The Stranger She Loved

by Shanna Hogan

  Sanderson followed Martin as he returned to the bedroom, seemingly to supervise the paramedics.

  “What are you doing to her now?” Martin demanded. “What medications did you give her?” Making it known he was a doctor, he barked orders for her treatment. “Did you give her epinephrine? You need to give her epinephrine!”

  Pulling him aside, Sanderson assured the doctor that everything possible was being done, although not necessarily in the order Martin requested. Reaching for his phone, Sanderson asked Martin to speak with the emergency room physician at the nearby American Fork Hospital, where Michele would be transported. Because Martin was a doctor—and because it was routine for medical professionals to consult with one another—Sanderson believed it would be helpful for the two men to speak directly. Martin, however, refused.

  “No. No.” Martin shook his head, his focus drifting from Sanderson. Instead, he wanted to speak to a different doctor, one he’d worked with previously.

  Sanderson pressed Martin, explaining that it would be more useful for the doctor treating Michele to speak to him, rather than the information being relayed through a third party.

  “I’m a doctor!” Martin pronounced. “She’s dead!”

  Puzzled, Sanderson asked another patrol officer on scene to monitor Martin and try to keep him away from the bedroom. The officer tailed the distraught doctor, attempting to quiet him.

  “You need to calm down, sir,” the officer said. “You need to take some deep breaths. You’re going to hyperventilate.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do!” Martin shouted. “I’m a doctor. I know I’m okay.”

  For twenty minutes paramedics attempted to revive Michele before strapping her body to a gurney to take her to the hospital.

  Outside of the house, concerned and curious neighbors had gathered on the front lawn. Standing on the driveway beside her husband, Kristi Daniels hugged herself around the waist and shuddered. As paramedics loaded the gurney into the back of the ambulance, Kristi caught a glimpse of Michele, blood streaking her cheek. Somehow she knew she would never see Michele MacNeill again.

  * * *

  The gurney barreled through the double doors of American Fork Hospital at 12:24 P.M. Flanked by one paramedic pumping the resuscitator and another steadying the IV, Michele was wheeled down a short hallway into the nearest trauma bay.

  Nurses circled the patient and lifted her onto the hospital bed. An ER tech took over chest compressions. A nurse suctioned the airway clear of any possible fluid or blood.

  When the attending physician, Dr. Leo Van Wagoner, first laid eyes on Michele, he knew she was dead. Her face was blanched, her chest mottled with discoloration. Blood had begun to pool in the lower parts of her body, causing blotchy purple bruising known as lividity on her back and buttocks.

  Van Wagoner skimmed the paramedic report, questions flying through his mind. What had caused her heart to stop? If she had been unconscious for only fifteen minutes, why were the revival efforts unable to produce any signs of life?

  At fifty, Michele was fairly young, and she was healthy, with no known history of heart problems, chest pains, or shortness of breath, according to the medic’s report. Between the medication, compressions, and ventilation, first responders should have been able to regain some sort of cardiac activity.

  Because Michele had been unresponsive for such an extensive period by the time she reached the hospital, the emergency room doctor knew resuscitation efforts were likely futile. But Van Wagoner, an experienced physician in his fifties with a stern face framed by cropped gray hair, would exhaust every medical option in an attempt to revive Michele, as he would for any patient in her condition.

  Shortly after Michele arrived, her husband traipsed through the trauma bay. Van Wagoner knew Dr. MacNeill as the director of a state-run facility for people with intellectual disabilities. Van Wagoner treated some of MacNeill’s patients, and they spoke about twice a month.

  Martin told Van Wagoner about his wife’s plastic surgery and her prescriptions. Contrary to what Martin had told the first responders, he said she was taking just two prescriptions. “She was down to just one Percocet a day,” he said. “And an antibiotic.”

  As the doctors and nurses worked to revive Michele, Martin roamed the corridors and paced around the nurses’ station, causing a scene. The nurses watched as Martin put his hands on his head and screamed at no one in particular, “Why did she do this? I told her not to do this!” At one point, he stomped out of the room, kicked at the door, and threw a stack of papers. Security was called to monitor him.

  In the trauma bay, nurses inserted an IV into Michele’s left shin and taped a catheter to her forearm to administer medications. She was dosed with more epinephrine, calcium, and sodium bicarbonate.

  Because her body was cold—her temperature had dropped to 96.26 degrees Fahrenheit—nurses used tepid fluid and a heated blanket called a Bair Hugger to try to warm her.

  Since Michele had recently undergone a surgery, Van Wagoner considered whether she’d suffered a blood clot. The bluish pattern on her skin appeared consistent with a burst pulmonary embolism—a blood clot that travels to the lungs. Van Wagoner administered a medicine used to break up blood clots, called a tissue plasminogen activator.

  Through all the procedures, the heart monitor continued to hum with a low, flat tone.

  For thirty-eight minutes, hospital staff tried to resuscitate Michele. As the nurses slowly ceased working on his wife, Martin became hysterical. He approached Van Wagoner.

  “I’ll give you ten thousand dollars not to stop,” he begged. “I’ll give you all that I have if you just save her!”

  Van Wagoner balked, astounded.

  “It was the oddest request that I have ever had doing emergency resuscitative efforts,” Van Wagoner said years later. “He offered me ten thousand dollars if I would not cease resuscitation efforts. He offered me ten grand! It put me in a tough spot.”

  Van Wagoner knew that Martin, as a physician, must have realized his wife was dead. In fifteen years of working in the ER, Van Wagoner had never heard such an unusual outburst, especially from a fellow doctor.

  Van Wagoner didn’t respond to the new widower. “I’m calling time of death,” he said somberly, then turned and walked away.

  Martin collapsed, sobbing.

  * * *

  Michele Marie MacNeill—former beauty queen, devoted wife, and loving mother of eight, including four adopted children—was pronounced dead at 1:03 P.M. on April 11, 2007.

  Days after her passing, the Utah State medical examiner would declare Michele’s death due to natural causes from a heart arrhythmia. It appeared that her passing was tragically inevitable.

  But nothing in this case was as it seemed.

  It would take six long years and the unrelenting dedication of Michele’s children to solve the mystery of her death, unraveling a lifetime of duplicitous deceit, searing betrayal, and an unfathomably cruel murder.

  Martin led a life of contradictions. While he portrayed himself as a loving husband, devoted father, and compassionate doctor, it was all a carefully concocted façade. In nearly thirty years of marriage, Michele never knew her husband.

  Perhaps no one ever really knew the real Martin MacNeill.

  2.

  From the moment Martin entered their lives, Michele’s family feared her life would end tragically. But for three long decades, they were forced to observe from a distance, silently bearing witness to her agonizingly slow descent toward death.

  “We all knew in our family that it wasn’t going to work out well for Michele,” remembered her youngest sister, Linda Cluff. “There was nothing really we could do—no way to stop it.”

  It shouldn’t have ended this way. Michele’s life had begun with such promise.

  Born on January 15, 1957, Michele Marie Somers was one of seven children of Milton and Helen Somers. She had three older brothers: Stephen, Richard, and Mick. And she had three sisters: Susan, Terry, and
Linda.

  The children were raised in Concord, California, a scenic suburb about thirty miles east of San Francisco in the shadows of Mount Diablo. Comprised of quiet, middle-class neighborhoods, Concord is the largest city in Contra Costa County. The Somers children ranged vastly in age. Helen had her first son, Stephen, when she was just seventeen. By the time Michele was born, some twenty years later, all of her brothers were grown men. Because of the gap in their ages, Michele wasn’t as close with her brothers. But she grew up tight with her three sisters. And her bond with her youngest sister, Linda Cluff, would endure throughout her life.

  Helen was a stay-at-home mom, while Milton worked various sales jobs. Milton also struggled with alcoholism and wasn’t active in his children’s lives.

  “He wasn’t a good father—I hardly ever remember him being around,” Linda recalled. “My mom pretty much raised us.”

  In addition, their maternal grandmother was very involved in the rearing of all seven children.

  Despite her father’s absence, Michele’s childhood was mostly wholesome and carefree. She was an adorable girl with wide blue eyes and light blond hair. “She was like a princess,” younger sister Terry Pearson remembered. “She was outgoing, very kind. She was very sweet to everybody that she came in contact with.”

  Although Terry described her as a princess, Michele was also a tomboy. Instead of playing with dolls, she rode bikes and pulled wagons with her sisters. Her siblings recall fond memories of her upbringing: piling on the couch with their mom to watch their favorite TV shows, munching on dill pickles from the grocery store, and playing with their dog Daisy’s puppies.

  Michele was a happy, sweet girl with a big heart and a generous spirit. Once she and her sisters secretly collected glass bottles for months, hauling them around in a red wagon, to raise money to buy their mother a brown teapot for hot chocolate. Decades later the pot remained in Helen’s kitchen.

  Michele was bright and had a love of learning. “I just remember how excited she was to turn five, to get to start kindergarten,” older sister Susan Hare recalled. “That enthusiasm for school never left her. She adored school.”

  As she reached her teens, Michele blossomed into a stunningly gorgeous young woman. Standing at five foot seven, she was slender with a curvaceous figure. She had long blond hair, flawless ivory skin, small feminine features, and a perfect smile.

  It seemed she led a charmed life. She was a straight-A student who played the violin and learned to speak French. She enjoyed theater, classical music, and the ballet.

  “Out of everybody in our family, Michele had it made,” Linda later said. “She had everything going for her. She was super smart, happy, beautiful. Everyone liked her.”

  Helen raised her children to be devout Mormons, and Michele and her siblings grew up studying the gospel of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Michele spent much of her life at church, studying the Book of Mormon. She never used alcohol or drugs, which are forbidden in the church. At the end of a long day, she loved to relax in a hot bath, flipping through magazines.

  She attended El Dorado Intermediate School and Concord High School. In high school she was a popular cheerleader who acted in school plays and was voted homecoming queen. For the homecoming dance she wore a long, lacy dress and white elbow-length gloves, her blond hair falling loose around her shoulders. She was crowned with a bejeweled tiara. A photo taken for the student paper was captioned, “Queen Michele reigned over her court.”

  Classmates remember Michele as soft-spoken, beautiful, and not at all pretentious. She went out of her way to be friendly and helpful. Everyone seemed to like her, especially the boys. She always had more guy friends than girlfriends, and had several suitors. During her senior year of high school she spent a semester abroad in Switzerland as a foreign exchange student. Shortly after returning, a smitten Swiss boy flew to California to see her.

  There was a particular type of guy Michele favored. She was attracted to flashy guys with big personalities. Her sisters remember shaking their heads at her sometimes pretentious choice of partners. “She liked different types of guys—real dramatic types,” Linda recalled.

  In 1975, Michele graduated from high school. She planned to continue her education and had a desire to attend Brigham Young University, the famed private Mormon institution in Provo, Utah.

  While contemplating college, she spent her late teens and early twenties working as a professional model and competing in beauty pageants—and was crowned Miss Concord in 1976. In her modeling photos she appeared sensual and sultry, her eyes lined with dark makeup, her hair wavy and feathered.

  Around 1977, Helen and Milton divorced. After that, Milton didn’t have much to do with his seven children. Milton would later remarry. Helen never would, instead devoting her later years to her children and grandchildren.

  Helen moved with her daughters to Mission Viejo, a suburban city in the Saddleback Valley in Orange County, California. Known for its tree-lined streets and picturesque neighborhoods, the city is largely residential and is considered one of the largest master-planned communities in the country.

  Michele was then twenty, and still lived at home. In Mission Viejo, Michele became a fixture at the Mormon church, where as a young adult she was a member of the singles’ ward, which hosted regular events facilitating opportunities for young, unmarried LDS members to meet.

  One night in late 1977, she was attending one such event at church when a man approached her. He was tall and handsome with thick blond hair and icy gray eyes. He flashed a wide, charming smile and reached out his hand. “Hi. I’m Martin.”

  3.

  As Michele would soon discover, Martin was a peculiar young man with a mysterious past. Having grown up in the slums of New Jersey, Martin’s background could not have been more different from Michele’s. His early upbringing was bleak, consumed by extreme poverty, mental illness, abuse, alcoholism, and death.

  Born on February 1, 1956, Martin Joseph MacNeill was one of six children born to Albert MacNeill and Lillian Woodie. He had two older brothers, Albert Jr. and Rufus Roy, and one younger brother, Scott. His sisters were Alice and Mary.

  Their father, Albert Sr., a navy veteran, was twenty-three years older than Martin’s mother. The couple married when Lillian was just a teenager. Albert Sr. was fifty-eight years old when Martin was born.

  The children were raised in Camden, New Jersey, an impoverished, densely populated city located across from Philadelphia’s Delaware River. Infamous for its high crime rate, Camden is considered one of the most dangerous cities in the country. Camden neighborhoods are blighted with crumbling asphalt streets, shuttered warehouses, and dilapidated apartment buildings, their broken windows boarded with plywood.

  Martin would later describe his family as “the definition of dysfunctional.” His parents had violent arguments, often fueled by alcohol. They divorced when Martin was a boy. Following the split, Albert Sr. moved to Long Beach, a seaport city in Southern California.

  Left in the care of their mother, the children lived in a cramped apartment. Martin would later say that Lillian turned to prostitution to support the children. Divided from where the children slept by nothing more than a sheet, she entertained clients as the children were forced to listen to the muffled grunts of sex, Martin claimed.

  It is impossible to know exactly what went on inside the MacNeill household. By 2007, the year of Michele’s passing, nearly every member of Martin’s family would be dead, several the victims of suicide or drug abuse. Whatever occurred had left each of the children deeply scarred and suffering from various maladies.

  In her early twenties, Martin’s sister Alice MacNeill committed suicide by strangling herself.

  Martin’s oldest brother, Albert MacNeill Jr., was an alcoholic. He suffered a stroke and died in a nursing home on March 11, 2005, at the age of sixty-four.

  Rufus Roy MacNeill became a heroin addict. He married and had children, but drugs eclipsed his family. On A
pril 3, 1986, he was found dead of an apparent drug overdose inside his mother’s bathroom in Camden.

  Following a stint in the marines, Scott MacNeill married and had three children. He was employed as a maintenance worker at an apartment complex when he committed suicide on July 30, 2006, at the age of forty-five.

  In the end, Mary MacNeill was the only one of Martin’s siblings who seemed to sidestep the family’s failings. After her parents’ divorce, she moved to Mission Viejo, California, where she later married.

  By his midteens, Martin had also developed a ruthless determination to escape Camden and make something of his life. Around then he moved to Long Beach to live with his father, who was in his seventies.

  Years later, Martin would look back at the dysfunctions in his family with disgust. He considered his parents and siblings weak, pitiful, and pathetic. But Martin faced his own deep-seated issues.

  Only his were more carefully concealed.

  * * *

  As a young man, Martin was handsome—tall and broad-shouldered with high cheekbones and a strong jaw supporting a prominent chin. Highly intelligent, he excelled in school and read voraciously, including classic literature and poetry. He enjoyed theater and acted in school plays.

  Over the years, Martin developed a flamboyant, almost theatrically dramatic personality. He had a strange, stilted manner of speaking and used broad hand gestures in everyday conversation, as if he was delivering a monologue. Because of his eccentric personality, classmates called him “Martin the Martian.”

  Beneath the quirky behavior, Martin was also mentally unstable. His moods fluctuated wildly from manic episodes to bouts of paranoia and depression. When he became enraged, his cold glare was penetrating and terrifying.

  As a teenager he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. After his diagnosis, he became fascinated with understanding the human mind and began studying psychology and psychiatry. He developed a keen ability to read others, instantly discerning one’s motives and weaknesses. He would use that ability to manipulate those around him.