The eight men and four women of the jury grappled with the choices given in the cold-case murder trial of a 63-year-old Florida dental hygienist: guilty or not guilty of second-degree murder in the 1982 beating and strangulation death of a 25-year-old Delta Air Lines reservations clerk whose body was found in Nuuanu.

On Friday, the first day of deliberations, they asked whether they could have another choice. At the end of Tuesday, they chose not guilty.

The deputy prosecutor’s hands were tied, unable to tell jurors Thomas Lewis Garner killed another 25-year-old woman in Florida in the same manner in 1984, just two years after Atlanta visitor Kathy Warnette Hicks was assaulted and strangled, her body left in a secluded area.

Unbeknownst to the jury, Garner was convicted in May 2021 for first-degree murder of Pamela Cahanes, and had begun serving a life sentence when he was indicted June 2021 in Hicks’ murder — his DNA linking him to both cold cases.

But Hicks’ family knew. They traveled in 2021 to Florida from Atlanta for Garner’s murder trial in Cahanes’ death.

Now after waiting nearly 41 years, they wanted to see Hicks’ killer brought to justice. Instead, Judge Rowena Somerville accepted the jury’s verdict and released Garner from custody in this case to return to Florida to continue serving his sentence in the Cahanes murder.

But despite the life sentence in the Florida case, Breylynn Hicks said, “That doesn’t matter. As far as I’m concerned, for me, he’s set free as far as what he did to my sister.”

The younger brother of two, now 55 and a police officer of 32 years, was just 15 when he took the call from a Honolulu police detective who mistook him for his father and told him that his daughter’s body was found.

He said after the verdict, “He killed my sister the same exact way that he killed the woman in Florida.”

“What I don’t understand is you got to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt,” Hicks said. “Is it probable that he could have dropped her off at 2 a.m. or 2:30 a.m., put her in a safe cab to her hotel and somebody could take her from there and murder her?”

He said Garner claimed he had little money and that his car’s transmission broke, so he had no car, but he could have borrowed a friend’s car. Instead, the jury “took his word for it like it was the God’s honest truth.”

Garner, now 63, bald and heavier, may have cut a more sympathetic figure now than when he was a fit, 22-year-old Navy sailor nearly 41 years ago.

Hicks said of the initial police investigation, “If they hadn’t dropped the ball in the beginning, we wouldn’t have been in this situation in the first place.”

He said police had a composite sketch of Garner, knew he was stationed at a military base, and had tips he was from Tuskegee, Ala., and had moved to Jacksonville, Fla. He said police “could have gotten far more evidence and far more people,” possibly going to military bases, finding witnesses and people who could have identified Garner.

Kathy Hicks’ mother, Joan Hicks, 87, said in a written statement, meant to be read at sentencing and directed to Garner, “In one shameful act, you took from us our daughter, big sister, cousin, friend and co-worker. She was an encourager to many. When you killed her, you killed a part of each of us.”

Because of his acquittal, the following words she wrote will never be read at any sentencing:

“I’ve seen the toll Kathy’s death has taken on my husband (Beaufus Hicks, 90). Since hearing of your apprehension, he has continued to physically and emotionally diminish,” she said. “Both of us are seniors now, unable to travel the distance to Hawaii to witness your trial, but we are thankful to know justice is finally being served.

“While you’ve had over 35 years to enjoy life and walk free, Kathy did not have that privilege. Kathy had a life filled with so much promise. You managed to snuff that out with your selfish, barbaric actions.”

“Today doesn’t bring closure; it brings justice. We are hopeful you will never see another day of freedom. May God have mercy on your soul.”

She spoke of the promise and possibilities her eldest and only daughter had at age 25 that would never be fulfilled.

Hicks’ cousin San Ireland, 66, said she “loved writing,” attended Georgia State University and majored in Eng­lish or journalism, and after her death, some of her poems were discovered.

Ireland, who also attended the Florida trial and traveled to Honolulu for Garner’s second murder trial, said she and Hicks were close since they grew up together and were just two months apart in age. She also worked at Delta, but as a flight attendant.

She said Hicks had asked her to go with her to Hawaii, but she declined.

“I wondered, if I had gone with her, whether I could have deterred her from going off with him,” she said.

Back then there were no cellphones, so some of her postcards saying she was enjoying her first trip to Hawaii arrived in the mail after her death, she said.

Cousin Dionne Richardson, 62, was 21 at the time, and said Hicks was like a big sister to her and “had a sweet disposition.”

Ireland and Richardson drove out to where Hicks’ body was found.

“I can’t imagine being forcefully taken down there,” Ireland said. “I prayed she was dead before that.”

Deputy Prosecutor Scott Bell said Garner knew Hicks was leaving the next day, and he was shipping out in five weeks to a new duty assignment.

He told jurors the defendant’s DNA was found on her underwear, that he was the last to see her alive, that her friends corroborated seeing him that Saturday night, Sept. 18, 1982, that his nickname was Tommy or Tony and that he was in the military.

But Deputy Public Defender Edward Aquino raised questions about other possible sources of the DNA, a lack of motive, a lack of vaginal injury and where and when Hicks was killed and how the body was transported to the Nuuanu location since Garner had no car.

But Bell said the prosecution’s case was based on credible evidence, and it was not the prosecution’s job to satisfy every curiosity, whim or question they might have.

“Mere speculation or guesswork is not a reasonable doubt,” Bell had told jurors. “The prosecution does bear the burden of proof, but the prosecution is only required to prove what is required by the law.”

Garner, then a 22-year-old Navy dental technician stationed at the Kaneohe Marine Corps Air Station, said he met Hicks at a Waikiki lounge and went to her Ilikai Hotel room that Saturday night, Sept. 18, 1982. The two eventually went to his hotel room, where they had sex, but he denied killing her.

He said they went dancing after they had sex, and he paid for a cab to take her back to her hotel at about 2:30 a.m. Sunday.

Bell said Garner prided himself in his physical fitness, and at 5-foot-11 to 6 feet tall towered over Hicks, who was 5 feet, 3 inches tall.

He said Garner had the strength to crush her hyoid bone, a clear indication she was strangled, according to the testimony of an expert witnesses.

Although fully clothed, her bra was found pulled below her breasts when her body was found down a grassy slope off Nuuanu Pali Drive near the Board of Water Supply pumping station in a relatively unpopulated area, he said.

She sustained two black eyes, and a cut lip due to biting down onto the bottom lip as she was being strangled, according to expert witnesses, which her friends did not see when she left her hotel room with Garner.

She was wearing the same red halter top and beige pants from the night before when joggers found the body at 10 a.m. Sunday, Sept. 19, 1982.

Bell played taped recordings of an investigator questioning Hicks’ friends who saw the young sailor and concurred he was good- looking, physically fit, in the military and that his name was either Tommy or Tony.

The two met at the Ilikai’s lobby lounge, where Garner said he was seated at a table listening to jazz, and was taken by the first single Black woman he had met there, who was beautiful, friendly and also from the South.

He had gotten a hotel room in Waikiki in hopes of “hooking up” with someone.

Hicks was supposed to meet a man named Steven Tate, but he was a no-show, but called her room three times in the early hours of the next morning.

So when she met Garner, she brought him up to the hotel room and introduced him to roommate Laverta Bynes.

Bynes told an investigator Hicks was friendly, outgoing and would not have stayed out all night and not let her know where she was going.