There's an article in this morning's Providence Journal about David. It goes into detail on what both Afterdark and I both described as David's very troubled childhood. Here's the link:
Daughter wants jury to hear of David Swain’s troubled past | Rhode Island news | projo.com | The Providence Journal
Daughter wants jury to hear of David Swain's troubled past
01:00 AM EST on Sunday, November 22, 2009
By Tom Mooney
Journal Staff Writer
Thirty-three years before he would hear his own jury convict him of murder, David Swain sat still in a courtroom gallery in Minnesota as a jury foreman declared his brother Richard guilty of bludgeoning to death a woman on an Easter night.
The woman was Betty Jane Swain — their mother.
Richard Swain, then 19, had clubbed her with such force that pieces of the plastic bag covering Betty Jane’s head had been embedded in her shattered skull.
The verdict on that November day in 1976 arrived on the eve of David Swain’s 21st birthday. He had moved East a year earlier to marry a Rhode Island teenager he’d met at a Minneapolis roller rink. It was an escape from the Midwest of his youth, one marked by upheaval and dysfunction. When he was a boy, his father, a violent man, had run off to become a woman. Now his younger brother had killed their mother.
David Swain was working as a grinder at Electric Boat at Quonset Point when news of his mother’s slaying arrived.
The ensuing ordeal traumatized him for life, his daughter Jennifer Swain Bloom says, and she hopes that if it’s disclosed to another jury it could spare him from spending the rest of his life behind bars.
Earlier this month, a jury in Tortola convicted Swain, who turned 54 last week, of murdering his second wife Shelley Tyre during a 1999 scuba diving vacation.
Swain, formerly of Jamestown, is appealing that conviction, his daughter says, claiming, in part, that the trial judge erred by prohibiting his tumultuous past, and its effects, from being introduced into evidence.
Omitting that testimony unfairly tarnished his image with the jury, Bloom says. While Swain maintains his innocence in his wife’s drowning, the jury heard no explanation for his memory lapses of the day she died. Consequently, they may have thought he was lying.
“Part of the problem with post-traumatic stress disorder is when terrible things happen to you, you can have memory block,” says Bloom, a California yoga instructor who spearheaded efforts to raise money for her father’s legal defense.
Many people who suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder are haunted by memories of terrifying moments. They simply can’t stop remembering them. But in her father’s case, Bloom contends, the disorder has manifested itself in Swain’s repression of those moments.
“I was freaking out years ago” when questions of Swain’s behavior and his possible culpability first arose, Bloom says. “I said to him, ‘Why can’t you explain this to people that makes sense to them’ and he just couldn’t do it.”
His inability to explain appeared evident in a videotaped deposition heard by the jury in Tortola, as well as the civil jury in Providence that found Swain responsible for Tyre’s death in 2006. Swain, a one-time scuba shop owner, is heard answering questions about the day Tyre drowned with the vaguest of recollections. His reply to numerous questions: “I haven’t a clue.”
Asked during the deposition if, as a certified diver and former emergency medical technician, he had ever drawn any conclusion about how his wife might have died, Swain responded: “Nope.”
Says Bloom: “The day he lost his wife, he can’t really remember things, and that comes off bad, no matter what.”
IN INTERVIEWS with The Journal, Shelley Tyre’s parents, Richard and Lisa Tyre, have described Swain’s demeanor in the days following their daughter’s death as callous and arrogant, and his words as lies.
First came Swain’s phone call from Tortola, notifying them that Shelley had died.
Lisa Tyre took the call: “It was David Swain saying ‘I went down with five and I came up with four.’ I was stupefied by that remark. Then he proceeded to tell me he would give a B-plus to Christian Thwaites” for his life-saving skills. Thwaites was the friend who had retrieved Shelley Tyre’s body from the ocean floor and tried to resuscitate her. “And that was the way he announced to the mother of the person he’d killed” that Shelley was gone.
Days later, Swain met with the Tyres in their Jamestown home. He said he’d left Shelley at the site of two sunken tugs and swam away to a nearby reef. He kept telling them he had no idea what had happened afterward. Richard Tyre was struck by Swain’s flat demeanor.
“I said to him in my anger, ‘How come you’re not showing any grief? How come you’re not showing anything a husband shows for his wife who has died?’ And he turned to me and said: ‘Because I was 16 years old and standing there when my brother beat my mother to death.’ ”
Seven years later, in 2006, Richard Tyre says he learned he had been lied to when he heard Swain say in his taped deposition that he had been 20 and had not witnessed his mother’s killing.
For years, “I sort of gave him slack, because I think if you go through that [witnessing your mother’s murder] you deserve slack. And then it comes out in the trial that he was 20, and it happened far away. And he lied to us.”
Jennifer Bloom says her father gets facts jumbled as a symptom of his mental disorder.
“He grew up in an abusive household, and then he lost his mother through violence and had to ID his mother’s body after she was killed,” she says. “So we’ve always speculated that seeing Shelley had brought up all that other stuff. Whenever you tried to talk about that stuff, he got so ungrounded. It was always sort of startling to watch.”
“If the jury knew [memory loss] was a symptom, and had understood what the guy had gone through, and how that affects the human psyche, they would have understood him better.”
Swain’s defense team had wanted to call as a witness Providence psychologist Paul Block who had held 34 therapy sessions with him between 2003 and 2004. Block was also to testify that Swain exhibited no violent tendencies. The Tortola prosecutor objected, however, because Block wasn’t a medical doctor and the judge agreed.
Reached Friday, Block said Swain does suffer from a mental disorder as Bloom describes. He would not, however, say what the diagnosed condition is.
“Given David’s history, if he experienced a tragic loss that was overly painful to him, he would likely present [it] in a cold and detached way … that can lead to misimpressions by people,” said Block. “He can come across as not caring and unaffected by things,” when, in fact, he is trying to avoid and not remember them. Such a disorder can include memory loss, said Block.
Swain’s behavior seemed bizarre to many at times.
He left some people irritated and suspicious of him after a memorial service speech he gave at Thayer Academy, a private school in Braintree, Mass., where Shelley Tyre served as the middle school headmistress.
“He was so happy and unaffected by it all,” said school spokesman David Casanave. “People said how weird it was.”
IN PREPARATION for the civil trial, the Tyres’ lawyer, J. Renn Olenn, took a sworn deposition from Swain.
Olenn asked Swain hundreds of questions ranging from how he met Shelly Tyre, to the couple’s finances and relationship, to the day Tyre drowned in about 80 feet of water. He also asked about Swain’s background.
A copy of that 276-page deposition and court records from Richard Swain’s murder trial reveal much of Swain’s younger years.
Swain was born in Louisville, Ky., one of three children of Betty Jane and Donald Swain. The couple quarreled often, and Donald had a record involving violent crimes. Betty Jane worked as a product development researcher for the Pillsbury cereal company. Donald Swain later changed his name to Diane after a sex-change operation in the early 1970s. He left the family when David was between 7 and 10 years old.
His mother’s job forced the family to move frequently. David spent his grade school and adolescent years in schools between Louisville, Jefferson, Ind., and Golden Valley, Minn.
Swain said in his deposition that his brother suffered from “some kind of mental disorder,” but that he himself had never been diagnosed with any mental or emotional illnesses.
On Oct. 25, 1975, his first wife, Sandra, gave birth to their first of two children, Jennifer. Five months later, just after Easter, the phone rang in their South County home: David’s mother was missing.
FOR THE HOLIDAY, Betty Swain, 47, had dressed in a dark pants suit with a blue thread pattern. She left her house in Golden Valley, Minn., driving her green Chevrolet station wagon, and arrived at a friend’s house around 4:30 p.m. for a dinner party.
Afterward, she dropped off a friend around 9:45 p.m. and headed home. When Betty Swain failed to show up for work the next morning, friends looked for her. Outside her house they found the glasses Betty Swain had worn the previous night.
They called her son, Richard, at the restaurant where he washed dishes. Had he seen his mother? He told them he assumed she was at work. Then, they called the police.
For the next three days, Betty Swain remained missing. Richard Swain offered little help. He told the police he didn’t even know the make or model of his mother’s car. The station wagon was found that Thursday parked about five miles from the Swain home with Betty Swain’s body locked in the back seat.
For days, police investigators kept finding the residue of blood matching Betty Swain’s throughout her house. They found it in the basement, on the recreation room rug and on paper towels from the garage. They also found blood stains in the driveway, on Betty Swain’s glasses, and on the knees of the blue jeans Richard Swain had worn.
Richard Swain’s only defense after his arrest was that he knew nothing about his mother’s death.
Like the jury in his brother’s murder case 33 years later, Richard Swain’s jury heard a circumstantial case. The police never found a murder weapon. There were no fingerprints in the blood to connect Richard Swain to his mother’s death and no witnesses. The doctor who performed the autopsy testified that she died between 9:45 p.m. and midnight Easter night from seven fierce blows to the head.
Richard Swain’s lawyer asked the jury not to speculate or “try to fill in the gaps” of what may have happened to Betty Jane Swain.
But the prosecution, using the same rationale that prosecutors used in Tortola in David Swain’s case, asked the jury to do just that; to make the connection that since only Richard Swain was with his mother at the time of her death, only he could have killed her.
Prosecutor James Erickson described the mother-son relationship as stormy and said Richard Swain had violent tendencies. He presented one witness, a former boarder at the Swaines’, who testified that Richard came into his room one night after a fight with his mother, yelling and cussing, while slicing a sharp pocket knife through paper.
“I would like to kill her sometimes,” he quoted Richard as saying, “get at her.”
As a motive, Erickson suggested that Betty Swain and her youngest son argued upon her return home about chores he hadn’t done. The two were planning to move yet again and Richard was supposed to have carried some boxes from the basement into the garage.
Erickson theorized that Betty Swain likely began moving the boxes herself when she was attacked from behind by her son.
The jury deliberated about eight hours before finding Richard Swain guilty. Newspaper accounts of the trial say that at that moment Richard Swain showed emotion for the first time. He cried.
Before he was sentenced to life, Richard Swain asked the judge to consider his mental history. The judge replied he would take note of his psychiatric treatment but summed up his impression of Richard Swain as “cold, stable and unemotional.”
JENNIFER BLOOM says her father rarely cries, but he did the day after the judge sentenced him to life, and she said goodbye to him in prison.
Before then, she had collected some 45 letters of support from David Swain’s friends and family, each appealing for leniency for the “kind” and “generous” man they knew. The judge in the case granted Swain a chance for parole in 23 more years.
Bloom and her father’s lawyers want him out long before then. The lawyers will also argue that someone likely tampered with Shelley Tyre’s diving equipment after her death, Bloom says, and that Tyre’s autopsy was done incorrectly and may not have uncovered evidence of a medical condition prompting her drowning.
“My family knows he is innocent,” she says, “and that knowledge cannot be shaken …”
Olenn, the Tyre’s lawyer, once described Swain as a sociopath. Last week, however, he would not comment on Swain’s alleged mental disorder. He did say “I’ve always felt that David Swain’s children were caused to suffer unbearably due to his actions. I don’t believe, as his children, they will ever be able to accept his guilt.”
