Saturday, February 04, 2006
Detectives reviewing the investigation in the 1984 rape and murder of Deborah Sykes in downtown Winston-Salem will make another run at questioning several retired police officers to follow up on revelations made Thursday night by a woman raped six months after Sykes' death.
The woman told a committee appointed by the city council that Winston-Salem police discouraged her from making a connection between the two crimes, despite striking similarities: Both victims were young, white women on their way to work within two blocks of each other, and both were kidnapped, raped and stabbed.
The city is looking into the way that police handled both cases to find out how Darryl Hunt was wrongly accused and convicted of murdering Sykes and how for 18 years the police overlooked the real killer, Willard Brown, who pleaded guilty to the crime in 2004.
The woman's statement Thursday night is critical because she identified Brown as the man who raped and stabbed her. In spite of her identification, police never charged Brown with the second rape.
City officials said that the woman's statement raised numerous questions about the way that two detectives, Bill Miller and W. Carter Crump, handled the investigation.
Both men are retired, and both have refused to talk with investigators. Miller did not reply to a note left at his home yesterday or to a phone message. Crump did not reply to phone messages. A man who answered a phone listed in his name hung up.
"Anything she said about what detectives may or may not have said we'll try our best to follow up on," said Lee Garrity, the assistant city manager working with the Deborah Sykes Citizens Administrative Review Committee. The committee hopes to issue a report later this year with its findings.
Garrity said that the city requires any police officers still working for the city to talk with the officers investigating the case for the committee. The committee does not have subpoena power to compel retired police officers or others to cooperate.
Garrity said that investigators had been talking for about a month in telephone interviews with the woman who spoke Thursday night. She finally decided that she wanted to speak publicly about her ordeal, which began Feb. 2, 1985, when a man kidnapped her outside what is now the GMAC Building on Fifth and Poplar Streets, took her to a field off Old Greensboro Road and raped her. The Winston-Salem Journal is not disclosing her name because the newspaper's policy is to protect the identity of rape victims.
She told the committee that within a day or two of the rape, her mother-in-law asked her to ask police about the similarities between the attack and the slaying of Deborah Sykes six months earlier on Aug. 10, 1984.
Sykes was accosted on West End Boulevard on her way to work at The Sentinel, the afternoon newspaper, and taken to a small park, where she was raped and stabbed to death. By the time that the second woman was raped, Hunt had been arrested and was in jail awaiting trial.
"My mother-in-law insisted I ask about the Sykes murder," the woman told the committee. She said that Miller told her that the police already had someone in jail and that "they didn't want to do anything to raise doubts about the one in jail."
Mayor Allen Joines said yesterday that the woman's story "certainly raises a question as to why the connection was not more fully looked at."
"That's exactly one of the reasons why this committee was put together, to try to unearth any issues like that, to be able to shine the light on those issues and make sure we're taking any actions to prevent them from happening in the future," Joines said.
The woman's mother-in-law never forgot the connection between the two cases.
In 2003, she called the Journal after reading the first of an eight-part series about the Hunt case, "Murder, Race, Justice: The State vs. Darryl Hunt." Based on research prompted by her phone call, the Journal included the second rape in the final installment of the series, pointing out the similarities between the two crimes.
A month later, DNA testing identified Brown as a suspect. When presented with the evidence, he confessed to killing Sykes, which soon ended Hunt's 18-year quest for justice.
According to police reports, the woman who spoke Thursday night identified Brown from a photo lineup in May 1985, just weeks before Hunt was convicted of killing Sykes. By then, Crump had been assigned to her case. According to police reports, she asked him to see Brown in person.
It took almost a year for detectives to find Brown and arrest him on an outstanding warrant for burglary. At that time, Crump was working on a second investigation of the Sykes case. According to a police report filed with the Sykes investigation, Crump even interviewed Brown in connection with the Sykes case, though that report does not mention that Brown was a suspect in another rape.
In April 1986, the victim of the second rape identified Brown in a lineup at the jail. She told committee members Thursday that she was so terrified at seeing him again that she almost threw up. She said she wanted to hear the men in the lineup repeat the threats made to her during the rape in an effort to identify the voice she remembered. Police were unable to arrange that, she said.
She told the committee that she was 80 percent to 85 percent certain in her identification of Brown but hesitated to press charges because she didn't want to make a mistake.
Hunt's attorneys questioned yesterday why the police relied so heavily on the woman to decide whether to charge Brown.
"Why was the onus on her to decide whether to press charges?" said Ben Dowling-Sendor, who represented Hunt in appeals of his two murder convictions. "In D.C., when I was a prosecutor, that's not how we did things."
The woman said she also asked Crump to check Brown's criminal record. He mistakenly told her that Brown was in prison the day that Sykes was killed. Crump told the Journal the same thing in 2003, though others in the police department disputed the mistake.
Prison records show that Brown was still in custody of the N.C. Department of Correction in August 1984, but he was on parole, having been released from prison June 14, 1984.
According to police reports, police took a blood sample from Brown in 1986 and sent it to the State Bureau of Investigation for testing. According to a May 1986 report, Brown's blood was Type O, the same blood type as the semen sample taken from Sykes. There is no mention in the reports that police ever compared the blood tests in the two cases.
The victim of the second rape got away from her attacker and ran to a nearby apartment complex, where the manager gave her a blanket and called the police. She asked the manager, David Wagner, to join her Thursday night, and she publicly thanked him for saving her life.
But she told the committee that she was bitterly disappointed that the police did not do more to solve the crime. She said, for example, that the police never interviewed Wagner about what he may have seen or heard the morning of the rape.
"When he told me the police had never returned to question him, I just sat down and cried," she said.