Witness says defendant looked ‘spooky’ After a preliminary hearing Thursday, Kaua’i District Court Judge Trudy Senda ruled there is probable cause to send accused murderer William Lowell McCrory’s case to Circuit Court. Senda set McCrory’s first Circuit Court appearance for
Witness says defendant looked ‘spooky’
After a preliminary hearing Thursday, Kaua’i District Court Judge Trudy Senda ruled there is probable cause to send accused murderer William Lowell McCrory’s case to Circuit Court.
Senda set McCrory’s first Circuit Court appearance for Nov. 19.
McCrory, 45, is charged with second-degree murder in the stabbing death of Brent “Kerby” Kerr, 44, whose body was found in bushes near the old Coco Palms Resort in Wailua last Friday. He has pleaded innocent.
A crowded courtroom listened to testimony yesterday from Billy Pierce, 48, who said he was with McCrory at the time of the murder and loaned the defendant the suspected murder weapon, a folding knife.
Pierce was questioned by Kaua’i County Police detectives soon after Kerr’s body was discovered by a man walking along Kuhio Highway.
Pierce didn’t talk the first time he spoke with detectives early last weekend, but he said his conscience kept at him, and the second time he was questioned by detectives he broke down and told everything he knew.
Pierce said Kerr “wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
Pierce, who had been drinking “two large bottles of vodka” earlier in the day with Kerr, said he rode with McCrory to the van at Kalapaki where Kerr lived late the night before or early in morning of Oct. 26, the date Kerr was killed.
Kerr, McCrory and Pierce lived in separate vehicles parked at Nawiliwili.
Pierce said it was pouring rain when McCrory borrowed his knife and knocked on the back panel of Kerr’s van. When Kerr emerged, McCrory attacked the victim, Pierce said. McCrory then asked him to help throw the dying man onto the floor of McCrory’s car, Pierce claimed. They dumped the body where they did because they ran out of gas in front of the Coco Palms, Pierce said.
“It was the awfulest thing I’ve ever seen and I didn’t want no part of it, man,” Pierce said, adding Kerr “was a good man. He didn’t deserve to die. The next day (after the murder), I woke up and started praying, you know. And I haven’t stopped praying since.”
Police recovered the alleged murder weapon from Pierce, who had kept it despite promising McCrory he would throw it away. Pierce said it was a present from his ex-girlfriend. “It had sentimental value,” he said.
As he left the witness stand, Pierce walked past McCrory, chained and shackled and wearing an orange jail jump suit, and shook his head from side to side. McCrory didn’t respond.
Other witnesses placed McCrory with his vehicle, out of gas in the vicinity of where Kerr’s body was discovered, and recounted his repeated threats against Kerr.
McCrory claimed the victim “borrowed and bummed” too much, witnesses said.
McCrory and Kerr were unemployed.
A female friend said McCrory was a different man when he was drunk, and everyone testified he had been drinking all day before the murder.
“His eyes were spooky,” Christine Taniguchi told detectives in court documents presented Thursday. “I’d seen him get upset (when drinking), but never like that.”
She said McCrory showed up earlier that evening at her Lihu’e home trying to borrow a knife, but she refused to give it to him because he told her repeatedly that he wanted to kill someone.
McCrory, a Californian who has lived in Hawai’i for the past 14 years, is in Kaua’i Community Correctional Center in lieu of $20,000 bail.
He didn’t testify in his own behalf at yesterday’s hearing.
Staff writer Dennis Wilken can be reached at 245-3681 (ext. 252) and mailto:dwilken@pulitzer.net
