William Pierce

Victims

9 confessed - 4 MURDER CONVICTIONS: three in Georgia, one of them Helen Wilcox, and one in South Carolina for Margaret “Peg” Cuttino. He recanted every confession in 1974, alleging they were beaten out of him, and the Cuttino conviction is contested to this day by the victim’s own relatives and by the county coroner. The remaining killings were confessed and never charged

Years active

1970 - 1971

Location

Georgia/South Carolina/North Carolina, USA

Method

Several

Status

Paroled from a Georgia burglary sentence in May 1970 despite prison psychiatrists having flagged him as sociopathic and potentially dangerous, and began killing within weeks. Arrested on March 8, 1971 after robbing a service station in Baxley, Georgia, and confessed under interrogation to nine murders across three states. Convicted in Georgia of three murders, including that of Helen Wilcox whom he had abducted from Hazlehurst in January 1971 and to whose remains he led police, and sentenced to life imprisonment. Convicted in South Carolina in 1973 of the murder of thirteen-year-old Margaret “Peg” Cuttino and again sentenced to life. He moved for a new trial in early 1974, recanting his confessions and alleging they had been coerced by Sheriff Red Carter through beating and burning, an allegation partly corroborated by a medical examination recording bruises and burns; the motion was refused and the South Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the conviction on August 8, 1974, holding the confessions voluntary. He challenged the convictions repeatedly into the 1980s. The Cuttino conviction remains disputed by the victim’s own relatives and by the county coroner, on physical evidence suggesting she was killed later than the date charged; DNA testing became impossible after Hurricane Hugo destroyed the biological evidence in 1989. He died in prison in May 2020, aged eighty-eight.

Pierce was born in 1931 and had a long record when, in May 1970, he was paroled from the Georgia state prison at Reidsville. A staff psychiatrist had reported that he should not be released. He was released anyway. He was known as Junior.

Within months people were being killed in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, shot, beaten and stabbed in the course of robberies and rapes. He was arrested on March 8, 1971. He was convicted in both Georgia and South Carolina in 1973 and sentenced to life imprisonment.

One of those convictions has never settled. Margaret Cuttino, known as Peg, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a South Carolina legislator, was abducted in Sumter in December 1970 and found dead. Pierce was convicted of her murder in 1973 on the strength of a confession he later retracted and of evidence that has been challenged repeatedly since. Local journalists, lawyers and members of the Cuttino family have argued for decades that he did not kill her, and the case is cited in South Carolina as a probable wrongful conviction. No court has vacated it.

The entry does not resolve that. What it records is that the man was convicted of multiple killings in two states, that one of those convictions is contested by people including the victim's own relatives, and that both things can be true at once.

The parole is the other half of it. A psychiatrist wrote down that this man was dangerous, a board released him regardless, and nine or more people died in the following ten months. This entry belongs with the release cases in this archive and is among the few where the warning is documented in advance.