A May-December Marriage Implodes
(“Naughty or Nyce,” Forensic Files)
This post was updated in January 2023.
The story of Michelle Nyce’s murder offers plenty of high drama, including an international romance, an alleged extortion plot, a millionaire doctor, and a lascivious gardener.
But the overall theme is pretty much a simple case of “there’s no fool like an old fool.”
Once Jonathan Nyce, 53, ran low on money, he thought that Michelle Rivera Nyce, 34, would stick by him.
Truncated sentence. It’s not clear whether Michelle wanted out of the marriage because of her fear of returning to poverty or because of the allure of her younger boyfriend, but her husband killed her before she had a chance to exit on two feet.
It happened on January 16, 2004, in Hopewell Township, New Jersey.
The state has already released Jonathan Nyce from prison, and some intelligence about his post-incarceration years turned up, but first here’s a recap of the Forensic Files episode “Naughty or Nyce,” along with additional information drawn from internet research:
Jonathan Nyce, a medical researcher with a PhD in molecular biology, had established a pharmaceutical company that at one time was capitalized with tens of millions of dollars. EpiGenesis started off in North Carolina, then moved to Cranbury, New Jersey.
He came from a Catholic family and his first marriage, to a woman from outside the faith, fizzled in part because of the religious difference, according to Never Leave Me by John Glatt, a 2006 mass-market paperback about the Nyce case.
Described as “socially awkward” or “ungainly” — by the time he was 12, he was six feet tall, the book recounts — he met Michelle through a classified ad. The two exchanged letters before meeting.
(Jonathan later revised the story about how they met, saying he first glimpsed Michelle on a beach, according to a People magazine article.)
Fairy tale start. She came from a family of seven children near the town of Orion in the Philippines. Jonathan would later describe the Rivera home as a squatters’ settlement with shacks “perched unsteadily on bamboo stilts above fetid Manila Bay” with no electricity and “no bathrooms except for trap doors.”
Michelle and Jonathan got married in the Philippines, then moved to the U.S., where they eventually settled into a huge $800,000 house and had a daughter and two sons.
Who knows, maybe the young woman trying to escape the disadvantages of a developing-world nation really did fall in love with the intelligent, generous American. He paid for new homes for Michelle’s relatives back in the Philippines.
Jonathan was also hospitable. Michelle’s father, Teodoro Rivera, visited the family frequently, sometimes staying for months and cooking Filipino dishes for the couple, according to a newspaper account.
Disturbing call. But Michelle was lacking something in her life and, by 2002, she had acquired a man on the side. Miguel DeJesus worked for a landscaping company the Nyces used. He and Michelle first met and exchanged phone numbers when he came to the house to ask about a bill, according to court papers, although the People story says they met at a plant nursery.
DeJesus was a real loser, according to Lisa Coryell, a crime reporter who appeared on the Forensic Files episode. Also known as Alexander Castaneda, DeJesus had several Social Security numbers and was a deadbeat dad and a cheater, Coryell said.
Jonathan Nyce claimed that DeJesus demanded $500,000 from him — or he would release a videotape of one of his trysts with Michelle.
Confronted by her husband, Michelle admitted to an affair with the Guatemalan (one news source describes him as Puerto Rican) in his early 30s.
She promised to end the affair with DeJesus, and Jonathan filed a restraining order against him.
Just five months later, however, Michelle was found dead in her forest-green SUV off Jacobs Creek Road. It looked as though the 1997 Toyota Land Cruiser had swerved in the snow and landed in an embankment.
But why were there footprints leading away from the passenger side of the car?
Fashion sense tip-off. And Michelle’s head injury and defensive wounds didn’t look as though they came from an auto accident. The blood patterns in and outside the car didn’t add up either.
Although whoever set up the accident scene wanted it to look as though Michelle was driving, she wasn’t wearing shoes. On the passenger side of the car, investigators found a brown pair that Forensic Files noted “didn’t match her dark blue outfit” (okay, but brown’s a neutral). Perhaps the doctor had thrown the shoes into the car as part of the staging.
Investigators discovered that Michelle had strong motives to abandon her marriage that probably didn’t have anything to do with her sometimes-boyfriend DeJesus.
From rich to retail. EpiGenesis had forced Jonathan out of the company, which faltered financially because an asthma drug it was developing didn’t pan out. The Nyces put their gigantic house up for sale for $1.6 million.
Michelle took a job selling Chanel cosmetics at Macy’s in the Quaker Bridge Mall. Jonathan would later claim that she only went to work to gain experience so she could start her own perfume company someday.
Around this same time, she found out that Jonathan had lied to her about his age — he had subtracted 10 years — and she was reportedly upset it.
Media opportunity. And one more liability on Jonathan’s side: He was “plagued by a fondness for drink,” according to a Philadelphia Daily News story from January 22, 2004.
Michelle’s brother Sonny Ragenil said Jonathan’s jealous rages, drinking, and budget-cutting motivated her to leave, according to the Philadelphia Daily News article.
And Jonathan could be controlling. When a casting director friend offered Michelle an on-camera role in an ad campaign, Jonathan strenuously objected; it’s not clear whether or not she eventually appeared in the ad.
Whatever the case, Michelle wanted to get away, 8,400 miles away to be exact, to the Philippines.
Rooms by the hour. Meanwhile, Jonathan despaired of losing his wife to divorce. On the night of January 16, 2004, Michelle returned home from a rendezvous with DeJesus at Mount’s Motel in Lawrenceville.
Accounts vary as to whether Michelle and Jonathan argued before it got violent or whether Jonathan pulled her out of her car and immediately started attacking her.
Either way, he killed Michelle in a jealous rage.
Cache of evidence. When police raided the McMansion, they found a baseball bat with traces of blood, Jonathan Nyce’s clothes soaking in pinkish water in the washing machine, and pieces of cut-up shoe treads hidden throughout the house.
They were from men’s size 12 moccasins and matched the footprints left in the snow near the death car, although Nyce would later claim that the impressions were really from a size 9.5 shoe, DeJesus’ size.
Jonathan probably wore the moccasins on the night of the murder, then removed the treads and sliced them up — not realizing that they’re just the kind of Columbo evidence investigators love to reconstruct.
Police also found blood in the garage and bloody towels hidden in the chimney.
Five-foot-tall tigress? Investigators believe Jonathan made up the entire story about the extortion attempt by DeJesus. He probably hoped to save his marriage by warding off the other man.
They think the murder happened in the garage, where Jonathan hit Michelle with a baseball bat and threw her to the floor. Then he put her body in the car and staged the accident.
The 6-foot-3-inch 200-pound former executive eventually confessed to police that he had caused Michelle’s injuries but claimed she tried to stab him in the neck with a dagger.
Then, making what is apparently a go-to excuse for wife killers (John Boyle and Richard Nyhuis), he said she landed on the floor during the scuffle but it wasn’t his fault. A Courier News account explained, “He claimed that she continued to flail at him from the ground, he said, so he knelt on her back and shoved her face into the floor.”
No knife like the stiletto Jonathan described ever turned up.
Crime of passion. Nyce’s two brothers and father attended the bail hearing where Mercer County Superior Court Judge Charles A. Delehey cut the amount from $2 million to $1 million in January 2004. A newspaper account at that time described Jonathan as “a research scientist world-renowned for his efforts to cure asthma.”
At the trial in July 2005, DeJesus testified about the affair, which helped the defense’s argument that Michelle’s killing was “passion/provocation manslaughter” rather than murder.
DeJesus also said that Jonathan had threatened him with death.
The court proceedings had no shortage of histrionics. According to a New York Times story from September 23, 2005, assistant prosecutor Doris Galuchie took issue with Nyce’s portrayal as a benevolent medical professional:
“He wasn’t saving lives,” Ms. Galuchie said. “He was an unemployed father who was, quite frankly, taking an interest in his children for the first time.” Mr. Nyce erupted. “That’s too much!” he shouted. He glared at Ms. Galuchie and moved forward in his seat … A few moments later Ms. Galuchie said, “This man didn’t even pay for his own wife’s funeral.” Mr. Nyce again shouted from the defense table: “I was in jail! Jesus!”
Kids relocated. Judge Wilbur H. Mathesius looked favorably on the defendant, saying that he’d done a lot of good in his life, and gave him eight years.
In post-sentencing comments, Nyce declared he still loved Michelle.
Jonathan Nyce’s relatives took care of the children, Samantha, Alex, and Trevor, whose ages ranged from 5 to 12 at the time of the murder. Michelle’s father traveled to New Jersey to request custody of the kids, but it’s not clear whether he had any success.
Jonathan served his time at New Jersey’s newest and largest detention facility, South Woods State Prison.
In May 2009, an appeals court upheld Nyce’s conviction.
Electronic autobiography. It didn’t matter much, however, because he was released from jail after just five years, on December 5, 2010. He received credit for good behavior and for the time he spent incarcerated before sentencing.
Nyce moved in with his parents and reunited with his three children.
He wrote an e-book, Under Color of Law: The Deliberate Conviction of an Innocent Man and the Destruction of a Family, to vindicate himself.
In his literary effort, he changed his story about the way Michelle died and the nature of her relationship with DeJesus. Jonathan alleged that DeJesus initially got Michelle into bed by drugging her, then took to stalking her. Jonathan blamed Michelle’s death on DeJesus, saying she died clutching Dejesus’ black hair in her hands and her fatal injuries probably came from falling off the Mount’s Motel balcony.
Oh, and she went to the motel only because she was duped into thinking there was a baby shower there, Jonathan claims in the 2012 e-book.
Amazon reviewers gave the e-tome 1.5 stars out of 5.
Going academic. As for Nyce’s former business, it’s not clear whether EpiGenesis Pharmaceuticals still exists or in what form. The business has LinkedIn and Facebook pages, but they look empty and untended. I couldn’t locate a website for the company.
After prison, Jonathan Nyce became editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cancer Science and Cell Biology, an online publisher of academic research. He was the only member of the editorial board without a biography accompanying his photo.
When originally writing about the case in 2018, I asserted that “not that it wipes away his horrible crime, but if you have to pick a post-manslaughter second act, it might as well be trying to cure cancer.” Now, however, it looks as though Nyce never really had humanitarian intentions.
On Feb. 5, 2020, the PhillyVoice reported that federal authorities charged Jonathan Nyce with selling fake drugs to owners of dogs with terminal cancer. He allegedly falsely claimed that one such medicine “will almost always restore a cancer-stricken dog’s appetite, spirit and energy!”
He gave the bogus treatments realistic-sounding names, Tumexal and Naturasone, and claimed the Food and Drug Administration helped fund his research. In reality, the drugs consisted of random ingredients mixed together, and the FDA had nothing to do with them.
The fraud raked in almost $1 million in sales to approximately 900 victims, according to the Department of Justice.
In December 2022, a federal jury convicted Jonathan Nyce of wire fraud and the interstate shipment of misbranded animal drugs.
The cancer journal Nyce worked for appears to have changed its name to BMC Biology, and it no longer lists him as a member of its editorial staff.
That’s all for this post. Until next time, cheers. — RR
P.S. I stumbled upon an interesting travel blog, unrelated to the case, but it has pictures of living conditions similar to what Michelle’s family would have had. Also, Jonathan Nyce’s e-book has thumbnail photos of the Riveras taken in the Philippines that you can scroll through for free on Amazon.
Watch the Forensic Files episode on YouTube or Amazon Prime
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