Sunday, January 4, 2004
Police, prosecutors and judges had several chances over the past 18 years to investigate the man now charged with the 1984 rape and murder of Deborah Sykes.
But a series of mistakes and decisions at all three levels of the criminal-justice system kept authorities from linking Willard E. Brown to the crime.
Those decisions deprived attorneys for Darryl Hunt, imprisoned for 18 years in the murder, of the opportunity to investigate Brown.
Had they had Brown's name, Hunt's attorneys may have been able to discover that he was not in prison the day Sykes was killed, as authorities believed, or they may have asked, beginning in 1994, that his DNA be tested, as they did with other suspects in the case.
"It's amazing to get that close and miss it," said James Ferguson, a Charlotte lawyer who represented Hunt at his second trial. Mark Rabil, Hunt's attorney of 19 years, said, "There were numerous opportunities along the way where Brown could have been looked at and Darryl Hunt could have been exonerated if they had not been wedded to a theory and their primary suspect."
Even though Rabil knew about a second attack with similarities to the Sykes case in February 1985, when Hunt was in prison charged with murder, Rabil learned Brown's name only upon his arrest two weeks ago, on Dec. 22. Hunt was released on bond Dec. 24, after DNA testing matched Brown to the semen evidence in the Sykes case.
Hunt's release order says that Brown confessed to investigators that he acted alone when he raped and killed Sykes. A hearing is set for Feb. 6 to decide whether Hunt's conviction should be overturned.
So far, District Attorney Tom Keith has said, the evidence that investigators have should lead to Hunt's exoneration.
In the meantime, Winston-Salem police are studying their role in the investigation.
"We are looking at the case to see if there were any opportunities that may have been overlooked at the time," Police Chief Linda Davis said.
The State Bureau of Investigation has taken over the Sykes murder case at Davis' request, but her department is continuing to investigate Brown as a possible suspect in unsolved rapes of the past 18 years, she said.
One expert said he wouldn't be surprised if the police solve some of those cases.
"Typically, this is the classic serial rapist," said Greg McCrary, a retired FBI agent based in Virginia who specializes in profiling sex offenders.
"Any time he's free on the street ... you have to consider him a suspect."
First clue
Brown first came to police attention as a possible suspect in the Sykes murder after another woman was attacked on her way to work downtown on Feb. 2, 1985, six months after Sykes was raped and stabbed to death.
A man accosted the second victim, a 20-year-old employee of Integon Corp., just after she parked in the company lot on Poplar Street, two blocks from where Sykes was attacked in a park on West End Boulevard. The man forced the second victim back to her car at gunpoint, and made her drive to the Flamingo Drive-In on Old Greensboro Road, where he raped her and slashed her face 12 times.
Sources said that she was able to grab the knife and a knit glove before escaping to a nearby apartment complex. She later identified Brown from a photo line-up and a live line-up, but declined to prosecute. Brown has not been charged with her rape.
By February 1985, Hunt was in jail awaiting trial in the Sykes murder. Criminal profilers say that the Sykes murder and the second rape were so similar that investigators should have reconsidered the charges against Hunt and looked for a suspect who might be responsible for both attacks.
"The danger is in thinking it couldn't be linked because we've got this guy. You've got to always be objective, and be open-minded and not get tunnel vision,'' McCrary said.
"When cases go bad at the beginning is when investigators have an iron-clad idea of what happened or they're locked into a theory as to what occurred and didn't occur.
"It should definitely have been a red flag. You have two possibilities. You don't have the right guy. The other potential is a copycat kind of thing. It isn't anything you can ignore," McCrary said.
Carter Crump, a retired detective who was handling the second rape case when Brown was identified, declined to be interviewed for this article, saying that investigators had asked him not to speak.
In a November interview, Crump said he considered that the two cases might be linked, but the eyewitnesses in Hunt's case, now discredited by Brown's confession, described two attackers ranging in height from 5 foot 9 to 6 feet tall. Crump said that Brown, who is about 5 foot 6, didn't match that description.
Crump said he also ruled out a connection because there was only one attacker in the Integon rape. Police believed that two men attacked Sykes, even though only one of the five eyewitnesses who had come forward by then had said that there were two men at the scene with Sykes.
Though Brown has now confessed to acting alone, the police in 1985 gave more credence to the eyewitnesses than they did to the possibility that the same man identified by the second victim may also have killed Sykes.
At some point in the investigation of Brown, the police came to believe, mistakenly, that Brown was in prison on the day that Sykes was killed, Aug. 10, 1984. Prison records list Sept. 26, 1984, as the day he was released from parole and June 14, 1984, as the day he was released from the Forsyth Correctional Center.
Somehow, the parole date was confused as the date of Brown's release from prison.
Davis said that police are still trying to figure out from old records when and how the mistake was made.
Rabil said he looked into the Integon rape in 1985 after reading about it in the newspaper, but the police would not give him the name of the victim or the suspect.
"We spent a lot of time trying to find out who was involved in the Integon rape," Rabil said. "We certainly never had the name Willard Brown."
Second probe
In 1986, the SBI began its investigation of the Sykes murder and Crump was one of two city police officers assigned to help. Assistant Chief Mike McCoy, who retired recently, said in November that he asked the new team of investigators to look at any similar crimes that might be linked to the Sykes murder.
Police and SBI agents interviewed Brown in March 1986. Police declined to release that report because the investigation against Brown is continuing. The SBI also declined to comment.
Davis said that Brown denied any role in the Sykes murder and that he was dropped as a suspect.
"Had they found out he was out of prison, unless we had someone put him at the scene in the Sykes case, we couldn't have gone anywhere with it," said Eric Saunders, the assistant district attorney who has handled the Hunt case since 1993.
"I just don't think, even if we had known he was out of prison, there would have been anything we could do unless someone identified him," Saunders said.
It's also not clear what testing was done with the evidence in the Integon rape. Saunders said that police told him that the knife was tested but that the only blood found on it came from the victim.
"I believe all that was checked and nothing came from that," he said. "I believe that's why the victim chose not to prosecute, because it would have been her word against his."
The victim declined to discuss the case, saying she wants to give the police and SBI agents time to finish their work.
The evidence in her case was destroyed by the police in 1988, as was then routine with cases considered closed. The records no longer specify the evidence, but presumably it included the knife, the glove and any semen, hairs and other evidence collected during the medical exam after the attack.
Failed appeals
Hunt's first conviction in the Sykes case was overturned in 1989, and in 1990 he was tried for a second time. His attorneys asked Superior Court Judge Forrest Ferrell to release the full SBI investigative report, which included the 1986 interview with Brown.
A Supreme Court decision, Brady vs. Maryland, entitles defendants to police records that might help them prove their innocence, either with evidence that impeaches a witness or evidence that leads to another suspect in the case.
Prosecutors argued for a limited release of material, and Ferrell went along. Much of the SBI report remained sealed.
Notes that appear to have been made by the prosecutor at the 1990 trial label the Brown interview "obviously not exculpatory." Neither of the prosecutors, Surry County District Attorney Dean Bowman nor his assistant, James Yeatts, could be reached last week.
In November, when the Journal published an eight-part series about the Sykes case that raised questions about tactics by the police and prosecutors, both men declined to comment.
It remains difficult to reconstruct the records in the case, which fill about a dozen boxes in the Forsyth Clerk of Court's storage room, so it was not possible to determine with certainty whether either interview was ever released. The clerk, Hunt's attorney and the Journal were unable to find a copy of either the police interview or the SBI interview with Brown from 1986, and Hunt's attorneys said they don't believe that either report was ever released.
"I think all of that's a reflection of the prosecution's attitude at the time," Ferguson said. "They had already developed their theory and they weren't interested in pursuing anything that didn't fit that theory.
"That's why it's so important in cases like this to turn over that kind of material to the defense. We had much greater incentive to look more closely because we always thought it was someone else."
The case against Hunt, and his friend Sammy Mitchell, who was charged with murder in 1990 but never tried, has always relied on eyewitness testimony. Police never found any physical evidence to link Hunt to the Sykes murder. But he was convicted again at his second trial in 1990 and again sentenced to life in prison.
A third judge reviewed the case against Hunt in 1993, as part of Hunt's appeals for a third trial.
Judge Melzer Morgan read all 3,000 pages in the 1986 SBI investigation and dozens of other police reports. He released some portions of the file, but sealed the remainder of the SBI report. The N.C. Supreme Court, in a 4-3 decision, and the U.S. Court of Appeals have all upheld his ruling.
Morgan could not be reached for comment last week. He declined an earlier request for an interview, citing the judicial code of conduct, which prohibits judges from discussing pending cases.
Rabil said that the reports of the interviews with Brown are another example of information that prosecutors withheld from Hunt's defense, in spite of the requirements under Brady.
"If we had his name, we could have tracked him down and attempted to get his DNA from a Coke can or a cigarette butt," Rabil said. "There's certainly a missed opportunity and a breach of the Brady obligation."
DNA testing in 1994 and again in 1995 showed that Hunt was not the rapist in the Sykes case, but Morgan denied him a third trial, arguing that he could have participated in the crime even if he wasn't the man who raped her and ejaculated. The higher courts upheld that ruling, too.
In 1995, a private investigator for Hunt collected cigarette butts from two other suspects in the case. DNA testing ruled out both men as the rapist. At Rabil's request, two other suspects were tested that year by the state, and were also ruled out.
Brown wasn't tested until last month. Judge Anderson Cromer of Superior Court ordered the testing in April in response to a motion by Hunt asking the state to compare the semen evidence in the Sykes case against state and federal databases of convicted felons.
It took seven months and the threat of a contempt citation to get the SBI to act on Cromer's order. The crime lab found a close match with one of Brown's brothers, which led them to Brown, whose DNA is a perfect match with the semen in the Sykes case, according to the order authorizing Hunt's release.
In November, Saunders had been vehement that the DNA evidence was not the key to solving the Sykes case once and for all.
"After reading the reports, there's no doubt in my mind that Sammy Mitchell and Darryl Hunt committed this crime," he said.
Then Brown confessed and Hunt was released.
"It appears as if I was wrong," Saunders said last week.
• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com