Tuesday, February 10, 2004
On the first day of court after the release of Darryl Hunt, a Forsyth County grand jury formally charged Willard E. Brown in connection with a string of crimes involving the 1984 death of Deborah Sykes.
The grand jury indicted Brown on charg-es of first-degree murder, rape, kidnapping and robbery, the same charges Winston-Salem police charged him with in December. The grand jury's action moves the case to Forsyth Superior Court. A court date has not been set.
Hunt spent 18 years in prison for Sykes' death. Judge Anderson Cromer of Forsyth Superior Court cleared him of the charges Friday. Cromer agreed with investigators that there was no evidence connecting Hunt with Brown.
Pete Clary, Brown's public defender, said he wasn't surprised by the indictments.
"It's exactly what I expected," he said.
Eric Saunders, the assistant district attorney who is expected to prosecute Brown, declined to comment.
A grand jury is unlike a jury that decides the guilt or innocence of a defendant. The 12-member panel hears only one side of the case - the investigators' side - and decides if the charges are warranted.
Brown has appeared briefly in court only once since he was charged. However, much of the case against him has been made public because of the effort to free Hunt.
For example, investigators have already revealed that Brown has admitted to the crimes and told investigators he acted alone. Mike Rowe of the Winston-Salem Police Department and Scott Williams of the State Bureau of Investigation testified Friday that there was no evidence linking Hunt to Brown. According to evidence at Hunt's hearing, there is a 546-trillion-to-one chance that the DNA match on a semen sample taken from Sykes' body could match another black male from North Carolina.
Cromer ordered the DNA testing in April, and the results closely matched one of Brown's brothers. Investigators began looking at Willard Brown because he had been a suspect in another downtown rape six months after Sykes was killed.
The DNA taken from Sykes matched Brown's DNA. Brown was in the Forsyth County Jail on a misdemeanor probation violation charge when he was charged with Sykes' death.
Although DNA testing done in 1994 and again in 1995 proved that Hunt was not the source of the semen found on Sykes, state and federal appellate courts turned down his requests for a new trial.
The courts said that the DNA evidence did not rule him out as Sykes' killer or even a participant in her sexual assault.