Accused killer Hawes testifies he stabbed lover in self-defense after she grabbed a knife first

Accused killer Hank Hawes showed no emotion during more than two hours of testimony Monday, saying he stabbed his lover Jennifer Wilson in self-defense after she flew into a rage and grabbed a knife.

Hawes, 40, said he had gone to the USC professor’s Monroe Street home to break things off, once and for all, in the early morning hours of Aug. 28, 2011.

She let him in the back door and there, in the kitchen, he told her it was over. Almost immediately, he said, Wilson asked whether he had seen an old girlfriend and whether they had slept together.

When he responded yes, he said, “I’d never seen that face before. It was rage. She didn’t really speak, she just had this look on her face.”

Hawes said he gestured toward Wilson and she bit his finger. In disbelief, he turned to leave the kitchen but Wilson had locked the door behind him, he said.

When he looked back, Wilson had a knife in her hand and Hawes said he “grabbed the closest thing that I could,” a knife from a butcher block.

Wilson jumped on him and they fought, he testified.

“Do you have a conscious memory of striking any particular blow yourself?” defense lawyer Doug Strickler asked.

“All I had was that thought: I just had to get her off me.”

Hawes said everything happened quickly. “I saw blood everywhere. I saw blood on the floor. There was blood on her. There was blood on me. I just sat there a second. I was in shock.”

He checked her pulse and found none.

Overcome by an “overwhelming sense of grief,” he said, he sliced one of his wrists.

At some point, Hawes said it occurred to him that he should get Wilson off the floor. “I can’t remember exactly how I got her in the bedroom, and put her up on the side of the bed,” he said.

He sat on the far side of the bed with his foot on the rung and cut both his wrists. “I’m in shock at this point,” Hawes said. “I’m losing a lot of blood.”

He called an old girlfriend, Stacy Newsom. “Outside of Jennifer, I was the closest to her,” Hawes explained. “I just remember being upset. I remember crying. ... I remember telling her Jen and I had a fight; she attacked me; there was blood everywhere.”

Hawes said he removed Wilson’s clothes and carried her into the bathroom. He vomited in the toilet, “somehow ... got her in the tub” and cleaned both of them up. Then he went into the living room, where Wilson had a trunk full of blankets. He covered the couch with a blanket — “I guess to just try to make it comfortable” — and lay Wilson on it before covering her with a comforter.

There, sitting beside Wilson on the couch, he cut his wrists a third time, he said.

“If I remember correctly, I remember looking at the rug and thinking, ‘I’m getting blood everywhere,’” Hawes said. So he went to the kitchen for a cooler and hung his wrist over it.

“How long, if you remember, did you sit on the sofa next to Ms. Wilson?” Strickler asked.

“I have no idea,” he responded.

When he finally decided to leave, it was because his dog was “trapped” in his house, he said.

On cross-examination, prosecutor Luck Campbell noted that Wilson weighed 105 pounds. Hawes estimated he weighed 175 or 180 pounds at the time — as much as 205 at one point.

“Your memory here today, you’ve got big gaping holes,” Campbell said.

“Blood loss will do that to you,” Hawes responded.

Campbell — mostly looking at the jury, rarely at Hawes — would return to that point. “At what point were you able to do Google searches for criminal defense attorneys in this weakened state?” she asked.

And: “Did they ever give you a blood transfusion for all this blood you lost?”

Hawes remained composed, polite, almost monotone — even when Campbell showed him color photos of Wilson’s chest and neck wounds. She asked if he remembered making them.

“I assume it was when I was trying to push her away,” he said.

Campbell elicited testimony that Hawes was trained as a medical technician, though he said he was working in the summer of 2011 selling life and health insurance. His mother was a nurse.

In letters from jail, Hawes asked his mother to find any information she could about recalls of amphetamines and blamed the tragedy on “a psychotic episode” from an overdose of his ADHD prescription, based on excerpts Campbell shared.

On another occasion, he said he had inherited his “disease” from his parents. Twice more, he asked his mother to do research on problems with amphetamine prescriptions.

Hawes offered a description of his relationship with Wilson, saying they were “two insecure people” who weren’t always completely honest with each other. “We saw each other as the best chance to have a family,” he added.

“You would use lies to manipulate her, is that correct?” Campbell asked at one point.

“I tried to make her feel bad,” Hawes acknowledged.

When Campbell asked Hawes whether he was jealous, he said: “I would say not jealous, but not a fool either.”

In other testimony Monday, as the prosecution wrapped up its case in the second week of the trial, Aaron Wilson of Lexington said he was at Cantina 76 on the night of Aug. 27. Hawes was buying drinks and shots of Tequila for people at the bar.

“He said he was happy because he’d got back together with his girlfriend,” said Wilson, who is no relation to Jennifer Wilson. At some point, he overheard Hawes ask someone if she knew any eligible women. “He said he was looking for somebody to go out with.”

Hawes left about midnight.

Judge J.C. Nicholson Jr. agreed to hear Tuesday from two women who previously have testified about “bad acts” against them by Hawes. He initially ruled that alleged incidents of abuse were too far removed from Wilson’s death to be relevant.

Campbell said Hawes pulled a knife on a girlfriend, Christine Dahlheimer, in 2010 and when upset would pretend he was going to strangle her. In another instance, he head-butted his live-in girlfriend Stacy Newsom, spit on her and threw her on the floor.

“He also told her if she ever filed a domestic-violence report, he’d make sure she looked like the aggressor,” Campbell said, adding that is “exactly what he’s doing” in his description of Wilson’s death.

Campbell named three other cases she could cite, if the judge would only allow it.

Reach Hinshaw at (803) 771-8641.

This story was originally published October 13, 2014 at 9:17 PM with the headline "Accused killer Hawes testifies he stabbed lover in self-defense after she grabbed a knife first."