November 18, 2007
The Walls Close In
The day after he spoke with Hunt and Mitchell, Daulton tracked down Crawford at the courthouse, where she was appearing on a prostitution charge. He didn't know at the time that she was 14; she was using a false name, the same name that Hunt and everyone else called her - Brenda Morino.
According to Daulton's report, she told him that the two men had been with her on Aug. 28, and she also said that they were with her on Aug. 10, the morning of the murder. Daulton said Crawford told him that if either man needed an alibi for any other date she would give them one for those, too.
A week later, on Sept. 6, Daulton had a photo lineup put together from Polaroid shots of Hunt and a half dozen other men. He didn't include a picture of Mitchell, because none of the witnesses in the Sykes case had ever described seeing a man with a beard.
Murphy looked at the photo lineup and asked to see Hunt in person. With that tentative identification, Daulton had the beginnings of a case against Hunt.
Gary Wells, a psychology professor at Iowa State University and an expert in eyewitness identification, said that there were several problems with the way the photo lineup was conducted. First, Wells said, Daulton should not have been the one to show Murphy the photographs, because he knew that Hunt was the suspect and could easily have influenced Murphy's choice. "My guess is as soon as the witness settles on that it gets reinforced," Wells said. Second, he said, the background in the photograph of Hunt was brown and the background in the other Polaroids was pale gray, which called attention to Hunt's picture.
Wells said that one other factor makes him suspicious of Murphy's identification. It is difficult for white people to accurately distinguish among black people, just as the reverse is true.
"Once a mistaken identification happens, undoing it is nearly impossible. Unless DNA comes along or you have something else, how do you ever undo that?" Wells said. "It's not like the witness is going to slap his palm to his head and say, 'I made a mistake.' You can't work backward. That's why the procedures that are involved in the initial identification attempt are absolutely critical to the reliability of the outcome."
Hunt had no record of violent crime or sexual offense at the time he became a suspect in what experts say was an unusually vicious rape and murder. Greg McCrary, a retired FBI agent who specializes in developing psychological profiles of sex offenders, said that whoever raped and sodomized Sykes and stabbed her 16 times would probably have had a history of violence against women.