Carrie LeNoir

It was Dec. 19, 1970, the Saturday before Christmas, and Carrie LeNoir, part-time postmistress in the little farm village of Horatio, barely had time to look up all morning as she labored behind the counter at the old general store-cum-fill-up station-cum-post office that she ran with her husband. That morning, before she sauntered into the post office from her house across the yard, a relative had called and mentioned something about Peg Cuttino and her disappearance, but the horror of the whole story hadn't really had time to hit LeNoir before she found herself in a work frenzy, slapping stamps on Christmas cards and weighing holiday packages.

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It was 2:30 p.m. before she finally got a chance to catch her breath. She decided to stroll back to the house, and as she returned, she noticed a car, a "brownish-yellow car," as she would later describe it, parked outside the store. As she neared it, she noticed three young people, two boys and a girl, perhaps in their teens, step out of the store and into the car. She did not, she would later say, get a good look at the girl. Nor did she recognize the two boys, which was, in and of itself, unusual. After all, the little store and post office on the old farm-to-market road was hardly a draw for strangers. She had planned to ask her husband if he recognized the trio, but work intervened and she forgot all about the encounter until later that afternoon when the two boys returned to the store and handed her three dollars for gas. The girl was no longer with them, and, as LeNoir would later put it, "the boys seemed excited."

A short time later, the local newspaper, the Sumter Item, an afternoon paper, arrived at the store. A picture of Peg Cuttino stared out from the front page. LeNoir's husband studied it. "That girl was in the store today," he told his wife. LeNoir studied the girl in the photograph as well, comparing her in her mind to the young woman she had briefly glimpsed outside the store earlier that day. There were some differences to be sure; the girl outside wore her hair about shoulder length. The last time Carrie LeNoir could remember seeing Peg Cuttino, her hair was long.

Missing poster Peggy Cuttino

LeNoir and her husband mulled over their options. They certainly didn't want to provide anyone with false information, and wanted even less to offer false hope. The next morning, just to be sure, she telephoned an acquaintance who also happened to be related to the Cuttinos. She asked about Peg's hair, and when the relative told her that Peg had been wearing her hair in a shoulder-length bob, Carrie LeNoir related the chance encounter at the Horatio post office the day before.

Sumter County Sheriff Mims

 

Later that day, the police came to visit LeNoir at the nearby Church of the Ascension where LeNoir, the organist, was rehearsing for the Christmas pageant that evening. It was a friendly chat, LeNoir recalled in a recent interview with Court TV's Crime Library, and when it was over, the detectives Hugh Mathis and Tommy Mims, now sheriff of Sumter County -- closed their notebooks, thanked her for her time, and moved on.

It is not clear, even today, how much stock the two detectives took in Carrie LeNoir's account of her chance encounter with a young girl who looked, in hindsight, a great deal like Peg Cuttino. To be sure, she was just one on a list of potential witnesses that swelled to include 1,465 names. The list even included Pee Wee Gaskins. He had been interviewed early on in the investigation by the same law enforcement official for whom he had been working as a police informant, sources close to the case say, and he was quickly ruled out as a suspect.

In short, Carrie LeNoir's statement was just one of many statements given in the case, and it would later be discounted, in large measure, some critics now say, because it didn't fit with investigators' conclusions about the case.

What none of them realized, however, was that in dismissing Carrie LeNoir's statement, they had taken the first steps toward mobilizing a small army of crusaders who would spent the next 30 years casting doubt, much of it legitimate, on the state's case in the matter of Peg Cuttino.