Dr. Martin MacNeill GUILTY of Drugging and Drowning Wife

A Utah jury has just declared Dr. Martin MacNeill guilty of drugging and drowning his wife six years ago, as well as obstructing justice.

Jurists unanimously decided that MacNeill had indeed planned and committed the killing of his 50-year-old spouse, simply so he could take up full time with a much younger mistress. 

In a widely watched murder trial a number of key prosecution witnesses, including one of the victim's older daughters, testified that, in anticipation of killing his unwanted wife, the diabolical doctor encouraged her to have extensive plastic surgery, with the aim of staging her drug overdose.

Michele MacNeill was soon thereafter found drowned to death in a bathtub at the MacNeill residence. Her daughter, Ada, who was 6 at the time, found her dead in the tub after returning from school that day.

The traumatized girl had told investigators that the bathwater "was brown" and her mother fully clothed in it.

Initially medical examiners, finding excessive amounts of more than one painkiller in Michele MacNeill's system, deemed her drowning an accident. 

But when widower MacNeill swiftly moved a longtime lover into his home only nine days later -- giving the woman a marriage proposal and a costly engagement ring as well -- it rightfully aroused suspicions.

The doctor's paramour, who goes by the name of Gypsy Willis, was purportedly "hired as a nanny" for Ada MacNeill, although family and neighbors observed that, apart from making a spaghetti dinner for the child once, the woman spent most of her time there in the doctor's bedroom.

Dr. Martin MacNeill is, of course, not the only murderous medicine man ever to have harbored evil in his heart and malice aforethought for an unsuspecting mate.

In July 2013 neouroscientist Dr. Robert Ferrante was arrested for poisoning his wife with cyanide because he feared she was about to divorce him.

Eponymous Rox, reporting for Killing Killers from an undisclosed bunker somewhere in the Northland.

Dr. Cyanide Mr. Death: Robert Ferrante arrested for murder

According to police, Dr. Robert Ferrante chronically suspected his much-younger wife of having affairs on him. So in April 2013 the celebrated neurologist ordered up some cyanide, concocted a deadly brew with it, and served it to her smiling.

 

It was 30 times the lethal amount and his spouse collapsed almost instantly, dying from acute cyanide poisoning a few days later in the very same hospital where she was head of obstetrics and gynecology.

 

Thus ended the brilliant career and life of Autumn Klein, a 41-year-old physician and mother of one ... and thus began the investigation into her highly suspicious premature death.

 

A no brainer

 

Across the globe tens of thousands of homicides are committed annually, and in the vast majority of these cases the victims are acquainted with or related to their killers.

 

In fact, sometimes they're even married to them.

 

Those unwavering crime statistics take the guesswork out of most murders, especially obvious ones like Dr. Autumn Klein's, a woman with everything to live for who was definitely not suicidal.

 

Klein was also much too healthy to have succumbed to a sudden massive "stroke" or cardiac arrest, as her husband claimed when emergency personnel arrived at their home in Pennsylvania this past spring and found her comatose but still clinging to life.

 

Over three months later detectives have made it clear: They've never bought into the acclaimed neurosurgeon's on-the-spot diagnosis.

 

They arrested Dr. Ferrante yesterday for the poisoning death of his bride.

 

When neuroscientists get neurotic

 

Like paranoid professor of neuroscience Dr. Amy Bishop gunning down three university colleagues and wounding three more in a campus massacre she'd plotted for months after being denied tenure, a twisted scientist can prove to be quite deadly.

 

As to the source of Dr. Robert Ferrante's own madness, no evidence of his deceased wife's *affairs* has yet materialized. But a man whom he jealousy believed was her latest paramour has confirmed she intended to discuss with her assassin something he would "not like."

 

Apparently as early as February 2013, Autumn Klein, weary of her husband's "controlling nature" and his routine accusations concerning her "infidelities," confided in that same male friend that she planned on terminating her unhappy marriage.

 

That's a fairly standard motive for spousal abuse and homicide, whether done with bare hands,  conventional weapons, or a vial of cyanide.