During the intervening 13 months, Labrador and his codefendants-New York publisher Alexander Benedetto, Georgetown University law student Michael Spicer and Spicer’s gay partner, Evan George-have attended numerous pretrial hearings which have failed to produce any physical evidence linking them to the crime. The men have pleaded not guilty, and there appears to be no obvious motive for the murder.
The lone account tying the men to the crime comes from Jeff Plante, the prosecution’s star witness and a lifelong con artist with at least four felony convictions who is wanted in Texas for violating his parole. Chief prosecutor Terrence Williams is also awaiting the results of DNA lab tests on 85 pieces of evidence that may provide the smoking gun that has thus far eluded the prosecution. Three previous rounds of testing have turned up nothing, and Williams is staking much of his case on the outcome of a new technique called “low-copy DNA” that was developed in Britain only last year.
In his determination to put the men on trial, Williams has the full support of McMillen’s bereaved parents. Josephine and Russell McMillen have been vacationing on Tortola for more than 20 years and knew Spicer and his family as neighbors who owned a villa just up the hill from the McMillens’ two-bedroom house. Lois had been hanging out with the four suspects in Tortola bars in the days leading up to her death, and her parents’ suspicions settled on the men not long after she failed to come home on the evening of Jan 14.
Police began searching for Lois soon after her parents phoned in a missing-person report on the following Saturday morning. They didn’t have to go far: a passerby discovered their daughter’s body within a mile of a police station at the southwest end of Tortola Island.
News of the murder spread like wildfire within the small community of affluent foreigners who stay in that corner of the island, and most of the McMillens’ friends and neighbors got in touch to express their condolences that morning. But Josephine McMillen says she only heard a deafening silence from the Spicer villa, where Lois’s pub-crawling companions were sleeping off a night of carousing. That set off alarm bells in the minds of the murder victim’s mother. “The four men never called or came down, they were the only people in the entire community who totally ignored us,” says Mrs. McMillen. “I don’t say that in itself signals guilt. But it certainly shows a callous attitude towards human life, and we feel certain that the police have the right suspects.”
Relatives of the four suspects see it differently. Barbara Labrador insists her 37-year-old investment-banker son William and his three friends are being set up as fall guys for an unsolved murder that threatens to scare off some of the estimated 300,000 foreign tourists who visit Tortola each year. Though modest by the standards of Jamaica or Puerto Rico, the crime rate in the British Virgin Islands has been rising steadily in recent years. Police were still busy investigating the October 1999 murder of a Trinidadian cyclist when McMillen turned up dead last year.
At first Barbara Labrador voiced cautious optimism about the British-ruled territory’s judicial system and predicted that William and his codefendants would be freed within a few months of their arrest. But after repeated delays of courtroom hearings, her attitude has hardened. “Violence against women is growing by leaps and bounds [on Tortola],” says Labrador, a Southampton, N.Y., resident and longtime activist in New York State Republican circles. “The police never investigated the crime properly, and I have no confidence at all in the system down there.”
The defendants’ last remaining hopes for a reasonably swift trial were dashed during a preliminary court hearing last August. The prosecution had been granted a series of postponements after the initial rounds of DNA tests in Barbados, Jamaica and Britain on evidence gathered at the murder scene had failed to implicate the four in the murder. Chief prosecutor Williams then produced Plante, an ex-con who had been arrested on charges of credit-card fraud on Tortola and was awaiting trial when Labrador was assigned to share a cell with him. According to Plante’s sworn testimony, Labrador confided in him about an argument with Lois McMillen over money that escalated into a full-fledged brawl on the evening of her murder.
The 59-year-old Plante appeared in court several weeks after the pending fraud charges against him were dropped, and the timing of his testimony aroused suspicions among relatives of the codefendants that he had cut a deal with the authorities. This was not the first time Plante had taken the witness stand on behalf of prosecutors to reveal a sensational jailhouse confession of murder: after he was released from a prison on the Hawaiian island of Maui in 1995, Plante told police a similar tale about a fellow inmate, who was later put on trial on the strength of that testimony. (That trial ended in a hung jury.)
Plante’s credibility as a witness came into question last month when he was arrested yet again on Tortola, this time for passing $600 worth of bad checks. Prosecutor Williams issued a statement soon after the arrest reaffirming his intention to call Plante as a witness when the case goes to trial in March or early April. Speaking through his lawyer, Plante denied that he is a con artist and stands by his account of Labrador’s alleged confession.
The fates of the murder suspects ultimately will be decided by a nine-person jury, and Barbara Labrador believes that her son’s best hope for acquittal may lie in the unsavory reputation that Plante has acquired among some of Tortola’s 11,000 year-round residents. “I place my confidence in a jury because the local people I’ve met [in Tortola] are essentially good, hard-working people,” says Mrs. Labrador. “[But] in my mind they, shouldn’t be going to trial at all, and anything can happen down there.”
