Thursday, January 1, 2004
One of the unsung heroes behind Darryl Hunt's release is a 73-year-old woman who never let go of a 19-year-old hunch.
Her daughter-in-law was abducted Feb. 2, 1985, on her way to work in downtown Winston-Salem and raped, six months after Deborah Sykes had been raped and stabbed to death on her way to work at The Sentinel newspaper's downtown offices.
Hunt was convicted twice in the Sykes' murder and served nearly 18 years in prison for a crime that another man has now confessed to. The new suspect in Sykes' murder is the man who the second victim had identified as her attacker. But the woman decided not to prosecute, and her case was closed.
The mother-in-law of the second victim said she knew that the police had arrested the wrong man all along.
"It was just a feeling I got and I never could shake it," she said last week. "I told (my daughter-in-law) too, when they find Debbie Sykes' killer they're going to find the one that did it to you."
Police charged Willard E. Brown last month in the Sykes murder, after DNA testing matched him to the semen evidence in that case.
The second victim's mother-in-law played a role.
After reading the first installment of an eight-part series about the Hunt case in the Winston-Salem Journal in November, she called the newspaper. She didn't want the connection to her daughter-in-law's case to be overlooked yet again.
"I didn't do it for no other reason than that it needed to be told," she said. "I just thought it's not right for a man to be staying in jail if there's something I can do about it."
Journal policy protects the identity of rape victims, so neither the name of the victim nor her mother-in-law is being used. The victim declined to be interviewed, saying that she wants to give the police and the State Bureau of Investigation time to complete their work.
The Journal followed the tip from the mother-in-law, and wrote about the second rape and the possible connection to the Hunt case in the final installment of its series in November.
Hunt's supporters say that without the renewed attention on Brown brought about by the phone call from the mother-in-law, it is possible that Brown may have slipped away once again.
"What a saint," said Mark Rabil, Hunt's attorney for 19 years.
Rabil said that he, too, was intrigued by the similarities between the two crimes back in 1985, but he could never get the police to release any information to him. As the years passed, he had forgotten about the second rape until the mother-in-law raised it again through her tip to the newspaper.
Hunt was released from prison Christmas Eve on bond. A hearing is scheduled for Feb. 6 on whether his conviction should be overturned.
The police had recognized the similarities between the two crimes and interviewed Brown in March 1986 as part of the re-investigation of the Sykes murder, but at that time Brown denied any involvement in her murder.
Police could not clarify this point, but according to law-enforcement sources, the records division at the N.C. Department of Correction mistakenly told police in 1986 that Brown was in custody the day that Sykes was killed, and police dropped him as a suspect. He has not been charged in the second rape.
Sykes was raped and stabbed 16 times shortly after 6 a.m. Aug. 10, 1984. Six months later, the 20-year-old woman was attacked about two blocks away, outside the Integon Building, at the corner of Fifth and Poplar streets.
A man forced her at gunpoint to drive her car to a drive-in theater on Old Greensboro Road, more than a mile away, where he raped her and slashed her face 12 times. She managed to escape to a nearby apartment complex, and the man fled.
The woman's mother-in-law followed the Hunt case in the newspaper, furious that the police were ignoring the similarities between the two crimes.
"There was just too much that was the same. If I could put it together, why couldn't law enforcement?" she said.
"In my opinion they let (Hunt) down and just like they did Debbie Sykes because the murderer has been out there 19 years on account of they would look no other way except Darryl Hunt,'' she said. "They didn't want to admit they were wrong, and it looks like now they're going to have to."
• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com