November 20, 2007
New Sykes Investigation
By 1989, there was a new district attorney in town. Tisdale had lost the 1986 Democratic primary to Warren Sparrow, largely because of backlash from black voters over Hunt's case. Sparrow went on to win the general election.
He prosecuted Hunt in the second Wilson trial, in which Hunt was acquitted, but he had a possible conflict of interest in the Sykes case. Two assistants in his office, Vince Rabil and Todd Burke, had worked briefly for Hunt's defense before coming to the prosecutor's office. In addition, Rabil was the brother of Mark Rabil, Hunt's attorney, and Burke was the son of Alderman Vivian Burke, one of the harshest critics of the police department's case against Hunt.
The state administrative office of the courts assigned the Sykes retrial to Dean Bowman, the district attorney in Surry County.
The SBI had completed its investigation. Two SBI agents spent most of 1986 working with two police officers on a review of the Hunt case. Their 3,084-page report fills six volumes, yet no one from the SBI has ever discussed the agency's findings. Tisdale and Sparrow said that the SBI never briefed them.
According to a police report, the SBI and police department closed their joint investigation Nov. 25, 1986, unable to identify any other suspects in Sykes' murder or produce any new evidence for or against Hunt.
"We could not prove Darryl Hunt wasn't involved," said retired Detective Carter Crump, who worked with the SBI agents in the 1986 probe. "We could not develop anything that led to anyone else being involved."
The SBI declined recent requests for an interview with agent Dan Stone, the lead investigator. To this day, the SBI refuses to make its full report public.
Only portions ordered released to the defense by a judge are in the public domain. It is clear from these reports that the SBI spent a lot of time trying to get evidence that would implicate Johnny Gray, the man who first called 911 to report the attack, in Sykes' death. Gray's girlfriend, Lisa McBride, and a pool-hall buddy named Al Kelly both told agents that Gray had confessed to stabbing Sykes himself. The agents even had Kelly wired with a recording device to get a confession from Gray, but the plan backfired, and Gray was never charged with the crime. Instead, he remained a state's witness against Hunt.
"I would have liked to have seen him indicted," said Mike McCoy, the assistant chief of police who supervised the two officers who the police loaned to the SBI for its 1986 investigation. "The reason that was given me is they thought he had an alibi by his calling in the incident, but I always thought he did that for a cover."
Not that McCoy believed that Hunt was innocent. He said recently he thinks that Hunt, Mitchell and Gray were all somehow involved. Like other police, he believes that something is wrong with the DNA evidence. The lab, however, did verify that it had the correct sample by matching DNA from the same evidence packet to Sykes' DNA.
Bowman asked the police department to assign its four best detectives to the case. Weavil, Richard Nifong, Earl Biggers and Teresa Hicks took on the case, with McCoy as their supervisor.
McCoy said that Little and others later accused him of being used by the department, to put a black face on a racially charged investigation.
"I was called an Uncle Tom," McCoy said. "I pledged to seek the truth, whether it showed that Hunt was guilty or innocent."
The detectives started by reading everything in the case, including all six volumes of the SBI report. Then they started tracking down witnesses. They talked to all whose names appeared in any report, if they could find them. Some people had simply disappeared.