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It was a freezing cold morning in mid-January 2004 when a repair crew for the local electric and gas company in Princeton, New Jersey, decided to take a break and go get some hot breakfast.
The two men had been out all night fixing power poles and lines that had come down in a recent snowstorm.
On their way to the diner, they noticed a dark green SUV engine still running, sitting with its front wheels submerged in six inches of water in a creek that ran alongside the road.
Thinking the car had been parked there by a local hunter.
They didn't think anything of it until their return trip an hour later.
Seeing that the car was still there, with its wheels still submerged and the engine still running, the men decided to stop and go down and make sure this was not a car accident.
A few minutes later, after peering inside the driver's side window of the SUV, both men stumbled backwards in horror.
They knew right away that this was no Hunter, and they also knew whatever happened here had to be much worse than just a car accident.
But before we get into that story, if you're a fan of the Strange, Dark and Mysterious delivered in story format, then you've come to the right podcast, because that's all we do, and we upload twice a week, once on Monday and once on Thursday.
So if that's of interest to you, please sneak into the Amazon Music Follow buttons house and file down the edges on all of their nail clippers.
Okay, let's get into today's story.
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20-year-old Michelle Rivera looked around the lobby of the glittering Las Palmas Hotel in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines.
It was 10 pm on the evening of Monday June 4th 1990 and the beautiful young woman with long black hair was about to have her first ever face-to-face meeting with her future husband, who had just arrived from America.
Looking up at her father, who was standing next to her, Michelle squeezed her dad's arm even tighter as she tried to control her excitement and also her nerves.
If everything went well and Michelle prayed that it would then very soon she might be spending her honeymoon in one of the fancy suites somewhere inside this glamorous and expensive 23-story hotel.
But all that depended on what happened over the next few hours.
Michelle knew that her father, a carpenter from their tiny village located far away from this grand hotel, had serious doubts about how his daughter had met up with the man they were about to meet here in this lobby.
But Michelle was sure that once her whole family got to know Jonathan Nice, it wouldn't matter that she and the successful scientist from North Carolina had met through what was basically a mail-order bride catalog.
As Michelle had kept telling both her parents in the 11 months since Jonathan had first seen Michelle's picture and answered her ad in the Lonely Hearts section of the Manila Times newspaper, the practical reasons they had for placing and responding to that ad had soon been replaced by genuine feelings of love and compatibility.
And after almost one year of exchanging letters, cards and gifts through the mail, the marriage proposal that Michelle had received from Jonathan just four months into their correspondence now seemed like the answer to both their prayers.
For 34-year-old Jonathan.
The long-distance courtship had offered the once-divorced and socially awkward scientist the chance to find a wife without really leaving his lab or taking valuable time away from his current research.
That research focused on finding a revolutionary cure for asthma, a lung disease that causes episodes of wheezing and breathlessness.
And when Jonathan's Filipino coworker had shown Jonathan Michelle's picture in the Manila Times, right away Jonathan was struck by her youth and beauty.
And as soon as Michelle answered Jonathan's first few letters, Jonathan was sure he had found the person he was looking for a gorgeous partner who was willing to give him a family, be a stay-at-home mom and focus her attention exclusively on caring for him and their kids.
For Michelle, the educational, financial and cultural roadblocks she had faced ever since graduating from high school had eventually convinced her that marrying a successful American might be her best bet for moving up in the world.
So far, her attempts to make that happen on her own had failed.
At the age of 16, armed with an outstanding academic record, Michelle had left the Rivera family's bamboo house, perched on stilts over the water, to attend the National College of Business Administration in the bustling and exciting city of Cuaizón, six hours to the south.
But less than one year later, Michelle's father could no longer afford the tuition.
And so, at the age of 17, Michelle set aside her dream of a professional career and found employment in a city closer to her hometown.
Living with her aunt, Michelle would spend the next few years working at a dress shop near the U.S.
Naval Base in Subic Bay.
The American servicemen and women and their families who lived on and near the base seemed rich compared to the average Filipino.
And it wasn't long before Michelle had joined hundreds of other young Filipino women in dreaming of finding an American husband who might take her to the United States.
And one way to make that connection was to sign on with Manila's pen pal agencies that promised to find Michelle new male friends in America.
And by the time Michelle and Jonathan had begun their correspondence Michelle, who had very little experience in the world, was captivated by the life she imagined she would have with Jonathan.
Her one concern the fact that he was 12 years older than she was had evaporated when Jonathan had sent her a picture of himself that showed a tall, fit and handsome man with thick blonde hair, blue eyes and a warm smile.
He looked every part, the former athlete who had played basketball back in college and who had taken very good care of himself ever since.
Michelle had spent the past year looking at that photograph and she had no doubt that, in addition to the emotional connection she and Jonathan had made in exchanging heartfelt letters with each other, as soon as they actually laid eyes on each other they would feel an instant physical attraction too.
Now, Michelle could feel her heart beat faster every time the elevator stopped in the lobby.
But when the man Michelle had been waiting for finally did step out of that elevator, Michelle did not recognize him, at least not right away.
It wasn't until Jonathan Nice caught sight of Michelle and her father and walked quickly over to where they were standing that Michelle realized with a shock that the flushed, overweight and balding middle-aged man standing right in front of her must be her future husband.
Fourteen years later, on a snowy day in mid-January 2004, Michelle Rivera Nice was standing alone in the state-of-the-art gym that her husband Jonathan, had built for her inside of their million-dollar home in the pricey rural community of Titusville, New Jersey.
Looking out one of the windows at the beautifully landscaped lawn, Michelle thought about the real cost of hiring Ostrich Nursery just over three years ago to plant the snow-covered trees that were now large enough to shade the three-acre property.
Michelle could still remember the first time she met the head of the Ostrich Nursery landscaping crew, Miguel de Jesus, the stocky and strong 34-year-old Puerto Rican who went by the nickname Enyo.
He had knocked on the door of the Nice's 21-room three-story colonial-style house to give Michelle a summary and bill for the work that his crew had done so far.
Michelle could also remember the instant attraction that she and Enyo felt for one another.
But it would be another nine months before Michelle and Enyo actually began the physical affair that had cost so much more than the 50000 Jonathan had given his wife to get those trees planted.
Michelle had not planned or expected to cheat on her husband Jonathan.
In fact, until the last few years leading up to her meeting with Enyo, Michelle had thought overall, her marriage had been pretty solid.
Once Michelle had gotten over the shock she had felt when she first saw Jonathan in the lobby of the Las Palmas Hotel, she had still decided to go forward with their marriage.
The real Jonathan may have looked older and less attractive than the picture he had sent her, but in the seven days they had spent together after he arrived in the Philippines, Michelle believed that their feelings for one another were still the same.
And after getting to know Jonathan and seeing how much he obviously adored their beautiful 20-year-old daughter, Michelle's parents had given the couple their blessing.
And on Monday, June 11th 1990, about one year after Jonathan had answered Michelle's Lonely Hearts ad in the Manila Time newspaper, Jonathan and Michelle, looking radiant in a beautiful white gown Jonathan had bought for her, were married at a civil service in Michelle's hometown of Orion.
After that, in the seven months that it took Michelle to get the visa that would allow her to join Jonathan in the United States, Jonathan not only set up a generous bank account for Michelle, he also took a second job so he could send regular checks to Michelle's entire family.
Jonathan had also come up with a cover story that he and Michelle would tell his family and colleagues when Michelle did appear by Jonathan's side at East Carolina University in the town of Greenville, where Jonathan was a professor.
To avoid the embarrassment of Michelle being seen as a mail-order bride, the couple would explain that they had met and married in Hawaii while Jonathan had been away at a conference.
And a little over nine months to the day from Michelle's arrival stateside in April of 1991, the marriage between Michelle and Jonathan delivered on the promise they'd made each other to have a family together.
In January 1992 the couple welcomed their first child, and 22 months after that they welcomed their second son.
And six years after that, they welcomed their third and final child, a daughter named Samantha.
By then, local gossip over Michelle's youth and sudden appearance had died down and she had been warmly accepted by Jonathan's friends and family.
Jonathan had also delivered on the promise he'd made to Michelle that marriage to him would mean a life of financial comfort and stability, not only for Michelle but for her family back in the Philippines.
And by the end of 1998, a little over nine years since their marriage, all of Jonathan's hard work and long hours at the lab catapulted the couple from the ranks of the financially comfortable into the ranks of the truly wealthy.
That's when Jonathan's research into a cure for asthma grabbed the attention of the 4 billion asthma drug market and Jonathan launched his own multi-million dollar company called Epigenesis.
Two years later, by early 2000, the family had moved from their apartment in Greenville, North Carolina, to their huge house here at number one Keithwood Court.
But for Michelle, there had been a dark side to her husband's success.
With each passing year of their marriage, Michelle had really begun to notice that Jonathan was becoming a more and more possessive and controlling partner.
He had gone from being proud of being seen in public with his attractive young wife to feeling jealous when any other man so much as looked at her.
After Michelle had joined a local gym and become interested in a career as a personal trainer, Jonathan had responded by building a gym inside their home.
So Michelle, dressed in form-fitting clothes, would no longer have any reason to leave the house if she wanted to work out.
And when Michelle went back to the Philippines to visit her family for the first time in nine years, Jonathan had refused to let her take their children with her to see their grandparents aunts, uncles and cousins.
The landscaping project had been another one of Jonathan's efforts to control Michelle's growing restlessness and also the loneliness and isolation she was feeling because Jonathan was now spending so many long days working at Epigenesis.
Jonathan had given her that 50000 and told her to do whatever she wanted to make the property outside their house as beautiful as all the new furnishings had made the inside of their house.
By the time Michelle picked up the phone and called Ostrich Landscaping, Michelle had also begun to suspect that, despite their lavish lifestyle, Jonathan's company Epigenesis might not be doing as well as Jonathan kept saying it was.
Despite his constant work and travel, investors were starting to lose confidence, not only in the drug that Jonathan was developing, but also in Jonathan's performance as CEO of Epigenesis.
Not to mention the fact that Jonathan had started drinking heavily.
But even though these stresses and strains on their marriage had caused friction between Michelle and Jonathan, it wasn't until Michelle discovered what she thought of as a huge betrayal of trust that the Nices' marriage really started to fall apart.
That betrayal of trust was a lie that Jonathan had told her right at the beginning of their relationship, because back in 1989, not only did Jonathan send Michelle a picture of himself that had been taken when he was much younger, he had also lied to Michelle when he told her he was just 34 years old.
In fact, when Jonathan answered Michelle's ad in the Manila Times, he was not just 14 years older than his 20-year-old bride-to-be, he was actually 40, making him twice as old as Michelle, whose biggest concern about their relationship had been their age difference.
And when Jonathan had filed all the paperwork required to make their marriage legal in both the United States as well as in the Philippines, Jonathan had also falsified his age.
Having seen that doctored paperwork, it never occurred to Michelle to question Jonathan's age until more than a decade later, when she and Jonathan's mother were talking about an upcoming birthday.
When Michelle commented on Jonathan's age, her mother-in-law looked surprised and then dropped the bombshell that would turn what remained of Michelle's love for her husband into anger and resentment.
In May of 2002, Jonathan would not be turning 44, he would be turning 52.
To Jonathan, that lie he had told so many years ago might have seemed unimportant once he and Michelle had fallen in love and gotten married.
But to Michelle finding out about it 12 years later felt like a perfectly timed blow that would break open all the cracks in their marriage.
When Michelle, aged 32, first met the handsome gardener Enyo, the two of them talked together over coffee.
After that landscaping project was finished, Michelle and Enyo, who had a common-law wife and three kids, exchanged phone numbers and talked by phone.
But it wasn't until a few months after Michelle had found out that her husband had lied to her about how old he was, that Michelle made the step from having an emotional affair with a man whose life was even more complicated than her own to having a sexual affair.
Now, two years after Michelle's first meeting with Enyo in a seedy pay-by-the-hour motel room, the next town over from Titusville, the Nices' stable and prosperous marriage and life was going down the drain.
One year after the affair started Jonathan, who had been suspicious about Michelle's sudden and frequent absences from the house, had checked her cell phone and discovered that his young wife was cheating on him.
Enyo's wife had discovered the same thing and had kicked Enyo out of the house.
After that, Jonathan went to the police claiming that he'd gotten a call from Enyo demanding half a million dollars or Enyo would go public with a recording he had made of having sex with Michelle.
Even though police couldn't prove Jonathan's claim, the investigation had turned the couple's lives upside down.
There had been a confrontation between Enyo and Jonathan, who had taken out a year-long restraining order against Enyo that forbid Enyo from coming anywhere near Michelle or the nice home.
There had been angry calls from Enyo's wife, and Enyo himself had begun asking Michelle for money.
And then everything else had fallen apart too.
Jonathan's new cure for asthma turned out to be a failure, and 10 months ago, in March 2003, the board of directors at Epigenesis had fired Jonathan and kicked him out of the company he had founded nine years earlier.
The board had given him a generous stipend, but it wasn't enough money to support the family's expensive lifestyle.
And four months later, Michelle overrode her husband's objections and got a part-time job, working 25 hours a week behind a cosmetics counter at the local mall.
Jonathan himself was now spending almost all day at home enjoying time with his three kids and also watching Michelle, who was now actively talking about wanting a divorce, even as Jonathan was begging her to stay with him and work on their marriage.
Now letting out a deep sigh.
Michelle took one last look through the window before turning away and leaving her workout room.
The snow that had fallen the night before had been enough for area schools to close for the day, but Michelle knew that the mall was still open despite the weather.
Glancing at her watch, Michelle saw that it was close to 4 pm time for her to shower.
Change into her black uniform, pin her brass, Chanel name tag to her breast pocket and head to her evening shift behind the Chanel counter at Macy's department store.
A few minutes after 4, Michelle heard the sound of Jonathan's car in the driveway.
He had taken the three kids out sledding, and now they were home just for a few minutes before heading off to Samantha's gymnastics class.
Just long enough for Michelle to say hello and goodbye to all four of them and for Michelle to remind Jonathan that after work she'd be meeting up with a girlfriend at the mall.
And then Jonathan and the kids all piled back into Jonathan's brand new big red Hummer and drove away.
But even though snow seemed to be the only thing that set that Thursday afternoon apart from the dozens of other Thursdays that had come before, January 15th 2004 was anything but usual for Michelle Nice.
Because by the time Michelle walked out of the house that she and Jonathan could no longer afford and climbed into the Toyota Land Cruiser that they could also no longer afford.
The mail-order bride from the tiny village in the Philippines had finally arrived at a decision about her marriage and her future.
Putting the big green SUV in gear, Michelle headed out in the gathering darkness towards Quaker Bridge Mall, where she would clock into work at exactly 603 pm.
Along the way, Michelle kept checking her rearview mirror.
It wasn't just the fights with Jonathan that had been keeping her on edge lately.
As Michelle had recently told her close girlfriend, as well as her husband, Michelle had begun to suspect that when she did leave the house, there was someone out there who had begun keeping an eye on her.
It wasn't until the maintenance crew from the local gas and electric company saw the dark green Toyota for the second time, still sitting with its front wheels partly submerged in Jacobs Creek its engine still running that they decided to stop.
It was around 7 am on Friday, January 16th, and the two men had spent the entire night working on electric poles and wires that had come down in the recent snowstorm.
They'd first spotted the Land Cruiser an hour earlier on their way to get breakfast.
Even though the SUV was parked 15 feet below the roadway, it was still easy to see and, with its engine on and front wheels standing at about 6 inches of water, the men had assumed that the vehicle must belong to a local hunter or someone who was out fishing.
Now, breakfast finished and heading back to work, the men weren't so sure.
And a few minutes later, after scrambling down the snowy embankment from their service truck to take a closer look at the Toyota, their curiosity and concern turned to horror.
It wasn't just the frozen blood smeared on the outside of the vehicle and staining the snow next to the driver's side door.
It was what the men saw when they looked through the driver's side car window that caused them to stumble backward and grab for their phones.
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Chicago, March 2nd, 1976.
A savage double murder rocks the city.
Two young lives snuffed out in their prime.
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A privileged, rich kid caught within four days, only to walk free through a web of influence and power.
For four years, the case gathered dust, the truth buried under the web of money, drugs and corruption, until an unlikely hero emerged, former rock musician turned star prosecutor, who refused to let the justice slip away.
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Within minutes of the 911 call to the Hopewell Township Police Department, Jacobs Creek Road was swarming with emergency vehicles responding to the frantic report of a dead body found inside of the dark green Toyota Land Cruiser near an abandoned campsite down at the edge of Jacobs Creek.
By the time Detective Daniel McEwen had arrived on the scene.
An hour later, the area was roped off with red accident tape and medics had confirmed that the person inside the vehicle was in fact dead.
Meanwhile, after finding out the license plate numbers, police also discovered that the car was registered to Jonathan and Michelle Nice, a wealthy couple who lived at No.
1 Keithwood Court, half a mile away.
But as Detective McEwen climbed out of his parked car and slid down the slope to the accident scene, he had already recognized the dark green Toyota Land Cruiser.
And when he looked inside the open driver's side door, the 40-year-old investigator could also instantly confirm the identity of the woman whose battered, bloody and frozen body lay slumped over the center console, because it was Detective McEwen who had handled the investigation six months earlier into Jonathan's claim that Michelle's lover, the gardener Enyo, had tried to extort half a million dollars from the wealthy founder of the drug company Epigenesis.
Now, as the detective looked at the mangled body of Michelle Rivera-Nice, his first thought hasn't this family been through enough?
Was immediately followed by the realization that what he was looking at was not the result of a tragic car accident.
Despite the red accident tape that was strung up around the vehicle.
When the detective stepped back and looked around, he took in three key details that all pointed to a much darker and more disturbing cause of death.
First, there was a set of footprints made by someone wearing large work boots that led away from the passenger side of the car and back up the embankment to Jacobs Creek Road.
There was no sign of damage to the vehicle that would have been consistent with the driver losing control of the car and plunging down the 15-foot embankment or colliding with another vehicle.
And then there was the position and condition of Michelle's body.
The driver's seat where she sat all 5 foot 2 inches of her was pushed so far back from the steering wheel and floor pedals that it would have been impossible for her feet to reach the brake or accelerator.
As for her injuries, it looked like Michelle's wounds were the result of blunt force trauma, not the result of a car crash.
If Detective McEwen was right, it was possible that Michelle had actually been attacked somewhere else and then driven by her murderer here to this secondary crime scene, where the murderer tried to make it appear that Michelle had been killed in a car accident.
Even before investigators from the New Jersey State Police Major Crimes Unit arrived on the scene at 1030pm that Friday night to coordinate the investigation, Detective McEwen's past experience with the Nice family had made him the obvious choice for lead detective on this case within the local Hopewell Township Police Department.
Operating now on the possibility that what they were looking at was a homicide and not an accident.
The Hopewell Township Police had already switched gears into investigation mode.
As soon as officers had informed Jonathan Nice that his wife had been in a car accident, they would have enough information from her husband about Michelle and where she had been the night before that they could start interviewing Michelle's friends and acquaintances, as well as her co-workers at the Quaker Bridge Mall, including the woman that Michelle had said she had plans to meet up with after her shift at the Macy's Chanel counter.
But for Detective McEwen, who knew that the first 48 hours of a murder investigation were critical because that was when the most people were assigned to the case and also when there was the most publicity that might generate leads, his plan was to focus on the people who he already knew had intense and troubled connections with Michelle Nice.
And at the top of that list was her husband, Jonathan.
Although Detective McEwen had never been able to prove Jonathan's claim that he was the victim of an extortion scheme, Detective McEwen had learned a lot about the Nice family when he dug into that allegation six months earlier, back in July of 2003.
At that time, Michelle had admitted to the detective that her husband was right when he'd accused her of having an affair with Miguel Eño de Jesus, one of the crew leaders from the ostrich nursery.
And the detective had seen firsthand the turmoil that affair had caused the confrontation between Jonathan and Eño, the fight over the restraining order against Eño, the angry phone calls that Eño's wife had made to Michelle.
Michelle had also told the detective and Jonathan that she had ended the affair after Enyo had started asking Michelle for quote loans, end quote and showing as much interest in her finances as he was showing in her.
So while crime scene techs continued to photograph and collect evidence at Jacob's Creek and local officers fanned out to interview the nicest neighbors, Detective McEwen and his partner hopped into their unmarked police car and headed out to No.
1 Keithwood Court to get a formal statement from Michelle's husband.
And by 1115 am Jonathan, distraught and haggard, was ushered into the Hopewell Police Station and seated behind a desk that was right across from the desk where Detective McEwen and his partner sat.
Jonathan had been told about Michelle's death before the investigators arrived.
Dazed and confused.
He had agreed to have a police officer stay at his home with his three kids so he could leave immediately with investigators.
According to Jonathan, the last time he had seen Michelle was at 4pm on Thursday afternoon, when he had brought their three kids home from sledding for a few minutes before heading right back out to gymnastics.
When they left the house, Michelle was getting ready for work and she had told Jonathan that after her shift ended at 8pm she was going to meet up with a girlfriend.
After the kids ate dinner, Jonathan made a call to Michelle that went straight through to voicemail and he and the children all left a message saying goodnight.
And then all four of them Jonathan and his three kids, watched a movie together and fell asleep in Jonathan's bed.
Jonathan told police it was about midnight when he woke up again and realized that Michelle was still not home.
When he dialed her number, his call went straight to voicemail again.
With a meaningful look at Detective McEwen.
Jonathan explained that, despite Michelle's earlier claim that she had ended her affair with Enyo, Jonathan suspected she was still cheating on him.
So even though it was unusual for Michelle to stay out this late, Jonathan wasn't surprised.
He assumed she must be with one of her lovers, which would also explain why she still was not home that morning.
So, instead of trying to find Michelle, Jonathan only stayed up long enough to take an anti-anxiety medication prescribed by his doctor, hoping just to calm himself down.
Not only could the three nice children aged 12, 10 and 5 confirm that their dad was at the house with them last night and that they all slept together in Jonathan's bed.
Jonathan also told the detectives that if Michelle had died under suspicious circumstances, the person they should be talking with was Enyo.
And here the research scientist reminded Detective McEwen about Enyo's extortion demand the previous summer for 500000.
Before getting a ride home from the police station.
Jonathan also told police that lately Michelle had begun complaining that she was being followed when she was out in town, maybe by Enyo or one of the Gardner's friends, his wife or maybe another family member.
Rubbing at his shadowed eyes, Jonathan said that he wished now that he had taken her concern more seriously.
And by midday Saturday, Detective McEwen and every other officer assigned to the Michelle Nice investigation were also feeling a new sense of urgency, because the medical examiner's report issued at 4 pm on the 17th had confirmed that Michelle Nice had been murdered and that the cause of death had been a savage beating.
Two hours after that report was issued, the other prime suspect on Detective McEwen's list, Miguel Eño de Jesus, accompanied by his attorney, walked into the Hopewell Township Police Department.
During the extortion investigation the previous summer, Detective McEwen hadn't just found out a lot about Michelle and Jonathan Nice, he'd also found out a lot about Enyo.
Like the fact that the Gardner used several different names and social security numbers in an effort to avoid paying court-ordered child support to a family from an earlier relationship.
The detective had used those various aliases to finally track Enyo down at an apartment he was sharing in Cranberry, New Jersey, with his common-law wife Patricia, 40 minutes east of where the Nice family lived.
But it wasn't until Enyo had lawyered up that he was willing to speak with investigators, and with that lawyer sitting next to him, Enyo made a series of admissions that would put him squarely in police crosshairs.
According to Enyo, he and Michelle had resumed their affair just two months after Michelle had told her husband that the affair was over and while Enyo was still subject to the restraining order to keep away from the Nice family.
Enyo also admitted that he had met up with Michelle on Thursday night before she was killed, when the couple had rented a cheap motel room for two hours.
But Enyo, like Jonathan Nice, also had an alibi.
According to the gardener, after they had checked out of Mount Motel, Enya had driven Michelle back to the Quaker Bridge Mall and kissed her goodnight at 1230am.
Just as Thursday night clicked over into Friday morning.
Then, in an effort to hide where he'd been from his wife Patricia, Enya said he met up with a friend at a bar 40 minutes from Michelle's home before heading to his own house at 1.15am where his wife was awake and waiting for him.
But even as officers prepared to test every minute of Enyo's alibi, the investigation into Michelle's death was about to go in a whole new direction, because Detective McEwen had found himself circling back to a comment that Michelle's husband had made almost two days earlier.
The detective did not know it at the time, but that comment would end up being the key to solving Michelle's brutal murder.
And by Sunday, January 18th, just 72 hours after Hopewell Township Police had received the 911 call reporting the discovery of her body down at Jacobs Creek, investigators had identified and were preparing to arrest Michelle's murderer.
Based on what police discovered when they followed up on Jonathan's offhand remark to Detective McEwen about Michelle's last day alive.
Here is a reconstruction of what really happened on the night that Michelle was killed.
By the time Michelle had dragged her suitcase out of her house and into the attached garage of number one Keithwood Court.
It was after 1 am in the very early morning of Friday, January 16th, and Michelle had said everything she needed to say to her killer.
She had made her decision.
It was just like she had told her closest friends.
She was tired of the arguments, the guilt, and the demands.
Still dressed in her black work outfit, with the Chanel name tag pinned to her blouse.
Michelle slipped off her shoes so she would make as little noise as possible.
She could only hope that her children had not heard anything that had happened during the last 30 minutes since she'd arrived home from the Quaker Bridge Mall.
Looking at the bulging suitcase, Michelle realized that getting it into the back seat of the Land Cruiser would take time that she didn't have.
Better to leave it.
So now, moving quickly, she stepped up to the driver's side of the car, opened that door and climbed in behind the wheel.
The garage was dark except for the interior car light.
The garage door was closed and the overhead lights were not on.
But before Michelle had time to close the driver's side door and turn on the car engine, her killer had suddenly stepped forward out of the gloom.
And the nightmare that would later be detailed in the medical examiner's autopsy report was about to begin.
Reaching in through the open car door, Michelle's killer grabbed her arm.
Squeezing hard enough to leave a fingerprint pattern of bruises.
The killer dragged the 100-pound woman out of the seat and threw her onto the floor.
As Michelle tried to scramble back to her feet, the killer reached behind her and pulled a baseball bat from a nearby utility shelf.
As Michelle turned to get away, her killer wound up and swung the bat with all their might, hitting Michelle squarely in the back of her skull.
Falling to the floor of the garage, Michelle's head struck the running board of the Land Cruiser, leaving a dark splash of blood that dripped down onto the ground.
Even though the medical examiner would later determine that the strike from the baseball bat had fractured Michelle's skull from the top of her eye socket to the base of her neck.
At that point the mother of three still gathered herself for a fight, trying to cover her face with her hands before turning over and dragging herself back to her feet.
But Michelle, barefoot now, except for her stockings, only made it a few steps towards the door before sliding in her own blood.
As she started to go down onto her hands and knees, the killer came up on her from behind.
And grabbing her shoulders, the killer immediately began to slam Michelle's face and head into the concrete floor of the garage again and again, only stopping after hearing what they later described as a sickening thud of smashed bone and cartilage.
According to the medical examiner, Michelle's attempt to fight off her attacker had left her with cuts and bruises on her hands, wrists and lips.
The beating had not only cracked her skull, it had also caused significant internal organ damage, as well as bruising and injuries on her arms, hips and elbows.
But as Michelle's murderer slowly stood up, breathing hard and looking around the dim interior of the garage, the medical examiner would later estimate that it may have taken as much as 10 minutes before Michelle finally choked to death on her own blood.
In that time, the killer thought through the next steps.
Leaning down again to check for a pulse that was no longer there, a jolt of adrenaline surged through the killer.
Gathering up Michelle's small body.
The killer pushed her into the driver's seat of the Land Cruiser.
Then the killer grabbed Michelle's blood-spattered suitcase, shoving it onto the backseat of the Toyota.
Oblivious to the biting cold.
At 215 am on Friday morning, the killer circled the big green SUV and climbed into the passenger seat.
Reaching over and starting up the engine.
The killer gripped the steering wheel with one hand and used the other to click open the garage door.
Then awkwardly making sure the headlights were turned off and using the long handle of an ice scraper to push the pedals of the accelerator and brake, the killer put the car into reverse and began backing out of the garage.
Once the killer had enough room in the driveway to turn the car around, they immediately lost control of the vehicle, veering off the driveway and onto the front garden, before finally coming to a stop back on the driveway.
With the car now in park, the killer leaned over the center console and pushed the driver's seat back as far as it would go, so there was more room to manipulate the floor controls with the handle of this ice scraper.
Or, as police believe, for the killer to climb into the driver's seat and drive the car while sitting literally on the lap of Michelle's bloody and lifeless body.
A few minutes later, the killer was driving slowly along the narrow, dark stretch of Jacobs Creek Road, looking for the white picket fence.
That was the one break in the guardrail that separated the road from the embankment leading down to Jacobs Creek.
Once the killer saw the white wooden fence, they slowed, then steered the car so it broke and then ran over the fence.
A moment later and the big car had dropped gently down the 15-foot slope, passed through the middle of the small campsite and broken the surface ice of the creek before the front wheels came to rest in six inches of water.
14 years earlier, when Michelle had met her future husband for the first time in person in the lobby of the Las Palmas Hotel, the one feature she had recognized from the photograph he had sent her of a much younger version of himself was his height.
Now after looking at his wife's dead body, slumped over in the seat next to him, her right eye swollen shut and the white bone of her skull showing through the cuts on her forehead.
Jonathan Nice opened the passenger side of the family Land Cruiser and unfolded his heavy six foot four inch frame from the car as he stepped out onto the smooth expanse of unbroken snow.
It was 3.15 a.m.
Jonathan had been waiting for Michelle when she arrived home two and a half hours earlier.
As soon as her car had pulled into the garage, Jonathan had used the remote to close the garage door before beginning what was, by now, a familiar and vicious argument about Michelle's ongoing affair with Enyo.
This time though, Michelle didn't just tell her husband that she wanted a divorce, something she'd been saying for almost five months.
This time, Michelle had walked into their bedroom, pulled out a suitcase and begun packing to leave.
For a long time now, Michelle had suspected that Jonathan had hired someone to follow her or was following her himself.
Michelle had also come to believe, after finding a condom inside one of Jonathan's travel bags, that she wasn't the only one in this marriage who was being unfaithful.
Now Jonathan turned, so he was facing the embankment and wearing a pair of shoes he had constructed himself by gluing size 12 work boot soles onto the uppers of a pair of comfortable moccasins.
He left the car and trudged through the snow back up to Jacobs Creek Road.
From there, dressed in pajama, bottoms and a t-shirt, he walked the mile back to the house on Keithwood Court where he spent the next few hours covering his tracks.
He dumped some of his bloody clothes and towels he'd used to clean the garage floor into the washing machine to soak, turning the water in the tub pink.
He filled white plastic trash bags with the blood-soaked paper towels he also used to clean the floor and walls before spot-painting areas of the garage to cover blood spatter.
He stuffed his wet black PJ bottoms behind the couch and then used a saw to cut the soles of his shoes away from the moccasin uppers, before cutting the soles into small pieces and hiding them throughout the house.
And he left the baseball bat still stained with Michelle's blood on the storage shelf where he had grabbed it a few hours earlier.
And then Michelle's husband and killer went upstairs and crawled back into bed with his three kids and waited for the call that would tell him that Michelle had been killed in a tragic car accident out on Jacob Creek Road.
It would turn out that from the moment Detective McEwen and his partner arrived at No.
1 Keithwood Court.
On the morning that Michelle's body had been discovered and saw the crazy tire tracks in the snow on the Nice driveway, the detective had suspected that Jonathan Nice must be involved in Michelle's murder.
Ever since meeting the Nice family back in July of 2003, the detective had been convinced that Jonathan's extortion claim against Enyo, along with Jonathan's claim that Enyo had threatened to hurt Michelle, were completely unfounded.
And in conducting interviews back in the summer and again now that Michelle was dead, What he kept hearing from people close to Michelle was that Jonathan's lies about his age and his escalating attempts to control his younger wife, coupled with Michelle's resentment and restlessness, had turned the couple's marriage into a volatile stew of jealousy and finally, uncontrolled rage.
But despite these suspicions, it wasn't until Jonathan contradicted the formal statement he had given police that Detective McEwen had the grounds he needed to get a warrant that would allow police to search the nice home for physical evidence that would tie Jonathan to his wife's murder.
That moment came when Jonathan, riding with the detective back to the nice home after Jonathan had sworn to police that the last time he had seen his wife was at 4pm on Thursday afternoon broke the silence inside the police car and told Detective McEwen, somewhat offhandedly, that until Jonathan and Michelle had fought later on the night, when Michelle got back from work, Jonathan had really believed that the couple could make their marriage work.
So, even as local police were out on Saturday tracking down and then interviewing Michelle's lover Enyo, members of a special 13-member joint task force of state and local law enforcement armed with a search warrant were entering No.
1 Keithwood Court, where over the next three days, they would find one incriminating piece of evidence after another.
On Sunday, January 18 2004, two and a half days after the discovery of Michelle's body, Jonathan was brought into the Hopewell Police Station for a second interview, during which the 54-year-old scientist confessed to the murder of his 34-year-old wife.
Jonathan would go on to say that he acted in self-defense after Michelle, who was one foot shorter than her husband and weighed 100 pounds compared to his 240 pounds, had threatened him with either a stiletto knife or the heel of one of her high-heeled shoes.
The jury that found Jonathan Nice guilty of passion provocation manslaughter 19 months later did not buy that story, but they did reject the prosecution's claim that Michelle's death was premeditated.
In September of 2005, Jonathan Nice was sentenced to eight years in prison.
Five years later, he was released and returned to his kids, who had been placed in the care of Jonathan's brother and sister-in-law.
In 2012, eight years after Michelle's murder, Jonathan founded a successful new company that sold drugs claiming to cure the symptoms of cancer in dogs.
But eight years later, in one final twist to a story that had caused a national sensation back in 2004, a federal investigation proved that Jonathan's so-called cancer-curing drugs were a fraud and that Jonathan's company was nothing more than a money-making scheme that had netted more than a million dollars.
And on Friday, December 23 2022, 18 years after murdering his wife Michelle, Jonathan Nice was convicted by a federal grand jury of wire fraud and the interstate shipment of misbranded animal drugs.
As of June 2023, the 73-year-old scientist now faces a large fine and up to 32 more years in prison.
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