The Stranger She Loved

by Shanna Hogan

  Although she had been dating other men previously, Gypsy now seemed exclusive to her married boyfriend. When a potential suitor she met on the Internet e-mailed her for a date, she told him it would be inappropriate given her current relationship. “A very good and best friend of mine has recently become much more than that,” she wrote in March 2007. “I met him online a year and a half ago. We’ve always been great together … And just recently his reasoning and views changed and we are together now.”

  Meanwhile, Michele could no longer ignore the signs of infidelity. Six weeks before her death, her suspicions had heightened. She confronted Martin more and more often. In February, Michele confided in her daughter Alexis.

  “I think your dad is having an affair,” Michele said, before bursting into tears.

  13.

  Martin and Michele’s twenty-ninth wedding anniversary was on February 21, 2007. On that day there was a romantic getaway, a candlelit dinner, passionate sex in a hotel room, and professions of love. But Martin was not with his wife.

  Instead, he spent his wedding anniversary with his mistress.

  The trip was to Scottsdale for Martin’s second appointment at the Mayo Clinic. With Gypsy accompanying him, they turned the medical visit into an amorous adventure. The couple first drove to Nevada, where Martin stopped in Henderson to visit Alexis and exchange vehicles with her, because he said the convertible she owned would be more fun for him to drive on his trip.

  Before seeing his daughter, Martin dropped Gypsy off at a nearby restaurant, in order to conceal the fact that he was traveling with another woman. Still, Alexis was suspicious of her father’s unusually exuberant mood when he stopped by her place. Knowing her mother’s concerns of infidelity, Alexis decided to secretly investigate.

  While Martin was inside the apartment, Alexis went out to his vehicle and opened the trunk. The luggage she found there included a few bags she didn’t recognize. Unzipping one of the bags, Alexis found makeup, women’s clothing, and lingerie.

  Her stomach sank.

  She closed the trunk and didn’t say anything to her father. Minutes later, Martin came outside, transferred the luggage to the other vehicle, gave Alexis the keys to his car, and left in the convertible to pick up Gypsy.

  As soon as he drove off, Alexis called her mom and told her what she had found.

  Horrified, Michele phoned her husband.

  “Who are you with?” Michele cried. “What is this about?”

  Martin denied to his wife that there was anything nefarious linked to the extra luggage, claiming the bags belonged to a colleague at the Developmental Center. Hanging up the phone, Martin turned around and returned to Alexis’s apartment. On the way he discreetly called Gypsy and explained what had happened. To allow Martin time to deal with his family, Gypsy made arrangements to stay the night with friends in Nevada.

  When Martin returned to the apartment, he berated Alexis, acting indignant that she could possibly think he would be unfaithful. To erase his daughter’s lingering doubts, Martin stayed overnight at Alexis’s place.

  Early the following morning, Martin picked Gypsy up from her friends’ house and they continued the trip to Arizona. For the remainder of their getaway, Martin and Gypsy stayed together in hotel rooms, where they could be intimate.

  * * *

  In March, Michele had plans to meet with her “Ya-Ya Sisters” for lunch. But that morning she called Loreen, sobbing. “Martin really needs me to do some things,” she said through her tears. “I can’t come to lunch.”

  “We can do it another time,” Loreen said.

  “But I really need my Ya-Ya Sisters,” she cried. It broke Loreen’s heart to hear Michele so upset.

  Michele would never get a chance to see her three close friends again.

  Martin, meanwhile, continued to speak of his impending death. He remained oddly inconsistent as to the cause of his illness. Intermittently throughout the month of March, he used a cane, while at other times he seemed healthy and physically fit.

  One weekend, Rachel was at the house while Martin was working on a home improvement project, enlarging Elle’s bedroom in the basement with drywall. Rachel watched as Martin singlehandedly carried the heavy materials down the stairs. Offering to assist, Rachel raced him down the steps. But Martin did not slow down and refused her help, snapping at his daughter, “I got it.”

  * * *

  On Friday, March 16, Alexis had come home for the weekend. While Martin was at work, she helped her mom snoop through the house, searching for anything that could connect him to an affair. Instead of hotel receipts or love letters, they discovered an envelope from the Mayo Clinic. Inside were the test results from Martin’s visits in February—and the contents of the reports were stunning.

  Contrary to what he had told his family and congregation, he was not dying of cancer, MS, or any other life-threatening disease. In fact, Martin was in good health. Tests that were performed on his big toe had determined he had a simple hereditary condition. He had been diagnosed with a rare genetic disease known as “hereditary neuropathy with liability to pressure palsies.” This nerve disorder causes pain, numbness, and paralyzation in the limbs. It is not, however, life-threatening, and can be treated by simple lifestyle adjustments, such as avoiding excess pressure on the nerves.

  A wave of relief momentarily washed over Michele—her husband was going to live. But she was also perplexed. If Martin was healthy, why hadn’t he told anyone in the family? Why was he continuing to tell people he was dying?

  * * *

  That night, after Martin returned from work and they all sat around the kitchen table, Alexis implemented her plan to expose her father’s adultery. Earlier she had plotted with Michele, concocting a ruse to get ahold of Martin’s cell phone and gain access to his call records.

  “Hey Dad,” she said. “I want to download a new ringtone to your phone. Can I see it?”

  Reluctantly, Martin handed over his phone.

  While he wasn’t looking, Alexis slyly connected to the T-Mobile Web site and requested that the password to his account be texted to his phone. When she received the text seconds later, she memorized the password and deleted the message so Martin wouldn’t know what she had done. She then downloaded a ringtone and handed the phone back to her dad.

  Later that night, Michele and Alexis signed on to the T-Mobile Web site and reviewed his phone records from January. They quickly identified one number in particular that they didn’t recognize—a number Martin had called frequently all month, often late at night. Some of the calls were placed in the middle of the night, at 2 and 3 A.M. Alexis wrote down the number and told her mom she would investigate further. That Sunday she flew back to Nevada.

  On Monday—March 19—Alexis called the number. At first no one answered and the call went to voice mail. It was not a personal greeting, and Alexis couldn’t determine much about the owner’s identity. An hour later she called again, but there was still no answer.

  At 5:41 P.M., she called a third time, and finally someone answered.

  “Hello,” the woman said.

  Alexis’s heart sank. The voice clearly belonged to a young female.

  “Hello,” the voice repeated. “Hello?”

  Alexis hung up without saying a word.

  Heart racing, Alexis immediately called her mom and told her the distressing news that Martin had indeed been phoning a woman.

  The following day Alexis ran a background check, conducting a reverse phone number lookup on the Web site Intelius, which provides access to public records. She paid the seventy-dollar fee and entered the suspicious phone number. The results produced a name: Gypsy Jyll Willis.

  * * *

  “Gypsy? What kind of name is Gypsy?” Michele asked her daughter when Alexis called her with the results of the search.

  “It sounds like the name of a stripper,” Alexis commented.

  When Martin came home from work that night, Michele confronted him, admitting she had seen
his phone records. “Who’s Gypsy?”

  Martin immediately became defensive, claiming the calls were innocent.

  “She’s nobody. Just a nurse I had worked with,” he said dismissively. “She’s renting one of our properties.”

  “Well, why have you called her at all these strange hours?” Michele asked. “Like three o’clock in the morning?”

  There was no reason for a married father to be speaking to a young woman in the middle of the night, Michele said. Martin claimed they spoke at night because Gypsy worked the graveyard shift as a nurse. Michele doubted her husband’s tale, and told him it seemed implausible. She insisted that he cease contact with Gypsy immediately. After a contentious argument, Martin agreed.

  But he had no intention of keeping his word.

  He immediately changed the password on his T-Mobile account. And in a subsequent conversation with Gypsy, he told her they needed to be more discreet—they would no longer be able to speak on his cell phone, because Michele was monitoring his call records. Martin, however, had an idea to get around the problem.

  “From now on we can only text from my cell,” he said. “I’ll call you from my office phone.”

  Over the next few weeks Martin saw Gypsy several times and they texted frequently—often exchanging more than a dozen texts each day.

  * * *

  “You need a face-lift,” Martin told his wife, cocking his head as if he were examining her appearance.

  “What?” Michele was taken aback, aghast.

  Martin softened his approach. “I want to get you a face-lift, as a gift.”

  It was the day after the fight about Gypsy when Martin made this unusual suggestion, seemingly out of nowhere.

  Michele wasn’t sure how to react. She didn’t feel like she looked old, and she considered invasive cosmetic surgery indulgent. As he had been throughout their marriage, however, Martin was persuasive. He told her it would make her feel better about herself.

  “After you are all healed, we can take a cruise,” he said.

  Michele examined herself in the mirror, scrutinizing the lines on her face. At age fifty, she was still a striking beauty. But time, as it has a tendency to do, had caused her looks to begin to fade. Fine wrinkles surrounded her eyes; her skin sagged slightly around her jaw. The thought of erasing a decade from her face was enticing. But more than anything, Michele desperately wanted to save her marriage. Martin had lost weight, was tanning, and she suspected he was sleeping with another woman. Perhaps if she looked younger, Martin wouldn’t be tempted to stray. It took some convincing from Martin, but eventually she agreed that she would see a surgeon, to learn more about the procedure.

  With haste, the very next morning, Martin began the hunt for a plastic surgeon. Searching through the newspaper, he found an ad for a surgeon offering a coupon for discount Botox. Martin called and scheduled a consultation.

  Dr. Scott Kent Thompson was fairly new to Utah, having opened his practice just nine months prior. A recently board-certified facial plastic surgeon with offices in Bountiful, Draper, and Layton, Thompson had completed medical school at the University of Rochester and a fellowship in New York before opening Scott Thompson Facial Plastics in 2006. Thompson’s main office was in Layton, an urban bedroom community about sixty miles from the MacNeill home in Pleasant Grove. Although there were dozens of qualified surgeons close by, Martin seemed intent on selecting one outside the area, who would not know his professional reputation.

  On March 22, Martin and Michele met with Dr. Thompson. Introducing himself, Martin lied to Thompson, saying he was an attorney and licensed psychiatrist. “Don’t worry. I’ve never sued anyone,” Martin said with a chuckle.

  Martin and Michele took a seat at a large wooden desk across from the surgeon. Thompson was in his thirties with a narrow, boyish face, sandy brown hair, and thick-framed glasses. He appeared young for a plastic surgeon, but his knowledgeable demeanor seemed to instill confidence.

  Michele spoke with the doctor, expressing concerns that she was now middle-aged and starting to see some changes in her face. They discussed various procedures and options. The hollows in her cheeks could be corrected by a mid-face lift. A brow lift would smooth the wrinkles in her forehead. A lower-face lift would tighten the skin around the jawbone to reduce jowling. And droopy eyelids and bags could be fixed with an eyelid surgery.

  Martin and Michele went back and forth, playfully discussing options. To Dr. Thompson, Martin seemed very protective of his wife, saying he was concerned about her high blood pressure and that he was going to have it checked out by a physician. Michele also expressed some hesitations, saying she was concerned about the risks, recovery, and downtime.

  At the end of the consultation, Martin told the doctor they wanted all the procedures they had discussed—a forehead lift, mid-face lift, lower-face lift, and an upper and lower eyelid surgery. “We just want to address this all at once.” Martin smiled at his wife.

  The surgery was scheduled for April 3—just twelve days later.

  * * *

  After booking the surgery, Michele told Alexis about the face-lift.

  “Mom,” Alexis said with concern in her voice, “you don’t need that. You’re beautiful.”

  “I don’t really want to do it,” Michele said. “But if your dad’s getting all fixed up and looking good, maybe I should too.”

  Amid the growing suspicions of an affair, Alexis was terribly bothered that her dad would convince her mom to change her appearance. Cosmetic surgery was never something she thought her mom would consider, Alexis later said. “She’d never been into plastic surgery,” Alexis said years later. “My mom had never talked about that before or anything.”

  Because Martin would be busy at work, Alexis volunteered to assist in her mother’s recovery. The surgery date corresponded with her spring break from medical school.

  Still, it was alarming how quickly the operation was moving forward.

  Later, Alexis spoke to her dad about the surgery. “When I talked to him initially he said he was giving it to her as a present,” Alexis recalled. “He surprised her with the plastic surgery as a present.”

  Perhaps embarrassed, Michele didn’t mention to many of her friends that she was getting a face-lift. “I don’t think she wanted people to know she was doing it,” one friend later said. “She was beautiful.”

  * * *

  On March 25, the MacNeills celebrated Ada’s sixth birthday. When Rachel arrived at the house that afternoon for the party, she noticed a silver Volkswagen Beetle parked out front. “Who parked in my spot?” Rachel asked. No one in the family seemed to know who the car belonged to.

  The next day was a sacred occasion for Elle and Sabrina. The whole family went to temple for a sealing ceremony, binding the two adopted daughters to the MacNeills for all eternity. Giselle, who resisted converting to Mormonism, declined to be linked forever to the family for which she had no attachment.

  Michele wanted the day to be special and purchased presents for the girls. Martin, however, appeared in a foul mood and was particularly nasty toward his wife. Michele spent most of the day in tears.

  Later that night, at the house, Alexis and Rachel were passing by Martin’s home office when they noticed their father at his desk, flipping through a thick book while jotting down notes. Alexis recognized the book as the Physicians’ Desk Reference, a guide known as the PDR in the medical community, which lists various prescription drugs, their chemical makeup, effects, and common usage.

  The book was covered in dust. Over the last ten years Alexis had seldom seen her dad look through it, and was surprised to see him reading it so intently.

  “Hey Dad,” Alexis said, stepping into the office. “What’re you doing?”

  Martin looked up from the book.

  His tone was curiously cheery. “I just want to make sure I’ll have all the medications your mom will need after her surgery.”

  * * *

  To ease Michele’s apprehensio
ns about the surgery, Martin contacted a doctor he worked with and asked to schedule a physical examination. Dr. Von Welch was a physician of internal medicine at Mountain Clinic in American Fork. Welch, in his fifties, with thinning brown hair, narrow eyes, and sharp features, regularly treated Martin’s patients at the Developmental Center, and they had a professional friendship.

  At the time of Martin’s phone call, Dr. Welch’s schedule was hectic and he wasn’t currently accepting new patients. However, Martin asked if he would see his wife as a personal favor, to avoid delaying the plastic surgery.

  On March 29, Martin and Michele met with Dr. Welch. Martin introduced his wife and explained they were very interested in moving forward with the surgery as scheduled.

  Because Michele was a new patient, Welch began the exam by asking about her medical history. Martin spoke for his wife, answering all the questions.

  “She doesn’t have any history of health problems,” Martin said as Michele sat quietly on the exam table.

  When Welch asked about heart problems, Michele stared blankly at her husband.

  “She has no heart problems,” he answered.

  Michele softly corrected him. “I have had heart palpitations in the past.”

  Welch would later say he found it odd how Martin took control of the examination.

  “She didn’t have very much to say,” Welch remembered. “She would answer a question and be quiet. It was very difficult to get much history or information from her.”

  During the course of the examination, Welch became frustrated by Martin’s continuous interjections and asked to speak with Michele alone.

  “I asked him to leave the examining room because he was answering all the questions for her and I felt like she could speak more freely if he was out of the room,” Welch said years later.

  Once Martin was gone, Michele told the doctor that she had been under a lot of stress and had been feeling depressed. While she didn’t elaborate or provide details as to what was causing her despair, Welch got the impression that she might have been facing marital problems.