Sunday, August 06, 2006
The citizens committee that for more than a year has been quietly studying the police investigation of the 1984 rape and murder of Deborah Sykes has discovered a startling series of missteps.
Prodded by one especially curious member, the committee has learned of a pattern of mistakes more extensive than previously believed, beginning with the destruction of evidence in a similar downtown rape two months before the attack on Sykes.
Police mistakenly arrested Darryl Hunt in the Sykes case on the strength of eyewitness identification. Hunt went on to spend more than 18 years in prison. He was released in late 2003 after DNA evidence led to the arrest of a different man, Willard Brown, who confessed to killing Sykes.
Central to the new citizens committee investigation, ordered by the City Council after Brown's identification and arrest, is the work being done by two Winston-Salem police officers. Sgt. Chuck Byrom and Lt. Joseph Ferrelli III are looking into four downtown rapes, including the Sykes attack, that occurred between June 1984 and February 1985.
The committee's focus is not on who committed the crimes, but on whether police handled the cases appropriately and thoroughly - and whether procedures today would prevent the missteps in the Sykes case. Committee members hope to publish a report of their work in the fall. City Manager Lee Garrity said that when the committee's work is done, previously unreleased files on two of the rape cases would be made public.
The committee also plans to seek a judge's order to make interviews with past and present police employees public and to release a 1986 review by the police department's internal-affairs office. Those interviews have not been made public because doing so would violate personnel-privacy laws, according to the city attorney's office.
Hunt's attorney, Mark Rabil, said he believes that the investigation shows that police intentionally hid evidence, first to cover up their incompetence and then to preserve a shaky case against Hunt, with the most shocking revelation being the destruction of evidence in the first rape.
"What good reason could possibly be given for that? I can't think of any," Rabil said. "It puts the beginning of the conspiracy to cover up even earlier than we thought we would find."
Police Chief Pat Norris said she would wait until the committee completes its report in the fall to draw any conclusions about police actions.
She and Garrity said that the refusal of former police investigators to cooperate with the committee leaves many unanswered questions about their conduct.
"There are a lot of questions about the way things were done, the way they appear to have been done," Garrity said. "There's always that reasonable person test - does it make sense? If I was one of those former officers I think I would want to set the record straight, if I could."
The victim in one of the rapes, a February 1985 attack, on Friday pleaded for police involved back then to talk with the citizens committee.
"I think the thing that disappoints me the most is that we'll never have a full understanding unless people come out and talk about it," she said. "The people that were involved in those cases back then, we will never fully understand until they come forward and speak."
Officer singled out
One member of the citizens committee, Jet Hollander, put together his own report to highlight major issues that he saw with the Sykes case, including how police handled the first of the four rapes and particularly the actions of one investigator - retired Capt. Teresa Hicks.
Hollander declined to be interviewed for this article.
But at a meeting on July 20, Hollander outlined the slow pace of Hicks' investigation into the rape of a woman several times over several hours on the night of June 13, 1984, and into the next morning.
In an interview last week, the woman said that she was walking home along Fifth Street when a man with a gun accosted her across the street from the library.
He forced her to walk from downtown past the Hanes Dye and Finishing Co. to a nearby school, raping her at various places along the way, including the park next to Crystal Towers across West End Boulevard from where Sykes was raped two months later.
An officer, Anthony Stover, handled the case on June 14.
He wrote down the woman's account, interviewed a friend she had been walking with earlier that night and took her to the hospital so that a rape kit could be collected, Hollander said.
Stover then put the evidence in storage and had a "Wanted" poster made out of a composite sketch.
Hicks, who specialized in crimes against women, then took the case.
According to Hollander's report:
• Hicks called the victim on June 15 but didn't reach her. Hicks then went on vacation for 12 days where, she wrote, she "was unable to attempt to contact" the victim.
• Hicks and another detective, Bill Miller, went to the scene of the rape nearly a month after the victim reported it to look for anyone who matched the description from the composite. Hicks wrote in a report that she wasn't able to work on the case more because of a heavy workload.
• In early August, the victim of the June rape identified a possible suspect from a book of mug shots.
• In late August, three weeks after the victim asked for a more recent photograph of the possible suspect, Hicks went to the suspect's former employer to ask for a photo.
• When Hicks was searching for the photo, police had already filed papers to destroy the case's evidence, including the rape kit.
The victim in the case, who said she felt that her report was not taken seriously until she had passed a polygraph, moved away while the case was open.
"If that was the investigation into my crime, I'd probably leave myself," Hollander told committee members.
Hicks had problems reaching the victim after she moved and was not able to find the suspect. A month after the evidence was destroyed, Hicks closed the case.
Why the evidence was destroyed remains a puzzle. None of Hicks' reports document any destruction of evidence, according to Hollander's report.
Stover signed the papers to destroy the evidence, although it was Hicks' case.
Hollander said in his presentation that Stover told Ferrelli and Byrom that he didn't know why the evidence was destroyed, but that he remembered it bothered him that that was done.
Hollander's report notes that Hicks was called to the scene of the Sykes killing.
According to an interview in 1986 with the State Bureau of Investigation, Hicks said that the description of the suspect in the June rape was different from the description of suspects in the Sykes killing. Early descriptions of black men seen with a white woman near the site of the Sykes murder had the men as taller than the attacker in the June rape, who the victim said was about 5 foot 6.
Hicks refused to be interviewed by the committee, but later asked for the committee's questions in writing. She never responded to those questions.
For this story, Hicks did not return a phone message or a written request for an interview. Miller could not be reached for comment.
According to police reports, fingerprints taken from Sykes' car were compared with those from the suspect in the June rape, but the prints did not match.
There is no indication that police pursued any further connection between the two crimes.
Other possible connections
The rape in June is not the only one that may have been connected to the Sykes case in which questions are being raised.
Six months after Sykes' death, a man kidnapped a woman on her way to work at what is now the GMAC Building on Fifth Street.
The man took the woman to a field off Old Greensboro Road, where he slashed her 12 times and raped her.
The woman told the committee in February that police discouraged her from making any connection to the Sykes case, and that Miller told her that police "didn't want to do anything to raise doubts about the one (Hunt) in jail" for that attack. Hunt had been charged in September 1984 in the death of Sykes, who was stabbed 16 times.
The victim in the February 1985 attack identified Brown - the man who eventually pleaded guilty to murdering Sykes - as her attacker, but said she couldn't be absolutely sure.
She told the citizens committee that when she asked to record Brown's voice to try to match it to the one of the man that attacked her, police said they wouldn't have the resources to do it unless she was certain she would press charges.
Because she could not be certain without more evidence, charges were never filed and police closed the case, the woman said.
The case evidence was destroyed in April 1988 and the case closed in September 1989, four months after the N.C. Supreme Court ordered a second trial for Hunt.
In January 1985, a month before the kidnapping near the GMAC Building, a woman was followed as she walked down West First Street. She was abducted and taken to a secluded area by Brunson Elementary School, where she was raped.
The police file in that case has not been made public; the committee has said it will release it only when its report is complete. The victim in that case died in July 2005.
In March 1986, police interviewed Brown in connection with the Sykes case. The report mentions a Crime Stopper's tip, but it is not clear whether police considered Brown a suspect or an informant in the Sykes case. According to the report he denied any involvement.
Other than that one interview, there is no evidence that after Hunt's arrest police pursued connections between the Sykes case and the three other downtown rapes.
The victim of the February 1985 attack said that in the wake of the citizens committee's work, she is "very disappointed" with how the police handled things in 1984 and 1985.
"I will never understand why, when everything's laid out on the table, something else couldn't have been done back then," she said. "I think we're all scratching our heads."
Police-department changes
Norris said that police-department procedures and practices have changed since the Sykes investigation, though she declined to discuss procedures in detail until the committee's report is final.
One change in the works for months is the videotaping of interviews with suspects. Supporters believe that this will improve confidence in police work and lead to fewer disputes in court over confessions.
Videotaping has been on hold while a consultant studied possible design changes to the public-safety center. City officials said they are moving forward with videotaping but could not pinpoint exactly when it might start.
Another change, which supporters believe will cut down on witnesses making false identifications, is showing suspect lineups one photo at a time, rather than the current practice of showing them all at once. Norris said that the department is waiting for a computer software package to be completed that will display photographs in sequence.
Norris also gave examples of recent cases in which police have made links to crimes by sharing information.
She pointed to a series of rapes and sexual assaults in 2004 and early 2005 in which work by Winston-Salem police led to charges against Gilberto Cruz-Hernandez in connection with eight sexual assaults in Winston-Salem, Greensboro and High Point.
After months of work, the break came as police investigated a break-in into an empty townhouse. DNA evidence from Cruz-Hernandez in that case matched DNA evidence from the sexual assaults, police said.
After Winston-Salem police brought charges against Cruz-Hernandez, Greensboro and High Point police followed with their own charges for cases in those cities.
Most important, Norris said, the department's culture has changed since she started as a patrol officer in 1977.
"In the past when people accused and said things weren't being done right in the police department, we immediately threw up that defensive mode," she said. "We're willing to listen now and hear what's being said."
Hunt and his supporters remain skeptical about cultural changes in the department, especially because some of the officers involved in his case are still part of the force.
Interviewed last week, Hunt said that during his 18 years in prison, he wanted to believe that the injustice against him was the result of honest mistakes.
The work of the citizens committee on the three other downtown rapes, he said, shows otherwise.
"One of the things that's obvious is Teresa Hicks, she worked on all these investigations," Hunt said. "Either she was intentionally, criminally hiding this information or, I'm trying to find a way to put it, ... if she wasn't smart enough to put this together, how did she make it to police captain?"
© 2006 Winston-Salem Journal. The Winston-Salem Journal is a Media General newspaper.