Doctor accused of murdering ex wife and her husband recently sued for malpractice

2 weeks ago 6

On December 30, police in Columbus, Ohio responded to a call for a wellness check at the home of a local dentist and his wife. The dentist’s boss and coworkers were concerned because he hadn’t shown up for work and they couldn’t reach either of them. Inside, police found the bodies of Spencer and Monique Tepe, who had been shot sometime in the early hours of the morning. There was no sign of forced entry and no gun found at the scene. Their two young children were unharmed.

Over the weekend, cops arrested Monique’s ex-husband, a vascular surgeon named Michael McKee. Police found McKee’s car on surveillance footage and tracked it 450 miles to Rockford, IL, where he currently works. A firearm which may be linked to the murders was found at his home, and he’s been charged with premeditated aggravated murder. As it turns out, McKee had other legal troubles before this arrest. While living and working in Las Vegas, he oversaw a surgery in 2023 that went terribly wrong. This past September, he was named as a defendant in a medical malpractice lawsuit.

Michael McKee allegedly oversaw a botched surgery at Las Vegas Surgical Associates during which an 8.6-inch catheter shard broke off in a patient’s leg, according to a copy of an amended complaint filed in Clark County Court and obtained by PEOPLE.

That amended complaint was filed on Sept. 29, 2025, and the patient’s lawyer spent over a month trying to track McKee down with no luck. At one point, the process server tasked with delivering the complaint to McKee spoke with one of his co-workers about his whereabouts, according to a declaration of due diligence filed in the case, and was told: “[He] just disappeared.”

McKee was working at OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center, a job he took after leaving Las Vegas and moving to Chicago. That move happened sometime after May 2024, which is when the malpractice lawsuit was first filed against McKee’s Las Vegas employer.

Illinois state medical records show that McKee had been licensed to practice in the state starting in October 2024, and just this past July he purchased a penthouse apartment in Chicago for $400,000.

Then, in September, McKee was named in the amended complaint.

The complaint alleges that the “failure of … Michael David McKee, M.D. to properly train or supervise [his co-worker] … caused the catheter or device to shear or fracture, leaving an 8.6-inch portion of the device in the plaintiff’s body.”

It goes on to claim that the plaintiff suffered “numerous adverse sequelae” because McKee allegedly “breached the standard of care,” including “lower extremity bleeding, edema, pain, discoloration, disfigurement, and other injuries.”

On Oct. 9, McKee’s co-worker told the process server that the vascular surgeon had “just disappeared” and on Nov. 10, the plaintiff’s lawyer filed a motion asking the judge that he be able to serve McKee via publication.

The judge delayed hearing arguments on that motion — which would allow the plaintiff to identify McKee as being a defendant in the complaint in a legal journal in lieu of physically serving him the legal document — multiple times before finally approving the motion on Jan. 6, 2026, just four days before McKee’s arrest.

As of now, the case is set to go to trial in July 2027 with McKee as one of the defendants.

The plaintiff is seeking damages totaling over $50,000, and because neither Nevada or Illinois require doctors to be insured for medical malpractice, it is unclear if McKee would be covered if convicted or be forced to pay out of pocket.

[From People]

Holy cow, a 8.6-inch portion of a broken catheter was left in the patient’s body? That’s a huge f-ck up. How does that even happen? I also would have sued him, the co-worker who performed the surgery, and the entire practice. I hope that person is okay now. The lawyer that filed the lawsuit claimed in an interview that they tried to serve him nine times and that the address and phone number provided to them by McKee’s old employers ended up being fake. That’s so sketchy.

As for the whole ”He just disappeared” thing…he didn’t just disappear. He was evading being served in a malpractice lawsuit and living it up in Chicago while (allegedly) plotting to drive seven hours to (allegedly) kill his ex-wife and her husband. No motive has been announced, but family members say he was “emotionally abusive” during their marriage, which ended when they separated in 2016 after just eight months. They also claim that Monique was still “terrified” of him. I’m betting that as more people who knew McKee start to speak out, this malpractice suit will be just the tip of the iceberg.