PHILADELPHIA _ First, he was convicted of killing his wife.
Now, Jonathan Nyce, a 70-year-old former pharmaceuticals executive, faces charges of endangering the lives of cancer-stricken pets.
In an indictment unsealed Tuesday, federal prosecutors accused Nyce, of Collegeville, of scamming desperate dog owners online by selling unapproved drugs he claimed were capable of curing canine cancer.
The new charges come 16 years after he was convicted of beating his wife to death in the garage of their Hopewell Township, N.J., home _ a 2004 case that became a true crime, tabloid sensation. Investigators believe Nyce began his alleged pet meds scam shortly after his release from an eight-year prison sentence in that case.
Marketing his product under the names "Tumexal" and "Naturasone," he allegedly bilked pet owners out of hundreds of thousands of dollars between 2012 and 2016 by claiming medicines sold by his website CanineCare.us could treat "a wide variety of cancers" and restore their ailing pets' "appetite, spirit and energy."
In reality, prosecutors said, the drugs Nyce peddled had not been FDA-approved and were nothing more than a collection of bulk ingredients he mixed himself at a facility in Collegeville.
Nyce allegedly charged others for access to clinical trials he claimed he was running for other promising treatments. One woman from Illinois, referenced in the indictment, handed Nyce more than $5,000.
U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain called the new accusations against Nyce "shameful" and accused him of taking advantage of nurturing pet owners "doing everything they (could) to keep their beloved pets alive and well."
"That is both cruel and illegal, and now the defendant will face the consequences," he said in a statement.
Nyce is expected to surrender to authorities in the next several days on charges including wire fraud and selling misbranded drugs, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office said. Nyce could not be reached for comment Tuesday and it was unclear whether he had retained an attorney.
But Nyce has repeatedly and strenuously maintained his innocence in the case that first drew him into the public spotlight _ including in his 2012 book titled Under Color of Law, which he describes on the dust jacket as a "fact-driven account of an innocent man's nightmare journey through the American criminal justice system."
The 2004 murder of Michelle Rivera Nyce drew national headlines as much for where it took place _ a 21-room, 5,600-square-foot McMansion in a tony section of Hopewell Township _ as for the high-profile of the accused killer.
Nyce, a Temple University graduate and an East Carolina University professor, founded the pharmaceutical firm EpiGenesis and had attracted millions of investor dollars in the '90s for a groundbreaking asthma drug he was developing
He was introduced to Michelle in 1989 after responding to a newspaper ad offering to connect American men with women from the Philippines. She eventually immigrated to the U.S., married Nyce and took a job at the Chanel counter at the Quaker Bridge Mall.
But when Nyce learned she was having an affair with their landscaper in 2004, he violently confronted her as she returned home one night from one of their trysts. He slammed her head into the floor of their garage, killing her and leaving their home covered in blood.
Nyce panicked after the slaying, investigators testified at his trial. He stuffed his wife behind the wheel of a Land Rover and somehow drove it through their upscale neighborhood using an 18-inch ice pick to press the pedals from the passenger's seat. Eventually, he drove the car off a six-foot drop and into an icy creek bank.
A Mercer County court found Nyce guilty of passion/provocation manslaughter, a lesser crime than the original charge of murder, and sentenced him to eight years in prison.
Despite the notoriety his case drew, Nyce and his then-attorney Robin Lord always maintained that prosecutors had it all wrong.
"If he really wanted to kill his wife," she said in a 2005 interview with the New York Times, "he could have designed a drug to do it."
