J. Renn Olenn

Journal PHOTO / Sandor Bodo

J. Renn Olenn first heard the name David Swain on a July day in 1999. It would be some time before he pursued him as a killer.

Olenn and his wife, Mary, were taking a weekend ride to Jamestown. A week earlier they had visited a painting exhibit in Boston and Mary had promised to drop off a copy of the show’s catalog to Richard Tyre, a humanities scholar whom she had heard lecture at a Newport museum.

Over tea and get-to-know conversation, Richard Tyre asked Olenn what he did for work.

“I’m an attorney,” said Olenn, adding, though, that he had earned an undergraduate degree in English and still harbored a desire to write.

Had he written much? asked Tyre, who spent a career teaching Shakespeare and the classics to college students.

Olenn said he had contributed to some legal publications and edited a book on aquatic injury. In fact he was a bit of an expert on swimming and diving accidents. Olenn, now 63, didn’t elaborate, but in 1982 he had won what at that time was the state’s largest wrongful death suit, against the manufacturers of both a swimming pool and a diving board. The landmark case would become partially responsible for diving boards disappearing from backyard and hotel pools around the country.

Richard Tyre and his wife of almost 50 years, Lisa, looked at Olenn in disbelief.

“You’re a godsend,” stammered Richard Tyre. He glanced at Lisa: “Can I tell them?”

“If you think you can get through it,” Lisa Tyre replied softly.

Richard Tyre began to tell the story of their eldest child, Shelley; how she had been the headmistress of a private school in Massachusetts and how she had somehow died while scuba diving that March, four months earlier. No one could explain to them why.

Not even the one person who was supposed to be by Shelley’s side at the time, her husband, David Swain.

As Olenn sat listening, under a picture of Shelley Tyre, her parents’ grief broke through. Richard Tyre struggled to share what they knew: that Shelley was 46, in good health and an expert diver like her husband, David, a Jamestown Town Council member who ran a local dive shop; that they had gone on vacation to Tortola with another couple and their young son; and that toward the end of the trip they had received a phone call from a dispassionate-sounding David reporting Shelley’s death.

Lisa Tyre recalled Swain’s exact words: “Shelley isn’t with us. … I went down with five and I came back with four.”

She told Olenn, coincidentally a diver himself, that she initially thought David was saying Shelley had traveled to another island. Then David made some bizarre remark about giving the man who found Shelley a grade of B-plus in lifesaving skills.

That’s when Lisa handed the phone to her husband. Together they deciphered David Swain’s message. He didn’t know how Shelley died, he said. He wasn’t with her. He had gone off by himself to take pictures. He didn’t know what happened, he kept repeating, he hadn’t been with her.

Olenn, a tall, bald man who speaks with a calming gentleness, interrupted the distraught Tyres to ask a few questions: Was Shelley’s diving equipment working correctly? Where was she diving? At what depth? Richard Tyre said he didn’t know any of those things; only that Shelley was an excellent diver.

Lisa Tyre would say later that from the moment of David Swain’s phone call, she blamed him for her daughter’s death. Not that she entertained any notion then that he had killed her — “nobody I know kills people” — but that his absence at her time of need made him responsible.

“There is something terribly, terribly wrong,” she told Olenn, and begged him, this stranger, to help solve the mystery.

Olenn’s response on that July day of strange coincidences, a day that would alter his life for the next eight years, was what anyone would have done, he says. Anyone with a heart and a parent like himself and skilled at investigating water deaths. He agreed to look into Shelley’s death.

It wouldn’t take long, he reasoned. The list of reasons why people die scuba diving is short. They lose air. There can be complications which cause that loss of air, but the inability to breathe is what kills divers.

Tortola police had ruled the death an accident “unless proven otherwise” but they weren’t investigating. David Swain had come home to Jamestown with his wife’s body but offered nothing to ease the Tyres’ minds. No one had been charged with any crime. Still, Olenn believed he could find the cause of Shelley’s death.

FOR ABOUT eight months, on weekends and at night, and in between running a busy law practice in Warwick, Renn Olenn dug for clues. He tapped experts in the fields of scuba product design and aquatic injury he had used in liability lawsuits over 25 years. He talked to the couple who had accompanied David and Shelley to Tortola. The husband, Christian Thwaites, had found Shelley Tyre’s body on the white sandy bottom in about 90 feet of water. Thwaites said he had tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate her until Swain told him to stop trying; it was futile. Olenn spoke with Shelley’s friends and those who had previously dived with her.

“I had no reason to think [Swain] had done anything because he wasn’t at the scene,” Olenn says. “He couldn’t explain what had happened. I thought she had died in an unwitnessed accident, but I was completely unconvinced I had an accurate accident scenario.”

A year passed since Olenn’s chance meeting with the Tyres. Still he had nothing to offer them. The lack of progress frustrated him. Olenn has practiced before dozens of Rhode Island judges over the years and earned a reputation among them as being not only honest — several have used him as their own lawyer — but methodical and meticulous; a lawyer who rarely leaves an avenue of discovery unexplored. Olenn took cases personally. He snapped his own photographs in every investigation rather than hiring someone and always shot more pictures than he would ever need.

“The camera sees what the eye does not,” he liked to say. He kept rubber boots and an old coat in his car trunk in case a sudden personal injury accident, a fishing boat mishap or an insurance claim required him to step out of his pin-striped persona and take a closer look.

Olenn had volunteered to help the Tyres at his own expense. He didn’t expect it would become such a commitment.

One day in the summer of 2000, back home in Barrington, Olenn told Mary, “I’m just all out of ideas. Nothing adds up.” Mary reminded him what he tells his associates in training at the firm: “Don’t try to handle a case until you’ve been to the scene.”

Olenn spoke to the Tyres. He offered to go to Tortola. He would talk to the dive shop operator who rented the scuba equipment to Swain’s group and he would dive with him to the two tugboat shipwrecks where Shelley had died. He would bring along one of his two sons to film the surroundings. The Tyres said they would pay their way.

Olenn looked where Tortola officials had not and he found suspicions thriving along the docks of the Caribbean island. Many of the local workers suspected foul play in Shelley Tyre’s death. No one ever got hurt, let alone died, they told Olenn, on a dive over the twin wrecks.

It was there — submerged beside the two sunken vessels — that a new realization crashed down upon Olenn.

He looked into the concealed space between the two ships where Tyre’s body, her broken mask and her snorkel with the missing mouthpiece had been found. He swam over to the benign section of sand 30 feet away where her fin had been discovered sticking toe-first into the sand. In that moment, every fact, every circumstance he had gathered in the previous year fell into place.

“I knew, just knew, that it was murder,” says Olenn. “And equally important, it could not be anything else.”

His motivation changed.

Now he was no longer just helping two retirees find answers to their daughter’s death.

Now he wanted to bring a killer to justice.

Other than a few defendant pleadings, Renn Olenn had never practiced a day of criminal law in his long career.

IN THE WAR years of the 1940s, steel mill workers and coal miners of Canonsburg, Pa., walked home with soot on their faces and grime on their lunch pails. Many were the sons and daughters of immigrants from Eastern Europe who had settled decades earlier in the hard-scrabble hills of Pennsylvania’s southwest corner.

In December 1944, as Canonsburg residents followed the Allied advance on Germany through many of their ancestral home countries, Valjean Olenn gave birth to her third child, Jeremiah Renn Olenn.

“Olenn” sounds Swedish but Renn’s father, Stanley, was actually Polish. He had changed the family name from its original Olejniczak at the start of the war to deflect the kind of ethnic discrimination against Eastern Europeans he’d seen while football coach at the University of Pittsburgh.

The late 1950s were hard times for many in Canonsburg; the Olenns were better off than many. Renn Olenn shared lunches with classmates who came to school hungry. Some children wore their only pair of shoes stuffed with newspaper until their feet grew into them. The Olenns lived on a 55-acre vegetable farm but, unlike many of their farming neighbors, also benefited from educated backgrounds. Stanley Olenn had a master’s degree in education and sold athletic equipment after his coaching days ended. Renn’s mother held a degree in social work. Their house held more books than their grammar school library and Renn and his sister and brother were encouraged to get lost in stories when they weren’t doing farm chores or homework.

As a child, Olenn often visited his grandfather’s nearby farm, helping tend the animals and roaming the outdoors. He became comfortable with solitude, never lonely, and cultivated a lifetime appreciation for the peacefulness of a quiet pasture.

At Heidelberg College the 6-foot-2 farm boy made his own name on the football field, becoming an All-Ohio Conference linebacker and center. He also discovered his appetite for learning, a sometimes insatiable curiosity about things that would drive him years later in his investigations as a lawyer. He recited passages from his favorite book South — by Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton — to his future wife, whom he met in a writing class, and studied Shakespeare from a dean who planted the ideal of living a life of “wisdom and rectitude.”

Olenn’s letter from the Minnesota Vikings, requesting he try out for the professional football team, arrived about the same time as his draft notice, in 1966, as graduation neared.

He entered the Army at a time when his older brother, Stanley, was already serving in Vietnam with the Army Rangers. Regulations prohibited brothers from being in combat zones at the same time, Olenn says, so he served out his tour as a tank officer in Germany.

OLENN ENROLLED in law school at Boston University after the Army. Professors arranged most student seating alphabetically and Olenn often sat beside Joseph Penza from Pawtucket, R.I. The two became friends and made a pact: if they ever managed to graduate, they would become partners. In 1975, three years after graduation, Olenn & Penza LLP opened its doors on Chalkstone Avenue in Providence. (In 1988, the firm moved to Greenwich Avenue in Warwick.)

Penza was the more dashing of the two; the lawyer with the two cars and cufflinks, the one who could light up a room. Olenn was the aloof one, more apt to seek out the corner of a room. “He’s not the warmest when you first meet him,” says Penza, “but actually he’s more heartwarming and thoughtful than I am.”

What the partners shared was the trust of a handshake and a knack for grinding out the details of every case. Penza would eventually specialize in representing police unions and officers charged with misconduct. Olenn became the jack-of-all-trades, handling cases involving personal injury, product and professional liability. His cases ran the gamut from the frivolous to the scandalous.

There was the 1987 case in which Olenn defended the Westerly School Committee and an English teacher after a high school student sued, contending his failure in the course caused him emotional distress and prevented him from graduating. Olenn argued for dismissal: “You do not have a constitutionally protected right to have a high school diploma. You have to earn it.” The judge threw out the case.

In 1994, Olenn was one of three lawyers who stood beside Thomas F. Fay, the former chief justice of the state Supreme Court, as Fay pleaded guilty to two felony counts and three misdemeanor charges of unethical conduct.

In recent years, at least three traffic court judges and one from the Workers’ Compensation Court — all facing individual ethics complaints — have chosen Olenn to represent them.

Says one Superior Court judge: “If Renn Olenn appeared in my courtroom in July and told me, ‘Your Honor, please don’t look out the window right now but it is snowing,’ I would be compelled to believe him.”

BUT OLENN’S most high-profile case — prior, that is, to Shelley Tyre’s death eventually finding its way into court — came in the late 1970s, soon after starting his practice.

Olenn represented the widow of George Muldowney, of Providence, who died in 1976 after he dove into a pool and broke his neck. Backed by Olenn’s research, Diane Muldowney sued the manufacturers of the pool and the diving board, arguing that the products were defective in design.

Olenn entered the case green. He knew nothing of the dangers of head-first diving. His probe went on for months, then years. Eventually he found experts who told him that most pools with diving boards were dangerous for the untrained diver. The novice diver rarely ended up in the deep section but 10 to 12 feet away from the diving board, where the pool bottom sloped up into the shallow end. Olenn discovered that hundreds of people each year were injured like Muldowney. It wasn’t the force of their heads hitting the bottom that broke their necks. It was the weight of their bodies that snapped their cervical vertebrae. The vertebrae, designed to support a person’s head when upright, could not endure the weight of their bodies crashing down upon them.

In 1982, five years after the lawsuit was filed, a jury awarded Diane Muldowney $1.25 million in damages. Olenn and Muldowney, whose families had become friends, went on to publish a brochure about the dangers of diving head-first into pools and marketed it to the pool industry as an educational tool for customers. The case won Olenn 15 years of consulting work and speaking engagements around the country.

Muldowney, who has since remarried, says Olenn showed true empathy: “He was very committed to the cause, and I think he gets that way with every case. He really cared about the children and cared about people. During those years we made him a part of the family.

“He believed in me when I was saying something was wrong and everybody else in the world was saying it was just an accident. We proved that something was definitely wrong.”

Olenn says all of his previous cases helped prepare him for the most sensational case of his career: convincing a civil jury in 2006 that David Swain had killed his wife.

THE DAY OLENN arrived home from his Tortola trip in the summer of 2000, he had not slept for several nights worrying how he would tell the Tyres what he believed to be the truth.

“The hardest thing for a trial lawyer to do is to disbelieve your own disbelief,” he says. “Every fact I knew about that case all indicated it was a murder and could not have been an accident.”

The seabed revealed the truth, says Olenn — that Swain was a murderer and a sociopath.

“I could not believe there was not a human emotion that set this guy off,” he says. “I kept looking for an emotion, I kept looking for a light, when, in fact, I should have been looking for the darkness.”

Olenn believed that Swain killed Shelley Tyre for her life insurance money, which would keep his struggling dive shop open and Swain cavorting around the world on diving excursions. The dive shop constantly lost money. Tyre’s headmistress salary from Thayer Academy, in Braintree, Mass., kept it from financial collapse. But Tyre had recently taken a new job at Rocky Hill School in Warwick at half the pay. She told friends she knew her marriage was in trouble and wanted to be closer to David to try to save it. Swain, meanwhile, was romancing another woman. A prenuptial agreement prevented him from getting any of Tyre’s money if they divorced.

“The dive shop was his life,” says Olenn, “his license to travel the world.” The year Shelley Tyre died, Olenn says, Swain traveled to Lake Titicaca in Bolivia to break a world record for the highest scuba dive from a kayak.

When Shelley announced she wouldn’t be making as much money anymore and that Swain might have to find another job, Olenn contends that was all the incentive Swain needed to kill her. “When he was going to have to pick up a blow torch or a shovel to make a living, that did it for this guy.”

Olenn won’t talk in detail about how he delivered the terrible news to the Tyres on a summer day in 2000 when he called them to his office. He says he told them he felt he now had a duty “to prove what I knew to be true” and if the Tyres hired him, he would do so in a civil court of law.

The Tyres mulled whether to sue David Swain for almost two years before Olenn, in March 2002, filed the wrongful death suit against their son-in-law. It might be the only way, the Tyres said, they could get answers to how their daughter died.

The case dragged on for four more years with Swain asking for one continuance after another, citing the illness of one of his lawyers. Superior Court Judge Patricia A. Hurst granted Swain’s continuances at first while advising him repeatedly to consider getting another lawyer; the trial would move forward. As the continuances dragged on, Olenn accused Swain of stalling. Eventually Judge Hurst set the case for trial in February 2006.

ALMOST SEVEN years after Shelley Tyre’s death, her parents, both retired educators in their 70s, followed the dark-suited Olenn into a Providence Superior courtroom.

Several of Shelley Tyre’s friends clustered in the gallery. Olenn seated the Tyres behind his table in the front of the courtroom, then leaned down to whisper a few cautionary words: Some of what you will hear will be painful, he told them. Be strong. The defense table remained empty.

Over the course of eight days of testimony, Olenn presented dozens of witnesses, or their taped depositions, to lend credibility to his circumstantial case. For a lawyer who had never tried what was essentially a murder case, it could not have gone more smoothly. Because neither Swain nor a lawyer representing him were in court, Olenn’s witnesses went largely unchallenged, save for the few questions raised by Judge Hurst.

Olenn could take his time behind the podium, refer to his yellow legal pad of questions, and calmly deliver one question after another to his gallery of credentialed professionals.

There was the expert in diving medicine who testified he had reviewed Tyre’s medical records and dive log. He found her in good health before she died and noted she had logged more than 353 previous dives. Her air tank was more than two-thirds full.

There was the mechanical engineer from San Diego who worked for decades in the scuba industry and had designed several types of diving equipment. He testified that swim fins normally sink heel first to the bottom and that only a strong “external force” could have pulled Shelley Tyre’s foot out of her strapped fin.

And there was the Tortola dive shop operator, who testified he dove to the twin wrecks a day after Tyre’s death to inspect the site for any hazards and found none. But he did find Tyre’s face mask, with its strap pulled free of the buckle, her snorkel missing its mouthpiece and one of her fins, still buckled, stuck toe-first in the sand. The shop operator also recalled what he called Swain’s suspicious behavior: asking whether the dive shop owner knew anyone who could “expedite” the medical examiner’s autopsy on his wife and urging that Shelley’s equipment be given away, even though standard diving procedures require that it be stored for police inspection until an investigation is complete.

Finally, there was the chief medical examiner for Miami Dade County who, at Olenn’s request, reviewed much of the evidence already submitted and ruled Tyre’s death a “homicidal drowning” due to “some type of terminal violence.”

On the final day of testimony, Swain appeared in court and called one witness for his defense, his 30-year-old daughter, Jennifer.

She countered the testimony of the Tyres, who had said Swain showed no emotion at the loss of his wife and an indifference to what might have happened to her. As far as any show of violence: “I’ve never seen you raise a finger,” she said. “You’re one of the most peaceful people I know.”

In his own defense, Swain addressed the jury for his closing argument. “This loss of the wife I so loved is a loss for all,” he said. He tried to discredit Olenn’s “highly paid” witnesses, saying, for instance, that the medical examiner never saw Shelley and never notified Tortola police after reaching his conclusion that she had been murdered. Swain also raised the possibility that Shelley’s diving equipment degraded over time to explain its broken condition.

He asked the jury: Would anyone be so foolish and heartless to kill someone in plain sight so his friends and their 9-year-old son would witness it? “Could I do that to them?” And if there were discrepancies in his taped depositions, which the jury heard, Swain said they could have easily been cleared up if Olenn had called him as a witness.

Swain didn’t tell the jury he had fought Olenn’s attempt to put him on the stand.

When it was time for him to address the jury, Olenn spoke passionately, if not dramatically, for the first time during the trial: “This crime has every, every element of murder.”

He lifted Shelley Tyre’s diving tank. And the murder weapon, he said, “was his hand on this valve.”

“Each of you have shown more curiosity about the death of Shelley Tyre than her husband ever has,” said Olenn. Swain’s strategy is to “belittle a mountain of evidence, stand up here and look at you and lie!”

But “he knows, as we all know, that she battled for her life,” Olenn said. “And here’s how he did it.”

Olenn then theorized for the jury that Swain jumped on his wife’s back — out of reach from her flailing arms — and turned off her air tank. In the ensuing struggle, Swain ripped off her face mask, which caused the mask’s strap to pull from its buckle. The mouthpiece from her snorkel tore loose. And, as she fought to free herself, Olenn said, she braced herself by sticking one fin into the sand.

Swain surfaced early, not because he was cold as he had testified — “cold in a full wetsuit in the Caribbean?” — but because “he was out of air… he had just killed his wife.”

For almost seven years, Olenn told the rapt jury, David Swain had gotten away with murder. Tortola police hadn’t prosecuted and Rhode Island authorities couldn’t because it’s outside their jurisdiction. “And the last place he has to go to get off scot-free is through you.”

The civil jury deliberated less than three hours before finding Swain guilty of killing Shelley Tyre with malice and forethought. They spent most of that time discussing how much the Tyres should receive in damages — $3.5 million, not counting interest.

All agreed by a show of hands in the first few minutes of deliberation that Swain was guilty.

ROBERT A. CAPELLO, a retired AT&T worker, listened with the other jurors as Olenn methodically pieced together his case against Swain.

“Everyone was impressed,” recalls Capello, the jury foreman. “Things just seemed to flow. He looked very calm and seemed very confident in what he was presenting. I remember one juror saying in the jury room after the case … ‘If I ever need a lawyer, I’d consider him.’ ”

After the verdict, Olenn accompanied the Tyres to Jamestown. Together they prayed over Shelley Tyre’s grave.

Days later in his scuba shop, Swain maintained his innocence. He said the Tyres — “desperate for any answers against the unknown” — had hired a lawyer who promised them answers and delivered them “by the fistful.”

“But that’s not what happened, and just because you can buy a verdict it doesn’t prove innocence or guilt.”

Swain filed for a new trial on numerous grounds, including his assertion that Olenn’s evidence didn’t justify the verdict. His argument prompted Judge Hurst to analyze the evidence for the record. “The only reasonable conclusion was that this was a homicide,” the judge said in denying the request for a new trial. “I’m satisfied I would have reached the same verdict as the jury.”

Swain reiterated that he would welcome a criminal trial so all of Olenn’s evidence could be challenged.

It appears Swain will get his wish.

In November, federal marshals arrested Swain at his dive shop on a murder warrant from Tortola. They brought him into federal court, where Swain initially said he would fight extradition. (His hearing has been continued until Jan. 25.)

The man responsible for his arrest sat two rows back in the gallery, watching: Renn Olenn.

For more than a year, Olenn had been delicately prodding law enforcement authorities in the British Virgin Islands to take another look at the case in light of the civil verdict against Swain.

He sent them transcripts of the civil case and contact information for his witnesses, many of whom have pledged to Olenn that they will travel to Tortola to testify against Swain if the time comes.

“Something in me locked when those cuffs locked,” Olenn said a moment after marshals led Swain away to the Central Falls Detention Center on Nov. 14. “It was like the circle was completed, another long step taken on the journey for justice for Shelley Tyre.”

In the last few years, Olenn has taken up building stone walls as a hobby. “Some people like going to the beach and listening to the ocean to relax,” he says. “To me, being in a pasture is much more relaxing.”

Olenn has learned that building stone walls is much like trying cases: “You have to be patient when doing it because the stones don’t lie. There is one way to fit them and if you don’t do it right it doesn’t stand up.” The arduous work has its rewards. “It allows me time to be alone, to think, and do something that will last 200 years and will be exactly right.”

If David Swain goes on trial for murder in Tortola, Olenn says he will be there to help prosecutors construct their case.

He’s already laid the foundation.

tmooney@projo.com