by Shanna Hogan
Those close to the family knew something was very wrong.
In his marriage Martin was a dictator who dominated Michele. She did nothing unless he approved and wasn’t even allowed to speak to neighbors without his permission. Their arguments were dramatic and sometimes turned ugly.
If Michele was bothered by the problems in her marriage, she didn’t confide in friends. Instead, she bore the burden in silence. When Linda tried to speak with her sister about any problems, Michele acted as if everything was fine. “You knew things were going on in the house because you’d hear arguments. But she’d never say anything,” Linda said years later. “It was a very secretive family.”
It’s impossible to know how much Michele understood about her husband’s true character. But over the course of their nearly thirty-year marriage, she caught glimpses of the stranger she’d married. At times the mask he wore inevitably slipped.
Throughout his medical career, Martin always seemed to be leaving jobs, often abruptly. His explanations were inconsistent, which seemed to bother Michele. And there was something else deeply unsettling. Pornography is forbidden in the Mormon faith, and Michele found the act of viewing explicit images to be a betrayal. Periodically over the years, however, she caught Martin looking at X-rated material. They had several nasty fights, but every time it seemed he might lose Michele, Martin threatened to commit suicide.
The couple’s most vicious confrontation took place in August of 2000. Michele caught Martin looking at pornography, and another nasty argument ensued. Shrieking irately, Martin picked up a butcher knife. He threatened to kill his wife and then himself. As he madly waved the knife, Damian, who was fifteen at the time, confronted his father. Damian lunged at Martin, wrestled him to the ground, and pried the knife from his hands.
A neighbor heard the screams and called the police. When officers arrived, Michele said she didn’t want to press charges, but a police report was filed. Martin was placed on a temporary psychiatric hold and spent the night at Wasatch Mental Health in Provo.
Over the years there were dozens of similar fights. But each time, Michele forgave her husband and he promised to change.
Such instances hinted at much deeper problems in the marriage.
Unbeknownst to Michele, Martin was a serial philanderer who engaged in numerous affairs. He frequently used his position as a doctor to prey on his female patients. Martin also had liaisons with women he met at church, online, and at his job. He chose vulnerable partners—new divorcées and single mothers.
After Michele’s death, several women would come forward with disturbing allegations. One woman from church claimed Martin propositioned her over the Internet. A man said that in the eighties he had witnessed Martin raping a girl.
In 1996, while working at the BYU health center, Martin had an affair with one of his patients, a forty-two-year-old recently divorced mother of eight named Karen Wright. When Karen first met Martin, he was seductive and charming, bragging about his dual degrees and luxury cars. He made her feel beautiful and desired, and explained that he didn’t have a good sex life with his wife. Soon they engaged in an affair, once having sex in his office. The encounters left Karen racked with guilt.
“He manipulated me,” Karen later said. “But he managed to do it in a seductive way. I didn’t tell anyone because I thought it was my fault. I think he knew I wouldn’t report it. That’s why he made me think I was so attractive.”
Over the years, Martin’s reckless and irresponsible behavior often got him in trouble. His entire medical career was punctuated with disturbing allegations of sexual assault, misconduct, and misdiagnoses. In 1990, Martin was accused of Medicaid fraud after he tried to bill for treatment and services that were never actually performed. He pled no contest and was banned from Medicaid billing for twelve years.
Four years later, he was accused of having sex with one of his patients at BYU. Around that time the MacNeill children remember a violent altercation between their parents where Martin once again threatened to kill himself.
In 1998, shortly after purchasing the Orem house, Martin abruptly resigned from the BYU health center following a long list of complaints filed against him. He briefly returned to BYU in 1999 for three months but left again after more unseemly allegations surfaced.
At each hospital and clinic that employed him, Martin faced troubles, but he always found another job as a physician, another group of unsuspecting patients who placed their trust in him. Fellow doctors and colleagues grew wary of Martin. But no one ever suspected his most sinister and deep-seated secret.
It was only after his wife’s death that his lies would be exposed.
7.
Being raised in a household stewing in such insidious treachery scarred each of the MacNeill children in various ways. Once they became adults, their lives took very different directions.
By 2000, Martin and Michele’s firstborn, Rachel, was twenty-one. She grew up slender and statuesque, with dark brown hair that contrasted with her alabaster complexion. She had Michele’s wide, warm eyes and Martin’s high cheekbones and angular chin. Unfortunately, she also inherited her father’s mental illness and was diagnosed as bipolar. At times she was exuberant and energetic; on other occasions she sank into depression.
Shortly after graduating high school, Rachel married in the church. Martin and Michele paid for the ceremony, reception, and honeymoon. But the marriage didn’t last, and Rachel soon divorced. She spent her twenties drifting from job to job, moving around the country. She lived twice in Seattle, Washington, before moving to California, where she wed a second time.
After her second marriage also ended in divorce, Rachel returned to Utah, where she rented an apartment in Salt Lake City, which Michele decorated and furnished. She returned to school, where she studied to be a dental hygienist. At the time of her mother’s passing, she was working at a dentist’s office.
Vanessa MacNeill’s life was fraught with more serious problems. Out of all the MacNeill children, their second daughter most closely resembled her mother. She was slim and tan with long blond hair, green eyes, a small nose, and pouty lips. As a teen she was troubled, and she suffered from anxiety. She abused drugs and alcohol and engaged in premarital sex. In the summer of 2000, at the age of eighteen, she discovered she was pregnant.
On March 25, 2001, Vanessa gave birth to a daughter named Ada. Given her troubles, she knew she wasn’t ready to be a mom. Shortly after Ada’s birth, Martin and Michele adopted their granddaughter and raised the girl as their own. Michele doted on Ada, spoiling her with dolls, toys, and a princess bed. All of the MacNeill children adored the little girl, and Alexis was particularly close with Ada.
After she’d given up custody of Ada, Vanessa’s drug abuse escalated and her life spiraled downward. By 2005, she was a heroin addict. Michele, who adored Vanessa, spent years trying to get her daughter into drug treatment programs. Vanessa detoxed and had intermittent bouts of sobriety, but she inevitably relapsed. She rarely held a job for long, and months passed where she was essentially homeless and stayed with friends. Contemptuous of her drug abuse, Martin excluded Vanessa from the family. Privately, he fumed about her problems, calling her “an embarrassment.”
At age twenty-six, Vanessa was living in an apartment in Bluffdale, twenty miles south of Salt Lake City, and attempting to turn her life around. Her mother’s death would leave her shattered.
Of all the children, the MacNeills’ youngest daughter, Alexis, seemed to possess the best traits of both her father and mother. Like Martin, she was wickedly intelligent, determined, and ambitious. Like her mom, she was generous, warm, kindhearted, and had a natural desire to help others. She blossomed into an attractive young woman with narrow brown eyes and a square face framed with straight, dark hair. Although she was the youngest of the MacNeills’ biological daughters, she would become the most responsible and accomplished in the family. After high school, she set out to become a doctor.
Alexis attended Brigha
m Young University for her undergraduate degree, before moving to London to study medicine at the Imperial College of Science, Technology, and Medicine, where she received her master’s. In 2006, she enrolled in medical school at Touro University Nevada College of Osteopathic Medicine. She rented an apartment in Henderson, Nevada, an affluent city in Clark County, about fifteen miles from Las Vegas.
As she navigated through her early twenties, Alexis remained extraordinarily close with her family and often spent weekends and school breaks at her parents’ home in Utah. Alexis’s bond was especially strong with her mother, whom she considered to be her best friend. They spoke several times a day and were so close Michele once commented that they must have been best friends in the “pre-existence.” Their connection would endure beyond her mother’s passing.
Damian MacNeill was perhaps the most disturbed of the children. Like his father and his sister Rachel, he was diagnosed as bipolar. But his bouts of depression seemed more severe. At times he disappeared from the world and sank into despair.
As a young man he was handsome, with shaggy dark brown hair, blue eyes, and a pointed chin. He was intelligent and funny with a wry sense of humor and a deep love of music and movies. After graduating high school, he went on a two-year mission to spread the Mormon message, which is considered a rite of passage for young Latter-day Saints. The church assigns each missionary a designated area in which to serve.
On the day Damian received the letter informing him of his assignment, he was in the front room of the house, surrounded by his family. After ripping open the envelope, he silently read the letter. He then threw back his head and jumped out of his chair.
“I’m going to Hiroshima.” He danced. Alexis leapt toward her brother, squealing with delight, and threw her arms around him.
When he left for Japan, all of his sisters were in tears. Two years later, Damian returned to Utah and enrolled at Utah Valley University, intent on becoming an attorney.
In the spring of 2006, he began dating a beautiful young woman named Eileen Heng, also an aspiring attorney, who had long, silky black hair, full lips, and petite features. The MacNeill family embraced Eileen, and she was a frequent guest for Sunday dinners and social gatherings. As the only son, Damian remained closest with his father.
Their enigmatic bond would ultimately destroy Damian’s life.
* * *
Once the MacNeill children were grown and had moved out of the Orem house, the place seemed empty. Martin and Michele were raising Ada. But Michele, who was accustomed to juggling a family of four children, found herself with much more free time. Having since undergone a hysterectomy, she was also facing the symptoms of early menopause and was taking prescription hormones. Martin and Michele were both in their midforties when they made the surprising choice to adopt three more girls in 2003.
While Michele always had a big heart and adored children, the decision confounded some family members. Never before had Michele expressed an interest in adoption. Years later, Linda would question what exactly had inspired the decision. Had Martin pressed for more children to consume Michele’s time? Was the grand philanthropic move just another way for him to seem more impressive?
“She loved kids but her kids were grown up and out of the house,” said a family friend. “I think he wanted her to be monopolized with kids, being busy taking them places. Because if everyone was out of the house it was just him and her. He couldn’t live his separate life.”
Regardless of the motivation, Michele began the adoption process, searching overseas in Ukraine. By 2003, Europe’s largest country had become a popular destination for Americans wanting to adopt Caucasian children, where the waiting period was only about five months to one year. Ukrainian law requires orphans to be at least five years old before they are eligible for adoption by American parents, with exemptions made for children with special needs.
Orphanages in Ukraine are austere cement buildings, housing thousands of children in dreary conditions. Orphans are assigned daily chores, given one outfit to wear, and permitted to bathe just once a week. After touring the facilities, Martin and Michele selected three girls from two separate orphanages. As they went through the adoption process, the couple hired a translator named Yulia Shust, who would later come to play an unusual role in the MacNeills’ life story.
In 2003, Noelle, Giselle, and Elle became the newest members of the MacNeill family. The eldest, Noelle, was a thirteen-year-old waif of a girl with cropped dark hair. She had grown up in the same orphanage as Giselle, a diminutive twelve-year-old with a light complexion. Elle, age ten, had a heart-shaped face framed with light blond hair.
Michele truly adored her new daughters, dressing them in the same type of girly dresses as she had her other daughters. The girls attended Orem Elementary School, and Michele enrolled them all in ballet classes. “She told us we were her princesses,” Elle said during her mother’s funeral.
But it wasn’t all bliss. After growing up abandoned, the girls faced difficulty adjusting to their new lives. As the youngest, Elle had the smoothest adjustment—she picked up English easily and did well in school—whereas Giselle could hardly write in English and had a pronounced Ukrainian accent. Noelle, however, was the most troubled and disconnected from the family.
For the first few months after the adoptions, there appeared no obvious signs of distress with the girls. Then, without warning, Noelle disappeared. Linda Cluff recalled visiting with Noelle at family gatherings. Then one day she was at the house when she noticed the girl was gone.
“Where’s Noelle?” Linda asked.
“We couldn’t deal with her,” Linda was told. “We had to send her away.”
Linda was shocked. “Everything was going fine. No one says ‘we’re having trouble.’ And all of the sudden she sort of disappears,” Linda recalled years later.
Noelle had been sent to a treatment facility in Michigan for children who suffer from reactive attachment disorder, a rare but serious condition in which a child lacks any attachment with caregivers. Eventually, Martin and Michele unraveled the adoption and Noelle became a ward of the state of Michigan. Years later, as an adult, Noelle would reach out to her siblings on Facebook and reconnect with the family. Michele, however, would never see Noelle again.
In 2004, shortly after Noelle departed the home, the MacNeills adopted another daughter from Ukraine. An adorable brunette, Sabrina was just seven when she and her sister were placed into an orphanage in the Eastern Ukraine city of Gorlovka—the same facility where Elle had lived. Growing up together, Sabrina and Elle had been close friends.
Around the time of Elle’s adoption, another American woman had adopted Sabrina, then ten, and her younger sister. But once Sabrina had settled with the family in New York, it became clear to her that her new mother only wanted her five-year-old sister. Sabrina felt unwelcome and unloved.
In the summer of 2004, Sabrina traveled to Utah to visit her friend Elle. During her monthlong stay, Sabrina bonded with the MacNeills. When Sabrina told Martin and Michele of her life in New York, they decided to adopt her, reaching out to the girl’s adoptive mother to complete the process.
The MacNeill family now consisted of Martin, Michele, Rachel, Vanessa, Alexis, Damian, Giselle, Elle, Sabrina, and Ada.
Sabrina blended easily into the MacNeill family, excelling in school and taking ballet with the other girls. After so many hardships, Sabrina’s life with her new family was everything she had ever hoped for. “It was wonderful,” Sabrina remembered. “I had always dreamed for a family like the MacNeills when I was first adopted. My mom was just wonderful. It was exactly what I dreamed of—just perfect.”
While the adopted children loved Michele, they all recall Martin as being largely absent. While Martin had a connection with his biological kids, the adopted girls seemed more like window dressing or props on the stage of his life. “I saw him every once in a while,” Sabrina said years later. “He worked a lot. He was gone all the time, but I saw him sometim
es.”
But while Sabrina and Elle said life with the MacNeills was happy, Giselle’s recollections were more unsettling. She remembered Martin as cruel and malicious, and claimed the girls all feared him. Giselle said he once molested her while they were together in the living room alone. “He was touching me in weird places. I don’t know what it was about me. He was always touching me,” she explained with a thick Ukrainian accent. “I always felt weird.”
Following the incident, Giselle retreated to her bedroom in the basement. She later spoke to Michele about the sexual assault, but her mother told her not to speak of it again. “You can’t actually have this conversation with him right now,” Michele told Giselle. “He’s under a lot of stress.”
For Giselle, it seemed like once Noelle was gone, all the tension in the MacNeill home transferred to her. “I felt like I was loved for a couple of months,” Giselle would recall years later. “But then afterward I was more of a troubled girl and it was more that I felt weird about that whole family.”
While both Sabrina and Elle enjoyed ballet, were straight-A students, and embraced the Mormon faith, Giselle never really fit in with the MacNeills. She didn’t do well in school, hated ballet, and refused to take dance classes. And she expressed little interest in converting to the Mormon faith. Feeling like an outsider in the home, Giselle became further withdrawn from the family.
She was subsequently punished and forced to spend hours completing chores. “It was more happy, but miserable at the same time. I was more of a slave girl who always cleans up, always gets in trouble, always does something,” she recalled. “I was one of the girls who was not part of the family. I was part of the side girl … I decided to back off just a little more because they never wanted to be around me. That’s how I looked at it.”
But perhaps Martin ostracized Giselle for more perverse reasons. While Sabrina and Elle were private and reserved, Giselle had a nasty habit of revealing family secrets. “The problem with Giselle is she told things,” explained a family friend. “And you don’t tell what goes on in that house. You have to keep the secrets.”