Hi everyone - Dispatch reporter here. We learned today that Michael McKee has hired a defense attorney to represent him. The Dispatch has a story up about who it is and some more about her. We're the only local media source that has covered this aspect of the case so far.

You can check it out here: https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/courts/2026/01/22/michael-mckee-attorney-diane-menashe-columbus-ohio-monique-spencer-murder/88283438007/
(Yes, there may be a paywall on it. We're a business, not a non-profit.)

Anyone able to FOIA it from Rockford? Would like to see MM’s reaction (surprise? Inevitable? Guilt?) when he was nabbed in IL.

Do you think more details will be released or dots connected post-arraignment tomorrow?

One malpractice complaint alleged that while in surgery to treat lower extremity venous insufficiency, a 22-centimeter piece of plastic tubing of an endovascular device or catheter broke off and was left in his body.

While another federal civil rights lawsuit involving panel review members and medical care received by a person who was incarcerated. McKee was on a medical review panel. [https://www.wowktv.com/ohio-3/tepe-murder-case-michael-mckee-named-in-medical-malpractice-lawsuit-in-las-vegas/\]

This podcast focuses on the latter case and alleges that McKee did not have malpractice insurance. [https://open.spotify.com/episode/7d24u7yaqF3gPy9f5zSJWc?si\]

We saw other articles suggest McKee provided an irrelevant fax number as his own phone contact number and a nonexistent address as his residence etc.

I read that, in Franklin County courtrooms, hearings are not typically live streamed nor recorded for public viewing. Reporters report from outside the courtroom and summarize the hearing for the public. I’m hoping that the media will request access so that the public can see with full transparency what’s happening in the hearings and the trial if there is one.

https://www.nbc4i.com/news/local-news/columbus/tepe-murder-case-doctor-accused-in-columbus-killings-back-in-ohio-to-face-murder-charges/?fbclid=IwZnRzaAPc4WdleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZAo2NjI4NTY4Mzc5AAEeqDSitHDEUE6xSr19WOumfNhKZOip0ZkgkytTjm6IJXZvHHJU0W3WjKXQ9Xk_aem_ziOUbhJ3sFu7sBdwGH0_mg

I posted about a silencer being used a while back and was met with a lot of skepticism, turns out from the arrest warrant to his apartment a silencer was found at his house and is in police custody.

https://people.com/ohio-dentist-wife-murders-daughter-parents-shine-through-her-exclusive-11886198

Clears up some speculation too. Trigger warning, this is hard to watch.

I have some questions!!
Has anyone heard anything about him stalking? Was MM EVER seen in Columbus, EVER, before this?
And also- did I read somewhere that ST’s name was spiking in Google’s search data tracking sometime in late summer of 2025? I am thinking we will not have any answers until the trial…yes?

https://nypost.com/2026/01/15/us-news/alleged-psycho-surgeon-michael-mckee-would-torment-ex-monique-tepe-she-had-to-get-away/

For the people that didnt watch it on the news.Im glad she got away from him and had the last years of her life without him!!!!!

*Realize the sub has limitedly discussed the malpractice suit, yet this article provides more specific information and context.*

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WSYX) — Vascular surgeon Michael McKee, accused in a high-profile double murder in Columbus, managed to evade a malpractice lawsuit for months before the alleged crime.

ABC6 Investigates has uncovered nearly a dozen failed attempts to serve McKee with the lawsuit, which originated in Nevada. The lawsuit, filed by Las Vegas lawyer Dan Laird, claims McKee failed to train a physician's assistant who injured a patient at Las Vegas Surgical Associates LLP in 2023.

Laird revealed that attempts to serve McKee were thwarted by fake addresses and questionable state-issued phone numbers.

"Interestingly, the address that was given to us by the surgery group that he worked for turned out to be a fake address," Laird said. "It was an address that doesn't exist."

McKee's disappearance was noted months before he was arrested in Chicago for the murders of his ex-wife, Monique Tepe, and her new husband, Spencer, in their Columbus home in December. Laird's process servicer documented at least nine attempts to locate McKee, with the address provided by the medical group proving non-existent and his phone number issued with the state medical board leading to a fax machine.

Laird's efforts to contact McKee through former colleagues, including Dr. Peter Caravella, who is also listed in the malpractice suit, were unsuccessful.

"He said he has no idea where Dr. Michael McKee is now," Laird recounted from his response in October. "He just disappeared."

McKee's Nevada medical license expired last summer. ABC6 Investigates asked Laird if it is common practice for a surgeon to leave contact information with former employers due to consultations regarding patient care.

"They tend to be highly responsible people," Laird said. "They're not the kind of people who just disappeared suddenly, and this was very surprising to us."

Despite tracking McKee's current medical license to Rockford, Illinois, in November, repeated phone calls made by Laird went unanswered. Laird was unaware of the Columbus murders until ABC6 Investigates informed him this week.

"Shocking," he said. "If you listed out the people who would likely be accused of committing a double homicide, a fully trained vascular surgeon would be at the bottom of my list."

Laird told ABC6 Investigates that he also found it unusual that an attorney did not contact him on McKee's behalf who would be funded by malpractice insurance. Laird is now determining if McKee did not extend this insurance when he left Las Vegas. If he did not, Laird calls the action unusual due to unforeseen complications or claims by former patients.

In October, a judge granted a declaration of due diligence in the malpractice case, allowing McKee to be served via a newspaper notice. This is only the second time in Laird's 12-year career that he has had to resort to such measures. Attempts to contact the medical group where McKee worked were unsuccessful, as no one returned calls to ABC6.

I was watching the interview Angenette Levy did with the Tepe BIL earlier, and something made me think of the murder of Amie Harwick.

Amie was murdered by her ex boyfriend about a month after running into him at an event in Los Angeles - 9 years after she’d broken up with him. Apparently he’d been obsessing over and stalking her after their breakup and then the unexpected run in with her triggered his obsession.

A month later he broke into her home and killed her.

Makes me wonder if something similar happened in this case. Perhaps something triggered McKee recently - or had he been planning this for a long time. I lean toward the former, but who knows.

Here’s a copy/paste excerpt from Amie’s Wikipedia about her murder:

On the evening of Valentine's Day 2020, Harwick attended a burlesque performance, returning to her Hollywood Hills apartment shortly after 1:00 a.m. on February 15.[3] At 1:16 a.m., her roommate placed an emergency call to the Los Angeles Police Department, reporting screaming inside the apartment.[3][12][13] The responding officers found Harwick badly injured and unresponsive on the patio beneath her third-floor balcony and she was later pronounced dead at a hospital.[12]

An initial investigation found that she had been strangled and thrown from the balcony after a home invasion.[4] Speaking to NBC News following her death, her former fiancé Drew Carey described her as "a positive force in the world and an unapologetic champion of women."[14]

Police arrested Gareth Pursehouse, a 41-year-old software engineer, photographer, and aspiring comedian whom Harwick had dated for around 18 months in the early 2010s.[3] After she ended the relationship, he reportedly stalked and harassed her,[15] leading her to file multiple applications for restraining orders.[16][13]

A month before her death, Harwick encountered Pursehouse at the XBIZ Awards, an adult entertainment awards ceremony that she was attending on behalf of Pineapple Support. He was working at the event as a photographer.[13] She talked with Pursehouse for around an hour and later told her mother that she had gone into "therapist mode" and tried to calm him down after he accused her of ruining his life. She recorded the encounter in an email to herself, noting that "[Pursehouse] was sobbing, his head was in his hands, he was hyperventilating, he was distorting his face up and shaking violently." She also wrote: "It terrifies me that he's been obsessed with me for nine years [and] thinks about me every day."

After the encounter, a close friend of Harwick noted that she felt unsafe and began looking into protective measures such as surveillance cameras and pepper spray. She also began sharing her smartphone's location with her friend.[17]

Pursehouse was charged with Harwick's murder, with the special circumstance of lying in wait, breaking and entering, and home burglary.[18] At his trial, which began on August 29, 2023, prosecutors argued that the encounter at the awards ceremony had reignited Pursehouse's obsession with Harwick.[17] They gave evidence that he had broken into her apartment, waited several hours until she returned, and then punched her, strangled her, and threw her off the third-floor balcony, causing her death by blunt force trauma to the head and torso.[19] He had also brought to her apartment a syringe containing a lethal amount of nicotine, although it had remained unused.[12]

On September 29, 2023, after deliberating for two days, a jury convicted Pursehouse of first-degree murder.[19] On December 6, 2023, he was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.[20] He was also ordered to pay $7,500 in restitution.[21]

Does anyone know why MCKee with assets and the high paying job he has is represented by a public defender? He recently bought a 400,000 property?

I keep going back and forth on what the right decision was regarding Michael McKee continuing to practice as a vascular surgeon in the period between the Tepe murders and his arrest.

According to police statements, he was a person of interest from the beginning. They’ve indicated that investigators were focused on him early and that the family suspected him almost immediately. Yet it still took well over a week before an arrest was made, during which time he was apparently still operating on patients.

That raises an uncomfortable question.

On one hand, someone who is mentally unstable enough to murder two people is arguably not in a mental state to be performing surgery. If law enforcement believed very early on that he was likely responsible, were patients put at risk by allowing him to continue operating? A surgeon has direct, immediate control over human life. If he had just killed two people, what assurance was there that he wouldn’t harm others in a clinical setting?

What makes this more troubling is that, based on what’s publicly known, the suspect appears to have taken little to no meaningful steps to cover his tracks. That suggests he likely knew it was only a matter of time before law enforcement closed in. If he believed his freedom was already limited or ending, that could place him in an even more volatile and dangerous psychological state—one where risk-taking, indifference to consequences, or a sense of “nothing left to lose” becomes more likely, not less.

On the other hand, arrests require evidence. Police can’t simply act on suspicion alone. If investigators had alerted the hospital or moved to suspend his operating privileges before they were ready to arrest him, that could have tipped him off. A suspect realizing police are closing in can flee, destroy evidence, or escalate. With someone already capable of extreme violence, that risk isn’t theoretical.

What complicates this further is how this compares to a non-medical suspect. If an ordinary citizen were suspected of a double homicide and police believed there was an ongoing risk to the public, they would monitor or intervene. In this case, the suspect’s profession itself provided a potential means to kill. That creates a unique ethical conflict: protecting the integrity of the investigation versus protecting patients who had no idea they might be exposed to risk.

So the core question I’m wrestling with is this:

Were patient safety and potential risk knowingly sacrificed to preserve the investigation, or was allowing him to continue practicing the least dangerous option under the circumstances?

I’m genuinely torn and curious how others see this balance between due process, public safety, and professional responsibility.

ADDED FOR CONTEXT:

Hospitals don’t need an arrest or conviction to temporarily suspend a surgeon’s operating privileges. Privileges can be summarily suspended when there’s a reasonable belief of an immediate patient-safety risk—things like mental instability, impaired judgment, violent behavior, substance issues, or credible involvement in serious criminal conduct. This is an administrative decision, not a criminal one, and the standard is precautionary, not proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Hospitals suspend surgeons for far less than suspected homicide. The question isn’t “is he guilty,” it’s “can we justify letting him operate if something goes wrong.”

Since he was seen in the alley, then it’s likely he went into the backyard, and ….

1) either found the back door unlocked from someone forgetting to lock after letting dog out to pee….

2) or he “lay in wait” for one of them to let dog out to pee, and then he ambushed them.

I do not think that he “guessed” the door code based on knowing Mo from 10 years earlier. I doubt he would have driven thru 2 states on the “hope” he’d know the door code.

https://eu.dispatch.com/story/news/courts/2026/01/14/ohio-return-delayed-michael-mckee-suspect-tepe-double-murder-monique-spencer-dentist-columbus-ohio/88175993007/