The Final Truth, bookcover

 

Over the years, Gaskins gave at least two accounts of the killing. In one particularly sordid version, he claimed to have been part of a murder-theft ring that he claimed was operating with the knowledge of police officials in South Carolina. The killer claimed that he had been hired by a never named law enforcement officer to "assassinate" Peg Cuttino. No evidence to support that claim was ever uncovered. In another version, later included among his vain and venal statements in the book, The Final Truth, Gaskins claimed that he had killed Peg Cuttino because during a chance encounter on the street, she had insulted him, telling her friends that he was "white trash."

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For many in Sumter County, there were a great many reasons to believe Pee Wee Gaskins. He certainly had the capacity to kill. That much was not in question. He also had what McElveen would later claim was a far greater opportunity to kill Peg Cuttino. He was, after all, living in Sumter at the time of Peg Cuttino's murder, and in fact, had been working as a roofer at the YMCA building a few yards from the spot where the girl was last seen alive. What's more, there is little question that he was working as a police informant at the time, and his name was even on the list of witnesses who were questioned in the first frantic hours after Peg Cuttino's disappearance.

There are also indications that he might have had access to a car similar to the one Peg Cuttino was said to have been seen riding in on the day she died. And there were also tantalizing details that he was able to provide about the case. He noted for example, a small array of burn marks on Peg Cuttino's arm, marks that authorities had identified as cigarette burns. Gaskins claimed that they were acid burns, that he had dripped the caustic liquid liquid he would have had access to in his job on the dying girl's body.

But there were plenty of reasons to question the supposed confession as well.

Gaskins shows police locations

 

Pee Wee Gaskins, a notorious liar, had some kind of book deal he was negotiating. Adding the Cuttino case to his crimes would have enhanced his position. What's more, Gaskins and Pierce had been corresponding while both were in prison. Gaskins himself, described by many who knew him as a classic manipulator and a keen student of the flaws in the judicial system, would later recant his confession. He claimed, according to court documents, that he made the stunning confession because "there was a lot of pressure put on me and I figuredsaying a lot of that would get a lot of pressure off me."

He also said he "felt that if I went into it and said I killed her and everything, that would take pressure off of Pierce. He was wanting to get from under thatI got letters from him."

Both the confession and the retraction would remain controversial. In separate letters to Pierce and LeNoir, with whom he was also corresponding, Gaskins would later insist that his retraction not his confession was made under pressure from authorities.

The entire dispute would be aired in 1983 when a court agreed to hear yet another appeal on Pierce's behalf, this one, claiming among other things that Gaskin's confession was grounds to overturn his conviction.

The appeals court, declined, and as had every other court that had heard the case, it upheld Pierce's conviction.

In essence, it seemed, the court found Gaskin's statements incredible.

It's not surprising that one of those who agrees with the court's decision, if only in that aspect of the case is Ken Young.

In the 1970s, Young was the assistant solicitor who prosecuted Gaskins in the Florencecase. During that trial, he says, he struck up a rapport with Gaskins, a rapport that lasted until Gaskins was executed years later for an unrelated homicide. Young says he was convinced that as deadly as Gaskins was, he was not Peg Cuttino's killer. "He didn't know beans about the case," Young told Crime Library in a recent interview. In fact many of Gaskins statements about the case, including the details about the burns on the girl's arm, "were in the paper," Young said. "Pee Wee Gaskins was probably one of the smartest criminals you'd ever want to meet. He was amazing. But no, I don't believe he killed Peg Cuttino. In fact, in front of his lawyers on death row, he told me, 'By the way, I never killed Peg Cuttino.'"

What is surprising is that Young, now in private practice, is one of those who firmly believe in Junior Pierce's innocence. In fact, he is currently representing Pierce and is preparing a draft of an order for post-trial relief in the case, though he didn't choose the case, it was assigned to him.   Among the issues Young plans to place before the court in the idea that critical information including details of the autopsy report were wrongly withheld from the defense.

"I don't believe they disclosed to the defense counsel all of the autopsy reportsthat the semenhad the tails," he said. "My expert, she's made the casethat there's no way that they could have been placed in the body at the time that was claimed by the state, December the 18^th." Young also contends that evidence, available at the time but apparently not shared with the defense indicates that "fromthe position of the body and the fact that the sperm still had tails on them that the earliest date that she could have the time of death would be December 26."

But Young also plans to argue that Junior Pierce's first defense team failed him as well.

As Young puts it, McElveen and the others were so focused on the task of establishing that Pierce was in Georgia, not South Carolina at the time of Peg Cuttino's death, that they missed the chance to uncover some of the facts that might have led them to the pathologist's report.

"The defense put all of their eggs in one basket," Young said.   "When they went and looked at the autopsy report, they only looked at the first page. They weren't interested in looking at anything beyond that," Young said. "If they had looked at the entire document, they would have seen these (semen samples) and at least asked for a blood test or something to exclude him. You didn't have the DNA tests back then, but they had tests that could haveruled him out. At least they could have tried that."

In one final irony of the case, while the technology exists now to prove almost conclusively whether the semen recovered 30 years ago from Peg Cuttino's body matches Junior Pierce's DNA, or whether it points to another killer, the samples themselves, no longer do.

"When I first got assigned this caseI said, 'Well, we got DNA now, we'll solve this thing right quick. So I started pressing (officials at the Medical University of South Carolina where the samples were to have been stored) to give me the autopsy results. You know everything was on slides, so I thought I could find that."

But when Young finally showed up at MUSC, "they took me to a parking garage in the basement, (where there were) all these rows and rows of filesI inventoried them, I went through them one by one, figuring that maybe something was out of place. The only drawer, the only drawer in the entire group that was missing was the one containing (the samples drawn from the body of) Peg Cuttino."

To some, there could be a thousand innocent explanations for the missing files. They could have been destroyed by fire, as were other state records, they could have fallen victim to one of the many hurricanes that wreak havoc on that part of the country, they might have even have been accidentally discarded, victims of the changes that have taken place in file management over the years.

But Young says he remains suspicious.

The way he sees it, the missing files are a pretty strong indication that "somebody's trying to impede my investigation of this."