"Never Leave Me" by John Glatt is the story about an ambitious and successful professor and renowned asthma researcher turned pharmaceutical businessman and his much younger, beautiful Phillipino wife. Dr. Jonathan Nyce was forty years old when he met and married 23 year-old Michelle who was a Filipino native. Nyce had met Michelle through a mail order bride service and when he saw her for the first time, he was in love. It is not clear from the information given whether the dirt poor Michelle felt the same way about the much older researcher, Jonathan Nyce.

Of all the true crime stories I have read to date, this was one of the most brutal. However, despite the graphic details of the bludgeoning death of Michelle Nyce, this is also a real page turner; I think I finished it in a day.

The story begins with how the couple met and progresses to their rise to wealth and success in the next seventeen years of their marriage. Nyce brought his young bride back from the Phillipine Islands to live in North Carolina, sometime in 1990. In the early days of their marriage, Dr. Nyce was a professor and up and coming asthma researcher at East Carolina University. The two would relocate to the tony suburb of Titusville in Hopewell Township, near Princeton, New Jersey. It was there, that the couple would purchase their dream home which was a huge home on a hill, located in a woodsy but very beautiful and exclusive area.

From all appearances, the two seemed to make a picture perfect portrait that many said looked like an ad for the American dream. The only thing was, Jonathan lied to friends about how he met his lovely, younger wife, telling them that they had met in Hawaii while Nyce was attending a medical conference. Even Michelle's best girlfriend, Larissa Soos, would not know the truth about this and other things in the Nyce marriage until her friend's death. In fact, Jonathan even lied to Michelle about his age, knocking eight years off it. Despite the Nyces being the envy of every other married couple in their circle of friends, there was trouble behind the scenes. The Nyce marriage would produce three beautiful children, Alex, Trevor, and Samantha who would often hear their parents arguing over money and other things.

For awhile though, all appeared to be well in the Nyce household and Jonathan's pharmaceutical business was booming, at least for a few years. However, as time went on, the marriage began to falter, what with Jonathan's business not receiving sufficient funding for his asthma research. As new techniques and medical treatments began to come on the market, Jonathan's invention was no longer viable, and it was not profitable by the end of the seventeen year marriage. It was also around this time that Michelle took on a job at Macy's working behind the Chanel counter there. Michelle also took on a lover named Miguel de Jesus aka Enyo.

Enyo was the family gardner who had become enamored of Michelle and the two began having an affair; a fact that her best friend Larissa was also not aware of until after her murder. Jonathan began to get suspicious of his wife, as she often left her Macy's job after work to go be with her lover in a cheap motel. Jonathan had always been coveted of his wife's extraordinary beauty, but he became positively obsessed with her after he found out about her affair with Enyo.

Author John Glatt does an effective job of playing up the suspense with the events that led up to Michelle's murder. Sometime in the early morning hours of January 16, 2004, Michelle apparently came in after a tryst with Enyo at the Mount's Motel and JOnathan was lying in wait for her in the garage. From what we know, Michelle parked the couple's Land Cruiser suv in the cavernous garage and it was there that Jonathan attacked her after she ostensibly informed him that she wanted a divorce. Not being able to face a life not being married to Michelle, he struck her with a baseball bat and bludgeoned her to death, smashing her head into the garage's concrete floor numerous times. Jonathan would claim that Michelle called him some expletive and began trying to stab him with a knife.

The police found blood all over the garage and in other ares of the home, including a slew of blood soaked rags that he hid behind a space in the basement. The kicker of this unfortunate tale, came when, just minutes afer the murder, Dr. Nyce drove the suv into a with his dead wife's body in it and pushed it fifteen feet into a ditch below the road leading to the Nyce home. Nyce reportedly drove the suv from the passenger seat, if you can believe it, using an ice scraper to hold down the gas pedal? Huh? This is perhaps one of the most bizarre ways I have heard of to dispose of your dead wife's body!!!! Michelle's frozen body would be discovered the next day by workers along the roadside.

Nyce had also trudged home on foot up the hill to his house, after he pushed the suv with Michelle's body in it. His huge footprints would be found near the suv and in the plentiful snow on the ground which led up to their home. Nyce would also try to pin the murder on poor little Enyo, MIchelle's married gardner lover, but the police didn't buy Nyce's story. It is hard to believe that with all the evidence found in the Nyce home and the tell-tale footprints in the snow, that a 6'4" man could be overpowered by a knife-wielding, petite 5'2" woman like Michelle. He had to hold her down to keep her from stabbing him? Yeah right. Never mind that no knife was found that Michelle supposedly used on her husband.

Needless to say, author Glatt has a masterpiece here, and this is undoubtedly one of the most violent, brutal and tragic true crime stories I have read. Great read for true crime buffs.



Recommended: Yes