'Survivor' Producer Speaks Out From Mexican Prison: "There Is Less of Me and My Soul Every Day"
In his first interview since sentencing, and after six years behind bars, Bruce Beresford-Redman still proclaims innocence for the murder of his wife. Though a Mexican federal court found his 2015 conviction problematic, it may have little impact on his imprisonment.
Bruce Beresford-Redman has seen his share of defeats in the last few years. In an exclusive interview, his first since his sentencing in March 2015, the former Survivor producer — incarcerated for the murder of his wife in Mexico — describes the agony of not seeing his two children for years, the horror of prison conditions and now the disappointment of another unfavorable ruling from a Mexican court.
His children, Camila and Alec, are growing up without their father’s physical presence. Beresford-Redman’s aging parents, Juanita and David, are raising them, largely on their own. They haven’t seen each other in four and a half years. The absence from them is particularly difficult, he says.
“There is less of me and my soul every day,” says Beresford-Redman, who is serving a 12-year sentence for the 2010 murder of his wife, Monica Burgos, at a vacation resort in Cancun, a crime he maintains he did not commit.
"My parents are doing a great job with them, and they are both excelling in school and growing up,” he adds. “I'm enormously proud of them, they are remarkable. We miss each other, and as the years go by I am ever more heartbroken to be kept apart from them, but they are both doing well, which is perhaps the only consolation I can find in this whole stinking mess.”
That mess continued to grow with a ruling last month by a Mexican federal court, which took on an appeal that offered Beresford-Redman a slim ray of hope. In a lengthy ruling, the federal court that has jurisdiction in the state of Quintana Roo found that a state appeals court had erred in several substantive ways during a review of his conviction, ignoring key evidence and failing to properly analyze documents and testimony that could have proved exculpatory.
That ruling came from the highest court that Beresford-Redman has at his disposal, and it was one of his last legal remedies. But instead of examining the merits of the case, the high court sent it back to the lower court magistrate with an order to re-evaluate the evidence.
The higher court criticized the lower judge for not properly reviewing the bona fides of the person who translated Beresford-Redman’s initial police interview, for failing to indicate which of the numerous forensic experts called to testify was being used to bolster the case for conviction, and for improperly reviewing testimony from at least three witnesses whose stories supported Beresford-Redman’s case.
Taking a stand on the merits of the case would “run the risk of denying [Beresford-Redman’s] appeal," the higher court found. The decision was an elaborate way of avoiding having to take a position on the substance of the appeal – but it did give Beresford-Redman another shot at a legal victory.
That was not to be. It is not clear in what manner the state appeals court reevaluated the evidence, but it is clear that the court declined to reverse the conviction. Instead, the appeals court affirmed the original ruling, saying that it had re-examined the original evidence and had found nothing new.
“It’s ridiculous, but that’s what [the state magistrate] did,” Beresford-Redman tells The Hollywood Reporter in a late August telephone interview from prison. “It’s ludicrous, but hardly unexpected.”
“[This] was the first time my case was looked at by a competent and independent authority,” he says. "In essence they found it incomplete.”
Beresford-Redman remains in the same prison where he was incarcerated when THR paid him a visit in 2014. At the time, he shared a cell with several other inmates. Since then, he says, his condition has declined.
“The conditions in the prison are much as they were when you were here,” he says. “My condition has deteriorated. I invite you to think of all you've done and seen and where you've been in the years since I met you here. In that time, I've been exactly where and as you saw me. It’s unbelievably frustrating to live such a small existence.”
Burgos was found dead in 2010 during a family vacation to the Moon Palace Spa and Golf Resort just outside of Cancun, on the pristine shores of the Gulf of Mexico. The couple and their children, 5 and 7 at the time, had traveled from Los Angeles, where Beresford-Redman worked as a producer on Survivor and Burgos ran Zabumba, a trendy Brazilian restaurant in West L.A.
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