Tuesday, January 6, 2004
A judge released yesterday a 1986 police interview with Willard E. Brown, the man whose arrest and confession in a downtown Winston-Salem killing brought freedom last month to Darryl Hunt, who had been serving a life sentence.
The report is one of hundreds of documents that Hunt's attorneys tried but failed to obtain from prosecutors and the courts during the 19 years they spent trying to prove their client's innocence.
Winston-Salem police interviewed Brown in 1986 in connection with the 1984 rape and killing of Deborah Sykes. According to the report, Brown denied any involvement in the killing.
The two-page report raises new questions. It does not acknowledge that Brown was a suspect in a second downtown rape and stabbing, six months after Sykes was raped and stabbed to death. Nor does it indicate whether police questioned him about two similar crimes.
After that interview, police dropped Brown as a suspect in the Sykes case. Brown has never been charged in the second incident.
The police did not investigate Brown's role in the Sykes killing again until last month, when court-ordered DNA testing led them to him. After a close match with a member of Brown's family, investigators tested Brown's DNA, which a court order said was an exact match with the DNA evidence in the Sykes killing. The court order, which allowed Hunt's release on bond, also said that Brown confessed to killing Sykes and said he acted alone.
Judge Melzer Morgan of Forsyth Superior Court released the report of the 1986 interview with Brown in the wake of a story Sunday in the Winston-Salem Journal. The story looked at how decisions by police, prosecutors and judges delayed Brown's arrest, and kept Hunt imprisoned since 1985.
Morgan declined to discuss why he was now releasing the report on Brown.
"I just thought it was appropriate," he said.
The police interviewed Brown in 1986 as part of an SBI reinvestigation of the Sykes killing after Hunt's conviction the year before. Two Winston-Salem detectives assisted with that investigation.
According to the report, Detective Carter Crump was showing SBI agent Dan Stone around 14th Street in March 1986 when they came upon two other detectives searching a house for Brown, who was wanted on an unrelated charge of breaking and entering.
Police found Brown hiding in the attic and arrested him. Crump interviewed him at police headquarters downtown about the Sykes killing.
The report gives no indication of what Crump asked him, nor what police did to substantiate what Brown said, except to say, "He denied any participation in this incident."
During the interview, Brown told Crump that he knew of Hunt and the co-defendant in the Sykes' killing, a man named Sammy Mitchell. Mitchell was charged in 1990, but has never been tried. He is in prison in connection with another, unrelated killing. Brown denied any association with Hunt or Mitchell.
Brown did say that 10 years earlier he had tried to shoot Mitchell over an argument Mitchell had with one of his brothers.
The report says that Crump interviewed Brown in connection with other crimes, and refers to a Crime Stoppers tip, but other than that it does not explain how Brown came to the attention of the police department, or why police were looking at him in 1986 in the Sykes killing.
It does not indicate whether police checked his prison record. Police have said that they checked the record, and mistakenly learned that he was in prison the day Sykes was killed.
Crump, who is retired, declined to comment yesterday because the case against Brown is pending. Police Chief Linda Davis could not be reached for comment.
Hunt's attorney, Mark Rabil, said that in spite of the omissions, the report would have helped with Hunt's defense over the years.
"It was information that should have been disclosed because it pointed to another suspect," Rabil said.
• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com