Post by Graveyardbride on Mar 29, 2015 23:07:25 GMT -5
The Stranger She Loved
Michele Somers was a California beauty queen. Martin MacNeill was a dirt poor kid from Camden, New Jersey. They were wed and swore until death do we part and their parting turned out to be her death, by his hands. A new book reveals the terrifying details in the headline-making Utah murder case in which Martin MacNeill almost beat the rap for killing his wife in a gruesome manner. The Stranger She Loved, by journalist Shanna Hogan, exposes the bizarre and disturbing swath cut through life by MacNeill – until he was finally brought to justice by his own children.
One of the children was sexually abused by their father; a second was abandoned to a life of devastating poverty in the Ukraine so that MacNeill’s lover could use her stolen identity. His wife, Michele MacNeill, despite their seemingly idyllic life, didn’t trust her hurband. Days before her death, she pleaded with daughter Alexis to do some digging. “If anything happens to me,” instructed the prescient wife, “make sure it wasn’t your dad.”
The author suggests MacNeill used an enema to pump disabling pain medication into his wife’s system. He then held her head underwater in the bathtub before coolly returning to work to establish an alibi. The heartless husband then returned home with their youngest child – and allowed 6-year-old Ada to discover the unconscious body of her mother in the bathtub full of bloody water. Michele had been at home recovering from the plastic surgery procedure that had been a gift from her husband on her 50th birthday on January 21.
As MacNeill and a neighbor labored to survive his wife, the doctor performed a bizarrely ineffective CPR on the dying woman. When paramedics arrived and intervened, the woman suddenly coughed up a substantial amount of water – but it was already too late.
MacNeill wasn’t jailed until last year for the death of his wife April 11, 2007 – a tribute to his execution of what the chief prosecutor called an “almost perfect murder.”
In some ways, the MacNeills led a picture-perfect life. Michele, a beautiful blonde and former homecoming queen, was a devoted mother. After bringing up their four biological children, she agreed to adopt three girls from Ukraine. Martin was raised in dire poverty and was diagnosed as bipolar while growing up in an addiction-plagued family. After he was discharged from the Army, where he had been diagnosed with latent schizophrenia, he converted to the Church of Latter Day Saints and finished college. He later used bogus transcripts to win admission to medical school. The couple met at church in Mission Viejo, Calif., where the domineering MacNeill alienated Michele’s family by arranging to marry her in secret. Michele’s mother, Helen, discovered after the wedding that her new son-in-law was scheduled to serve six months in jail for a check forgery spree.
The mendacious medical student pursued his medical degree in Mexico before receiving his degree from the College of Osteopathic Medicine in Pomona in 1983. After completing his residency in Queens, he relocated his family to Utah.
“While Martin had a tendency to come across as brash and egotistical, he was also a well-respected professional and was considered a pillar in the Mormon community,” Hogan writes. While working part-time at the health center at Brigham Young University, he earned a law degree at BYU – though he never practiced law. Over the years, he held jobs at various hospitals and clinics in the state. In 2000, he was appointed to the prestigious position of medical director of the Utah State Developmental Center.
His children would soon learn there was a dark side to their father’s professional trajectory, including allegations of sexual misconduct. Michele, a trusting soul, was aware of his penchant for pornography and suspected he was having an affair before her death. In fact, Martin was carrying on simultaneous affairs before settling on a 29-year-old nurse, Gypsy Jyll Willis, following his wife’s death. He would bring her into his home as a nanny to his younger children.
Martin was very controlling in regard to Michele’s surgery, attending all her medical appointments while virtually instructing the surgeon on what post-op medications she should be prescribed. The doctor, though uncomfortable about prescribing heavy narcotics, still followed Martin’s call for an array of drugs that included Percocet and Valium.
Their daughter Alexis, a medical student, returned to the family home in Pleasant Grove to help her mother after surgery. When she went to wake her mother the next morning, she had trouble rousing her. Her father admitted to over-medicating his wife, but claimed it was an accident. When her mother revived, she tearfully described Martin’s force-feeding her more drugs even after she vomited.
Throughout his wife’s recovery, Martin remained in constant contact with Willis, texting her day and night. But Michele told Alexis in their last telephone conversation after her daughter had returned to school that he was being quite loving. A few hours later Michele was dead.
Alexis immediately suspected her father and shared her dark conviction with her older sister, Rachel. The elder sibling wasn’t convinced until the day her father insisted the pair go to temple and pray on the matter of finding a nanny for the younger girls. While they were there, a strange woman wandered over and introduced herself as Jillian. It wasn’t until later that Rachel realized it had all been a set-up; Jillian was actually Gypsy Willis. The woman was soon living in the MacNeill home as a nanny, though she did little to care for the younger girls.
Things became even more sordid. Six weeks after her mother’s death, Alexis awoke in her bedroom at home with her father’s hands groping her buttocks, according to the book. She later used the sexual assault to gain custody of the younger children.
Her father had already sent one of the girls, Giselle, to visit a relative in the Ukraine and then severed contact with her. The 16-year-old, living in abject poverty, frantically tried to reach her father – but he had other plans. Willis had a history of bad debt and needed a new identity. Using his daughter’s Social Security number and altered birth certificate, he created a fraudulent identity for Willis as his wife. Giselle was finally rescued and brought home by an aunt.
After the medical examiner ruled that Michele’s death was the result of a heart condition, Alexis and Rachel got nowhere with their attempts to force police to look closer at their mother’s death.
The women hired their own investigator and uncovered more tawdry secrets from their father’s past, including the suspicion that Martin may have murdered his own brother, the author writes.
It wasn’t until 2008 that the sisters learned the Utah County attorney’s office was finally looking into their mother’s death. Over the next few years, investigators worked closely with Michele’s daughters and her sister, Linda Cluff, finally mustering enough evidence to bring Martin to trial in 2013. It was a complex, circumstantial case, but one that finally resulted in a conviction. Seven years, five months, and eight days after murdering his wife, justice prevailed in a Utah court room. Dr. Martin McNeill was sentenced to serve 15 years to life, plus an additional two years for related crimes.
Source: Sherryl Connelly, The New York Daily News, March 29, 2015.