Friday, February 03, 2006
A woman speaking publicly for the first time since she was attacked 21 years ago said yesterday that a Winston-Salem police detective steered her away from linking her assault to the earlier murder of Deborah Sykes, for which the police already had a man - Darryl Hunt - in custody.
The woman, who was raped and slashed 12 times in an early-morning attack with strong similarities to the one in which Sykes was killed, identified Willard Brown as the suspect in her case.
Brown confessed to killing Sykes in 2004, after Hunt had served 18 years in prison for the crime. His confession came not long after authorities matched his DNA to a semen sample taken from Sykes.
The woman, on her way to her job at the Integon Corp. (now GMAC) was kidnapped on Poplar Street downtown, taken to a field and raped on the morning of Feb. 2, 1985.
Sykes had been raped and killed on her way to her job at The Sentinel on Aug. 10, 1984.
The woman, who told her story to the Deborah Sykes Citizens Administrative Review Committee, said she survived in part because she tucked her chin down to prevent her throat from being cut.
"It is time for me to speak," she said.
Soon after she reported her attack to police, she said, she thought of Sykes's murder, and mentioned to detectives her sense that her case was similar.
Sykes was raped and stabbed 16 times in a park on West End Boulevard, less than three blocks from where the woman was grabbed.
The woman said that Winston-Salem police Detective Bill Miller told her that police already had their suspects in the Sykes case, and "they didn't want to do anything to raise doubts about the one in jail," she said.
Her decision not to press charges against Brown has puzzled many people involved in Hunt's defense.
Yesterday, the woman explained why she had not pursued charges. She said that soon after her attack, she identified Brown in a lineup that was done by taking her on an elevator in the Forsyth County Jail to view the lineup through a small window.
The woman said she gasped when she saw Brown.
"My knees became weak. I thought I would throw up," she said.
She said she was 80 percent to 85 percent sure that it was Brown, but that she did not want to press charges against a man who could be innocent.
Later, she would ask the police to do a voice comparison test, in which she could hear Brown speak to make sure that he had the same deep, gruff voice as the man who attacked her.
She said that Detective Car-ter Crump told her that if she could not press charges, then there weren't the resources to do the voice comparison.
So, because she could not get enough evidence to be sure, charges were never filed, she said.
The second attack came back to public light in November 2003 when the Winston-Salem Journal published an eight-part series about the Sykes case that examined weaknesses in the case against Hunt. The final part of the series included a section about similarities in the attack on the woman in February 1985 to the one on Sykes.
The Sykes committee is reviewing police investigations related to Sykes' murder in light of Brown's conviction.
Critics in the community have long questioned the decisions made by police and prosecutors in pursuing the case against Hunt despite obvious flaws, many of which were highlighted in the Journal series.
Brown is now serving a sentence of life plus 10 years in prison, and he has not been charged in connection with the second attack.
The woman told the committee that the reports on her case were inattentive to details. She told detectives when she remembered more about her attack, but they didn't always include what she had said, she told the committee.
The woman said she tried to get the police report in her case in 2004. A police detective told her he could not release it because it was department policy not to release the report unless charges were filed.
She said that Assistant District Attorney Eric Saunders told her that he would not release it either. She said he told her that she needed closure, she said.
"I felt like a hot potato being passed," she said.
The Journal is not using the woman's identity because it does not print the names of rape victims. That was not the newspaper's policy in 1985, however.
The woman said she had agreed to an interview with a Journal reporter in 1985, but canceled because she did not want her name printed.
Dan Galindo can be reached at 727-7377 or at dgalindo@wsjournal.com