Even among those who have spent years trying to exonerate Junior Pierce for the murder of Peg Cuttino, there are many who acknowledge that the men who pursued and prosecuted him were, by and large, honorable men.

Among them is Ken Young. Formerly an assistant county solicitor who worked closely on other cases with the late Kirk McLeod, the man who prosecuted Pierce, Young is now representing Pierce as he seeks, once again, to overturn his conviction.

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"Kirk and I were very close," Young said in a recent interview. "I don't think he would ever lie and he (was) convinced thathe had the right man.

"He based that on complete and total reliance on what    Sheriff Ira Byrd Parnell told him and what (SLED Chief) Strom had told him," and they in turn had placed their faith in Pierce's alleged confession, though Young now believes that confession was tainted. "According to Junior Pierce, he was told what to say by the sheriff down in Georgia," Young said. "These fellows went down there, there was a lot of pressure to solve the case and I think that they heard this man give them enough of the answers to convince them that they had the right man. That's all they needed to hear."

The trial began on March 1, 1973, but not in Sumter County. Pierce's lawyers had successfully argued that the public furor surrounding the case was such that Pierce had no chance of getting a fair shake from a jury in Sumter and so the case was moved to Williamsburg County.

It was expected to last two days. As it turned out, that was a reasonably accurate estimate.

During about a day-and-a-half of testimony, the prosecution focused on Pierce's testimony, and according to critics, glossed over the inconsistencies and weaknesses in their case, the lack of witnesses to the crucial Dec. 18, 1970, confrontation outside the restaurant during which Pierce met Peg Cuttino. They also downplayed the absence of the murder weapon or any other physical evidence linking Pierce to the crime. Nor did they pay any particular attention to the discrepancies in the testimony of the boy who claimed to have seen a man in the woods sometime not long after Peg Cuttino had disappeared, discrepancies that included the make and the model of the car parked in the woods, and the time at which he had allegedly seen it.

Investigators sift for evidence

 

The defense, in retrospect, did little to challenge those inconsistencies either. Instead, McElveen, a young lawyer fresh out of the military trying his first murder case, and his co-counsel focused on what they believed to be a critical piece of evidence. Drawing on the testimony of Junior Piece's boss at the Swainsboro, Georgia, factory where he worked, they tried to prove that Pierce could not possibly have been in Sumter on the day that Peg Cuttino disappeared.

According to McElveen, Ray Sconyers, vice president of the Handy House Corporation, testified that he personally handed Pierce his time card at about 7:05 a.m. on the morning of Dec. 18, 1970, and that he had seen Pierce about once every hour during the day, and that he had personally handed Pierce his paycheck around 4 p.m. What's more, Pierce's girlfriend, who had testified against Pierce in three separate trials, told the court that she had been with him, along with two other witnesses, all night on the evening of Dec. 18, 1970. It would have been impossible, McElveen said, for Pierce to travel the roughly 200 miles to Sumter on the day, kill Peg Cuttino and then return, all on the same day. "They pinned their case on her having been killed on the same day that she was taken andwe proved he was back inSwainsboro that night." McElveen said in a recent interview, adding that he was convinced that the testimony of Sconyers and Pierce's girlfriend would skewer the prosecution's case.

Then McElveen went after the confession. He allowed Pierce to testify that he had been forced to talk and that, even then, he had never actually admitted to killing the girl, and that authorities had twisted his words.   McElveen said he was confident that "we did a pretty good job of dissembling (sic) the confession because we were able to show that everything that wasin this remarkable, revealing confession was in a newspaper somewhere, andthat they changed it (to make it) a little bit better every time they testified," McElveen said.

In what was to have been McElveen's most audacious gambit, the lawyer employed the services of a nationally noted hypnotist named Robert Sauer. Sauer had, over the years, worked from time to time with law enforcement agencies, and had even worked with SLED briefly on the Cuttino case. He had been called into to help interview one potential suspect, who, after being hypnotized by Sauer, was dropped from the list.

Sauer, however, was not permitted to testify. Had he been, jurors would have learned that under hypnosis, Junior Pierce had denied killing Peg Cuttino or even being in Sumter County at or about the time of her disappearance. In fact, McElveen said, Pierce was not even certain where Sumter County was. In McElveen's mind, the interview under hypnosis would have been a crucial element of the case. Sauer had even gone so far as to add what he described as a built-in lie detector to the hypnosis regimen, urging Pierce's subconscious to make him raise one finger if he tried to lie. That test, McElveen said, convinced him that Pierce was telling the truth when he recanted his confession.

But the jury never heard it.

About 6 p.m. on Friday, March 2, after less than 16 hours of testimony, the jury began deliberations. About 6 hours later, they returned with a verdict.

William "Junior" Pierce was found guilty of murder. He was sentenced to life in prison, though in truth, the sentence made little difference. He was already serving life for murder in Georgia and it was unlikely that Junior Pierce would ever see the inside of a South Carolina prison.