Private investigator Dan Myers says he knows the identity of the man who raped Lovely Bones author Alice Sebold
The private investigator who helped prove Anthony Broadwater’s innocence in the 1981 rape of author Alice Sebold says he’s learned the name of a man who may be the real rapist – and is calling for the criminal case to now be reopened.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, investigator Dan Myers said a detective who was involved in the original investigation gave him the name of a suspect, who was locked up for committing another sex crime around the time of Sebold’s rape.
That man now lives in Syracuse and is listed on New York’s sex offender registry, Myers has discovered.
‘I know he does still exist,’ Myers said. ‘He definitely did time in prison, and he’s now out.’
Broadwater, 61, was convicted of raping Sebold in 1982. He spent 16 years in prison and was released in 1998.
On Monday, his conviction was overturned after a producer working on a film adaptation of Lucky, Sebold’s memoir about the rape, noticed inconsistencies in the story.
Lovely Bones author Alice Sebold, right, is yet to comment on the exoneration of Anthony Broadwater, pictured left in court on Monday. In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Myers said a detective who was involved in the original investigation gave him the name of a suspect
This is the 1981 line up of black men that Alice Sebold was told to choose from. Anthony Broadwater is the second from the right, fourth along in the lineup. She picked the man next to him, who was in the fifth position, but was then told by police she had ‘failed to identify the suspect’. They were convinced it was Broadwater and she later changed her identification in court, naming him as her attacker. The man in fifth position has not been named and it’s unclear why he was in the lineup
The producer Tim Mucciante hired the private investigator to look into the case and lawyers to work on an appeal.
Myers, a detective who retired last year from the Onandago County Sheriff’s Office that covers Syracuse, said Mucciante hired him early in the summer.
Producer Tim Mucciante called in Myers to look into the case because he was so alarmed by the inconsistencies in the memoir
‘With Tim, it started with him wanting detail of the actual rape because they were making a true to life movie and some things didn’t add up,’ Myers said. ‘He originally just wanted me to find out if this rape had even taken place. Then as I went into the investigation, I found out the rape did happen. I 100 percent believe it occurred and that she (Sebold) was the victim of a crime.’
Sebold identified Broadwater in court as her rapist, even though she had identified a different man, standing next to him, in a police lineup months earlier. She said that the pair were ‘identical’ and that she had chosen the wrong man in the lineup.
‘I don’t blame her for what happened,’ Myers said. ‘I blame the prosecutor and the judge who decide to continue on with the case against Anthony even though she identified the wrong person. I blame the system.’
Sebold didn’t name her attacker in her memoir.
Myers said he discovered Broadwater’s name in newspaper clippings from the early 1980s. He then spoke with several police contacts he knows, including a retired Syracuse detective who was involved in that 1981 case.
‘He shed a lot of light on the investigation,’ Myers said.
Shockingly, that detective expressed doubts that they’d arrested the right man.
‘He told me he didn’t think Anthony Broadwater was the person who committed the crime,’ Myers said. ‘And he said he might know who did commit it. He had a name.’
‘He had a feeling that it was the wrong person and he thought that for many years, and he told me that I should reach out to Anthony and talk to Anthony about it,’ he added.
Broadwater, pictured in court on Monday, said he was still crying tears of joy and relief over his exoneration the next day
Broadwater, 61, shook with emotion, sobbing as his head fell into his hands, as the judge in Syracuse vacated his conviction at the request of prosecutors
Anthony Broadwater is pictured on the steps of his home this week, holding a newspaper about his exoneration, with producer Timothy Mucciante, who hired the lawyers who represented him in court after becoming suspicious of the case
Myers met with Broadwater in front of his house, bringing another private investigator Curtis Brown with him.
Sebold detailed the assault in her 1999 memoir, Lucky – her first of three books – which was in the process of being adapted as a film for Netflix. The fate of the film adaptation following Broadwater’s exoneration is currently unknown
‘After speaking with Anthony, we started walking back to our car,’ Myers recalled. ‘We both looked at each other and agreed he was the wrong guy.’
‘The biggest thing that stood out in my mind when I started looking into Anthony is that he had no criminal history,’ he said. ‘Given the crime, I would have expected him to have quite a rap sheet. And he’s been out for more than 20 years, with no re-offenses.’
Myers then approached lawyer David Hammond, whose office is located in the same building as his firm, Intrigue Investigations.
‘I told him the latest developments and that we’d spoken with Anthony,’ Myers said. ‘I suggested the law firm get involved in getting Anthony exonerated. He knew about the case. He was very excited about it.
‘Ultimately, I took Anthony over to the county clerk’s office and we got all the transcripts and paperwork from his trial,’ he said.
Hammond, of CDH Law, and fellow defense lawyer Melissa Swartz, of Cambareri & Brenneck, went through the case and presented it to prosecutors.
Myers was sitting in the court gallery when Broadwater’s conviction was thrown out.
‘I could see the release in Anthony’s body,’ he said. ‘He was very happy, and I felt glad for him and relieved.’
He embraced Broadwater afterward.
‘I told him I knew he was innocent from the day I showed up at his door and interviewed him,’ Myers recalled.
‘I remember that first day I interviewed him, I told him there were people who wanted to help him,’ he continued. ‘He didn’t believe me at first. I reminded him of that on Monday, and he laughed.’
He described Monday as one of the best days of his career.
‘A lot of credit has to be given to Tim Mucciante to continue to push this through,’ he said. ‘He started this whole thing.’
Myers said he hopes police will now reopen their investigation of the 1981 rape and freshly scrutinize the individual the retired Syracuse detective shared with him.
‘Up until Monday, it was a closed case,’ Myers said. ‘It probably has just been reopened because Anthony was exonerated. It would definitely be worth them finding this other person and giving him an interview.’
Broadwater has been living in this home in Syracuse, New York, since he was released from prison in 1998. He is married but he never had children because he didn’t want them to bear the stigma of his rape conviction. He did not know the crime he was wrongly convicted of was what Sebold used to kickstart her career
DailyMail.com learned that Broadwater had no idea that she used the story to kickstart her literary career and has been living in ‘squalor’ since he got out of prison while she has made millions in book sales.
When his private investigator found Broadwater earlier this year, living in a derelict apartment in Syracuse, the town where the rape happened, he was stunned to learn that Sebold had sold over 1million copies of Lucky, and gone on to make millions more through The Lovely Bones.
‘He was pretty shocked. He is living, this is not an exaggeration, a very squalid existence. Alice Sebold, based on Lucky and The Lovely Bones, is living in a very, very nice home in San Francisco.
‘It is not right,’ Mucciante told DailyMail.com on Wednesday.
How Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones rocketed her to literary stardom
Alice Sebold was writing her hugely successful novel The Lovely Bones, about the rape and murder of a teenage girl, in the late 1990s when she found herself having to abandon that project so she could complete her own memoir about how she was raped as student.
She said years later that she wanted the dead narrator of her novel, Susie Salmon, to ‘tell her own story,’ while her memoir, Lucky, would be the ‘real deal’ about rape.
That memoir was published in 1999 three years before her novel and received great critical acclaim.
But it would be The Lovely Bones (2002) that would launch her into literary stardom after it became an instant classic.
The novel starts with the arresting line: ‘My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.’
The book is told in the voice of Susie, a dead girl speaking from heaven after she has been raped and murdered.
Susie tells the harrowing tale of her vicious abduction and murder in a cornfield near her home and observes the events which follow.
How her dismembered elbow is discovered in the field in a patch of blood, but her body is nowhere to be found.
This allows her parents to harbor a vain hope that she will be found alive.
The portrayal of her family suffering the immense grief of losing their child was what made the novel a hit with critics.
The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani described it as ‘a deeply affecting meditation on the ways in which terrible pain and loss can be redeemed.’
But others found Susie’s ability to flit between heaven and Earth an unconvincing plot device.
The ghost of the girl is glimpsed by family members as they walk around corners in their house.
And she even enters the body of a school friend who is making love to her own former sweetheart.
The novel was immensely popular, particularly with teenage girls and women.
English author Joan Smith attacked the novel’s ‘apple-pie sentimentality’, saying it was sickly sweet.
Literary critic Philip Hensher described the book as ‘a slick, overpoweringly saccharine and unfeeling exercise in sentiment.’
The novel went on to win the American Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award for Adult Fiction in 2003 and was made into a movie by fantasy-loving director Peter Jackson starring Saoirse Ronan, Susan Sarandon and Stanley Tucci.
The Lovely Bones has influenced an entire sub-genre of Young Adult (YA) fiction known derisively as ‘sick lit’, which has enduring popularity to this day.
Commonly it is fiction which revolves around the afterlife where protagonists are killed early on in the narrative, finding themselves in a strange ghost world.
The hugely successful Twilight Saga, a series of fantasy romance novels by Stephenie Meyer, were influenced by Sebold’s work.