The Utah Nanny Mistress Murder | The Case of the MacNeill Family | UNSEEN

The girl you've just heard hides the most disturbing secret. Six-year-old Ada McNeil is being interrogated by police after she discovered her mother Michelle, unresponsive in the bathtub. Her dad Martin claims Michelle was found slumped over its side, face down. But little Ada tells police a different story and draws her mom face up. Does she all the way in the bathtub or just part way in the bathtub, huh? Just days before the incident, Ada's mother Michelle had undergone plastic surgery. And because her husband Martin is a doctor, he insisted on administering her medication himself. But during her recovery, Michelle told her eldest daughter Alexis, "If anything happens to me, make sure it wasn't your dad who killed me." The problem is, Michelle's husband Martin is lying. He's not a real doctor. Michelle's death is a ruled and accident. The day of Michelle's funeral, her daughter Alexis spots a mysterious dark-haired woman who was not invited by anyone. She appears sympathetic and supportive of Michelle's family. But what Alexis doesn't know is that this woman has been meeting with her father in secret and that her mother's murder is only the first part of her father's master plan to get rid of his eight children. No one would have uncovered what really happened to Michelle McNeil if it wasn't for her daughter Alexis, who will stop at nothing to avenge her mother and take down her own father. It's 2007. 24-year-old Alexis McNeil is attending medical school at the University of Nevada, 500 miles away from her seven siblings and loving parents, Michelle and Martin. Their family home is in Pleasant Grove, Utah, a town just outside Salt Lake City, where her father is a successful surgeon and osteopathic physician. Without her life, she's wanted to follow in his footsteps. While Alexis is away at school, she remains in close contact with her family, calling her mother every day. But on April 11, 2007, when she calls her mom, there is no response. This is unusual as Alexis's mother Michelle always answers her phone. At the same time, back home in Pleasant Grove, Alexis's father, Martin, leaves her work to go pick up his youngest daughter, Ada, from school. At first, when they arrive home, nothing appears out of the ordinary until the six-year-old girl goes to the upstairs bathroom. She walks inside and discovers a disturbing scene. Her mother is in the bathtub, and she isn't moving. Ada runs downstairs and tells her dad that something's wrong with mom. When Martin finds his wife unconscious in the bathroom, he immediately calls 911. Michelle McNeill, only eight days earlier, on April 3, had decided to undergo a facelift to the concert of her daughter, Alexis. Michelle is a stay-at-home mom to Alexis and her other siblings. A former pageant queen, Michelle is deeply involved in her local community as an active member of her church, and a senior board member of the Utah Ballet. Growing up, Alexis fondly remembers her mother always coming to watch her dance classes, and being there for her and her siblings no matter what. But when Michelle turns 50 years old, her husband Martin noticed his wife's growing insecurities around aging, and decided he would try and help her. Martin says, "I would love to give you a facelift as a gift. This is something that will make you feel young again." 10 days after the initial consultation, and with the encouragement of her husband, Michelle's surgery is booked. The procedure is scheduled during Alexis' medical school spring break, so that she can fly home to help her mother recover and nurse her back to health. April 3, 2007, Michelle checks into the hospital as her procedure begins. The surgeons work on her for over eight hours. And after the procedure, everything appears to have gone well. Michelle is clear to go home the very next day. During her spring break, Alexis stays at her family's home in Utah, making sure her mother's recovery goes smoothly, but the night before she returns to medical school, her mother tells her something she will never forget. Alexis is stunned. She wonders if it's the pain medication talking. If her mother even knows what she just said, but Alexis can't shake the unsettling feeling left by her mother's odd statement, even as she heads back to school in Nevada. Back in Pleasant Grove, Utah, just a few days after Alexis left her mother in seemingly good health, EMTs are now desperately attempting to save Michelle's life. Rushing her to the hospital, that's when Martin makes a phone call to his daughter, Alexis, and delivers her the news no child ever wants to hear. "Hey said, your mom, she's in the tub, she's not breathing, I've called an ambulance, and then he hung up. And I just started driving to the airport, and I was just screaming, just screaming." Shortly after arriving at the hospital, Michelle McNeill is pronounced dead. She's taken to the medical examiner's office for an autopsy. Her death is ultimately ruled a result of natural causes. The report attributes her passing to a combination of heart inflammation and high blood pressure. The medical examiner's report indicated that Michelle had died of myocarditis and hypertension, and it listed it as a natural cause of death. The whole family is in shock, Michelle was healthy and only 50 years old, and when Alexis arrives back home, she immediately notices something is deeply wrong. "I walked in my parents' room and all of my mom's things that were in the room were now gone." April 14, 2007, just three days after her death, Martin invites hundreds to gather at a church beside the Mount Tempennoga's Temple to mourn the sudden and tragic loss of Michelle. "On the day of the funeral, that church house was full to the brim." However, there is one person at the funeral that no one seems to recognize, a young woman with long, dark hair. She's not a relative or a friend of Michelle's, but before anyone can ask what her name is, Martin gets up to speak at the funeral. Martin's unsettling speech sets off even more alarm bells in Alexis's mind, and as she turns over the events of her mother's death in her mind, she has more and more questions about things that had once seemed fine, but now strike her as suspicious. After a surgery like Michelle's, painkillers are usually prescribed by the doctor who performed the procedure. Since Martin is also a surgeon himself, he decided to manage his wife's medications. When Alexis arrives back in Pleasant Grove after her mom's death, she finds that the rest of the medication is missing. And when she confronts her father about it, he says that the police must have taken it with them during their investigation. And though the autopsy concluded Michelle's death was due to natural causes, Alexis is sure that there's more to it, something isn't right. In the meantime, the whole community reaches out to Martin, offering support in the wake of his wife's sudden death. Though four of the couple's children are adults, they have their four younger girls between six and sixteen years old still at home, three of whom had been adopted into the McNeil family from Ukraine. Martin needs all the help he can get around the house, as he is now raising all his children alone. That's when just days after Michelle's passing, Martin announces to the children that he's hired a live-in nanny to help around the house, and that her name is Gypsy Jillian Willis. The name sounds alarmingly familiar to Alexis. That's when the young woman recalls a disturbing conversation she's had with her mother. Just two months prior to the tragedy, Michelle told Alexis she had suspicions that her husband was having an affair with a woman who had the exact same name. In fact, Alexis had been the one to help her mother secretly check Martin's phone. I figured out a way to get into his phone. There was a number that came up repeatedly, and it was in bizarre hours like one o'clock in the morning, two o'clock in the morning, and the name was Gypsy Jillian Willis. Alexis immediately confronts her father. She tells him that she knows the new nanny is the same person her mother was concerned about, and insists that she cannot be allowed to move in. But he completely dismisses her, and within two weeks of Michelle's death, Gypsy is moved into the family home. Alexis suspicions of her father only grows after her younger sisters, still living at home, begin explaining that Gypsy never helps around the house, and that they notice the living nanny is sneaking into Martin's room late at night. Between Martin's affair with Gypsy, his strange funeral speech, the missing painkillers, and Michelle's final ominous warning to her daughter, Alexis is all but certain her mother was right. Her death was not an accident. It was murder. I was the only one that knew this, so I needed to start figuring out what had happened, and protect the rest of my family because my dad was a killer. On the outside, Martin McNeil appears to simply be a grieving man mourning a tragic loss of his wife, but Alexis knows that her four younger sisters are in grave danger, and she heads over to the family home, determined to force her father to admit to everything. I said, "I don't like Gypsy being there. I think you're having a affair with her, and I think you murdered mom." Martin immediately becomes defensive. The argument escalates, and he ends up calling the police on his own daughter, claiming she is crazy and that she is harassing him. The cops, who know Martin as a respected doctor, don't question his claims. They then immediately escort Alexis out of the house before she can even put her shoes on. "That looks crazy. I remember people looking at me. I couldn't even try to clean myself up." With no place left to turn, and fearing that no one will ever take her concern seriously, Alexis brings her suspicions to her older sister, Rachel, who lives close by in Salt Lake City. "My father underestimated my sister's love for me. She ended up believing it. And she said, "If Alexis is kicked out of the family, then I guess I am to help. Finally, this weight had been lifted off of my shoulders." Alexis and Rachel find another ally in their mother's sister, who reveals disturbing details about Martin's secret criminal past, which she had kept hidden from his children. Just prior to his marriage to Michelle, Martin had been involved in several illegal money-making schemes, eventually being convicted and serving six months in prison for forgery and grand theft. In fact, when he'd started medical school, he'd actually been on felony parole. And as they dig deeper into their father's past, they continue to uncover more evidence that Martin isn't who he says he is. But it quickly becomes clear he won't go down without a fight. He begins bombarding his daughter with threatening texts. "I will win every time, little girl. I have the power under the law. I will call the police next time. I am not afraid of you or your threats. And if either you or Rachel tries to hurt me, I will not hesitate to destroy you." He said, "If you go to the police, if you do anything to defy me, you're going to live to regret this day." But his threats don't stop Alexis. She keeps fighting. The way she knows her mom would have fought for her if she were in her shoes. "I knew that my mom would do anything for me. So I had to fight for her. And I had to fight for her children." Alexis and her sister ramp up their campaign to expose their father. They make a website asking anyone on the internet to send in any incriminating information they have about Martin McNeill. And it's not long before Alexis's email inbox overflows with accounts of Martin's concerning behaviors. Multiple women reveal they've engaged in affairs with him. The allegations even turn criminal, with reports that Martin had sexually assaulted a disabled woman, plotting to kill his mother, and had allegedly confessed to murdering his brother. Alexis goes public with all the information they have in an attempt to show everyone her father's true nature. But it's been over a year since her mother's death and Alexis can't find anyone in law enforcement or in the media to take her accusations seriously. "I went to every single newspaper in Utah as I go to the governor's office. I cannot understand why no one would listen. My mother was murdered and no one cares." After years of Alexis and her family desperately trying to convince someone, anyone, to take them seriously, Captain Doug Whitney from the Utah County Sheriff's Office, finally listens. "He said that he was going to do anything he could to help us. It was a really incredible feeling because we've been fighting for so long to get anyone to just listen to us." With Captain Whitney's help, Alexis's investigation expands using all the resources at the Sheriff's Office's disposal, and they're able to discover even more disturbing lies about Martin's past. "We ended up finding out that he had forged his college transcripts in order to get into medical school." Her father's entire medical career had been based on lies and deception. "The father that I thought I had never really existed." With the mounting evidence against Martin, Alexis worried for the safety of her siblings, tries to file for custody of her four younger sisters who are all still living with a murderer, but what she doesn't know is that Martin and Gypsy are already plotting to get rid of the four girls so they can be alone together. Martin decides to send Jezelle, his young daughter who was adopted from Ukraine on a special trip to visit her biological sisters back in her home country. "My dad had just basically said, 'We'll get her after the summer.'" But behind closed doors, Martin had a bigger plan, stealing his adoptive daughter's identity. With Jezelle abroad, Martin uses her social security number to forge a new identity for Gypsy, who needed to escape her mounting debts, renaming her as Gillian McNeil. They even start pretending to be husband and wife, using April 14th Michelle's funeral date as their wedding date. Taken together, they're strong grounds to suspect that Martin used Michelle's plastic surgery to obscure her murder so he could be free with his mistress, Gypsy. But despite everything, investigators still have a problem, Michelle's death had been ruled as being due to natural causes, not murder. During the initial investigation, Martin's account of what had happened was taken as the truth. After all, you was a respected doctor, and there was no reason for the cops to question his authority. Now the truth about Martin's life of lies, and his affair with Gypsy is exposed, but they still need something concrete from the day of Michelle's murder, something to prove that Martin lied about Michelle's death too. There was one other person at the crime scene with Martin, his six-year-old daughter, Ada, and her story might just be able to expose her father's lies once and for all. Following the murder, Ada had drawn a picture of her mother that would become key to the investigation. The drawing shows her mom in the bathtub, lying, face up, but Martin's description of how they found Michelle was the opposite. He always claimed that Michelle had been found with her head submerged in the water, lying face down. "Was she all the way in the bathtub or just partway in the bathtub? Did you ever see your mom wet her hair like that before?" It ended up being a critical thing because it differed from how my father told the police that she was positioned. Investigators with the testimony from the six-year-old and her drawing are close as ever to making the arrest, but there's one final thing that will put a nail in the coffin on this case, once and for all, Michelle's blood. Though the initial autopsy had revealed nothing unusual, the secondary results years later reveal something troubling, especially given that Martin was in charge of her medication following the surgery. "There were four drugs, individually, they're dangerous, but collectively they could be deadly." Finally, after years of fighting, in August of 2012, Alexis receives the phone call she's been waiting for. "He said, 'I just want to let you know your father was just arrested for first-degree murder of your mother.'" October 17, 2013, six and a half years after Michelle's death, Martin McNeill is finally brought to trial for the murder of his wife. "I just didn't want to disappoint my mom." "Next witness, they call Alexis McNeill." "I was sitting by my aunts and my sister, and I just remember a squeezing each other's hands so tight." "Stay did you call? I have to pay it as to count one murder." "I burst into tears. I was sobbing." "So many emotions." "So much sadness, so much loss." Martin McNeill is sentenced to 15 years to life in prison, without the possibility of parole. Gypsy Willis is charged with two counts of giving false statements, and sentenced to time served, plus three years' probation. Alexis is awarded custody of her younger sisters, and Giselle is finally found and flown home from Ukraine to be with the rest of the family. "Those were my sisters, and I needed to be there for them, and I needed to protect them, so that kept me, that kept me, me going. Alexis, throughout impossible odds, has not only avenged her mother, but also protected her sisters by refusing to abandon them to a monster. Today, the siblings still share a close bond and have supported each other as they have all grown up to start families of their own. A little sister L that just had her first baby, 8-18 years old, she graduates this month from high school. Alexis has become a doctor and is now married with children of her own. Through her actions, her mom's love still lives strong in the family. We celebrate her every January 15th, balloons and cake and she would have been 62. We can just be a family and remember the good things.