Man acquitted in 1982 cold-case murder
The eight men and four women of the jury grappled with the choices given in the cold-case murder trial of a 63-year-old Florida dental hygienist: guilty or not guilty of second-degree murder in the 1982 beating and strangulation death of a 25-year-old Delta Air Lines reservations clerk whose body was found in Nuuanu.
On Friday, the first day of deliberations, they asked whether they could have another choice. At the end of Tuesday, they chose not guilty.
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The deputy prosecutor’s hands were tied, unable to tell jurors Thomas Lewis Garner killed another 25-year-old woman in Florida in the same manner in 1984, just two years after Atlanta visitor Kathy Warnette Hicks was assaulted and strangled, her body left in a secluded area.
Unbeknownst to the jury, Garner was convicted in May 2021 for first-degree murder of Pamela Cahanes, and had begun serving a life sentence when he was indicted June 2021 in Hicks’ murder — his DNA linking him to both cold cases.
But Hicks’ family knew. They traveled in 2021 to Florida from Atlanta for Garner’s murder trial in Cahanes’ death.
Now after waiting nearly 41 years, they wanted to see Hicks’ killer brought to justice. Instead, Judge Rowena Somerville accepted the jury’s verdict and released Garner from custody in this case to return to Florida to continue serving his sentence in the Cahanes murder.
But despite the life sentence in the Florida case, Breylynn Hicks said, “That doesn’t matter. As far as I’m concerned, for me, he’s set free as far as what he did to my sister.”
The younger brother of two, now 55 and a police officer of 32 years, was just 15 when he took the call from a Honolulu police detective who mistook him for his father and told him that his daughter’s body was found.
He said after the verdict, “He killed my sister the same exact way that he killed the woman in Florida.”
“What I don’t understand is you got to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt,” Hicks said. “Is it probable that he could have dropped her off at 2 a.m. or 2:30 a.m., put her in a safe cab to her hotel and somebody could take her from there and murder her?”
