by Shanna Hogan
Touching her mother’s things, she was swamped by grief. Suddenly, an overwhelming ache gripped Alexis’s chest. She burst into hysterical sobs.
* * *
By 5 P.M., Michele’s firstborn, Rachel, still hadn’t learned of her mother’s death. When she went to work that morning, she’d left her cell phone at her apartment. When she returned home that evening, she checked her cell and discovered she had missed a barrage of calls—mostly from her father.
She was overcome by a sickening sense of dread.
Something is obviously very wrong, she thought.
Rachel tried to call her father, but he didn’t answer.
Still clutching her phone, Rachel fled her apartment, got in her car, and drove directly toward Pleasant Grove. While driving, she checked her voice mail.
The first message was from her dad—his voice dripping with desperation. “Rachel. Quick. Get to the hospital. It’s your mom. Quick.”
A molten wave of panic hit Rachel.
She called her dad again. He answered. “Rachel?”
“What’s happening?” she blurted. “Is everything okay?”
“Rachel…” Martin paused. “Come home.”
“What’s wrong?” she asked again, her voice rising. “What’s wrong? Is mom okay?”
“Rachel. Come home,” Martin repeated before hanging up.
“He wouldn’t tell me any more,” Rachel recalled. “He hung up on me.”
As she sped toward the house, she called back repeatedly, but Martin wouldn’t answer. Phoning Alexis, Rachel learned the tragic news. At around 6 P.M., Rachel pulled up to the house, jumped out of her car, and rushed inside. The front room was full of strangers.
“Right away I began to look for my father. I wanted to make sure he was okay,” Rachel said years later. “He was in my parents’ room. He was sitting on the couch. He was there. I just went to hug him and comfort him.”
Lunging toward her father, she threw her arms around his neck and bawled.
“Your mom was my rock.” He wept.
Once again Martin explained how Ada had found Michele in the tub. He mumbled under his breath, “She’s ruined. Ada’s ruined.”
Holding her father, Rachel tried to find words of comfort when he suddenly made a surprising exclamation. “We need to get an autopsy done.”
“What?” Rachel recoiled.
“We need to get it done right away.”
“Why?” Rachel didn’t understand what he was talking about—it didn’t make sense. “Why do we need to get it done right away?”
Martin told her he was concerned about an impending police investigation.
“I don’t want anyone to think I murdered your mother,” he whispered.
“Why? Why? Why?” Rachel shook her head in disbelief. “Why would anyone think that?”
“It was so shocking to me,” Rachel said years later. “It didn’t make sense.”
Alexis entered the bedroom and Rachel stood to hug her sister. Alexis discreetly pulled Rachel into the closet, away from their father.
“Dad killed Mom,” Alexis whispered.
“What?” The words made no sense to Rachel. Nothing made sense at that moment.
Martin joined them, insisting on showing Rachel the position in which he had found Michele.
Rachel, who had always been more emotionally fragile than Alexis, had no interest in seeing how her mom had died. She objected, but against her wishes, Martin stepped into the bathroom.
“He wanted to tell me what happened to my mother,” Rachel recalled. “Knowing that she had died, that was not something that I wanted to do. My dad was adamant that he describe what had happened … I didn’t want to know. He insisted.”
Alexis followed her father. Too broken to watch, Rachel stood in the bathroom doorway—not wanting to be in the room where her mother had died. Martin crouched beside the tub.
“He literally bent over and went into the tub to show how she was,” Rachel said years later. “He found my mother in a position that he showed us.”
* * *
Around 7 P.M., Michele’s friends Cheryl, Loreen, and Karen arrived at the MacNeill house to offer their condolences. Martin’s sister Mary greeted them at the front door.
Inside, a somber silence hung in the air. Giselle and Sabrina were in the kitchen, standing at the counter. Martin was seated on a barstool facing the front door. Rachel was staring at her phone screen, in between making calls.
“When we came in there was a strange feeling,” Loreen recalled. “No one was talking.”
Cheryl attempted to comfort Michele’s children.
“Rachel was upset and emotional,” Cheryl remembered. “Alexis was probably more hysterical than I had ever seen anyone at a death.”
Karen went downstairs with Alexis, while Cheryl pulled Rachel aside to talk privately. Loreen spoke directly to Martin.
“What can we do?” Loreen asked him.
“I’m doing my best,” Martin said. “I know I need to pull it together for the children.”
At the appearance of Michele’s church friends, Martin reverted to his old regal routines. He began to give Loreen a tour of his house. Room by room he showed off some of his renovations. In the living room, he commented that he had added space for a grand piano.
“I did this all for Michele,” he said. Strangely, that was Martin’s only reference to his wife or her death.
“I thought it was odd that Martin showed us the renovations of the home,” Cheryl said years later. “He never really talked about Michele that night.”
* * *
While Alexis was distant from her father, Rachel, Vanessa, and Damian remained by his side throughout the night. Martin spoke repeatedly about the autopsy and his concern about being blamed for his wife’s death.
“He kept repeating that the autopsy needed to be done. I didn’t want to listen to any of it,” Rachel later said in court. “My mother had just died—it was so horrible.”
Rachel attempted to ease her anguished father’s concerns. “Dad, the autopsy will show you didn’t do anything.”
Still, each time there was a knock at the door, Martin flinched, looking over his shoulder. He was nervous and shaky, as if he expected the police were coming to arrest him at any moment.
As Rachel comforted her father, she felt the reality of life after Michele setting in. She thought of Giselle, Elle, Sabrina, and Ada—who would care for them?
“I’ll make sure the kids are taken care of,” Rachel told her dad. “Drive them to school and ballet and such.” Rachel insisted she would quit her job to be the full-time caretaker.
“Don’t you dare do that!” Martin suddenly snapped at his daughter. “We all just need to get on with our lives.” Instead, Martin said he would hire a nanny.
Vanessa also volunteered to care for her younger sisters, but Martin declined. “Everything needs to get back to normal,” Martin told Vanessa.
Despite her father’s wishes, Rachel thought the girls would be better off in her care than with a stranger. That evening, Rachel called her boss at the dentist’s office and left her notice of resignation on the voice mail. When Martin found out he was livid.
Later that evening, Rachel wandered around the house, making her way into the garage, where she discovered the wet towels and get-well gifts piled atop the hospital bed. She was disturbed to discover the black top, undergarment, and bra Michele had been wearing when she died. The shirt was sliced down the front. Everything was covered in blood.
“It was just a big bloody mess. All of these things were just thrown in the garage,” Rachel said years later. “It was just a big pile. Everything was just thrown in.”
Concerned that her younger sisters would discover their mother’s bloody clothes, Rachel bundled them up and brought them back into the house. Hands trembling, she presented them to her father.
Martin glanced down at the clothes and glared at Rachel, his face dark and frightening.
“How dar
e you show me those things?” he said in a hateful voice. “Get rid of it!”
Rachel turned away from Martin, shaking. She couldn’t bear the thought of throwing away her mother’s things.
“I wanted to keep everything of my mother’s,” Rachel later said.
Gathering the clothes, she placed them in the washing machine. Once they were clean she stored them in a bag and kept them at her apartment.
Years later those same clothes would be considered state’s evidence.
18.
Bloody fluid had leaked from the yawning incisions on Michele’s face, saturating a towel spread beneath her on the autopsy table. The blood pooled around her head, framing the entirety of her face with a macabre crimson halo.
It was April 12, 2007, and Michele had been dead a little more than twenty-four hours. Her remains—cold and stiff from rigor mortis—had been transported to the Utah medical examiner’s office in Salt Lake City.
Wearing latex gloves and a long white lab coat, assistant medical examiner Dr. Maureen Frikke began the autopsy at 2:15 P.M. She first jotted notes about Michele’s vitals: fifty-year-old Caucasian female, five foot seven, 182 pounds.
Frikke then carefully examined Michele’s remains.
Remnants of the revival efforts remained attached to her body. Bloodstained tubes jutted from her right nostril and the corner of her mouth. An uncapped catheter was taped to her left forearm; the tail end of an IV line hung from her left shin. Absorbent gauze was fastened to her right hand, concealing a needle puncture.
Frikke made note of marks left from the plastic surgery, indicating various stages of healing—the purple bruises, the surgical tape on the eyelids, the sutured incisions encircling Michele’s ears, and the gaping wounds near her hairline.
Photographs were snapped, tissue samples collected.
Frikke held one of Michele’s hands—her perfectly polished French manicure unchipped. Scraping under the acrylic fingernails, Frikke collected the residue in a plastic bag for possible DNA testing.
Frikke inspected every inch of Michele’s body. Besides the wounds from the surgery and revival efforts, there were no overt signs of trauma—nothing to indicate how she’d ended up dead and on an autopsy table.
Scalpel in hand, Frikke carved a Y-shaped slice down the chest, beginning at each shoulder and finishing at the pelvis. She peeled back Michele’s skin, exposing the ribs and organs.
Examining the chest cavity, Frikke saw no fractures or dislocations of ribs, vertebrae, sternum, clavicles, or pelvic bones. There was no internal hemorrhage around the neck. No obstruction was found in Michele’s upper respiratory tract.
Frikke carefully removed each organ, examining and weighing them one by one. Slivers of each were collected for later examination under a microscope. She noted that Michele had previously had her appendix, ovaries, fallopian tubes, uterus, and cervix surgically removed.
Frothy, blood-tinted fluid sloshed around Michele’s stomach. A large amount of fecal matter was compacted in her colon, indicating she was constipated—possibly due to the medication she had been taking.
Surveying the liver, Frikke noted it was congested with gobs of yellow sludge—the early signs of fatty liver disease. It was not, however, severe, and would not have been fatal. The gallbladder, spleen, kidney, and pancreas were all normal—smooth and glistening.
Next, Frikke examined the lungs. Because Michele was found in the bathtub, drowning needed to be considered as a possible cause of death.
Drowning is notoriously difficult for pathologists to diagnose after death. There are no laboratory tests to prove drowning. And even if a person dies by drowning, there may be no signs present in an autopsy to prove that particular cause of death.
Furthermore, a person can suffocate in water without ever sucking any liquid into the lungs—a medical phenomenon known as dry drowning. To diagnose a drowning death when there is no water in the lungs, pathologists check for other indicators, which may include overinflated lungs, heavy with fluid.
As Frikke examined Michele’s lungs, she noticed they were, in fact, heavy. In an adult female the lungs typically weigh 300 to 400 grams. Michele’s right lung weighed 690 grams; the left was 670.
The extra weight was a result of a backup of fluid in Michele’s lungs. But while it could have been an indication of drowning, this is also a common finding in an individual who has undergone prolonged resuscitation efforts.
Frikke also found no frothy fluid in the trachea or obstructions in the airways.
The medical examiner turned her attention to Michele’s heart. When she weighed the heart, she discovered it was enlarged and heavy—390 grams. An average female heart weighs about 300 to 350 grams.
The muscle walls of Michele’s heart were thick, the left side larger than the right. There was mild blockage in the arteries; her aorta was hardened and narrowed by fatty plaque. Michele also had inflammation of the heart, a condition known as myocarditis. Frikke carefully examined the left and right ventricle—finding no evidence of infection or hemorrhage. There also was no evidence of a recent heart attack. Although it was not definitively the cause of death, Michele indeed had heart disease.
An enlarged heart such as Michele’s is often the result of high blood pressure—a condition with which she had been diagnosed. But Michele’s heart disease was in the early stage and not necessarily fatal. In addition, for individuals who are hypersensitive to medication, some narcotics can exacerbate a heart condition and cause inflammation of the heart.
Seeing no other explanations for a relatively healthy woman to suddenly drop dead, Frikke suspected Michele’s death was related to her heart.
One of the complications of an enlarged heart is a higher risk for an abnormal heartbeat rhythm—known as an arrhythmia. An arrhythmia can cause the heart to abruptly stop beating, resulting in a sudden, unpredictable death.
There would have been no obvious symptoms or warnings. The arrhythmia causes an instantaneous cessation of breathing. Death would have been rapid.
There is no way to prove a person died from an arrhythmia. A pathologist can only determine whether a person would have been at risk of having this type of irregular heartbeat.
Considering the condition of Michele’s heart, Frikke theorized she died of an arrhythmia. She would wait to rule on the cause of death until the toxicology results came back from the lab.
19.
The days following their mother’s death were a blur of agony and anguish for all the MacNeill children.
For Alexis, it was as if her soul had been stolen and was sinking toward oblivion, leaving an empty cavity of grief. Adrift in the sea of despair, Alexis wanted to feel closer to her mom’s spirit. She wore Michele’s clothes and slept in her bed—anything to smell her scent, feel her presence. Sorting through her possessions, she found a book of poetry her mother had written. She read through the book, marveling at Michele’s beautiful writing.
Alexis wrote about her grief.
“I am lost without you. You are my hero, my strength, and my best friend,” she wrote on her mom’s online obituary. “I will cry for you forever. You are my heart and my life. I will do my best to survive, but right now I cannot breathe. I will try to make you proud. I am broken now, but I will try to be brave like you. I will love you forever.”
Vanessa’s adult life had been punctuated by problems. But through it all her mother never lost faith that she would turn it around. “I never showed you the love that you showed me. I gave up. I have given up so many times and you never, never gave up on me,” Vanessa wrote to her mom. “In the times when I feel like I have lost touch with myself, I always know that you are the one who truly knows who I am.”
Staying at the house in Pleasant Grove, Vanessa latched on to little Ada, who had always been so wise beyond her years. As Vanessa wept, Ada took her biological mom’s hand.
“Tomorrow will be a little bit easier than today.” Ada wiped the tears from Vanessa’s face. “Sometimes I wil
l cry. But most of the time I will wipe away your tears.”
It was such a touching reminder for Vanessa that she needed to have the same strength, love, and selflessness as her own mom.
“I think perhaps your strength lives on in her,” Vanessa wrote. “For Ada, I will be strong. I will do everything that I can to be the mother that I am supposed to be for Ada. I will never be the mother that you have always been for me as well as for her.”
To build a tribute for her mother, Rachel used part of the five thousand dollars her father had previously given her to purchase a computer, which she used to create a Web site and video montage in her mother’s memory. The video consisted of a collection of home movies and photos of Michele, set to one of her favorite songs, “Thula Mtwana” by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. “My mother always had a special love for Africa, even though she never got a chance to go there in her lifetime,” Rachel captioned the video.
Damian was also fractured by the enormous loss. His sisters would later say his mother’s death caused him to slowly implode.
On April 13, the family published Michele’s obituary in the local paper and online.
“Her life was dedicated to her family. Her life was dedicated to helping all around her. We know her dedication lives on,” the obituary read. “Her outer beauty and talents were so great, yet nothing compared to the beauty of her soul—the Light of Christ, a flaming fire that burned so brightly for all to see.”
Friends from across the country and as far away as Canada and even Tokyo commented in an online tribute, telling how Michele had influenced their lives.
“Michele had an ability to touch people that no other person could touch. She was loved and adored by people who shut out the rest of the world,” one friend wrote.
