Megan Wallace had just been booked at the St. Johns County Jail in St. Augustine, Florida, when she started hearing gossip about its most notorious resident. Michelle Taylor, then 34, had allegedly set fire to her own house in 2018, killing her 11-year-old son. The motive was insurance money. Everyone at the jail seemed disgusted by her. “The guards treated her like shit,” Wallace said.

A mother herself, Wallace vowed to stay away from Taylor. But after a couple of months, Taylor was moved out of solitary confinement and into her cellblock. “The stories I’d heard didn’t add up to how she was in real life,” Wallace said. Taylor was withdrawn and heavily medicated. Other women at the jail were openly cruel toward her, but she didn’t lash out. “She slept all day and wouldn’t get up for breakfast or lunch.”

Wallace knew how it felt to be judged by people who didn’t have all the facts. She had spiraled into addiction after the sudden death of her husband, culminating in her arrest two days after Christmas in 2022. Prosecutors accused her of drug trafficking, which she insisted was bogus. As Wallace fought her own charges, she started to feel sorry for Taylor. “All she did was cry about her son,” Wallace said. “She was like, ‘I don’t want to live.’”

Wallace eventually opened up to Taylor about losing her husband. They formed a bond that strengthened over time. As Wallace got to know Taylor, she seemed less like a monster and more like a grieving mother who had suffered unspeakable trauma. David wasn’t the only child Taylor had lost. Her middle child, Natalie, who was born with cerebral palsy, died in a tragic accident five years before the fire. News reports about Taylor mentioned her daughter’s death, leading to callous comments online and lurid rumors at the jail. “People said she drowned her daughter in the bathtub and locked her son in a closet and took off the door handle,” Wallace said.

Taylor didn’t talk about the fire in jail. But she’d always sworn she had no idea how it started — she barely escaped herself. Although Wallace had no way to know the truth, it seemed obvious to her that Taylor had loved her children and her home. By the time Wallace saw her own charges dropped in the summer of 2023, she felt certain that the fire had been an accident and that Taylor had been wrongly accused.

Back home, Wallace started reading everything she could about arson cases. She learned about people who had been wrongfully convicted based on junk science. And she discovered that the Florida state fire lab, which examined the evidence in Taylor’s case, had once lost its accreditation after misidentifying gasoline in numerous cases. One name came up over and over again: John Lentini, a renowned Florida fire scientist who had helped exonerate people all over the country. In October 2023 she wrote him an email with the subject line “Please help.”

As it turned out, Lentini had been contacted about the case before, by a defense attorney who no longer represented Taylor. At that time, Lentini was skeptical he could help; there appeared to be overwhelming evidence of arson. According to the lab, a dozen fire debris samples taken from Taylor’s home contained gasoline.

“The lab report that says they found gasoline is bullshit.”

Although Lentini was a fierce and vocal critic of the lab, he found it hard to believe that it would produce a report containing so many false positives. In a call with Taylor’s new lawyer, he offered to examine the underlying data from the fire debris samples — but he was doubtful it would change much. “If there really was that much gasoline in the house,” he told Wallace, “there is nothing I can do.”

But on January 4, 2024, Wallace received an email from Lentini. “Michelle is not guilty,” it read. “The lab report that says they found gasoline is bullshit. Every part of the state’s case rests on that.”

Today the state of Florida is prepared to convict Taylor for killing her son, despite the fact that the only direct evidence of arson has been thoroughly discredited.

More than a year after Lentini raised red flags about the state’s case, writing in an expert report that it is based on “unreliable methodology and incorrect opinions regarding the presence of ignitable liquid residue,” several other leading fire experts have agreed with his conclusions. They include two different lab directors who are also veteran forensic chemists. One of them examined the data from the state lab, while the other retested the carbon strips used to analyze fire debris from the scene. Both recently submitted reports to Taylor’s defense attorney saying there is no evidence of gasoline.

The lab’s conclusions have also been contradicted by two forensic chemists with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who reviewed Lentini’s expert report and agreed in depositions last April that the gasoline findings were unsupported.

The lab has not responded directly to these claims. But in January, the analyst who examined the fire debris evidence in Taylor’s case submitted an amended report backtracking on some of her original findings “due to the re-evaluation of the data.” Four of the samples she previously said were positive for gasoline were now determined to be negative for any ignitible liquid. A spokesperson for the Fire Marshal’s Office did not respond to a detailed list of comments in time for publication.

Despite the ongoing dismantling of evidence supporting its arson case, prosecutors with the State Attorney’s Office for Florida’s 7th Judicial Circuit have refused to drop the charges against Taylor. They insist she is a habitual liar and a fraud — a mother so diabolical she was willing to set fire to her house with her children inside to “further her lifestyle.” They point to a paper trial that proves her willingness to commit arson “in an attempt to fraudulently collect insurance funds. Her 11-year-old-son … died as a result.” Yet the investigation carried out on behalf of Taylor’s homeowner’s insurance company did not find evidence of arson either. Fire debris analysis conducted at a private lab in the aftermath of the fire revealed no gasoline or other ignitable liquid.

To Lentini and others who have worked on wrongful convictions, the case against Taylor is a version of an all-too-familiar story. In the absence of reliable forensic evidence, prosecutors put together a circumstantial case that can convince a jury a defendant is capable of murder, even if the science does not add up. In cases where a child has died, which are especially emotionally charged, it does not take much to cast parents or caretakers in a suspicious light. Mothers who escape a fire without their children are often judged harshly for that fact alone — and those with a checkered past are easier still to demonize, especially when the state can show that they were guilty of fraud. In the case of Angela Garcia, a Cleveland woman tried three times for killing her daughters in a fire, prosecutors seized on evidence of financial fraud to win a conviction and life sentence despite the fact that there was no reliable evidence of arson. Her sentencing judge accused her of treating her daughters “like coins in a slot machine.”

Out of 26 cases in which the state fire lab had identified gasoline, more than half did not stand up to scrutiny.

In Taylor’s case, prosecutors have made clear that they plan to tell the story of a bad mother who senselessly sacrificed her only son for material gain. But that theory eclipses a different story, one with frightening implications for anyone who survives a fire in Florida. According to Lentini, Taylor’s case is the sixth time he has personally seen a misdiagnosis of gasoline by chemists at the state fire lab — and there is reason to believe there are many more. A review of the lab in 2016 by the nation’s leading accrediting body for crime labs found that analysts were using flawed methodology to identify gasoline in fire debris evidence. Out of 26 cases in which the lab had identified gasoline, more than half did not stand up to scrutiny.

Yet rather than reconsider its case against Taylor, prosecutors have sought to suppress any reference to the lab’s problematic history when the case goes to trial. “The State respectfully requests that no party or witness in the case be allowed to comment on the prior loss of accreditation by the State Lab,” Assistant State Attorney Jennifer Dunton wrote in a pretrial motion last spring, arguing that it was “not relevant.”

With a trial date set for June, Taylor and her attorney were reluctant to speak on the record about the case. But the likeliest scenario is that neither side will have a chance to tell their story to a jury.........

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