Monday, March 13, 2006
Kevey Coleman, whose testimony helped convict Darryl Hunt in the murder in 1984 of Deborah Sykes, now says that the first person he identified when questioned by police two years after the crime is Willard Brown, the man who confessed to the crime after DNA evidence identified him in 2004.
If true, Coleman's initial identification of Brown, which has never been documented in police reports, bolsters the arguments of those who have defended Darryl Hunt for more than 20 years. Hunt was twice convicted in the case and spent nearly 18 years in prison; his supporters have accused police of ignoring other possible suspects because they did not want to do anything to raise doubts about Hunt's guilt.
Coleman's statement that he identified Willard Brown during a series of 1986 interviews with SBI agents and police was made last November to the Deborah Sykes Citizens Administrative Review Committee. The committee is looking at how police investigated the case, to bring closure to a divisive episode in the city's history.
But Coleman's statement highlights a problem for the review committee. From what the committee has released so far, there does not appear to be anything to corroborate Coleman's recent claims, which he made during an interview with Lt. Joseph Ferrelli III and Sgt. Chuck Byrom, police investigators assigned to the committee. A videotape of the interview was released Friday.
On the video, Coleman says repeatedly that much of the case is fuzzy in his memory, and that he has spent years trying to put it behind him.
Sykes, a copy editor at The Sentinel, the city's former afternoon newspaper, was raped and stabbed early in the morning of Aug. 10, 1984, in a small park off West End Boulevard.
That summer, Coleman worked the night shift at a Coca-Cola bottling plant and went to school at Winston-Salem State University during the day.
He said he had gotten a ride to the corner of Sixth and Cherry streets Aug. 10, and was walking to his house on Chatham Road when he saw a white woman walking with two black men.
He told Ferrelli and Byrom that he and the two men nodded to acknowledge each other as they passed. He was not wearing his contact lenses, he said, and never believed he could be 100 percent certain because of that.
One of the two men he saw was lighter-skinned, with a beard. The other was dark-skinned and had something in his hand, or was using his finger to push the woman in the back, Coleman said.
He said he continued home.
"Soon as I hit my porch, I heard the scream, and the scream was about 10 seconds. I mean, it was a long scream,'' Coleman said.
Coleman never came forward to police, not even the day after the crime, when police stopped a car he was riding in to ask if anyone had seen anything about the crime.
In 1986, however, one of Coleman's co-workers heard him talking about what he had seen the morning of Sykes' murder, and called Crime Stoppers. That was when Coleman began his series of interviews, which were conducted in 1986, and again in 1989 when the police reinvestigated the case before Hunt's second trial. Hunt had been convicted in 1985, but won a new trial in 1989.
Coleman said he saw line-ups and looked at mugshot books during at least one of the 1986 interviews.
He said he chose Brown first as the man who looked like one of the two men he saw that morning. He said investigators told him that Brown was in jail at the time.
But there was confusion in the records about Brown's release date from jail and when he was released from probation. He was, in fact, released on June 14, 1984, two months before Sykes was killed.
Coleman also chose another photo that he said looked like one of the men he had seen. It was Hunt's picture. The similarity between Hunt and Brown, he said, was that they had "real, real red eyes."
Varied reactions
Retired police Detective Riley Spoon was one of the police detectives asked to help when the SBI reinvestigated the Sykes murder in 1986, after Hunt had already been convicted of murder.
Spoon said yesterday that he does not recall discussing Willard Brown with fellow detective Carter Crump. Spoon also said he has reviewed the case notes he wrote in 1986 and found no references to Brown there either.
That doesn't mean for certain that Brown never came up, but if Coleman had identified Brown, it would have been in the case file, Spoon said.
"Even if we had told him that he was in jail, it would have been in our notes, it would have been in our case file," he said.
And if Coleman had first chosen Brown, that would have prompted a harder look at Brown's jail records, as it did in the original Sykes investigation when a man named Terry Thomas was mistakenly identified as an early suspect, only to be dismissed once his record was examined.
"We did it with Terry Thomas. We checked (prison records) 47 ways till Sunday to make sure there was no way that he was out on work release or whatever, and we would have done the same thing for Willard,'' Spoon said.
He also said that he and Crump did not believe Coleman had much useful information to offer.
"What I came away with was he couldn't have seen what he said he saw, because he wasn't in a place to see it," Spoon said. "My notes don't say anything about him seeing a line-up and identifying Willard Brown. We had plenty of red herrings and we documented them. It wasn't like we had some mandate that 'Darryl Hunt is the guy that did this and your job is to cement that.'"
Hunt's longtime attorney, Mark Rabil, reacted with outrage to the possibility that Coleman might have picked out Brown's picture back in 1986.
"The thing that really makes me angry is that they didn't write it down," Rabil said Friday. If Coleman identified Brown, he said, that alone "would have resulted in a new trial. The only African-American (witness) with no criminal record, and there's no problem with cross-racial identification."
Rabil said that if Coleman's statement is true, defense attorneys could have saved 10 years in getting Hunt out of prison.
"Instead we wasted years on bad angles," he said.
Unexplained details
The more Coleman was interviewed, the more accurate his identification of Hunt became, according to the police reports.
By the last of at least three interviews in 1989, the police report reads: "Mr. Coleman again stated that the men he saw with the white female looked exactly like Sammy Mitchell and Darryl Hunt.''
Mitchell was Hunt's friend. He was charged with murder in the case, but never tried. The charge was dropped against him at the same time that Hunt was cleared.
At one point in the recent videotaped interview, Coleman said that Brown came up again in 1989, when detectives Randy Weavil and Teresa Hicks spoke with him.
Again, he said, he was told Brown was in jail and that the police had the paperwork to prove it.
But there appear to be discrepancies in Coleman's recent statement.
At other points in the interview, for example, Coleman said he did not hear about Brown in 1989, and was not shown Brown's photo again.
Still, when asked gently by Ferrelli and Byrom whether he might be mixing up information about Brown he learned in 2003, after a series of articles in the Journal, with what he knew in 1986, Coleman said no.
Coleman said he felt threatened several times over the years, both by detectives and by Hunt's supporters.
In 1986, he said, he was treated as a possible suspect, fingerprinted, asked if he killed Sykes and asked to take a lie-detector test.
That's why he initially didn't mention to the investigators the scream he heard the morning of Aug. 10, 1984, as he arrived back at his house, he said. "After the first meeting, I was feeling my way around to make sure I wasn't going in jail too, because they didn't care who they was putting in jail. I mean, that's just how they came off," Coleman said.
Before the 1990 trial, Coleman said, Hunt's supporters "threatened me every kind of ways, up and down." They told him his sister wouldn't be able to get a job and that his mother would be harassed, he said.
Coleman declined to answer questions for this story.
Getting at the truth
Many of the former police detectives or State Bureau of Investigation agents who could confirm or deny what Coleman is now saying have refused to talk with the committee and have declined interviews with the Winston-Salem Journal.
Vivian Burke, a member of the Winston-Salem City Council, said Friday that their refusal to talk reduces the chances that the committee can ever get to the truth of the case. "But I'm hoping that we'll come very close to the truth. And I'm hoping that their conscience will be their guide," she said of retired police who may be reconsidering.
Spoon is the only retired detective who agreed to be interviewed by the committee out of more than 10 who were asked. "I really felt like I owed it to the folks that are doing this," Spoon said.
He said he gave the interview despite reservations that the committee is trying to find malice by detectives, rather than errors in procedure and ways that would prevent future miscarriages of justice.
When he was interviewed by Ferrelli and Byrom in December, some of the questions the Sykes committee had prepared rubbed him the wrong way, confirming his worry, he said.
"I got the impression that they're being asked to find out if this case was set up from the beginning to stick with Darryl (Hunt) because he's the guy that was identified for whatever reason.... And that's not the case at all. And I didn't mind answering those questions and saying that."
The committee is not releasing interviews of any current or former police-department employees on the advice of the city attorney's office. Angela Carmon, an assistant city attorney, said at the committee's meeting Thursday that it can be argued that the interviews are part of personnel files and thus protected from release by state law.
But that is not the position of the city manager's office, which says it hopes to find a way to eventually release the interviews, said Lee Garrity, an assistant city manager.
If state law protects the information, it isn't clear how the committee will be able to publish all of its findings as planned later this year.
The release of the Coleman interview marks the second time that committee members have heard mention of Brown and the possibility of an overlooked connection to the Sykes case.
Last month, a woman who was the victim of an attack in February 1985 similar to the one that killed Sykes - both were raped and stabbed in attacks that began downtown just a couple of blocks apart - told the committee that she had identified Brown in a photo line-up.
The woman was speaking publicly about her attack for the first time in the 21 years since it happened. She said she asked the police at the time whether her case was similar to the attack on Sykes but was told by police that they had Hunt in jail in the Sykes case and did not want to do anything to put that into question.
Crump, the retired detective who helped investigate the second rape case, said in a November 2003 interview for an eight-part Journal series about the Sykes murder that he considered the possibility that the two cases might be related.
He said, however, that Brown was shorter than the description of attackers in the Sykes case that police had from other witnesses. He also said that the second rape was clearly committed by one man, and that police believed two men attacked Sykes.
In addition, there was the police's belief that Brown was in jail at the time Sykes was attacked. Crump has declined to be interviewed since 2003.
Spoon, meanwhile, said that the review committee should be careful with its work. The nature of detective work, he said, is dealing with questions that are not answered or issues that are not connected, which is what he felt happened in 1986 with the reinvestigation of the Sykes case.
"Any homicide other than the ones where somebody just plops down in your lap and says, 'Yeah, I did it,' some of the results can be confusing," he said.
"In a lot of ways, it's not perfect, and it's because you're dealing with people. The public has this idea from Law & Order where everything's solved in an hour, and it just doesn't work that way."
Dan Galindo can be reached at 727-7377 or at dgalindo@wsjournal.com
CAPTION: Graphic containing information detailing what Kevey Coleman, who was a witness the morning Deborah Sykes was killed, said to the police when he recognized Williard Brown from a photo.
A7: In this Sept. 27, 1990, photo, prosecutor James C. Yeatts asks Kevey Coleman about what he saw the day of the killing of Deborah Sykes.