was, like, a jekyll and hyde kind of personality. i recall the evil that passed over his eyes. there was definitely an evil in his eyes at the time he s talking to me. hinton took her to a bed and sexually assaulted her. at that point i had lost it, and it was painful what he was doing. so i was screaming, please don t do this to me. please don t do this to me, and crying. after the assault, he left tammy in the basement, handcuffed with duct tape on her mouth. and at some point i hear his wife. i hear her voice upstairs. and so i begin to make some noise in the basement. and she s like, what is that? and he kept running to the basement, which was curious to her. so in the meantime, i managed to lick the duct tape off of my mouth so that my mouth was free. and he came down and opened the door yelling at me.
one of them remembered an eerie late night conversation. butch had waked up in the middle of the night and said, i didn t do this. the demon inside of me killed that girl. and then went back to sleep. and yet, jailhouse snitches, as they re called, get a lot of side-eye. oh, yes, they do. what is what is this guy getting in exchange for sitting here, telling us a story? right, right. but the state had other witnesses to bring in stories of his criminal past. tammy singleton came to court to tell how hinton kidnapped and assaulted her when she was 14, and to show he no longer had any power over her. are you seeing him? are you making eye contact? i looked directly at him. he tried to avoid my stare, but i i did look directly at him and forcefully say what had transpired. i needed people to understand that he did have a modus operandi. i wanted to assist the melendis in getting some closure in their situation. and while the prosecutors didn t have a crime scene, t