Thursday, December 25, 2003
News of Darryl Hunt's release reached Deborah Sykes' mother yesterday as she was getting ready to leave work for the holidays.
Although another suspect has been charged with murder, rape, kidnapping and robbery in connection with the case, Evelyn Jefferson said that she still has too many questions about the case to believe that Hunt had no role in her daughter's slaying in August 1984.
"I just hope that the right one is prosecuted. I felt he was. Now I don't know what to believe," she said in a telephone interview yesterday afternoon near her home outside Chattanooga, Tenn. "I'm just in shock about the whole thing."
After DNA testing this month led them to a new suspect, the police reopened a case that Jefferson had long believed was closed.
Willard E. Brown, 43, was charged Monday. Authorities say that he confessed to the crime.
Brown said he acted alone, and he apologized to Hunt and to the Sykes family, according to the order authorizing Hunt's release.
Jefferson said she could not reconcile Brown's confession with the testimony she heard at both of Hunt's trials from witnesses who saw her daughter on the street with two men.
"As far as I'm concerned, it's still going to need some more investigation because everyone said there was more than one person. I can't get past that," she said. "If Darryl Hunt is proven to be innocent, I will be as sorry as anyone else that he was imprisoned for 19 years, but I still believe there's a lie somewhere,'' she said. "I believe he was in the area, and I believe he did know about it."
Sykes was raped and stabbed to death Aug. 10 1984, after parking her car a block away from the downtown Winston-Salem offices of The Sentinel, the afternoon newspaper that closed in 1985. She was 25, and had just moved back to North Carolina with her husband. Hunt was arrested a month later.
Jefferson has never believed that Hunt acted alone, but she said that until now she felt some closure in the case. Hunt was in prison. Sammy Mitchell, Hunt's friend who was also charged in Sykes' killing, is in prison after being convicted of another killing. And Johnny Gray, a witness who later became a suspect, died in prison.
Hunt's release and the charges against Brown have brought new pain, she said.
Jefferson said she is not persuaded that Brown acted alone, either.
"I suppose it will take another trial and let me see and hear the evidence and let me hear a little more about DNA," she said. "What they do now is not going to bring my daughter back. It's still another year at Christmas."
• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com