Trial in 1982 murder goes to jury today
Jul. 6—An Oahu jury will hear closing arguments today in the trial of a cold-case murder suspect, now 62, accused of killing a 25-year-old Delta Air Lines reservation clerk 40 years ago in Honolulu.
An Oahu jury will hear closing arguments today in the trial of a cold-case murder suspect, now 62, accused of killing a 25-year-old Delta Air Lines reservation clerk 40 years ago in Honolulu.
A jury trial began June 30 for Thomas Lewis Garner, a Florida dental hygienist and Navy veteran, in the 1982 murder of Kathy Warnette Hicks, who was choked to death after being punched several times.
The trial is expected to conclude today and the case will then be turned over to the jury for deliberation.
A crack in the case came when Garner's DNA was linked to DNA found on Hicks' underwear, as well as to the cold-case murder of another 25-year-old woman in Florida, killed two years later.
Garner was convicted May 6, 2021, of first-degree murder for beating and strangling Pamela Cahanes, a Navy recruit from Stillwater, Minn. She had finished boot camp in Orlando two days before her death.
Cahanes was found naked except for a pair of white underwear. That case was reopened in the 1990s when semen was found on the underwear.
Investigators developed a DNA profile of the suspect, and by 2018 technology had advanced to the point of building a family tree from that profile using a genealogy database, the Orlando Sentinel reported.
In February 2019, an investigator conducting surveillance on Garner saw him throw out a bag of garbage at his Jacksonville home. DNA from a cigarette butt, cotton swab and dental floss collected from the bag matched the semen.
Garner had been serving a life sentence for Cahanes' murder in Sanford, Fla., when he was indicted June 2021 on a charge of killing Hicks.
Garner was a Navy sailor stationed in Hawaii from April 1980 to October 1982.
The month before Garner was set to leave, joggers found Hicks' fully clothed body on a grassy slope in Nuuanu in the area of the Board of Water Supply's pumping station park shortly after the crime.
Police said she was killed sometime between 11 p.m. Sept. 18, 1982, and 10 a.m. the following day. Police said that before her body was found, Hicks was seen at the Ilikai Hotel.
The Honolulu Advertiser reported that police wanted to interview her hotel roommate about a date she had with a man she met here, but the fellow Delta employee had returned to the mainland.
The 25-year-old Atlanta woman came to Honolulu to play in a softball tournament sponsored by United Airlines at Kapiolani Park. She told friends she was at a bar at or near Hickam Air Force Base.
Police said they did an extensive investigation, which initially focused on a suspect named "Tony, " but no arrests were made until after Garner was indicted in June 2021, then extradited in December 2021 to Honolulu from Florida, then arrested on a second-degree murder charge.
