CHAPTER 6
ON THE WINDWARD COAST OF ST. LUCIA, IN THE TOWN OF DENNERY, the white buildings of the Bordelais Correctional Facility spread across a flat plane as hills jetted up in the distance and palm trees swayed in the ocean breeze.
Sidney’s crew consisted of two cameramen, a sound engineer, and a lighting tech, all of whom had piled into the van for the long journey from Sugar Beach, out of the Jalousie Plantation, and through the mountains of St. Lucia to the island’s only jail.
One of the cameramen opened the sliding door of the van as they crested the hill.
The Bordelais Correctional Facility came into view in the basin below; with the camera on his shoulder, he leaned out the open door to capture the footage.
Tall chain-link fences topped with spiraled barbed wire surrounded the entire complex.
After the twelve-foot brick interior wall and four guard towers, the chain link was the last line of defense to separate an inmate from the rest of the island.
Long rectangles of two-story white brick buildings, four in total, made up the cell blocks.
An arid dirt soccer field represented the prisoners’ only relief from confinement; and from their place up on the hill, Sidney and her crew witnessed two teams of felons running through the dusty haze.
This was where Grace Sebold had spent the last ten years.
The scores of letters, written by Grace Sebold over the years, had come as Sidney climbed to some semblance of fame for her previous documentaries and the exonerations that followed.
The first letter had arrived after Sidney’s documentary featuring Neve Blackmore, a middle-aged woman who had spent eighteen years in a Florida jail for the murder of her ten-year-old son.
As a young and inexperienced producer, Sidney poked around the case until she became certain of the woman’s innocence.
Some great investigational journalism, along with dumb luck, and the discovery of a scathing piece of DNA evidence had been enough for Florida’s newly elected state’s attorney to reopen the case.
Nearly two decades after her son was savaged, Neve Blackmore was exonerated.
Sidney Ryan documented Ms. Blackmore’s journey, the unearthing of new evidence, and Neve’s eventual release from jail, and put it all together in a two-hour film.
Although that first documentary was hailed as a symbol of justice, Sidney looked at it as just the opposite.
In the wake of her son’s death, a mother was accused of his murder and forced to mourn in prison.
Neve Blackmore fought for most of her adult life to clear her name.
Yes, she was ultimately vindicated, but she had paid a hell of a price for the mistakes of those too eager to convict.
And eighteen agonizing years later, still no one had been held accountable for her son’s murder.
Neve Blackmore had spent nearly two decades, not tracking down her son’s killer, but simply working to prove her innocence.
It seemed to Sidney much less an image of justice than a pitiful waste of two lives.
When that first documentary gained critical praise and a moderate audience, letters trickled in from inmates around the country hoping for Sidney to conjure the same magic that had freed Neve Blackmore.
Sidney paged through each letter, researching the convictions and the evidence that produced them.
Back then the mail was manageable. She handled every envelope herself and settled on the case of Byron Williams, a young African-American man accused of shooting and killing two plainclothes police officers who were on surveillance duty.
With alibis from five different sources and forensics that suggested the shooter to be female, Sidney attacked the case with zeal.
With her camera crew in tow, she led a yearlong investigation that finally caught the attention of a U.S.
senator and the local district attorney.
This time, after eight years in prison, Byron Williams was released and cleared of all charges.
Sidney organized her journey into a four-part documentary and shopped it around.
Netflix purchased it, created an aggressive marketing plan, and released it to subscribers to be streamed over the Internet.
It became the most downloaded true-crime documentary of the year, putting Sidney Ryan’s name on the radar of every convict in the country who believed he or she was innocent.
Her in-box flooded with requests from felons requesting her assistance with their appeals.
Family members of the accused also penned letters, begging Sidney to help their loved ones who rotted in jail for crimes they didn’t commit.
In a given week, she’d receive a stack of envelopes six inches thick.
Inside the packages were shoddy investigational work, lists of appeals, and makeshift interviews with “witnesses” that would surely crack each case.
The mail became too much to handle, and much of it sadly piled up, unopened and ignored, in the corner of her office.
Suddenly a sought-after producer and filmmaker, she fielded a host of offers before finally taking a producing spot on the prime-time show Events, which was tied to the popular magazine of the same name.
There she began work on her third documentary, entering into the ruthless world of television network hierarchy.
Sidney was naive to the backstabbing and conniving that dominated the industry, and had been eaten alive and overshadowed by Luke Barrington during her first year as his producer.
Still, Sidney’s style and strong filmmaking skills won many accolades and spawned many lookalikes, including podcasts and YouTube documentaries of little-known crimes.
It was about that time that she opened the first letter from Grace Sebold.
Sidney knew the case well, and not simply because she and Grace had attended Syracuse University together.
The story had made national headlines a decade earlier and the American media were frenzied about the sordid details.
GRUESOME GRACE SEBOLD and GRISLY GRACE were the chosen headlines of the day used to describe the fourth-year medical student who had bludgeoned her boyfriend before pushing him off a cliff in the Caribbean.
Although they never ran in the same circles, Sidney remembered Grace well enough at the time the news broke, four or five years after Syracuse, to be shocked by the story.
Sidney didn’t, however, have a good enough connection with her to know if the accusations were true or false.
A decade later, Sidney was getting an opportunity to find out.
She spent hours reading the more than one hundred letters Grace had sent over a twenty-six-month span.
Sidney noted as she carefully paged through each of them that none was repetitive.
Other than asking for Sidney’s help at the end, each letter tackled a different subject.
Many were powerful attestations about the inconsistencies in the case against her, the rules of good investigational work that were violated, the physical evidence that was engineered, the DNA findings that were misinterpreted, and the complete lack of motivation for Grace to have killed the man she loved.
Others were about Grace’s life before the conviction, the family that desperately grieved for her, the brother who was ill and required more care than her parents could offer, and the life she was missing as the years passed by in jail.
Some were nothing more than congratulations on Sidney’s success and her rise in the ranks of television journalism, praising her hard work and the difference she made in the lives of those she helped exonerate.
Through the letters, Sidney felt a sense of charisma emanating from Grace, a trait she could neither explain nor remember from her time with Grace at Syracuse.
There was something alluring about Grace Sebold.
And if Sidney could sense it through letters, she was certain viewers would see it in a documentary.
Grace’s attorney had provided Sidney with a thumb drive of all relevant information about the case.
From Julian Crist’s autopsy report and photos, to toxicology findings, to evidence collected during the investigation, to high-res crime scene photos, to recorded interviews and court transcripts, Sidney knew everything about Grace Sebold’s case, her trial, and her conviction.
At least, this was her belief before interviewing Claude Pierre.