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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 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.

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.”

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.