10 years after wife's death, man convicted of 'near perfect murder'

Thu, Oct 29 05:59 AM

When David Swain was led out of a British Virgin Islands court and into an armoured car on Tuesday evening, it closed a chapter in a mystery that began in March 1999 when his wife's body was found floating in the turquoise waters off the British Virgin Islands.

Police at first wrote off Shelley Tyre's drowning as a tragic accident, a strange, but otherwise unremarkable death of an experienced diver on a romantic getaway to one of the hemisphere's premier dive spots. Swain, of Rhode Island, testified he tried to revive his petite, 46-year-old wife using CPR following a mysterious accident. But Tyre's parents suspected that Swain, 53, had killed her and wouldn't let it drop, pursuing a murder trial.

Authorities here charged Swain with murder after a 2006 civil trial in Rhode Island found him responsible for his wife's death. That jury awarded Tyre's family $3.5 million, but Swain filed for bankruptcy and has not paid the sum.

Ten years later, a British Virgin Islands jury delivered a unanimous guilty verdict following a trial that heard expert testimony indicating Swain wrestled his wife from behind underwater, tore off her scuba mask and shut off her air supply while they swam near an underwater shipwreck.

Prosecutors accused Swain of drowning his wife on the last day of their Caribbean vacation so he could pursue a romance with a Rhode Island chiropractor and gain his wife's inheritance estimated at $630,000. They said Tyre's drowning was almost a perfect murder.

After obtaining permission from the judge following the verdict, the victim's father, Richard Tyre, walked to the witness box and clutched a microphone with a trembling hand. "We're old, we're in our 80s, and when Shelley was killed, our life pretty much ended," he said in a broken voice. A judge expects to sentence him on November 4.

The defence called it a weak case that lacked physical evidence and was built on speculative theories.

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