The Safest Place on Earth
When Janet Siclari’s brutalized body was discovered slumped against a sand dune outside of the Carolinian Hotel in August 1993, just days before Hurricane Emily struck the Carolina coast, there had been six murders in the history of Nag’s Head. Janet Siclari became the seventh.
For four and a half years, the case remained unsolved, until a hit in a state DNA database connected a suspect with the crime. For the first time in North Carolina history, a killer would be identified, and a murder solved, through a “cold hit.”
Established in the 1830s as an idyllic family vacation spot, Nag’s Head, N. C., is rich in history and folklore. Local legends maintain Blackbeard buried his treasure beneath its sands, and the Wright Brothers first took flight fifteen minutes to the north.
While the exact origin of the name Nag’s Head is uncertain, one local legend suggests that shipwrecked Englishmen, upon seeing it, were reminded of a high point on Scilly Island also called Nag’s Headthe last spot of land that the seamen would have seen before voyaging on to the New World. Another favorite tale told by locals attributes the name to land pirates, who would fasten lanterns around the necks of their horses and then walk them up and down the beach so as to resemble ships close to shore. Upon seeing what they believed to be other merchant ships, unsuspecting vessels would be lured toward the beach, run aground, and be pillaged.
Once Nag’s Head was characterized by numerous sand dunes that towered over its magnificent ocean beaches, but Jockey’s Ridge is now the last of the great moving dunes. Legend has it that the original Nag’s Head Hotel met its demise in the 1870s when the sands below its foundation shifted, leaving the “Unpainted Aristocracy,” a mile-long stretch of cottages, to stand sentry against the northeasterly winds. Stately cottages built from lumber scavenged from the shipwrecks once so commonplace along the shore, the Unpainted Aristocracy have been left in the natural, unpainted state from which they take their name both as a testimony to the informality of the resort and to the futility of resisting the salt-and-sand-laden winds of the area.
It was here that Janet Siclari and her brother Robert spent so many vacations. They had been going to the Outer Banks since they were kids, and had always felt safe there. With just under 3,000 people living in the area, nothing bad could ever happen in Nag’s Head. Or so they thought.
On Saturday, August 28, 1993, at approximately 6:50 a.m., a sanitation worker discovered the partially-clad body of thirty-five year old Janet Siclari slumped against a sand dune in a pool of blood.
She was lying on her left side, her athletic, five-foot, ninety-five pound frame curled into a fetal position. Blood stained the sand for close to twenty-five feet in all directions. She was dressed in a cropped blue tank top, a white denim vest, and no shoes. She clutched what had once been white denim shorts, now colored a deep crimson red, up under her neck, tucked just below her ear perhaps in an effort to stem the flow of blood. Her panties had been neatly folded and tucked into one of her pockets.
She had defensive wounds to the palms of her hands and fingers, and lacerations on the side of her face and jaw. Her face, chest and neck were covered in blood. One two-and-a-half inch cut had sliced through her jugular vein and severed her larynx, and several other, smaller cuts, possibly intimidation wounds, perforated her throat.
Janet was certainly alive and conscious for some minutes as she struggled to make it back to her hotel, but, unable to remain conscious due to blood loss, she had collapsed on the beach. Janet Siclari had then silently bled to death a mere twenty feet from the oceanfront deck of the Carolinian Hotel, where she had so often enjoyed the company of friends.
Near the body, close to the steps that led to the deck, gray socks and size nine high-top Spalding tennis shoes were found and catalogued as evidence.
Robbery did not appear to be a motive, as Janet was still wearing her earrings, rings and bracelet, and her room key hadn’t been taken. Even her watch was still on her wrist, keeping time.
The medical examiner would find live semen inside Janet’s body, tails intact, indicating she had had sex within twenty-four hours of the discovery of her body. There was no bruising of the genital area to indicate sexual assault, and her shorts and panties were not torn. A sample of the semen was taken from Janet’s body and retained. Without a weapon, fingerprints or other physical evidence, the sperm sample was the best evidence to connect potential suspects to Janet’s murder. But the question remained open: Was the man with whom Janet had engaged in sex on her last day the killer, or was he merely an intimate acquaintance unfortunate enough to have been the last person to leave physical evidence of contact with her?
In a town whose economy is built on tourism the investigation of such a crime would be difficult. Vacationing tourists, potential witnesses and suspects, would be continually checking out of their hotels and returning home. Officer Cliff Midgett of the Nag’s Head police department summed it up in an interview with The Virginian-Pilot: “[In a resort town], if you don’t develop a suspect real quick, everyone packs their bags and leaves.”
As if the ordinary challenges of investigating a murder in a resort town weren’t enough, within days of the discovery of Janet’s body, the people of Nag’s Head would be evacuated as Hurricane Emily moved toward the Carolina coast. Interviews would be postponed for several daysseveral days for potential witnesses and suspects to scatter.
After interviewing two hundred people, obtaining twelve DNA samples from various men, including the victim’s brother, and offering a $20,000 reward for any information, the police were unable to make any arrests. It would be another four and a half years before Janet’s family would see her killer brought to justice.
Robert and Janet Siclari were more than brother and sisterthey were best friends. Less than two years apart, they were literally inseparable, doing everything together. A trip to the Outer Banks for a week of fun and sun was for Janet and Robert, like countless others, a family tradition.
On August 20, 1993, the Siclaris and three female friends arrived in Southern Shores, North Carolina for a week-long vacation. When the week came to an end and their rental agreement on their vacation cottage expired, one friend opted to return home, while the others decided to spend one more night at the beach.
Unable to rent the cottage for another day, the group decided to finish their stay at the Carolinian Hotel, whose oceanfront bar had been the site of several pleasurable evenings during their vacation. On Friday afternoon, they rented two of the Carolinian’s rooms: one, the more expensive of the two, for Robert and Janet, and the other for their two companions.
The four spent the afternoon relaxing, swimming and enjoying their time on the beach. When evening came, they had dinner at the hotel, and then went to the Carolinian’s Comedy Club.
When the show was over, Robert, exhausted, opted to go back to his room, while
Janet and her friends decided to continue the evening at a local watering hole called the Port-O-Call Restaurant & Gaslight Saloon. There they had drinks and chatted with a few friends they had met on the beach. While at the Port-O-Call, Read Powell, the bartender from the Carolinian’s Tiki bar, noticed the three and stopped by to chat with Janet.
Earlier, the three women had stopped at the Carolinian’s bar and spoken with a couple of men about where to go to listen to music. One of the men kissed Janet on the cheek and told her that he had been trying to speak with her since he had first laid eyes on her, earlier in the week. At about midnight, Janet’s friends called it a night and decided to head back to the hotel. Janet chose to stay behind to listen to the band. The friends left her the keys to the rental car and walked back to the hotel. An employee would later remember seeing Janet dancing with another of the patrons.
When last call came at 2:00 a.m., Janet left the bar with Read Powell. His date had left him at the bar and gone with the man with whom Janet had been dancing, much to Powell’s chagrin. Janet felt bad for Powell, so she offered to give him a ride home. Powell accepted, and together they got into her rental car and drove off down the beach.
Read’s girlfriend Fran Hart lived in the basement of the Carolinian Hotel. After Janet dropped Read at his house, he borrowed a car from a housemate, grabbed some pepperoni, and a steak knife from the drawer. He then drove to the Carolinian, parked his car in the lot, and ate his pepperoni while he waited for his girlfriend to return.
About a half an hour had gone by when Read saw Janet drive into the lot. He initially thought Janet was Fran. The two were similar in appearance: both had similarly styled dark hair and dark skin, and both were wearing similar outfits that night. When he realized it was Janet and not Fran, he thought that she must have gone someplace else after she dropped him off at his home.
Read waited in the parking lot until about 3:00 a.m., and when Fran didn’t show he took the borrowed car back to his friend’s house. He then walked back to the Carolinian to continue to wait for Fran. She showed up about a half hour later, whereupon the two argued, exchanging a shove and a slap. Then Read Powell walked back to his home.
Janet returned to the hotel room she shared with her brother between 2:30 and 3:00 a.m. Robert later recalled waking up as Janet removed her sandals, left her purse on the dresser, and lit a cigarette before walking back outside.
By 8:00 a.m., Robert was awake, but Janet’s bed had not been slept in. Robert noticed the commotion out on the beach. When he saw that there were police milling about, he immediately knew something had happened to his sister.
Approximately seventeen days after the death of Janet Siclari, a knife with an eight-inch blade, wrapped in a blanket, was retrieved from a laundry chute at the Carolinian Hotel. The chute had not been emptied since approximately two weeks before the murder. A pathologist would later testify that it could be the murder weapon, but that the evidence was inconclusive.
Other than Robert Siclari, Read Powell was the last person to see Janet alive. Law enforcement officials requested that he provide a DNA sample, which he did; the sample ruled him out as a match for the genetic material found inside Janet Siclari.
Thomas Jabin Berry was a commercial fisherman and roofer from Englehard and Manteo, North Carolina. In 1993, at the time of Janet Siclari’s murder, Berry was heavily addicted to crack cocaine and was working part-time on a fishing boat near Nag’s Head.
By 1996, Berry was sitting in a jail cell for violating probation following an earlier offense. He had pleaded guilty to an earlier charge of statutory rape of a 12-year-old neighbor, and accepted an Alford plea to taking indecent liberties with a minor. He had been credited with time served, given a ten-year suspended sentence, and released on probation. In 1995, however, he had failed a mandatory drug test and his probation had been revoked, landing him in the Pasquotank Correctional Institute to complete his sentence.
At the time of his incarceration, authorities took a sample of Berry’s blood and submitted it to the state’s DNA data bank. The procedure was a routine one for inmates who found their way into the system by a sexual assault conviction. Samples were obtained from such criminal offenders at the time of their incarceration.
In April 1997, a DNA profile match was identified between the blood sample taken from Berry and the semen sample recovered from Janet Siclari’s body. It was the first time in North Carolina history that a computer had made a positive DNA match on a “cold hit.” After four and a half years, there was finally a suspect for the murder of Janet Siclari. Officers immediately arrested Berry and charged him with her rape and murder.
Officials searched a shed on Berry’s mother’s property, and also obtained a search warrant for his sister and brother-in-law’s residence. Officers were looking for photographs, bloody clothing, shoes, knives, or any other evidence connecting Berry to the crime.
According to Doris Berry, her son sent her numerous letters avowing his innocence. In one such letter, Berry said police had placed him in solitary in order to force him to plead guilty to a crime he claimed he didn’t commit.
“Every day a guard comes back here and asks me questions about the [Siclari] case and if I was involved,” he wrote. “Then they say I should plead guilty even though I did not do anything. They are doing this to try and force me to plead guilty to something I didn’t do.”
Berry had no alibi for the evening that Janet was murdered, and denied having ever laid eyes on her. He said he hadn’t even been to the Port-O-Call that evening.
He did, however, admit to being in Manteo to obtain an ID card the day before Janet’s body was found, but couldn’t remember if he had stayed at the beach and partied with friends or returned home.
During the interrogation, Berry stated that if he did rape and murder Janet, he had absolutely no memory of it. He could provide no explanation whatsoever as to how his sperm could have been found inside her body. He stated that he doubted that it were possible for him to have been strung out enough on crack to kill Janet and not have remembered it. “That’s something you just don’t forget,” Berry remarked.
As a fisherman, Berry routinely carried knives, and usually kept one in a sheath attached to his belt. At trial, testimony from Berry’s wife and a former girlfriend would substantiate that Berry carried a knife “ninety-eight percent of the time.” The women also confirmed that Berry not only wore Spalding sneakers of the same size and type as the ones found on the beach near Janet Siclari’s body, but that he also wore gray socks similar to those catalogued as evidence “pretty much all of the time.”
Robert Kennedy, a forensic crime scene analyst, compared the Spalding sneakers found at the crime scene with two other pairs of shoes that Berry wore on a regular basis. Kennedy analyzed the impressions left by the heel, the ball of Berry’s foot, and the upper portion of the shoe, and determined that all had a similar wear pattern.
Ann Pryor [a pseudonym] lived only a few houses away from Berry’s residence in Englehard. Ann had become close friends with Berry’s wife, and she and her boyfriend would frequently hang out with the couple.
One night during the summer of 1992, Berry knocked on the back door of Ann’s home at about 3:00a.m. Ann asked him to leave, and then went back to bed. Then, Ann would later testify at Berry’s trial, within minutes of returning to her bedroom, Berry broke into her home, entered her bed with his pants off, and climbed on top of her. While he was attempting to penetrate her, Ann noticed that his arm was bleeding. Berry told her that he had cut it while breaking and climbing through her kitchen window.
Ann told Berry that she would do whatever he wanted, but that he should let her tend to the wound on his arm first. When Berry agreed, Ann went into the kitchen. In her testimony, she was unable to remember if she got Berry a glass of water to calm him or if she wrapped his arm for him. What she did remember was leaving through the back door and running three blocks to a friend’s house. She admitted that Berry didn’t attempt to stop her, and that he had no weapon with him.
Ann never filed a complaint regarding the break-in or the assault, though she did state that she mentioned the incident to a deputy she met at the Seafood Festival a short time later.
Thomas Berry’s version of his encounter with Ann Pryor was a little different.
According to Berry, he and Ann’s boyfriend had been out drinking when the two decided that it would be a grand idea to switch partners for the evening. It was only after Ann told him to leaveand after the subsequent breaking and entering and attempted sexual assaultthat Berry acknowledged that Ann may not have been aware of the agreement between the two men.
In 1992, Susan Lee [a pseudonym] was twelve years old and living next door to Berry’s mother. The Lees had known the Berry family for several years, and the families would frequently get together.
Susan testified at Berry’s trial that during the early part of 1992 he was at her home while she and her babysitter were lying on the bed in her mother’s room. He tried to put his hand inside her pants, but retreated when she pushed it away, and made no further attempts.
Not long thereafter, Berry was again at the Lee residence and asked Susan to help him find his nephew. Susan knew that Berry’s nephew and his friends could frequently be found playing in forts they had built in the woods behind the trailer park.
Susan took Berry out to the area to help him look for his nephew. The first fort that they went to yielded no results, so they proceeded to a second. When Susan took Berry to the second fort, he threw her to the ground and raped her. Although he displayed no weapon to Susan, he told her that if she mentioned anything about what had just taken place to anyone, he would kill her mother.
Susan’s mother, however, did discover what Berry had done, when a third party told her about the incident. Mrs. Lee contacted the police and filed a complaint against Thomas Berry for the sexual assault on her daughter. Again, Thomas Berry’s version of the encounter differed: he said that the rape of Susan Lee was actually consensual sex. He pled guilty to indecent liberties with a minor and was subsequently placed on probation.
The assault on Susan Lee occurred in March 1992, with the alleged assault of Ann Pryor following approximately three months later. Between September 8, 1992 and February 1993, Thomas Berry was in jail. Unable to post bond, he remained incarcerated until his trial. Janet Siclari was raped and murdered six months after Berry was released from custody and put on probation.
The assault on Susan Lee and the attempted assault of Ann Pryor, placed in a timeline with the murder of Janet Siclari, not only seemed to indicate a pattern of sexual assault, but also that Berry was learning from his previous mistakes. The State contended that the Lee incident taught Berry the dangers of letting his victim live; the Pryor incident taught him the dangers of committing his crimes unarmed.
Thomas Jabin Berry was indicted on March 30, 1998, for first-degree murder and first-degree rape in the death of Janet Siclari. Six hundred people were summoned for jury duty, and the final list of potential jurors included two hundred and forty-three Dare County residents.
In January 1999, after a thirteen-day trial, and without ever testifying on his own behalf, Thomas Jabin Berry was sentenced to two consecutive life terms for the brutal rape and murder of Janet Siclari.
The jury deliberated for four and a half hours before reaching a decision as to Berry’s guilt. When it came to the sentencing phase, however, the jury was deadlocked, unable to reconcile the single vote against a death sentence. Because the jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision in a reasonable amount of time, North Carolina law required that the death penalty be removed from the table. Superior Court Judge Jerry Tillett could therefore impose nothing more than a life sentence.
Berry appealed his sentence, arguing that there was not enough evidence to warrant a conviction. Appeals Court Judge John Tyson responded on behalf of the court: “Given the manner of the killing, the medical examiner’s testimony, and DNA evidence, we find that sufficient evidence existed…to find the defendant guilty of the first-degree rape and first-degree murder of Janet Siclari.”