MICHELE Somers and her new beau Martin MacNeill made a striking young couple.
She was a popular star student, while he was tall and handsome – and determined to be a doctor. Falling for each other at a church social in 1978, Michele, 21, and Martin, 22, soon eloped.
Four children arrived in quick succession – Rachel, Vanessa, Alexis and Damian.
As years passed, Martin became an osteopathic surgeon and medical facility director, while Michele focused on her family. The couple even went on to adopt four more children – Giselle, Elle, Sabrina and Ada.
‘She made everything and everyone not just look, but feel, beautiful,’ her oldest daughter Rachel later recalled to Deseret News. ‘She was an angel walking among us.
After three decades in a seemingly happy marriage, though, Martin, then 50, changed. ‘He started acting very strangely,’ Rachel said. ‘He became just very obsessed with losing weight and his appearance.’
Michele began to suspect Martin was having an affair with a woman named Gypsy Willis, who she’d tracked using Martin’s phone records.
But then he suggested Michele should also make some changes to her appearance, and urged her to have a facelift. Wanting to save her marriage, she agreed.
Martin arranged the procedure, choosing the plastic surgeon and giving him a list of medications he wanted Michele to be prescribed.
They were all central nervous system depressants, not meant to be taken at the same time.
On April 3, 2007, Michele went under the knife. When she was back home after the op, Martin insisted he’d take care of her.
‘She looked bad’ and ‘in a lot of pain’, daughter Alexis, by now a medical student, later told ABC News.
‘I’ll take care of her medicines tonight,’ he told Alexis
While Alexis was at her mum’s bedside, her father ordered his daughter to leave. ‘I’ll take care of her medicines tonight,’ he told Alexis.
But the next morning, Alexis found Michele ‘listless and unresponsive’. Confronting her dad, he admitted he might have over-medicated Michele.
After coming round, Michele, who was wearing pads over her eyes, asked Alexis to let her hold her medications.
‘She said, “Give me each of the pills so I can feel it with my finger, so if he tries to give me something else, I’ll know what he’s giving me”,’ Alexis explained.
Five days later, believing her mum had recovered enough, Alexis left to go back to med school.
The following day, her mother was dead.
Tragically, Michele’s body was found in a bathtub of water by her youngest daughter Ada. Martin called emergency services and attempted CPR, but it was too late.
An autopsy later found Michele had died by natural causes from heart disease. But her adult children were suspicious.
After Michele’s funeral came another shock.
Martin had arranged a live-in nanny for the younger children. It was Gypsy Willis, the same woman he’d been having an affair with before Michele’s death. Despite his daughters’ protests, Martin brought her home.
‘I moved in to help with the kids. When we had opportunity, I still slept with him,’ Gypsy later admitted to ABC News.
Sickened, the siblings kept up pressure to have Michele’s cause of death reviewed, and eventually new investigators took on her case.
Shockingly, investigator Doug Witney discovered Martin’s medical career had been based on ‘falsified transcripts’ to get into college.
‘We basically found out that our entire lives had been based and surrounded on lies,’ Rachel said of her father’s double life.
In 2010 Michele’s cause of death was amended to include ‘drug toxicity’, and ‘natural causes’ was changed to ‘undetermined’.
Three years later, in September 2012, Martin MacNeill was charged with first-degree murder and obstruction of justice.
At his trial in Utah, US, in October 2013, prosecutors said MacNeill had drugged Michele, left her in the bath to die, and may have held her head underwater ‘for good measure’.
He’d pumped Michele full of drugs he knew would be difficult to detect
Prosecutor Chad Grunander
He pleaded not guilty, his defence arguing that Michele had a heart attack and fell into the bath.
During closing statements, prosecutor Chad Grunander described MacNeill’s actions as an ‘almost perfect murder’, adding he’d ‘pumped [Michele] full of drugs’ he knew would be difficult to detect once she was dead.
The jury found him guilty, believing he’d drugged, then drowned Michele in the bath. In September 2014 he was sentenced to 15 years to life for murder and 15 years for obstruction of justice.
In March 2017, MacNeill lost an appeal against his conviction.
He died by suicide in prison the following month.
Alexis, who went on to become a doctor, adopted Elle, Sabrina and Ada.
‘They’re just beautiful, wonderful girl,’ Alexis said of them. I don’t know what I would’ve done without having my sisters to fight for,’ she told ABC News.
Every year on their mum’s birthday, they celebrate with a slice of Michele’s favourite chocolate cake.
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