Hawk’s Ex-Girlfriend Says He Confessed To Murder; Robert Hawk Says Brother Told Him To Keep His Mouth Shut

  • Thursday, June 2, 2016
  • Jessica Kramer

Billy Hawk’s ex-girlfriend, Wynna Williams, said Hawk confessed to murdering Johnny Mack Salyer. His brother, Robert Hawk, testified to seeing Billy Hawk in a boat before news of the slaying and years later receiving a threatening phone call, where he was told to keep his mouth shut. 

Billy Hawk is charged in the cold case murder of Salyer, who was found dead in a barrel in 1981. 

Ms. Williams said “just days” before Salyer’s death appeared in the news, she came home to her apartment and found Hawk had broken into her home. At the time, she had a two-year-old son. 

“I came home. I went down the hall, flicked the bedroom light on, and he was standing there with a gun in the dark, and he grabbed me,” she said. “He put me face down on the bed, and he was pushing his knee and everything in my back, and he had the gun in my mouth.” 

Ms. Williams said that was when Hawk started talking about what he and Harold “Moe” Sosebee had done to Salyer.  

Ms. Williams told the jury Hawk had said that when Salyer looked at him, the victim said, “You brought me here to kill me.” 

At this point, Ms. Williams said Hawk hit her in the chest and knocked her backwards. 

She described the scene in detail while the jury was briefly out of the room: “He said they took (Salyer) and put him in a barrel and that nobody would ever find him. … He was constantly screaming, and he kept pushing the gun in my nose and my mouth, and he threw me over the bed, and he would pick me up and throw me around like a rag doll.” 

Ms. Williams told the jury that when she heard the door shut after Hawk, she was still on the floor. She said she ran and put a chair in front of the door and then made it to the bathroom, where she found messages written on her mirror in her lipstick. 

The messages said Hawk would put her in a barrel if she told anyone about what had happened. 

“He also said he would take my son’s mommy away from him,” she said, struggling to keep her composure. 

After the break-in, Ms. Williams said she was terrified of Hawk and did not speak to police until they came to her in 1988. 

She also detailed receiving a phone call from Hawk the same day the news of Salyer’s body’s discovery came out in the paper. 

“(Hawk) said, ‘Did you see the paper?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ … I told him it made me sick to my stomach, and I said, “Did you do this?’ And he said, ‘No. I don’t know what you’re talking about,’” she told the jury. 

With the jury out of the courtroom, Ms. Williams described how Hawk called her at work for months.  

Defense attorney Bill Speek noted that even though the break-in occurred 35 years ago, the way she described the event was “almost like it happened yesterday.” 

“Every time I flip a bedroom light on, I picture it,” she replied. 

However, after having Ms. Williams read transcripts from her multiple interviews with police over the years—some dating back to 1988 and others as recent as the fall of 2015—attorney Speek pointed out a number of discrepancies in the witness’s statements. These discrepancies include Ms. Williams mentioning Hawk’s reference to “a man from Silverdale.” 

Attorney Speek read from Ms. Williams’s interview with police in 1988 in which she said Hawk told her, “My Silverdale man stuck (the gun) right in (Salyer’s) chest, then bam, bam, bam!” 

Ms. Williams denied knowing anything about a Silverdale man, but agreed that Hawk did not identify whether it was him or Sosebee who shot Salyer. 

After attorney Speek questioned the witness about discrepancies in her testimony from interviews with police in 2015, she said, “I wasn’t lying. I just didn’t wanna get back into this. … I didn’t want to admit it because I wanted to be through with this.” 

Billy Hawk’s brother, Robert Hawk, also testified against him. He described seeing his brother and another person docking a boat as he was simultaneously pulling away from the same dock. Robert Hawk said he didn’t recognize the boat, which was “in pretty rough” condition. 

“It was just out of character,” the witness said. He said his brother told him he’d been fishing, but Robert Hawk didn’t know his brother was a fisherman. 

“They pulled up to the dock and from there I saw them get out, but I didn’t see any gear, fishing gear, fishing rods, nothing,” he said. “It just struck me as odd at the time.”  

The witness said it was a few years later, perhaps in 1989 or 1990, when the media “started inquiring again about the (Salyer) case.” He said his brother called him directly at work, which was strange. 

“He told me he knew that the media had been asking, and I had better just keep my mouth shut,” Robert Hawk said. 

The witness admitted that very close to that time he been involved in an issue with grandparents’ rights and his children. 

Prosecution also spoke to Vicki Salyer, Johnny Mack Salyer’s wife. She said she left Chattanooga in 1981 with her daughter, who was not yet two years old, because of her husband’s drug use. She told defense attorney Jonathan Turner that the incident that made her decide to leave involved her arriving home to find her young daughter beside a table with cocaine on it.

“She was right by the coffee table, and I grabbed her, and I licked all her fingers to make sure she hadn’t touched anything, and went to the back of the house to the bathroom, and the door was locked,” she said through tears.

Ms. Salyer said her husband came to visit her and their daughter in Indiana, but returned to Chattanooga about May 21, 1981. While he was visiting, she said her husband was visibly nervous and agitated, “pacing back and forth, not able to sit still.” She said the behavior was strange.

“He was a very gentle soul. He was a caring person,” she said.

After he returned to Chattanooga by plane, Ms. Salyer said May 24 was the last time she spoke with him.

Attorney Turner had Ms. Salyer read from old transcripts of interviews where she had told officers that her husband owed someone a lot of money and had ruined her personal finances. She had also said that Hawk and her husband “were tight” and were “in this together.

Earlier on Thursday, Jake Smith of the University of Tennessee's Body Farm described the process of removing Salyer’s casket from the ground and transporting his remains from his grave in Virginia back to Knoxville to be examined. The examination took place in the fall of 2015. Mr. Smith told attorney James Logan that in terms of body preservation, things were different back in 1981. He also said something metallic was recovered from Salyer’s remains, but that he wasn’t present at the time. 

Dr. Lee Meadows Jantz, a forensic anthropologist on the faculty at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, noted a “hole in the skin of the chest” on the victim’s body and concluded that “the skeleton did not reveal any trauma.” She said she recovered eight metallic pieces from the remains.  

Special agent forensic scientist Teri Arney, who works for the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation’s crime lab, identified one of those metallic pieces as a .25 auto caliber bullet. She said under a microscope, she could faintly see grooves on the bullet from rifling, indicating it had been fired. 

Agent Arney told attorney Jonathan Turner it was not an intact bullet and showed a lot of damage, which might have been caused by “impacting a hard surface,” such as a bone or a metal barrel. She said a pistol she received at the same time as the bullet was not a match, and that TBI did no testing to determine whether the bullet was placed in the body of Salyer before or after his death. 

The state also spoke with Dr. James Metcalfe, the Hamilton County chief medical examiner. Dr. Metcalfe explained that another man had been the medical examiner in 1981, but he had reviewed the original autopsy report for Salyer’s body. 

He said the original autopsy was not completed because there was “no description of the internal examination or the incision to initiate that.” Dr. Metcalfe described doing his own autopsy on the remains in late November of 2015.  

“In the areas where it was not broken down, there was quite good preservation of the skin texture,” he said. 

He determined Salyer’s body had a gunshot wound in the upper chest. He told prosecutor Lance Pope that in relation to the wound, the bullet had passed through an area of cartilage. 

Attorney Logan asked about the original autopsy, where a possible cause of death was not determined. He said that though the medical examiner at the time ordered full body x-rays, none of the x-rays Dr. Metcalfe provided showed the chest area. 

Dr. Metcalfe said he provided all the information he was given. He also said that the combination of the bullet hole and the bullet led him to the conclusion that the victim’s death was due to a gunshot wound to the chest. 

Though Dr. Metcalfe found no signs of trauma to the bones, he said the deformation of the bullet was not consistent with it surviving “going through the side of a metal drum.”


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