Outrage: The Peg Cuttino Story

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True, there had already been six petitions filed on Pierce's behalf when the law frowns on more than one, Cooper said. But he decided to reopen the case one more time. "My hope in granting limited relief on the issue of after discovered evidencewas that the DNA evidence would lay this matter to rest which has been simmering now since 1970 some odd when the girl was killed," Cooper said, adding that "it's always been a situation where reasonable minds have disagreed as to whether Junior Pierce did this or not."

Cooper's hope that the DNA evidence would put a final coda on the case one way or the other, however, was short lived.

After Pierce's conviction, one set of blood and semen samples was stored in a basement room at the Medical University of South Carolina at Charleston. Authorities contend that they remained there until 1989 when Hurricane Hugo blew into town. In addition to all the other damage the storm did, it also claimed the filing cabinet containing the samples taken from Peg Cuttino nearly two decade earlier. Young has always maintained that there was something suspicious about the fact that only that cabinet was damaged, though authorities contend that the cabinet also contained several files from cases wholly unrelated to the Cuttino slaying.

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Young says he also believes that a second set of slides were sent directly to SLED, the state's equivalent of the FBI, and that they too have mysteriously vanished. Authorities dispute that.

In an effort to out the matter to rest, Cooper ordered a SLED agent to investigate the case of the missing samples. "A SLED agent spent days in Charleston interviewing, looking around, taking pictures, and his conclusion was that, Hurricane Hugo had in fact destroyed this as it had so much of the other records of the medical university during that period of time because these things are all stored in the basement and of course they were all flooded during the Hurricane Hugo," Cooper told the Crime Library.