A deadly affair

Dennis Murphy Correspondent • Profile

This report aired on Dateline Sunday, Jan. 22, 7 p.m.

The SUV was still running but the female driver with the ghastly head injury was clearly dead. It looked as though she’d skidded off an icy New Jersey back road and plunged down the slight embankment to the creek below.

Wedged behind the driver’s seat was a suitcase filled with women’s clothing, but arriving police officers immediately noted something odd on the passenger’s side: footprints in the snow leading up to the road 150-feet away.

Detective Dan McKeown got to the scene on a cold January morning in 2004, and says the second he saw the woman in the car crash, he knew who she was.

The deceased in the front seat was 34-year-old Michelle Nyce, the Filipina-born wife of a local pharmaceutical executive and entrepreneur, Dr. Jonathan Nyce.

Dan McKeown, Hopewell Township detective:  The first thing that did go through my mind was hasn’t this family been through enough?

The detective had met the couple the previous summer when the husband, Dr. Nyce, made a police complaint about someone stalking his wife Michelle. 

And now this: the pretty young wife was dead, slumped in her Toyota showing injuries far more grievous than expected in a one-car accident. This looked like a homicide.

The detective immediately called on Dr. Nyce at the million-dollar home in a gated community where he lived with Michelle and their three children.

Det. McKeown: We wanted to talk to Jonathan to find out as much information as we could to try and reconstruct Michelle’s mindset. Who she was with and where she was going prior to this incident.

Dr. Nyce told the detective that he’d last seen Michelle about 4 o’clock the afternoon before the accident, when she was getting ready for work. Michelle sold Chanel products at the local Macy’s.

Det. McKeown: He’s under the impression that she’s going to work and that after work she’s going to go out with a friend. And that’s allegedly the last time that he talks to her.

Dennis Murphy, Dateline correspondent: At that point, did you see any reason to doubt that story? A man was with his family, went to sleep, his wife tragically had a car accident on the way home from wherever she’d been. That was the story?

Det. McKeown: No. That was the story.

Police, of course, had to know more about the relationship of Jonathan and Michelle Nyce. He recounted for them a history of their becoming a couple much as he did when he sat down to talk with “Dateline”.

Dr. Jonathan Nyce: I thought my life was perfect. I had three perfect children. I had a beautiful wife who I adored. And I believed during that time she adored me, too.

Nyce was a 39-year-old professor at a North Carolina college. He was a little geeky and unlucky in love when an acquaintance steered him toward a friend, a teenager living in the Philippines who’d been advertising in a newspaper for a pen pal. The lonely heart biologist and the teenager from an ocean far away began corresponding in the late ‘80s. Nyce flew to the Philippines to meet her.

Nyce: And when I saw her in person she was everything and more that I had come to expect from the writing.

Just weeks after that first meeting, Jonathan and Michelle signed the Filipino paperwork that made them husband and wife. He fudged his age by 9 years, though she didn’t find out until years later how big the gap between them was.

Murphy: You were 40. She was 20. You’re looking at each other through the fog of very difficult cultures.

Nyce: Yes.

Murphy: Did it worry you?

Nyce: She asked me that. And I said, “I’m not marrying you for your wealth. If I marry you it’ll be because I love you.”  And I did love her.

And big changes awaited the newlyweds back in the States. Dr. Nyce’s lab research on promising asthma treatments had paid off like winning the lottery. Big pharmaceutical companies wanted to be in business with him in a major way.

Nyce: I raised about $65 million to advance my drugs into clinical trials.

The assistant professor became a wealthy business-owning entrepreneur and a new father. By the time he relocated from North Carolina to central New Jersey, they were a family of five. Michelle found a 20-room, 5000 sq. foot neo-colonial on Keithwood Court.

Her friend Larissa Soos remembered how pleased Michelle was with their sudden good fortune.

Larissa Soos, Michelle Nyce's best friend: They built their dream house. Jonathan was doing well with his company—they would travel. She was the best dressed. Her kids got the best of everything. And she helps her family back in the Philippines.  She was living an ideal life. 

Three kids, a successful husband, and a handsome house to decorate and make a home.

Nyce: I bought 50,000 worth of trees or something that Michelle had selected and they were planted in our yard and it looked beautiful.

But like another famous couple before them, things came undone in the seeming paradise of the garden. The landscaping required a gardener and soon the mistress of the house required him too. Michelle and Enyo the gardener had a torrid fling. The husband says he was clueless.

Nyce: I thought our family life was continuing. You know for me it was wonderful, and I thought for her too.

But there was tension and worries aplenty on Keithwood Court. Jonathan Nyce’s business had fizzled. The clinical trials of his medicine were a bust. He got fired from his company.

Nyce became a stay-at-home dad, writing a book of poems for children he tried unsuccessfully to get published.

Nyce: Michelle seemed very angry about me being home during the day acted sometimes very strangely different.

Murphy: Some women joke about "For better or for worse, but not for lunch." But this was a little bit more than that?

Nyce: I remember her coming into my office one day when I was working and just cleaning my desk everything on the floor and saying, “This is my house during the day.” 

In the summer of 2003, with Dr. Nyce oblivious, he says, to his wife’s regular hook-ups with the gardener at hot sheets motels, he claimed he received a threatening phone call.

Nyce: It was horrific. It was a man basically saying, “I have something you need to listen to.”  And then he played the tape of Michelle having sex with someone else.

Murphy: How did you know it was Michelle?

Nyce: Her voice is very distinctive and the man called her by her name in the tape, so it was very clear that it was Michelle.

The mystery caller, Nyce says, hung up and immediately rang again now demanding $500,000.

Murphy: Half million dollars or else what?

Nyce: He would distribute not only the audio tapes, but he said he had videotapes as well.

And that’s when Hopewell Township Detective Dan McKeown had his first encounter with Dr. Nyce. McKeown was assigned to run down the alleged extortion attempt.

In the course of interviewing both the husband and the wife, Michelle reluctantly admitted her affair.

Murphy: Are you starting to hear details about a man in her life?

Det. McKeown: Yes. It turns out he is a gardener, and the year prior was hired by Jonathan Nyce to plant trees in the yard.

Michelle said she’d broken it off with Enyo the gardener after he began demanding money from her and started stalking her. The detective confronted the gardener and a court-ordered restraining order against him seemed to put the complaint to rest.

Det. McKeown:  We didn’t hear from Jonathan again until January of 2004.

That was the day his wife had been found in the vehicle in the icy creek. In his statement to the investigators, Dr. Nyce had been quite clear about the last time he’d seen and spoken to his wife. It was 4 p.m., before her shift at Macy’s.

But later, as the detective drove Dr. Nyce back to his house, in a casual conversation, Nyce said something that didn’t add up.

Det. McKeown: Out of the blue Jonathan says, “You know, I really thought things were going to work out.”  He goes on to say that they had been getting along so much better, that the only time they argued was when Michelle talked about moving out or leaving him.   And I said, “Well, when’s the last time you had that conversation?”  Jonathan replied, “Last night.” 

And "last night" did not mean "4 p.m." And now Det. McKeown’s ears were ringing. He whipped the car around.

Jonathan Nyce was brought back to the Hopewell police department for another interrogation. Two hours into the interview he broke.

Det. McKeown: And he paused for a moment and he said, “I need to know one thing. Was she with Enyo that night?” I said, “Jonathan, I’ve never lied to you before. She was with him.” And it was at that point that he broke down and he gave us his new version of what happened.

In the new version of his story, taped by police, Dr. Nyce claimed that Michelle had tried to kill him in the garage when she came home in a rage at about midnight.

Nyce (police tape/interrogation): "For some reason she called me a f*ng freak. I don't know why. I was just asking her questions about where she was. She took something out of her Chanel bag and lunged at me right at my face, right at my neck."

Nyce said Michelle attacked him, slashing with what he took to be a stiletto or knife. He said she tumbled from the driver’s seat and went down on the concrete floor hard.

Nyce: She just flew out and hit with a sickening "thunk" of her head on the pavement.

Even then, Dr. Nyce said, his wife was lashing out. He says he pounded her head into the floor to get control of her and suddenly realized she was dead.

What happened next would challenge even veteran cops who’ve heard a lot when it comes to disposing of the corpse. He made it look like his wife’s body was driving the car.

Det. McKeown: He put her in the driver’s seat of the SUV. He allegedly gets into the passenger seat and uses an ice scraper to control the gas and the brake pedals.

Husband and dead wife threading their way through the icy streets of their gated community until he finds the creek, veers off the road, plunges into the water, leaves the engine running and then scuttles up the snowy embankment to the road and walks home.

Murphy: This is a quite a story you’re hearing.

Det. McKeown: Yes, it was.

Murphy: And basically, there were two people in the garage who knew what happened. And one of them was dead.

Det. McKeown: That’s correct.

Dr. Jonathan Nyce would be charged with murder and he would plead not guilty: not guilty on the grounds that it was an accident.

Could he convince a jury of that?

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