Margaret Cuttino, known as Peg, was thirteen, the daughter of a South Carolina legislator. She was reported missing in Sumter on the afternoon of Friday, December 18, 1970. On December 30 her body was found under leaves and small branches in Manchester State Forest. The man convicted of killing her has been doubted ever since.
William J. Pierce Jr., known as Junior, was born in 1931 and had a long record. In May 1970 he was paroled from the Georgia state prison at Reidsville, although a prison psychiatrist had flagged him as sociopathic and potentially dangerous and recommended against release. Within weeks people were dying in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, shot, beaten and stabbed in robberies and rapes. On March 8, 1971 he was arrested after robbing a service station in Baxley, Georgia. Under interrogation he confessed to nine murders in three states: two men and seven women, aged from seventeen to sixty.
Georgia tried him first. One of the victims there was Helen Wilcox, whom he had abducted from Hazlehurst in January 1971 and to whose remains he led the police. At trial he renounced his statements, saying the interrogators had forced a false confession out of him while he was drunk and that he had never been read his rights. He was convicted, and in all he received life sentences for three Georgia murders.
In the Cuttino case he told investigators that he had driven from Swainsboro, Georgia, to Sumter on December 18, picked Peg up at a hamburger stand, and driven her to Manchester Forest, where he killed her. The indictment charged the murder on that date. After a change of venue he was tried at the February 1973 term of the Court of General Sessions in Williamsburg County. A witness named Earl Williams testified that on the afternoon of Saturday, December 19, while hunting and cutting wood with his father in Manchester Forest, he saw Pierce standing a hundred to three hundred feet away. The jury convicted him, and he was sentenced to life.
The motion for a new trial turned on a storekeeper. Samuel Lenoir testified that at about 2:30 on the afternoon of December 19, a day after the date in the indictment, Peg Cuttino and two boys he did not know came into his store in Sumter County, not far from where her body was found, and bought three Coca-Colas, and that later that afternoon the two boys came back without her. He did not know Peg, but recognized her that evening from a newspaper photograph of the missing girl. The South Carolina Supreme Court accepted that Lenoir and his wife were firmly and sincerely convinced of what they had seen, but found other evidence that weighed against them, and on August 8, 1974 it affirmed the conviction.
In 1974 Pierce recanted all his confessions. His defense alleged that they had been beaten and burned out of him by Sheriff Red Carter, and a medical examination was said to have recorded bruises and burns; the courts held the confessions voluntary. He went on challenging his convictions, in South Carolina and, from 1977, in Georgia, into the 1980s, without success.
The doubts never went away. Carrie LeNoir, of the family whose store the girl was said to have visited, kept copies of the case documents for decades in the hope of clearing him, and two grand juries declined to reopen the case. The county coroner and others disputed the police timeline. Critics pointed out that Pierce had an IQ of about 70 and a history of confessing to things, that the confession had never been written down or recorded, that the supposed weapon, a tire iron, was never found, and that he claimed to have killed her at a landfill yet had driven her body to the state forest instead of leaving it there. Some of the girl's own relatives came to share those doubts. DNA testing became impossible after Hurricane Hugo destroyed the biological evidence in 1989. No court has vacated the conviction.
Pierce died in prison in May 2020, aged eighty-eight. The warning written before his parole, and the deaths in the ten months that followed it, are both part of the record.