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 on August 13, 1992, and he received the death sentence, which at that time was mandatory for murder in the Bahamas. The Court of Appeal dismissed his appeal on October 4, 1994.
He was to be hanged in March 1996, after the Advisory Committee on the Prerogative of Mercy found that clemency should not be granted, and 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. He stayed behind bars, and his death sentence came to be treated as commuted to life; when he returned to court in 2013 there was a question over whether that term had begun in 1997 or in 2006.
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.
His case came before the Supreme Court on June 6, 2013, and was adjourned to August and then, while the prosecutor, Ambrose Armbrister, looked into when his sentence had begun, to September. 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 apologized to God, to Feaste's family, to his own family and to the Commonwealth of the Bahamas.
On the morning of September 3, 2013, the day after his fifty-first birthday, Senior Justice Jon Isaacs sentenced him to fifty-five years, running from his original conviction in August 1992. With twenty-one already served, that left thirty-four to run.
He stands convicted of one murder. The eight other killings he was charged with have never been put to a jury.