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Within a few weeks of the ill-fated meeting, perhaps in a nod to mounting public pressure, the authorities decided to put the whole matter before a grand jury. "It is high time and quite proper that you check this off the books of Sumter County," Third Circuit Judge Dan F. Laney told the grand jurors in his charge to them.
If that was the goal to put the matter to rest once and for all it failed.
When the grand jury announced its decision that "no substantive evidence had been presented which would support a finding of either incompleteness or impropriety on the part of public officials charged with the investigation of the (Cuttino) case," LeNoir, Howard Parnell, and others who had turned the case into a crusade were outraged.
"They think it's over," LeNoir said at the time. "They think they've cleared the names and reputations of all the individuals in law enforcement and all the law enforcement agencies involved."
But as far as LeNoir was concerned, it was far from over.
For the next several years, as the courts all the way to the state Supreme Court continued to reject Pierce's appeals and his bids for post conviction relief, and as a second grand jury failed to reopen the case, Carrie LeNoir waged a relentless battle that took her from the streets of Sumter to the federal Justice Department in Washington, D.C., trying to find help in her crusade.
She found none, but rather than dull her ardor, that only deepened the sense of LeNoir and others that they were fighting a battle that was as much about politics as it was about justice.
During the course of that battle, she even found herself at odds with James Cuttino, the dead girl's father. Among the documents that LeNoir had collected were autopsy photographs of Peg Cuttino, along with information regarding the discovery of intact semen in the dead girl's body, evidence, she contends, that Peg Cuttino could not possibly have been killed on Dec. 18, evidence that, she believed, undercut Junior Pierce's supposed confession and threw in doubt most of the testimony from the state's witnesses.
She was, she admits, not shy about showing that information to anyone when she thought it might advance the case she was trying to make. Cuttino, who according to those who knew him, was not only convinced of Junior Pierce's guilt, he was desperate to at last put the whole sordid matter to rest and LeNoir and others believe it was at his insistence that the courts went after her, demanding that she turn over the documents she had collected. Cuttino had argued that LeNoir was "trespassing on (Peg Cuttino's) memory." At first LeNoir refused. She was even sentenced to 90 days in jail, though the sentence was suspended pending appeal. Ultimately, she agreed to return the documents to the court, where they were placed under seal.
 | | Pee Wee Gaskins |
In 1977, the bizarre case took yet another bizarre turn when Donald Henry "Pee Wee" Gaskins, the South's worst serial killer, was at the time already convicted of one murder, indicted for many more murders, and was standing trial for the murder of another in Florence County, made the shocking announcement that he, not Junior Pierce, had abducted and killed Peg Cuttino.
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