The Stranger She Loved

by Shanna Hogan

  “I vow to live my life with passion as she did, to love those in need as she did, and to not judge others but to love them, as she did,” wrote another.

  Even the Ukrainian translator who had assisted with Michele’s adoption of her girls left a comment, posting her condolences. “My thoughts and prayers are with you in your time of grief. May your memories bring you comfort,” Yulia Shust wrote.

  For Michele’s children, it helped to know how much she was loved.

  * * *

  Martin, meanwhile, made hasty arrangements to bury his wife. Without consulting his children and against their desires, he planned for the funeral to be held three days after her death—a Saturday.

  “My father was very adamant to have the funeral right away,” Alexis recalled.

  Martin never spoke to anyone in the Somers family about Michele’s death, and forbade his children from sharing any details of her passing.

  “I don’t want those people showing up at the funeral,” Martin announced to his family. Michele’s youngest sister, Linda Cluff, was one of the few exceptions. Martin told his daughters to contact Linda with instructions about who in the Somers family could attend the funeral. Linda was informed her family’s presence would only compound Martin’s grief. If they showed up at the church, the police would be there to escort them from the property.

  “One good thing about Michele’s death is I won’t have to deal with them anymore,” Martin grumbled to his kids.

  Michele’s older brothers, Mick and Stephen Somers, had already arrived in Utah from their homes in California when they learned they were not welcome at the funeral. Because they didn’t want to upset Michele’s childrens, they decided not to press the issue.

  While making his wife’s final arrangements, Martin also continued to text and call Gypsy. The day after Michele’s death, Gypsy snapped six suggestive pictures on her cell phone. In one she was topless, with her bare backside turned to the camera. She sent the images to Martin. Later she would admit she’d sent the provocative pictures to keep him interested in her. “I wanted to distract him and I wanted him to still think of me,” Gypsy confessed.

  On the morning of the funeral, April 14, Gypsy sent two more text messages at around 9 A.M. At the time, Martin was dropping his younger daughters off at neighbor Angie Aguilar’s house. To assist the family during their difficult time, Angie had agreed to babysit.

  Exchanging pleasantries with Angie, Martin made an odd comment about adding a trellis to his house. He did not discuss Michele.

  An hour later Martin arrived at the Manila Stake Center, a meeting place for their local stake, a regional group encompassing several LDS wards. The building was located on the grounds of the Mount Timpanogos Utah Temple, where the MacNeills spent each Sunday. Linda Cluff and her children also arrived at the stake center early. When they pulled into the parking lot, Martin was standing beside his car, unloading boxes of Michele’s trophies, pictures, and memorabilia from the trunk. He had set up two tables inside to display the items.

  Linda noticed he wasn’t using a cane and was walking around without difficulty. She offered to assist with the boxes, but Martin waved her away. “He was extremely rude and refused any help,” Linda remembered.

  The funeral began at 11 A.M. In attendance were dozens of fellow churchgoers, friends, and neighbors from Pleasant Grove, including Angie Aguilar, Cheryl Radmall, Loreen Thompson, and Jacqueline Colledge. Martin’s coworkers John David Laycock and Roma Henrie were also present. Even the plastic surgeon, Dr. Scott Thompson, attended.

  Absent from the funeral were most of the Somers family, as per Martin’s directive.

  Among the sea of heartbroken faces was a dark-haired woman in a form-fitting black dress. She sat toward the back of the church and didn’t speak to anyone. Gypsy Willis wasn’t there to mourn her former romantic rival, the late Mrs. Martin MacNeill. She wanted to support Martin. Gypsy spent much of the funeral staring at her phone, discreetly sending texts to her lover. I’m thinking of you, she wrote.

  “I was concerned for Martin,” Gypsy recalled. “I wanted to be there for him.”

  * * *

  During the funeral, several of Michele’s loved ones shared fond memories.

  Cheryl and Loreen spoke about the joy their “Ya-Ya Sister” had brought to their lives.

  Rachel described the last time she’d seen her mom, on Easter. Alexis told the congregation of the amazing bond she had with her mother and the shock and disbelief of knowing she was gone.

  “Last time I spoke to my mom she was happy,” Alexis said, her voice breaking.

  Martin, who sat near the front of the church, directing the music, was the last to speak. His eulogy would last thirty minutes and leave the audience confounded.

  Using a cane, he limped to the podium and began with a joke, before launching into a speech about his difficult childhood growing up in New Jersey. He talked at length about his siblings who died from substance abuse or committed suicide. He mentioned the brother who he said “drank himself senseless” and suffered a stroke, the family members whose bodies were ravaged by years of booze and heroin addiction. As for his brother Rufus Roy, he said his mother found him dead with a needle in his arm. “Ten nickel bags were his ticket out.”

  Martin also spoke of his personal struggles in life, questioning why he was suffering the loss of his wife. “What have I done to cause this?”

  He quoted the story of Job from the Bible and questioned God about why He had taken his wife away. “Lord, I thought I was your boy,” he said. “Lord, I thought I was doing a good job. Lord, are you there?”

  Later, he vowed that he and his children would survive the terrible fate God had dealt them. “As the hours passed last night, the answer came to me.” Martin paused. “I’ve had such a good life.”

  Throughout the speech, he didn’t speak of Michele as a wonderful wife and mother. Instead, she was only mentioned in passing.

  Michele’s friends found his eulogy bizarre and insincere. “It was probably the strangest funeral I’ve ever been to,” said one friend. “When Martin spoke, it was all about himself. He talked about past traumas in his life. People he had lost who died of drug overdoses or suicides. And it was all about him. He didn’t honor Michele at all. I don’t know if he wanted us to feel sorry for him, or amazed that he turned out so well coming up through such difficult circumstances. It was just really bizarre.”

  At the conclusion of the services, Martin and his children gathered outside the church to greet those who had come to pay their last respects. While Martin had seemed upset earlier in the day, his mood appeared to brighten. At one point Rachel looked over and saw her father grinning as he chatted with a young brunette.

  “His emotions would kind of fluctuate,” Rachel recalled. “He would be sad and then he’d be smiling. It depended on who he was talking to.”

  Rachel didn’t know it at the time, but Martin was smiling while talking to his mistress. Throughout the day, Martin and Gypsy exchanged twenty text messages, and he later called her from his cell phone.

  As Michele’s casket was loaded into the hearse, her friend Lani Swallow approached Martin to offer her condolences. Strangely, she noticed, he wasn’t crying and no longer seemed mournful. Offering her assistance with the girls, Lani explained she had recently been laid off work, her son had moved out of the house, and she would be happy to serve as the children’s nanny.

  “My heart was broken. I just loved this family and loved these girls,” Lani later said. “And I just thought that it would be really important for them to have someone they knew who cared about them and gave them comfort that knew their mother.”

  But Martin said he had already found help. “I already hired a nanny,” Martin told her. “It’s a nurse I work with.”

  * * *

  The family gathered at the Highland City Cemetery for Michele’s burial. Linda stood near the plot with her daughter, eyeing Martin suspiciously. At first she noticed he was using a
cane. But when Ada began to cry, Martin handed the cane to the funeral director and bent down to pick up the girl. Then, as people started to approach, a worried look came across Martin’s face. He put Ada down, grabbed the cane, and hobbled to his seat.

  “People were starting to come and I noticed him just looking around,” Linda said years later. “As people were starting to approach, he sat Ada down and started using the cane again and limped over.”

  Michele’s body was lowered into the ground, dirt shoveled atop her casket. There would be no tombstone or marker on her grave for more than a year.

  * * *

  Once Michele was buried, Martin’s demeanor was suddenly jovial. He laughed, smiled, and remarked that he was now a bachelor.

  Following the funeral, family and close friends gathered at a restaurant in Pleasant Grove for lunch. Linda sat across from Martin, listening as he made jokes about having to fill his days playing golf with his buddies.

  “He was smiling, joking around with some gentlemen,” she recalled. “It was particularly disturbing to me. It caught my attention, and I listened because he was joking more about how he would have to get used to living the life of a bachelor.”

  Even Rachel, who always adored her father, was disgusted by his demeanor. “He was making jokes about being single, and laughing,” Rachel remembered. “It made me sick. I just left.”

  * * *

  The Somers family, who had been kept from the funeral, held their own private graveside ceremony the following day. Coupled with their grief over Michele’s death was an intense anger toward Martin.

  When Mick and Stephen heard about the strange circumstances of their sister’s death, they both suspected Martin had played a part in her passing.

  For Linda, Martin’s behavior at the funeral confirmed what she had feared for years. “As soon as I heard Michele died I had no doubt that Martin had killed her,” Linda said years later.

  She was determined that Martin would not get away with murder.

  Linda’s years-long quest for justice was just beginning.

  20.

  If anything happens to me, make sure it wasn’t your dad.

  Those words kept replaying in Alexis’s mind in the days after her mother’s death. Following the funeral, she was plagued by awful thoughts. Every time she stepped into her parents’ bedroom or bathroom, her mind reeled.

  This is where he killed her, she thought. This house is where my dad killed my mom.

  She couldn’t sleep and ate very little. The thought of ever taking a bath again, which she had always enjoyed, was repellent. It would be years before she could dip inside a bathtub again, even in her own home.

  While it was difficult to fully accept, she continued to believe that her father killed her mother. “I just had this overwhelming feeling that he had done it,” Alexis recalled. “My whole world turned upside down. I am a pretty rational person, but that was the feeling. It was very strange, unsettling, and horrifying to come to that realization.”

  Hoping to make sense of her suspicions, she questioned her father.

  While originally he had told her the police confiscated the medication, Alexis pressed him repeatedly on the issue. Frustrated, Martin snapped.

  “They were thrown out!” he shouted. “It was making me too sad to look at it.”

  Cocking her head, Alexis gave her father a puzzled look.

  “As soon as I heard that, things were just starting to add up. Everything was adding up,” Alexis said years later.

  For a time, Alexis didn’t share her concerns with anyone but Rachel. Her most immediate worries were for the welfare of her younger sisters.

  Now unemployed, Rachel spent the next few weeks at her parents’ house, watching over the girls. Rachel, Vanessa, and Alexis all volunteered repeatedly to be their caretakers, but Martin was firm: they needed to hire a nanny.

  * * *

  Five days after his wife’s death, Martin returned to work at the Developmental Center. On that Monday morning he arrived early. Steve Nickelson, who had recently resigned as nurse practitioner and was working his final week, was one of the few employees in the building at the time.

  As Nickelson passed by Martin’s office, he was surprised to see the doctor. Martin had taken only two bereavement days. It was shocking to see the doctor return to work so quickly after suffering such a sudden and tremendous loss. When Nickelson found Martin sitting at his desk, he stopped to offer his condolences. While sympathetic, Nickelson was also undeniably curious about what had happened to Martin’s wife. After about twenty minutes of casual conversation, Nickelson got the nerve to ask. “What happened?”

  Sighing deeply, Martin regurgitated the story he had told investigators and his family. “You know she had undergone cosmetic surgery?”

  As they spoke, Nickelson noticed Martin showed no hint of emotion.

  “I think he let me put the pieces together,” Nickelson recalled. “I don’t think he told me he thought she hit her head or he thought she drowned. He left it at that and let me draw my own conclusions.”

  Toward the end of their conversation, Nickelson glanced at Martin’s left hand and noticed he was wearing a different wedding ring. For the past six years they had worked together, Martin had always worn a plain gold wedding band. Now he was wearing a ring with a distinctive black stripe.

  Administrator Roma Henrie also noticed the new ring that afternoon when Martin arrived, unexpectedly, at the weekly steering meeting. “Sitting on the steering team for eight or nine years, you recognize the wedding bands of everyone,” she said later in court. “And then when someone’s ring is suddenly missing or changed, you notice that.”

  Committee members were seated around the conference table when Martin arrived, much to their dismay.

  “What are you doing here?” Henrie asked. “You should be at home!”

  In a somber tone, Martin told the others he welcomed the distraction from his grief. “My older children are with the younger girls,” he said. “I have nothing to do at home.”

  Nursing director Guy Hale Thompson remembered that Martin seemed strangely calm that day. “It was pretty much business as usual,” he remembered.

  Later during the meeting, another coworker pointed out Martin’s new ring. Martin explained he had lost his wedding band and had bought a cheap one to wear in its place. “I didn’t feel comfortable without a ring on my finger,” he said.

  Following the meeting, Henrie went to Martin’s office to privately offer her sympathies. She hadn’t had a chance to speak with him at the funeral. “I just wanted to say how sorry I am,” she said. “I didn’t realize your wife was sick.”

  Martin’s reply was quick. “Well, she insisted on having elective surgery that I didn’t believe she needed. And she thought she did.”

  Martin also insisted it was Michele who wanted the procedure done covertly, an hour away from Pleasant Grove, where she wouldn’t be recognized.

  “They missed a heart condition that she had and we didn’t know she had,” Martin told Henrie. “And she had a reaction to the medication she was taking.”

  Martin also referenced his own failing health, making a statement that would stick with Henrie for years. “He said the worst part was he had signed everything—the house and everything—over into her name, shortly before that,” Henrie recalled. “Because he had cancer or something in his foot and he didn’t know if he was going to live and he had signed everything over to her, thinking he might not survive. He said now he was in a mess because everything was in her name.”

  That week Martin also ran into the janitorial supervisor.

  “I’m sorry about your wife’s passing,” she told Martin.

  “Everything’s fine,” Martin said. “Everything will be fine.”

  “He seemed happy to me. He was just fine,” the woman remembered. “I thought he’d still be gone. He seemed fine. He was actually happy.”

  * * *

  Following the autopsy, assistant medica
l examiner Dr. Maureen Frikke spoke to Martin.

  Suspicions flying through her mind, Alexis was adamant that she be present to hear everything Martin told the pathologist. Both she and Rachel were at the house when Martin spoke to Frikke on the phone. Rachel, however, didn’t want to hear any of the details, and left the room.

  Martin placed the call on speakerphone as he explained to Frikke how he had found his wife. Once he had drained the bath, he said, he started chest compressions, until the neighbors arrived to help pull her out of the tub.

  He failed to mention that Michele had spewed several cups of water once the paramedics took over CPR. It would be a full year before the medical examiner’s office learned of that detail.

  Martin asked about the autopsy. “Have you found anything abnormal?”

  “Yeah. She didn’t have a uterus,” Frikke said.

  Both Martin and Frikke laughed.

  * * *

  Thirty years earlier, Helen Somers had tried desperately to convince her daughter there was something terribly wrong with Martin MacNeill. Young and in love, Michele wouldn’t listen.

  On a hunch, Helen had stored the court records from Martin’s 1977 fraud arrest—including those disturbing psychological evaluations—for three decades. She’d moved them from house to house, from California to Utah.

  With those documents in hand, Linda Cluff went to the Utah County Sheriff’s Office just three days after Michele’s death.

  A sheriff’s deputy took down her contact information, but Linda was at the wrong station. The Pleasant Grove home where Michele had died was not in the sheriff’s jurisdiction. Linda would need to contact Detective Marc Wright at the Pleasant Grove Police Department.

  A few days later, Linda and her daughter Jill met Detective Wright for the first time. Linda expressed her concerns and provided him with copies of the documents concerning Martin’s criminal past. Wright flipped through the pages but seemed disinterested.

  “We’ll need to wait to see what the autopsy turns up,” Wright explained. “I’ll give you a call when I receive it.”