In 1979 the federal government gave Marion Albert Pruett $800, a new name, Charles "Sonny" Pearson, and a place in the witness protection program. He had been serving a twenty-three-year sentence for bank robbery in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta when he testified against another inmate over the stabbing of his cellmate. He said later that he had done the killing himself. Two years after he walked out under his new identity, five people were dead in four states.
Pruett was born in Gastonia, North Carolina, on October 4, 1949. By 1981 he was living in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, outside Albuquerque, with his wife, named in the Eighth Circuit's opinion as Pamela Sue Carnuteson and in other accounts as Pamela Sue Barker, who went by the name Michelle Lynn Pearson. She was beaten to death with a hammer and her body was burned with gasoline; the date is given as March 2, 1981, in some accounts, and the federal court put the discovery of her body in April.
Early on the morning of September 17, 1981, he walked into the branch office of Unifirst Savings and Loan Association in the Metrocenter shopping area of Jackson, Mississippi, where Opal H. Lowe, known as Peggy, worked with three other women. He had spent the night at a motel not far away, and he chose the branch, he said later, because no men worked there; men were more likely to give him trouble. While the robbery was under way Peggy Lowe took a call from her son and made a plan to meet him for lunch. Pruett had picked out another employee as his hostage and took her instead. He drove her off in her own car with the money, switched to his, and made her crouch on the floorboard with her head down on the seat so that no one would see her; whenever they passed another car, or another car passed them, he threw his coat over her. He drove about a hundred miles east on Interstate 20 without stopping. At one point she asked to pray, and he let her. Across the state line in Sumter County, Alabama, he left the interstate for a gravel road and then a small country road, and took her into the woods, where, by his account, he made her undress to her underclothes so that she would not try to leave. By his sworn account he left her there for about fifteen minutes while he went back to the car for a shot of cocaine, and came back to find that she had moved. He made her kneel, put her face down and repeat her husband's telephone number so that he could be called, and while she was saying it he shot her in the back of the head at close range. Almost everything the jury knew about that morning came from Pruett, the only witness for the defense, and the one point left in dispute was what happened in the moments before he fired.
Three weeks later he was in Fort Smith, Arkansas. He arrived on Sunday, October 11, and drove around looking for a bank or a store to rob, but most places were closed, so he parked in a secluded wooded spot called Horseshoe Bend and spent several hours there injecting cocaine and drinking whiskey. Sometime after midnight he drove to a Convenience Corner store he had noticed on an earlier trip to town and saw through the window that the clerk on the overnight shift, Bobbie Jean Robertson, was alone. "I pulled in and was going to get gas and I seen that there was a girl working there by herself and I said well hell, I think I'll just rob her and kill her so that's what I done," he said later. He had her put the register money in a paper bag, told her to get her pocketbook, and ordered her into his car, promising that she would be let go if she cooperated. At Horseshoe Bend he told her to get out. She started to walk away, then turned back to ask whether she could have her purse. He fired from the car. The first bullet broke her thigh bone and the second hit her in the shoulder as she tried to run. Then he got out, walked over to where she had fallen, pressed the muzzle against her left temple and fired again. He drove off with her pocketbook and about $165 from the store. Police found her the next day in a thicket of weeds a few feet from the dirt road.
Four days later he was in northern Colorado. In the early hours of October 16, 1981, Anthony Taitt, a twenty-one-year-old student at Colorado State University working as a clerk at a 7-Eleven in Loveland, was shot four times. Several hours later James R. Balderson, a clerk at a 7-Eleven in Fort Collins, was shot and killed. The two robberies brought in less than forty dollars. When Pruett was executed, the Associated Press counted Robertson as one of three people he had killed in a single week.
On October 17, 1981, an officer stopped him for speeding in Stratford, in the Texas Panhandle, saw the holster of a .38-caliber revolver sticking out from under the front seat, and arrested him. Peggy Lowe had not been found. Pruett later claimed that two FBI agents in Texas, and then Jackson police officers, had offered him cocaine to tell them where her body was; every officer he named testified that it was untrue. He said himself that he had led them to her so that her family could give her a Christian burial. On October 27 he guided a convoy of officers and federal marshals from Jackson through the back roads of Sumter County at night, over roads he had driven once, on the day he killed her, and straight to the place where she lay. The next day, in the Jackson jail, he gave a television interview. While he waited there for trial, he also gave Detective Larry Hammond of the Fort Smith police a detailed confession to the Robertson killing.
He was tried state by state. The Mississippi case turned on geography: Peggy Lowe had died in Alabama, and Pruett's lawyers argued that only Alabama could try him for her murder. Pruett took the stand as the only defense witness and described the killing in detail. Tried in Lowndes County on a change of venue, he was convicted of capital murder and sentenced him to death, and on February 23, 1983, the Supreme Court of Mississippi held that the kidnapping that began in Jackson, when he took her from her desk at gunpoint with the money sack in his hand, made the killing a capital crime in Mississippi. The court called him "a very intelligent and crafty person." One member of the court argued that a prospective juror who said that conscience would not allow a vote for death had been wrongly excused and that another jury should set the penalty. The sentence did not hold. On March 21, 1986, a federal district court found an error at the guilt phase and ordered Mississippi to retry him within 120 days or release him; the Fifth Circuit affirmed, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to step in, and the deadline ran out on April 3, 1987, with no new trial. Pruett argued that the lapse barred the state from ever trying him again, but on September 2, 1987, the Supreme Court of Mississippi held that it could. In February 1988 the sentence was reduced to life.
Between trials he was moved from state to state. Returned to federal custody after the Mississippi verdict, he was sent to Colorado, pleaded guilty to the Balderson and Taitt murders and received consecutive life terms. Arkansas came next. Arraigned in Sebastian County on June 12, 1982, he asked to represent himself, and after a change of venue the trial was moved to Van Buren, in neighboring Crawford County; the defense's requests for more time and for a second move were refused. He delivered a closing argument himself in which he admitted killing Bobbie Jean Robertson, and on September 9, 1982, the jury convicted him of capital murder and sentenced him to death by electrocution. It had heard some evidence that drug abuse had impaired his mental capacity but found no mitigating circumstances. New Mexico then convicted him of his wife's murder and sentenced him to life. His defense there was that a Crimestoppers informant had named another man as the killer, and that he had been rushed to trial before the informant could be found; the Supreme Court of New Mexico rejected that, and his claim that the confession he gave a Jackson detective had been bought with a promise of cocaine, on January 31, 1984. At that trial he admitted robbing her to feed a cocaine habit he put at $4,000 a week, but denied killing her. The press called him the Mad Dog Killer.
The families turned on the government that had set him loose. In October 1982 Eugene and Mary Taitt of Denver sued the Justice Department for $5 million, claiming it had been negligent in freeing Pruett from the federal prison in Atlanta in November 1979 and sending him to Rio Rancho under a new name; the suit called his release "an act of carelessness and gross negligence" given his criminal record. The week before, in Fort Smith, the parents of a woman he had killed had filed a $4 million suit of their own.
The Arkansas Supreme Court affirmed his death sentence in 1984. In June 1987 Governor Bill Clinton demanded his return from Mississippi, and in March 1988 he was extradited to await an execution set for April 7. On April 4 a federal judge stayed it, and the habeas case that followed lasted nine years. In 1997 the district court vacated the conviction and sentence, holding that pretrial publicity had denied him a fair trial and that hypnotically refreshed testimony at the penalty phase had violated his right to confront the witnesses against him. On August 7, 1998, the Eighth Circuit reversed and dismissed the petition, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused a final stay. On the night of April 12, 1999, at the Cummins Unit of the Arkansas Department of Correction near Grady, Pruett, forty-nine, asked God and his victims for forgiveness. "And I forgive everybody for what's about to happen to me," he said, and closed his eyes as the drugs were injected. He was pronounced dead a few minutes after nine. Every one of the five killings had been committed under the identity the federal government issued him in exchange for testimony he later disowned.