Monday, March 15, 2004
A new review by the city manager's office of the 1984 rape and murder of Deborah Sykes will focus on mistakes made by the police, including how the man now charged with the crime was not identified earlier even though he had been interviewed and was suspected in a similar crime.
The probe will be the second by the city manager's office under the direction of Bill Stuart, 19 years after an original investigation that was critical of how the police department handled the case. A detective in the case was demoted and two supervisors drew sanctions after the 1985 investigation by Stuart's office.
Lee Garrity, the assistant city manager for public safety, will explain what officials hope to accomplish with the new review during the public-safety committee's meeting at 5:30 p.m. today in City Hall. Garrity, Police Chief Pat Norris, Assistant Chief Louis Saunders and Julie Risher, the police department attorney, will oversee the review, which is expected to be done by October, Garrity said.
"We are wide open at this point to see what happened," he said. "If things weren't done right, we need to deal with it."
Darryl Hunt was released from prison Dec. 24, having served 18 years after being convicted twice in the death of Sykes. He was exonerated in February after police charged a new suspect, Willard E. Brown, with rape and murder. DNA taken from Brown matched a semen sample from the Sykes case, investigators said in the court papers supporting Hunt's release.
Authorities say that Brown, as he was being booked, confessed to killing Sykes and acting alone. He had been identified by the victim of a 1985 rape downtown that bore similarities to the Sykes case, but he was never charged. Police said that the woman attacked in the second case did not want to prosecute.
In both cases, a young white woman was accosted after parking her car downtown and stabbed repeatedly after being raped. Sykes was killed in a small park on West End Boulevard. The second victim, who was forced to drive to a remote location, was able to escape.
Brown was interviewed in connection with the Sykes case when it was reinvestigated in March 1986 after Hunt had been convicted in his first trial. Brown denied involvement in the Sykes murder. It remains unclear why he was dropped as a suspect. One officer has said he checked prison records at the time and was told that Brown was in prison on the day that Sykes was killed; police now dispute that a mix-up of dates led them to drop Brown as a suspect.
Garrity's report will examine what investigators did to determine a connection between the Sykes homicide in 1984 and the 1985 rape. The report also will focus on the duties of the police assigned by the prosecutor's office when preparing for Hunt's second trial in 1989.
"My last understanding was that they (the police) didn't start from scratch during the reinvestigation," Garrity said.
As part of the city's review of the Hunt case, Council Member Vivian Burke, the chairwoman of the public-safety committee, also has called for the city to provide information about the police investigation into the 1983 homicide of Arthur Wilson. Wilson was robbed and beaten to death Sept. 17, 1983, on Claremont Avenue.
No one was charged in his death until April 1986 when a man named Merritt Williams Drayton, who had been picked up on another homicide, told police that Sammy Mitchell and Hunt had beaten Wilson to death. Drayton later said he, too, had been involved and pleaded guilty.
Mitchell was found guilty in the Wilson murder in October 1986 and sentenced to 50 years in prison. Hunt was convicted in October 1987, but was acquitted in a March 1990 retrial.
Burke said that several people have mentioned concerns about Mitchell in light of the developments in the Hunt case. Additional questions recently raised by the Winston-Salem Journal led Burke to ask Garrity to include the case in the city's review, she said.
"So we can get everything out there now," Burke said. "We need to come to some closure on this with the facts. Then there will be no shadows hanging over anyone."
The review is being done in- house because using a private agency would be too costly, Garrity said.
Garrity said he intends today to listen to members of the public-safety committee, Hunt's attorneys and members of the Committee on Racial Healing, an 11-member group formed by Mayor Allen Joines to talk about the issue of mistrust of the police department and criminal justice system.
"We can talk all we want,'' said Burke, who asked for the new review and who also had been the committee chairwoman during the first review in 1985. "But if we don't get the truth, then we're in the same situation we're in with Darryl Hunt."