Prison life for Roye was harder than for most. It wasn't so much the conditions. Though never religious, Roye was a Jew by birth and culture. Other Jews in the prison, including Israelis, sort of took him under their wings. It is a truism in many overseas prisons that the circumstances of incarceration can be greatly improved with a little cash, and though Roye had little, his Jewish friends at Bangkwang Central Prison had managed to pool together enough money collected from family members back home to significantly improve their lives.

Tibor Krausz, writing for The Jerusalem Report, a prestigious Israeli newsmagazine, visited the prison in 1999 and put it this way. "(T)he Jews of Block 2 have pulled together and carved out a life of comparative luxury for themselves. With cash sent in by friends and relatives, they bought themselves into the same cell, then bribed the guards to have only 10 other inmates in their 216-square-foot quarters, not the standard 20, and allowed them sleeping mats, bottled water, and a diet of meat, fruit and vegetables."

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By 1997, the writer continued, the Jewish prisoners had leased a $500 a year cell for a kind of exclusive club they had even managed to get their hands on a color television. There most of the Jewish prisoners spent their days in the company of a chaplain, a Chabad rabbi, who drilled them in Torah studies.

Roye was the exception. His incarceration had only accelerated a crisis of faith. For a time, Miriam Moorman told Crime Library in a recent interview, he dabbled in mysticism. But the pain of prison life doused whatever hope that path might have kindled in him. By the time the writer for The Jerusalem Report turned up on the visitors' list at Bangkwang, Roye had all but vanished into himself.

As Krausz wrote, "In his five years there, Stephen Roye has deteriorated from an Emmy Award-winning American television producer to a fading shadow... Roye spends his time curled up...he mumbles incoherently, barely eats and sees no visitors."

"He's on his last legs," one of Roye's cellmates told Krausz.

As severe as the toll had been by then, it would take nearly three more years for Roye to finally taste freedom. In December 2002, after more than eight years behind bars in Thailand, Stephen Roye, then almost 57 years old, was escorted out of Bangkok's Bangkwang Central Prison, placed on a plane and flown home, back to the United States.

Much had changed in his absence. His elderly parents had died, and his young son had grown to manhood without him. But there was also cause for hope. Yes, Roye was headed to an American prison, but it was a prison in his native Los Angeles, and for the first time in more than eight years, there was now at least a chance that Stephen Roye would soon win his freedom. There should have been something in his eyes that reflected that. But there wasn't.