The Stranger She Loved

by Shanna Hogan

  Howard Willis would later say Gypsy was the aggressor during the fight. “It was an ugly situation,” he remembered.

  That day in August would be the last time Howard and Vicki would see or speak to their daughter.

  “We feel awful for the choices she has made, and cannot have her around us,” Howard later said of his relationship with Gypsy. “She is basically not welcome on our property.”

  Howard and Vicki felt their oldest daughter had become an ugly and awful person. Eventually the entire family would turn on Gypsy.

  “I would consider Gypsy to be a deceptive, malevolent, malicious, calculating person,” her sister Julie Willis said years later. “If she sees something she wants, she will rationalize that to the point that she will get that no matter who stands in her way.”

  * * *

  After more than a year, Martin had grown weary of battling for custody of the children he never really wanted. That summer, he relinquished parental rights, and Alexis formally adopted Elle, Sabrina, and Ada.

  Linda, meanwhile, had been fighting her former brother-in-law for custody of Giselle. But as she navigated through the thorny adoption process, Linda noticed something peculiar. She traveled to Salt Lake City and petitioned the court to have Giselle’s original adoption papers unsealed. Once she obtained the documents, she compared them to Giselle’s original birth certificate and found the girl’s birth date had been altered by twenty years. Giselle’s adoption could not continue.

  * * *

  By the summer of 2008, Linda, Alexis, and Rachel had been hounding the prosecutor’s office for months, inundating them with letters and packets of information. Finally, their labor paid off.

  A few months earlier, the women had received a call from the Utah County Attorney’s Office: investigators were looking into the case. But months had passed and no progress had been made.

  Then in July, the case was assigned a new investigator—one who would probe deeper into Michele’s mysterious death.

  His name was Doug Witney.

  29.

  The slim manila folder landed on investigator Doug Witney’s desk with a thwack. Raising an eyebrow, Witney glanced up at his supervisor, who had just flung the case file onto his desk.

  “Can you give this a look?” asked Jeff Robinson, supervising investigator of the Utah County Attorney’s Office Bureau of Investigations. “See if there is anything we can do.”

  Witney nodded as he thumbed through the pages of the file. Inside there were just a few sheets of paper: a couple of statements, a letter addressed to county prosecutors, and a court report from 1977.

  Witney scanned the documents, assessing the details: fifty-year-old woman found dead in the bathtub after a face-lift—the victim’s family believed the husband was the killer.

  It wasn’t a typical case for the bureau, which primarily investigated financial fraud, corruption, and officer-involved shootings. The bureau’s investigators, who serve as fact gatherers for Utah County prosecutors, strictly handled murder cases that involved a legitimate complaint about the agency in charge of the case. But while they received dozens of such complaints each year, they had yet to work any such case that warranted going to trial.

  Still, had Michele’s family not pushed for the investigation to be reopened, it would have never made its way to Witney’s desk.

  The bureau had been brought onto the case seven months prior, as Robinson explained to Witney. Following persistent provocation by Linda, Rachel, and Alexis, prosecutors handed the case to Robinson, who had originally assigned it to a different agent. A few months later that agent had resigned, having not touched the case. So Robinson gave it to Witney to take a look.

  Witney was a dogged investigator in his sixties with white hair, a sharp chin, and blue eyes encircled by wrinkles. Witney had originally joined the bureau in 1991, and worked with Robinson for twelve years before moving on to the Utah County Sheriff’s Office.

  He retired a few years later, but a life of leisure didn’t suit him, so when Robinson asked him to reexamine one of his old cases, he didn’t hesitate. He was working only twelve hours a week on the other case and had the time to delve into the strange details of the death of Michele MacNeill.

  As Witney looked over the file, something caught his attention: a letter written by Helen Somers, attached to a packet of old court records. There was something that struck Witney about a mother holding on to documents for thirty years because she feared her daughter’s husband.

  Michele’s mother must be resolute in her conviction, Witney thought.

  Witney looked up at Robinson. “I think there’s something we can do.”

  He couldn’t have known then, but he’d soon be entangled in one of the thorniest murder mysteries of his career.

  “When I started the case there were a couple of statements in the case file, a couple of letters—not a lot of information,” Witney recalled. “So I started collecting information.”

  Witney contacted Alexis, Rachel, and Linda, who explained their concerns and provided the investigator with the reports and information that they had been compiling about Martin. At first, Witney didn’t know what to make of the amateur sleuths. But once he started reviewing their research, he sat up in his chair, intrigued.

  “They started to challenge a lot of things about their father,” Witney later said. “Who he was. Where he was. What he was doing.”

  Over the next few years, Linda and Michele’s children would work closely with Witney in building a case against Dr. Martin MacNeill.

  Witney’s supervisor and close friend, Jeff Robinson, would also work on the case throughout the investigation. Robinson was a seasoned investigator with over twenty-five years in law enforcement, including eighteen years at the bureau. He had thinning brown hair and inquisitive eyes that peered through oversized glasses. A graduate of the FBI National Academy, he had previously worked with the Brigham Young University Police Department as a patrol deputy before joining the bureau, which he had led for the last decade.

  Over the next few months Witney and Robinson conducted extensive interviews with all of the MacNeill children. As an eyewitness to Michele’s pre- and post-surgery appointments as well as her recovery, Alexis was a vital resource. She explained to investigators that on the night Michele was released from the hospital following the plastic surgery, she was drugged with the same cocktail of medication that was found in her blood after her death.

  The black notebook where Alexis had written all of Michele’s vitals and medications was never found. However, Alexis was able to hand over the Zyrtec notepad, in which she had first recorded the information. Rachel also provided the shirts and bra her mother had been wearing when she died.

  Witney and Robinson immediately requested and received reports from the Pleasant Grove police. Aside from demonstrating how lacking the initial investigation was, the documents did little to further the case.

  The Pleasant Grove police never investigated Michele’s death as a crime—not from the very first day. So investigators Witney and Robinson interviewed witnesses the police never had. They would talk to dozens of police officers, paramedics, nurses, and the MacNeills’ neighbors who had seen Michele on the day of her death, honing in on the vast discrepancies between what Martin had told police and the reports from other witnesses at the scene.

  While Martin had informed first responders that Michele was taking a lot of medication, he told the ER doctor she was taking only “a Percocet” and an antibiotic.

  Several officers said Martin’s angry, belligerent attitude was unlike any death scene they had ever worked. Nurses at the hospital said Martin’s hysterics were inconsistent with the behavior of a bereaved husband.

  “Martin’s behavior, including swearing, screaming, pounding his wife on the chest at the home and at the hospital, and cursing her for having an operation he insisted upon, appear to be a façade,” Robinson wrote in the report.

  Through interviews with neighbors, investigators
also learned that Doug Daniels had tried to clean the bathroom but could find no towels. “This would indicate that Martin MacNeill would have to have stopped any lifesaving measure long enough to wipe up blood and water on the floor,” Robinson wrote.

  Most glaring was the position of Michele’s body. Neighbors had first found Michele slumped inside the tub. But Martin told police, paramedics, and his children that she was draped over the tub’s edge, her face submerged in the water. The lividity on the back of her legs and buttocks suggested Michele died on her back.

  “Upon arrival of police and paramedics, Martin immediately started lying about the events surrounding Michele’s death in an effort to hinder, delay, or prevent any police investigation,” wrote Robinson.

  The more Witney and Robinson probed into the inconsistencies in the first few moments after Michele was discovered, the more they realized the importance of interviewing the very first person at the scene: Ada MacNeill.

  30.

  Grasping a crayon in her fist, Ada MacNeill scribbled on a piece of paper. She was seated at a desk in a room filled with toys and stuffed teddy bears.

  As the female police officer took a seat across from the girl, Ada fidgeted.

  “How do you feel about talking to me today?” asked Officer Patty Johnston.

  “Mmm.” Ada shrugged. “Okay.”

  It was September 9—almost a year and a half after Michele’s death—and Ada, now seven years old, was being formally interviewed for the first time about exactly what she saw on April 11, 2007. The interview was being conducted at the Children’s Justice Center in Provo, a homelike facility where children involved in criminal investigations can be interviewed in a comfortable and serene atmosphere.

  One day prior, Alexis had driven Ada and her sisters from Nevada to Provo for the interview. They stayed the night with Michele’s friend Loreen Thompson.

  In a comforting tone, Johnston, a child advocate and investigator with the Utah County Attorney’s Office, began the interview by talking about Loreen’s dog Otis, Barbie dolls, and SpongeBob.

  Johnston explained to Ada the importance of telling the truth. If a subject was too scary, the officer told her just to say that she didn’t want to talk about it.

  “The reason, Ada, that you came here to talk to me today is we’re trying to find out what happened in your house in Utah,” Johnston said gently. “Can you tell me who you used to live with?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Ada murmured.

  For much of the interview Ada avoided all questions about what happened to her mom and anything related to her father.

  “When you lived in your house in Utah, tell me all the people who lived there.”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it,” Ada repeated.

  “You don’t want to talk about your house in Utah? Tell me, how come?”

  Ada softly whispered, “I don’t know.”

  “Were there some things that happened in your house in Utah that made you sad?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Ada said.

  “I know there were some happy things that happened and I think there were some sad things that happened. Is that true or not true?” Johnston asked.

  “That’s true,” the girl said softly.

  “It’s important that we talk about some things that happened in your old house. Do you think you can be brave enough and talk about some things?” Johnston asked.

  “I don’t know.” Ada looked down.

  “It’s hard, isn’t it?”

  Tenderly, Johnston tried to ask more questions about the girl’s father, but the only thing that Ada would say was his name was Martin.

  “Why don’t you really want to talk about it?”

  “I don’t know.” Ada sighed.

  “How does it feel to talk about your dad? Does it make you happy to talk about your dad?”

  “No.”

  “Does it make you sad?”

  “I don’t really want to talk about it,” she whispered.

  When asked, Ada spoke fondly of her mom, saying she was happy, nice, and “real pretty,” but she said that it made her “sad” to talk about her.

  “Do you miss her?” Johnston asked.

  “Yeah,” she whispered.

  “Someone told me that a little over a year ago your mom died,” Johnston said. “Do you know what happened?”

  Ada nodded and slowly started to reveal the details of what she saw that day.

  “Dad came in with me and we walked in the room,” Ada said faintly. “The water was like almost brown and stuff and you could hardly see it. So my dad told me to go next door and get somebody.”

  Ada said she thought her mom was wearing a blue shirt, pants, and a jacket. “She just was wetting her hair. But she was still in her clothes.”

  Ada then described the position of her mother’s body.

  “She was just laying down in the bathtub. She was trying to wet her hair,” she said. “Then my dad came in and saw the bathtub and he was like trying to pull my mom up, I guess.”

  “What was your dad doing in the bathroom?” the officer asked.

  “He was screaming, ‘Quick. Help. Run next door and get somebody.’ So I had to run next door.”

  “How did you feel that day?”

  “Sad,” Ada said.

  Johnston explained that Ada was very brave to get help. She told her to pick out a teddy bear, which all children that come to the Children’s Justice Center are allowed to do when interviewed in a criminal case.

  “We talked about you missing your mom. Is that right?” Johnston asked. “What about your dad. Do you miss your dad?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Ada glanced down.

  At the end of the interview, Johnston asked Ada to draw a picture of how she found her mom that day. In black pen, Ada drew a rudimentary stick figure surrounded by an amorphous shape meant to represent the tub. Next to it were notes about what she remembered.

  “Her head was out of the water. Her hair was going down the drain. All the water was red. Her eyes were open.”

  31.

  Michele MacNeill’s cause of death was a mystery.

  If her husband murdered her, how exactly did he do it? How could prosecutors press murder charges when the medical examiner believed heart disease had killed her?

  Those questions looped endlessly through the minds of investigators Doug Witney and Jeff Robinson.

  Overcoming the medical examiner’s ruling would be a nearly insurmountable task in a homicide investigation. To build a case, investigators needed to convince the pathologist to reconsider the original findings.

  To complicate matters, Dr. Maureen Frikke, the medical examiner who had performed Michele’s autopsy, had died. On March 22, 2008, Frikke passed away in her home at the age of fifty-nine, following an eight-year battle with breast cancer that had metastasized to her liver.

  Witney and Robinson had come to believe Dr. Frikke did not have all the facts when conducting the autopsy and that her conclusion may have been different if she had been privy to all the information. Because the death was never investigated as a crime, it’s unclear if Frikke was even aware that Michele expelled several cups of water when the officers performed CPR. And while the autopsy showed she had acute inflammation of the heart, it might not have been what caused her death.

  “Unfortunately, because of Dr. Frikke’s death, all we have remaining are the notes she made at the time of her conversations with Martin,” Witney later said.

  Reviewing those notes, Witney noticed that Frikke had placed several question marks by answers Martin had given her during their phone conversation. For the investigators it seemed like an indication that Frikke found his responses questionable—that his explanations didn’t match the evidence.

  In September, Witney and Robinson consulted Dr. Todd Grey, the chief medical examiner for the state of Utah and Frikke’s supervisor, and asked him to review Michele’s case.

  G
rey was an experienced and respected pathologist. He was tall with shaggy hair graying around the temples, rugged facial hair, and round-frame glasses. Grey had worked as a forensic pathologist in Utah since 1986 and as an assistant medical examiner before becoming chief of the department.

  Witney and Robinson provided Grey with materials they had gathered through the investigation, trying to get him to consider changing Michele’s cause of death.

  Autopsy findings are changed only under the rarest of circumstances. In Utah, the medical examiner’s office receives only three to four cases a year where they are asked to reconsider the cause of death because of suspicions of a homicide. Of those, less than 5 percent are actually reopened.

  Witney and Robinson provided Grey with reasons they were reopening the case, including information about Martin’s affair.

  But in evaluating the autopsy and toxicology report, Grey found that Frikke’s investigation was thorough. The drug levels detected were not sufficient to explain death and were not indicative of an intentional lethal overdose. Further, the weight and condition of Michele’s lungs did not make him suspect drowning. Grey sent Witney an e-mail in which he declined to amend both the cause and manner of death.

  “While the investigation subsequent to the victim’s death raises questions about the possible role of her husband, there’s nothing in the autopsy or toxicology that proves her death was from an unnatural cause,” Grey wrote. “The autopsy findings certainly provide evidence of natural disease that could explain death.”

  The investigators were disappointed, but were not ready to give up. Over the next two years they would meet with Dr. Grey numerous times in hopes of getting him to change his opinion.

  * * *

  Witney and Robinson spent months examining the background of Martin MacNeill. The investigation would ultimately unravel years of fabrications, fraud, and unconscionable lies.

  “MacNeill’s a thespian,” Witney later said. “It appears his whole life was scripted and staged.”