Text messages shed light on troubled relationship at Hawes trial

A week before her death, USC professor Jennifer Wilson expressed reservations about seeing her lover for fear he would videotape their rendezvous.

Friday, a computer forensics examiner for the Columbia Police Department continued his review of voluminous texts exchanged between Wilson and Hank Hawes, on trial in a Richland County courtroom for her August 2011 stabbing death.

In an after-midnight exchange on Aug. 20, Wilson texts Hawes that she’s “kind of frisky” but afraid to meet up with him.

He urges her to come to his house on Woodrow Street.

“She says, ‘I’m afraid it will be used against me, like a videotape,’” noted defense lawyer Fielding Pringle, reviewing a text exchange with officer John VanHouten.

Pringle continued reading from a transcript: “No, you might video, that worries me. She says, ‘I don’t want sex tapes out on me.’”

The early morning exchange could explain comments Wilson made to a friend, as well as to her counselor, that Hawes had threatened to ruin her life and expose something embarrassing.

It was unclear Friday whether any such tape exists.

As lawyers continued to mine thousands of pages of transcripts of text messages for the five-woman, seven-man jury, other tensions in the relationship emerged:

Friday’s testimony ended with the doctor who conducted Wilson’s autopsy on Aug. 29, the day after she was stabbed to death in her Shandon duplex.

Dr. Bradley Marcus, the chief medical examiner for Richland County, detailed 12 stab wounds on Wilson’s 5-foot, 6-inch, 105-pound frame. She also had slash marks “all over the body” as well as defensive wounds and bruises, he said.

He said a large bruise on her right shoulder “could be a bite mark.”

Any one of six wounds could have been considered fatal, he said, because of the arteries or organs the knife hit. But Marcus ruled that it was a stab wound to the neck, made in a twisting motion, that killed Wilson because of blood loss.

Before defense lawyer Doug Strickler could object, Marcus said: “This was brutal. Brutal.”

Judge J.C. Nicholson Jr. of Charleston told the jury to return at 9:30 Monday and expect to be at the courthouse through Wednesday.

This story was originally published October 10, 2014 at 9:00 PM with the headline "Text messages shed light on troubled relationship at Hawes trial."