What’s in a 35-year-old barrel? According to Billy Hawk’s defense attorneys, evidence that could exonerate the 62-year-old bowling alley owner of first-degree murder.
Hawk has been in Hamilton County Jail on a $500,000 bond since September, when a grand jury indicted him in the slaying of Johnny Mack Salyer. In June 1981, Salyer’s body, clad in underwear and badly decomposed, was pulled from a 55-gallon steel drum on Chickamauga Lake. Until his roommate and cousin identified him by a Rolling Stones tattoo on his right inner thigh, Salyer remained anonymous.
Victim Mack Salyer, pictured, and murder suspect Billy Hawk were co-defendants in a pending cocaine distribution case. A third co-defendant, Debra Bales, married Billy Hawk several months after their arrests. Records of the initial Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office investigation show Billy Hawk was the primary suspect in Mack’s death.State investigators say Hawk killed him. At the time, he and Salyer were co-defendants in a pending cocaine distribution case.
But they have not given a theory about how, or released a witness list for the trial, which has been delayed from its original date. And since Hawk’s indictment, defense attorneys and prosecutors have engaged in a paperwork battle over evidence. On Monday, they agreed to meet April 12 to argue over motions in preparation for the May 31 trial.
But that’s about the extent of their agreement. Especially over the barrel.
Since March, attorneys Bill Speek, Jonathan Turner and Jim Logan have filed a flurry of motions calling for the state to release its evidence – and drop the case. They contend the state relies on too much eyewitness and expert testimony and not enough forensic evidence.
“It has come known that the barrel is no longer available,” reads one motion, filed March 9. “Defense counsel has not been given any explanation as to why this barrel is not available.”
In the same motion: “Defendant knows that whoever placed Johnny Mack Salyer in this barrel would have left some evidence behind. Unfortunately, this barrel cannot be analyzed or tested by the defendant, which means this evidence is lost forever.”
In a different section of the same motion: “The state, including its agents, had a duty to preserve the barrel and the state failed in that duty, this depriving [Hawk] his rights to due process and fundamental fairness.”
Last week, District Attorney General Neal Pinkston filed his own motion:
“The barrel was never collected and checked into the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office property room,” he wrote. “Instead, it appears the barrel was stored for a limited period of time at the Hamilton County Highway Department and was later crushed and discarded into a local landfill.”
The motion says Pinkston will call witnesses at the April 12 hearing to discuss what – if any – scientific evidence investigators could have gleaned from the barrel. He said the state had no duty to preserve the barrel because that’s only required of potentially exonerating evidence.
And since Hawk’s defense counsel hasn’t announced the barrel’s value as evidence, “we are left to speculate.”
Hawk’s team, meanwhile, says that’s not their job. They just have to show the barrel existed. And, they write, “there is no doubt that this barrel existed and was in the custody of the state.”
Contact staff writer Zack Peterson at zpeterson@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6347 with story ideas or tips. Follow @zackpeterson918.