From Part Eight of: Ronald Cotton's case unfolded in a way that Darryl Hunt could only dream about. In May 1995, DNA results ruled out Cotton, a Burlington man, as the source of the semen evidence in two rapes in July 1984. The police then had another suspect tested. That man's DNA matched, he confessed, and Cotton was freed from his life sentence.
"It wasn't hard to admit that a mistake was made," said Michael Gauldin, now the Burlington police chief and one of the detectives who built the case against Cotton. "The hard part is that Mr. Cotton spent 11 years in prison for two crimes he didn't commit, and it turns out he was an absolutely innocent man."
The evidence that Gauldin had against Cotton was strong. One of the victims, a woman named Jennifer Thompson, studied her attacker's face during the rape. She wound up identifying Cotton from a photograph, and police found circumstantial evidence that seemed to support her identification. A flashlight seized from Cotton's home matched one used by the attacker; a witness reported seeing Cotton in the neighborhood the night of the rapes.
Gauldin is now a member of the N.C. Actual Innocence Commission, which is working to improve criminal investigations, and Thompson, who lives in Winston-Salem with her husband and three children, speaks publicly about the hazards of identifying the wrong man.
Thompson said she never once doubted herself until DNA proved her wrong.
"I felt shame," she said recently. "Eleven years of his life were gone and I knew the majority of why he'd been put in prison was because of my testimony."
In 1994, Darryl Hunt had tried but failed to win a new trial after DNA evidence ruled him out as the source of semen found on Deborah Sykes in the 1984 rape-murder in downtown Winston-Salem. Cotton's conviction was one of the first in the country overturned by DNA evidence. All told, 138 convicted murderers and rapists nationwide have been exonerated by DNA, forcing prosecutors and police to question the investigative techniques that led to such injustice.
They focus on issues that Hunt's attorneys have been raising for nearly 20 years. Eyewitnesses are unreliable, especially witnesses whose stories change over time. Prison snitches are untrustworthy. Confessions can be coerced. Police too often develop tunnel vision, ignoring witnesses whose testimony doesn't support their theory, in favor of those who do. And prosecutors too often don't give the defense investigative reports that the law entitles them to.
"The only difference between Hunt's case and these 130 some odd people is the courts haven't given him the relief the others got," said Richard Rosen, a law professor at UNC Chapel Hill and one of the attorneys who handled Cotton's appeals.
"To say that Darryl Hunt should stay in prison for the rest of his life based on a decision by a jury that didn't hear the single most powerful piece of evidence is just not just."
Rosen said he believes that Hunt's case might have turned out differently had it not become a symbol of the city's racial politics.
"It's not an easy case for the court to rule against the state," he said. "There were a lot of people invested in finding Darryl Hunt guilty."
Last year, the chief justice of the N.C. Supreme Court appointed a group of prosecutors, police, defense attorneys and crime victims to the N.C. Actual Innocence Commission to look at what leads to wrongful convictions and to propose reforms.
The commission began by studying the issue of eyewitness testimony. It has just proposed new procedures for police to follow to reduce mistakes by eyewitnesses. Many of the practices cited as potential problems were used by Winston-Salem police in the investigation that led to Hunt's arrest. For example:
• The commission recommends that the investigating officer should not be the one to conduct a lineup because he might inadvertently give hints to a witness about the suspect's identity. In Hunt's case, the lead detective conducted the lineups.
• The commission recommends that rather than show a witness a line of five or six men, or a group of photographs, investigating officers show a witness one photo or one person at a time. The traditional photo lineup method used in the Hunt investigation can lead to mistakes, because witnesses compare one photo to another, rather than rely on their memory.
• The commission recommends that police remind witnesses that their investigation will continue, even if the witness identifies a suspect. That removes the responsibility witnesses feel to identify someone. In Hunt's case, detectives told Johnny Gray that he was their only eyewitness to the attack.
Flawed Theories
At Hunt's first trial in 1985, District Attorney Don Tisdale let the jury know that he wasn't sure whether Hunt raped and stabbed Deborah Sykes on his own or committed the crime with another attacker.
"Was there more than one person?" he asked during his closing argument. "I can't say that there was."
Either way, Tisdale argued, Hunt was guilty of murder.
By Hunt's second trial in 1990, the prosecutors argued two different theories.
James Yeatts, the assistant prosecutor, made the case for three attackers. "...the truth of this matter is that Darryl Hunt aided and abetted Sammy Mitchell - yes, I'm not going to beat around the bush about it - possibly Johnny Gray in the killing of Deborah Sykes and the robbery of Deborah Sykes and the rape of Deborah Sykes and the sexual offense of Deborah Sykes."
In the state's final closing argument, lead prosecutor Dean Bowman pointed to Hunt as the murderer and the rapist, leaving the jury to choose its own theory.
The state argues that the DNA evidence doesn't warrant a new trial because prosecutors have always argued that there were multiple attackers. But the DNA evidence doesn't fit any of the prosecution theories raised at either of Hunt's two trials, for DNA testing has ruled out all three suspects ever identified by the state as the rapist - or at least the person who ejaculated.
Eric Saunders, the assistant prosecutor who has been handling the case for 10 years, still questions the accuracy of the DNA evidence, though he has never demonstrated any flaws in the science. "After reading the reports, there's no doubt in my mind that Sammy Mitchell and Darryl Hunt committed this crime," he said.
The police are at a loss to explain the DNA. They theorize that Sykes may have had consensual sex before she was attacked. But they have never found any evidence that she was having an affair, and the autopsy that found abrasions and semen oozing from her doesn't support the theory. Police also suggest that she may have been raped after her death, an idea dismissed by the prosecutor's office. "I wouldn't attempt to argue that to anyone with common sense," Saunders said.
The only other possibility is that someone never identified by any of the eyewitnesses is the person who raped Sykes and ejaculated.
Thomas Murphy, one of the state's lead witnesses, did report seeing a fourth person near the scene, but he didn't mention that man until 1986, almost two years after the crime. No one else has ever testified to seeing another person at the scene.
The witnesses to the attack itself - Gray and two men who lived at the Rescue Mission - said they saw one man, not two or three or four. Gray said it was Hunt straddling Sykes and Hunt who ran from the scene, zipping his pants. And the witnesses who saw Sykes before the attack always mentioned two men. Thomas Murphy identified Hunt and Johnny Gray; Kevey Coleman said the two men looked like Hunt and Sammy Mitchell. Regardless, the DNA doesn't match any of them.
Defense lawyers familiar with Hunt's case say that the latest idea of an unseen assailant is typical of how police and prosecutors revise their theories in the face of DNA evidence. Defense lawyers deride it as the theory of the unindicted co-ejaculator.
Warren Sparrow, the Forsyth district attorney who asked the state to appoint a special prosecutor for Hunt's second trial, is now a defense lawyer in Winston-Salem.
"The other side is engaging in what they normally accuse defense lawyers of, which is creating a fanciful explanation," Sparrow said. "More weight needs to be given to the science. In this case, the scientific evidence is not consistent with the theory of the case.
"It's a pretty slender reed to convict someone for life in prison."
No jury has ever heard the prosecution's latest theory. Hunt lost his shot at a third trial from the N.C. Supreme Court by one vote.
Experienced trial lawyers say it is unlikely that a prosecutor could win a conviction for Hunt with an argument that required a jury to believe that an unidentified assailant raped Sykes before or after her death.
"I wouldn't go to a jury," said Tisdale, who prosecuted Hunt in 1985 in spite of his own misgivings about the eyewitnesses. "You start ruling all the participants out and it gets to be ludicrous."
Tamara Hinson of Newton was one of the jurors who voted to convict Hunt at his second trial. The trial was so long ago that she can't say for certain whether she would vote to convict Hunt now that he has DNA evidence on his side. But she said that without question he deserves another trial, so that a jury can evaluate the complete case.
DNA, she said, should not be used only to convict someone; it also has to be considered to help exonerate.
"I guess if it is taken to a jury again they'll have everything right in front of them and I just hope they'll be fair," Hinson said.
At an Impasse
Even after 19 years, the fear and suspicion created by the Hunt case keep many from talking openly about what they know.
The N.C. Department of Justice refused to allow the State Bureau of Investigation agent who worked the case in 1986 to give an interview. Bowman, the prosecutor in Hunt's second trial, now works for the attorney general's office and was not permitted to give an interview either; the N.C. Department of Justice said that the case is still open because of the pending DNA database search. James Yeatts, still an assistant district attorney in Surry County, declined to be interviewed.
Many of the police officers involved also declined to discuss their role, saying that they don't want to relive the past.
Sammy Mitchell, Hunt's codefendant, declined a written request for an interview. His attorneys, too, declined to comment. Mitchell's mother is dead, and a sister, reached in Chicago, declined to be interviewed.
Johnny Gray died in prison two years ago of complications from cancer of the larynx. Many of the state's other key witnesses are either dead or unwilling to tell their stories. Roger Weaver, the hotel clerk who found bloody towels in the restroom, died in 1992. Ed Reese, the man who identified Sammy Mitchell near the murder scene, died in 1998. Thomas Murphy, the first witness to identify Hunt, is back in the area, living in Stokes County, but his family said that he is too sick with emphysema to talk.
Al Kelly, the man who informed on Gray, has disappeared. His last known address was a drug-rehabilitation center in Durham. Lisa McBride, Gray's former girlfriend, still lives in Winston-Salem but declined requests for an interview.
Others would speak only reluctantly and then only briefly. Cynthia McKey, Hunt's alibi witness, said that the case still makes her uneasy. Charles "Too Tall" Wall, the man the defense thought of as a possible suspect until DNA testing cleared him, opened the door to his apartment a crack, only to deny any knowledge of the Sykes murder. "I didn't have nothing to do with it," he said. "I didn't see anything. I didn't hear anything."
Kevey Coleman, the only witness to place Hunt and Mitchell at the scene together, would agree only to a brief telephone interview. He said he felt harassed over the years by people who supported Hunt, but he wouldn't explain what he meant. He said he certainly didn't want to see his name in the newspaper again - not after all these years.
Today, Hunt and his attorneys want his story told because they believe that is the only way he will ever get a fair hearing. They said they believe that Hunt has languished in prison because the public doesn't understand what happened to him, and doesn't care.
When the Journal contacted Hunt's attorney, Mark Rabil, about the case, he opened his files. And although he insisted on being present at interviews with Hunt, he did not stop him from answering any questions.
At the Journal's request, Hunt consented to take a new polygraph examination, something that he was never given the chance to do by prosecutors after his initial test came back inconclusive in 1984. His lawyers, however, would not give their consent. They shared the letter from their own polygrapher, who in 1985 said that Hunt was telling the truth when he denied stabbing or raping Deborah Sykes.
"It's very tempting to want to do that, and of course Darryl's willing to do it, just as he's been willing to do any type of testing we've asked about," Rabil said. "The consensus of the attorneys in the case is that the focus needs to be on the DNA testing. DNA is the more reliable. Lie-detector tests are not proven scientific instruments and they're not admissible in court, whereas DNA testing is."
The Newspaper's Role
Many of those involved with the case - from the police to Hunt's supporters - blame the Journal and the rest of the media for the way the case polarized the city.
The police complain that the media repeated allegations that they had framed Hunt without confirming the facts. On the other side, Hunt's supporters say that the media slanted its coverage, giving more weight to the evidence than it deserved.
Khalid Griggs, the imam at the Community Mosque of Winston-Salem and one of the leaders in the Darryl Hunt Defense Committee, said he didn't learn about the flaws in the case against Hunt until he went to one of the early rallies.
"Just the way the press covered it, it was such an open-and-shut case in my mind, I never assumed he could be anything but guilty," he said recently. "I'm ashamed now."
Both sides say that the Journal paid more attention to the story because Sykes worked for The Sentinel, an afternoon paper owned by the Journal's parent company. The Sentinel closed at the end of March 1985, leaving the Journal the only daily newspaper in town. The Sentinel pledged $2,500 for a reward fund. All told, about $11,000 was pledged, including about $4,600 in cash. None of the reward has been disbursed, and the cash is still available.
Both newspapers covered the murder and the investigation that followed, with stories about the bungled 911 call and allegations that police had arrested the wrong man. The Journal's coverage continued over the years, following each new development in the case, with stories about both trials, the drink-house murder that Mitchell is serving time for, the appeals and the DNA evidence.
"If anything, we would have tried to make sure we did not overplay the story," said Sylvia Oberle, the Journal's city editor from 1980 until 1992. "I just think it was a very prominent story."
Now the director of a nonprofit organization called the Center for Community Safety, Oberle has heard complaints about the coverage of Hunt's case in her work with neighborhood groups, clergy and police.
She said she thinks that the newspaper gave both sides a fair hearing. At the time, she said, she worried that the reporters who covered the story had natural sympathy for Hunt as the underdog and was concerned that personal bias might slip into their coverage.
She now has a more complex view of the newspaper's role in the case. The paper diligently reported what Hunt's supporters said without taking a closer look at the facts or examining the broader community feeling, Oberle said. The newspaper assigned labels to Hunt's supporters, often calling them "black activists," she said. And rather than helping people understand the weaknesses in the state's case, the newspaper left readers with the impression that the problems were a matter of opinion held only by a vocal few, she said.
"In the process some really important issues of justice were lost and we became a really divided community," she said.
A Request for Clemency
In December 2000, Rabil filed a clemency petition with then Gov. Jim Hunt. The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond - considered by defense attorneys as the circuit court least sympathetic to criminal defendants - had turned down his appeal for a new trial based on the DNA evidence, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear his case.
The governor has more latitude than appellate courts. His decision, while political, doesn't set legal precedent.
Hunt's lawyers believed that it would take more than a persuasive brief to win over a governor. They needed political pressure, preferably from unexpected sources. Hunt's petition got a surprising boost from one of the four state Supreme Court justices who turned down his bid for a new trial in 1994.
Hunt's attorneys approached Willis Wichard, by 2000 the dean at Campbell University's School of Law, believing that he might be sympathetic to the case. For one thing, he had ruled in favor of Hunt after the first Sykes trial.
They were right. Wichard agreed to write the governor a letter on Hunt's behalf. He didn't recommend clemency, but he expressed reservations about a conviction that he had let stand.
"It was a case that there were enough problems with it that I was willing to say that I thought the governor should take a very careful look at it," Wichard said recently. He declined to release a copy of the letter or explain the problems he referred to.
Hunt left the governor's office in January 2001 without reviewing the case. He said through an aide that it was too complex to evaluate in the short time he had left in his term. The clemency petition was passed on to the new governor, Mike Easley, who as attorney general had defended the state's prosecution of Hunt. As governor, Easley has not acted upon Hunt's clemency petition.
Easley's office declined a request by the Journal to review the clemency-petition file in Hunt's case, but some of its contents can be pieced together from other sources.
A spokesman for the N.C. Attorney General's office, which handled the appeals for the state in Hunt's case, said that it filed its briefs from those appeals with the governor's office, but did not draft a specific answer to the clemency petition. The Forsyth County district attorney, Tom Keith, said that because of an oversight he did not file an answer to Hunt's petition. He still could if he chooses.
The file is filled with letters from people who knew Sykes and care about her family. Sykes' mother, Evelyn Jefferson, now lives in northern Georgia, just outside Chattanooga, Tenn. She organized a letter-writing campaign through her church and her family's church in Iredell County in opposition to clemency for Hunt. She estimates that the governor has hundreds of letters by now. She said she also intends to oppose parole for Hunt when he becomes eligible in 2005.
Doug Sykes didn't join Jefferson's letter-writing campaign for his late wife, though he, too, said he opposes parole. "I'm trying to get past all this. I've got a family. I've got a life," he said recently. "Unless some startling new evidence comes up, I consider it solved."
Jefferson said she always believed that Mitchell and Gray should have been tried in her daughter's murder, too, but she said she has drawn comfort all these years knowing that at least one man is serving time. She doesn't want Hunt released from prison - ever.
"I have just prayed that I feel at ease with his conviction, and I do."
Mistakes Were Made
Hunt's case offers more paradoxes than answers.
Michael Grace, a local defense lawyer, now shares a practice with Tisdale, Hunt's first prosecutor. Grace said the public outcry over the case backed the state into a corner.
"How do you imagine a DA coming in at this point and saying, 'We give up?'" he said. "The failure is now we're at a point where in private moments all parties would agree there's a problem, but publicly no one will. That's not the system's mistake. That's human failure."
Hunt's supporters say that if his case had been handled quietly, without rallies and rhetoric, the outcome would have been worse.
"My opinion is he would be on death row and possibly executed because who would have cared?" said Larry Little, the former city alderman who first took up Hunt's cause. "You can always Monday-morning quarterback. But look at the black men on death row. Without exception they are all alone. What we did by getting the community involved was give him a fighting chance."
Getting a life sentence was Hunt's only lasting victory. But even that left him in a fix, because the appeals courts pay more attention to death-row cases than to any other.
Burley Mitchell, a retired chief justice of the state Supreme Court, voted with the majority to deny Hunt a third trial. He said he and the other justices knew that an error in a life sentence could always be corrected later, but an execution can't be undone.
"Naturally you pay more attention to the death cases," he said. "You try not to overlook anything. In a perfect world you'd do that in any case, but in this world you pay more attention to details on capital cases than on any other of them."
Hunt has not benefited, either, from reforms that corrected some but not all of the practices that worked against him in court.
His first attorneys, Rabil and Gordon Jenkins, had never tried a murder case before, let alone a capital case. There's no single error that can be attributed to their inexperience, but today they would not be allowed to represent him, because the courts recognize that representing a man on trial for his life is unlike any other trial, both in its complexity and pressure. The courts now require the lead attorney in a capital case to have experience in another capital case.
The climate in the courtroom has also changed. Defense attorneys say that prosecutors are more open with their investigative reports than they were in 1985 and 1990, when prosecutors refused to turn over their complete files to Hunt's attorneys. But it's still up to prosecutors to determine whether a police report is helpful to the defendant, and defense attorneys rarely get complete access to police files.
Judges are less tolerant, too, of closing arguments that pander to emotion. Lawyers familiar with the graphic imagery in prosecutor Bowman's closing argument at Hunt's second trial say that it probably wouldn't be allowed today.
It's also harder for a prosecutor today to excuse blacks from a jury, though not impossible. As long as the prosecutor can state a reason for removing the juror other than race, even one as subjective as not liking the juror's tone of voice, a judge will normally allow it.
The rules governing venue for a trial haven't changed. That's still up to the presiding judge. Some local lawyers say they never ask to move a trial out of Forsyth, even when publicity has worked against their client, because they don't want to end up in a rural county.
Today, the public and the courts are more skeptical than ever of eyewitness testimony. Almost everyone called to jury duty now has heard about cases of defendants exonerated by DNA evidence and eyewitnesses who turned out to be wrong.
"The Darryl Hunt case has always disturbed me because it almost came too early," said Barry Scheck, a co-founder of the Innocence Project at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York. "If it had come a little later, it would have received a more favorable treatment from the courts because people would have recognized how frequently these type of things do occur."
Scheck said that it can take years for his organization to get convictions overturned, because prosecutors are unwilling to admit to error. Cases involving multiple attackers are the most difficult, because the state can always argue that the defendant participated in the crime even if his DNA doesn't match the evidence.
He cited a case in Chicago that involved two men convicted in the rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl in 1983. In 1995, DNA testing excluded both men, but the state continued its prosecution, as has happened in Hunt's case. A judge eventually dismissed the charges, and Rolando Cruz and Alejandro Hernandez were released.
"There's just a general feeling that if we admit error in this case, if there was mistaken eyewitness identification or false confession or prison snitches, then juries in new cases are going to be distrustful of the government's proof," Scheck said.
"It's a prosecutor's job to seek justice. We all should want to exonerate the innocent and find the people who committed the crime, and they shouldn't be worried about undermining the present prosecution of cases because in the long run it's only going to increase the confidence people have in law enforcement."
For many of Hunt's supporters, his story is a modern version of an old lament: When it comes to justice, a black man still struggles in this country.
"At the very beginning, Darryl didn't have a snowball's chance in hell by the fact that it was a white woman brutally murdered and that someone had to pay," said the Rev. John Mendez, an early Hunt supporter.
Another Incident
Six months after Sykes was raped and stabbed to death, a second woman was attacked downtown in a crime with some strikingly similarities.
On Feb. 2, 1985, just before 8 a.m., a 20-year-old woman parked her car in a lot on Poplar Street and headed across the street to her office at Integon Corp. (now GMAC). Before she got to the door, she was accosted by a man with a gun and a knife. After her attacker forced her into her car, he ordered her to drive to a drive-in movie theater on Old Greensboro Road, where he raped her and stabbed her in the face 12 times. She escaped to a nearby apartment complex and got help.
Sykes, 25, was approached shortly after leaving her car in the early morning while going to work less than three blocks from the Integon offices. She was raped and stabbed 16 times.
"You're looking at similar race, similar age, similar locations. I would never say they are clearly connected, but they would be considered worth looking at," said Vivian Lord, a professor of criminal justice at UNC Charlotte, who advises the Charlotte police department on cold cases. "Most sex offenders will continue to assault until they are stopped, especially those kind of violent rapists."
Police abandoned the thought that the crimes could be connected after the victim in the second attack picked out a suspect, a man who was in prison when Sykes was murdered.
Police had relied on eyewitnesses when they arrested Hunt in the Sykes murder, and by the time of the attack outside Integon, they considered the earlier case closed. There is no indication that the physical evidence in the two cases was ever compared, or that the victim in the second case was ever shown photographs of the other suspects in the Sykes murder. The police declined to release reports on the second incident.
Rabil said recently that the police ruled out the possible connection between the two crimes too soon, just as they ruled out other evidence that supported Hunt's claim of innocence.
"Yes, that's certainly a lead that should have been checked out," Rabil said. "We tried to look into it as best we could, but without the police reports to find out who the victim was, we just didn't have anything we could really go on. And they certainly had their man and didn't want to admit a mistake by trying to draw a comparison."
The attack outside Integon was never prosecuted because the victim did not want to press charges. She said recently she did not regret her decision, but declined to discuss her reasons.
She did say that her attacker was close to her height, or about 5 foot 6, and that she identified a suspect after looking at dozens of mug shots. Investigators told her that the attacker in the Sykes murder was described by witnesses as taller than the man she identified as her rapist.
"I didn't see the similarities," she said. "I really didn't."
"We have to go with what the victim tells us," said Carter Crump, a retired police sergeant who helped investigate the Sykes murder and the later rape. "She made an identification."
Crump said he still wonders whether the two cases might have been connected, and regrets that the evidence in the second rape was destroyed in 1988, as was routine then with cases the police considered closed.
A Final Test
Hunt dreams of a simple life back in Winston-Salem, with the woman he married in prison three years ago and her three children.
He and April Clark met in 1989 when he was out on bond and her stepfather, Khalid Griggs, was his court-appointed guardian. She was a student then at Winston-Salem State University, living at home because she needed help with her 2-year-old daughter.
Her parents told her to treat Hunt like family and make him feel at home. She had a boyfriend then, whom she eventually married. But she did as her parents asked, and she and Hunt became good friends. He played with her daughter and walked her to the bus stop; she made him breakfast, and during his second trial in September 1990 she was waiting for him at home with encouragement at the end of the day.
"It was a moment that we realized we were falling for each other. He knew how I felt and I knew how he felt. Between us there were no secrets but the outside world didn't know," she said in a recent interview. "When he left to go to court, that was it. I didn't realize he wasn't coming back."
They didn't see each other again until 1997. By then, April Hunt's first marriage had ended. She found his address among her stepfather's papers and wrote him in prison, in Marion. She had never driven outside of town before, but two weeks later she put on a blue sundress with white roses and took her three children on the two-hour drive to see him. "It was wonderful," she said.
They were married on Oct. 17, 2000, in the visitation room at Piedmont Correctional Institution in Salisbury. Griggs discouraged her from marrying a man serving a life sentence. In premarital counseling, the prison chaplain did the same.
"Do you understand he may never get out?" the chaplain asked her.
"It hasn't hindered the way I feel for him," she said. "I try to live my life righteously. If I don't get him in this life, I'll get him in the next life."
Before his hearing last spring requesting the state DNA database search, Hunt asked her to buy him some comfortable clothes. He didn't want a suit this time, just a new pair of slacks, a simple shirt, shoes, clean socks and a belt. His other friends in Winston-Salem suggested that she not bother. He would wear the clothes only for a few minutes.
"They sent him here in an orange jumpsuit," she said. "I said, 'For a few minutes let him feel like a person.'"
The judge ordered the state crime lab to run the database search that Hunt asked for. It has been six months since the police sent the evidence in the Sykes case to the state crime lab. Testing began late last week, said John Bason, a spokesman for the lab.
In prison at Randolph Correctional Center where he was transferred last month, Hunt is afraid to get his hopes up, and at home on Waughtown Street his wife is wary, too.
"I want them to find a match and let my husband out," she said. "People all over the United States are getting out on DNA evidence. I don't know what their motive is. They don't want to admit a mistake. It's an injustice not only for the Hunt family, but for the Sykes family. They've got the wrong man."
The state lab in Raleigh has solved 135 crimes with the database of DNA profiles in the nine years since it started the program, and lab officials say that the database could be an even more powerful tool for busting criminals if not for the backlog.
"It's irrefutable evidence," said Bill Weiss, the deputy assistant director of the lab. "The other thing is not only does it convict the guilty, it frees the innocent."
Even if the state lab finds a match to the Sykes evidence, it's not clear what would happen next. Keith, the Forsyth district attorney, did say he would reopen the investigation. That's something he did not do in 1994 once it became clear that there might still be a rapist at large.
For those who believe in Hunt's guilt, it is difficult to imagine science identifying someone without any connection to Hunt.
"If they can convince me they have the right sample I would probably feel very badly,' said Jefferson, Sykes' mother. "But I don't expect that to happen."
There is physical evidence in the Sykes case that has not been tested. LabCorp tried to test an anal swab in 1994, but said then that the trace amount of sperm was too small for a DNA profile. The technology has changed since that time, and it's possible that the crime lab could extract enough semen this time around to test for DNA, which could help establish with more certainty how many men attacked Sykes.
The police also have fingernail scrapings taken during the autopsy, which could have trace amounts of skin cells from whoever attacked Sykes. And the hairs collected from her mouth and neck have never been tested for DNA, which can be done, though with less accuracy than testing of blood, semen and skin. Hunt's lawyers are looking into the possibility of having the scrapings and hair tested by a private laboratory; Keith said he prefers to wait until the state runs its database search.
In his opening arguments at Hunt's first trial in 1985, the prosecutor, Tisdale, ridiculed the idea of using DNA testing to solve the crime.
"This is not something you see and Quincy comes in and finds some gene in somebody's body that matches up somewhere else," Tisdale explained. "That happens on TV."
Science has proved Tisdale wrong.
Five years later, the new prosecutor, Bowman, stood before another jury and, during a summation that helped convict Hunt a second time, argued with such passion that his audience wept.
"Finally, what was Deborah Sykes thinking when this man right over here ... raped and ravaged her and deposited some thick yellow sickening fluid in her body?" he asked.
Science has proved Bowman wrong, too. For it wasn't Hunt's fluid in Sykes' body.
It's been 19 years since Hunt first told the police he hadn't raped Deborah Sykes and he hadn't stabbed her.
Science has never proven Hunt wrong.
• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com