Thursday, February 19, 2004
District Attorney Tom Keith of Forsyth County says he believes that one man raped Deborah Sykes and that the same man killed her. And that man is not Darryl Hunt.
Which is why today, when he meets with Gov. Mike Easley to oppose clemency for death-row inmate George Page, Keith will also deliver court papers in support of a pardon for Hunt.
"I will tell him, 'Willard Brown did it, and Mr. Hunt did not,'" Keith said.
Hunt's case has never been so simple. For nearly 20 years, Sykes' rape and killing and Hunt's imprisonment raised tensions among blacks and whites. Even his exoneration this month by a Superior Court judge left a sense of bitterness and betrayal.
In spite of Keith's certainty, many people - including Sykes' family and some of Keith's own staff - cling to the idea that Hunt had something to do with the brutal stabbing death of Sykes, a young newspaperwoman, in downtown Winston-Salem.
For 10 years, Keith, too, argued Hunt's guilt. Although Keith wasn't elected until after Hunt had already been twice convicted of murder, his office got into the case in 1994 to oppose a bid for a third trial based upon DNA evidence that showed that Hunt was not Sykes' rapist. It wasn't until last December, when DNA testing identified Brown and Brown confessed that Keith said he began to realize that he and so many others may have been wrong.
Hunt's supporters say that for all Keith's talk now, he should have been able to see the evidence for what it was far earlier.
"If he had a passion for justice, he would have done it 10 years ago rather than letting his office and the state attorney general's office continue to argue against fairness for Darryl," said the Rev. Carlton Eversley, the pastor of Dellabrook Presbyterian Church and a member of Hunt's defense committee.
Keith, in his fourth term as district attorney, said that the Hunt case is about 20 years of accumulated errors by police, prosecutors and even defense attorneys. It all led, Keith said in his first extended interview about the case since Hunt's exoneration, to what he calls a catastrophe.
"I wish I'd taken a different view, but I didn't know then what I know now," he said.
Case unravels
The state's case against Hunt unraveled with a phone call to Keith on Dec. 19.
The state crime lab had been working for two weeks on matching the DNA in the Sykes case with its database of convicted offenders. Investigators had a close match with one of Brown's brothers, which led them to Brown.
Police Detective Mike Rowe called Keith with the news: Brown's DNA matched the evidence in the Sykes case.
"It was like one of those 'Oh (expletive)' moments, because now there is a substantial probability that we have convicted the wrong man," Keith said. "I didn't sleep very well. I didn't want to wait until Monday to find out if he acted alone. I wanted to know then. You know how I am. I'm compulsive. I want the answer."
Keith's public words that night, however, were very different.
"We've all known that there's a third person since 1994," he said, resurrecting the long-held theory by police and prosecutors that two or more people were involved in the attack on Sykes. "This is that third person."
Keith says now that he meant the remark as one of several possibilities, with Hunt's innocence being another. "I just shoot off the top of my head sometimes."
But his comment that night set off a round of criticism by Hunt's attorney and members of the Darryl Hunt Defense Committee, who throughout the weekend called for Hunt's immediate release and an outside investigation. Within days, the police department yielded control to the State Bureau of Investigation, though Rowe stayed on the case.
On Dec. 21, the Winston-Salem Journal published a story that identified Brown as the suspect. The next day, Rowe and SBI agent Scott Williams charged Brown with murder, rape, robbery and kidnapping, and took him to the jail's booking area to be fingerprinted and photographed.
Up to that point, Brown had denied any role in the crime. The pressure of the moment broke him, said Keith, who related the conversation that followed:
"I'm sorry," Brown told the detectives.
"What for?" Rowe asked.
For everything, Brown said: Sykes' death, Hunt's wrongful conviction. Everything.
"It poured out," Keith said. "He just kept talking and talking."
Although Brown told investigators that he acted alone, Keith said he needed proof before doing anything about Hunt, who had been imprisoned 18 years for the crime. Keith said he spent the rest of December and January trying to reconstruct what happened on West End Boulevard the morning that Sykes was killed, Aug. 10, 1984.
Publicly, Keith continued to send mixed messages, often angering Hunt's supporters by giving the impression that he thought that Hunt may somehow have been involved. Actually, Keith knew very little about the Sykes case. He admitted that he had never before read the court record, even though he frequently had recited the state's multiple-attacker theory as if it were his own. It was about midnight on Dec. 23, Keith said, when Rowe and Williams called him from Raleigh to tell him that they could find no evidence in police or prison records that Brown and Hunt ever had known one another.
Hunt was released the next day, Christmas Eve, pending a Feb. 6 hearing in order for investigators to substantiate their case against Brown.
Unreliable witnesses
When Keith took office in 1991, Hunt had just been convicted for the second time, and his attorneys were preparing their next round of appeals.
In 1993, when the N.C. Supreme Court ordered hearings on new evidence in Hunt's case, Keith assigned his top assistant, Eric Saunders, to defend against a motion alleging that the state had withheld evidence.
Like his boss, Saunders never read the entire file, only the documents in question. And like his boss, Saunders continued to argue the theory that more than one man had attacked Sykes.
Keith said that when he reviewed the case files, that theory fell apart.
"When I read some of this stuff, I had no idea some of these witnesses were as weak as they were," he said.
Keith rejects the notion that he might have dismissed the charges against Hunt back in 1994 if he had taken the time to read the case then. In 1994, DNA evidence showed that Hunt was not the rapist, but back then there was no confession from Brown and no DNA match.
Keith's motion to vacate Hunt's conviction analyzes the three witnesses for the state who saw the attack itself. All three reported seeing Sykes with one man, not multiple attackers as Keith's office had argued.
Keith said he didn't give much credence to the two witnesses at the scene who said they saw Sykes with two men. One of those witnesses, Kevey Coleman, didn't come forward until two years after the crime and wasn't wearing his contact lenses the morning of the crime. The second witness, William Hooper, had always said that Hunt was not one of those he saw on the street.
Keith also dismissed the secondary witnesses that others had long found so persuasive.
The most prominent of those was the downtown hotel clerk who reported finding bloody towels in a restroom trash container after a man he identified as Hunt used it the morning of Aug. 10. Keith said that witness, Roger Weaver, was no more believable than the two hotel security guards - one of whom had been in the restroom with the man - who were never able to identify that man as Hunt.
Keith also studied the crime- scene photos and walked the grounds where Sykes' body was found. His analysis contradicted a theory that the medical examiner, Lew Stringer, reached at the scene the day of the murder.
A glass-strewn dirt path ran between the spot where investigators found Sykes' body and where they found her shoes. Stringer said he expected to find shards of glass in her feet, and when he didn't, he theorized that she had been carried. And because she was 5 foot 10, he figured that at least two men had to have been involved.
In the crime-scene photos, Keith noticed that there was no broken glass in the grass alongside the dirt path. "If you walked on the path you'd get cut feet, but if you walked on the grass you wouldn't," he said.
No other prosecutor had thought of that simple explanation.
Dealing with family
Keith said he had hoped that the evidence would convince members of Sykes' family of Hunt's innocence. But he didn't set aside much time for them to get used to that possibility.
Sykes' mother, Evelyn Jefferson, and her husband, Doug Sykes, arrived here from their home outside Chattanooga, Tenn., just in time for the Feb. 6 hearing. Keith had spoken briefly with Jefferson on the phone the day before. Less than an hour before the hearing was to begin, Saunders met with the family to explain the facts behind the motion to overturn Hunt's conviction.
Jefferson was not convinced. When the court gave her a chance to speak, her hatred for the man she still believes killed her daughter came out.
"I have saved up my thoughts for 19 years, understanding that he would have a parole hearing in 2005," she said last week. "What I wanted to do in court that day is say what I would have said to the parole commission if I had a chance."
In court, she and Doug Sykes both said that exonerating Hunt would be a travesty. Their words, played in the news as one of the most emotional moments of the hearing, did much to reinforce the idea that Keith wanted to dispel - that in spite of the evidence, Hunt took part in Sykes' murder.
Keith said he knows that some people will continue to ignore the evidence and hold on to that belief. He acknowledged that he contributed to the public's divided opinion about Hunt when he called Brown "the third man" on the day that he got word about the DNA match. But his words for Easley, he said, will be unequivocal.
A pardon from Easley would entitle Hunt to compensation of about $360,000 for his wrongful conviction. Easley 's office is not saying how quickly a ruling might come after Keith delivers the court order and his motion supporting a pardon.
Keith said he believes that Hunt deserves the money.
"It is important that the system make amends for the system," he said.
• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com