Cyril Darville was born on September 2, 1962 and worked as a butcher at City Market in Nassau.
Ray Anthony Feaste, twenty-seven, was last seen alive on March 10, 1990. His body was found a week later on a track road off Gladstone Road. He had been shot. Feaste was a hacker, the Bahamian word for a man driving an unlicensed taxi.
Darville was charged, at twenty-eight, with the murders of Feaste and eight other hackers. He was tried for Feaste alone. What happened to the other eight charges is the whole difficulty of this case: they were never tested in court, and the phrase Bahamian papers still use for him is accused serial killer.
A jury convicted him in August 1992 and he received the death sentence, which at that time was mandatory for murder in the Bahamas. The sentence was later commuted to life under the Prerogative of Mercy.
In 1996 a death warrant was read to him. Amnesty International recorded that another man, Thomas Reckley, was hanged at Fox Hill that March, and that Darville and a third condemned man were granted stays.
In 2006 the Privy Council in London, the final court of appeal for the Bahamas, held that the mandatory death penalty was unlawful. That decision invalidated both his death sentence and the commuted life term, and left him to be sentenced again.
He came back before the Supreme Court in September 2013, on his fifty-first birthday. A probation officer told the court he had been well behaved across two decades at Fox Hill, helpful with mopping floors and cleaning bathrooms, involved in only three incidents, but added that he might not have shown his true nature to the guards any more than he had to the family and friends who never believed him capable of the crime. His counsel asked for release, or three years; the prosecution proposed thirty to sixty. Darville apologised to God, to Feaste's family, to his own family and to the Commonwealth of the Bahamas.
Senior Justice Jon Isaacs sentenced him to fifty-five years. With twenty-one already served, that left thirty-four to run.
The count here is one conviction against nine charges. Murderpedia gives one to nine, which is the same fact stated as a range; the two figures mean different things and are kept apart.