The Attack at the Silk Plant Forest

NAVIGATION

Part Two: The Case

Det. Williams interviews Marker, finds 'his man'

By Phoebe Zerwick

JOURNAL REPORTER

WINSTON-SALEM

CHAPTER 3

Many leads

The first mention of Kalvin Michael Smith in connection with the attack on Jill Marker came almost six months after the crime, on June 1, 1996, in an anonymous tip to Crime Stoppers.

Crime Stoppers works with the police department by offering rewards for information that leads to an arrest. The reward in the Marker case was $12,000.

The tip was short and to the point.

“Caller advised that Kalvin Michael Smith is responsible for the beating of the lady at the Silk Plant Forest,” the report reads. “Caller advised that the subject could be located at 1228 Shouse Street in Winston-Salem. Information was left on the answering machine and no further details were given.”

Kalvin Smith at the Alexander Correctional Institution (Journal Photo by Megan Morr). You can view the entire photo gallery.

Smith, then 25, had a long list of arrests for petty crimes, with five convictions, three for misdemeanor larceny, one for possession of marijuana and one for assault on a female. A part-time painter, he had no permanent address and no permanent job.

Don Williams, the lead detective in the case, was occupied at the time with a new and strong lead, and he put the tip aside.

Williams was busy checking out a patient at Umstead Hospital, a state psychiatric institution in Butner, who had called police in April to take credit for the crime. In an hourlong interview with Williams and Detective Mike Rowe, Shane Fletcher said he had been obsessed with Jill Marker for months and had gone to the Silk Plant Forest the night of Dec. 9, 1995, with the idea of raping her.

Fletcher was able to tell the detectives important details about the crime. He knew the location of the cash register and where Marker had been struck. He could describe her appearance, as well as that of her husband, Aaron Marker. Fletcher even had what he told the detectives was the weapon — a heavy stick. In April, a video-recorder had been stolen from Aaron Marker’s car, and Fletcher claimed to have seen the tape of the Markers’ baby, who had been born April 19, while Marker still lay semiconscious in the hospital.

Fletcher got one important fact about the crime wrong. He told Williams and Rowe that Marker fell to the floor near the cash register, when in fact she was found about 60 feet away, at the back of the store. But he didn’t fall for the detectives’ trick questions. When they asked about the weapon he had dropped, he said he hadn’t left anything behind.

Williams later seized a heavy, varnished stick from the home of Fletcher’s mother. But she told him that her son could not have committed the crime because he had been a patient on the psychiatric ward at Forsyth Medical Center at the time of the attack.

The detectives obtained a court order for Fletcher’s medical records, which showed that he was asleep in his bed at the medical center at the time of the assault. After talking with hospital nurses and security staff, Williams was convinced that Fletcher could not have left the locked ward without detection. After weeks of investigation, he ruled out Fletcher as a suspect.

In a subsequent interview, Fletcher told Williams that he must have invented his confession, picking up details about the case from watching television and reading the newspaper.

The police overlooked one striking coincidence related to Fletcher’s confession. He was a patient in the psychiatric unit at Forsyth at the same time that another suspect in the case, Kenneth Lamoureux, was there. According to court records and police reports, Fletcher was in Room 2568 and Lamoureux had Room 2569, across the hall.

In the early months of the investigation, police had focused on Lamoureux because he had been seen in the plant store an hour before the attack and witnesses said that he knew Marker. Police never looked into whether Lamoureux and Fletcher had come to know each other in the psychiatric unit the week of Marker’s attack. “I didn’t even connect them,” Williams said.

Fletcher and Lamoureux almost certainly would have had the opportunity to meet each other, because the treatment program for psychiatric patients includes group sessions and free time in a lounge area.

Fletcher declined to be interviewed for this story. In an interview at his home outside San Antonio, Texas, Lamoureux said he remembered one patient on the ward when he was there, a man who had swallowed a spoon. Fletcher’s medical records say that he had swallowed some sort of foreign object during his stay at Forsyth. His mother did not remember that particular incident, but she said that he frequently swallowed metal objects, such as watches, batteries and coins.

Williams spent most of June running down leads on Fletcher. It wasn’t until July 22, seven weeks after receiving the tip about Smith, that officers arrested Smith on an outstanding warrant for larceny and brought him to police headquarters for questioning in Marker’s beating.

Williams, who retired from the Winston-Salem Police Department in 2000, remembers well that first encounter with Smith.

He talks with nostalgia and confidence about the methods that he used investigating crimes and the instincts that he honed.

“You can talk to most detectives. They can sit right in front of a suspect. They have a gut feeling. ‘This is the man. Now how am I going to prove it?’ And you can’t give that man up. It’s just that quick. You can tell. Even if you don’t have sufficient evidence to charge them, you know they’ve done the crime.”

Williams said he immediately suspected Smith because Smith cried when asked about the crime. “That’s one of the giveaways of being involved,” Williams said. “When you’re a crook, you cry when you’ve got something to hide.”

Williams’ reports do not back up his recollection. His report on the July 22 interview is only one page long, and it makes no mention of Smith’s tears or Williams’ suspicions.

According to the report, Smith waived his rights and agreed to take a lie-detector test. The results are not clear from the police reports made public during the discovery phase of Smith’s trial.

According to Williams’ report, Smith passed the lie-detector test. “At the conclusion of the polygraph examination, Detective L.M. (Lonnie) Maines informed me that Mr. Calvin Smith had been truthful in his answers to not being involved in this case,” the report reads, spelling Smith’s name incorrectly.

In a later version of the report, Maines’ name has been crossed out and the name (Randy) R.C. Patterson, is written in its place.

Patterson’s report says that the test results of Smith were inconclusive. There is no report by Maines in the public record.

Patterson said in a recent interview that he didn’t remember the case, but that inconclusive polygraph results are common, and that the standard procedure would have been to administer a second test.

Williams’ report does not say whether Smith was given a second test, but Patterson said that is the most likely explanation. After his test was inconclusive, Maines probably tested Smith and found him to be truthful, Patterson said.

Maines said recently that he did not polygraph Smith. He said that Williams must have made a mistake when he wrote his report. “Why this says inconclusive and this says truthful I don’t know,” he said. “The only thing I can think is there’s some miscommunication.”

Though Williams says now that he believed Smith to be guilty early on, he wrote the opposite at the bottom of the Crime Stoppers report: “Kalvin denied any involvement and took a polygraph. Kalvin Smith was truthful in his answers given during the polygraph. No further action taken.”

Smith went back to jail on the larceny warrant. Williams never tracked the anonymous caller. Later in the investigation, however, a woman named Andra Wilson told him that she had provided the tip.

Wilson was one of Smith’s many female friends in the mid-1990s. Smith had been born in Winston-Salem but spent most of his childhood in Atlanta with his father, a manager with Piedmont Aviation. In his late teens, he dropped out of high school and moved back to Winston-Salem.

Friends and relatives, who refer to Smith by his middle name, Michael, say that he had a restless spirit. As a child, he played baseball and football and excelled at art and music. As soon as he was old enough to date, he did.

“The only problem my son had from the time he was a preteen up is he loved girls,” said his father, Augustus Dark, who today lives in Winston-Salem. “He always had two or three girlfriends at a time. Michael would spend all his time trying to avoid getting caught. Michael never was the kind of person who wanted to control anybody. He just wanted to be free.”

Wilson and Smith said they met in December 1995, about Christmas, a couple of weeks after the attack on Marker. After spending a month in jail in connection with a larceny charge, Smith was released Dec. 4, 1995, and went to stay with a girlfriend named Valerie Williams. He said that in late December, he had an argument with Williams and wound up at Wilson’s apartment on Timlic Avenue in the Skyline Village apartment complex. Smith said he is certain that they met close to Christmas because he helped Wilson assemble a dollhouse for her daughter as a present.

Wilson, interviewed at a relative’s apartment in Winston-Salem, said she can’t remember much about that period of her life because she has bipolar disorder. She said that the disorder was not diagnosed until 2000, when she was undergoing treatment for anger management.

“Y’all waited a few years too late for me to remember,” she said. “I can’t even remember being pregnant with my children.”

Wilson said she did remember Smith coming to stay with her about Christmas 1995, though she insists there was nothing between them beyond friendship. Others, including Smith, say that their relationship was more than that.

“I would see him over at her house. He stayed with her for a while,” said Felicia Morrison, a neighbor whom Wilson called a close friend. “They were dating, I guess, if you want to call it that.”

In a recent interview at the Alexander Correctional Institution in Taylorsville, Smith said that he stayed with Wilson only until he got back together with Williams. Wilson, he said, was devastated when he left and, after his arrest, told him that she had reported him to Crime Stoppers out of spite. He cannot explain why, of all the ways she could have gotten back at him, she chose to blame him for a crime committed six months earlier.

“She told me she did it and she told me why,” Smith said. “If she couldn’t have me to herself, she was going to make my life miserable.”

Marker was back home in Ohio by the summer of 1996, in a rehabilitation hospital in Cleveland, growing stronger but still unable to speak.

Her vision was impaired, too, but she knew her infant son, Barron Lloyd Marker, who lived with his father, and she was beginning to answer simple questions by nodding her head yes or no.

Dr. William Bell, who treated her at Forsyth Medical Center, told police and later testified that he thought she had been struck at least 20 times with a heavy blunt object such as a stick or a metal pipe. The blows fractured the back of her skull 10 times on the left side and left her brain swollen with fluid and badly bruised.

The damage was extensive.

In the emergency room, her heart developed an abnormal beat, which required electric shocks to stabilize. A doctor who reviewed her medical chart later testified that that episode alone could have affected her memory. Doctors ran a tube through her throat to her lungs to help her breathe.

In the operating room, Bell repaired the skull fractures and removed the blood clots. Marker remained in the intensive-care unit for almost five months. Bell wrote in his discharge plan that Marker was unconscious for most of her hospital stay. Occasionally, she would open her eyes, but she was unable to focus. Finally, after more than four months, she could wiggle her right index finger on command.

Jill Marker writes her name, date of birth, and the day's date (Journal Photo by Ted Richardson). You can view the entire photo gallery.

Her doctors had told police that it was unlikely that Marker would ever recover her memory. Even a mild concussion can cause some temporary memory loss. The kind of traumatic brain injuries Marker suffered typically leave gaping holes in a patient’s memory. Patients generally do not remember the events surrounding the injury because the injury itself prevents the brain from recording that memory. The injury often erases memories of the weeks leading up to the injury and prevents the formation of new memories afterward, medical experts said.

“I’ve got to believe with that degree of injury it would be very unlikely that she could actually remember the event,” said Dr. Eugene Benjamin, a neurologist at the VA Medical Center of Martinsburg, W.Va., who reviewed Marker’s medical record for the defense just before Smith’s trial.

Police still were hoping for the best.

“It’s a whodunit right now,” Williams’ supervisor, Sgt. Ted Best, told the Journal in August 1996. “A big factor in the investigation is going to be when and if Jill can be interviewed.”

Williams kept in contact by telephone with Marker’s husband and her parents. In August, Edna Hoisington reported that her daughter was able to communicate by writing and shaking her head. In September, Aaron Marker told Williams that his wife was beginning to remember some things.

Williams then called Marker’s father, Bud Hoisington, and instructed him to ask his daughter about the attack. According to Williams’ report, he requested that Hoisington ask her whether the attacker was white or black and whether she knew his name. He told Hoisington not to share the names of any suspects with his daughter, which suggests that Hoisington knew the names of suspects. He also asked that Hoisington withhold information about the time his daughter had spent working at the Today’s Child day-care center. Marker worked there and taught the children of Lamoureux, the early suspect in the case. Williams’ warning suggests that Hoisington knew about Lamoureux.

Hoisington said that he and Williams talked often during those months, but he does not remember that conversation. He said that he and his wife did not know any details of the investigation and did not talk about the crime in front of their daughter. They did, however, know about Lamoureux. They said they recalled when Lamoureux’s wife came to Marker’s room at Forsyth Medical Center to warn her parents about her estranged husband.

Today, Marker says that she remembers very little about the attack. She speaks with difficulty through a hole in her throat, and it’s hard to tell whether her reluctance to answer questions about the attack is because of the subject or the effort required to speak.

She lives just south of Akron with her parents in a house they built with money she won in a $9.25 million settlement of a civil lawsuit against the Silas Creek Crossing shopping center. The money also pays for round-the-clock nursing care. Her parents give her companionship, but without the private-duty nursing she would not survive. Her breathing is shallow, and she needs constant care to keep her lungs from filling up with fluid.

Before the attack, Marker was a slender woman, perfectly groomed with wavy brown hair. With help from her nurses, she still keeps herself groomed, with blond streaks in her hair, polish on her nails and suntanned legs. She is learning to walk again, leaning against a nurse or a walker.

Marker’s eyes are open, but blank; her face betrays little emotion. The muscles are weak from her injuries, so she doesn’t smile or laugh, except as part of a physical-therapy exercise. Her left side is weak and she can’t swallow. She has to wipe her mouth constantly with a washcloth to clear out saliva. She has trouble breathing deeply, so her speech sounds muffled and rasping.

Her right hand is in constant motion, expressing the emotions so absent from her face. She holds her hand up to signal that she agrees. She wags her hand to signal “sometimes” or “maybe” or “so-so,” and crosses her fingers to signal what she hopes.

She hopes to walk again.

She hopes for another excursion to the golf course.

She longs for her son, reaching to stroke his head when he visits.

By all accounts she has made remarkable progress since the attack nine years ago, yet she is vague about the months she spent in Winston-Salem.

“I lived in Winston-Salem,” she said. “I don’t remember anything else.”

She said she doesn’t remember being pregnant. She doesn’t remember picking out the Noah’s Ark pattern for her nursery. She doesn’t remember the apartment that she shared with her husband. Her memory of the attack is vague, too. She said she doesn’t remember what the attacker said or what she said, if anything, nor does she remember a weapon or people helping her afterward.

“I just know that a man attacked me,” she said. “I just know that he was a black man. I remember what he looked like.”

Neurologists and psychologists who work with brain-injured patients say that the gaps in Marker’s memory are not unusual. What is surprising is that she would remember anything at all about the person who attacked her.

View our interactive graphic on brain damage.

“The likelihood of someone with a very severe brain injury, who’s been in a coma and a persistent vegetative state, to remember the events would be extremely limited if at all,” said Dr. Jordan Grafman, the chief of the cognitive neuroscience section at the National Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, Md.

Although he could not comment specifically on Marker’s condition, he said it is unlikely that someone with injuries as severe as hers would remember her attacker’s face and nothing else. He said that medical literature includes reports of patients who can recall a portion of an event, but those reports involve a more complete memory than the single image of a man’s face. And even those memories are unproven.

The human brain is the most complex organ, a mass of neural tissue that controls every movement, every breath and every thought a person has. Learning and remembering, aided by a region of the brain called the hippocampus, found in the temporal lobes on either side of the brain, are among the most complex brain functions.

Parts of Marker’s brain were so badly bruised and beaten that her doctor later described it looking like “pudding, sort of vanilla pudding kind of thing, softened up.” The beating caused blood clots and swelling in almost all the major portions of the brain, including the temporal and frontal lobes, areas critical to memory.

Even people who have never suffered a brain injury can confuse a true memory of an event with stories they later hear or images they later see about it. The problem is magnified in Marker’s case, making it hard to tell whether her memory of her attacker was formed at the time of the attack or later, after she may have heard bits and pieces about the investigation into her case, perhaps from her parents who were at her bedside every day, or from the nurses who looked after her and followed her case.

“The problem is usually relatives or police officers often help them reconstruct the event, and if their memory after the injury is not completely impaired, they can sometimes incorporate what they’ve been told; then it becomes hard to disentangle what they remember from what they’ve been told,” Grafman said. “We’re all desperate to fill in the past. We all reconstruct, but if you have a memory problem, you’re going to rely more on what’s reconstructed.”

Marker’s neurologist, Dr. Deepak Raheja, gave Williams permission to visit her at the end of October 1996. The doctor told Williams that she was still unable to speak, but that she could answer questions by nodding her head. He also said that her vision had improved, but nothing in the police or court records shows how well she could actually see. Williams and another detective arrived in Cleveland on Oct. 31.

Marker was seated in a wheelchair in her room at Grace Memorial Hospital.

“Was the person that hurt you a male?” Williams asked.

Marker nodded her head.

“Was the person that hurt you white?”

She shook her head.

“Was the person who hurt you Hispanic?”

Again, she shook her head.

“Was the person who hurt you black?”

She nodded.

She also indicated that she knew her attacker, that he was a deliveryman and that she would be able to identify him in a photograph. Before he had left for Ohio, Williams had a photo lineup put together with Smith’s photograph and five others. His reports do not indicate whether he showed Smith’s photograph or the lineup to her during the interview.

Raheja said in a recent interview he does not believe that Marker’s memory was reliable. “It’s fair to say that at that time I would not have given her a high score on memory, given the traumatic events and everything else she was not able to do,” Raheja said. “She had very minimal comprehension.”

He said that in the summer and fall of 1996, her disabilities were so severe that there was no way even to test the quality of her memory. Memory tests require a patient to be able to answer a series of questions about the past. Marker was unable to speak and therefore could not be tested, he said.

“To presume that she had any memory function would not be a fair assumption,” Raheja said. “It’s a very difficult scenario because formal testing would not have been done.”

Even her mother says now that for the most part her daughter’s memory of that period of her life is vague.

“I don’t know whether she blanked it out or what,” Edna Hoisington said recently.

During this same period, Marker’s husband, Aaron, asked the probate court in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, to declare Marker incompetent and name him as her guardian. In a report dated July 29, 1996, Raheja said that her language and comprehension were impaired, meaning that she was unable not only to speak, but also to understand all that was said to her.

On Oct. 28, three days before Williams spoke with her, an investigator for the court in Ohio visited Marker and concluded that she was not competent to conduct her own affairs.

“Mrs. Marker was awake and appeared to be aware of my presence in the room, but her only attempt at communication was waving her finger back and forth throughout my visit,” the investigator wrote in his report. “Mrs. Marker cannot express her needs and requires a guardian to render all types of decisions.”

The standard for competency to manage one’s own affairs is not the same as whether a person has a reliable memory of the past or is competent to testify at a criminal trial. Children can testify, even though they cannot manage their own affairs. Nonetheless, the Ohio court’s decision is a measure of the extent of Marker’s disability. The incompetence issue would never be mentioned in the criminal trial yet to come.

Regardless of the potential for error, the interview with Marker changed the course of the investigation. Lamoureux was no longer a suspect. “He was definitely ruled out after she said it was a black male,” Williams said recently. So were any other white men.

Williams never tried to have Marker’s memory evaluated, nor did any of his supervisors in the police department or any of the prosecutors in the district attorney’s office. Williams said he took it as a matter of faith that Marker had proved her doctors wrong and that her memory was real and true.

“I’m just happy that she did remember what she did,” he said. “I’m no doctor. I don’t know how the brain works.… All I know is I just thank the good Lord that she did.”

• Phoebe Zerwick can be reached at 727-7291 or at pzerwick@wsjournal.com

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