November 18, 2007
Every morning on his way to work at Hanes Dye and Finishing, Thomas Murphy drove by the park off West End Boulevard where Deborah Sykes was killed.
In the weeks after the murder, Murphy kept his eye out for the man he saw with her the morning of the crime. Some days, he and the lead detective in the case, Jim Daulton, would do surveillance work together. On Aug. 28, Murphy was by himself when he spotted the person he believed he had seen with Sykes 18 days earlier.
The man was between 5 feet 10 inches and 6 feet tall, wore a brown-checked shirt and light-colored pants, and he was carrying a transistor radio. Murphy called Daulton with the description, and that afternoon he went to the police department. His appearance was convenient, because Daulton realized that he didn't have a formal statement from Murphy, who had been his most helpful witness.
So it was that more than two weeks after the murder, Murphy signed a statement saying that on the morning of Aug. 10 he had seen Sykes with a black man wearing a brown-checked shirt and light pants, with his arm around her. A second man, about 100 feet away, was taller. It's the first formal statement in the police files from Murphy. The description of the man he had seen with Sykes is exactly the same as the one he gave for the man he saw that morning.
The next day, Aug. 29, Darryl Hunt and his buddy Sammy Mitchell came by the police department, in response to a card that Daulton had left for them the week before. He wanted to talk with them again because of tips from CrimeStoppers and street sources saying that Hunt and Mitchell were talking about the murder, even bragging about it. And now Daulton had Murphy's Aug. 28 sighting to ask them about, too.
Mitchell and Hunt told Daulton, as they had previously, that they spent the night of Aug. 9 with Cynthia McKey, one of Mitchell's girlfriends, at her house at 1905 Dunleith Ave [key locations map]. They said they left McKey's house the morning of Aug. 10 in time to take the bus downtown to the Hall of Justice, where Mitchell had a court date on an assault charge. Daulton also asked Hunt where he had been the day before, Aug. 28, trying to figure out whether Hunt was the man Murphy had seen downtown with the brown-checked shirt. Hunt told him that he had been with his girlfriend, Margaret Crawford, at the Motel 6 on Patterson Avenue on the far north side of town.
This is the first time that Crawford's name appears in any of the police reports. As things turned out, Hunt supplied the very witness police used to make a case against him.
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