Did a Facelift Lead to Michelle MacNeill's Death?

To investigators, the death of 50-year-old Michele MacNeill seemed more like a tragic accident than a homicide—at first. An affluent former beauty queen living in suburban Pleasant Grove, Utah, with her husband and their eight children, MacNeill was found unresponsive on April 11, 2007, in her bathtub eight days after getting a facelift.

An initial autopsy said MacNeill died of natural causes related to heart disease, but Utah County authorities in 2008 began investigating the death further when some of her children came forward with suspicion of foul play. They believed their father, Dr. Martin MacNeill, was responsible.

A medical examiner who subsequently reviewed the case ruled the cause of death as “undeterminable.” But when Martin went to trial in October 2013, more than six years after his wife’s death, he was convicted of overmedicating her and drowning her.

“This was a tough case,” Chad Grunander, the chief deputy of the Utah County Attorney’s Office and the lead prosecutor on the case, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. “But the defendant’s family really lined up against him [and] we reached a point where we felt confident that Martin had killed his wife.”

Much of Grunander’s confidence in Martin’s conviction stems from the circumstances that preceded his wife’s death.

There appeared to be an obvious motive: He was having an affair. After Martin met Gypsy Gillian Willis online in November 2005, their relationship got “more serious right before the death,” says Grunander, citing emails from Willis to that effect.

Defense attorney Randy Spencer tells A&E Crime + Investigation that the affair was not a homicide motive, arguing his client “was engaging in inappropriate behavior that was unrelated to murder.”

After the MacNeills turned 50, Martin asked Michele to get a facelift. He also asked the plastic surgeon to prescribe a series of drugs for his wife, that—if taken together—could be lethal. 

Following the surgery, Michele told her daughter Alexis that she believed her husband was trying to overmedicate her, and that, “If anything happens to me, make sure it was not your dad.” 

Alexis, who was enrolled in medical school in Nevada at the time, briefly took over dispensing her mother’s medication. She left Michele one day before she died and was convinced that her father was responsible.

Grunander describes Alexis as “a bulldog” who “pushed” authorities to bring charges against Martin. “She never gave up on her mom and making sure her father was brought to justice,” he says.

Grunander says Martin called 911 to report his wife as unresponsive and told the operator that he’d performed CPR, but autopsy evidence suggested that he did not. Martin also told his son and his son’s girlfriend to flush his wife’s medicine on the day of her death, claiming that the sight of it caused him grief.

“That was significant, because law enforcement weren’t able to count the remaining tablets,” Grunander says, adding that Martin “was taking control of the death scene.”

Within weeks of Michele’s funeral, Martin had Willis move into the home under the auspices that she was being hired as a nanny. 

He did not tell his children that he was involved with Willis. Soon thereafter, Martin fraudulently used the identity of one of his daughters to open a bank account for Willis so that she could escape her poor credit history. That led to fraud charges and convictions for both Martin and Willis. After their release from prison on those charges in July 2012, Martin was charged with Michele’s murder.

The strongest proof against Martin came from the way he handled Michele’s death, according to Grunander, but the case still lacked “smoking gun” evidence.

“We had a lot of motive, opportunity and means,” Grunander says. But right up until the conviction, he says, there wasn’t conclusive scientific proof that Michele had been the victim of a homicide.

Spencer, the defense attorney, counters that the case’s “scientific evidence creates doubt,” pointing to the initial autopsy report stating there had been no foul play.

But the plastic surgeon who prescribed the medication that may have led to Michele’s death called the deadly cocktail “out of my usual routine,” and claimed he only consented to the combination because Martin—a physician himself—requested it. Another woman who had an affair with Martin testified that he had told her once that he knew how to induce a heart attack and make it look like it’d occurred naturally. 

Although a cause of death was never definitely proven, there is strong evidence to suggest that Michele drowned, with a forensic pathologist noting at trial that she regurgitated more than seven cups of water during the attempted resuscitation. 

The largely circumstantial evidence was enough for jurors to convict Martin of first-degree murder and obstruction of justice in November 2013. 

He “was in shock” when the verdict was read, Spencer says. “He looked at me and he said, ‘Randy, I’ve done a lot of bad things in my life and I haven’t been caught for most of them, so it’s really ironic that I was just convicted for something I didn’t do.’”

Martin’s first bid at parole would have been in 2052 when he was 96, but he died by suicide at Utah State Prison in 2017.