Utah Doc’s Other Alleged Mistress Spills Secret She Learned During ‘Pillow Talk’
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ABC News(PROVO, Utah) — Another alleged mistress of a Utah doctor who is on trial for killing his wife said Wednesday that he once explained to her how he could induce a heart attack in someone while making it appear natural.
Anna Osborne Walthall testified that she began an affair with Dr. Martin MacNeill in 2005, when he was a consultant at a laser hair removal clinic she briefly operated in Utah.
Walthall said the doctor volunteered to serve as a “liaison” between her and her estranged husband during their divorce. Their relationship turned sexual in March 2005, she said, and ended six months later when Walthall moved out of town.
She said during a “pillow talk” moment she remembered the doctor telling her there was a natural way to induce someone to have a heart attack.
“There’s something you can give someone that’s natural that’s a heart attack that’s not detectable after they have a heart attack,” she quoted MacNeill as saying.
The 57-year-old physician is on trial for the April 11, 2007, death of his wife, Michele MacNeill, 50. Prosecutors allege MacNeill persuaded his wife to have plastic surgery so he could dope her up during her recovery and then drown her — all so he could pursue a relationship with another mistress, Gypsy Willis.
The medical examiner never determined a cause of death for Michele MacNeill.
The doctor’s defense attorneys tried to discredit Walthall by mentioning she had been diagnosed with disassociative identity disorder.
In the days before Michele MacNeill was found lifeless in the bathtub, one of her eldest daughters, Alexis Somers, confronted her dad about over-medicating her mom as she recovered from plastic surgery.
After Alexis Somers found her mother “very sedated” one day after she came home from the hospital on April 4, 2007, Somers, who was then a medical student, said she told her father, Dr. Martin MacNeill, “I’m taking over.”
Somers testified for the second time during her father’s murder trial, which is in its third of five scheduled weeks in Provo, Utah. She said her mother was a reluctant plastic surgery patient who didn’t like taking all of the drugs her physician husband insisted she take during her recovery.
After taking a cocktail of pills that left her sedated, Somers said her mother told her she didn’t want MacNeill to dispense her medication anymore since she couldn’t see through the bandages on her face.
“She actually had me take out every single pill from the pill bottles and she wanted to feel what the pills feel like in her fingers, so if my dad tried to give her anything, she would know what he was giving her,” Somers said.
On April 10, 2007, Somers said she left her family’s home in Pleasant Grove, Utah, to go back to medical school in Henderson, Nev.
Somers told the court her mother “was feeling really well” when she left.
The next day, the mother of eight was found by her 6-year-old daughter unconscious in a bathtub full of brown water. Less than two hours later, Michele MacNeill was dead.
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