mom had in her system at the time of her death. First, he said he didn’t know where they were. Then after searching for them she asks again, and this time he says he asked his son’s girlfriend to flush them because seeing them was making him too sad. Alexis tells Rachel that while she was caring for her mother, Michele told Alexis about Martin disappearing and her suspicion that he was having an affair. She asked Alexis to go online while Martin was asleep and look up his phone records. And she did find a number that Martin had been calling and texting a lot at all hours of the day. With a google search she was able to find that the number belonged to someone named Gypsy Jillian Willis. And Martin had been having a secret affair with her for several years. 3 days later Michele’s funeral was held. The family didn’t know it at the time, but Gypsy attended the funeral. When she found out Michele was dead, she looked up her services and attended because she felt badly that she had been with Michele’s husband. And she wanted to support him. And she texted him during the services. She had even sent suggestive photos of herself the day after Michele died, to keep his attention on her during this difficult time. Gypsy was a 30-year-old nursing student when she met Martin in an internet chat room in 2005. Her screen name was Phoenix Sheba. And Martin went by the name Joe online. And they bonded online discussing quantum physics. And yes, she knew he was married. She wasn’t looking for anything serious and “Joe” told her he had a perfect life and was married to the perfect wife. But after a few weeks they met in person and quickly started a sexual relationship. She moved into a duplex that Martin owned and he gave her a credit card to help her get through the expenses of nursing school. Alexis and Rachel were surprised and angry to discover that police weren’t investigating their mother’s death. But the medical examiner had determined the cause of death to be from hypertension (which is high blood pressure) and Myocarditis (which is inflammation of the heart muscle due to an infection or other inflammatory condition). So, Michele’s heart had failed and her death was due to natural causes. The sisters offer to move back home to help care for the 4 youngest children, but Martin tells them he was planning to hire a nanny. And he already found someone perfect, someone he thinks is named Jillian. Alexis, shocked, asks if it’s Gypsy Jillian Willis, “because if it is, I know who that is, I know mom though you were having an affair with her, and she is not to be brought into our home. “ Less than 30 days after Michele’s death, Gypsy moves into the MacNeill home. Turned out Gypsy didn’t cook or clean. Or take care of the kids. Alexis confronted her father again, asking if she was his mistress and he did not take it well. He told her she was being rude, that Gypsy was a guest in their house. And if Alexis questioned him again, he would see that she was thrown out of medical school. Rachel tried to speak to her father as well and was told to leave the house for being rude to Gypsy. 3 months later Martin travelled to Wyoming with Gypsy to meet her family. Martin told Gypsy’s parents that he never loved his wife the way he loves Gypsy. He said the love he felt for Michele was more like that of a friend or sister. And then Martin proposed right there in front of Gypsy’s family. In an interview on the show 20/20, Gypsy said she wasn’t surprised by the proposal. Everything seemed very natural. He had mourned Michele. This was 3 months after the death his wife of 29 years, the mother of their 8 children. This was also the first time Gypsy had seen her mother in several years after getting into a fistfight with her over a dog. She had even bit her mother during that fight. Gypsy’s own sister, Julie, said to 20/20 that she “would consider Gypsy to be a deceptive, malevolent, malicious, calculating person.” The following summer, 14-year-old daughter Giselle, was sent back to Ukraine to visit family. But what was supposed to be a short visit ended up lasting a year. While Giselle was gone, Martin used Giselle’s information to apply for a new social security card but used the name Jillian MacNeill and went to court to update the birth year. And then got a new passport with the information. The fraud was supposedly to get Gypsy out of $50 thousand dollars in back taxes. This is why Giselle couldn’t come home. Alexis and Rachel desperately tried to get the police to investigate their mother’s death, but the case was closed, and they were getting nowhere. The went to the media, but no one was interested. After several years they were able to get the attention of Doug Whitney, an investigator at the Utah County Attorney’s Office and he reopened the case. He started by investigating Martin MacNeill’s past. Martin was born in 1956 and had entered the military at the age of 17. But after 2 years he was dismissed for psychiatric reasons. Yet he had been receiving veteran’s benefits for years with forged paperwork. 3 years later he met Michele and they eloped. But just 4 months after they got married, Martin went to jail for 6 months for forgery, theft and fraud for writing bad checks. Martin also used fake transcripts to get into medical school in California where he earned his degree in osteopathic medicine and then again used fake transcripts to get into law school at Brigham Young University and earn his law degree. Gypsy was not the first of his extramarital affairs either. In 1994 he was accused of having sex with a patient the BYU Heath Center and threatened to commit suicide. And he apparently threatened to commit suicide on multiple other occasions when Michele confronted him about a pornography habit and when she was suspicious about extramarital affairs. Doug Whitney also discovered multiple fake IDs for Gypsy, a fake birth certificate, multiple joint bank account opened for her and Martin all with Gypsy’s name and Giselle’s social security number. He had Martin and Gypsy arrested for federal identity theft. And in 2009 they were convicted sent to prison for 4 years. While in prison they wrote to each other frequently, making plans for their future together. Doug Whitney now believed that Martin murdered his wife and set out to find the evidence to prove it. He asked a toxicologist to review Michele’s original toxicology report from her autopsy, which showed an unusual combination of powerful sedatives and painkillers. This review was brought to the state medical examiner’s office and Michele’s cause of death was changed from Natural Causes to undetermined. Weeks after he was released from prison, he was arrested for murder. The arrest warrant stated that Martin had attempted to murder his mother when he was younger and that he may have killed his brother Rufus Roy MacNeill, who had been found dead in a bathtub, but that he had not been prosecuted for it. Gypsy had an alibi for the morning of the murder. She was arrested on fraud charges and she pled guilty in exchange for 3 years’ probation if she testified against Martin. 5 years after Michele’s murder, Martin MacNeill went on trial. The prosecution showed that on the morning of the murder, there was a 90-minute window from when Martin left from work, to 11am when he picked up Ada from school. And his whereabouts couldn’t be accounted for. Plenty of time to go home, drug Michele and then drown her in the bathtub. One witness testified how Martin described to him how he walked into the bathroom to find Michele bent over the side of the tub, face down in the water. But the neighbor, Christy Daniels, testified that when Ada came to her for help, Michele was laying in the bathtub on her back, partially dressed. The 4 eldest MacNeill daughters testified against their father. And several inmates from Martin’s time in prison for fraud testified that Martin talked about cheating on his wife with his then girlfriend Gypsy and made comments about how he was good at getting away with things, including the murder of his wife. And Martin’s former mistress, Anna Osborne Walthall, testified that Martin once told her he knew a way to naturally induce a heart attack so it couldn’t be detected in tests. Gypsy testified that she and Martin had been having an affair before Michele’s death and that he gave her money to get her through nursing school and that they even exchanged tests on the day of Michele’s funeral. But she did not believed Martin killed Michele. She also said that the identity theft of Martin’s daughter was all his idea, that she knew it was wrong, but that Martin was smart and persuasive and he convinced her it was the best way to get her out of her massive tax debt. On December 9, 2013, Martin MacNeill was found guilty of first-degree murder, as well as obstruction of justice for hindering the investigation to the murder by making it appear as an accident. He received 15 years to life for murder and an additional 1-15 years for obstruction. Since the trial, Gypsy’s roommates at the time, said Gypsy talked about killing Michele by either poisoning her or cutting her car’s brake lines. And she had been stalking Michele, and even broke into the McNeill home, and stole a photo of Michele. Martin and Gypsy never got married, but they did get a marriage license and the date of Michele’s funeral is the date on the license. On April 9, 2017, 2 days before the 10th anniversary of Michele’s murder, Martin committed suicide in prison. He was 61 years old. Sources: 20/20 S41 E38 “The Perfect Nanny” The Daily Mail .co .uk Wikipedia .com The cinemaholic .com