U.S. District Judge Norman Roettger may have just written the climax, overturning the conviction in the 36-year-old murder of Sebring millionaire Charles Von Maxcy. On Thursday, he directed a new trial for William H. Kelley, 59, a man on Death Row since 1984.

"I'm overjoyed and prayed this day would come that the truth would come out," Kelley said Thursday through his lawyer, James Lohman of New Orleans.

The story of how Kelley ended up on Death Row has more twists and turns than a Slinky.

Roettger, who sits in Fort Lauderdale, outlined how then-state prosecutor Hardy Pickard withheld basic evidence to secure a conviction. Pickard was also the prosecutor for Juan Roberto Melendez, who spent 17 years on Death Row before a Polk County judge last December declared important evidence had been withheld.

"We're delighted. The crux was the state was hiding evidence that would have exonerated Billy Kelley," Lohman said.

Roettger said the prosecutor withheld plenty, including:

That transcript, Roettger wrote, could have changed the outcome of Kelley's trial because it contained testimony of a taped telephone conversation in which Sweet talked to his lover, the murder victim's wife, on how he should set somebody up to take the fall for the killing.

"Irene Maxcy and John Sweet were lovers, and they planned to kill Irene's husband, Charles Von Maxcy, a citrus grover and rancher," Roettger states in his order. "Unfortunately, the murder did not signal the beginning of a blissful life on the estate for Irene Maxcy and John Sweet."

When organized crime came to Highlands County, it wasn't pretty. Sweet, with his big-city suits, stood out like Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny. After the Oct. 1, 1966, murder, he moved in with Irene but, according to Roettger, "he wanted more money, purportedly to pay off the murder balance."

That's when Irene Maxcy became a witness against her former lover, but her testimony was so shaky that Sweet's first trial ended in a hung jury and his second was overturned on appeal because she was rumored to have had an affair with the lead detective.

Prosecutors were so angry they got Irene Maxcy put away for 4 1/2 years for perjury.

Then in the early 1980s, Sweet again turned up on the wrong side of the law in Massachusetts, where police were probing his alleged mob activity: prostitution, narcotics, arson, bribery, counterfeiting, loan sharking and hijacking.

He had a deal to offer: the triggerman who killed Charles Von Maxcy in exchange for immunity from prosecution. The man he fingered just happened to be Billy Kelley, a man whom Sweet owed money to for marijuana.

"He had lost it, so he wanted to incapacitate Kelley. He had a motive for doing that," said James Lohman, who along with constitutional law expert Laurence Tribe of Harvard represented Kelley.

Kelley's trial riveted Florida from coast to coast. He was represented by William Kunstler, the famed civil rights attorneys at the time. It ended in a mistrial, but the second trial garnered a conviction solely on Sweet's testimony, and a death sentence.

Among the plethora of evidence kept from the defense and jury, prosecutor Pickard withheld key documents regarding Sweet's immunity agreement. Roettger called Sweet's credibility "a monumentally important issue."

Now the question is what happens next. The state routinely appeals such decisions from district judges.

However, in the Melendez case that involved the same prosecutor, the state didn't pursue an appeal. And as in the Melendez case, a credible suspect has come to light, in a 2001 hearing. A man named Charles Busias, who made incriminating statements to a pal and his son.

The late Busias had dark curly hair and a deep husky voice.