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. [ The Florida woman charged with murder, ]Michelle Taylor, who 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Taylor was withdrawn and heavily medicated.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.
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Author: Liliana Segura, Intercept
Liliana Segura is an award-winning investigative journalist covering the U.S. criminal justice system, with a longtime focus on harsh sentencing, the death penalty, and wrongful convictions. She was previously an associate editor at the Nation Magazine, where she edited a number of award-winning stories and earned a 2014 Media for a Just Society Award for her writing on prison profiteering. While at The Intercept, Segura has received the Texas Gavel Award in 2016 and the 2017 Innocence Network Journalism Award for her investigations into convictions in Arizona and Ohio. In 2019 she was honored in the Abolitionist category of the Frederick Douglass 200, a recognition given by the Frederick Douglass Family Initiatives and the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University.
