At 10:03 a.m. on December 30, 2025, a co-worker of Dr. Spencer Tepe made it through the door of the house at 1411 North Fourth Street in Columbus, Ohio, and found him on the floor beside his bed. There was blood. Spencer was not moving. Monique was nearby. She was not moving either. Within minutes, Columbus Fire Department Medic 7 pronounced both of them dead, each shot multiple times in the night, while their four-year-old daughter and one-year-old son were still inside the house.
The children were unharmed. The family dog was unharmed. The person who had done this was already six hours and nearly 400 miles away.
The Discovery
It had taken more than an hour of mounting alarm to get anyone through that front door. Spencer had not appeared at work that morning at Athens Dental Depot, something his colleagues described as entirely out of character for him. His employer, Dr. Mark Valrose, was out of state for the holidays when word reached him that Spencer had not come in and was not answering his phone. Valrose called 911 at 8:58 a.m. He told the dispatcher that Spencer had never once failed to show up, that they could not reach him or Monique, and that there were two young children in the home. He said contacting Monique was actually the more alarming part.
An officer was dispatched at 9:10 a.m. and arrived five minutes later. He knocked. No answer. He left. He had gone to the wrong address, Summit Street instead of North Fourth Street, a quarter mile away.
By 9:56 a.m., Spencer’s co-workers had driven themselves to North Fourth Street. They could hear children crying inside the house and could not get in. One called 911. At 10:03 a.m., after someone gained entry through what investigators believe was an unlocked door, the final 911 call went through: Spencer was on the floor, blood visible at the scene, the couple unresponsive. Columbus Fire Medic 7 pronounced both Spencer and Monique dead at 10:11 a.m.
Three spent 9mm shell casings were recovered from the scene. There was no sign of forced entry anywhere on the property. The murder weapon was gone. Police noted early on that the homicide did not appear to be a murder-suicide, but they would not explain for weeks how anyone had gotten inside the house. That question has not been officially answered.
The Tepes of Weinland Park
Spencer Tepe was born on December 9, 1988, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He completed both his undergraduate degree and his Doctor of Dental Surgery at Ohio State University, graduating with his DDS in 2017. He practiced at Athens Dental Depot, a dental office in Athens, Ohio, a commute of nearly 80 miles each way from the family home in Columbus. His colleagues described him as driven, patient-focused, and committed to continuing education, with a particular interest in implant therapy. He was also a member of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. Outside the practice, Spencer played golf, traveled, and spoke fluent Spanish.
Monique Tepe was born on October 14, 1986, in Chicago. Her family relocated to Worthington, Ohio, when she was an infant, and she was raised there. She attended Ohio State as well, earning a master’s degree in early childhood education. Those who knew her described her as warm, direct, and unusually resilient. After she and Spencer married in 2020 and had children, she became a stay-at-home mother. Her brother-in-law, Rob Misleh, would later describe her on Good Morning America as “a very strong person.”
The two had met online in 2018. They married in the backyard of the house on North Fourth Street in Columbus’s Weinland Park neighborhood, a leafy, established area just north of downtown. They had a daughter in 2022 and a son in 2024. More than a thousand people attended their joint memorial service on January 11, 2026.
The First Marriage
Before Spencer, Monique had been married once. She wed Michael David McKee in August 2015. The marriage lasted, in practice, less than seven months. The couple separated in March 2016. Monique filed for divorce in June 2017, using her maiden name of Sabaturski in the filing. The divorce was finalized the same month. They had no children together.
According to a probable cause affidavit later filed by Columbus detectives, McKee had been abusive throughout the marriage. One witness told investigators he had physically assaulted Monique and forced unwanted sex on her. Another told police McKee had informed Monique that he could kill her at any time, that he would find her no matter where she went, that he would buy the house next door to her, and that she would always be his wife. Misleh told Good Morning America that McKee had tormented her for the duration of the marriage. “She was willing to do anything to get out of there,” he said. “She was terrified.”
McKee was a vascular surgeon. In the years following the divorce, he moved repeatedly across the country, holding medical licenses in multiple states including California and Nevada. His Illinois license, the one that placed him in Rockford at the time of the murders, became active only in October 2024. He was working as a vascular surgeon at OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center in Rockford, about 90 miles west of Chicago, and living in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago itself. In the months before December 30, he had been named in multiple medical malpractice and negligence allegations. In one Las Vegas case, attorneys attempting to serve him tried nine times without success. He was a man practiced at disappearing.
The December Reconnaissance
On the night of December 6, 2025, Monique and Spencer Tepe were in Indiana with friends for the Big Ten Championship football game. At halftime, Monique excused herself from the group and went back to the hotel alone. When Spencer later told friends why she had left, he said she was upset about something involving her ex-husband and had gone back to the room.
While they were at the game, surveillance cameras recorded a man approaching the Tepe property on North Fourth Street and entering what a probable cause affidavit describes as the curtilage: the immediate area surrounding the home, legally considered part of the residence itself. The man remained there for several hours before leaving. Court records confirmed McKee was not scheduled to work that day. The drive from Rockford to Columbus is nearly seven hours each way.
What McKee was looking for during those hours, and whether he found it, has not been explained in the documents released to the public. What happened at the hotel that night, and what specifically upset Monique, has also not been disclosed. But Spencer’s account to friends placed it firmly: something to do with her ex-husband had sent her from the game early, at the same time her ex-husband was walking the property of her home.
Twenty-four days later, McKee made the drive again.
The Investigation
In the first days after the murders, Columbus police released few details, saying only that the killings were not a murder-suicide and that there was no sign of forced entry. They asked the public for any video footage from the Weinland Park area between midnight and 9 a.m. on December 30. On January 5, 2026, they released surveillance footage showing an unidentified man walking through the alley alongside the Tepe home sometime between 2 and 5 a.m., the window during which investigators believe the couple was killed.
Investigators matched that footage with vehicle-tracking data showing that a car registered to McKee had arrived in the neighborhood shortly before the homicides and left shortly after. The vehicle was traced to Rockford, Illinois. Separately, the affidavit disclosed a detail about McKee’s phone: on December 29, he left it at his workplace in Rockford, and it showed no activity for approximately 17 hours, from that evening until after noon on December 30. He had made the drive without a phone attached to his person.
A search of McKee’s Chicago apartment yielded multiple firearms. One of them produced a match, described by police as a preliminary but primary link, through the National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, to the three 9mm shell casings recovered from the Tepe bedroom. The indictment included a specification that McKee had been armed with a firearm equipped with a silencer at the time of the killings. He had driven nearly seven hours, entered the house by means that remain officially unexplained, killed two people in their second-floor bedroom while their small children slept down the hall, and driven seven hours back to Illinois with a weapon no one would find for nearly two weeks.
McKee Is Arrested
On January 10, 2026, agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives arrested Michael David McKee at a Chick-fil-A restaurant near his workplace in Rockford, Illinois. He was 39 years old. He was taken without incident. The ATF’s involvement stemmed from the silencer specification, which carries its own federal implications.
McKee waived his extradition hearing and was transported to Ohio on January 20. A Franklin County grand jury had already returned a five-count indictment on January 16, charging him with four counts of aggravated murder and one count of aggravated burglary. Ohio law permits multiple aggravated murder counts for a single victim when different legal theories apply, including prior calculation and design. The indictment specified that McKee had been armed with a suppressed firearm during the commission of each count. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was arraigned on January 23 and pleaded not guilty. He is being held without bond in the Franklin County jail. The criminal proceedings remain ongoing.
Columbus Police Chief Elaine Bryant characterized the attack as a targeted, domestic-violence-related crime. Monique had been afraid of McKee for years. She had told people that fear in specific terms: that he had threatened to find her wherever she went, that he would always consider her his. The friends and colleagues who knew this had driven to North Fourth Street the morning of December 30 the moment something felt wrong. They were racing there before the police got the address right.
Monique Tepe was 39 years old. Spencer Tepe was 37. Their daughter was four. Their son was one. They were in the house on North Fourth Street when their parents were found, and they were taken in by family afterward.
