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The house was quiet when the man pulled into the driveway on the afternoon of Monday, August 28th, 2017. He was a family friend, there to pick up 14-year-old Charlotte Nywriter to take her to swim practice. He got out of the car and walked up to the two-story yellow house. He knocked on the door. There was no answer. The house remained quiet. He knocked again, harder, still no answer.
The front door had small glass windows in it, and the man gazed through one window into the dark house. The stairwell leading upstairs was almost directly across from the front door, and the man saw a silhouette of a woman standing there on the stairs. It was a silhouette he recognized. It was Michelle Nyrider, mother to young Charlotte. She had arranged for the family friend to pick her daughter up, but now she just seemed to be standing there in the gloomy house, not moving.
The man knocked again, looking to see if Michelle would move. She didn't. Something was wrong. The man took out his phone and called 911. He explained to the emergency operator that there was something strange happening. He said that his friend Michelle was standing motionless at the stairs. He noted that Charlotte was nowhere to be seen. They sent a police officer over to investigate. Police Sergeant John McDivitt responded to the call.
He gained entry into the house and saw that the woman wasn't, in fact, standing on the stairs. She was hanging from the banister above, rope tied around her neck. She was unresponsive and had no pulse. At a glance, it looked like a suicide. Sadly, it wasn't the first time police had been to the house. Arguments between Michelle Nyrider and her middle daughter Carrie were common.
The police had been to the house in response to nearly a dozen 911 calls over the previous two years. It seemed that the turmoil within the household had finally come to a head, prompting 46-year-old Michelle Nyrider, mother of three, to take her own life. But there were certain things that didn't add up. There were marks on Michelle's body that puzzled investigators. And in the woman's bedroom, her bed had been pushed away from the headboard, as if during a struggle.
The police weren't sure it was a suicide and it turned out their hunch was right. But when the truth of the matter finally came to light, those involved in the investigation had a hard time believing what really happened to Michelle Nyrider. Part One: An Idyllic Family When Michelle Nyrider was found dead in her home in upstate New York, she'd been divorced for several years.
But there was still an ongoing battle between her and her ex-husband Lloyd for sole custody of their youngest daughter, Charlotte, the only one of the three girls that was under 18. But for Lloyd and Michelle, things were good at the beginning. At least, they seemed good to those on the outside looking in. Lloyd and Michelle met in high school. They started dating in 1989. Two years later, after graduating, they married. They both went to college and got degrees.
Lloyd earned an engineering degree and Michelle received a master's in literature. They settled in Corning, a small town in New York State, and started their family. Lloyd went to work for Corning Glass, a Fortune 500 company. Michelle was a stay-at-home mom, eventually taking care of three daughters. By all accounts, it seemed like an idyllic family in those early days. Friends said Lloyd was charming, attentive, and involved.
Michelle seemed happy too, but as the years went by, the cracks started to show. A friend of one of the daughters later said that she became concerned about the way their father treated them. Lloyd was a strict disciplinarian who wouldn't shy away from slapping his daughters in the face, even in front of other people. If they did something he deemed punishable, he would make them line up on their knees facing the wall. He was controlling and some say egomaniacal.
When the middle daughter, Carrie, was little, he would take her to ballet class and use the opportunity to charm the mothers of the other children there. Of course, all this seemed fairly harmless at the time. The girls seemed to have a good relationship with him, despite his strict standards and questionable discipline tactics. But those on the outside looking in couldn't see what kind of man he was at home, away from prying eyes.
In late 2007, Michelle apparently cut ties with her parents. Her mother said there hadn't been an argument and she could think of no reason for her daughter to suddenly stop talking to them. No reason but Lloyd, anyway. Jeannie Launde, Michelle's mother, felt confident that the sudden change in behavior was Lloyd's doing. She guessed that Lloyd had threatened to hurt Michelle or their little girls if she didn't do what he said. He was trying to isolate her, to take away her options,
giving her nowhere to go if things got bad at home. Then, after the financial crisis hit in 2008, things changed. Lloyd was laid off from Corning Glass and couldn't find work near home. He ended up moving to New Jersey for a job. This, it seems, gave Michelle room to breathe. Her friends said that she was visibly more relaxed when Lloyd wasn't around. She eventually found a job as an English teacher at a local college.
But even though Lloyd was no longer around, his presence still lingered in many ways. He casted a long shadow. So it came as a surprise when Lloyd filed for divorce. But it seemed that Lloyd hadn't thought it through. He was suddenly on the hook for child support payments that he didn't want to pay. By this time, their eldest daughter had already gone to live with Lloyd in New Jersey. Michelle moved into a different house in Corning with the other two girls.
But Lloyd wanted full custody of the two youngest daughters, Carrie and Charlotte. Perhaps because he didn't want to pay any child support or because he didn't want Michelle to have one. No matter the reasoning behind it, Lloyd was determined to gain full custody. He submitted 26 different post-divorce filings, a number that Michelle's divorce lawyer said was incredibly high. Usually, two or three post-divorce filings were common. 26 was overkill.
In these filings, Lloyd accused Michelle of all manner of things, trying to make her out to be a terrible mother. Michelle disputed these accusations and started gathering evidence of her own against Lloyd, accusing him of turning their daughters against her. Unfortunately, Michelle had no idea just how right she was. Part 2: Manner of Death Undetermined From the beginning of the investigation into Michelle's death, police were skeptical about it being a suicide.
After Sergeant McDivitt found the mother of three dead, investigators went to work trying to determine whether it was a suicide or a homicide. There were several things that caught their attention, and it all started with the body. There were ligature marks on Michelle's chin, as though someone had come up behind her and pulled the rope around her head, snagging it on her chin. It seemed unlikely that she would have done that to herself. There were also scratch marks on her neck, around where the rope had been.
While somewhat suspicious, the marks could have happened if Michelle suddenly changed her mind about killing herself. But the more likely cause involved someone trying to choke her while she struggled to get the rope from around her throat. There were also statistics to consider. The police knew full well that it's uncommon for women to kill themselves by hanging. While not unheard of, it's more common for women to use less violent methods of suicide. There was also some puzzling factors in the house itself.
mainly in Michelle's room. Her bed had been pushed away from the headboard and there were smudges of Michelle's blood on the bedroom wall. It looked as if there had been a struggle in the room. The officer on scene knew that the youngest girl was supposed to have been home, so one of their first priorities was to see if they could find the girl. They called Lloyd, but couldn't get a hold of him.
Later, they received a call from Carrie, who was distraught as she explained that a family friend had contacted her to tell her that her mother was dead. The 19-year-old told the officer that her little sister was with her in her apartment in Rochester, New York, about 100 miles away. She went on to explain how Charlotte, who was supposed to have been in Corning with the girls' mother, ended up with Carrie in Rochester.
Carrie had just moved into a new apartment to attend the Rochester Institute of Technology. But, according to her, she'd driven home on Saturday, August 26th to spend one last night at the family home. That was two days before Michelle was found dead. When she came into the house, Carrie said her mother immediately started yelling at her, accusing her of taking her father's side in the custody battle over Charlotte. The argument got out of hand.
So Carrie decided to get her little sister out of the house in case Michelle wanted to take her anger out on the teenager. It's important to reiterate here that arguments were fairly commonplace at the house. As mentioned earlier, the police had been to the house in response to 911 calls before when arguments had grown heated. One argument, about two years before Michelle's death, actually spilled out of the house.
In the middle of a verbal fight, Michelle had gotten into her car to leave while her daughter Carrie remained outside the car, blocking Michelle's vehicle from leaving the driveway. There are conflicting reports as to what happened next. Michelle's story was that she was inching the car out slowly, trying to get her daughter to move. Carrie insisted that her mother had actually tried to run her over with the car. While a police report was filed after the incident, nothing came of it. No charges were filed. With this in mind,
one could hardly blame Carrie for leaving with her little sister. If Michelle had really tried to run her over, she had a legitimate concern for Charlotte's safety and her own. According to Carrie, she was in the house on that Saturday in August for no more than 15 minutes before gathering Charlotte and leaving for Rochester. Charlotte confirmed this story, at least in part. She said that she'd been sleeping on the downstairs couch when shouting woke her up.
Carrie then took her out to the car, and they soon headed up to Rochester. Police considered this, thinking that, if it was a suicide, the argument could have been the catalyst. Later on Monday, August 28th, Lloyd Nyrider called the police and told them he was flying back from a job interview in California. He said he hadn't had contact with his ex-wife all weekend, but he didn't seem surprised that Michelle had apparently hung herself.
Less than 36 hours after learning about her death, Lloyd was at a Steuben County courthouse canceling his child support payments. With Michelle dead, there was no one to pay. Investigators intercepted him at the courthouse and invited him into their car where they had a recorded interview. According to Lloyd, Michelle was the very definition of a suicide risk. She was manic, angry, and had even taken part in a suicide pact with friends when she was younger.
Lloyd told investigators how Michelle would yell at their daughters from upstairs in her room at the Corning House and then would slam her bedroom door. He said she did this so much, she actually broke the doorframe. At this point in the investigation, authorities were still waiting on key pieces of information, like the time of death. They were also waiting for the autopsy report. After this interview with Lloyd, it seemed like a suicide was a viable explanation, but they weren't ruling anything out.
When the autopsy report came, the cause of death was clear: death by asphyxiation. But the manner of death was undetermined. There wasn't enough evidence to rule it a homicide or a suicide. This was a considerable roadblock for the investigators and prosecutors. Without a homicide ruling, they would have to build a very strong case to ensure that they could get a conviction. If it was a homicide. They started digging more, looking for motives.
And it turned out that both Carrie and Lloyd had a motive to kill Michelle. Carrie and her mother argued constantly. This was well documented. And it was possible that Carrie had shown up at the house and immediately started arguing with her mother, just like she said, but instead of leaving. Was it possible that she had strangled her mother and staged the suicide?
As for Lloyd, investigators found that he was sitting on about $100,000 in credit card debt. His monthly child support payments were around $6,000. To top it off, Michelle had a life insurance policy plan that would pay out $250,000 to the youngest daughter, who would be under Lloyd's care. As a minor, Charlotte couldn't receive the payout, but her legal guardian could. Taken together, these factors were certainly motive enough for murder.
But Lloyd had been in California when Michelle died, at least. That's what investigators thought initially. Then they got the time of death. It turned out Lloyd wasn't in California when Michelle died, and he wasn't in New Jersey, where he lived at the time. As the investigators found out, Lloyd Nyrider was in Rochester, New York on Saturday, August 26th, 2017. He was just 100 miles away on the day that his ex-wife died. Part three, putting it all together.
As investigators looked into Michelle's final days, they saw a portrait of a woman that differed greatly from the one Carrie and Lloyd were painting. Just days before her death, Michelle showed up in court to fight Lloyd's petition for sole custody. But for the first time since he started the legal battle with her, Lloyd didn't show up. He didn't withdraw or ask for an adjournment. He just didn't show. The case was dismissed. This was a major win for Michelle
and she was certainly happy about it. But this wasn't the only thing that she had going for her. According to friends, Michelle was in a good place. She loved her career as an English professor. She had her faith, her friends, and her youngest daughter. On the day of her death, Michelle and her youngest met up with another family to do some ice blocking, sliding down a grassy hill on large blocks of ice. There are pictures and footage taken from the event, and Michelle seems to be having a good time.
She didn't seem to be a woman contemplating suicide. Despite the uncertain manner of death, investigators felt confident that Michelle had been murdered. And as they gathered more information, they narrowed their focus on Lloyd and Carrie. They felt it more likely that Lloyd had committed the atrocious act, but they couldn't discount 19-year-old Carrie as a suspect, given the rocky history with her mother.
With the time of death determined as Saturday the 26th, investigators went over Lloyd's story again. According to him, he drove from New Jersey to Rochester to help Carrie move into her new place that Saturday. After helping her move, he got a hotel room. Then Carrie stopped by for a while. Then, after dark, he walked Carrie out to her car and headed back into the hotel. He was there for the rest of the night.
The next morning, Carrie and Charlotte showed up at the hotel for breakfast with him. Then he drove to New Jersey to catch a plane to California for a job interview. Attempting to confirm his story, investigators talked to Carrie. Their stories matched up exactly. She said that her father walked her out of the hotel, at which point she drove to Corning to spend one last night in the house. But her mom freaked out, so she grabbed her little sister and left. Lloyd had an alibi that seemed solid.
Police checked his phone and found that it hadn't left the hotel that Saturday night after he checked in. This made Carrie the more obvious suspect. After all, she was the one who was in Corning, but she said it was only for 15 minutes and that wasn't enough time to kill Michelle and stage the scene to look like a suicide. However, when investigators checked Carrie's phone movements for that night, it showed that she'd been in Corning for two hours, not 15 minutes.
It seemed that Carrie was lying to them. But investigators still weren't ready to rule Lloyd out. They checked the footage from the Mike Rotel in Rochester. The security camera footage showed Lloyd checking in at the front desk. A different camera showed him going to his room. It also showed Carrie stopping by that evening. Then both Carrie and Lloyd walked out of the hotel room. According to them, Lloyd walked her out and then went back up to his room. But that's not what the footage showed.
Although dark and grainy, the parking lot security footage showed Lloyd and Carrie leaving together in her vehicle. Lloyd didn't come back onto hotel property until 6:30 the next morning. And when he did, he was wearing the same clothes he wore the day before. About an hour later, Carrie and Charlotte showed up to eat breakfast with their father. Suddenly, Lloyd's whereabouts were in question on the night of Michelle's murder. Now investigators knew Lloyd was lying and that Carrie was likely covering for him.
But all the evidence they had so far was circumstantial. They needed proof that they could use to secure a conviction. But investigations take time, and it was the middle of November by the time the police secured warrants to tap not just Lloyd's phone, but Carrie's as well. They were hoping for a smoking gun, but over two months had passed since the murder, and the two suspects weren't really talking about it. So they decided to stir things up.
thinking that Carrie would be the weak link. One of the investigators called her and asked her to come in and talk to him. He said it was routine and they had a few more questions to ask her. Carrie agreed to meet the following Monday. After hanging up with the investigator, she immediately called her father. She asked Lloyd what she should do. After explaining the conversation she just had, Lloyd put her fears at ease, getting her to calm down. But then he said he didn't want her talking to the investigator.
He instructed her to call the man back and lie, saying that she had a counseling appointment that day. He even laughed as he asked his daughter if she could cry and say that the whole thing had been hard on her. She agreed to do what he said. While this wasn't on par with admitting to the murder, it was enough to tell investigators that they were on the right track. With this new development, DA Brooks Baker decided to hire a private forensic pathologist to take another look at the manner of death.
There was no longer a body to inspect. Michelle's remains had been cremated at Lloyd's behest. But there was all the information gathered during the first autopsy and the investigation. These included photographs and detailed notes. After looking over all the case materials, paying particular attention to the mark on Michelle's chin and the petechial hemorrhaging in her eyes, the pathologist ruled the death a homicide. They were close to having enough for a trial.
But they still needed the whole story. They needed a confession. And they decided that Carrie would be the one more likely to fold. So on January 24th, 2018, two state troopers showed up in Syracuse, New York, where Carrie was interning. At the same time, in New Jersey, two investigators paid a visit to Lloyd's office. The investigators took a swing at Lloyd, telling him that his ex-wife's death had been ruled a homicide. They asked him if he was in Corning that night.
Lloyd stuck to his guns, saying he was in Rochester, not Corning. His story didn't change. So the two investigators asked him if he would take a lie detector test. He agreed readily, so they gave him the address where he could meet a polygraph tech who was on call in New Jersey. Meanwhile, in New York, Carrie wasn't faring so well. After the police applied a little pressure, she broke down and admitted that she'd driven her father down to Corning on the night her mother was killed.
Part Four: The Choice In a police station with cameras recording, Carrie explained what had happened. It had started a week before Michelle's murder. Her father approached her and told her that he was nearing the end of his rope. He was in debt and couldn't afford to pay Michelle any longer, so he was going to kill himself. But, he told Carrie, there was a way he wouldn't have to take his own life. If Carrie helped him kill Michelle, he could continue living.
And didn't Carrie want him to keep living? That was the choice he gave the 19-year-old girl. Either dad kills himself or mother dies, pick one. But this wasn't just an out of the blue option. It was the byproduct of Lloyd's manipulative parenting. He knew what Carrie would choose because he'd spent years laying the groundwork. If he hadn't known he'd pitted Carrie against Michelle, he may never have asked such an awful, unfathomable thing of his middle daughter.
In fact, in court documents filed during the long custody battle, Michelle accused Lloyd of something called parental alienation. Essentially, she accused Lloyd of purposefully pitting Michelle's own daughters against her. Textbook parental alienation happens when one parent constantly belittles the other in front of the children. Over time, this can morph the child's view of the alienated parent, turning their attitude and emotions against said parent.
Parental alienation is not widely recognized in the psychological community, nor widely accepted in the legal system. It remains controversial. Proponents of parental alienation say that it should be recognized as a diagnosable mental health disorder among children. They also say that it can increase the child's risk of mental illness over their lifetime. Some even equate it to the kind of manipulation that happens in cults.
And if Lloyd had spent years convincing Carrie that her mother was no good, as the court documents suggest, it would go a long way to explaining why she agreed to help her father kill her mother. Michelle's friend and lawyer even went so far as to say that the conflicting reports of the incident with the car in the driveway were Lloyd's doing. She said that Lloyd convinced Carrie that her mother was trying to run her over with the car when all she was really doing was inching out of the driveway.
after Carrie agreed to help her father. He explained how he'd do it. He said he'd put a towel in her mouth so she wouldn't make noise, then choke her with a rope, and then stage it to look like a suicide. So when the day came, Carrie and Lloyd left the microtel in Rochester and drove down to Corning. Carrie told investigators that she let Lloyd into the house and that her mother was at the top of the stairs when he walked in. Michelle immediately started yelling, asking why Lloyd was there.
Charlotte was asleep on the couch, so Carrie stayed downstairs while Lloyd went upstairs. She said that the yelling got even louder when Lloyd went upstairs, and it woke Charlotte. That was when Carrie took a younger sister out of the house and waited in the car with her. She raised the back hatch of her vehicle so Lloyd could sneak in when he was done, and that's just what he did after staging the scene. He came around the house from the back and snuck into the rear of the vehicle so Charlotte wouldn't see him.
Once he was in the car, Carrie shut the back hatch and drove them back to Rochester. This explanation lined up with the hotel security footage and the fact that Carrie's phone showed her in Corning for two hours, not the 15 minutes she initially claimed. With Carrie's taped confession, the police had what they needed to arrest Lloyd. But there was one problem. He never showed up for the lie detector test.
Luckily, they were still up on his phone, and they traced it to a parking structure in Princeton, New Jersey. When the police showed up, Lloyd was on the top level of the five-story parking garage. Before they could subdue him, he got up on the ledge and threatened to jump off. With police surrounding him, Lloyd was trapped, but he was also desperate. For over two hours, Lloyd kept the police at bay by threatening suicide, but he eventually came away from the ledge.
Although he was still close enough that he could run and jump off, then he made one final mistake that took his options away. He turned his back on a New Jersey State trooper who saw an opportunity. The trooper ran up and leveled Lloyd, tackling him to the concrete. 45-year-old Lloyd Nyrider was under arrest for the murder of his ex-wife, Michelle Nyrider. But sending the man away for what he did was anything but guaranteed. The most damning piece of evidence the district attorney's office had was Carrie's confession.
and they were worried that the girl would have a hard time telling the truth in court, with her father watching in person. So they went about securing more evidence. They did this in a number of ways. First, they offered Carrie a deal. As it was, she was facing a sentence of 25 years to life, but if she agreed to plead guilty and testify against her father, she could get 15 years to life. They let her think on that while they went about getting Michelle Nyrider's clothes tested for Lloyd's DNA.
After a couple of weeks in jail, Carrie agreed to testify against her father. And to make the case even more solid, they found traces of Lloyd's DNA on the clothes Michelle was wearing when she died. But while Carrie was going over everything once again with prosecutors, her story changed again. She said she'd actually helped Lloyd stage the scene after her mother was dead. She helped to get Michelle's body from the bedroom where Lloyd had killed her to the banister.
where the two of them tossed her body over the railing after Lloyd tied the rope off. This was extremely shocking to everyone. Knowing that Lloyd's only defense would be to blame everything on his daughter, the DA sought answers for this troubling revelation. That was when they explored the possibility that she'd been manipulated by Lloyd for years. There seemed to be no other reasonable explanation for Carrie's cold, callous actions. Ready to show the court how Lloyd had manipulated his daughter,
The DA approached the 45-year-old father and told him about the DNA evidence they'd found on Michelle's clothes. He offered Lloyd a deal that the man was unlikely to accept. If he pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and recounted his part in the crime, he would face a sentence of 25 years to life with the possibility of life without parole. It was to be an opening gambit in a series of negotiations. The DA didn't think Lloyd would agree to the terms.
but to everyone's surprise, he accepted the deal. After starting off in court, saying that he killed Michelle because he was afraid she'd hurt his daughters, he soon got down to admitting his mastermind role in the murder. When the time for sentencing came, Lloyd Nyrider received life without parole. As for Carrie, things turned out a little differently. Instead of facing a minimum of 15 years, the DA agreed to a lesser plea. Carrie Nyrider was sentenced to one to three years in prison.
She was released on parole in January of 2020. Some think she got off too easy for her role in her mother's murder, but Michelle's mom, Carrie's grandmother, thinks differently. She said that Michelle wouldn't have wanted Carrie to rot in prison for 15 years. She would have wanted her to get the help she needs to reintegrate into society, to live a successful and happy life. For Carrie, the road back will no doubt be a long one. As for Lloyd, his road is at its end.
While trying to escape the financial trap he was in, he committed cold-blooded murder. And in so doing, he built himself a trap that he'll live in for the rest of his life.