Outrage: The Peg Cuttino Story

Confession is Good for the Soul

Junior Pierce, police sketch

William "Junior" Pierce tossed his head back, cupped his hands over his eyes and stared off toward some imagined horizon. He let out a low, otherworldly moan and a guttural sound filled the cinder-block room. It was the kind of sound the fortune-tellers at the carnivals that used to visit Junior's small Georgia town would make just before they would claim they had a vision.

Junior loved to play this game with the cops.

Though he had an IQ that just barely broke 70, he had always believed he was smart enough to make suckers out of the cops. He seemed to think that he really could make them believe that he was crazier, or dumber than he really was.

Of course, he hadn't had much success with the gambit. The fact that he was sitting in a Georgia jailhouse, facing charges in nine separate murders, murders that had stretched from Hazelhurst, Georgia, to West Columbia, S.C., seemed proof that Pierce was not nearly as good at the game as he thought he was.

Joe McElveen

There are some, his former lawyer among them, who say that while Junior may have been violent, and may even have been a murderer, it is not likely that Junior Pierce was a serial killer in the classical sense. There is little doubt, however, that he was a serial confessor. In fact, several of the cases against Pierce would later be dropped, and in at least one of the cases, says Joe McElveen, who would represent Pierce in the Cuttino case and later went on to become mayor of Sumter, investigators discounted Pierce's confession altogether. In that case, South Carolina investigators "went down to Georgia at some point to look into a double murderthat Pierce confessed to," but after interviewing Pierce, the disgusted sheriff said that he had no faith in the confession and "didn't want to solve the crimes that way," McElveen said.

But by April 1971, four months after Peg Cuttino's killing, the authorities in Sumter County, who by then had been joined by the State Law Enforcement Division, were getting desperate to solve the case.

Though they had conducted nearly 1,500 interviews, and had tracked down scores of seemingly promising leads, several of them out of state, they had come up empty. In the minds of the people of Sumter, they were no closer to solving the case than they had been the day she disappeared. That worried them, and it deeply disturbed Sheriff Parnell and the other investigators on the case.

Hugh Munn, then a young reporter for The State, South Carolina's most prominent newspaper, and later a spokesman for SLED, says he believes that Parnell and the others working the Cuttino case were under immense pressure to close it. "I just think there was a rush to get this thing resolved quickly, which was always the way, and it still is in law enforcement," Munn said. "You wantto tell the community; 'Look, calm down, everything's under control.'"

They got their chance in April when Sheriff J.B. "Red" Carter from Baxley, Georgia, picked up the telephone and contacted SLED Chief J.P. Strom, telling him that he had a good ol' boy in his jail who had a statement to make in connection with Peg Cuttino's murder.

Sheriff Red Carter of Ga

According to court documents and reports published later in the Sumter Item, Pierce had made one of his overly dramatic confessions, claiming he had driven to Sumter on Dec. 18, 1970, the day that Peg Cuttino disappeared, with the intent to "rob and steal."

According to his alleged statement, he stopped for a bite at a drive-through restaurant not far from the center of town, when he saw two girls and a young man embroiled in a bitter dispute. Pierce, it is alleged, told authorities that he listened to the conversation "about as long as I could take it," before he decided to intervene. He allegedly claimed that he told the boy to leave, but the boy stood up to him briefly after going to his car to fetch a chain, presumably to use as a weapon. Not to be outdone, Pierce allegedly said that he went to his old maroon Pontiac to get a gun, and when the boy saw the pistol, he and the other young woman, drove off, leaving Peg Cuttino behind.

It has long been a subject of controversy that this heated confrontation between Pierce and the boy seems to have gone completely unnoticed by anyone in the small town of Sumter. Though Pierce is said to have claimed that he saw a woman watching the events unfold from inside the restaurant, neither that woman, nor any witness has been able to corroborate Pierce's alleged statement.

That, say critics of the state's case, would stretch credulity under any circumstances, but it was particularly questionable considering that the showdown is alleged to have taken place in the middle of the day on the Friday before Christmas, at a time when the streets of Sumter were filled with excited youngsters just out of school, as well as shopkeepers and customers.

Equally questionable was Pierce's supposed claim that as soon as the confrontation ended, Peg Cuttino, the Sunday school student and choir girl, turned to the gun-wielding stranger and volunteered to go with him, saying, according to reports of court proceedings published later, "I'll ride with you."

No explanation for the girl's alleged behavior was ever offered, despite the fact that it seemed to contrast sharply with the public image of Peg Cuttino as a decent young girl, who, even she did have a rebellious streak, would hardly have been foolish enough to hop into a car with an armed stranger, especially one as odd as Junior Pierce.

In his statement, Pierce is alleged to have said he drove with the girl to a landfill at the edge of town. According to a report published in the Sumter Item in the opening days of Junior Pierce's 1973 trial for Peg Cuttino's murder, Sheriff Parnell recounted that Pierce told authorities that he had parked at the landfill and, "the little girl started crying and said she wanted to go home," and that Junior, apparently fearing that police would be looking for him after the confrontation outside the restaurant, told her, "I can't carry you home."

"That's when he struck her in the head with a bumper jack," a tire iron, the sheriff testified.

According to the statement, Pierce never explained why the girl's mood seemed to have changed so abruptly, nor does he explain why after killing her, instead of simply dumping her body in the landfill, and perhaps covering it with trash, he drove a half-mile to a wooded area and dumped her there, taking the time to cover her body, however crudely, with leaves and moss and sticks. He is also said to have claimed that moments after he finished covering Peg Cuttino's body, he spotted two people walking through the woods, a man and a boy. One of them had a rifle, presumably to hunt squirrels. Pierce allegedly claimed that he stood behind the car in an effort to block his license plate from view.

In fact, there were, according to later testimony, two people in the woods around that time, a man and his son. The boy would later testify that he was hunting squirrels when he spotted a man standing suspiciously near his car and lingering there until the boy and his father left.

William Pierce escorted

To the authorities, the boy's testimony was powerful corroboration. But to critics, even today, it still raises as many questions as answers. One of those questions is the make and model of the car. Though Pierce allegedly claimed that he was driving a maroon Pontiac, the witness said the car he saw was a white Ford station wagon. What's more, the boy testified that he saw the car on Dec. 19, the day after Pierce allegedly confessed he had killed the girl.

Most troubling of all to the critics, Carrie LeNoir among them, is the fact that Junior Pierce's alleged confession was never put down on paper, and never recorded in any way.

Testifying on his own behalf, Pierce would later disavow the confession, insisting that the entire confession was cobbled together from pieces of information he had been fed by Baxley Sheriff Red Carter before officers from South Carolina arrived to interview him. According to published reports of Pierce's testimony, he claimed "that he knew details about the girl's death because Red Carter had discussed the case with him and told him that if he made a statement, he would never stand trial in South Carolina." Later, Pierce claimed that he had been threatened with abuse bordering on torture if he didn't confess. Those allegations, largely dismissed at the time, gained greater currency among some of the people of Sumter years later when Carter was convicted in federal court for his part in a drug-trafficking scheme in Georgia.

There were also questions about some of the physical evidence in the case. Pierce's car, which he claimed he had abandoned at a service station not far from his Georgia home, was never recovered. Nor was the tire iron that authorities believed he used as the murder weapon.

Even today, Pierce's confession remains suspect in the minds of many. As McElveen put it in a recent interview with Court TV's Crime Library, "Something very fishy was going on in Baxley, Georgia, when he was being held down there."

All the same, it was good enough for the authorities in Sumter.