48 Hours

Prisoners In Paradise

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

August 11, 2003 / 10:54 AM EDT / CBS

For more than 20 years, Josephine and Russell McMillen, and their daughter Lois, fled the cold winters of Connecticut, for their villa on Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands.

At the end of 1999, Russell McMillen fell seriously ill; Lois planned a longer than usual holiday stay with her parents. On the evening of Jan. 14, 2000, Lois, 34, told her parents she was going to a local hangout to listen to music. She never came home.

Early the next morning, they called the police. Her body was found on the other side of the island. She had been drowned. Her car was found less than a mile away, at the ferry dock. 48 Hours reports on the search for her killers.

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Police believed that after a violent struggle, she broke away from her attacker and took off across this sea wall, down onto the rocks, leaving behind a trail of personal possessions: a gold necklace, a can of mace, a hairclip, and one shoe. They found her body in the shallow water, shirt and bra pulled up, her breasts exposed. But the medical examiner can’t say whether her attacker followed her down there and held her under, or whether, dazed, she simply fell, hit her head and drowned.

Crime of any kind is rare on Tortola. News of this murder shocked the island, especially because the victim seemed not to have an enemy in the world.

As an adult, Lois had drifted through careers: an aspiring actress, then an artist and graduate of the Parsons School of Design. She'd recently been living at home in Connecticut.

Hours after Lois’ body was found, police arrested four vacationing Americans: Michael Spicer, a well-to-do Tortola neighbor of Lois’; his 23-year-old friend, Evan George; Alex Benedetto, the son of a wealthy publisher, who’d dated Lois a few years before; and William Labrador, Benedetto’s best friend and partner in a New York modeling agency.

News of the arrest electrified Tortola, where Spicer and Labrador were well-known.

In an exclusive interview from her majesty’s prison in Tortola, Labrador proclaimed his innocence. “I’m an innocent man that has been falsely accused f the crime of murder of a woman who has been coming here for 30 years plus and here I sit falsely accused.”

In late 1999, when business was slow, Labrador and Benedetto decided to spend the holidays in Tortola. Once there, they hooked up with Spicer. They stayed at Spicer’s family villa, “Zebra House.” In the press, he was been described as “trust fund baby.” Also there was Spicer’s other houseguest Evan George.

All but George knew Lois. She lived just down the hill and loved to go out. On the two nights before her death she did go out with the guys. But the men say the night of the murder was different.

The men say they never even saw her on the night she died. For most of night, three of the four were together in public places. Only Labrador can’t prove what he did after his friends dropped him off.

Police went to Zebra House, where the day after the murder, they turned up three pair of wet sandy sneakers, and a shirt with a stain on it, thought to be blood. The police also noticed a small, fresh cut on Labrador’s nose. He said he got it the day before while hiking. By the end of the day, they had arrested the four men.

What happens next? Find out in A Tropical Island Trial.