Island Murder Conviction Overturned

April 15 -- William Labrador felt like he was beginning his life anew last week, after a British court ruling freed him from a jail cell in Tortola, three years after he arrived on the picturesque Caribbean island for a vacation with his buddies.

"It's time to go live my life again, which thank God was not taken from me," Labrador, a 39-year-old former Manhattan financial consultant, said after he was released from jail.

Labrador was convicted in May 2001 in the death of former model and up-and-coming artist Lois McMillen, 34, of Middlebury, Conn. Prosecutors in Tortola, which is part of the British Virgin Islands, said that McMillen drowned from someone holding her head under water.

But on April 7, the Privy Council in London, the highest court in the British Commonwealth, overturned Labrador's conviction, and barred prosecutors from retrying him.

Labrador said that he has always been confident that he would be exonerated of a crime he never committed. After his mother, Barbara Labrador, met him in Tortola, and he was released, one of his first acts as a free man was to take a swim.

"I put on my suit right then and there and jumped in the ocean," Labrador told Good Morning America. "That's when I finally felt my freedom. Being able to do that without someone turning a key on me."

A Trip to Paradise Gone Awry

Meanwhile, the mystery of McMillen's death remains so, and the court ruling is the latest chapter in a case that reads like a movie script.

It all began with a two-week vacation in an island paradise of Tortola for four best buddies: Labrador, publisher Alexander Benedetto, construction worker Evan George and law student Michael Spicer. Labrador, Benedetto and George were houseguests at a home owned by Spicer's family.

The trip to paradise took a terrible turn when the four men were charged with killing McMillen. The men had hung around with the aspiring artist, who was also on vacation, with her parents, Russell and Josephine McMillen. But they said that they did not see her the night she disappeared.