A Nevada attorney spent months hunting a vascular surgeon now accused of a double homicide in Ohio, encountering a trail of 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 addresses and dead ends as the doctor seemingly vanished. Exclusive court documents and interviews reveal a frantic, failed effort to serve Dr. Michael McKe with a malpractice lawsuit, painting a picture of a man who had disappeared long before police say he committed murder.
Las Vegas lawyer Dan Leaird filed a medical malpractice suit in 2023, alleging McKe failed to properly train a physician’s assistant who injured a patient. The normal process of serving the doctor, however, immediately collapsed into a maze of false information. This search began in September, months before McKe’s ex-wife and her new husband were shot dead in Columbus.
According to a declaration of due diligence filed in Clark County District Court, process servers attempted to locate McKe at least nine separate times. The address provided by his former employer, Las Vegas Surgical Associates LLP, was completely fabricated. “There is no such street. There is no such address,” Leaird stated in an exclusive interview.
Further attempts led only to more bizarre dead ends. The phone number McKe listed with the Nevada State Board of Medical Examiners connected to a fax machine’s tone. Contacting his former colleagues yielded no answers; one surgeon, identified as Dr. Cara, said he had “no idea” where McKe was and that he “just disappeared.”
“Dr. McKe almost really became a phantom, a ghost, if you will,” Leaird recounted. He expressed profound surprise, noting that physicians are typically highly responsible individuals not prone to simply vanishing. Searches on social media platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn also failed to produce a viable location for the doctor.
The attorney’s investigation eventually tracked McKe to Rockford, Illinois, in November. Repeated phone calls to numbers associated with him went unanswered and unreturned. At no point during this months-long search was Leaird aware that McKe’s ex-wife, Mo’Nique Tepee, and her new husband, Spencer, had been killed in their Ohio home in December.
McKe was arrested this month and charged with both murders. He appeared in a Chicago-area courtroom this week for extradition proceedings. When informed of the homicide charges, Leaird reacted with shock, stating a fully trained vascular surgeon would be at the very bottom of his list of people likely to be accused of such a crime.
Due to the exhaustive and failed attempts at personal service, a Nevada judge granted Leaird’s declaration of due diligence in October. This legal maneuver allows the malpractice lawsuit to proceed by serving McKe through a notice published in a newspaper, a rare tactic Leaird has used only twice in twelve years of practice.
The connection between the Nevada malpractice case and the Ohio murders remains unclear, but the timeline is striking. For months leading up to the December homicides, a professional was actively and publicly documenting McKe’s elusive behavior and inability to be found, while his own colleagues confirmed he had disappeared.
Attempts to contact Las Vegas Surgical Associates LLP for comment on the 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 address they provided have been unsuccessful. The Nevada medical board has not commented on the status of McKe’s medical license following his arrest on murder charges.
This case raises urgent questions about professional accountability and personal crisis. The meticulous legal document chronicling the search for McKe stands as a eerie prelude to the violence that followed, suggesting a man unraveling and withdrawing from his professional life long before the alleged attack.
Law enforcement in both Nevada and Ohio are likely scrutinizing this period of disappearance. The malpractice lawsuit details could provide critical context for McKe’s state of mind and movements in the months preceding the shootings, information that may prove vital for prosecutors.
The victims, Mo’Nique and Spencer Tepee, were killed in their home in the quiet Winland Park neighborhood of Columbus, a crime that shocked the community. McKe awaits extradition to Ohio, where he will face the murder charges as the separate Nevada malpractice case continues its unusual path toward resolution.
For attorney Dan Leaird, the pursuit of justice for a medical malpractice client has become inextricably linked to a far more tragic narrative. The phantom he spent months chasing through legal filings and false leads is now at the center of a national news story, a devastating outcome no due diligence search could have predicted.