Marion Albert Pruett was serving a federal sentence for bank robbery in Atlanta when he gave evidence against another inmate over the killing of his own cellmate. The government paid him eight hundred dollars, issued him the name Charles Sonny Pearson, and relocated him under the witness protection program in 1979. He said later that he had committed that killing himself.
Under the identity the government had given him, he killed five people in four states during 1981. His common-law wife Pamela Sue Barker was beaten with a hammer and set alight at Rio Rancho, New Mexico on March 2. Peggy Lowe, a loan officer, was taken from the Jackson, Mississippi savings and loan where she worked and killed on September 17. Bobbie Jean Robertson was abducted from the counter of the Fort Smith convenience store she was working in on October 12. James R Balderson and Anthony Taitt, both store clerks, were killed in Colorado in the days that followed. Three of the five died inside the week before his arrest.
He named himself in court: a mad dog killer, funded by a cocaine habit he put at four thousand dollars a week.
Arkansas sentenced him to death for Bobbie Jean Robertson’s murder on September 9, 1982, and New Mexico, Mississippi and Colorado each returned terms of life for the others. The Supreme Court refused a final stay on the day of his execution. He was put to death by lethal injection at the Cummins Unit near Grady, Arkansas on the evening of April 12, 1999, aged forty-nine, the nineteenth person executed by the state since Furman v Georgia.
The witness protection program is what distinguishes this case from any other multiple killing of its decade. The identity he used to rent rooms, buy the revolver and move between four states was federal property, issued in exchange for testimony he afterwards disowned.