Fake cancer drugs for dogs net ex-pharmaceutical exec Jonathan Nyce an 8-year prison term

Twenty years after he killed his wife in a case that became a true-crime tabloid sensation, a former pharmaceutical executive from Collegeville was ordered back to prison Friday — this time for scamming money out of the owners of dying dogs.

Federal prosecutors described Jonathan Nyce, 73, as a “prolific con man” and “an unrepentant scoundrel” who bilked hundreds of desperate pet owners out of nearly $1 million with claims he’d discovered a treatment capable of curing canine cancer.

He started shilling the fake medications online in 2012 almost immediately after he finished an eight-year sentence for the 2004 bludgeoning death of his wife in their Hopewell Township, N.J. home.

As he stood in court Friday, facing incarceration again for a whole new set of crimes, Nyce remained remorseless. He insisted his dog meds — which he sold without FDA approval — were a precursor to unlocking the secret for a cancer cure in humans.

“This has the potential to revolutionize what we know about cancer,” he told U.S. District Judge Wendy Beetlestone, citing what he described as “peer-reviewed” studies he’d conducted on his drugs. “My legacy to my species — to all of you — is that we may be able to normalize cancer [rates] in humans from 50% to 5%.”

Beetlestone, meanwhile, appeared unconcerned that the eight-year prison term she imposed might interfere with any imminent, revolutionary medical breakthrough.

“The best that can be said,” she concluded, crediting government descriptions of Nyce’s science as “bogus nonsense,” “is that [he] is deluded by his own brilliance.”

The sentence all but ensured the end of Nyce’s decades-long career in medical research and drug development — one as remarkable for its ambition as it was for scandalous crimes that brought it all crumbling down.

A Temple-educated Ph.D. in biology and a former professor at East Carolina University, Nyce originally made his name in the ‘90s as the founder of the pharmaceutical firm EpiGenesis, which attracted millions of investor dollars in its quest to develop asthma drugs.

The treatment failed — and so, too, did his company.

But within a few years, he went on to gain notoriety — just not the sort he’d sought out to achieve.

The 2004 slaying 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 stature of Nyce, her accused killer.

The couple had been introduced in 1989 after Nyce responded to a newspaper ad offering to connect American men with women from the Philippines. She eventually emigrated to the United States, 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 confronted her and slammed her head into the floor of their garage, killing her and leaving their home covered in blood.

Investigators testified at his 2005 trial that Nyce panicked after the slaying. While their children slept upstairs, Nyce stuffed his wife behind the wheel of a Land Rover and drove it through their upscale neighborhood using an 18-inch ice pick to press the pedals from the passenger seat. Eventually, he drove the car off a six-foot drop and into an icy creek bank to make it appear as if his wife had died in a car wreck.

A Mercer County jury found Nyce guilty of passion/provocation manslaughter, a lesser crime than the original charge of murder. But he’s continued to maintain his innocence since then — including in a book titled Under the 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.”

“If he really wanted to kill his wife,” his then-attorney Robin Lord, told The New York Times in 2005, “he could have designed a drug to do it.”

Still, as prosecutors told it Friday, Nyce began blazing the trail that would lead him back to prison almost as soon as his release from behind bars.

Beginning in 2012, he began marketing his canine cancer drugs — which he called Tumexal or Naturasone — over the internet to grieving pet owners.

While he charged hundreds of thousands of dollars to roughly 900 unknowing victims brought in by claims that the medicines were FDA- funded and approved and could “restore a cancer-stricken dog’s appetite, spirit and energy” he failed to disclose that the drugs had not been vetted and that, in fact, the FDA had twice sent him notices to cease selling his product.

The drug was little more than a cocktail of over-the-counter pet meds that Nyce and his son mixed together at a facility in Collegeville, Assistant U.S. Attorney Christopher Parisi said Friday.

Nyce’s “dedication was not to research and science,” he said. “It was to making a quick buck. He is a snake-oil salesman. He is a con man.”

But Nyce’s attorney, federal public defender Nancy MacEoin, pushed back, chiding the government for being so quick to dismiss her client’s work.

None of his more than 900 customers testified at his 2022 trial that they considered themselves to be victims of a scam. In fact, MacEoin noted, the only three who did take the witness stand testified in his defense, saying they were happy with the product Nyce sold them.

“He has dedicated his life to curing cancer,” she said.

Nyce’s daughter, Samantha — who was 6 years old and sleeping upstairs at the time of her mother’s slaying — pleaded with Beetlestone on Friday to let her father go with a sentence of probation or house arrest.

“He’s the most lovely man that I know,” the now 25-year-old told the judge. “He doesn’t even really know how to be bad or hurt someone.”

Yet, while his daughter and lawyer sought to convince the court of Nyce’s good intentions, Nyce was more concerned Friday with convincing the court he was right.

In a 20-minute address to the judge, he maintained that decades of cancer research had approached treatment all wrong and that his dog medicines had succeeded in triggering a “tumor suppression mechanism” in canines that could lead to valuable breakthroughs in human cancer treatments.

(He also insisted he’d saved “thousands of lives” with a paper identifying a hormone that he said contributed to numbers of COVID deaths during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.)

Parisi, the prosecutor, was unimpressed.

“It’s clear to me that he thinks if he just keeps talking he can eventually convince everyone that he’s right,” he said. “He talked, and he talked, and he talked. And he lied, and he lied, and he lied. And he stole nearly $1 million from hundreds of people desperate to save their dying pets.”