Wednesday, December 24, 2003
The charges against Willard E. Brown in the 1984 rape and murder of Deborah Sykes all but destroy the theories that police and prosecutors had long held in the crime.
DNA evidence identified Brown last week as the man who raped Sykes, but that alone doesn't rule out the possible involvement of Darryl Hunt, who is serving a life sentence for his conviction in the rape and murder of Sykes.
Rather, it puts another person in the mix, which highlights the contradictions between the eyewitness testimony that convicted Hunt and the DNA evidence that led to Brown's arrest.
Hunt has been in prison 18 years serving a life sentence. His friend, Sammy Mitchell, who police have long said they believed was involved, was charged with the crime in 1990 but never tried. Mitchell has been in prison on another murder conviction.
The Winston-Salem Journal published last month an eight-part series about the Hunt case, based on the review of thousands of police reports, court documents and other material. The series pointed out many flaws and discrepancies in the case, and weaknesses in some of the witnesses, showing how prosecutors changed their theory in the case as new evidence emerged.
Now that Brown has been charged, a new look at the key witnesses amplifies the flaws that began to emerge when DNA testing in 1994 showed that neither Hunt nor Mitchell was the source of semen found in Sykes.
Six witnesses saw some of the events in the early morning hours of Aug. 10, 1984, on West End Boulevard and in the small park - across from the Crystal Towers apartment building - where Sykes was killed.
Four of the witnesses saw only one black man and a white woman, while the other two reported seeing two black men with a white woman. Some identified one of the men as Hunt, and at least one said that it might have been Hunt and Mitchell, but no one reported seeing a third person at the scene with Sykes.
Johnny Gray, who first reported the crime by calling 911, testified that he heard screams coming from the park. When he went to look over a wood-pylon fence, he saw a man on top of a woman, beating her. The woman was struggling and yelling, he said. The man looked toward Gray, and got up and ran toward Marshall Street, pulling up his pants. The woman, Gray said, slumped down. Gray did not report seeing anyone else on either side of the fence.
Gray walked to a friend's apartment more than half a mile away, and called 911 to report the attack from a pay phone outside. He gave the police a false name, saying he was Sammy Mitchell, which was one of the factors that led police toward Hunt and Mitchell.
When Gray came forward two weeks later, he initially identified a man named Terry Thomas as the man he saw attacking the woman. Thomas was in jail at the time, however. Two weeks later, Gray picked out Hunt's picture from a police photo lineup, and eventually a live lineup. He never said that anyone else was involved in the attack.
Gray died in prison, where he was serving time for murder, in 2001.
The two other witnesses who reported seeing the attack were Ralph Nash and Bobby Upchurch, painters on their way to work. They told police that they saw two people, initially near a car parked on West End Boulevard. They said they saw a black person holding onto a white person. The two walked down the street into the park, they said, where the black person threw down the other person and they began to struggle. The black person was on top of white person. Neither man ever could provide an identification; they could not even definitely say whether it was a man and a woman.
But both saw one attacker and one victim.
Three other witnesses saw things on West End Boulevard just before the attack itself.
Thomas Murphy and William Hooper both drove north on West End Boulevard about 6:20 a.m. on their way to work at the Hanes Dye and Finishing plant. [interactive witness map]
Hooper was the first to drive down the street, and he reported seeing two black men flanking a white woman. He said that one man was shaking his fist in the face of the woman, and the other man then stepped forward and kissed her on the lips. The woman did not appear to be struggling, he said, and he drove on to work.
Hooper, who never could pick anyone out of the photo lineups he was shown, later became a defense witness, insisting that Hunt was not one of the men he saw on the street that morning. He did provide descriptions that became composite drawings of both the men he saw.
Murphy drove down West End Boulevard just a couple of minutes later. He reported seeing one black man with a white woman, his arm around her neck and the two leaning into each other. He also said he saw a second black man about 100 feet farther down the block. He was a key prosecution witness, identifying the man he saw as Hunt and later saying that the second man he saw down the block was Gray.
In 1986, when the State Bureau of Investigation began its reinvestigation, a tip led them to another witness, a man named Kevey Coleman. He reported seeing two black men with a white woman near the corner of Sixth Street and West End Boulevard, and that they walked north down West End, eventually moving toward the park before he lost sight of them as he walked to his house on Chatham Road.
Coleman, who said he was not wearing his contact lenses that morning, initially could not identify either man. Later, he would testify that he thought that the two men looked like Hunt and Mitchell.
Brown's arrest contradicts all six witnesses. Four of the witnesses saw only one attacker, and of those who saw two attackers, one witness said that Hunt wasn't there and the other said that the attackers were Hunt and Mitchell, not leaving any room for Brown.
Another part of the prosecution's case that collapses in the wake of Brown's identification has to do with the presumed number of attackers, which authorities continued to change through the years.
During the original investigation conducted in 1984 and 1985, the police focused on Hunt, who was charged about a month after the crime. Officials said at the time they believed that one man committed the attack.
As the case progressed, however, authorities grew to believe that both Hunt and Mitchell were involved because they spent all their time together.
At Hunt's trials, especially the 1990 retrial in Catawba County, prosecutors presented a range of witnesses intended to destroy Hunt's alibi. Hunt had said he spent the night with Mitchell at the home of Cynthia McKey on Dunleith Avenue.
Prosecutors had numerous people testify to having seen Hunt and Mitchell elsewhere, not too far from the scene of Sykes' murder on the morning of Aug. 10:
• Two bail bondsmen testified that they saw Hunt and Mitchell around Liberty Street sometime between 1 and 4 a.m. with two women, one of whom was Margaret Crawford, a 14-year-old prostitute who was Hunt's girlfriend.
• Though her credibility was questioned - she didn't come forward until just before the second trial and was on probation for welfare fraud at the time - a woman named Debra Davis testified that she saw Hunt and Mitchell together outside Crystal Towers the morning of the murder.
• A man named Ed Reece testified that he saw Mitchell near Crystal Towers that morning.
None of these witnesses ever said anything about seeing another person. Before Friday, Brown's name had not been mentioned by any witness, nor had it appeared in any police reports in connection with Hunt and Mitchell.
As the years went by, the police and prosecutors began to believe that the attack may have been carried out by three people, and that Gray may have had some role. The prosecutor acknowledged in his closing argument at Hunt's second trial that Gray could have been involved; he said that it was irrelevant to Hunt's guilt. The jury found Hunt guilty of murder.
In 1994, DNA samples from Hunt, Mitchell and Gray came up negative when compared with the semen sample taken from Sykes. As a result, police and prosecutors began to theorize that there was another person, never identified by anyone, who was Sykes' attacker, and that this person was involved with Hunt and Mitchell, and possibly Gray. No witness, however, has ever reported seeing another person at the scene.
• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com
• Les Gura can be reached at 727-7234 or at lgura@wsjournal.com