by Shanna Hogan
In another photo, the family is huddled in front of a fishing boat during an excursion at the lake. Michele is surrounded by her toddlers, her hair blowing in the wind.
A Christmas portrait one year shows the children posed together in front of a pile of tattered wrapping paper and shiny new toys. Rachel’s arms are wrapped around her sisters, who are clad in matching red pajamas. In the middle, a beaming Damian has donned a tiny Santa hat.
There were birthday parties and family vacations. Dance recitals and backyard barbecues. As they were growing up, the MacNeill children say, their life seemed truly blessed. “I had a wonderful childhood,” Alexis remembered. “My mom was always there and just the best person.”
The girls remember their upbringing as idyllic. Both parents were warm, affectionate, and loving, they say. Michele was the heart and soul of the family. And despite working long hours as a doctor, Martin was a doting father who was very active in their lives.
Rachel, who shared her father’s love of books, grew up closest to Martin. “I adored him,” Rachel recalled. “We were very much a devout Mormon family. I thought of my parents as having the ultimate love story.”
As a girl, Alexis had ambitions of following in her father’s footsteps and becoming a doctor. Each year on her birthday, Martin brought his daughter with him for the day to whichever hospital or clinic he was working in. As an adult, Alexis would pursue a career in medicine.
“I had a very close relationship with my father. I kind of tagged along with him a lot at work,” Alexis would testify years later in court. “He was someone I loved and respected and relied on, and someone I always wanted to be proud of me.”
While her father was a role model, Alexis was most connected to her mother, whom she considered to be her best friend. “I was always around her. She was kind of like my superhero and I tried to be her sidekick,” Alexis remembered. “She was someone that I adored. She confided in me a lot. I did the same with her. She was my mom.”
Church was at the center of the MacNeills’ life. In each city in which they lived, they were actively involved in the local LDS community.
While Martin had a tendency to come across as brash and egotistical, he was also a well-respected professional and was considered a pillar in the Mormon community. He taught Sunday school and acted in church plays, once cast in the role of Jesus. While living in California, he had also served as bishop for a small LDS congregation. In the LDS church, bishops preside over worship services and are called to serve from among members of their congregation, without pay, for a term of four to seven years.
For Mormons, marriage is sacred, and is a prerequisite for the highest degree of being in the afterlife. Beyond a legal marriage, Mormons believe in a divine union known as a celestial marriage, which endures beyond the grave. To seal their love for all of eternity, Martin and Michele were wed in a Mormon temple in a ceremony known as a sealing. The MacNeill children were also each baptized into the faith.
Each Sunday, Martin led the children into the church. For services, Michele dressed the girls in lacy pink and purple dresses, their hair tied with ribbons. Damian wore tiny suits with suspenders and bow ties. Martin stood at the center of his brood, chest puffed out, bursting with pride.
Church congregants often commented on how perfect the family seemed. “He’d walk into church, he’d march in and line up his children, who were perfectly dressed,” recalled a family friend. “Everybody had to be perfect. They’d even hold their bodies and heads like [they were] marching in. Everything had to be just so.”
* * *
As Martin’s career took off, he worked at various hospitals and clinics across Utah. In 1988, he treated patients at an emergency room in Blanding, Utah, a small city flanked by two Native American reservations. After a short stint at the hospital, Martin took a part-time job at Brigham Young University. Martin worked as a physician at the college’s health center, treating students and faculty for a variety of ailments. At the same time, he enrolled at BYU’s law school, where he pursued a law degree.
In 1990, he graduated from law school, although he never passed the bar or practiced as an attorney. That year he took a director position working in medical law and moved his family to Washington, where they lived in Friday Harbor, a quaint town located on the east side of the San Juan Islands, only accessible by plane or ferry.
The MacNeills were there less than a year before returning to Utah, where Martin found full-time work as a physician at BYU’s health center. Over the years he also took various side jobs in the medical field to earn extra money.
In addition, Martin acted as the family’s primary care physician, writing prescriptions if the children were sick. “We never went to any other doctor growing up,” Alexis later said. “I don’t remember going to any doctor. It was always my dad.”
While Martin worked long hours as a doctor, Michele was a homemaker who kept busy volunteering and participating in after-school programs with her children. Because of her lifetime love of the ballet and classical music, she enrolled the children in dance classes at a ballet studio called the Petite Neat Academy in American Fork, a city at the foot of Mount Timpanogos in the Wasatch Range, north of Utah Lake. Their ballet teacher, Jacqueline Colledge, trained Rachel, Vanessa, Alexis, and even Damian to dance, and she would be part of the MacNeills’ lives for twenty years. For performances, Michele volunteered to sew costumes, create props, and prepare meals. While their relationship started out as business, over the years Michele and Jacqueline became the best of friends.
Eventually Jacqueline introduced Michele to the Utah Regional Ballet, a professional ballet company that performs around the world. Because of her knowledge of ballet and her eloquent public speaking skills, Michele became a spokesperson for the arts in Utah. She also served as president of the guild boards before becoming a member of the board of directors of the Utah Regional Ballet.
“She had wonderful ideas,” remembered Jacqueline, a full-figured woman in her fifties with olive skin and shoulder-length black hair. “She wasn’t afraid at all to stand for something she believed was a good direction for the company to go.”
Martin also pursued his love of the fine arts throughout his adult life. Over the years he performed in community theater, acting in a number of plays and musicals. With his booming voice and flair for the dramatic, he was a natural thespian.
As time would prove, Martin was, indeed, a talented actor.
* * *
In 1993, the MacNeill family settled in Salem, a small suburb known as “the city of peace” on the south end of Utah County in the Provo-Orem metro area. They purchased a four-thousand-square-foot house at 15 East Center Street. Built in the early 1900s, the six-bedroom, two-bathroom home was painted beige and brown, with custom molded woodwork and a porch overlooking the grassy front yard.
By then, several members of the Somers family had also settled in Utah, including Michele’s mother, Helen. Her youngest sister, Linda Cluff, who had since married and had children of her own, lived in nearby American Fork, while Michele’s older brother Richard Somers had settled with his family in Salt Lake. Sadly, Richard passed away at the age of fifty-two on October 25, 1994, after a long battle with cancer. He left behind a wife and two daughters.
A few years later, Michele’s estranged father, Milton, also died of natural causes.
Despite the Somerses’ attempts to repair their acrimonious relationship with Martin, he remained distant. While Martin and Michele didn’t often see her family in California, Linda was often around the couple. When Linda divorced her first husband, she and her two children, Ryan and Jill, lived for a period in the MacNeill home. Linda, who was slender and pretty with long, blond hair and big blue eyes, later remarried and had another son, Adam.
Though Linda remained close with her sister, the rest of Michele’s family became further alienated from the MacNeills when Martin accused one of her relatives of molesting Damian. The Somerses believed it was an outlandish li
e and just another way of turning Michele against them.
Martin seemed to despise Michele’s family. Later he would claim that he never felt accepted by the clan and thought they were always judging him. Linda, however, believed the conflict existed because the Somers family knew Martin’s true character. “He was always really standoffish,” Linda later said. “He hated us because we knew all of his secrets.”
When the MacNeills intermittently attended get-togethers with the Somers family, Martin would inevitably create a scene and storm out of the celebration. “Michele, let’s get out of here,” Martin would pronounce. “Children, we are leaving!”
“We’d go to family gatherings and Martin would act all superior,” Linda recalled. “Meanwhile, the kids would be crying; he would be acting like a lunatic. It was really weird.”
* * *
In December 1998, the MacNeill family moved to Orem, the fifth-largest city in Utah. About forty-five miles south of Salt Lake City, Orem is a major metropolis in the northern-central part of the state. The conservative city has a high Mormon population and has been ranked one of the best places in the country to raise a family.
The MacNeills purchased a sprawling estate at 19 West 620 South, located at the end of a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood known as Stonewood. The six-bedroom, eight-bathroom, eleven-thousand-square-foot home was built in 1994. Michele, who always had a knack for design, decorated the home with warm earth tones, dark wood furnishings, and antique fixtures. Once complete, the house looked like something out of a catalog.
The MacNeills quickly made friends in their new neighborhood. One such friend was Lani Swallow, a Mormon mother with a full face and long, dark hair, who had a son close in age to Damian. “Damian and my son bonded. They were the two new boys in the neighborhood,” Lani later said. “Whenever I needed to plan things with Michele, I would often be at her house doing that, and they would roughhouse and play.”
The MacNeills became prominent figures at the Mormon church in Orem. Michele regularly volunteered her time and always seemed willing to help out anyone in need. Church friends described her as one of the most kind, generous, loving people they had ever met.
In 2000, Michele was called to serve as president of her church’s Relief Society, a philanthropic and educational organization for women in the LDS church. Each congregation in the church includes a Relief Society, and all female Latter-day Saints over the age of eighteen are members of the organization. Every Sunday the Relief Society hosted meetings consisting of various kinds of lessons. As president of her congregation’s chapter, Michele held one of the highest-ranking callings for women in the church’s hierarchy. As part of the position, she appointed two other female congregants as counselors: Loreen Thompson and Cheryl Radmall.
Cheryl was slender with shoulder-length golden hair. Loreen had short graying hair, deep-set eyes, and olive skin. Karen Klinger, who was a thin brunette, served as the Relief Society’s secretary. As the women worked together and met for lunchtime planning meetings, a close friendship blossomed. Two and a half years later, when they were released from their commitments, the four women remained the best of friends. And when Karen was later diagnosed with breast and uterine cancer, the other women rallied around her.
In the summer of 2002, Karen was going through one of her final surgeries to remove the uterine cancer, after which she planned to undergo several rounds of intensive chemotherapy. The night before the operation she was nervous, and Cheryl, Loreen, and Michele wanted to be there for their friend.
They took her to see the film Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, a movie based on the 1996 novel about four women with an enduring friendship that lasts decades. “And from that point on, Michele called us the ‘Ya-Ya Sisters,’” Loreen recalled. “There were four of us and we had a very tight, close relationship.… It was unusual because we were all very different, but we developed a strong bond very quickly.”
Although life eventually took Michele and the other women in different directions, their friendship would endure until the day of Michele’s death.
* * *
In 2000, Martin was appointed by Mike Leavitt, governor of Utah at the time, to a prestigious position as the medical director of the Utah State Developmental Center.
Located about fifteen minutes from Orem, on the outskirts of American Fork, the center provides twenty-four-hour supervised care for 265 mentally disabled individuals. The facility was established in 1932 and operates under the Utah Department of Human Services.
As the medical services director, Martin was in charge of health care for the residents. He had a private office at the Developmental Center’s medical services building and oversaw a team of doctors and nurses. He served a dual role, working in administration in addition to his duties practicing in urgent care. Heavily involved at the job, Martin often arrived early, stayed late, and worked weekends. For several seasons he also played on the company softball team.
Although working with mentally disabled patients can be stressful, Martin provided treatment with cool, detached professionalism. Amongst his colleagues, however, Martin was considered demanding and difficult. Coworkers described him as intimidating and a bully with a profound lack of medical skills. He terrorized vulnerable medical residents, and his management tactics chased competent nurses and doctors away from the facility.
Nurse practitioner Steven Nickelson worked closely with Martin for seven years. “He has a very strong personality,” remembered Nickelson, a slight man with thinning red hair. “I didn’t give him reason to be defensive, but I knew that was something I had to manage—swimming through rough waters. I just approach it differently.”
* * *
Over the years, as Martin grew more successful and accomplished, his already engorged ego swelled. Associates and former friends described him as a braggart and a brute who dominated every conversation. In social situations he was known to be openly condescending, contemptuous, and unapproachable. Michele’s friends were often fearful to call the house because of concerns that Martin might answer the phone.
As Martin’s children grew older, they realized that he was not a typical father. Embarrassed by his pompous outbursts, his daughters seemed to frequently be apologizing for their dad and making excuses for his moods. “I was constantly trying to explain my father,” Alexis said years later. “He thought anyone that was not at his educational stature was very beneath him. He treated them very poorly.”
The children knew Martin was eccentric, with a dry wit and macabre sense of humor. He told his family that right after medical school he had worked with infamous pathologist Dr. Jack Kevorkian, known as “Dr. Death” for his physician-assisted suicides, his daughters recalled. “He didn’t start killing people until after I worked with him,” Martin joked.
Even so, the girls felt they knew their father’s true character. While he could put on an air of superiority, at home he seemed warm and earnest. They all believed their family was normal and that their dad loved their mom.
“I thought he was rough around the edges but sweet,” Alexis recalled. “When he would come home, he was a completely different person. So we thought we knew the real person.”
6.
On the deck of a cruise ship, Martin leaned close to his wife, wrapped his arm around her shoulder, and squeezed affectionately. He was dressed in a dark suit and checkered bow tie, a jubilant grin spread across his face. Michele wore a silk gown and a triple string of pearls, her hair elegantly swept to the side.
Michele turned her gaze to the camera lens, her smile soft and subdued, as the flash brightened the area. They were a portrait of staid sophistication—the reputable doctor and his lovely wife. The MacNeills seemed to have it all: wealth, education, class, and beauty. Vacations were extravagant: cruises and beach trips. Parked in their garages were luxury cars including BMWs and Jaguars.
Their home in Orem was grand, with dark hardwood floors, soaring ceilings, tall picture windows, and a fireplace accented
with green marble. The space had an elegant quality—heavy mahogany bookcases, antique table lamps, couches covered in muted fabrics, oil paintings and family photos hanging on the beige walls.
A sense of hushed class—no discernible signs of trouble. Just a lingering hint of gloom, so subtle it existed only in the corners of the rooms, hiding beneath the accent rugs, hissing behind the curtains.
Michele spackled and painted over any flaws in the family with such expert precision that they were almost imperceptible. No one could tell that secrets and lies infiltrated every aspect of the family’s existence. But the absence of overt turmoil spoke to its own troubles too dangerous to acknowledge. Any hint of distress was kept behind bedroom doors. Late-night disagreements were heard only as muffled voices pulsing through the walls of the master bedroom.
There were certain rules the children were expected to follow. They were to do well in school, value education, go to church, respect their elders, and above all, not embarrass the family.
The outward appearance of perfection—the refined images captured in the framed family photos—was perhaps more important than the unsettling truth. Churning behind the deceptive smile was a Martin MacNeill the family did not know existed.
* * *
“It wasn’t a normal family,” remembered Linda Cluff. “They were so used to portraying what they wanted people to believe. Their house was crazy. There would be these great big fights. But then they’d all walk out the door and they’d be like perfect.”
When a new neighbor or friend came by the house, Martin always made an entrance and provided a tour of his stately home. Then he would quickly disappear into the confines of his office.
While Martin appeared to be a loving, attentive father, his connection with the children seemed more like ownership. They were an extension of his carefully cultivated image, not individuals. He cared less about his family than about guarding his reputation. And if his children challenged that status, he excluded them from family functions and rarely spoke of them.
