Debra Brasswell first saw the barrel in the boat in 1981. It was definitely after her April 2 birthday, because the water was cold, though she couldn't remember the exact date.
But she did recall that her boyfriend caught her looking at it.
"This is junk," Brasswell said he told her, "and I'm going to throw it away."
Billy Hawk unloaded the brown, rusty barrel with a little blue in it. But when she tried to help, he screamed: "Sit down, you're going to cut yourself!"
As Brasswell testified Wednesday in her ex-husband's first-degree murder trial, she remembered thinking, "Well, this isn't much fun."
And she wasn't exactly wrong.
Prosecutors say Hawk, 62, faces first-degree murder charges in the 35-year-old slaying of Johnny Mack Salyer. During opening statements, prosecutor Lance Pope recounted the June 2 afternoon when a couple off Rocky Point Road found a 55-gallon steel drum floating on Chickamauga Lake. The next day, alarmed by the smell, they called authorities, who pulled a decomposing body from the barrel. The figure inside was clothed only in underwear.
After some initial difficulty determining the identity of the body, they realized it was Johnny Mack Salyer, an alleged drug dealer and a co-defendant in a pending cocaine distribution case with Hawk and Brasswell, who then was known by the name Debra Bales.
The defense probed Wednesday into the details surrounding the May 8, 1981, drug bust, which landed Brasswell, Hawk and Salyer in jail.
But much of Wednesday's high-profile trial centered around Brasswell's recollections of the barrel, which the defense attacked.
Bill Speek, one of three attorneys representing Hawk, questioned Brasswell's inability to recall key details, such as the date. He pointed out that Brasswell didn't share the barrel story for 35 years. She lied to police in the early 1980s, when they first tried to make an arrest, he said. And again in the late 1980s, when she and Hawk were getting divorced, he said. And again in fall 2015, when authorities were closing in on Hawk's indictment, he said.
"You lied all the way to 35 years later," Speek said. "And now you try to remember to the best of your ability?"
Brasswell, who owned up to giving different accounts to police, said she lived in fear of Hawk.
"The best we can find out when that [boat ride] was is because the water was cold," Speek said. "The truth is, you don't know when he took you out on that boat ride."
"It's been 30-something years," she replied. "But I do know the sequence of events."
During her cross-examination with Pope, Brasswell said Hawk asked if she wanted to go boating one morning. So they picked up a boat from Hawk's father, drove down Highway 153 and pulled off at a gas station, she said.
There, they ran into a mutual friend. Brasswell asked him to join them, she said, but he had chores to do. When she asked again, he grew irritated, she said. Then, while jurors were absent, Brasswell said he also "kind of knocked his head back a bit and said, 'I've already been to the lake.'"
That testimony drew objections from the defense, who wanted to limit the hearsay. Prosecutor Pope, who is working the case alongside District Attorney General Neal Pinkston, also probed into Hawk and Brasswell's marital strife as a means of understanding the 1981 murder.
After hearing arguments from both sides, Judge Don Poole agreed to let Brasswell testify about an incident that happened near the end of their marriage while she and Hawk lived in Murfreesboro, Tenn.
One evening, she said, after returning from a business appointment, Hawk stormed into the house and demanded that Brasswell fix him something to eat. She said she would in a minute because she was absorbed with something on TV. Instead, he became enraged and grabbed her by the throat in the kitchen, she said.
"And I was screaming," she said, "and he put his hand over my mouth and he said, 'B****, I will stuff you in a barrel."
Otherwise, they didn't talk about the barrel, or Salyer, whom she said she barely knew. There was one time, when the news broke in 1981 that Salyer was identified, where Brasswell said she asked Hawk if he was involved at all.
He said no, she said - and asked her to not bring it up again.
Hawk's trial continues today in Judge Poole's Criminal Court at 8:30 a.m.
Contact staff writer Zack Peterson at 423-757-6347 or zpeterson@timesfreepress.com.