PROVIDENCE — Lawyers for David Swain, the former Jamestown Town Council member now charged in Tortola with killing his wife in 1999, say they plan to fly to the Caribbean island this weekend to prepare for Swain’s anticipated murder trial.

Timothy Bradl, one of three Boston lawyers representing Swain, said yesterday the legal team wants “to get the lay of the land” and try to line up necessary local counsel to help represent Swain, who is considering waiving extradition back to Tortola.

Swain, 51, has been held without bail at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls since Nov. 14 when federal marshals arrested him at his Jamestown scuba shop on a murder warrant from Tortola.

Tortola officials charge that Swain drowned his wife, Shelley Tyre, 46, during a scuba-diving vacation there in March 1999.

Island law enforcement authorities initially listed her death as an accident but were persuaded to take another look at the case after Tyre’s parents won a successful wrongful-death civil suit against Swain in 2006.

Swain maintains he is innocent.

He is scheduled to appear in federal court on Jan. 25 at which time he may formally waive any further resistance to returning to the island to face the charge.

Swain’s lawyers went on a public offensive Thursday, criticizing Shelley Tyre’s parents and their lawyer J. Renn Olenn in a letter to the editor published in The Jamestown Press.

The criticism centered on a news conference the Tyres held in Olenn’s Warwick law office following Swain’s arrest and the Tyres’ remarks about their former son-in-law.

At one point in the news conference, Lisa Tyre, Shelley’s mother, alleged that David Swain was emotionally abusive to Shelley Tyre, treating her as an inferior with his own brand of silent arrogance.

“Ms. Tyre’s family clearly never liked David, and has channeled their understandable grief into the office of a plaintiff’s lawyer who has tried at every step to transform Mr. Swain into a killer, which he is not,” the lawyers’ letter said.

Swain’s lawyers went on: “We view the recent publication of the personal character attacks against Mr. Swain made at the plaintiff’s lawyer’s news conference as nothing more than a poorly orchestrated attempt by him [Olenn] to prejudice the jury pool” in the British Virgin Islands, of which Tortola is a part.

Swain has no history of violence, his lawyers said in their letter. “His marriage to Shelley Tyre was completely free of domestic issues. Their trip to the BVI was a celebration of her getting a new, less time-consuming job so they could spend more time together.”

During the civil trial, Olenn convinced a civil jury that Swain had allegedly killed his wife during a dive because he was romancing another woman and knew that a prenuptial agreement prevented him from receiving any of her money if the two divorced.

Olenn declined yesterday to respond to Swain’s lawyers’ allegation that he was trying to sway a jury in Tortola by hosting the Tyres’ November news conference.

Said Olenn: “I’m looking forward to David Swain’s explanation [to what happened to Shelley Tyre] at his trial in Tortola. He avoided going on the stand and giving an explanation in Rhode Island.”

tmooney@projo.com