The Stranger She Loved

by Shanna Hogan

  8.

  By 2005, a precipitous shift had occurred in the MacNeill marriage. While Martin had never remained faithful, he had always seemed intent on keeping Michele. But over time, he seemed to become weary with the life he had so meticulously constructed. Martin grew distant, contemptuous, and verbally abusive toward his wife. His mood swings were volatile and unpredictable—alternating from bitter and cruel to strangely kind and affectionate. At the end of each day, Michele never knew which version of her husband would be walking through the door.

  Martin, meanwhile, continued to cheat on his wife. And in 2005, he had two sordid affairs with two very different women. One would steal his heart. The other may have learned his most monstrous secrets.

  * * *

  Anna Osborne Walthall was in her early forties, raising two young boys, and embroiled in a bitter divorce when she first met Dr. MacNeill. Voluptuous, with a round face framed with shoulder-length brown hair, Anna was outspoken and educated, with degrees in music and business. In 2005, she was living in Park City, Utah, and running a laser hair removal franchise in Salt Lake City called Sona MedSpa.

  Utah law required a licensed physician to oversee operations of cosmetic medical facilities. And that March, Anna hired Martin as her medical director.

  As they worked together, Anna opened up to Martin about the details of her imploding marriage. He offered support and legal advice, and eventually volunteered to assist as a liaison between Anna and her husband.

  Soon an attraction developed, and Martin and Anna began a torrid sexual affair. After sex the couple would lie in bed, engaging in deep, intimate conversations. They discussed religion, ambitions, love, and family.

  But most of the time, they spoke of death.

  Martin’s mind was more morbid than most, yet few ever saw the depths of his depravity. But for whatever reason, he seemed willing to confide in Anna. He told her of his lifelong struggle with homicidal urges. At times, he said, he surrendered to those demons.

  He said he tried to kill for the first time when he was just eight years old, Anna later reported in court. It was 1964 and his mother, Lillian, had drunkenly passed out on the couch. Sorting through the cabinets, Martin gathered all the medication he could find. He grabbed a beer from the refrigerator and fed the pills into the can. Jostling his mother awake, he helped her raise her head, and put the can to her lips.

  “I helped her sit up and drink it,” Martin told Anna. “Then I watched as she stopped breathing.”

  Just as his mother’s heart ceased beating, Martin’s sister Mary came home and found Lillian unconscious. Mary called 911, ambulances arrived, and the paramedics revived her. Later, everyone, including Lillian herself, believed she had tried to commit suicide.

  As Anna listened to the story, a chill ran down her spine. “Later, did you regret trying to kill her?”

  “I regret there wasn’t more medication in the house,” he quipped. The casual amusement in his voice unnerved Anna.

  Years later, Martin said he murdered his older brother, Anna testified.

  Rufus Roy MacNeill was a drug addict who wasn’t suicidal but cut his wrists for attention, Martin claimed. While Martin was visiting New Jersey, Rufus Roy called to say he had hurt himself and wanted to die. Martin went to their mother’s place in Camden and found Rufus lying unconscious in the bathtub, with superficial cuts on his wrists. Stooping next to the tub, Martin told Anna, he dunked his brother’s head underwater and held him there till he stopped struggling.

  “Were you ever worried that you’d get caught?” Anna asked, sitting up in bed.

  “No. No one would ask me about it.” Martin shook his head. “It’s not unusual for a cutter to drown because they lose enough blood that they don’t have the strength to stay above water.”

  Although Anna was disturbed, she was also intrigued with the doctor’s twisted mind. She both loved and feared Martin. As their dark sexual entanglement escalated, discussions of killing became more frequent. When Anna complained of her ex, Martin offered to murder him. He also mentioned a desire to kill his daughter Vanessa because he said her drug use had become a “family embarrassment,” according to Anna. Once, during a violent sexual episode, Martin even proposed ending Anna’s life to put an end to her woes.

  Martin said that throughout his medical career, he had murdered several patients, Anna later testified. And he claimed to have published an anonymous article on mercy killings. The 1988 article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association is infamous in the medical community. Entitled “It’s Over, Debbie,” the piece, written by an unknown medical resident, recounts the treatment of a twenty-year-old woman dying of ovarian cancer. Because the patient was in pain and not responding to chemotherapy, the doctor gave her an overdose of morphine with the intent of ending her life.

  “I injected the morphine intravenously and watched to see if my calculations on its effect would be correct. Within seconds her breathing slowed to a normal rate, her eyes closed, and her features softened as she seemed restful at last,” the doctor wrote in the article. “With clocklike certainty, within four minutes, the breathing rate slowed even more, then became irregular, then ceased.”

  * * *

  Throughout the summer of 2005, as Martin’s affair with Anna grew more impassioned, his marriage further disintegrated.

  In August, suspicious that he had been unfaithful, Michele searched her husband’s computer and found pornography. They argued and Martin bitterly announced he regretted adopting their daughters. “I don’t love you anymore,” Martin told his wife. “I don’t want to live here with you.”

  Weeks later, during a counseling session at church, Martin also confided to the bishop that he no longer loved his wife and adopted children.

  Meanwhile, Anna was planning for a future with Michele’s husband. Her MedSpa business was floundering, and she made arrangements to move to Oklahoma with her children. She wanted Martin to leave his wife and join her. In October, Anna’s business went bankrupt and she closed the doors to MedSpa, angering customers who had purchased prepaid laser hair removal packages worth thousands of dollars.

  Later, Anna was ambushed by a local television reporter doing a segment on the shuttered business. With tears in her eyes, Anna told the reporter she was broke but promised to somehow refund her customers’ money.

  As she prepared to move, Anna spent her last few weeks in Utah tangled beneath bedsheets with her lover. And they continued to discuss Martin’s tales of murder and mercy killing.

  Martin told Anna of his favorite method of murder: injecting a person with potassium to induce a heart attack. An injection of too much potassium is lethal and would quickly cause heart failure, Martin explained. But the chemical also occurs naturally in the human body, and when a person dies from a heart attack their potassium levels elevate. Because of this, he said, high potassium levels do not seem abnormal in an autopsy.

  Martin said he would never get caught killing, but on the off chance he was arrested, he would never plead insanity.

  “Why not?” Anna asked.

  “Because.” Martin’s stare bored into Anna. “I always know exactly what I’m doing.”

  9.

  Martin’s stony gray eyes idly flitted across his computer screen. Trolling the Internet, he clicked through member profiles on a service connecting users with similar interests. A picture of a young brunette caught his attention. She was pretty, with a round face, high cheekbones, wide brown eyes, and pouty lips. Her screen name was “phoenixsheba.” Under her interests she listed astrology, sphinxes, and, oddly, quantum physics.

  Chuckling to himself about the woman’s seemingly strange and diverse interests, he typed out a message. What do you know about quantum physics? Martin wrote, jokingly accusing her of trying to seem smarter than she was.

  In a house forty miles away in Salt Lake City, the message popped up on the computer screen of a twenty-nine-year-old divorced nurse named Gypsy Jyll Willis. She sent a quic
k reply—a basic definition of quantum physics. I have an interest in anything I can learn more about, Gypsy added.

  The message spurred a long online chat about their respective lives. Martin told the woman he was a thirty-nine-year-old married pharmaceutical representative named Joe.

  For the next three weeks, they continued to send instant messages back and forth, and during the last week of November 2005, they met for lunch at a Thanksgiving Point restaurant.

  When Martin approached Gypsy in the restaurant’s parking lot, she was immediately impressed. With graying temples and fine wrinkles around his eyes, he looked much older than thirty-nine. Still, she was attracted to his handsome good looks, bright smile, and deep voice. Plus, the chemistry they had online carried over in person. “I was kind of taken aback, I guess. I was not expecting to feel so impressed and overwhelmed,” Gypsy said years later. “His personality is very strong, he’s really terrifically intelligent, very handsome, very tall, just great. In my mind he was the perfect combination of qualities.”

  Soon “Joe” confessed his name was actually Martin, and admitted he was a forty-nine-year-old doctor and lawyer. Although he was twenty years her senior, Gypsy was infatuated. “I thought he was amazing,” Gypsy explained. “I thought, ‘This is really an awesome person.’”

  He was also married—a detail Martin was quite candid about. Martin also mentioned to Gypsy he was dating a few other women, although she didn’t ask for details.

  During one of their first dates, Martin spoke about his wife. “She’s very beautiful—a former beauty queen,” he said. “She’s a great, very capable mom.”

  “He said he had the perfect life and the perfect wife,” Gypsy recalled.

  At that comment, Gypsy’s brow had furrowed. “If your life is so perfect, what are you doing here?” she asked.

  “Boredom.” Martin shrugged. “Everything is so consistent and perfect and boring.”

  Gypsy realized why she was there—she was meant to be his excitement.

  * * *

  Throughout the latter part of 2005, Martin and Gypsy met in person several times and talked frequently online and through text messages.

  Meanwhile, Martin also spoke with Anna, who was then living in Oklahoma. Anna pressed him often about leaving Michele. For a few weeks she even expected to hear that Martin’s wife had died mysteriously, perhaps of a heart attack caused by an undiscovered potassium injection.

  But with Gypsy in his life, Martin no longer seemed interested in Anna. Soon, he had ended their affair and ceased all contact. “I would never leave Michele,” he told Anna.

  When Anna realized it was over, she was hurt and angry. “I hate him. I hate him,” she scribbled in her journal. “I want to hurt him.”

  Although they never spoke again, Martin haunted Anna. Her mind kept replaying their discussions of murder. Filled with dread, Anna saw her psychiatrist in January 2006.

  “I had an affair with a serial killer,” she said.

  10.

  Gypsy captivated Martin. The bored doctor, disenchanted with his perfect life, was bewitched by the much younger woman. For Gypsy, the romance was simply intoxicating.

  By January 2006, their affair had grown sexual. They met for trysts at her apartment, in motel rooms in Orem, and in his office at the Utah State Developmental Center. They spoke or texted dozens of times a day, often late at night when Michele was asleep. To entice Martin, Gypsy’s texts often included provocative pictures of herself. “It was very passionate and very sexual,” Gypsy said years later. “It was so fun—this beautiful, handsome doctor taking time out of his life for me.”

  It seemed such an unlikely pairing. Martin was a traditional Mormon doctor, while Gypsy was free-spirited and unconventional. And Gypsy couldn’t be more different from Michele.

  Born on October 8, 1976, Gypsy Jyll Willis was the first child of conservative Mormon parents, Howard and Vicki Willis. She had two brothers, Ben and Matthew, and a sister, Julie. Gypsy got her unusual name when she was a baby and her mother placed a red cap on her head, remarking she looked like a little gypsy. “That should be her name,” her father said.

  As a little girl, Gypsy’s favorite bedtime stories were the ones that told of a knight in shining armor who rescues the beautiful damsel in distress. She dreamed that someday a dashing prince would sweep her off her feet and take her away from her mundane life, growing up poor on a farm in Idaho.

  The Willis family lived a sheltered existence in the small rural city of St. Anthony, in the county seat of Idaho’s Fremont County. Both parents worked, but they never seemed to have enough. In 1985, when Gypsy was nine, Howard decided he wanted better for his family and went back to school to work toward a degree as a doctor. As the eldest of the four children, Gypsy was always expected to be responsible, and was often left in charge of her siblings.

  In high school, Gypsy became fascinated with her father’s medical books and decided she wanted to become a nurse. During her junior and senior year she enrolled in a vocational high school that offered a program in nursing. She graduated at the age of seventeen as a licensed practical nurse, or LPN. That same year her father also completed medical school and became a physician. While Gypsy worked as a nurse, she continued her education at Idaho State University.

  As she blossomed into a young woman, Gypsy attracted a lot of attention from the opposite sex, and always seemed to have a boyfriend. Vicki worried her daughter was growing up too fast. “When Gypsy was perhaps in her early teens she was going at a breakneck pace toward adulthood. And intellectually she was absolutely where she wanted to go. But emotionally these things take time to develop. And that was her major flaw,” Vicki said years later. “Her intellectual ability outstripped her emotional maturity.”

  In 1994, a few days before her second year of college was set to begin, Gypsy discovered she was pregnant. When Howard and Vicki learned their daughter was going to be a teen mom, they chastised her. Sex before marriage is forbidden in the Mormon faith, and Gypsy felt shunned by her religious parents.

  Dropping out of college, Gypsy worked throughout her pregnancy to save money, and in 1995, she gave birth to a little girl she named Heidi Marie.

  Throughout her pregnancy she had dated Heidi’s father, an engineering student who lived out of state. But on the day she went into labor, she couldn’t get ahold of him. After delivering her baby she called again and reached his new fiancée—her boyfriend had left her for another woman. Gypsy was devastated.

  Now a single mom, Gypsy turned to her parents. Howard’s attitude toward his eldest daughter was dismissive. “You’re used goods now,” Gypsy said her father told her. “No one is going to want you. You need to give up any hope of finding your own guy for your own preference and just find a guy willing to take you and your child.”

  At age twenty, Gypsy married a man she met at church named Jayson Jensen. She would later say she hadn’t been ready for marriage but had believed it would redeem her in the eyes of her parents. “I didn’t want to get married,” she recalled. “But I wanted to fix things with my family. So I got married and tried to patch it up and make it all better.”

  Gypsy and Jayson moved to Nebraska to raise Heidi. She worked while he studied to be a chef. But shortly after they wed the relationship became tumultuous.

  Two years after marrying, Gypsy filed for divorce, moved back home with her parents, and took a nursing job at a home for retired veterans. But her relationship with her family was strained. “As far as I know, I became the first person on either side of my family to have a child out of wedlock and be divorced,” she remembered. “I felt a lot of judgment from my parents.”

  By the time she’d turned twenty-three, Gypsy had fallen in love again, this time with a man named Eric Blair. And when she decided to move with her boyfriend to Salt Lake City, her parents took temporary custody of three-year-old Heidi. On the understanding that she would still be a part of Heidi’s life, Gypsy signed away parental rights, and Howard and Vic
ki later adopted their granddaughter.

  For a period of time, Gypsy returned to Idaho every few weeks to see her daughter. But tension grew over Gypsy’s relationship with Eric. After one nasty argument with her parents, Gypsy was told not to return home.

  In 1999, Gypsy sued her parents for custody of her daughter. Howard and Vicki then took Heidi and moved to Wyoming.

  When her finances were depleted by the legal fees, Gypsy dropped her custody bid, knowing Heidi was getting older and it would be traumatic for her to be taken from the grandparents who had been raising her.

  Years passed before Gypsy ever saw her daughter again.

  Estranged from her family, Gypsy became disenchanted with the Mormon faith. “I tried really hard to be a good Mormon. I think I was just inherently a little bit different,” she said years later. “I think I could have been a very good married Mormon. I definitely had some failings there. I obviously got pregnant.”

  Trying to come to her own understanding of the world, Gypsy explored other religions and grew spiritual. She embraced her whimsical birth name, and her interests became bohemian. She got a tattoo of angel wings on her shoulders, drove a silver Volkswagen Beetle, and attended Renaissance festivals and colorful cultural events. “I was having a happy-go-lucky life living on my own,” she recalled.

  But she still longed to see her daughter.

  Though she had no contact with her parents, she had remained close to her paternal grandmother. Through that connection, she learned that her parents and Heidi were going to be in Utah for a blessing of Gypsy’s brother’s new baby. Gypsy decided to go to the church to try and see her daughter.

  When Gypsy sat next to her parents and Heidi in the church’s pews, she was worried they might cause a scene. Instead, Vicki patted her on the shoulder, and after the ceremony invited Gypsy to a picnic.