The sign for murder suspect David Swain’s former dive shop, Ocean State Scuba, stands weathered on North Main Road in Jamestown.

The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

JAMESTOWN — As summer’s final sunset lingered over Narragansett Bay last Sunday, a ferry boat carrying two dozen friends and relatives of David Swain slipped out of the downtown marina and burbled south toward Beavertail light.

Each passenger had paid $100 for a tranquil two-hour harbor cruise. But the real reason and the real benefactor of the evening’s fundraising event sat 1,700 miles away in a sweltering hilltop prison on the island of Tortola.

There, 52-year-old Swain, once a familiar presence in Jamestown — scuba shop owner, community volunteer, former Town Council member — settled in for another humid night in captivity; his barred cell window otherwise open to the sounds and smells of the Caribbean and its prowling insects.

Up until now Swain’s supporters have said little publicly as his years-long saga evolved from that of grieving widower, after the 1999 scuba diving death of his wife, Shelley Tyre, to the pariah garnering suspicion at the local coffee shop, to now the officially accused suspect in Tyre’s “murder.”

But the possibility that Swain might spend the rest of his life in Her Majesty’s Prison on Balsam Ghut has many decrying his past treatment and advocating the need for judicial fairness as his criminal trial approaches.

“He’s in prison, he’s lost his shop and he’s lost his life,” says Swain’s daughter Jennifer, who earlier this month launched a Web site to raise money for her father’s defense fund ( www.davidswaindefense.com). “I’ve listened to Dad pour his heart out many times about how much he loves and misses Shelley. I know he did not kill her.”

For seven and a half months Swain has been held without bail on the island he last visited with Shelley Tyre nine years ago. Following a lengthy preliminary inquiry, a Tortola judge ruled in July that enough evidence exists to try him for murder. He is scheduled to be formally arraigned and enter a plea on Oct. 7.

During this upcoming trial — unlike his civil wrongful death trial in 2006 which resulted in a jury finding that he had drowned his wife — Swain will have a lawyer representing him and present a legal defense. It will cost money, perhaps as much as $200,000. But his supporters are determined to help.

“Here we are in America, where there is this process to prove someone’s guilty and that didn’t happen in this case,” says William Munger, owner of Conanicut Marine on Jamestown who has known Swain for 20 years and organized last weekend’s fundraiser for him. “That civil trial was a fiasco. He had no lawyer, no defense and yet it stuck. You don’t go lynch someone if you don’t like him. Everyone is entitled to some fairness in the process.”

Shelley Tyre, a 46-year-old experienced diver, died March 12, 1999, while she and Swain were diving over two tugboat wrecks on the last full day of their Tortola vacation. Swain has said repeatedly that he and Tyre separated while underwater as they often did and that he doesn’t know what happened to her.

Seeking answers to their daughter’s death, Tyre’s parents, Richard and Lisa Tyre, now of Canton, Mass., brought a wrongful death lawsuit against Swain in 2002. For years the trial was delayed, in part because of Swain’s numerous requests for continuances, noting that his lawyer had developed cancer.

The Superior Court judge hearing the case, Patricia Hurst, repeatedly advised Swain to find another lawyer while granting most of his requests. Eventually, however, the case went forward without Swain having representation.

For several days, jurors heard uncontested allegations raised by the Tyres’ lawyer, J. Renn Olenn, that Swain, who was romancing another woman at the time, had drowned his wife for her insurance money, knowing that a marriage agreement prevented him from gaining financially if the two divorced.

Olenn called in scuba “experts” from around the country, as well as the medical examiner from Dade County, Fla., who all inspected Shelley Tyre’s broken scuba gear and other exhibits and offered unchallenged opinions that she had been killed.

The jury’s verdict came within hours.

Its ramifications were wider than Swain or any of his supporters ever anticipated.

Tortola officials, urged by Olenn to reopen the case in light of the civil jury’s verdict, reversed their original finding that Tyre’s death was accidental and issued a murder warrant for Swain’s arrest.

NORMA WILLIS, a longtime influential figure in Jamestown and South County politics, first met David Swain weeks after his wife died when Swain decided to run for the Town Council. She later served with him on the board and considers him a friend.

“When this whole thing came out that he murdered his wife, well, I didn’t believe that. I just do not believe that,” she says. “Everything” during the civil trial “was circumstantial. All kinds of things could have happened. But that guy Renn Olenn brings in some one from Miami who thought he knew how everything worked? Come on.”

Swain “certainly hasn’t had a fair shake,” says Willis. “To think that judge would let that trial go through without giving him the time to gather another attorney and defend himself — I’ve never heard anything like that. And for murder? We treat our most horrific criminals better than he was treated.”

THE WEB SITE for Swain’s defense fund is attracting testimonials from former customers such as Dan Glynn who says he has known Swain for almost 20 years.

“He is the last person I would consider capable of such an act. … It just isn’t in him. Dave does come off arrogant at times but he does know what he is talking about.”

Glynn says when he couldn’t afford to take more diving classes, “Dave took a chance as he did with many divers.” He would “let you pay as you go whatever you could afford. Most other places wanted their money up front. To Dave it was more important that you got into the water and had fun and worry about money later.”

Patrick Hentschell recalled the time he was preparing a dive with buddies in Jamestown and realized he hadn’t filled his air tank. He drove to the Swain’s Ocean State Scuba shop to find it closed. Then he saw Swain walking along the sidewalk.

“He very kindly opened the store and loaned me a tank for my dive. He did not charge me for the air and took me for my word I would return the tank.”

Few have known Swain longer than Sandy Wheeler. They married as teenagers after she became pregnant and were married for 12 years before divorcing in 1987.

“He was a deeply caring man, and even though he had difficulty expressing himself with words, his actions always spoke volumes about the man that he was inside.”

Wheeler says after the two married, “I learned to scuba dive because I thought it would be something we could do together. I did not have the same confidence in the ocean as he did. He would always stay with me, and when we divorced, I never dove again because there was no one on this earth that I trusted more than him to be in the water with.”

“When Shelley died, he called me and we spent a lot of time together. As a nurse, I let him grieve her passing with tears, stories and many happy memories. David is an extremely complicated man who tends to distance himself in order to protect himself from pain and suffering. I believe with my whole being that this is not a man who would be capable of committing any type of crime, no less murder.”

SWAIN SPENDS 23 hours of each day in his small cell, one of the few white inmates and the prison’s oldest. He has had various cellmates, his daughter says, some “great, some not so great.” He passes much of his time doing calisthenics, writing his journal, reading the many books friends have sent and answering their letters from home.

Swain regularly writes his friend Munger asking what’s going on back home on the island, what are his friends up to, what’s in the news.

Munger recounts the passing days and seasons along the waterfront. As far as the fundraising goes, Munger says, “it’s kind of like bake sale money so far. Unless we can round up some money, he’s at a huge disadvantage just to be able to tell his story.”

Out on North Main Road, the closed scuba shop that once defined David Swain now embodies an upended life: three-foot weeds grow in the gravel parking lot and racks of wetsuits and clothes collect dust just inside the shop’s door.

tmooney@projo.com