He could feel them looking at him. The chief of the State Law Enforcement Division, the local police chief, the coroner, all three of them: Their mute gaze hung on him like burrs on a horse blanket. He tried not to show it, but Sheriff Byrd Parnell could feel their eyes boring into the back of his head. He knew they were studying him. They were looking to him for some signal, some clue as to how they should react to the gruesome sight on the forest floor before them.

Sheriff Parnell

It wasn't that they had never seen a murder scene before. All of them were professionals, with the possible exception of the coroner, Howard J. Parnell, a nondescript and slightly funereal man, who, by accident of adoption, was also the sheriff's nephew. By virtue of fate, it seemed, he was a mortician. And by dint of politics, he was the coroner, charged with the usually mundane responsibility of attaching causes to unobserved deaths. The others, though, were all men who had spent their lives in the sometimes politically charged world of small-time South Carolina police work. They were no strangers to the bloody detritus of mayhem, though most often, that violence was committed by men with guns against men with guns and, as often as not, it was fueled by booze. But this was different.

chapter continues

advertisement

It wasn't just that the victim was so young, though certainly she was. Just 13 at her last birthday, she had seemed to exude a kind of fawn-like innocence. It was a treasured trait in the conservative communities of rural South Carolina, particularly back then, in 1970, when Vietnam and Kent State were still a world away and before Watergate had truly destroyed the notion of innocence. She was practically wearing a uniform of innocence when they found her; the prim blue blouse, the modest white skirt, the girlish, polka-dot sash.

But it wasn't just the tragedy of betrayed innocence that made this case different. It wasn't the fact that she had been so brutally slain, or even that the modest white skirt was hiked up around her hips, and that, by all appearances, she had been raped and sodomized. Even then, and even in this close-knit corner of the South, where everyone, it seemed, had been washed in the blood of the lamb, such savagery was hardly unheard of.

Peggy Cuttino, victim

What made this case different was who the victim was. Or, to put it more accurately, what she was likely to become. In life, Margaret "Peg" Cuttino had been the oldest daughter of a prominent man, a state legislator, a powerful man by the standards of the time and place who commanded respect and attention. That fact alone made her death different than any others in Sumter County, and in all likelihood, Sheriff Byrd Parnell knew it that day as he stood there in the woods staring down at the violated figure on the ground, covered, just barely, with leaves and a few sticks. That fact alone made it a case that could not be allowed to linger unsolved. That would have been so even if Sheriff Parnell was not who he was: a veteran lawman, president for a time of the National Sheriff's Association, and, by all accounts, a hard-nosed cop who had always made it a maxim to leave no crime unsolved before election time.

In time, Parnell would be able to declare the case solved. The break in the case, such as it was, would come when William "Junior" Pierce, a slow-witted convict from Georgia, a man with a long history of arrests for both petty and violent crime, would allegedly confess to the killing of Peg Cuttino, perhaps under duress, perhaps even under threat of torture.

But what Sheriff Parnell and the others who stood there could not possibly know was that the case, in some ways, would never really be resolved. Even now, more than 30 years after Peg Cuttino's murder, questions still dog the case. Three decades after the case was supposedly closed it remains as controversial and divisive as ever. After all these years, simply mentioning the names Junior Pierce or Peg Cuttino in some quarters of Sumter County still pits neighbor against neighbor.

Sth Carolina map, with Sumter County highlighted

 

There are some, many perhaps, in Sumter County who believe that authorities never really solved the case, and instead insist that Junior Pierce, though hardly an innocent man, could not have killed Peg Cuttino on the day and in the manner authorities have long claimed. In the three decades that have passed since Peg Cuttino's death, political careers including Sheriff Parnell's have been dashed on the rocks, all as a result of the storm of controversy generated by the case. A deep rift and a festering sense of mistrust have carved their way through the sandy soil of Sumter County. It is a measure of how deep and dark that chasm is that for time during the contentious debate over the case, the word of a blood-thirsty convict, an admitted serial killer named Pee Wee Gaskins, for a time carried as much weight with the people of Sumter as their elected sheriff and others charged with protecting the peace and safety of the community.

Even today, the case still pits what most observers call "regular folks," hard-working and religious people who deeply believe that Peg Cuttino's death was linked, however tenuously, to some deep, dark secret in the woods outside Sumter, a secret that somehow involved powerful people.

In short, more than 30 years after Peg Cuttino's body was found in a shallow, makeshift grave in the depths of Manchester State Forest, more than 25 years after her presumed killer was convicted of the crime, the case is still, in the minds of many, a mystery.