It looked as if Christmas was going to come gently to Sumter County that year, riding in on the back of a 65-degree breeze blowing in from the coast. It was Dec. 18, 1970, a Friday, and in the small town of Sumter, an army of young students burst through schoolhouse doors for the first day of their Christmas break.

Peg Cuttino was among them. A 13-year-old girl on the verge of maturity, the 5-foot-2, 130-pound girl with shoulder-length brown hair was a daughter of the local aristocracy. Her father, James Cuttino, was then a member of the state legislature, and the family lived in a pleasant, though hardly ostentatious, house at 45 Mason Croft Drive.

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In many respects, the bright and athletic eighth-grader was the picture of youthful gentility. Ever since she was a young child, she had been a regular fixture at political events in the conservative county, handing out fliers for her father's campaigns and chirping to anyone within earshot in her girlish little voice:   "Please, vote for my daddy."

As she grew older, she became more active in church groups. She sang in the youth choir at the First Presbyterian Church, studied the Bible at Sunday school and was a member of the Pioneer Youth Fellowship. She was a starter on the girl's varsity basketball team at the Alice Drive Junior High School, a few blocks from her house.

She was, it seemed, a parents' dream. At least that's how people described her, and her staunch traditionalism, it seemed, was a comfort to her staunchly traditional neighbors in Sumter. There were rumors, of course, as there always are, that perhaps Peg Cuttino was not as perfect as she might have appeared.   She is said to have displayed flashes of rebellion, and there were also stories that she might have stormed out of her parents' house on at least one occasion. But even the gossips tended to depict her behavior as typical teenage angst and nothing more, a minor flaw when they contrasted Peg Cuttino's bearing and demeanor to the wild antics and youthful rebellion that seemed to be taking hold all over the country in the winter of 1970.

Little by little, those same trends were beginning to appear in Sumter. Drugs were starting to appear. Though it would never be confirmed, and in fact would be flatly rejected by most people in a position of responsibility in the community, a legend had started to take root in Sumter, a legend about an old abandoned trailer somewhere in the woods where some of the youth of Sumter County would gather for wild, drug-fueled parties. There was even talk, idle talk it now seems,   that young people had been plied with drugs and forced to perform in grainy pornographic films which were later sold to a distributor in California. In a peculiarly Southern Gothic twist on that legend, it was even whispered over back fences and at church barbecues that the dastardly porno ring had snared some of the children of well-connected people in town.

It didn't matter that no proof of such an operation ever surfaced. All that really mattered was that the rumors resonated deeply with some of the more traditional folks in Sumter County who were threatened by young people.

Against the backdrop of such fear, the public image of Peg Cuttino, dressed for the last day of the fall semester in her modest white skirt with the polka-dot sash, seemed positively angelic.

She had gotten out of school that day at about 11:30 a.m. and chatted briefly with her mother, saying she wanted to walk the few blocks to the Willow Drive Elementary School to have lunch with her younger sister, Pamela.

Her mother thought nothing of it. Authorities would later say that the young girl walked briskly down Willow Drive and was seen as she passed the YMCA building, then under construction on a vacant lot alongside her sister's school. In what would someday become a subject of great controversy in the case, among the men working on the building was Pee Wee Gaskins. Then a small-time hood and part-time police informant, Gaskins would later go on to become one of the nation's most fearsome serial killers. Years later, Gaskins would play a crucial role in the ongoing war over the Cuttino case. But on that day, he was just another nobody on the street.

To this day, no one really knows what happened after Peg Cuttino walked past the YMCA. She never made it the scant few yards to her sister's school.

About two-and-a-half hours later, when Peg still had not returned, her mother started to fret and telephoned police. It was less a measure of her family's prominence and influence in the community than an example of simple small-town values that within minutes, local radio stations broadcast an alert for the missing girl. All the same, her family may have been a factor when, within a few hours of those first broadcasts, a massive search was launched.

There were some people who claimed to have seen her on the street in the moments leading up to her disappearance. Among them was a schoolmate. Though not a close friend of Peg's, the boy said he knew her slightly and insisted that he had caught a glimpse of her at an intersection several blocks from the school shortly before 1 p.m. and that she wasn't alone. According to published reports at the time, the boy said he had seen Peg Cuttino in the back seat of a car with two other people. "There was a man driving the car with dark-colored hair with glasses," he told authorities, according to a version of the events later recounted in print. "He was between 30 and 35 years of age." A woman, her face obscured from view, was sitting in the front seat, and Peg Cuttino, apparently alive and awake, was riding in back seat on the right hand side of the car. The young man told police that he waved to her, but that she apparently did not recognize him. He also told authorities that he thought no more of it until he heard word that the girl had vanished. Though authorities never doubted the young man's sincerity, they also failed to identify the car, and neither the mysterious driver nor his female passenger ever came forward to support the young man's claim.

By the next morning, a small army of volunteers had formed to scour the brush for Peg Cuttino. On Sunday, the third day after the disappearance, the searchers paused to pray and on Monday, more than a dozen men on horseback scoured a four-square-mile stretch of woods just outside of the town of Sumter. That evening, according to published reports, just about supper time, three local radio stations aired a brief prayer for her safe return, offered by the president of the Sumter County Minister's Association. A lot of people apparently listened. But it didn't help. For days the search for Peg Cuttino continued and each day ended in frustration and deepening fear.

Still, local law enforcement officials tried to hold out hope. In a statement widely reported in South Carolina the next day, Sumter Police Chief Leslie Griffin acknowledged that he could not rule out kidnapping and had in fact issued a nationwide alert for the girl. But he added that "we have not been able to discern any evidence which might indicate foul play."

Somewhere, perhaps, some may have entertained the secret and unspoken hope that maybe Peg Cuttino's prim demeanor had misled them. Of course it would have been a bizarre irony, but what if she had run away, or was simply hiding out somewhere as a youthful lark?

It would almost have been a relief if Peg Cuttino had simply been touched by that rebelliousness that everything about her seemed to defy.

But she wasn't.

 

On Dec. 30, 1970, 12 days after Peg Cuttino disappeared, two young officers from nearby Shaw Air Force Base were riding their trail bikes in Manchester State Forest when they came upon a figure lying on the ground, partially covered with sticks and leaves. At first, they thought it might have been a mannequin dumped in the woods as a trash or as a prank. But then they spotted the polka-dot sash, which had been described in detail in every news release and bulletin about the missing girl. They raced to a nearby general store and summoned police.

The police arrived quickly, and so did three pathologists from the Medical University of South Carolina at Charleston.

The pathologists concluded that Peg Cuttino had been bludgeoned to death with a blunt object, in all probability a tire iron. The young girl in the modest white skirt, they said, had also been raped. There were traces of semen -- some of it still fresh -- in her body.

 

The authorities also issued another conclusion that would, in time, prove to be among the most controversial. Though they conceded that they couldn't be certain beyond a shadow of a doubt given the comparatively primitive forensic tools available to them at the time, the authorities argued that in all likelihood, Peg Cuttino had been raped and murdered on Dec. 18, 1970, probably within an hour or so of her disappearance. There were some questions about that conclusion. Despite the comparatively balmy temperatures in South Carolina during late December, some of the sperm found in her body had not significantly degraded. That seemed to be an indication, according to at least one forensic scientist, that whoever had raped and murdered the girl, had done so not on Dec. 18, but later, perhaps as late as Dec. 26, eight days after her disappearance.

The authorities however, paid little heed to that theory. They built their case on the premise that Peg Cuttino had been taken from the streets of Sumter and killed all on the same day.

There was at least one person who was willing to dispute that assertion. In fact, she's been disputing it for more than 30 years.