November 16, 2007
The Winston-Salem Police Department's case against Hunt fills two file cabinets in the corner of Lt. Randy Weavil's office. A heavy chain runs through the drawer handles and the cabinets are padlocked shut.
In 1990, the courthouse where Hunt was tried didn't have a secure evidence room. The chain and lock were the best the police could do to protect their evidence.
Most of it is still there today.
The photographs of Sykes' wounds and her bloody clothes. The plastic bags that hold whatever the medical examiner could scrape from beneath her fingernails. Investigators never did find the knife that was used to kill her. They did seize a pair of Hunt's pants and a T-shirt with a spider design from a friend's apartment, though there was never anything on the clothing to link Hunt to the crime.
The interviews are there, too. The ones that the police did back in 1984 when Hunt was arrested. The ones that the State Bureau of Investigation did with the city police when it took on the case in 1986. The ones that Weavil and his partners did when the police decided to reinvestigate in 1989 after Hunt won a new trial.
Weavil still seethes about the case, the way his department and he himself have been stained.
He knows how hard it was to get some of the witnesses to tell police what they saw that morning, or what they heard afterward. It doesn't bother him that some witnesses didn't come forward until five years after the crime. People didn't want to get involved. They never do.
Weavil believes what they told him. He believes that Hunt was there, at the scene, when Sykes was stabbed to death. It doesn't matter to Weavil whether Hunt raped her. He is still guilty of her murder.
Yet even after they solved the crime, even after they endured all the accusations of police railroading, years after Weavil considered the case shut, people are still asking questions.
In April, a judge ordered him to find the cotton swabs and the test tubes that were used 19 years ago to collect a semen sample. It was time to unlock the drawers again.
Weavil has investigated murders that haunt him more than the killing of Deborah Sykes. But this case eats at his pride. No one had ever attacked his integrity the way Hunt's supporters did, saying that the police framed Hunt.
"The goon squad," they called him and his three partners. "The turnaround team."
The defense lawyers even mocked his name. "Did you get to the part where they called me Detective Weasel?"