Saturday, February 07, 2004
Investigative reports from the February 1985 rape of a woman downtown show that police either hid information
about similarities to the August 1984 rape and murder of Deborah Sykes or missed an obvious connection between
the cases, an attorney for Darryl Hunt said yesterday.
Mark Rabil, Hunt's longtime attorney, talked about the police work on the 1985 case a day after Hunt's conviction was overturned by a Superior Court judge. Hunt's exoneration came six weeks after DNA testing led to the arrest of another man, Willard E. Brown, in the Sykes murder. Brown was a suspect in the February 1985 rape.
After reviewing the police reports in the 1985 rape, Rabil said that the information available at the time should at least have led to Hunt's release 10 years ago, when DNA testing first ruled him out as the rapist in the case, because the police could have tested Brown's DNA at that time.
Brown confessed to Sykes' murder Dec. 22 when confronted with DNA evidence that linked him to the evidence
in the case. He said he acted alone and that Hunt had no role in the crime.
In a motion filed Friday, Rabil said that police should have known from their own reports as early as May 1986 that Brown's blood type matched the evidence in the Sykes case. They ignored that evidence, he said, even though they considered Brown a suspect in the Sykes murder.
Rabil said he could not release the reports because Superior Court Judge Anderson Cromer ordered them sealed during Friday's hearing. But Rabil said that the reports reveal key points about the way that police failures led to Hunt's extra years in prison:
• The investigation of the 1985 rape coincided with the second investigation of the Sykes murder, requested by the city manager because of what he called shoddy police work in the first investigation.
• The 1985 rape investigation was closed, and the evidence destroyed, in September 1989, four months after the N.C. Supreme Court ordered a second trial for Hunt, and just as police were investigating the Sykes case for the third time.
• Police interviewed Brown in March 1986 in connection with the Sykes murder, but the report filed in that case makes no mention of the evidence police had gathered against him in the 1985 rape. The report in question was never turned over to defense attorneys, and was not released publicly until last month, after a Winston-Salem Journal story questioned why it had never been considered as critical evidence.
Rabil said he can only conclude that police either intentionally kept the files in the two cases separate to protect their case against Hunt, who had been convicted of murder in 1985, or missed the obvious.
"Even the SBI agents and police officers, whose job it was to completely reinvestigate the case, still had tunnel vision," Rabil said. "If we had had this information in 1993, we would have had DNA testing done and it would have led to the identification of Willard Brown and hopefully Darryl would have gotten out 10 years ago."
District Attorney Tom Keith said yesterday that he asked the court to seal the reports because he doesn't want to jeopardize the case against Brown. Brown is charged with the Sykes murder, but a court date has not been set. He has not been charged in the 1985 rape.
Keith declined to discuss the details of the investigation.
"Just knowing how law enforcement works and how myopic we get, I just think that's the way things work out sometimes," he said.
Sykes, a 25-year-old newspaper copy editor, was killed on her way to work in downtown Winston-Salem on Aug. 10, 1984. She parked her car on West End Boulevard by an overgrown park about 6 that morning. Her body was found behind a wooden fence later that day. She had been raped and stabbed 16 times.
Six months later, another young white woman was attacked two blocks away, on Poplar Street, after parking her car and walking to Integon, now GMAC Corp. A man forced her at gunpoint back to her car and ordered her to drive to a deserted dead-end road off Old Greensboro Road. There, he raped her and slashed her in the face 12 times. She was able to wrest the knife from him, and fled to a nearby apartment complex.
Rabil said that officers and supervisors who investigated the Integon rape all were involved at points in the investigations of the Sykes murder, including Carter Crump, R.C. Spoon, Teresa Hicks, Randy Weavil, G.C. Cornatzer, Bill Miller and Mike McCoy.
Rabil said that police do not mention any of the similarities in the reports.
"At least some of them had to draw a connection," Rabil said. "Any good homicide cop would draw a connection...."
In fact, the similarities between the two crimes formed the basis of Keith's motion Friday to vacate the murder conviction against Hunt.
"Brown's admission that he acted alone is supported by the striking similarities between Mrs. Sykes' rape/murder and the Integon rape felonious assault where there is no question there is only one assailant," Keith's motion reads.
Crump said yesterday, as he has before, that he did connect the two crimes. But he said he checked prison records and mistakenly learned that Brown was incarcerated on the day that Sykes was killed.
"If I've got two similar cases going on two blocks away, don't you think I would have followed up until I find out that he was in jail? That's what I did," he said. "If I didn't document it, that's an error on my part."
The question of when police checked Brown's prison record remains in dispute. Keith's motion said that police only checked Brown's record in November 2003, in response to questions from the Journal. Rabil said that the police reports do not mention Brown's prison record.
Crump interviewed Brown in March 1986 in connection with the Sykes case. According to the report that was released last month, Brown denied any role in the crime.
The report, part of a yearlong SBI investigation into the Sykes murder, does not mention that Brown was a suspect in a similar crime. Nor does it mention that his blood type matched the blood type in the semen evidence in the Sykes case. Crump said he does not remember why he left those details out of the report.
Rabil has long contended that prosecutors withheld information from Hunt's attorneys that could have been helpful in his defense.
"I think this report was carefully written by the police in such a way that any prosecutor or judge who might be reading the report would conclude that it was not something that had to be turned over to the defense attorney as exculpatory," Rabil said. "They would do that, in my opinion, to hide the possible connection between the Sykes murder and the February 1985 Integon rape."
Rabil said that the reports show that police had Brown's blood type tested in May 1986 after the victim identified him in a lineup at the county jail. His blood was type O, which matched the semen evidence in the Sykes case.
Police never had any physical evidence to link Hunt, whose blood is type B, to the Sykes rape. Her blood also was type O, and the serologist testified at Hunt's trial that her fluids must have masked the blood type of her rapist.
• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com