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A Special Report
THE ATTACK AT THE SILK PLANT FOREST
NAVIGATION
PROJECT TOOLBAR
Part Three: The Confession
‘I didn’t have nothing to hide’
Detective Don Williams returned to Winston-Salem from his visit with Jill Marker in October 1996 with a new focus for his investigation into her near-fatal beating. He began looking in earnest at the black suspects whose names he had in his files.
Marker couldn’t speak when Williams interviewed her in an Ohio hospital, but she could nod or shake her head yes or no.
From her gestures, Williams concluded that Marker had been attacked by a black man in his 30s with a medium to heavy build, possibly a deliveryman. It is not clear from his report why he concluded that her gestures about the attacker’s race and age were more certain than her gestures about whether he was a deliveryman.
It was now November 1996, nearly a year since Marker, an assistant manager at the Silk Plant Forest store, had been struck some 20 times in the head as she was closing up on a Saturday night, Dec. 9, 1995.
Williams didn’t have much to work with as his investigation took its new turn.
In July, he had interviewed a 25-year-old black man named Kalvin Michael Smith, but he hadn’t gotten around to documenting it ...
