If authorities in Sumter County were hoping that the conviction of Junior Pierce would ease the public's fears, that it would bring closure to the tragedy of Peg Cuttino and restore the public's flagging faith in them, they would soon discover that they had been hopelessly wrong.

"I can understand why they wanted to do it," said Munn, now an instructor at the University of South Carolina. "I think in this particular casethey (wanted) to say, 'We believe we got the right man, we've got the evidencehe's confessedlet's get it over with."

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But, by all accounts, they underestimated just how deeply the case had shaken the community. Within days of the conviction, letters to the editor started to appear in the local newspaper, letters that seemed to suggest that Junior Pierce, though hardly an innocent man in the grand scheme of things, might have been railroaded in the Cuttino case.

Of course there were some, most of them well-connected, who believed, or at least insisted publicly, that justice had been done. Chief among them was James Cuttino, the slain girl's father. Until his death several years ago, Cuttino remained firm that the right man had been convicted. But even the grieving father's insistence did little to douse the smoldering dissent in Sumter.

Hubert Osteen, president of the Item, who was an editorialist at his family-owned paper at the time, said recently that the fallout over the case drove, for the first time, a wedge between the authorities, people like Kirk McLeod, who had prosecuted the case, and Sheriff Parnell, and the community at large, and may even have touched Cuttino himself.

"Up until that time, there was no mistrust of the authorities," Osteen said. "The sheriff had been in office for 20-something years. He could do no wrong, and then this thing broke. That's when people started questioning his case"

And no one questioned the state's case more vocally or persistently than Carrie LeNoir.

As Munn put it, at precisely the moment that the authorities believed they put the case to rest, "Carrie LeNoir steps in and she throws in some pretty compelling arguments."

The way LeNoir saw it, the state's case against Pierce was flawed from the beginning. The case, as McElveen has said, was largely based on the presumption that Peg Cuttino had been killed almost immediately after her disappearance on Dec. 18, 1970, though the forensic science of the time was hardly precise enough to accurately pin down the date within a span of more than several days.

Yet Carrie LeNoir insisted that she had seen Peg Cuttino at the general store and post office on the afternoon of Dec. 19. She had told that to investigators, she said, and yet the prosecution apparently ignored her statement. In fact, McElveen and his co-counsel were never informed of LeNoir's statement and didn't learn of its existence until days after the trial.

Also overlooked was the eyewitness account of Peg Cuttino's classmate who had seen her riding in the back of a light-colored Mercury Comet with a man in sunglasses and a strange woman. The sighting, according to the student, occurred at about the same time that, if the prosecution's allegations were to be believed, Peg Cuttino was on her way to the landfill where she would be slain by Junior Pierce. Taken together with the testimony that had been included in the trial, which, according to the critics, conclusively proved that Pierce was in Georgia at the time of the killing, the new revelations fueled even greater suspicion about the validity of the state's case.

Within a month of the trial, those doubts had reached critical mass, and on April 5, McElveen and his team laid out their case for a new trial in court, arguing, among other things, that if the jury had been privy to the statements of LeNoir and the witnesses, they almost certainly would have voted to acquit.

The judge, however, saw things differently. He refused to grant a new trial.

But rather than end the controversy, that decision only fueled the suspicion. For the first time, at the lunch counters and coffee shops of Sumter, people were starting to use the word "cover-up." Rumors, ugly and unfounded though they might have been, began circulating. Once again, the notion that somewhere out in the woods, there was a trailer where well-connected youngsters were exploited by Left Coast pornographers began to circulate. Perhaps, it was whispered, Peg Cuttino had been a victim of that ring. There was, of course, never any proof of any such cabal, but the idea that such rumors could take root at all was a clear indication of just how frayed the public trust had become in the wake of Peg Cuttino's death.