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| Dr. Michele St. Romain (Doctor Michele Saint Romain) |
On a warm summer night in June 1991, Dr. Michele St Romain disappeared without a trace. It’s a case you’ve probably never heard. But here in Birmingham, Alabama, it was quite a mystery. Everyone in Birmingham was talking about the missing Children's Hospital doctor.
I was 20 years old when a picture of the missing Children’s Hospital doctor flashed all across the local nightly news. The case would take investigators years to solve. Three Alabama cases first sparked my interest in true crime and mysteries. The case of missing doctor Michele St. Romain is one of them.
**In this story, the name of Dr. Michele St. Romain's boyfriend was changed. This is a transcript of the video on YouTube.
The Disappearance
Sometime after 6:30 p.m. on the evening of June 11, 1991, Dr. Michele St. Romain finishes dinner with her then-boyfriend, Dr. Stanley McRie, a handsome doctor who works at another Birmingham hospital.
Michele tells him she’s tired and plans to go home and read before going to bed.
Dr. Romain returns to her Valley Avenue apartment and is never seen alive again.
Birmingham, Alabama, is a bustling city. And on the morning of Wednesday, June 12, 1991, doctors, nurses, secretaries, and supporting medical staff, move briskly along the streets around Children’s Hospital.
It’s 7:00 a.m., and Dr. Michele Saint Romain should be at work to start her shift. But by 8:00 am, she still hasn’t reported to work.
Throughout the day, calls to her home and pager remain unanswered.
Word gets back to Dr. McRie that Michele never showed up. He returns home after 1:00 p.m. to do a welfare check.
When Dr. McRie arrives the scene is troubling. Dr. Michele St. Romain’s front door is ajar. She isn’t inside, but her car is in the parking lot.
Inside her apartment, lies her purse, her wallet, her checkbook, and her Children’s Hospital beeper.
Dr. McRie calls out to his girlfriend, but there is no answer.
Where is Dr. Michele St. Romain?
Dr. Stanley McRie contacts the Homewood police department and files a missing persons report. When police arrive on the scene, they find nothing out of place. Nothing is disturbed. What was she doing right before she disappeared?
There are no pots and pans out of place. There is no bathrobe to indicate she was about to shower. Homewood Police have no clue what Dr. St. Romain was doing just before she disappeared.
Word spreads quickly at Children’s Hospital, and before long, Birmingham news stations flood The Club Apartments to cover the case of the missing doctor.
Dr. McRie is frantic. He last saw Michele after dinner. She was supposed to be at home resting---reading a book.
Now, she’s missing. And Dr. McRie is the one who has to tell Michele’s parents.
Shocked and worried upon hearing the news, Woody and Anita Saint Romain immediately leave their New Orleans home and board a plane bound for Birmingham.
Born on November 30, 1964, Michele St. Romain grew up in Marrero, Louisiana, a suburban neighborhood of New Orleans. She is the only child of Woody and Anita St. Romain.
As a child, Michele St. Romain loved animals and was always passionate about becoming a doctor. Even at a young age, Michele surprised her dad when she would arrive home with a chameleon or a frog she had found outside. By the time she was 14 years old, Michele was already honing in on her medical skills.
She even had the chance to examine a real body at a local university lab. And she had no fear. Michele was particularly interested in how the brain functioned.
It was then that Michele St. Romain realized she was interested in neurology as an area of study, specifically pediatric neurology.
In high school, they say she was an exceptional student who later received a scholarship to attend Loyola University, and she later received her doctorate at Louisiana State University.
The Saint Romains wanted her to study nearby, but Michele wanted to gain experience in a different state.
It was around 1989 that Michele met Dr. McRie, who was also studying to be a doctor. They came to Homewood together and signed a lease at The Club apartments for a year. Michele lived upstairs. Her boyfriend, Dr. McRie, lived in the apartment downstairs--- right beneath her apartment.
Meanwhile, detectives try to get more information on where Michele could have gone.
Dr. Michele St. Romain’s parents arrive and speak with detectives at once. They cannot imagine why Michele would be missing.
She knew how much her parents worried. Michele would never disappear without telling her mother.
This is a strange disappearance. Missing are her car keys, her apartment key, and a pair of hospital scrubs. Wherever the doctor is---she must still be wearing the scrubs from the night before.
Investigators have no solid leads to satisfy her parents nor the Homewood and Birmingham communities.
Residents at Children’s Hospital are also alarmed. Is someone out there targeting doctors?
At first, investigators are not convinced that this is a case of kidnapping. Despite what everyone says, the 26-year-old woman could have walked away from her life.
But Dr. Michele St. Romain’s parents are adamant. Their daughter is young, but she is responsible and professional. And she would never worry her parents this way.
Dr. St. Romain wouldn’t just vanish. At the time of her disappearance, Michele had just renewed her lease and was preparing to start her second-year residency at Children’s Hospital. Hospital officials say she loved her patients and took her work seriously.
Woody Saint Romain last spoke with his daughter on his birthday, and Anita remembered seeing her daughter on Mother’s Day.
The Saint Romains plead with the public to help find their daughter, to keep her case in the public eye, and to keep helping in any way possible.
A $10,000 reward is offered. Residents at Children’s Hospital in Birmingham put up another $10,000. Before long, there is a reward of over $30,000 for information about Dr. Saint Romain’s whereabouts.
Billboards are erected with a large photo of Michele St. Romain. Police hold news conferences asking for anyone with information to come forward.
They even contact Robert Stack’s Unsolved Mysteries to see if they will feature the case.
One call comes in. A call that could swing the investigation in another direction.
An emotional and frightened woman is on the line, and she gives police information about Michele. Detectives don't reveal what the mystery caller said, but they make a plea to the public for her to call back.
By now, FBI investigators are on the case.
They have their eye on someone who they believe could have the answers regarding the doctor’s disappearance: Michele’s boyfriend, Dr. McRie.
It’s common for investigators to look at the victim’s romantic partner first.
Dr. McRie was the last person to see Michele alive that night. And his apartment is right underneath hers.
Investigators dig deeper by looking into her phone records, showing that Dr. Saint Romain was alive and well from 10:00 p.m. to 10:20 p.m. A further probe confirms that she spoke to an old friend from New Orleans for about twenty minutes.
But what happened after that? The door was left partially open, and there was no sign of a scuffle inside the apartment.
Had she stepped outside to get something out of her car or to take out the trash?
Or was she abducted as she left for work that morning?
That scenario is unlikely. The area is too busy on a weekday for her abduction to go unnoticed.
Most likely, someone snatched her after the phone call ended that same night.
Is it possible her boyfriend Dr. Stanley McRie returned to her apartment at some point during the night after her phone call?
For a while, detectives believe this is a possibility. But Dr. McRie passes a lie detector test.
After finally clearing Dr. McRie as a suspect, the question is—could Michele have had another lover on the side? Probably not, since her current boyfriend lives just downstairs.
Michele was tired that night and was most likely still wearing her scrubs when she disappeared.
Detectives pondered over other possibilities, but they couldn’t come up with an answer.
They did receive another strange tip. Days before the pediatric intern's disappearance, a baby vanished from University Hospital’s nursery. For two hours, the nursing staff frantically looked for the baby.
It was Dr. Michele Saint Romain who found the missing baby boy in a clothes hamper in the nursery at University Hospital. The pediatric resident rotated between University Hospital’s nursery and Children's Hospital.
At the time, Michele’s mother thought this could have something to do with her disappearance. Perhaps, the person who took the baby saw her.
Though strange, detectives don’t find a connection between the baby that went missing and the missing doctor.
Just a stone’s throw away is Homewood, Alabama, and a nearby area known as Greensprings. In 1991, many up-and-coming professionals live there. There are several doctors, teachers, lawyers, and nurses, who populate the area.
But lately, there has been a rash of robberies and attacks upon women at various condos on Valley Avenue.
There is also the unsolved case of Toni Maria Lim, a dancer, who was found dead in her Homewood Apartment a year earlier.
Police are looking at a man, who admits to being involved in one of the incidents at an apartment complex near the area where Saint Romain was abducted, but he denies involvement in her disappearance.
By the end of 1992, that same man, Jack Trawick, who would later become known as a notorious Alabama killer, is wiped from the suspects’ list.
Another tip comes in and comes from an unlikely place. An inmate tells detectives that he has some information about the disappearance of Dr. Michele St. Romain.
According to the inmate, he was with a man who had Dr. St. Romain in his trunk. He said he happened to be with the man when he dumped her at a remote location, and he’s willing to show detectives where it is.
Perhaps, this is the lead that can finally solve the case.
The inmate accompanies detectives to the heavily wooded area, but he doesn’t give them an exact location. This is a large area, and they don’t find anything.
The inmate gives detectives the name, and that person is brought in for questioning. However, it’s obvious the man has no idea what detectives are talking about. They deduce this person isn’t involved in any way.
The Alabama inmate is deemed not credible. He is just a prisoner who is trying to get out early, so he is returned to the facility.
Both the inmate and the man he accused are removed from the suspects list.
In New Orleans, Michelle’s grieving parents try to stay positive. Her father Woody, an oil exec at BP Corp Refinery, is hopeful his daughter is alive.
He says to consider any other scenario would be too “hard to face.”
Weeks pass…
Nightly newscasts still feature the case, and fading missing persons flyers line the streets. Still, there is no word, not a single clue.
Months pass. Then years. New Children’s Hospital doctors come and go. Michele St. Romain’s boyfriend eventually marries someone else.
Dr. St. Romain’s parents continue speaking to media outlets to keep the spotlight on the case. Woody St. Romain makes sure missing persons flyers are distributed at every BP gas station throughout the southeast. Her mother is upset that police still haven’t solved this case.
It’s back to square one for investigators.
Could these cases be connected?
Just four short years after Dr. Michele St. Romain’s disappearance, her father, Woody, has a heart attack and passes away. Those who knew him said, he most likely died of a broken heart.
1999, the only CrimeStopper Hotline calls they receive are from psychics who wanted to help with the investigation. It doesn’t appear Birmingham, Alabama detectives take these calls seriously. The mystery caller, from years earlier, called back, but detectives were busy working on other cases by that time.
8 years later
In a remote area, in a hollow near Edgewater, railroad workers find a fragment.
And investigators know right away that this is their victim.
To search, heavy excavating equipment is brought to the scene. Eight years of trash and debris and thick blackberry vines make searching the area difficult. Over the length of a football field, workers dig to exhaustion. Just before calling off the excavation, they find torn cloth consistent with doctors' hospital scrubs.
They find part of a skull, back, and teeth. A wing shaped necklace still hangs from the column.
The necklace, which held a beautiful birth stone on a gold chain, matches the one Michele St. Romain wore everyday. It was a special gift from a previous boyfriend who had it made for her.
This has to be her.
And there’s a familiar twist.
This area is the same one they investigated in 1992. The inmate who directed them to the East Pleasant Grove site was a 35-year-old man named Michael McNeily.
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| Michael McNeily Today |
Eight years earlier Mcneily pointed out a general area near the wooded ravine. Detectives acted on that tip and searched the wooded area but found nothing.
But, since they have found her necklace, her clothes, and fragments. They need to dig more into Michael McNeily’s past.
And what they find is disturbing.
McNeily has history of kidnapping women.
In 1990, he kidnapped a woman, who escaped. That case was later reduced to assault.
But McNeily didn’t stop there. Detectives are now sure that he was the one who kidnapped Michele St. Romain that next summer.
And he was able to fly under the radar. He was the maintenance man at The Club Apartments.
Months after abducting Dr. St. Romain, Mcneily kidnapped another woman. This time it was the manager of The Club Apartments. She also escaped.
I was told one of the women was able to escape the trunk of the car after McNeily ran out of gas.
Detectives had the right man the whole time, and they even had the location.
Despite this, detectives keep a good attitude, they are just glad this case will finally be solved.
One of the detectives told the Birmingham Post Herald that McNeily’s story back then had different details and a “slightly different flavor,” he said.
While detectives prepare to speak to McNeily. Dental records confirm it is Dr. Michele St. Romain. The examiner says it didn't appear a struggle took place, but they couldn’t immediately confirm the cause of her demise.
Michael McNeily has all the answers.
It’s time for him to tell the truth about what happened.
Investigators want a full confession.
And they don’t know if they’ll get it. Michael McNeily is up for parole.
In the end, Michael McNeily tells all in one long chilling confession.
According to McNeily, he abducted Michele from the parking lot of The Club Apartments that night.
He had been watching Michele and had spoken to her on at least two occasions. One of those conversations took place at the pool. He wanted her, but she told him she had a boyfriend. She wasn’t interested.
Michael saw her again and asked her out, and again she turned him down. He wanted to date he, but she kept turning him down.
Refusing to take no for an answer, McNeily kidnapped her instead. How he abducted her isn’t clear. An attorney who worked on the case told me last week, McNeily’s details were a bit sketchy. At one point, he said he took her from the parking lot. However, it is believed, he used his work access to get inside the apartment, possibly using his maintenance keys.
Mcneily then said he took her to another location to have his way with her. She refused. A struggle ensued, and somehow Michele broke free, just like the others, but this time, Michael McNeily couldn't let that happen again.
Michael McNeily admitted to shooting Michele St. Romain.
Michael McNeily was sentenced to life
Prison officials told me he has matured and “calmed down a lot” over the last eleven years and has good behavior.
He was denied parole in August of 2021.
The Alabama parole board confirmed his next parole hearing is on August 2026.
The Club Apartments was demolished in 2002.
The Road Michael accessed
to dump the body?
Dr. Michele St.Romain crime scene entrance possibly
Cited Source
The Alabama Parole Board
The Birmingham News
The Birmingham Post Herald
St. Clair Correctional Facility
Jefferson County Court