During his murder trial in 1990, Darryl Eugene Hunt listened as prosecutor Dean Bowman described Hunt's role in the crime.
Bowman said that Hunt and two other men raped and killed Deborah Sykes on Aug. 10, 1984, and Bowman urged jurors to convict Hunt of first-degree murder.
In particularly graphic terms, Bowman then coldly depicted Hunt's involvement.
"He (Hunt) spread those legs right there apart, and he crawled down inside her, and he raped and ravaged her and deposited some sickening yellow fluids in her body," Bowman said, according to a court transcript.
Jurors convicted Hunt of first-degree murder, and a judge sentenced him to life imprisonment.
DNA tests conducted since the trial show that Hunt might not have raped Sykes. The semen found in Sykes' body did not match samples from Hunt or two other suspects in the killing.
Swabs of semen were removed from Sykes' body, but the technology at the time of the homicide was not advanced enough to test the small swabs.
By 1994, tests that could work with smaller amounts of DNA were developed, and the swabs were tested.
Hunt's attorneys have worked to get Hunt a new trial based on the DNA evidence, but state and federal courts have consistently denied his appeals.
The judges ruled that there is still sufficient evidence that Hunt robbed, kidnapped and killed Sykes. Neither Hunt nor the other suspects were charged with rape or any sexual offense in the case.
Hunt's attorneys are continuing to fight for a new trial and are expected to file a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court on June 22. It is their last chance to free their client with the DNA evidence.
Some residents of Winston-Salem and the state will anxiously await the decision of the nation's highest court.
The case receives extensive news coverage and, even now, divides Winston-Salem along racial lines.
Sykes was white, and Hunt is black.
Many blacks maintain that Hunt was railroaded by prosecutors and police and convicted on weak evidence by mostly white juries. Many whites believe that Hunt is guilty of the crime and was treated fairly by prosecutors, jurors and the police.
Sykes, 26, was a copy editor for The Sentinel, an afternoon newspaper that closed in 1985. Sykes was raped, sodomized, robbed and stabbed to death on her way to work the morning of Aug. 10, 1984.
Hunt, 35, formerly of Winston-Salem, has been convicted twice of murder in Sykes' death and continues to serve a life sentence in prison.
Hunt's attorneys will ask the Supreme Court to hear the case because they say that a jury should consider the DNA evidence. That evidence refutes the prosecutors' contention that Hunt raped and killed Sykes, the defense argues. Prosecutors contend that Hunt received two fair trials, and that the DNA evidence doesn't exclude Hunt as the killer.
Larry Little, a lawyer and the founder of the Darryl Hunt Defense Committee, said that Hunt is innocent, and that state and federal courts erred by not giving Hunt a new trial. Little is also a political-science professor at Winston-Salem State University.
The courts have wrongly given more weight to the testimony of a Klansman and a convicted killer than to the DNA evidence, said Little.
Thomas Murphy, a Klansman, testified that he saw Hunt with a white woman the day of the killing. Johnny Gray, who is serving a life sentence for an unrelated homicide, testified that he saw Hunt attacking Sykes.
Prosecutors have said that Gray may have participated in the crime.
"The verdicts have not spoken the truth," Little said. "There isn't one shred of evidence against this man."
Although no public-opinion surveys have been done, whites and blacks have remained interested in the case in part because the case contains controversial elements of sex and race, said Walter C. Farrell Jr., a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Sykes has become a symbol of "the white community vs. black criminals," said Farrell, who studies urban issues and has worked with criminal-defense attorneys in capital-murder cases. "The white community has said, 'We must take a hard line against black criminals.'"
A brutal crime
Deborah Brotherton Sykes left her house in Mooresville at 5 a.m. on Aug. 10, 1984, and drove to Winston-Salem. She parked her car on West End Boulevard about two blocks from the newspaper offices of The Sentinel, where she worked as a copy editor.
As she walked to work, she was approached by one or two men who forced her to walk north on West End Boulevard, witnesses said. Sykes was then raped, sodomized, robbed of $200 and stabbed to death. An autopsy showed that Sykes was stabbed at least 16 times with a small knife, and she died quickly from blood loss.
Sykes was found on a grassy slope across the street from Crystal Towers, a high-rise apartment building for elderly people.
Sykes' death touched off an intense, six-week police investigation that led to Hunt being charged with murder Sept. 14, 1984. At the time of arrest, Hunt was being held in the Forsyth County Jail on charges of taking indecent liberties with a child.
Hunt was 19 at the time with an IQ of 77, according to testimony in his trials. Hunt was unemployed, and he dated a teen-age prostitute. He was a regular at drink houses in the city and had been charged with 11 crimes, some violent, in the previous year.
Two juries convict Hunt
Hunt was tried and convicted of first-degree murder in June 1985. The N.C. Supreme Court overturned Hunt's conviction in May 1989, ruling that the trial judge improperly admitted a statement that a witness denied making.
Hunt was convicted again in September 1990. He wasn't eligible for the death penalty because the jury that first convicted him in 1985 rejected the death penalty. A judge sentenced Hunt to life imprisonment.
There is no physical evidence linking Hunt to the crime. Instead, prosecutors relied on circumstantial evidence.
Eyewitnesses testified that they saw Hunt near the scene. A hotel clerk testified that he saw Hunt leave a hotel bathroom and then found bloody paper towels near the sink.
Margaret Marie Crawford, a prostitute who was Hunt's girlfriend, testified that he had grass stains on his clothes and blood on his hands the morning of Sykes' killing.
Other witnesses put Hunt at the crime scene. Two inmates testified that Hunt admitted to killing Sykes while he was in prison.
Hunt testified that he didn't kill Sykes, and he knew nothing about the murder. Hunt said he rejected a plea offer from prosecutors to implicate Sammy Mitchell as the killer. Other witnesses said that Hunt and Mitchell were at a house on Dunleith Street when Sykes was killed.
Mitchell was indicted on a first-degree murder charge in January 1990. Mitchell, whose indictment was handed down before Hunt's second trial, has not been tried in Sykes' killing. Mitchell is serving a 50-year sentence on a second-degree murder conviction in another man's beating death.
James Ferguson of Charlotte, one of Hunt's attorneys, argued to jurors that a police investigator steered witnesses into identifying Hunt or making incriminating statements about him.
"There are no facts that have been proven in this courtroom to you that Darryl Hunt is involved in the crime," Ferguson said. "Not as a lookout, not as a participant, not as anything."
DNA hasn't helped Hunt
Judge Meizer Morgan of Forsyth Superior Court denied Hunt's request for a third trial in November 1994 after a hearing in which a DNA expert testified that the semen found in Sykes couldn't have come from Hunt, Mitchell, Gray or Sykes' husband.
Morgan ruled that Hunt wasn't entitled to another trial because the DNA evidence probably would not lead to a different result in a third trial.
Morgan said that there was evidence that Hunt killed and raped Sykes, which was not refuted by the DNA evidence. Hunt could have penetrated Sykes without depositing semen, Morgan said.
Other state and federal courts that considered Hunt's appeals have cited Morgan's ruling.
DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, contains genetic information that is unique to each individual. It can be extracted from blood, hair, skin or other bodily fluids or tissues. DNA evidence has exonerated 72 defendants in the United States and Canada in the past 10 years, said Jane Greene, the executive director of the Innocence Project at Cardozo Law School in New York. Several of those cases were rape-homicide cases involving multiple suspects, Greene said.
The courts' reasoning didn't surprise Dr. Victor Weedn, a forensic pathologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, a lawyer and an expert on DNA evidence.
Most defendants are convicted of murder and sexual assaults because of eyewitness testimony or an admission of guilt, Weedn said.
Prosecutors and criminal-defense lawyers are reluctant to use DNA test results because the procedures are expensive, and many crime laboratories don't have the resources to do the necessary testing, Weedn said.
"Not everything hinges on DNA evidence," Weedn said. "DNA evidence really doesn't prove guilt or innocence. It does prove if there is a link to the crime scene or other evidence."
Prospects of a new trial
The Supreme Court will decide whether they will hear Hunt's request for a new trial in its October term.
Hunt's appeal faces an uphill battle because the justices consider only 1 percent of the appellate cases that are filed in the court, District Attorney Tom Keith said. He noted that the three-judge panel on the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled to deny Hunt's request.
If the Supreme Court orders a new trial, Keith said that his office will determine how many of the state's witnesses are still alive and available to testify at Hunt's trial.
Two key witnesses have died, and the whereabouts of Hunt's former girlfriend aren't known, Keith said. The memories of other witnesses may have faded.
Hunt knows the odds of the court considering his case are slim, said Mark Rabil, one of his attorneys.
Rabil and Ferguson must convince at least four of the nine justices that Hunt's case is compelling, and that the nation's highest court needs to make a decision on the legal issues in it, especially the DNA evidence, Rabil said.
Hunt will be eligible for parole in 2005 regardless of whether the court decides to hear his case, Rabil said.
"He (Hunt) remains extremely disappointed in the system," Rabil said. "He has no faith in the system, but he has faith in God that everything will work out."