Michelle and Jonathan Nyce - Part 1

0:00 Hi, I'm Rich and I'm Tina. If there's one thing we've learned in over twenty years of. Marriage, it's that some days you'll feel like killing your husband, and. Some days you'll feel like killing your wife. Welcome to Love Mary Kill. Hi, Tina, Hey Rich, How are you today? Great? How are you today? I'm doing good. You sounded really excited in our opening. Well, it's been a while since you've done an episode, so I'm excited to hear this case. Before we get to the case, I wanted to give a quick heads up. We know that many of you like our banter and our snacks, but if you are more of a just the facts kind of person, we have you covered. Check out Love Mary Kill Just the Facts.

0:51 You'll get the same deep dive research and storytelling, but we've cut the snacks and the banter to get straight to the case. So search for Love Mary Kill, Just the Facts wherever you're listening now. I love that March Madness is here. Do you know what that means? There's a bunch of insane leprechauns running around. It does mean that, but it also means that I have created our very own bracket challenge. I called it Love Mary Madness, and I want to invite all of our listeners to join make their picks, see how their picks stack up against hours. Okay, and oh, I have to do a bracket. You have to do a bracket as well. Historically I'm not great at it.

1:33 Well, you know, there's a lot of luck involved, so you never know. It's all for fun. But we are going to put up some prizes. The overall winner will take home a one hundred dollars gift card. Oh, I thought you were going to say a date with. Rich No, but we have also fifty dollars gift cards for the top men's and women's brackets, and there will even be a consolation prize. If you finish dead last, we'll give you a prize as well. So I have a chance, You have a chance. The ultimate though, if anybody gets a perfect bracket. I haven't talked to you about this yet, but if anyone gets a perfect bracket, we will personally show up on your doorstep and bring you snacks. Oh how great is that? That's great?

2:14 So you can get all the details and sign up now at Madness dot Lovemarykill dot com. Okay, that's Madness dot Lovemarykill dot Com registration closes March eighteenth, so don't delay. Okay, So I told Rich that no one was going to sign up, So prove me wrong and sign up and make Rich's day. I have another thing I wanted to mention. Okay, a bad thing. No, it's a really good thing. No, you're not in trouble at all. It's quite the opposite. So a really smart person that I follow on Instagram shared something today called the tell them theory, which I thought was really good. Basically, if you think your waiter was friendly, tell them, or if you think your friend looks nice, then tell them right.

2:58 In other words, don't save com implements for a special occasion, because life is a special occasion. I thought that was a really nice sentiment. Yeah, I think I must opposted that. Yeah, I agree that the tell them theory is a great theory. There's another theory that a lot of people are talking about called the let them theory, but I feel like the tell them theory is a little more positive. What is the let them theory? It's mel Robbins, I think that's her name. She's like a podcaster and a writer, and she says, you know, like, don't get cut off. If your neighbors just bought a new fancy car and you can't afford one, you don't let them. You know, or let them enjoy what they've got. Right, Or if someone you know voted for someone that you don't support, let them, you know, don't let all that stuff affect you. Yeah, yes, those are simple.

3:45 Good advice too. Yeah. Well, I wanted to tell you that A you look great today and B you inspire me to be a better person every day. So thank you for that. Okay, why do I feel suspicious of your actions? Are not good at taking compliments? You deserve it? Well, that is very nice of you to say you're right, I do not. I don't do well with compliments, but I appreciate the effort. Well. I also want to encourage all of you listening to tell someone today, whether it's your spouse or the person working at the drive through window. I think it's really good advice. Yeah, that's a great advice for for Monday. And I feel like a lot of people the time change is going to happen on Sunday, So Monday, especially if you have young kids, our hearts go out to you because the time change is really it's nice because we seem like that much.

4:32 It's only an hour, but it really. Messages really especially babies, and so. Yeah, they don't they don't quite get the whole daylight savings time concept. Today our podcast isn't the most popular podcast in the world, but we're doing great and we've made a lot of friends along the way, and a lot of you guys have taken us on journeys with you and some are fun journeys like vacations or you know, walking your dog at night. But some journeys aren't so pleasant. People have told us that we gotten you through chemotherapy or our friend Elias went through Diellis's treatment, and some people have lost family members and you still tune in and listen to us every Monday. So we just want to say that we're so grateful for your support, and.

5:14 We just wanted to give a big shout out to Elias, whose kidney transplant finally came through, and we are just so so happy for you and just so excited. We are so happy for you, and we're sending you best wishes for a quick recovery. I have a snack for you. I'm hungry today. Well, This is from another one of our sweet listeners, Molly. She sent us chocolate banana slugs from Mackenzie's Chocolate in Santa Cruz. You know mebe I'm not so hungry. I sure probably thought I was hungry. I'm pretty sure, I'm not one hundred percent of I'm pretty sure there are not real slugs in the chocolate. But she did send us a pretty sure, pretty sure I want you to try him first, though, But she did send a nice note explaining why banana slugs are important.

5:59 Because banana slugs are the official mascot of University of California, Santa Cruz. They only exist in northern California and the Pacific Northwest. They consume leaves, animal droppings, moss, and dead plant material, then recycle them into soil humus. So they are really important little creatures. And Mackenzie's Chocolates, which apparently is a really cool place in Santa Cruz, has made a chocolate version of the banana slug. Okay, I've got one. For you, all right, lay it on me. Well, what did you think of the chocolate banana slug? Well, first of all, it's adorable. It's so cute, kind of looks like a little sperm but has a little smiley face on it. It's very cute. Yeah, it was a delicious.

6:43 Thankfully there was no slug, no actual slug inside. It's really just pure dark chocolate in the shape of a banana slug. You probably don't know this, but one of the things that I put on my face to remain so beautiful is not a slug muse, but snail musin. He actually a product and you just add it to your beauty. Wow. It's because it's like snail musin. Wow, I learned something new today that I'm not sure I really wanted to know. But thank you for sharing. Well, thank you so much for this nack. Yes, delicious, No, thank you Molly for sending it. Adorable, really awesome, and yeah, really adorable and delicious.

7:27 So what was the chocolate company again? Mackenzie Chocolate? Okay, have you ever met someone, maybe a colleague or just someone in passing who is clearly a genius but they knew they were a genius? Yeah, I just. Opened the door for that one. But they're like, they're so convinced of their own IQ that the rules just don't seem to apply to them, or they think the rules don't apply to them. It's sort of a dangerous level of arrogance where someone thinks they can outsmart reality. And today we're telling the story of a man who could be the poster child for that, doctor Jonathan Nice. He was a millionaire, a high flying pharmaceutical CEO, and a world class scientist. But as we'll see, he thought he could engineer a crime as easily as he engineered a drug. And then there's his wife, Michelle. She moved here from the Philippines for the American dream, and on the surface she found it the twenty one room mansion the successful husband. But the reality inside that house was a lot darker. It was a mix of massive debt, intense control, and eventually a total betrayal. This case was a recommendation from Nell. Thank you so much Nell for suggesting this case. It all starts on a bone shilling, sub zero morning in January two thousand and four in Hopewell Township, New Jersey. A utility worker was out in the cold when he looked down into a fifteen foot ravine and saw a green Toyota land Cruiser sitting in a shallow creek. When he got down there, the engine was still running, steam was coming off the hood into

8:58 the freezing air, and inside, slumped over in the driver's seat was the body of Michelle Nice. At first, the police thought, okay, icy roads, tragic accident, but the details were off. The car wasn't even that badly beat up, yet Michelle had these horrific blunt force injuries to her head that didn't match a fender bender. Then the investigators noticed two things that changed everything. First, the driver's seat. Michelle was five foot four, but the seat was shoved all the way back like it was set for someone much taller. And second, there was a single set of size twelve footprints in the snow, leading away from the passenger side, up the hill and straight toward the Nice's million dollar home just a mile away. This is the story of a brilliant scientist that everyone thought of as a gentle giant, but he had a secret temper and an obsessive need for control. And just when you think you've reached the end of the doctor Nice's story, there's a bizarre second act involving a million dollar fraud and and a supposed miracle cancer cure for dogs.

10:03 So doctor Nice is not so Nice not nice at all, the seat being moved all the way back. That's one of those things that people just seem to forget a lot after they have done something nefarious. Right. We have seen that so many times. It's really kind of surprising. Just north of Philadelphia's industrial suburbs is a place called Collegeville. It's where the Nice family had deep roots. Jonathan Wesley Nice the third entered the world there on May twenty sixth, nineteen fifty His parents, Jonathan Junior and Emma, instilled in him the understanding that he had a significant legacy to maintain. Life in the Nice household was defined by a modest, devoutly Catholic upbringing and the constant hum of a father's hard work. Jonathan Junior was a mechanically gifted man who moved the family from hosiery Mills in Skip Back to Gettysburg, and finally to a permanent home on Mill Road in Collegeville in nineteen teen fifty seven.

11:01 Money was often tight, but the house was full, with Jonathan being the eldest of four brothers. Physically, Jonathan was a bit of an anomaly. By the age of twelve, he had already shot up to six feet tall, eventually topping out at six foot four. Yet, despite his imposing stature and later found love for basketball and tennis, Jonathan wasn't the big man on campus type. He was a loner, quiet, serious, and plagued by acute asthma attacks that often left him breathless. While other kids were out socializing, Jonathan lived in a world of his own making. He was a boy with a vivid imagination, filling notebooks with poetry and stories, But his true obsession was science. He didn't just study it, he lived it. In a scene that would become family lore.

11:48 His parents once returned home to a sickening, heavy stench in the kitchen. They found seventeen year old Jonathan boiling a raccoon carcass. He wasn't being macabre, at least not in his mind. He simply wanted to study the skeleton. He was just learning. As his parents would later say. What do you do with the pot after that? Do you you throw it away? Or do you just well, it's boiling? So what do you think? I really couldn't tell you. The whole idea of boiling a dead raccoon carcass just is pretty disturbing. Do you think he found it on a roadside. I think I read that he got it from a furrier, which a furrier is someone who, like someone who makes furs out of animals.

12:33 Right, do people wear raccoon coats? I don't know, I mean, why wouldn't you? I guess, I guess, I mean I wouldn't. But a quick Google tells me that, yes, people do wear raccoon coats. There's one on Poshmark for sale right now. You're six hundred and twenty five dollars and I am not really, I'm not interested. I'm getting you for you an expert. I know. Ye no, thank no, thank you. I don't work for a veny kind. That academic curiosity eventually morphed into a fascination with the law. Along with his friend Eugene, Jonathan co founded a high school Explorers group focused on criminology. They weren't just reading textbooks, they were visiting state police barracks and riding along with troopers on live calls. But for all of his intellectual confidence, Jonathan was painfully shy, especially around girls. He stayed within a tiny circle of friends, avoiding the typical high school party scene in favor of his studies. And his faith.

13:29 In nineteen sixty eight, he became the first in his family to attend college, enrolling at Temple University in Philadelphia. It wasn't an easy road. His parents couldn't afford the tuition, so Jonathan spent eight long years working hospital jobs and commuting by train from home to earn his Bachelor of Science. During this marathon of a degree, he pivoted from his dream of being a doctor to the world of medical research, and he met Sylvia. Sylvia was an Orthodox Jewish woman, and the attraction was immediate. Jonathan proposed quickly, and the two settled into an apartment near his parents, but the foundation was shaky from the start. The cultural and religious divide between Jonathan's devout Catholic roots and Sylvia's upbringing began to pull at the seams of the marriage Almost as soon as the IDs were exchanged.

14:22 Jonathan threw himself into his work at Temple University, beginning the long, arduous climb towards a PhD. During these years, Jonathan found his voice. He began moonlighting as a freelance medical writer, translating the dense world of genetics for the general public. In May nineteen seventy seven, Philadelphia Magazine published a seven page spread of his titled Message from a Small Chromosome. It was a deep dive into the Philadelphia chromosome, a genetic mutation linked to a rare, brutal form of leukemia. For Jonathan, this wasn't just an assignment. It was an obsession with the tiny, microscopic errors that could end a life.

15:04 In nineteen seventy eight, he secured his master's in molecular biology. But as his professional life gained momentum, his personal life finally fractured. The religious tension with Sylvia had become an insurmountable wall. Despite an attempt at counseling, the marriage collapsed. Jonathan was thirty years old, single and ready for a new start. He found it three thousand miles away in southern California. Jonathan accepted a postgraduate position at the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles before joining the prestigious Kenneth Norris Cancer Center. The move was a physical rebirth. The dry, golden California air did what years of Philadelphia medicine couldn't.

15:48 His chronic asthma faded away for the first time in his life. The six foot four scientists could breathe freely, but his work was heavy. Jonathan was now in the front lines treating children with terminal leukemia. He watched patient after patient succumb to the disease when standard drugs failed, and he became obsessed with understanding why he discovered a specific enzyme that was a thousand times more prevalent in these drug resistant cases. He didn't just want to treat them, he wanted to outsmart the cancer. He began developing a smart drug, a treatment that would lay dormant in the body until the specific enzyme triggered. It like a biological landmine for cancer cells. Yet, as Jonathan would soon learn, the world of medicine is often governed more by the ledger than the laboratory. He took his bindings to venture capitalists, pitching his breakthrough with the fervor of a man who had seen too many children die. But the suits looked at the numbers and saw a small market only applicable to the small percentage of patients that were resistant to the standard drugs. The return on investment wasn't there.

16:59 That's hard, king, it really is, and I can't remember the numbers of it, but there it is a very small percentage of people who are resistant, and that was the only group of people that this drug would help. But it would still help them. I think there's so many people with different, smaller diseases that face problems like this, where you know, the medical research just isn't there. That's why it's so important to have grants from the government to help in these smaller situations that aren't as profitable. Right, Jonathan Nice had the intellect to solve the medical mystery, but he was starting to realize that in the high stakes world of biotech, brilliance wasn't enough. You needed power. In nineteen eighty seven, the thirty seven year old scientist packed up his life in southern California and headed back to the East Coast.

17:44 He accepted an assistant professorship at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, a town a world away from the fast paced biotech labs of Los Angeles. When he first stepped onto the ECU campus, Jonathan Nice looked a lot less like a rigid academic and more like a California beach boy. He stood out in the humid North Carolina heat, strolling into the lab in loud Hawaiian shirts, shorts, and sandals. Colleagues initially saw him as a gentle giant, affable, quick with a laugh, and physically imposing, though the six foot four frame was starting to soften with age and his hairline was beginning to recede. But the easy going exterior was just an exterior. While he was pleasant at faculty mixers, he remained an enigma. He didn't make close friends, he didn't grab beers after work. His most consistent social interaction was the frequent visits from his parents, who would drive down from Pennsylvania to see their eldest son's rising star, and that star was rising fast. By June nineteen eighty eight, Jonathan secured a four hundred thousand dollars grant for cancer research and was fast tracked to a full professorship. He was a powerhouse in the lab, known for his outside the box thinking that left his peers both impressed and slightly intimidated. But then came the epiphany. While sitting in a colleague's lecture on asthma, a light bulb went off.

19:13 He realized the smart drug that he had designed for a tiny population of leukemia patients could potentially be repurposed to treat the millions of people suffering from chronic asthma, the very condition that he had struggled with as a child. In the world of medicine, this was a gold mine. At that time, roughly ten million Americans suffered from asthma, and that number was growing quickly. It's about twenty eight million people today. The market for a breakthrough treatment would be worth billions. For the next five years. Alongside his partner, doctor James Metzger, Jonathan became a man possessed. But as the stakes grew higher, controversy emerged. Jonathan enlisted his colleagues to help run tests in their laboratories, utilizing their resources and expertise. However, when it came time to protect the discovery, he moved into the shadows. He secretly filed patents for the drug entirely in his own name. When this news broke, the department exploded. Three of his colleagues were livid, officially accusing him of professional misconduct and demanding a stake in what they viewed as a collective discovery. The tension reached a fever pitch, reportedly getting so bad that Jonathan actually locked himself inside his laboratory at one point to avoid the confrontation. In the end, the university's head of pharmacology investigated the claims and ruled in Jonathan's favor. He was cleared of misconduct, but the bridge was burned. Jonathan Nice

20:45 had proven he was brilliant, but he had also shown that when it came to his legacy, there was no room for partners. I don't know a lot about how patent law works, so I'm not sure if these colleagues had a legitimate beef or not. It does sound like the investigation found that, you know, he acted properly, but it still seems a little shady what he did. Definitely, because in research, you're a team, and you know, usually I think everyone should get credit. Who cooks on the project. Yeah, I would think so too. We'll be back after a break. By nineteen eighty nine, Jonathan Nice was approaching forty and the contrast in his life was stark. Professionally, he was becoming a titan, a tenured professor with a potential billion dollar patent in his pocket. Personally, though, he was a ghost.

21:37 Despite his six foot four athletic frame and a face that many described as handsome, he seemed almost entirely disconnected from the world of dating. The loner tendencies of his childhood had solidified into a sterile, work obsessed adulthood. But as he stared down the start of a new decade, Jonathan decided he wanted to start a family. He wanted a wife and children, and he approached the goal with the same clinical determination that he applied to molecular biology. The catalyst was a chance encounter in a hospital cafeteria. Jonathan struck up a conversation with a young Filipino woman and asked her out. She politely declined she was already engaged, but she offered him a different kind of lead. She showed him the Lonely Hearts section of the Manila Times newspaper.

22:26 Scanning the newsprint, Jonathan's eyes stopped on a photograph of a nineteen year old girl named Michili or Michelle Riviera. She was striking with a youthful radiance that jumped off the page. She was looking for an American pen pal. Jonathan was instantly captivated, but he was also deeply insecure. He carried that newspaper clipping in his pocket for days, pulling it out in private debating whether or not to reach out. When he finally summoned the courage to write, he didn't lead with the truth. He told her that he was thirty years old, shaving nearly a decade off of his real age, and he tucked an old photograph of himself into the envelope, a version of Jonathan from years prior. He kept the budding correspondence a total secret in the highbrow, often judgmental circles of academia. He feared his colleagues would look down on a mail order romance.

23:21 So while he debated patents and lectured on genetics by day, by night, he was meticulously crafting letters to a nineteen year old on the other side of the world. I'm not a researcher who has a cure, a potential cure for a deadly disease, But I imagine having the stress of that. Yeah, you know, like if I work hard enough, I could save millions of people's lives. So putting off a family, you know, I can understand how that happened. Oh totally. And I think having a mind like that, that you're really focused on science, I think it does become all consuming. Like even if you're not just doing it for the good of mankind. It's just inherent and I think people like that that they just can't really focus on anything else.

24:04 Yeah, singularly focused. While Jonathan was navigating the sterile High Sakes lab of North Carolina or world Away Mishili, Michelle Riviera was dreaming of a life beyond the horizon. Born in November nineteen sixty nine, Michelle was the fourth of seven children raised in the tiny, remote village of Depenza, Kapunitan. To get there from the bustling capital of Manila, you had to endure a three hour ferry ride, a journey that underscored just how isolated her world truly was. Life in the village was a constant struggle. Her father worked tirelessly to put food on the table for nine people. Even as a young girl, Michelle was a standout. She was a perennial honor student, a responsible and loving daughter who spent her mornings over textbooks and her afternoons scrubbing floors and raising her younger siblings. At sixteen, she made her first move toward a bigger life, relocating to Queyson City to enroll in the National College of Business Administration for one semester, it seemed her hard work had paid off, until the money ran out, Her father could no longer afford the tuition, and the gates of academia slammed shut. Undeterred, Michelle found work in a dress shop at the Subic Bay US Naval Base. It was there, surrounded by the home of American sailors and international commerce, that she began meticulously polishing her English. She wasn't just selling clothes, she was preparing for a conversation that she hadn't had yet. By eighteen,

25:35 she joined a pen pal agency in Manila, and soon a letter arrived from an American scientist named Jonathan. To Michelle, Jonathan represented everything her village lacked, stability, education, and a ticket to the American dream. As the weekly exchange of cards and letters grew more intimate, the distance between North Carolina and the Philippines began to shrink. Frequent, spensive long distance phone calls replaced the silent wait for mail. For Michelle, it was a whirlwind romance with a man that she believed was a thirty year old rising star. For Jonathan, it was a chance to start a family of his own. Do you have any more information? About this pen Pale agency.

26:17 No, I really don't. And I think was the purpose to put together two people and you know, to find a mate. You know, I don't know for sure, but I can guess that Michelle's purpose in joining this was to meet someone's overseas and potentially find a new life, you know, somewhere where there was more opportunity for her than the little village that she was raised in. In late May nineteen ninety, the weekly letters and long distance phone calls culminated in an announcement from Jonathan. He had bought a ticket. He was wrapping up a lecture in Tokyo and a meeting in Hawaii, and he was going to come to the Philippines to marry her. For twenty year old Michelle, the dream was suddenly terrifyingly, her father, Teodoro, was skeptical.

27:03 He wasn't about to let his daughter marry a man he had never looked in the eye. In early June, he chaperoned Michelle on the three hour ferry ride to Manila to meet her suitor. As the boat churned through the water, Michelle sat in a quiet panic. She confessed to her father she was afraid that she was making a massive mistake. Theodoro, ever, the protective father, gave her an out. He told her, if you don't like him in person, we turn around, we call it off. You don't have to go through with it. But when they reached the meeting point, it wasn't fear that struck Michelle. It was confusion. Standing before her was a man who bore almost no resemblance to the photos that he had sent. The thirty year old athlete from the airmail envelopes was gone.

27:47 In his place stood an older man with thinning hair and a frame that had grown heavy with middle age. Yet while Michelle saw a stranger, Jonathan saw a miracle. He would later recall, she was the most beautif woman I ever met. She was everything and more that I had come to expect. For two days, the trio stayed in a Manila hotel, navigating a mountain of marriage paperwork, with Theodora watching from a room across the hall. It's not awkward at all, is that you're meeting your future wife and you're staying in a hotel room, and her dad is right right there across the hall. I can't imagine. I'm surprised. She wasn't like turned off immediately because she was like, well, you've lied to me about what you look like. Yeah.

28:29 She definitely had her doubts, But despite the initial shock of his appearance, Jonathan deployed the same gentle, giant charm that had won over his colleagues in North Carolina. He was attentive, generous, and seemingly desperate to be loved. By the end of forty eight hours, Theodoro gave his blessing, Jonathan leaned into his new role as the American Savior. He traveled to Michelle's village, meeting her large family with open arms and winning them over instantly. To the rivieras he wasn't an aging scientist with an ego, he was a kind, wealthy man who was going to give Michelle the world. As the wedding date approached, Michelle's cold feet returned.

29:10 She was about to marry a virtual stranger from the other side of the planet. To seal the deal, Jonathan took a bottle of white out to his own birth certificate. He painstakingly altered the year, transforming himself from forty one to a more acceptable thirty two. On June eleventh, nineteen ninety. Just one week after they met in person, they stood before a judge in Michelle's hometown and were married in a civil ceremony. The first week of their marriage was a sun drenched blur of romantic beaches and candlelit dinners. Jonathan was the perfect gentleman, kind, considerate, and profoundly generous. In those early days, it was easy for Michelle to look past the receding hairline and the decade of missing years.

29:54 She believed that she had found her hero. How long did they know each other when they he decided to meet in person and get married. I am not sure the exact timeline, but it was. It was several months, I would guess, maybe six months give or take. Okay, when Jonathan touched down back in North Carolina, and he didn't return as a man celebrating a new marriage. He returned as a man with a secret. To his colleagues at ECU and even to his own parents. The trip to the Philippines never happened. He told everyone he had been away at a grueling cancer conference. For the next several months, Jonathan lived in a state of suspended animation. He had opened a bank account specifically for Michelle's family, and he began depositing money to help his new family in the Philippines. But as the weeks turned into months and Michelle's visa remained stuck in bureaucratic limbo, Jonathan's composure began to crack. Was that part of the deal, like money exchanging hands? Or was he just he wanted to take care of her family?

30:54 He just wanted to help. I think he will talk about this more, but I think he had a bit of a savior complex. I think he saw this family that was living in poor conditions and he wanted to be a hero. The distance didn't just make his heart fonder, it made him frantic. He flooded Michelle with daily phone calls and a relentless stream of romantic cards, but the long distance nature of the relationship triggered a suffocating anxiety. He became convinced she was dragging her feet, and every delay in her paperwork fell to him like a personal rejection. By the time her visa was finally approved in late March nineteen ninety one, Jonathan wasn't just relieved. He was frustrated. He couldn't understand why she wasn't moving faster. Even as Michelle prepared to leave behind everything and everyone she had ever known. Finally, on April nineteenth, nineteen ninety one, ten months after they had married, Michelle said her goodbyes and boarded a plane for California. Jonathan met her there for a brief honeymoon before the move to North Carolina, but the vacation had an underlying purpose the rehearsal. Terrified that his academic peers would label Michelle a mail order bride, Jonathan spent their days in California coaching her on a fabrication the news story they had met in Hawaii during a medical conference. He had literally tripped over her foot while taking a break from scuba diving. It was a meet cute straight out of a Hollywood script. Years later, Jonathan would try to flip the script, claiming Michelle invented

32:27 a lie because she feared people would think that she had been a sex worker at the Subic Bay Naval Base. Whatever the case, this was the story they would tell consistently for the rest of their years together. I guess there were a lot of sex workers at the sub Bay Naval Base where she worked, so she was very concerned that people would think that of her, and there was no There was no evidence that she was okay. When they finally arrived in Greenville, Jonathan paraded Michelle in front of his colleagues. The reaction was instant, stunned silence. Faculty lounge hummed with gossip. The Hawaii story was thin and the pairing was odd. Jonathan was twice her age, introverted and increasingly rigid. Michelle was a radiant, outgoing twenty one year old who seemed to vibrate with the happiness that Jonathan never possessed. The final stop on the reveal tour was Collegeville. Jonathan walked into his parents' home and introduced them to the daughter in law they didn't know existed.

33:26 To their credit, the senior nices didn't care about the secrecy. They saw Michelle's warmth and immediately folded her into the family, treating her like the daughter they never had. You imagine not even telling your parents until he brought them over to introduce her. Yeah, that would be a that would be a huge shot. It sounds like they were used to his eccentricities a little bit and were like, yeah, that's just Jonathan. Michelle had a new family and a New Country, but she was living in a house built on Jonathan's carefully curated fictions. The age, the meeting, the scuba diving, Meetcute stage was set for a life where the truth was whatever Jonathan Nice decided it should be. The years of the Nice marriage in Greenville played out like a suburban dream.

34:09 Within months of her arrival, Michelle was pregnant, and on January twenty ninth, nineteen ninety two, she gave birth to a son they named Alex for Jonathan. This was the fulfillment of a lifelong ambition. The man who spent most of his time blocked in sterile labs was suddenly a doting father, hovering over his infant son with the devotion that surprised even his closest colleagues. Michelle, still only twenty two, took to motherhood with the same disciplined grace she'd shown in her village. She worked tirelessly to master her English, and her happy, go lucky spirit quickly made her a favorite among the university faculty and their spouses at department parties. However, a noticeable dynamic began to emerge. Jonathan was intensely protective.

34:54 Some might say possessive, Michelle was often seen literally hanging on his arm, appearing highly dependent on the gentle giant who had brought her to this new world. By late nineteen ninety three, the family grew again with the birth of a second son, Trevor. Despite the grueling hours that Jonathan was putting in alongside doctor James Metzger to perfect his potential billion dollar asthma drug, he made a ritual of family time. There was a duck pond situated right between their apartment complex and the University Medical Center. Most afternoons, Jonathan would step away from his microscopes and patents to meet Michelle and the boys, and together they would stand at the water's edge feeding the ducks, a scene Jonathan would later describe as the happiest time in his life.

35:41 But as Michelle became more comfortable in her American skin, her world began to expand beyond Jonathan's shadow. She developed close friendships with other stay at home moms, and she found a new outlet for her disciplined nature, the Gem. Every morning, the moment Jonathan's car pulled out of the driveway, Michelle headed for a strenuous workout. She became fanatical about her fitness, transforming her physique, and more importantly, building a social life entirely independent of the university circle. She now had her own friends, her own routine, and a burgeoning sense of self that existed outside of being missus nice to any outsider visiting their home. The marriage looked like a picture perfect portrait of the American dream, a brilliant scientist, a beautiful, fit wife, and two healthy sons. But beneath the surface of those duck pond days, the dynamic was shifting.

36:36 Michelle was finding her feet, while Jonathan was still holding onto a version of her that was increasingly a work of fiction. I think the dynamic that we're describing in their relationship is entirely predictable. Right. You've got this very young, twenty year old woman, young woman who is coming to a new country, and over time she's going to find out who she is. And she's going to blossom into who she's spent. Yeah, and I think Jonathan was not. I think he had a hard time handling. That sounds like it. In the spring of nineteen ninety five, Jonathan took a leave of absence from ECU to launch Epigenesis pharmaceuticals. The mission was bold to bring a revolutionary, one size fits all asthma drug to the global market.

37:18 He wasn't just a professor anymore. He was now a CEO on the verge of a medical breakthrough that promised to change the life of millions. But as the company grew, the gentle giant of the lab began to vanish. Jonathan was now a man in a suit, courting venture capitalists and presenting papers at international conferences. His absence from the actual research bench fueled a growing acrimony among his colleagues, who felt he was reaping the glory while they did the heavy lifting. Inside the new company, the culture was even more strained. While Jonathan had the outside the box brilliance to envision a new miracle drug, those who worked for him described him as the worst manager in the world.

38:02 He lacked even a shred of business sense, but his obsessive need for control made it impossible for him to delegate. He hired a qualified executive to run operations, only to suffocate him by demanding a hand in every single decision. For Jonathan, Epigenesis wasn't just a business, It was his personal kingdom. The financial Floodgates, however, didn't care about management styles. After features in Nature magazine and Newsweek, investors began flocking to him. By April nineteen ninety seven, Jonathan opened an office in Durham, North Carolina, home of Michael Peterson when if we talk about Durham, that's what you think of, and he was fielding licensing offers from twenty five different pharmaceutical giants. This new wealth transformed the Nice household. Michelle began sending more money back to the Philippines, where her family purchased land and established a duck farm, finally becoming self sufficient. Jonathan would later claim he went even further, building schools, playgrounds, and six houses for her relatives, though the Riviera family would later dispute those claims of savior level generosity. But as the bank account grew, the house in North Carolina grew colder. Michelle, now twenty eight and applying for US citizenship, was feeling the weight of Jonathan's absence.

39:24 He was constantly traveling, leaving her alone with two young sons and a third pregnancy. She kept her fanatical gym routine up, telling friends it was the only thing keeping her, saying to the outside world, she was still the happy, go lucky wife, but those close to the Lab saw a different side. In March nineteen ninety eight, Michelle gave birth to their daughter, Samantha. To Jonathan, the family was now complete. He would later insist they were the happiest couple imaginable, a family people envied, but as some observers, the nicest seemed to be performing, working just a lo a little too hard to project a perfect image while the foundation of their marriage was quietly crumbling. Do you think at any point in their marriage was Michelle actually happy.

40:11 I know she was a happy person, but was she happy with her husband? You know, it's a really good question. It seems like, you know, when they were writing letters back and forth that she really loved him, but it seemed like things started to kind of go south pretty quickly. Yeah. I think when she realized that he was different than he portrayed himself, that sort of left a bad taste in her mouth. Huge red flag. Yeah, it absolutely is. And I think that, you know, she came to America and that I think he was so busy with his work that she probably didn't get to spend that much time with him as she probably expected when she made that trip. We'll be back after a break.

40:53 By early nineteen ninety eight, the buzz surrounding Epigenesis had reached a fever pitch. Jonathan Nice was no longer just a scientist. He was a sought after commodity. Cities across the country were competing to become the home of his revolutionary new drug, but it was Princeton, New Jersey that won out with a lucrative tax package. Do you have any idea how much the company was worth. Did he become a millionaire overnight? Or was it just a good lucrative company. The company became worth a lot. I don't know the exact number, but it was all on paper, right. It was all like a lot of investors were pumping a lot of money in, but the company never really made money. So like an Elizabeth Holmes type situation.

41:35 Yeah, very much so. In the fall of nineteen ninety eight, the company moved into a sleek, fifty one hundred square foot facility in Cranberry, New Jersey. Jonathan brought his old guard from North Carolina with him, including his loyal research assistant Sherry Leonard, his co founder, doctor W. James Metzker took a seat on the board, although he would tragically lose his own battle with cancer just two years later later, leaving Jonathan with even fewer people who felt comfortable standing up to him. One of his first new hires in New Jersey was Amanda Gillim, brought in as VP of Operations. Amanda arrived with high hopes, but it didn't take long for the cracks in the corporate facade to show. She watched as the staff from North Carolina followed Jonathan with a devotion that bordered on blindness. To Amanda, it was clear Jonathan didn't want a partner or an advisor. He wanted an audience. His ego had become as massive as the office space, and anyone who dared to challenge his business sense was quickly sidelined. While Jonathan was building his empire, the foundation of his home life was crumbling. He moved Michelle and their three children into a rented townhouse in Princeton, landing an upscale community near the university. For Jonathan, it was a status symbol. For Michelle, it was a cage.

42:58 Michelle was devastated by the move to Princeton. In Greenville, she had built a life, a community, a circle of friends, and a hard won sense of belonging. In the cold, intellectual atmosphere of Princeton, she felt like an outsider once again. During those first few months, the happy go lucky mask finally slipped. She spent her days in a deep depression, calling her old friends in North Carolina and breaking down in tears. She began to voice the question that she had suppressed for years. Had she made a massive mistake leaving the Philippines. As always, her only sanctuary was the gym. While Alex and Trevor were at school, Michelle would drop young Samantha off at the gym's daycare and lose herself in the physical strain of a workout. It was the only part of her life where she still felt in control. Slowly, however, Michelle and Jonathan began making friends in New Jersey, and Michelle began to feel at home. Meanwhile, the public's adoration of Jonathan continued unabated. In March nineteen ninety nine, the prestigious US one business newspaper featured him in a glowing cover story. To the readers, Jonathan Nice was the man who was going to cure the world's breathing by the dawn of the new millennium. Jonathan Nice was wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, but that wealth existed almost entirely on paper.

44:22 To the outside world, he was a Titan of biotech. His colleagues, however, noticed something unsettling. They started to suspect that Jonathan was a compulsive liar. He became increasingly tangled in a web of untruths, some small, some foundational, and even when caught red handed, he refused to back down. The brilliant scientist was losing the one thing a researcher needs most, credibility. Jonathan began living the high life of a Silicon Valley mogul. Though his wealth was tied up and yet to be proven stock, he acted as though the finish line had already been crossed. He traded up for a sleek out d sports car, bought Michelle a green Toyota land Cruiser, and handed her a generous allowance. Michelle, ever mindful of the world she had left behind, funneled much of that wealth back to the Philippines, sustaining her family and their duck farm. In early two thousand, as the company prepared for Phase two human trials, moving from healthy volunteers to actual asthma sufferers. The Nices bought their dream home, a five thousand square foot mansion in the ultra exclusive Hopewell Township, perched at the end of a private cul de sac on three acres of land. It was a twenty one room monument to their success, costing nearly nine hundred thousand dollars or about one point eight million today, the first home they had ever owned. Jonathan would later claim the house was Michelle's choice, a compromise he made despite wanting to be closer to their children's school.

45:53 If it was her choice, she leaned into it with a vengeance. Michelle spared no expense, furnishing the twenty one rooms with the best of everything. In the center of the circular driveway, she installed a massive, five tier water fountain and surrounded it with six thousand hand planted tulips. Jonathan's tulips. This a lot of tulip show was very beautiful. Jonathan, perhaps fueled by guilt for his absences or a need to maintain the perfect image, seemed unable to say no to her. The peak of Jonathan's professional life came in April of two thousand, Jonathan signed a staggering one hundred million dollar deal with Taisho, Japan's largest over the counter drug company. The deal turned Epigenesis into an international powerhouse, and they expanded once again, moving operations into a sprawling twenty thousand square foot facility in Princeton. Jonathan's exit strategy was clear, sell the company to a giant like mrk or Ty, show, cash out his massive steak, and solidify his legacy as the man who cured asthma. He was standing on the summit of the American dream. In the year two thousand, the twenty one room mansion in Hopewell became less of a home and more of a fortress.

47:08 The first cracks in the perfect facade appeared when Michelle prepared for her first trip back to the Philippines in nine years. She wanted to show her children the village where she had grown up, to bridge the two halves of her life. Jonathan's reaction, though, was swift and paranoid. He refused to let the children go, going so far as to lock away their passports. He claimed he was protecting them from kidnappers targeting the children of wealthy scientists, but to Michelle it felt like a different kind of theft. She traveled alone, and when she returned to New Jersey, she was changed. The dependence Jonathan had cultivated was beginning to dissolve. She was more independent, more vocal, and more determined to secure her family's future in the Philippines, funneling even larger sums of money back home.

47:57 Do you think her intention was to move back to the Philip Peen someday with the children. The good question. I think at this point that that idea of may have just been starting to form in her mind. Jonathan's insecurity, always simmering beneath the surface, began to boil. He was acutely aware of the growing gap between them, not just the years that he had lied about, but the physical reality. Michelle was thirty one, in the prime of her life, and fanatical about her fitness. Jonathan was fifty, overweight, and increasingly tethered to his desk, terrified of the men that she might meet at a public gym. Jonathan spent thousands of dollars to build a professional grade fitness center inside their home. It was a grand gesture, but it was wrapped in a layer of control. If she wouldn't stop working out, he would at least ensure that she did it behind closed doors. By late two thousand and one, the duck Pond days were a distant memory.

48:52 Michelle abruptly cut off all contact with her old friends in North Carolina, as if that chapter of her life had been bleached from her mind. Jonathan would later claim this was the moment the marriage began to spiral, saying that his success went to Michelle's head. Meanwhile, Michelle was expanding her circle. In July two thousand and one, she met a woman named Larissa Sues, a fellow Filipino immigrant who had also married a successful American man. They were both middle children from large rural families, Navigating the strange, sterile waters of elite New Jersey suburbs. The two became inseparable. They spent hours in the expensive home gym that Jonathan had built, with Michelle acting as Larissa's personal trainer. She confided in Larissa that the gym wasn't just a gift, it was a restriction. Jonathan had forbidden her from joining a public club because of the guys. But Michelle, ever resourceful, turned her cage into a social hub. Bored with solitary workouts, she began inviting friends over, filling the house with the very outside energy that Jonathan was trying desperately to exclude.

50:00 In early September two thousand and one, Jonathan Nice was standing on the precipice of immortality. He had just signed preliminary documents for a staggering eight hundred million dollar deal with a pharmaceutical giant. To celebrate and secure even more capital, Epigenesis launched a high stakes cross country road show to court new venture capitalists. Jonathan believed he was days away from joining the global elite. Then the world changed. The attacks of September eleventh, two thousand and one didn't just shatter the national psyche. They froze the financial markets. The investor climate turned sub zero overnight. The eight hundred million dollar deal, the one that was supposed to cement Jonathan's legacy, vanished into thin air. While Jonathan's smart drug was proving partially successful in clinical trials, partial wasn't enough for a terrified market. In normal times, a scientist of his caliber might have survived the lull, But Jonathan had built his empire on a house of cards, supported primarily by the Japanese firm Taisho and a small, increasingly nervous investor base.

51:11 By early two thousand and two, he was watching his kingdom crumble. The twenty thousand square foot facility in Princeton, once a hive of billion dollar ambition, became a ghost town. Jonathan was forced into rounds of brutal layoffs, cutting the staff from a small army down to just twelve loyalists. The pressure was suffocating. Desperate for a cash infusion to keep the clinical tests alive, Jonathan turned to the one thing that he actually owned, the twenty one room dream home. He took out a two hundred thousand dollars home equity loan against the mansion in Hopewell to a man who had been chasing nearly a billion dollars. It was a drop in the bucket, a temporary bandage on a severed artery.

51:54 Jonathan Knice was now a man fighting a war on two fronts. At the office, he was trying to outrun a financial collapse, and at home, he was trying to maintain the illusion of the successful provider for a wife who was becoming more independent by the day. In May two thousand and two, Michelle's father, Theodoro, arrived from the Philippines for a six months stay, bringing a sense of home to the cavernous twenty one room mansion. He fell into a rhythm of domesticity, filling the house with the scent of Filipino and Chinese cooking, and doting on his three grandchildren, two outsiders, including Larissa and Teodoro himself. The relationship between Jonathan and Michelle still seemed good. Jonathan was the consummate gentleman, pulling out Michelle's chair at dinner, opening doors, and never missing a chance to show affection in front of friends. But Michelle's feelings for Jonathan had changed, and then came the revelation that shook Michelle to her core.

52:54 The setting was a family birthday party for Jonathan's brother Michael. It was a casual gather during the kind of event where guardrails are lowered and family laura is shared. Michelle found herself chatting with Jonathan's mother, Emma. The conversation turned to Jonathan's upcoming birthday, and Emma, with the casual certainty of a mother, remarked that she couldn't believe her son was turning fifty two. Michelle froze. She corrected her mother in law, stating that Jonathan was turning forty four. But Emma didn't budge no. She insisted he was born in nineteen fifty. I'm his mother, of course I know what year he was born. In that moment, twelve years of marriage shifted. Michelle realized that the man she had built a life with, the man that she had moved across the world war, had lied to her before they had even met. He hadn't just budged a number in a letter.

53:48 He had used white out on a legal document. He had looked her father in the eye while posing as a man nearly a decade younger. The betrayal wasn't about the number. It was about the fundamental deception. From that day forward, the love Michelle had felt for the gentle giant was replaced by a cold, sharp resentment. She began to see every gentlemanly gesture and every protective rule not as acts of love, but as layers of control. She wanted out, But as she looked around the five thousand square foot dream home, she realized she was living in a cage where Jonathan held the only keys. He controlled the bank accounts, the investments, and the narrative. Even though she was now a citizen, she still felt powerless. She was a woman with a magnificent house, a famous husband in six thousand Tulips, and she had absolutely nothing of her own.

54:44 I think this discovery of his age thing, she must have somewhere in her mind believed that he was older than he said he was. But I think this just made it so real for her that it was really like flipping a switch. I think that was just, you know, a moment in time when she realized, this is not what I want anymore. Right, it's a huge deception. In the fall of two thousand and one, as the world outside was still reeling from nine to eleven and Jonathan's company was hemorrhaging cash, Michelle was focused on the three acres surrounding their mansion at one keith Wood Court. She hired a company called the Ostrich Nursery for a massive fifty thousand dollars landscaping project. It was through this project that she first met the man who would become her undoing, a thirty one year old crew leader named Miguel Dejesuss, better known as Enyo.

55:34 The initial attraction was mutual and immediate, but it stayed dormant for nine months. It wasn't until July two thousand and two, just as Jonathan's age deception was settling into permanent resentment, that Michelle called the nursery again. When Enyo returned to discuss a bill, Michelle didn't just pay it, She asked for his cell phone number. When a surprised Enyo asked why she was blunt, I'd like to be your friend. To Michelle, Enio represented the youth that she had traded away at nineteen. He was handsome and closer to her age than the husband who had lied to her for a decade. But Enio was also shady. He operated under at least three different aliases, Alexander Costanado, Sergio Martinez, and Miguel de Jesus, utilizing multiple social Security numbers to stay one step ahead of child support warrants. And a common law wife named Patricia Michelee, however, saw in Eno an escape. She bought a secret pay as you go phone to bypass Jonathan's control and began an ardent pursuit.

56:38 She showered Eno with gifts, watches, jewelry, expensive chocolates, and for six months, the relationship remained platonic. In October two thousand and two, the relationship moved from long phone calls and lunches to CD motel rooms in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. Once a week, the mistress of a twenty one room mansion would meet her gardener in a cheap room to escape a marriage she discret is boring but inescapable because of her children. The secret didn't stay quiet for long. In September, Enyo's wife, Patricia, grew suspicious and dialed the mystery number that showed up frequently on his phone. Michele's voice answered with the cheerful high honey, I am not your honey. Miss Patricia snapped back, I'm your honey's wife.

57:22 Despite the confrontation and subsequent thirty minute phone call between the two women, Michell denied the affair, insisting they were just friends. As the affair deepened, Danyo began making pointed questions about Jonathan's finances. He wanted to know the cost of the house. He asked to borrow three thousand dollars for his family in Guatemala. Michele refused, she was now a woman living three lives. The devoted wife of a genius scientist, a happy go lucky friend to Larissa and others, and the clandestine lover of a man with three names. She told no one about Enyo, We'll be back after a break.

58:07 By February two thousand and three, the cracks in the nice marriage were no longer just private, They were becoming public spectacles. Michelle planned another trip to the Philippines to see her family, with Jonathan set to join her a week later, but citing the same paranoid fears of kidnapping and danger, Jonathan again refused to let Alex, Trevor, or Samantha leave New Jersey. His parents, Emma and Jonathan Senior, moved into the twenty one room mansion to babysit while the parents were away. Just days before her departure, Enyo asked Michelle for money yet again. This time she finally caved. She handed her lover one thousand dollars in travelers checks, some of the money that Jonathan had specifically provided her for her trip. She was effectively using her husband's crumbling biotech fortune to support her lover. When Jonathan finally arrived in the Philippines, his first time back in thirteen years, The Rivieras greeted him as a returning hero. They threw a massive family party, but the celebration was short lived.

59:11 The family quickly noticed that the gentle giant was gone. In his place was a man who was drinking, heavily, irritable, and prone to dark, explosive moods. The tensions boiled over during a family outing to a local beach. Jonathan had treated all of Michelle's nieces and nephews to a day in the sun, but during lunch, his insecurity spiraled out of control. He became convinced that their hunky tour guide was paying too much attention to Michelle. In front of her entire family, the successful American scientist began screaming at his wife, a public unraveling that left the Rivieras stunned. Adding to the grim atmosphere, Michelle's family was struggling financially.

59:53 The Duck Farm, the business that Jonathan's money had helped build, had gone bankrupt. According to John Nathan, he found the family living in squalor, a claim that the Rivieras would later vehemently dispute as a savior complex fabrication, regardless of the truth, Jonathan later claimed he spent six thousand dollars on a massive shipment of freeze dried emergency food to rescue them upon his return to the US. I wish I knew more about the financials here, because there's a very clear dispute between what Jonathan has to say about what he did for the rivieras and what they have to say about it. Okay, well, we know that Michelle was sending it. It sounds like a significant amount of money back there, right, Yeah.

1:00:36 She definitely was. The question is how much of that was basically her doing it on her own versus Jonathan doing it or asking her to do it, because the way Jonathan made it seem later is that he was the one who really was doing all this. I'm curious about a duck farm as a business, but Google tells me that in the Philippines they eat a lot of duck, and particularly fertilized duck. It's something called blue or ballot balut. It's a culturally ingrained street food in a major industry. Interesting. I didn't know much more about the duck farm other than that they had it, so that makes sense. By the spring of two thousand and three, Jonathan Knice was a man mortgaged to the hilt, desperately trying to maintain a million dollar lifestyle on a foundation of shifting sand.

1:01:25 While he was still driving the audi and living in the twenty one room mansion, he had already traded away the one thing that gave him power control of his business. In a desperate bid to save Epigenesis, A new consortium of venture capitalists had moved in. They saw what Jonathan's colleagues had seen for years, a brilliant scientist who was a catastrophic manager. To the venture capitalists, Jonathan wasn't a titan, he was a liability. They began a ruthless restructuring, stripping Jonathan of his authority and cutting the staff to the bare bones. David Ramsay, a partner at one of the VC firms who was poised to take over, put it this way. He was more of a scientist and a discoverer.

1:02:08 It was the corporate version of a death sentence. The pressure was visible. Jonathan seemed to be physically and mentally breaking. The final blow landed on March twenty eighth, two thousand and three. Jonathan was summoned into the boardroom. He had built, and was summarily fired from his own company. The board made it clear that he was the one to carry the blame for the company's stagnation. They handed him a confidential severance package later rumored to be two years of salary and showed him the door. But the ultimate insult came next. The company didn't just fire Jonathan. They abandoned his life's work, a halted development on the smart drug that he had spent nearly twenty years on, pivoting to a completely new approach. Eventually, the drug that was supposed to cure the world was shelved entirely due to disappointing test results. Jonathan Nice walked out of that building a man with no mission, no company, and a reputation in tatters.

1:03:05 He was fifty two years old, and he was heading home to a fifty six hundred square foot monument to his own failure. I wish I knew more about the drug trials. What I don't really know wasn't able to learn, is whether his drug was a fraud or whether it just didn't quite work as well as he expected, Whether it was partially effective or not. It's really hard to tell. And I think when these venture capitalists took over. They probably didn't want anything publicized, so they just kind of quietly you dismissed it and took it off the shelves. Yeah, it is really disappointing because asthma, I mean, it's such a horrible condition and so many people struggle with it. It sounds like this drug had so much promise, But that's the problem with pharmaceutical industry because there's so much money there. Whenever there's a drug that has any promise, I think people are so quick to invest in it.

1:03:56 People are throwing money at it, but it takes years to really figure out whether it's actually going to work or not. Yeah, I mean decades even to make sure that it's not harmful. Right. Following the boardroom ouster from epigenesis, Jonathan retreated into a deep clinical depression. He refused to discuss the firing, telling neighbors and colleagues a more palatable story he was taking a sabbatical to focus on his true passions. Jonathan decided to spend the first year of his severance living in a literary fantasy. He began writing a children's book called Doctor Nice's Poems for Children and the Parents who love them. Well, that is quite a turnaround, it is. He hired a professional illustrator and dedicated the work to Michelle and their three children, framing it as a love letter to the family that he was increasingly losing touch with.

1:04:45 The lead poem, about a single shoe that his sons made for him from deer Hyde, which was based on a true story, was a window into Jonathan's psyche. I think it's actually a very nice poem, so I'm going to read it. Son one and Son two made Dad a new shoe. They didn't have quite a enough stuff to make two. But what would Dad do with only one shoe, said Son two to Son one, and Son one to son too. But their dad was happy to get such a prize. He sat himself down to try it for size. It fits just so perfectly well, he exclaimed that I think I shall never wear two shoes again. He hopped up and down, He hopped left and right. He hopped so fast he gave mom a fright. He hopped all the day until it was night. Then he hopped into bed and turned off the light. He dreamed all night long of Son one and Son too, His heart filled with joy for the gift of the shoe, for gifts from the heart means so very much more than anything anyone could buy in the store.

1:05:38 Those years of reading Dog. Made it leads very much like a doctor Seue's poem. It is a good poem for a man who had been chasing an eight hundred million dollar dream. The poem's closing sentiment felt like a desperate attempt to rewrite his own reality. He was trying to convince himself that he didn't need the corporate kingdom that he had just lost. Jonathan couldn't stay in the world of poetry for long. His obsessive need for control wouldn't allow it. Even while he was writing about hopping Fathers, he was trying to birth a new company, Prism Pharmaceuticals, to develop a lung cancer prevention drug. He also began tinkering in the garage, remaking furniture, and even attempting to invent a new comfortable type of footwear by cutting the heavy soles off of a pair of size twelve Brahma work boots and gluing them onto the bottom of a pair of moccasins. Remember that for Part two. By the summer of two thousand and three, the twenty one room mansion had become a pressure cooker. Jonathan was always home, now hunched over his computer, retreating into his books, or obsessively writing poetry. While Michelle had once struggled because Jonathan was never home, now she felt suffocated by his constant presence. It was a reminder of their financial ruin and the lives that had built their life. She began to resent his sabbatical, urging him to find a job as the severance money began to dwindle. Meanwhile, Michelle continued her own deception. She told Jonathan that her physical fitness classes at the community college started a month

1:07:11 earlier than they actually did, using those phantom hours to meet Enyo in CD Motels. On June twenty sixth Enyo's wife, Patricia reached her breaking point after finding a silk thong in ENO's pocket. She drove to the Nice home and rang the doorbell, looking for a confrontation. Michelle's dad, Teodoro, answered, but the collision of the two families was narrowly avoided. Neither Jonathan nor Michelle was home. Two days later, Enyo packed his bags and left Patricia, but he wasn't moving toward Michelle he was moving into the shadows of a friend's house. In an attempt to save his crumbling family, Jonathan booked a July fourth week long vacation for the entire Nice clan in the Outer Banks. At the last minute, Michelle refused to go, claiming she had to stay back to study. Jonathan was reduced to begging, eventually driving to North Carolina alone with the three children. When Michelle and Theodora finally joined them by bus three days later, the tension in the air was so thick that everyone in the extended family noticed. Jonathan's scientific mind, once used to map genetic defects, was now mapping his wife's deception. He had noticed the discrepancies in her school schedule, he had felt the growing distance between them. On returning from the Outer Banks, he did a reverse search on the mystery number in her phone. It came back to a name he didn't recognize, Alexander Castaneda.

1:08:37 I have a question for you. You've mentioned school a couple of times. Did I miss something? Is she getting like a personal trainer certification or something. I'm not sure what if she was just going back to school to take some classes, or if she was actually going towards some goal like that. But yeah, I didn't really mention it earlier. I think she was just taking some classes at a community college, primarily in like fitness. In a moment of raw, unhand hinged desperation, the former CEO drove to the address on the background report that he paid for. He sat in his car outside his rivals home, crying uncontrollably. He called his old assistant and friend, Sherry Leonard. Sobbing into the phone, he told her he was either going to beat the man to death or kill himself. Sherry, hearing the genuine suicidal intent in his voice, spent hours talking him down, eventually convincing him to just go home. Two days later, Jonathan put his feelings into a poem directed at Michelle. Your stainless steel heart like a knife, rips open my soul with another man's seamen still warm within your belly? When, oh when will my dying end? Quodit departure from his I hope Doctor suis poem right.

1:09:45 Up here in the children's book. No, he didn't show Michelle the poem. Instead, he tucked it into a desk drawer near his bookcase alongside his pistol and ammunition. And that is where we are going to end part one. But before we wrap, I few topics I wanted to discuss with you. First of all, I want to go back to the dead raccoon. Do you think that that childhood experiment was just a curious scientific mind or do you think there is something troubling there, like a warning sign? Well, he didn't kill the raccoon, right, the raccoon, So no, I think he probably was just a scientist, and that is something that you know, a scientist would do. Right. Yeah, I think you're right too. When I first read that fact, I was like, Oh, that's really that's like serial killer stuff. But then I was like, no, I think it really was just someone who was very curious and like he said, he didn't kill the animal.

1:10:35 He didn't have any history of cruelty to animals or anything like that. How do you think Jonathan's dramatic fall from being like this powerful titan of industry, potentially you know, leading this pharmaceutical company worth billions of dollars and then basically losing it all. How do you think that affected his relationship with Michelle? Well, you said he went into a deep depression, and I'm sure it didn't feel good at all. Worked for that for you know, such a long time, and even though when things weren't going well, he was probably still optimistic and he was probably like a darling to the investors, right because he was the one who had this, you know, this drug that was possibly going to change the world.

1:11:16 So people built him up until they didn't anymore. So, Yeah, I'm sure it greatly affected his you know, like you said, Psyche and his marriage. And you know, I wonder if Michelle also was like, oh, yeah, you're not you know, the great inventor that I thought you were. Yeah, I wonder if that kind of just contributed to what she had already started believing about him, that he was a fraud, right, that he was deceptive and lying about different things, And that might have definitely would have impacted her her perception of him too, I would think. But I think the pivotal thing that really affected her, it sounds like, was when she realized that he'd been lying about his age for so long. Yeah, like their relationships started on this huge lie.

1:11:58 Right. We did talk about this a little bit earlier, But do you think that Jonathan did have a savior complex when it came to Michelle's family in the Philippines. Yeah, I think he did. And it was a way to ingratiate himself into her family and for her father to be like, oh, well, I guess you would be a good mate for my daughter because you'll take care of her and us, and so, yeah, it was definitely the case. I was reading a little bit about the savior complex and what what are like the key warning signs of a savior complex, and I think he had some of these, but some I don't think he necessarily did. But here are the key warning signs. One is neglecting your own self care, like constantly putting others' needs before your own to the point of exhaustion or illness. And I don't think I don't think he did that. Enabling behavior like shielding people from the consequences of their actions, preventing them from growing. Not really sure he did that either. Unsolicited advice like frequently trying to fix people who haven't asked for help. I think he definitely did that. I don't I don't think that Michelle's family was really asking for his help. I think he just felt like he needed to relationship imbalance, constantly partnering with or befriending individuals who are in crisis or need help, validation through helping, deriving self worth solely from being needed or rescuing others, martyrdom, making sacrifices, then feeling bitter or taken for granted when they're not appreciated. I don't know if that happened with him, but I do get the sense that he felt like he was making all these contributions to this family in

1:13:29 the Philippines and they didn't really appreciate it. And then control issues, which I think he definitely had, believing that you're the only one capable of solving someone else's problems. Well, to be fair, it sounds like he did help the family, you know, even if it was Michelle sending the money back. Well, he was the one who ran the money, so I mean he definitely didn't help them out. Oh absolutely. Jonathan seems like a typical scientist so far. He is self absorbed and has an ego, But so far I don't really see sociopathic tendon with him. Yeah, guessing maybe in part two we'll see more of that. No, I mean, I don't think you're wrong about that. Obviously we will learn more about him in part two. But I think he was, like you said, he was very self absorbed. I think he was maybe controlling in some ways, like he really wanted to have control over everything, couldn't couldn't let go control of anything, including like his business and his marriage. But I don't get the sense that he used really a sociopath either.

1:14:27 Well, marrying Michelle, who was an immigrant, I think that shows that he must have been somewhat controlling too, Not that every man who marries an immigrant is controlling, but he chose someone who wasn't. Would be fully dependent on him, right. And she was younger and you know, helping her family out, So he did, I think, think that he could control her, but she grew and you know, she found her own way. Yeah, she would have been fine without him, and I think that probably. I think he probably had a hard time dealing with that. Although part of the reason he may have been up with Michelle was just because he was very awkward around women and painfully shy and had a hard time socializing. So finding someone through a pen pal ad in a paper that was halfway around the world and corresponding with them for months might have been more comfortable for him than you know, meeting someone local. Right, We'll be sure to come back for part two.

1:15:28 Well, speaking of finding love and being a little awkward, I have been consumed this weekend with the latest season of Love Is Blind. Love Is Blind, Ohio. Love Is Blind, Ohio. Yeah, and I feel like it's not it's kind of a cruel series really, because you know, these people are just I think a lot of them are genuinely looking for a mate. Yeah, especially the women, Like I feel so bad for women in today's world because the dating pool isn't good. The premise of the show, just for people who haven't watched it, I think, I mean, I mean I did watch a little bit of it. But these people are meeting each other and getting to know each other, but they can't see each. Other, right. They're in what they call pods, and you're just there's a wall that you can't see the other person.

1:16:13 You just talk to them and you have several dates and dates me I'm not sure how long. I think that they let you meet a few times a day and you can spend an hour or two with the person, and sometimes they have a couple of drinks, but you know the object the objective of the show is love is blind, and you know, you don't have to. Falling in love just based on talking to this person without actually seeing them and just geting to know them. And as a social experiment, it's a huge fail because like every season, they most of them, I mean, and they have to get The thing that I think is really toxic is they have to get engaged before they let them see each other. So they have to propose and the other person has to accept and you know, and they're like, I love you so much. And it's just crazy to me because it's like, yeah, I think you like each other, but you can't love each other until you see each other and touch each other.

1:17:05 Yeah, there's definitely more too, like falling in love with someone than just talking with them. That's an important thing. But I'm on episode six right now and they are on their vacation in Cabo, and it's just so funny because where they're in the pods and they haven't seen each other, Like, I don't care what you look like. I love you. It doesn't matter if you are four foot tall and three hundred pounds. I'm gonna love you for the rest of my life, and obviously for the well, most of them still like when they see each other, they're like, you know, they don't have really unattractive people on the show. They're all like moderately attractive. But you know, like the guys that said I don't care what you look like once they meet, Like and one guy who's like this athlete guy who's he's probably the best looking guy in the show. His fiance is she's beautiful. She's blonde, and she's beautiful, and he's like, first when he meets he's like, oh, you're so beautiful and keeps talking about it.

1:18:00 But then he's like to the you know, the camera or to the other guys, he's like, you know, I really prefer women with dark features and darker hair. And he's like, you know, so it kind of sure, love is blind, but I prefer He's like, she's great. But so that happens every season. It's like these guys are just it's usually I mean, it's the women too, but it's mostly you know, guys who are like, I don't know, she's not exactly my type, which is crazy to me. Did you have a type before you met me? No, I never had a girl named girl's named Tina. I did have, well, it was only one though it wasn't a long. Term ex girlfriend before me was also. Named but that wasn't a regular thing. But I really never felt like I had a type either. I knew guys who did, like, like, you know, I only want a date a woman that looks a certain way, has certain features.

1:18:51 Had to put it on paper, I probably would have said six fee, which isn't six feet tall. But you know, I'm glad I didn't have to put that on paper and abide by it. The other last night, you was showing someone a picture of yourself when you were younger. I was like, yeah, I went to dated. You've had a good glow. That went through some awkward years. My seventeen year old was pretty awkward too, so to be fair, Yeah. It's interesting that the love is blind that they chose Ohio. It's not that it's nothing wrong with that you live in Ohio. We're next to Ohio. Yeah, what are you saying about people from Ohio?

1:19:31 It's an odd choice, Like why did they choose Ohio for a reason? They just move around, Okay, they're trying. To get like just like Middle America sort of average American. I think that's their goal pretty much. Yeah, but if you haven't checked out Love is Blind, I mean it's it's a good show. It's entertaining if you like I think I'm just a big reality reality TV person. They can be very entertaining. I did watch part of I made you watch at least one season, and I really loved it, and you. Did it was all right. I mean I can see the entertainment value that. The problem I always have with shows like that is I always feel like if it really felt like reality, I would. It always feels a little bit staged, like they're kind. Of Yeah, there's definitely producers that are pulling the strings.

1:20:14 Well, and there's a little performative type thing too, where the people who go on the show, I feel like they're not being one hundred percent sincere, like they're trying to, you know, be dramatic or make for good TV watching. I'm not sure if that's true for the people that can tell the Yeah, the people that are dating, I get the feeling that, especially for the women, that they are there because they genuinely want to find love. Yeah. Well, I hope that it all works out for them. Yeah. Me too, but it definitely won't. But it makes really good TV when it doesn't work. Although it's devastating because they have to get married and some people like they put like they go through, like they have wedding dresses, their families are there, they have like its weddings, and you get to they have to go all the way to the altar and then I think it's a probably about half of them and maybe more than half of them end up saying no. It is kind of heartbreaking.

1:21:05 Yeah, yeah, well, as always, thank you so much for hanging out with us. If you'd like to listen to part two of this episode right now, consider joining us on Patreon dot com slash Love Marykill. We have just one tier five dollars a month. You get early ad free access plus a monthly bonus episode. Please rate, review, follow, and subscribe. Find us on social media, YouTube and TikTok, or email us at Lovemarykill at gmail dot com if you'd like to send us a snack. L MK pod po Box one one one Dexter, Michigan four eight one three zero. Thank you so much to now for recommending this case, and thank you so much to Mollie for the banana slugs awesome, excellent, Until next time.

1:21:53 Don't kill your wife and don't kill your husband to Compat