This Utah doctor withheld decades of secrets from his family—from mistresses and falsified transcripts to a hidden felony conviction—a history that bolstered the family's suspicions that he'd killed his wife. How his life of lies unraveled:
In April 2007, the eight kids of the MacNeill family lost their mother, Michele MacNeill, in what authorities quickly determined to be due to natural causes, just days after she had undergone facelift surgery.
“He walked in the room and sort of took it over, like, ‘Look at me,’” Cluff said. “Like he was above everybody. I never liked him. He seemed arrogant to me. He seemed all about himself.” Martin MacNeill decided that his wife should get a full face-lift “out of the blue,” Somers said. “My mom had never talked about that before or anything. She’d never been into plastic surgery.”
Somers, who was in medical school, told her father she would be giving her mother the medication going forward. At that point, Michele was still wearing eye patches. “Ada said my dad picked her up from school and told her to, ‘Go check on your mother,’” Somers said. “So she ran in, just calling, ‘Mommy! Mommy!’ And my dad stayed in the kitchen while she went into the bathroom and found her.”911 operator Heidi Johnson remembered it was hard to understand Martin MacNeill’s call.
“He said, ‘Your mom. She’s in the tub. She's not breathing. I’ve called an ambulance.’ And then he hung up. I just started driving to the airport and I was just screaming. Just screaming. He killed her. That was my first instinct.” But Somers had a hunch. About a month before her Michele’s death, at the request of her mother, she had logged onto her father’s phone while he slept, she remembered.
“He said ‘Oh, I found the perfect nanny.’ And I said, ‘What’s her name?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I think it’s, I think it’s Jillian?’ And I said ‘Dad? Gypsy Jillian Willis?’” Somers remembered. “I said, ‘I know that woman. I know mom was worried you were having an affair with her and you are not to bring her in the home.’”“I moved in to help with the kids. When we had opportunity, I still slept with him,” Willis said.
Witney obtained an investigative subpoena, digging into MacNeill’s background as far back as college and his post-graduate career. He also uncovered that MacNeill had been discharged from the military after briefly serving because he had claimed that he was schizophrenic and hearing voices. “We basically found out that our entire lives had been based and surrounded on lies,” his daughter Rachel said.While Rachel, Alexis and Michele's sisters were trying to get authorities to pay attention to the circumstances behind her death, MacNeill was trying to get another family to adopt the three youngest girls.
Willis used the identity Jillian Giselle MacNeill, and Martin claimed she was his wife and at other times, his daughter.Michele MacNeill’s sister, Linda Cluff, discovered Giselle was still back in Ukraine. She sent her daughter, Jill Harper, to go there, and Harper found her cousin was living in deplorable conditions.
Even though MacNeill was finally free, prosecutor Chad Grunander was preparing to put him back behind bars. After less than two months of freedom, MacNeill went back into custody at a Utah county jail on a $1 million cash bond, facing murder charges in the death of his wife. Most of the MacNeill daughters took the stand and testified about their relationship with their father, how their trust had slowly eroded, and how they came to believe that he killed their mother.
Somers also told the jury her mother asked to feel each of the pills in her hands so she’d know what her husband was giving her, because she had bandages over her eyes and couldn’t see. “[Martin MacNeill] committed a fraud on the federal government with Gypsy in applying for a spousal military I.D. card for Gypsy. And on that application for that I.D. card, they put down, as far as a marriage date, the date that Michele was buried,” Grunander said. “That was a very significant piece of evidence. From my perspective, it was-- it was akin to an admission. I killed Michele, I killed my wife to be with this woman, Gypsy.
“It was going downhill, that they were trying to get his money, that she was not gonna let him keep cheating on her. She wasn’t going to allow that,” Poirier said. “He pretty much just opened up about it. He said he gave her some…sleeping pills and got her to get in the bathtub.”After a 22-day trial, MacNeill’s fate was in the hands of the jury. They deliberated for 11 hours.
On April 9, 2017, after serving two and a half years, Martin MacNeill was found dead at the Utah State Prison. Officials later confirmed that he took his own life.
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