November 20, 2007
Detective Randy Weavil largely escaped involvement in the Darryl Hunt case the first time around.
The afternoon of Deborah Sykes' murder in 1984, a supervisor at the scene asked him to round up the local winos for questioning. Other than that, he hadn't had much to do with a case that had tarnished so many others in the department.
That was fine with him. He didn't enjoy dealing with the top brass. He liked solving crimes and putting the bad guys away. "I'm just a finder of fact," he likes to say.
Sometimes, the facts are hard to find, especially when witnesses don't want to get involved.
That was what happened with the killing of Arthur Wilson in September 1983. Wilson was buying drinks for everyone at Ezell Clowers' drink house on Claremont Avenue and was beaten to death just after 2 a.m. on the sidewalk outside.
People must have seen or heard the attack, but when the police showed up to interview witnesses, no one knew anything.
There was no clamor to solve the case, no reward fund, no newspaper headlines. Not many people cared about a 57-year-old black man who lost his life in a drink-house squabble.
The break came in April 1986. A man named Merritt Drayton was in custody in connection with his girlfriend's death. He told a jailer that he wanted to speak to a detective because he had information about an old homicide.
He knew who killed Arthur Wilson, Drayton told Weavil and two other detectives who took the call. It was Sammy Mitchell and Darryl Hunt.
Weavil knew that this was bad news. The Hunt case had divided the community and damaged the department. A report from City Manager Bill Stuart's office blasting the police for mishandling the investigation was five months old by then. Jim Daulton, the lead investigator, had been demoted to a dispatch position because of his testimony about how police lineups had been conducted. Two supervisors had been suspended, and the chief himself was reprimanded. The department's internal-affairs office had just finished its review. And the State Bureau of Investigation was conducting a new probe.
In such a setting, Weavil was not happy with having to tackle Hunt and Mitchell all over again. He didn't want to be the next target of the Darryl Hunt Defense Committee.
"We didn't tell anyone (initially) because of the political climate in the police department," he said.
Drayton told Weavil that he and Mitchell and Hunt were all drinking with Wilson that night. Wilson kept flashing a wad of cash, and the three men decided to rob him. They followed him out of the drink house, and Mitchell beat him with an ax handle. Drayton still had the handle, at his girlfriend's house.
The detectives took Drayton to the crime scene and obtained his confession.
"Now we had to tell administration what was going on," Weavil said. "There were people in the administration who were afraid. You've just brought up the two worst names you could bring up in the political climate."
Drayton gave the detectives a list of witnesses, many of them people whom police had interviewed three years before, the very same people who said they hadn't seen a thing. But now that they had one witness to the crime the others talked.
The drink-house crowd didn't make for the best witnesses. Weavil knew that. But he had to work with what he had. At least they were consistent, all saying that they saw Mitchell and Hunt in the drink house that night with Drayton. Three witnesses said they saw the three men attack Wilson.
Weavil's supervisors told him that they didn't want any mistakes, that they had endured enough criticism over Hunt. They insisted that Weavil interview every witness two or three times. Each interview was typed and filed. They didn't want any more accusations from Hunt's supporters.
Mitchell and Hunt both were indicted for murder in Wilson's death. Mitchell was convicted in October 1986 and sentenced to 50 years in prison. He is still serving that sentence. Hunt was convicted in October 1987 and sentenced to 40 years.
Hunt did not testify at his trial. But in his first public discussion of the Wilson case, Hunt admitted recently that he did go to Clowers' drink house the night of Wilson's death with Mitchell and a cousin. He left with his cousin, he said, sometime between 11 p.m. and midnight, well before Wilson's death. Mitchell stayed behind, Hunt said.
"I would have loved to go to Sammy Mitchell with that statement," Weavil said recently.
Except for their brutality, the Wilson and Sykes cases shared little.
"The difference is the sexual pathology," said Greg McCrary, a retired FBI agent who specializes in profiling sex offenders. He said that the attack on Sykes, who was raped, sodomized and stabbed 16 times, was an unusually violent sex crime driven by rage. He would have expected the attacker to have a history of sexual offenses - which Hunt didn't have.
The crimes also played out differently for the public. One was a crime with a black victim and a black defendant, and was barely noted by the public when it occurred; the other was an explosive case with a white victim and a black defendant. In spite of the differences, the Wilson case ended up reinforcing whatever people already believed about Hunt.
To Hunt's supporters, the Wilson case was further proof that the police were out to railroad an innocent man. To the police, it was evidence that the man they had convicted in the Sykes murder had been part of a murder before.
Hunt appealed both convictions, and 1989 became a banner year for him, the only period when he had legal success.
The N.C. Supreme Court overturned the Sykes conviction in May 1989 because Don Tisdale, the district attorney, had introduced as evidence the police statements made by Hunt's girlfriend, a prostitute named Margaret Crawford, even after she recanted them. Six months later, the court overturned the Wilson conviction, saying that the trial judge had given the jury flawed instructions about the law.
Hunt got out of prison in November 1989 on a $50,000 bond raised by the National Council of Churches, using former Alderman Larry Little's house as collateral. Hunt was 24, in some parts of town a returning hero.
"Hey, baby, we're praying for you," older women would say when he went to the grocery store. People asked him to autograph things - a Bible, an old hospital bill.
Little arranged for Hunt to take classes at Winston-Salem State University, and Earline Parmon, now a state representative, got him a job with Velma Hopkins, a former union organizer who ran the cafeteria at Forsyth County's Reynolds Health Center.
Hunt said he walked for miles that winter, because he was free and he could.
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