November 19, 2007
There were enough red flags to make a prosecutor sweat. Tisdale hated having to tell Evelyn Jefferson, Sykes' mother, that he had a lousy case against her daughter's accused killer.
"Yesterday I had the unpleasant task of talking to the family of Deborah Sykes, only to find that they were optimistic about the case," he wrote Masten. "They had been informed by the police that there were sperm found, that hair samples were found, that there was significant blood evidence, and that the eyewitnesses were ideal. I did not find it appealing to lie to them and my most encouraging word to them was that we were in trouble."
The police department was itself in turmoil in the summer of 1984. Lucius Powell, the chief, resigned at the end of August because of conflicts with the aldermen, leaving Masten as the acting chief. The Sykes investigation was conducted amid personality clashes within the detective division.
Tisdale said in his memo to Masten that the department had assigned the wrong man as lead detective. Jim Daulton had spent most of his 18 years as a motorcycle cop, writing traffic tickets and investigating car wrecks. He didn't become a detective until 1982, and for most of that time he had worked juvenile crimes.
Tisdale wasn't the only one troubled by Daulton's lack of experience. Within the department there was criticism from the former chief on down. The department assigned other officers to help but kept Daulton as the lead detective. Daulton says now he never felt that he was in charge of the case; rather, he was a yes man who did what he was told. After Hunt's conviction, Masten demoted Daulton to the radio room, where he worked until his retirement last year.
Hunt's arrest did not conclude the investigation. A woman who worked at the Hyatt House hotel overheard a desk clerk, a man named Roger Weaver, talking about the Sykes murder, and called the police.
Weaver told police on Sept. 19 that the morning of the murder a man he had seen before that summer came through the hotel lobby and headed for the restroom. Weaver didn't object. When the man took a while, Weaver sent the security guard in to chase him off. And shortly afterward, when he got a break from his duties, Weaver went to use the restroom himself. There, he said, he saw pink water droplets in the sink and bloody paper towels in the trash.
Weaver said he had thought about calling earlier with the tip, but he was afraid for his safety. He worked nights, often alone. After he saw Hunt's picture in the newspaper, he said, he was sure it was the same man.
Weaver always impressed Tisdale. He was more credible, certainly, than Johnny Gray. But Tisdale knew that eyewitnesses were unreliable. Another Hyatt worker and a parking-lot security guard were never able to identify Hunt as the man they saw that morning.
"I don't mean to sit here and dismantle my own case," Tisdale said recently. "Hunt's picture appears in the paper. Then they show Mr. Weaver a picture. Is he identifying what he saw when the guy went into the bathroom or is he identifying what he saw in the paper?"
A district attorney can choose to drop a charge or ask for more investigation before pursuing a case, but Tisdale's doubts didn't stop him from prosecuting Hunt, or from asking for the death penalty. "I never really doubted that he was a participant," Tisdale said. "If I had, then I shouldn't have tried him."
Tisdale's current law partner, Michael Grace, said that political pressures put Tisdale in an impossible situation. Drop the charges and he would be perceived by some as soft on crime; prosecute, and others would say that he was knowingly trying an innocent man for his life.
"I'll bet you money if he had it to do again he probably wouldn't prosecute it, but once the light shines on it, it takes on a life of its own," Grace said. "But I guarantee you, if he hadn't, there would have been comments in the paper that he caved to the black community."
Tisdale said that, in retrospect, he may not have prosecuted had he known the consequences. "I cut my own throat prosecuting that case," he said. "I lost 98 percent of the black vote at the last election. I don't think Martin Luther King could have solidified the black vote better than that."