The Stranger She Loved

by Shanna Hogan

  “It doesn’t look good,” he said. “You got to get up here. You got to get up here now.”

  Alexis was in her car, speeding toward the airport, hot tears spilling down her cheeks. She dropped the phone. At that moment she had no doubt: her father had murdered her mother.

  “I just started screaming, ‘He killed her! He killed her!’” she said years later. “I just knew, I knew right away that he had done that. My mother had told me that if anything happened to her, make sure it wasn’t my father. And I knew it was him.”

  After hanging up with Alexis, Nickelson turned to Martin. With stilted speech, Martin related that after Ada had found Michele, he rushed to his wife’s side and drained the bloody water.

  It struck Nickelson as odd that Martin would drain the tub. Both he and Martin had been on death scenes and knew it was important to preserve evidence.

  * * *

  Strapped to a gurney, Michele was loaded into the back of an ambulance. Police and firefighters trickled out of the house as neighbors continued to mill about, speaking amongst themselves in hushed tones. Doug and Kristi Daniels witnessed the scene from their driveway.

  Emerging from the house, Detective Wright approached Doug. “Do you know the MacNeills?” Wright asked.

  “Yeah. We’re right next door.”

  “Could you close the place up?” Wright nodded toward the MacNeill house.

  “Of course,” Doug replied.

  Reentering the house, Doug wandered back in the MacNeills’ master bathroom. Bloodstains remained on the carpet, along with more blood smeared on the tile floor. Unsure if Michele would live or die, and knowing their children would return home soon, Doug felt compelled to clean up the scene, hoping to minimize their trauma.

  Doug glanced around the bathroom and searched for a towel. Oddly, he could find none. He searched the bedroom, where Michele’s bloody top and bra remained on the floor. Whatever bottoms she may have been wearing were nowhere in the bedroom or bathroom.

  Browsing through the rest of the house, Doug entered the laundry room, where he found three or four damp towels wadded in a pile on the floor. He grabbed the towels, returned to the scene, and wiped the blood from the tub and tile. He dabbed the carpet but was unable to remove all the blood from the fibers. When he was finished, Doug brought the wet towels back to the laundry room.

  Meanwhile, Kristi retreated to her house to check on Ada, who was playing with Kristi’s son. Ada didn’t ask questions and Kristi tried to appear as if everything was normal. She gave the children a box of crayons and some paper, encouraging them to draw. Later she fed Ada a snack and watched over her until a family friend arrived to retrieve the girl.

  “Ada stayed in the house to play until someone came and got her,” Kristi remembered. “I didn’t want to ask her any questions. I didn’t want to be involved in what she saw.”

  * * *

  When a loved one dies, it’s normally a solemn time. But at the American Fork Hospital, Martin’s belligerent behavior rattled the nurses and ER staff. Once Michele was declared dead, Martin crumbled. Damian arrived at the hospital to find his mom dead and his father in hysterics.

  Damian grabbed Martin by the shoulders. “What happened?”

  Because Michele’s death had been unattended, at 1:30 P.M. her body was picked up by the Utah State Medical Examiner’s Office to be taken to Salt Lake City for an autopsy.

  Martin, meanwhile, continued to make phone calls. Among those he spoke with was Dr. Scott Thompson. When Martin told the surgeon his wife was dead, Thompson was dumbfounded—he had just seen Michele the day before. He was deeply distressed, having never lost a patient before.

  “I worried she wasn’t walking around enough and got a blood clot in her leg—that could have caused a pulmonary embolism,” he later said in court. “That’s what I was worried about because it was such an acute, sudden thing.”

  As the last physician on record to see Michele, Dr. Von Welch received a call directly from the emergency room doctor that afternoon. He was astonished to hear that Michele had even gone forward with the surgery.

  “I was shocked,” he recalled. “At the time I examined her, she was healthy, and it was just unexpected to hear that she would have a bad outcome from surgery.”

  17.

  Martin left the hospital and returned home, where he plopped down on the couch in the front room. He took out his phone and texted Gypsy. I lost Michele.

  Gypsy was confused. Martin had mentioned his wife was having surgery, and in recovery, but the message was ambiguous. Gypsy said she replied innocuously. Did she go to the store? You can’t find her?

  No. Michele is dead, Martin typed.

  Stunned, Gypsy replied, I’m so sorry.

  Martin also called his sister Mary to inform her of his wife’s passing. By then Mary, who was still living in California, was his only remaining sibling. She took the next plane to Utah and would stay with Martin for the next two weeks.

  As Martin made phone calls, Damian returned home as well, and sat down on the couch beside his father. Because of Martin’s apparent breakdown at the hospital, Damian had assigned himself the unfortunate task of being the bearer of the horrifying news to the rest of the family.

  At the hospital he had briefly spoken with Alexis.

  “Mom—she didn’t make it,” Damian had said, his voice husky with sorrow.

  Alexis sobbed, her body convulsing with painful tremors.

  Damian had then reached Vanessa at her apartment in Bluffdale.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this, Vanessa,” Damian said. “Mom’s dead.”

  Incensed and in anguish, Vanessa chucked her cell phone across the apartment, shrieking. The phone hit the wall, shattering into pieces. “No! No! No!”

  Because she didn’t have a car, Vanessa got a ride from a friend to her parents’ house.

  Damian tried phoning Rachel multiple times, but she didn’t answer her phone. Over the next few hours, Martin also left several cryptic voice mails on Rachel’s phone.

  “Rachel. Something happened,” Martin said in one message. “Come home now.”

  While fielding phone calls from family and friends, Damian made arrangements for Giselle, Elle, and Sabrina to be picked up from school. He also repeatedly called his girlfriend, Eileen Heng, who had been in class at BYU. Around 1 P.M., when class ended, Eileen checked her phone and noticed she had a dozen missed calls—all from Damian. She called him back.

  “My mom,” Damian said, his voice shaky. “She died.”

  Eileen left campus and drove directly to the MacNeill house, arriving after 2 P.M. Stepping through the front door into the living room, she saw Martin and Damian seated together on the couch. Eileen rushed to their side. She wrapped her arms around Damian and then hugged Martin. “What can I do for you?”

  Martin sighed and said somberly, “Let’s go to the bedroom.”

  The three filed into the master bedroom, where just a few hours earlier Michele’s life had ended. The three sat on the couch in the sitting area as Martin recounted how he found his wife. Over the next few days, Martin would tell this same account of his wife’s death multiple times. The details remained consistent—the facts solidifying—as he repeated the story to friends, family, and coworkers.

  Beginning with Ada coming home after school, Martin described finding Michele folded over the tub’s ledge, her face submerged in the water, her knees on the tile floor.

  “There was blood everywhere,” Martin told Eileen.

  Because Michele was partially nude, he said he thought she had been getting ready for a bath or had just used the toilet. Martin discussed various scenarios, speculating on how he believed she’d lost her life.

  “I just want to know how she died,” he said. Maybe she fell and hit her head and fell into the tub? Martin questioned. Or perhaps she overdosed on the medication.

  Martin also expressed concerns about his wife’s cholesterol and high blood pressure—suggesting she wasn’t pr
operly controlling her health problems with her prescription medication. “Michele had high blood pressure and cholesterol,” Martin told Eileen. “But she refused to take her pills.” He repeated over and over, “She wasn’t taking her pills.”

  After moments of speculation, Martin made a request directly to Eileen. “Can you get Michele’s prescriptions from the bathroom?” Martin explained that since Michele apparently wasn’t being consistent with her medication, he wanted to review which pills she had been taking. It was important that he account for the medicine in front of a witness, he said.

  Eileen readily agreed. Leaving her flip-flops beside the couch, Eileen crossed the bedroom barefoot. As she approached the bathroom, she stepped in a large wet spot on the carpet. Glancing down, she noticed a crimson stain standing out against the beige fibers.

  Entering the bathroom, Eileen peered around. Unlike what Martin had said about “blood everywhere,” she saw none.

  Near the toilet was a plastic container holding about ten prescription pill bottles, just as Martin had described. Retrieving the container, she brought it back to the bedroom and handed it to Martin. Martin asked his son to open each container and count the number of pills. Damian wrote the type of pill and quantity of each on a white pad of paper.

  When they were finished, Martin seemed frustrated. “I don’t want to do this anymore.”

  He didn’t say if anything was missing.

  Martin told his son and Eileen he wanted the drugs destroyed, because he thought they might have contributed to his wife’s death. “Flush them down the toilet. I can’t bear to look at them.”

  Eileen tossed the loose pills into the toilet and watched as they disappeared in one flush. Then she took the empty pill bottles to the garage.

  “He asked me to and he just lost his wife and I wanted to help,” Eileen said later, when asked why she flushed the medication.

  Martin then requested that Eileen tidy up the master bedroom before other family members arrived. Although the room seemed clean to her, she straightened up a pile of magazines on the table, stacking them neatly.

  The hospital bed in the middle of the room appeared as if it hadn’t been slept in. An hour later, when Eileen returned to the master bedroom, the bed was gone.

  * * *

  Word of Michele’s death spread like a virus through a series of ghastly phone calls. In hushed whispers, neighbors and friends delivered the news among the church congregation. The MacNeill children spoke to family members, confirming the awful truth: their mother was dead.

  Michele’s close friend Cheryl Radmall heard about the loss from a mutual friend. Cheryl phoned Karen Klinger, who was still battling cancer. The two women went to Loreen Thompson’s house to tell her the news in person.

  Opening the door to unexpectedly find two members of her friendship foursome, Loreen’s first thought was that something must have happened to Michele’s husband.

  “Is something wrong with Martin?” Loreen asked.

  “It’s Michele,” Cheryl cried. “She passed away.”

  “No!” Loreen threw her hand over her mouth in shock.

  While friends across Utah were hearing of the tragic passing, no one in the MacNeill family had called Michele’s mom or any of her siblings.

  That afternoon, Michele’s sister Terry Pearson received a call from a friend in California, who’d heard the news through a network of acquaintances in Utah. The friend had phoned Terry to offer her sympathy at the loss of her sister. Having heard nothing from the MacNeill family concerning Michele, Terry was stunned and alarmed.

  “What are you talking about?” Terry said. “Who told you that?”

  At first she questioned if it was even true. It had to be a rumor, a mistake, a terrible joke. In a panic, Terry called her youngest sister, Linda Cluff. As Terry explained the disturbing phone call she’d received, Linda felt a hot tingling on the back of her neck.

  “That can’t be true,” Linda said. “I’ve heard nothing.”

  In shock, Linda could hardly speak. Her daughter Jill Harper-Smith called Michele’s cell phone. One of the children answered and confirmed it was true—Linda’s beloved sister was dead. Tears flooded Linda’s eyes. Blended with the grief, a sick feeling boiled inside her gut. She hadn’t yet learned any of the details of Michele’s death, but somehow, at that moment, she instantly knew.

  “He killed my sister,” she whispered breathlessly. “Martin killed my sister.”

  Michele’s family had always known there was something terribly wrong with Martin and had feared that one day he would harm her. For three decades he had stolen Michele from her family through lies and manipulation. Linda knew that her own mother, who by then was in her late eighties, would be devastated. Linda went to her house to inform her of the loss of her daughter in person.

  As Linda told her mother the shattering news, Helen’s words from thirty years ago seemed haunting. “I won’t be surprised if he killed her someday,” Helen had once said. Now it seemed that awful premonition had come true.

  Evil had prevailed. Michele was dead.

  Trembling, Michele’s mom called Martin. He hung up on her.

  * * *

  Throughout the afternoon, many of Michele’s loved ones congregated at the MacNeill house. The doorbell rang repeatedly as neighbors and members of the church brought casseroles and frozen dinners to assist the new widower. Michele’s friends came by to offer condolences and check on Martin. A bishop from the church stopped by to perform a blessing.

  At Damian’s request, his friend Chris had picked up Giselle, Elle, and Sabrina from school. He also picked up Ada from the Danielses’ house and brought the four girls back to his own home.

  Huddling together with her sisters on Chris’s couch, Sabrina knew something was wrong. She turned to Ada.

  “What’s going on?” Sabrina asked. “Do you know what’s going on?”

  Ada whispered to Sabrina, “Something happened to Mom.”

  The bad feeling in the pit of Sabrina’s stomach swelled.

  The girls stayed at Chris’s house for over an hour, until Damian called to tell them to come back. By the time Chris pulled into the driveway of the Pleasant Grove home, Sabrina’s eyes were brimming with tears.

  “I remember walking in and I already knew that something really bad … I knew that something bad had happened,” Sabrina recalled. “I ran into my room and I was already really emotional and crying.”

  Sabrina collapsed on the floor of her room next to her armchair, throwing her forearms across her face and weeping. Elle plopped down on the bed. Giselle and Ada stood anxiously nearby.

  Minutes later Martin entered the bedroom, a towel draped over his face. He swiped away the towel, revealing a somber expression.

  “Girls…” Martin’s voice wavered. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but your mom is dead.”

  Each of the girls began to sob, asking questions. Sabrina gasped, searing tears streaming down her cheeks. She had just found a family. And now, after just three years, she had lost her mom.

  “We’re so lucky,” Martin sniveled. “Families get to be together forever.”

  He left the room and closed the door.

  * * *

  Just one day after leaving Utah, Alexis MacNeill was back, and desperate for answers.

  A friend met her at the airport and drove her to the hospital in American Fork. Alexis spoke to hospital staff and learned that her mother’s body had already been transferred to Salt Lake City by the medical examiner’s office.

  Returning home, Alexis bolted through the front door, finding Damian and his girlfriend in the living room. Alexis gave Damian a quick hug before darting directly to her parents’ room.

  A poisonous silence filled the bedroom. The lights were off. Martin was on the couch, hanging his head in his hands and staring despondently into the dark.

  Ignoring him, Alexis riffled through the bedroom and bathroom, searching for her mom’s prescriptions. She needed to know
exactly what remained.

  Peering around the bedroom, Alexis noticed that the hospital bed was gone. Many of her mom’s things were no longer displayed—including the get-well gifts and stuffed animals her daughters had given her. The pink container that had held Michele’s medication and the rollaway nightstand that had sat beside the hospital bed were also missing.

  Stepping into the bathroom, Alexis noticed there were no towels. The bath mats that usually lay in front of the tub and shower had also vanished.

  Alexis looked around, but she could not find the medication. Also gone was the little black notebook that she had used to document all of her mother’s vitals. In the armoire that held the TV, however, she was able to locate the Zyrtec notepad, which she had originally used to track the medication.

  “The first thing I did was look for the medication. I looked right where I had left them,” Alexis said years later. “There was nothing. There was no medication and the black book wasn’t there as well.”

  Alexis turned to her father. “Where’s her prescriptions?”

  Glancing up, Martin shook his head. “I don’t know. The police must have taken them,” he lied.

  “What happened?” Alexis asked her father.

  Speaking slowly and somberly, Martin once again explained how he found Michele, offering various theories, including that she may have died from a pulmonary embolism.

  “Show me how you found her,” Alexis said defiantly. “Show me.”

  Martin rose from the couch, and his daughter followed him into the bathroom.

  “I wanted to know what happened,” Alexis later testified. “He took me into the bathroom and showed me how he found my mom.”

  To describe the position of his wife’s body, Martin squatted beside the tub where the rug had been placed. He draped his body over the edge and stuck his head into the basin.

  “I tried to pull her out.” Martin peered up at Alexis. “I was too weak.”

  Alexis could barely look at him.

  Continuing to search for the medication, Alexis rummaged through the kitchen and living room. Entering the garage, she found the hospital bed. Piled on top of it were wet towels, the bathroom rug, and her mother’s clothing balled in a bloody heap. On the bed she discovered the missing stuffed animals and get-well gifts. In a five-gallon Rubbermaid bucket she also found the medical equipment, including a humidifier and blood pressure cuff.