by Shanna Hogan
Once it was discovered his license was based on false credentials, Martin lost all rights to ever work as a doctor again. Gypsy would also surrender her practical and registered nursing licenses and would never again work in health care.
Meanwhile, while Martin was locked up, Spencer managed his finances, paying to maintain the Pleasant Grove home while withdrawing his own legal fees. In addition, the attorney negotiated a settlement with the United States Veterans Benefits Administration for the fraud.
By the time he was released, Martin would be a penniless, unlicensed former doctor.
* * *
While Martin and Gypsy were both behind bars, Doug Witney continued to collect evidence to try and link them to Michele’s death.
In 2009, Witney’s investigative team—along with Alexis, Rachel, and Linda—made the collective decision to go to the media for help generating leads. They released part of the investigative report to the press and spoke with reporters.
“We were still at that point trying to find out what we had and were kind of at a stalemate,” Jeff Robinson later said. “We needed more to move forward and knew it couldn’t hurt.”
The case received coverage in Utah’s oldest daily paper, the Deseret News, when a reporter named Sara Lenz took interest in the story. Alexis, Rachel, and Linda gave extensive interviews, and soon the incredible tale of the demonic doctor regularly appeared on the paper’s front page.
Worried about their father’s eventual release, Alexis and Rachel used the media coverage to spur public interest in their mother’s death. “I’m afraid for my little sisters’ safety,” Rachel said in an interview. “And for anyone he comes into contact with for the rest of his life. He is a predator.”
In defiance of his sisters, Damian spoke to reporters in support of Martin. “Some people are quick to infer that because of my father’s actions following my mother’s death, he had to also be involved somehow in the death itself,” Damian wrote in an e-mail to the Deseret News. “This seems ludicrous to me.”
Meanwhile, as Witney and Robinson continued building their case, they reviewed the evidence with county attorneys. Soon prosecutor Chad Grunander became intrigued with the complicated criminal life of Martin MacNeill. Grunander was assigned as the lead attorney on the case and would work closely with investigators to bring it to trial.
In his early forties, Grunander was brawny with a bald head, prominent jaw, and deliberate manner of speaking. A Utah native who grew up in a small town ten miles south of Provo, Grunander was Mormon and served on a mission in Argentina in the early nineties.
After attending BYU, where he earned a degree in political science, he went on to graduate from law school at California’s Western School of Law in 2003. Grunander then worked for eight months as a clerk for a judge in Provo before joining the Utah County Attorney’s Office in 2004. As a prosecutor, he said he truly found his calling. “I really just fell in love with prosecution, primarily the courtroom,” Grunander explained.
Throughout his career Grunander had tried a variety of cases including misdemeanor drug possession, robbery, sexual assault, and murder. He was well liked among his colleagues and had a reputation for turning down unfavorable plea bargains. Grunander was also a married father of four, with three boys and a girl.
As Grunander worked on the MacNeill case, he was concerned that the evidence was all circumstantial.
“When I started to learn more about the case, I thought it was a very compelling story,” Grunander recalled. “But like most people, I didn’t know where the case was going to go. It was a tough case, nowhere near a slam dunk.”
Over the next few years, investigators would take the case to Grunander many times, urging him to press charges. But the prosecutor wanted more—something he could take to court. “Show me how she died,” Grunander told Witney. “The jury will want to know how she was murdered.”
“I believe I know,” Witney replied. “I just can’t prove it yet.”
While working the case, Witney developed a theory: he believed Michele was drugged and then drowned in the bathtub. To Witney, one particular detail kept jumping out. Through interviews with Pleasant Grove police officers Joshua Motsinger and Ray Ormond, they learned that Michele had expelled a significant amount of water. So much so, in fact, that both officers had to change their uniforms after performing revival efforts. It was a fact that assistant pathologist Maureen Frikke hadn’t known when she declared Michele’s death natural.
If Michele had expelled water when the paramedics did CPR, that meant Martin—a supposed doctor—hadn’t done CPR properly or at all. If it had been performed correctly, the water should have been regurgitated within the first few breaths he delivered.
On the phone with 911, Martin had claimed he performed CPR, but at that point Michele was still in the tub, making the resuscitation efforts unlikely. “It would be virtually impossible to give chest compressions to someone in that position,” Witney wrote in his report.
Further, while performing CPR alongside Martin, neighbor Doug Daniels never saw Michele’s chest rise or fall. Doug had also reported seeing a significant amount of mucus on Michele’s face, although none had transferred onto Martin.
Even though Frikke didn’t find water in Michele’s lungs, it was still possible she had drowned, as investigators learned through interviews with pathologists. If Michele inhaled water, most of it could have been expelled during the CPR. Regurgitating water during resuscitation can be an after-effect of “dry drowning,” in which the airway spasms shut, preventing both oxygen and liquid from traveling to the lungs.
While it was a solid theory, Grunander was still reluctant.
“You see the medical examiner’s report,” the prosecutor told Witney. “It says natural cause of death.”
* * *
Prison can be a lonely and unsettling place. The lack of privacy, loss of freedom, and unappetizing food can erode an individual’s self-worth. But it’s the boredom that will gradually consume a prisoner’s soul.
To keep busy in December 2009, Martin enrolled in an A-Plus Computer Technician course. He attended classes every day from 7:30 A.M. to 2:30 P.M., learning skills including computer support fundamentals, Web page design, and information systems basics.
In the classroom a few seats from Martin sat a tall black man in his midthirties named Michael Buchanan who had been locked up since 2007, serving a nine-year sentence for possession of cocaine with intention to distribute.
When they first met, Buchanan learned Martin was a doctor and asked about the cause of his conviction.
“Well, Doc,” he said. “You must be in here for writing bogus scripts.”
Nodding in affirmation, Martin made a reference to the prescription pain pills Percocet and Oxycontin. Weeks later, Martin advised Buchanan about treatment for a foot injury the inmate had suffered.
Although they were housed in separate units on different sides of the prison, during the following six months, Martin and Buchanan got to know each other in class, becoming unlikely friends.
Weeks later, Martin was resting against the exterior of an eighteen-person prison dormitory nicknamed the “Chicken Coop” when he was approached by a burly black man with a shaved head and gravelly voice named Von Harper who was serving twenty-seven years on drug charges.
Leaning against the building, Harper addressed Martin. “What are you locked up for?”
“They think I killed a few bitches,” Martin replied flippantly.
The two continued talking and soon became workout buddies, running on a large track in the prison yard. Martin’s exercise routine also included bench lifts, curls, dips, and sprints, and about fifty push-ups a day.
“I work out a lot. And Doc started asking me questions about working out,” Harper recalled. “And sooner or later we started working out together.”
As Harper got to know “Doc,” he learned of Martin’s nasty temper.
“He can be mean—most of the time mean,” Harper
later said. “If you got on the wrong subject with him … Just whenever I asked him questions or something it’s just like you see another side to him. He’d get mad or not want to talk about it.”
When not working out with Harper, Martin trained with two other inmates, including Frank Davis, a muscular man with a chiseled jaw and sloping forehead who had a twenty-year history of felonies. When Davis was suffering from a hurt shoulder, another inmate referred him to Dr. MacNeill. “That’s Doc. He really is a doctor. He’s pretty good too.”
Soon Davis joined Martin and Harper in their daily workouts.
“That’s basically why I was talking to him, to get in the idea of how I could get in that kind of shape,” Davis later said.
* * *
The media coverage of the MacNeill case resulted in a number of promising leads for investigators.
Anna Osborne Walthall had long believed her former lover was a serial killer. And in 2009, when she learned of Michele’s death, she contacted investigators. Through a series of interviews, Anna related to Witney and Robinson the dark stories of murder Martin had told her during their six-month affair.
According to what Witney and Robinson learned from Anna, Martin could have been responsible for attempting to kill his mother, successfully murdering his brother, and euthanizing patients throughout his career as a doctor.
Anna also seemed to provide a plausible explanation for Michele’s mysterious death. During the autopsy, the medical examiner had found elevated levels of potassium in Michele’s system. Perhaps Martin had injected his wife with an overdose of the chemical.
Anna was willing to testify in court, and enthusiastic about putting Martin behind bars. “I want him convicted for killing Michele,” Anna told investigators. “I’m very excited about the prospect of Martin being off the streets for a very long time.”
In her zeal to help convict Martin, Anna would keep in regular contact with Witney and Robinson through phone calls and e-mails in the ensuing months. She also divulged further suspicions, saying she now believed Martin and her ex-husband had conspired to kill her. She also suspected he had made plans to fly to Ukraine to kill Giselle and possibly one of Anna’s former lovers.
While investigators were thrilled that Anna had come forward, there was also a problem with their potential witness. Anna suffered from dissociative identity disorder, a severe mental illness formerly known as multiple personality disorder, in which a person experiences two or more distinct personality states. Anna also believed she could somehow communicate telepathically with the beyond and that she had a sixth sense that enabled her to experience a person’s sins while they engaged in sexual intercourse.
As Witney and Robinson later learned, Anna also had a macabre fixation with murderers and wrote letters to David Berkowitz, the notorious “Son of Sam” serial killer, convicted for a string of shootings in 1976 that left six dead. Berkowitz was serving six life sentences at New York’s Attica Correctional Facility.
In a rambling letter to Berkowitz, Anna discussed at length her assertions that Martin was a serial killer with an unusual motive for murder. “I believe with my whole heart that MacNeill’s victims were occult blood sacrifices,” she wrote. She further stated she had “adopted Martin” and was attaching herself to him so “Satan could not take him.”
Anna was candid with investigators about her mental illness and assured Witney and Robinson that it didn’t cause her to confuse reality with fantasy. Using Anna’s leads, Witney and Robinson began investigating whether Martin had committed other murders. Yet decades had passed since most of the deaths Martin had discussed. Proving murder in these cases would be almost impossible.
Although Martin had told Anna he tried to kill his mother as a child, she was still alive and currently living in California. When Martin’s sister Mary was contacted, she said she had no memory of calling 911 to resuscitate her apparently inebriated mother.
As for the death of Rufus Roy MacNeill—the details Anna described were eerily close to those of Michele’s death. Yet, during Michele’s funeral, Martin said Rufus Roy had died of an apparent overdose: “Ten nickel bags were his ticket out.”
Witney and Robinson contacted New Jersey police and learned that Martin’s brother had indeed been found dead in his mother’s bathroom in 1986. But he had been discovered on the toilet, not in the bathtub, with a heroin needle sticking out of his arm. His death was ruled an overdose.
Still, investigators suspected Martin may have killed before. And when they learned of the strange circumstances surrounding the 1977 death of Martin’s father and the mysterious premonition he had shared with Michele, they also questioned if the doctor may have played a part in Albert MacNeill Sr.’s demise. But because so much time had passed, it would be nearly impossible to prove.
Investigators would spend months trying to link Martin to other crimes, but no evidence was uncovered to connect him to those cases. Beyond the death of his wife and molestation of his daughter, Martin would not be charged in connection with any additional murders or sexual assaults.
Still, as Linda and Michele’s daughters learned of Anna’s allegations, they too began to wonder whether Martin was a serial killer.
34.
Damian MacNeill had become obsessed with death following his mother’s passing.
Three years after Michele’s demise, he struggled with the loss. “My mother’s death destroyed him,” Alexis recalled.
In late 2009, the twenty-four-year-old was living in New York City and had just completed his first semester of law school. Alone and estranged from his sisters, dark and disturbing thoughts churned through Damian’s mind. Under the Twitter handle @damianmacneill, he used the social networking site as a forum to express his reflections, which involved the “joys of killing.”
“I want to know what it’s like to kill without remorse,” Damian wrote on Twitter.
Continuing her investigation against Martin, Linda discovered Damian’s Internet postings. Concerned, she printed out the Twitter feed and showed it to Witney and Robinson.
“I was scared. I thought it was my duty to do something about it,” Linda recalled. “What if he goes off killing people?”
The investigators also were disturbed and thought they needed to inform Damian’s school about the posts. In September 2009, Witney sent an e-mail to New York University officials to express his apprehensions about Damian. “To be perfectly clear, Damian MacNeill is not a suspect in the death of his mother. However, at the insistence of MacNeill family members, we entered ‘damianmacneill’ into Google search and were shocked at the postings found on his Twitter site, which suggests a propensity to commit indiscriminate violent crimes,” Witney wrote. “The comments by Damian MacNeill are very troubling wherein he speaks of killing others and the joy of such.”
Witney’s e-mail went on to say the Utah County Attorney’s Office considered Damian MacNeill a “ticking time bomb, someone who has been through a lot in his life and apparently it is coming to a head.” Witney explained that NYU officials should take whatever action deemed necessary and that the attorney’s office didn’t want to ignore what could be warning signs of violence to come.
While it was unclear if Damian was reprimanded, his postings on Twitter vanished and he completed classes that semester with passing grades. But during the school’s winter break in January 2010, Damian sank into a cavernous pit of misery. He spent the hiatus from school watching depressing films, many dealing with the subject of death.
On January 7, Damian uploaded to his Facebook page clips from one of his favorite movies, the 2009 Danish art film by Lars von Trier, Antichrist. He posted the movie’s prologue, a gloomy black-and-white scene in which the protagonist couple has sex, neglecting their son as he falls out the window of their apartment, his blood splattering upon the sidewalk. “Love and death come hand in hand,” Damian wrote in a Facebook message accompanying the clip.
A few days later Damian uploaded another scene from what he said
was his favorite movie, The Fountain, a 2006 film by Darren Aronofsky about a man dealing with the death of his wife.
On what would have been Michele’s fifty-third birthday, Damian reposted Rachel’s tribute video for Michele. In his posting, Damian quoted the song the video had been set to, by Ladysmith Black Mambazo: “Do not cry. Mother is absent. Mother shall come back.”
During the last few days of winter break, Damian was fixated on one particular movie: The Hours, the 2002 film based on the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel about three women whose lives are interconnected by the Virginia Woolf novel Mrs. Dalloway. The film focuses on suicide, with the opening and final scenes depicting the 1941 drowning of Virginia Woolf, played in the movie by Nicole Kidman. Each of the movie’s three main characters consistently contemplates suicide as a way of evading her own problems.
On his Facebook page, Damian posted several clips from the film, including one in which the character of Virginia Woolf speaks to her husband about killing one of her novel’s fictional characters.
“Why does someone have to die?” Woolf’s husband asked.
“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. It’s contrast,” Virginia replied dryly.
“And who will die? Tell me.”
“The poet will die. The visionary.”
In his posting on the video, Damian wrote, “I still have to face The Hours.”
In The Hours, one of the characters mirrors Virginia Woolf’s protagonist in Mrs. Dalloway. As in the book, the woman named Clarissa Vaughan spends her final day hosting a party. Damian referenced Clarissa’s quotes in his last two Facebook posts.
“They’re all here, aren’t they? All the ghosts … all the ghosts are assembling for the party!” Damian typed on January 15, his mom’s birthday.
His chilling, cryptic final update: “I don’t think I can make it to the party.”
The next day was January 16—a Saturday. By that point Damian had plunged into a deep depression. It seemed he no longer cared if there was an afterlife, or if following death there was nothing but oblivion. Either was more promising than the bleakness of life.