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Pursuit of Justice
JUST THE TRUTH: THE GUILTY MAY BE OVERLOOKED
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Published: February 29, 2008
Her business card reads, "The Integon Victim."
She is the woman who was raped, kidnapped and cut on the morning of Feb. 2, 1985. In the aftermath, she identified her attacker as Williard Brown, but he was never charged.
In November 2003, her story became public again, first when it was mentioned in a Winston-Salem Journal series about the Deborah Sykes murder case and the fate of Darryl Hunt, and then a month later when Brown confessed to killing Sykes and Hunt
was freed.
In February 2006, she told her story publicly for the first time, to a citizens committee studying what went wrong in the Sykes investigation. Even then, more than 20 years after the attack, she was referred to only as Regina K., her first name and middle initial.
But today, Regina K. Lane is public.
She wants people to know what happened.
"I'm not a bitter person because of it; I'm a changed person because of it," she said in a recent interview at her workplace, Triad Guaranty Insurance on Stratford Road.
Lane has co-founded a group called Mothers for Justice, which has a mission of educating people about public safety and advocating for changes that will protect the innocent.
She recently joined supporters of Kalvin Michael Smith in lobbying city leaders to give more power to a citizens committee that will review police actions in the case. Smith has maintained his innocence in the beating in 1995 of Jill Marker in the Silk Plant Forest store in Winston-Salem. Smith has been in prison, serving a sentence of at least 23 years after he was convicted in 1997.
The soft-spoken Lane still has questions about the way Winston-Salem police investigated her case.
Brown had raped and killed Sykes in downtown Winston-Salem on Aug. 10, 1984. Winston-Salem police erroneously focused on Hunt, who was twice wrongly convicted of murder.
With Hunt in jail after being charged in the Sykes case, two other women were raped; earlier, in June 1984, another woman had been raped in the same park where Sykes was killed. The four attacks all happened downtown.
The Sykes committee found that Winston-Salem police made a number of mistakes investigating the case, either failing to see possible connections between the other downtown rape attacks or failing to document them.
Brown pleaded guilty to killing Sykes but was never charged in connection with any of the other cases.
Lane says that the way her case was handled confuses her to this day.
Back in 1985, she identified Brown from a photo lineup and a live lineup. But she said she couldn't be 100 percent sure of her identification, and told police that she didn't want to prosecute the wrong person.
She also said she told detectives that she thought her attack was similar to the killing of Sykes, who had been raped and then stabbed 16 times off West End Boulevard. Lane was cut 12 times in the face after Brown kidnapped her on her way to work at Integon and raped her off Old Greensboro Road before she broke free and ran away.
She told the Sykes committee that a detective told her that the police didn't want to do anything to raise doubt about Hunt as the attacker of Sykes. The detective even told her that he would need to check to make sure she hadn't cut herself, she said.
Police also told her, she said, that Brown was in prison when Sykes was attacked -- which was mistakenly indicated in some records. (In 2003 police and State Bureau of Investigation agents found that Brown was not in prison, and DNA linked him to the Sykes case.)
Lane said she was told by police that Brown had been living in High Point with a girlfriend -- but police didn't know the girlfriend's last name.
"I always wondered why they couldn't find out. If they knew as much as they did, then why couldn't they find out the other part," she said.
"I had always hoped that the police could help me prove my
case.... That's the part that I will always have questions about," Lane said. "I just felt neglected. I just felt like there was more that could have been done."
Lane talked with a reporter from the Journal after she was attacked. But she decided not to agree to an interview because she didn't want her name published. At the time, the Journal published the names of rape victims. The newspaper no longer does that.
Lane said she believes that Winston-Salem police would handle the case differently now.
"I've been taught since I was a little girl that (police) are my friends, they are there to help me and protect me," she said. "And I still believe that today. They are heroes because they're putting their lives on the line for us."
Still, Lane has gone public with both her story and her support for Smith in the Silk Plant Forest case.
The city is about to start a process of examining police procedures and facts in the case against Smith. The full city council is poised Monday to appoint the new citizens committee, a week after the council's public-safety committee approved it.
An investigation by the Innocence Project at Duke University Law School has already turned up a number of flaws in the case, its faculty adviser says, including the fact that the lead detective didn't document potentially critical evidence to Smith's attorney.
Lane doesn't understand why so many officers and retired officers didn't want to talk to the Sykes committee, she said.
"I mean, we all make mistakes, but I think we learn from our mistakes, too," she said.
She said she would encourage police officers and retired police officers who worked on Smith's case to be open.
"My hope is that they would come forward and be able to share what they know and be able to share the work that they've done and how they came about the decisions that they made regarding the case," she said. "It could be the same situation here that the wrong person's incarcerated.'' If that's the case, she said, "you still have someone who was a brutal person still walking the streets and able to hurt other people."
In January, Lane and other women in Winston-Salem created Mothers for Justice.
Among nine members on the committee is Jennifer Thompson-Cannino, a rape victim who identified the wrong man, Ronald Cotton, after she was attacked in Burlington. Cotton was convicted in 1985, but in 1996, DNA showed that another man had attacked Thompson-Cannino. Cotton was freed.
She has told her story many times since then, sometimes with Cotton, and talks about the many ways people can make mistaken eyewitness identifications.
Thompson-Cannino met Lane at a meeting of the Sykes review committee.
"I thought she was extremely poised and eloquent, and I think that that was a characteristic that just embodies her," Thompson-Cannino said. "She is one of the bravest, most special people I have ever had the pleasure to meet."
Smith's mother, Sheila LeGrande, is a co-founder of Mothers for Justice.
LeGrande said that Lane is a great spokeswoman on criminal-justice issues.
"Regina really gets the message out that we are trying to relate to the public," she said. "All the ladies that are involved in Mothers for Justice, they are for what's right, and that's to serve the public and make sure that nobody is discriminated against, nobody's rights are violated, that justice is served."
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