Stayin' Alive

Pee Wee kills his enemy, Dennis Bellamy, and he tries to avoid the death penalty. His legend also grows with the Peg Cuttino murder.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Peewee Gaskins murdered eight people between nineteen seventy and nineteen
seventy five, whom he then buried near Prospects, South Carolina.
By seventy six, it was time for Peewee to face
the consequences of his brutal actions. He had been arrested
and charged with murder, and prosecutors wanted the death penalty.

(00:26):
I mean, if you're gonna have a death penalty, if
Peewee Gaskins doesn't get put to death, who should? He
was one of those people pee Wee would say he
did not deserve to live. I felt a great need
to try to kill the whold story. Eight people found buried,

(00:50):
all at the hands of this little short guy, Peewee.
He said, I was the last person to see her alive,
and I gas from my heart, radio and doghouse pictures.
This is Peewee Gaskins was not my friend. I'm Jeff Keating.

(01:27):
Police and prosecutors were convinced he had been involved in
killing eight friends, family members, and associates over six years,
but convicting Peewee Gaskins and sentencing him to the electric
chair would prove more difficult than they would imagine eight bodies,
eight victims, and eight chances to get convictions. They would

(01:53):
start with the strongest case, the murder of Dennis Bellamy.
Here's Jim Bay to remind us of how it went down.
Denis Bellamy. It was the first person that he was
tried for killing. First of all, he was an older
brother of two other Pewee's victims, Diane Bellamy Neely and

(02:16):
John Henry Knight. He bullied won't Neely, beat him up,
put him in the hospital several times. And he was
one of those people that Peewee would quickly say he
did not deserve to live. He was an evil person,
and Peewee was judge and jury on in his belovy

(02:38):
r Right there in his yard, he pistor whipped to
his Bellamy. He was a fierce enemy of Nenat Bellamy.
The pistol whipping occurred when Dennis showed up drunk and
caused a scene cussing and groping women at one of
Peewee's popular weekend cookouts. Before then, Walter, Dennis Peewee, and

(03:03):
Johnny Knight were all part of a theft ring. Walter
thought he hit it big in early after stealing a
collection of close to twenty valuable Browning and Frankie shotguns.
Local pawn shops knew better than to buy these obviously stolen,
rare guns, so instead, Walter and Dennis struck a deal

(03:25):
with Peewee, who served as their banker. Dennis was going
to give Walter a Ford Falcon that Walter was eager
to drive. Peewee would sell the guns, pay Dennis for
the Ford Falcon, take a fee for the transaction, and
return the rest to Walter. Everybody agreed on the deal,
but had to wait because selling stolen guns was risky.

(03:50):
Peewee was patient and waited for the right time to sell. Unfortunately,
Dennis had little patients, especially when he was money from
Peewee gaskins. After a bit of drinking one night, Dennis
declared it was time to get those guns back for Peewee,
and he demanded Walter and Johnny go with him. The

(04:16):
night that Dennis Bellamy was killed was a rainy night,
I believe in the fall, and Dennis and Walter Neely
and younger brother John Henry Knight, we're all in North Charleston.
They met at the pool room and Dennis announces we're

(04:37):
going to prospect I'm going to get the money for
those guns that I gave to you altered at Peewe's
gonna sell. I'm going to have the money or the
guns tonight. And of course Dennis Bellamy were drinking heavily
and they got in the old pickup truck and they
drove the prospect and it was a visit to the

(04:59):
Gaskins car the Pound. He made Dennis take his boots
off before he came in the house because it was
muddy and raining. And he came in and they had
words and he says, okay, that's no problem, We'll go
get the guns. And John Henry Knight and Walter nearly

(05:20):
remained in the trailer watching Johnny Carson on TV, and
Dennis and p would go down in the dark to
look at the stash of mostly rifles, brand new rifles,
which of course had along been sold and P we
didn't have them, and he didn't have any money for
Dennis Bellamy, and it was there, not far from the

(05:44):
huge oak tree. He shot him in the back of
the head with a pistol. Thirty minutes later, he takes
Walter and John Henry Knight back down to the area
where Dennis had been killed. He says, let's go with
Dennis sway and known as we're gonna go back and

(06:06):
get the guns and then head back, and Pee Wee
stops under a huge oak tree and he says to
John Henry, take this flashlight. Put it on that big
bottom limb of this He said, wouldn't that be a
perfect place for us to pull engines and re haul

(06:29):
engines and stolen cars? Of course? And John Henry Knight said, oh,
that would be a great place. And that limi holding
the engine and pole. That was the end of John
Henry Knight. Johnny Knight was murdered at the same place
as his older brother, both shot in the back of

(06:52):
the head. Dennis was killed because he wanted the money
he was owed and because Pee Wee hated him. But
why John Henry Knight? He killed him because he was present.
That's why Johnny was killed. And what did Pee we
say to his good friend Walter Damia hole? That murder

(07:15):
was probably the tipping point for Walter Neely. Just one
month later he cracked under pressure and took police to
that hole. It was the first of four shallow graves
they would unearthed over the next week. Here's sled investigator
Ira Parnell, who was the firearm forensic expert charged with

(07:35):
tying the weapon used to the murders. The first two
was found were the last two that he buried. The
only people who losol associate with anything we had with him.
In other words, either the handman or the rifle or uh.
The last two boys, both of them shot and the

(07:56):
hat with the thirty two festol that he had with him.
And interestingly enough, it was a little breada thirty two
semi automatic pistol with Pee. We had taken an electric
pencil and written his name on the side of the
gun as a signature. Almost by the day that that

(08:17):
was obviously his gun, because while would you put his
name on it, this was the same gun Pee we
had with him when he was arrested while taking a
taxi cab to catch a bus bound for Tupelo, Mississippi.
So when we got the bodies what was left him
and got him exhumed, I flew down to Charleston, was

(08:39):
sled plane and picked up bullets, had brought him back
to Columbia and test fired the gun that we had
from Peewee. Was able to say that those bullets came
out of those boys head was both fired by that
particular pistol, and that was really some of the only
physical evidence that we had because a lot of them
were stabbed in the other really undetermined because they were

(09:02):
deteriorated so badly until it was not much left to
look yet, the wooded fragments or anything left in in
hear rest of It was complex and interesting case. In
nineteen seventy five, there were no sophisticated computer databases or
DNA testing for cases like this. The only hard evidence

(09:25):
that directly tied Peewee Gaskins to any of the eight
victims was these bullets. This made it easy which case
the prosecutors would pursue first. On May seventeenth, nine seventy six,
Twelfth Circuit Solicitor Ken Somerford charged Donald Henry Gaskins for

(09:45):
the murder of Dennis Bellamy and some of her sought
the electric chair as punishment for the heinous crime. This
is deadly salibi. The assistant solicitor who worked with Kin
Somerford to present the case against Peewee, well, it was
as much public interest as you could find. Eight people

(10:09):
found buried and more suspected killed but not found, all
at the hands of this little short guy, Peewee. The
evidence we were able to present in court started with
Peewee himself and his family, but there was substantiated rumor
that Peewee had bragged about his graveyard in his part

(10:29):
of the woods. He had no witnesses other than himself,
that I recall. He had to combat the fact that
we had his own family connecting him with the boys,
his history of having the graveyard, the ballistics tools for
digging graves found in his possession. During the trial, prosecutors

(10:50):
presented solid evidence. They showed the jury a pair of
muddy shoes belonging to Dennis Bellamy found in Peewee's trailer.
Belle Me was buried shoeless that rainy night. Five witnesses
said they last saw the brothers together on the evening
of the murder, and one said Walter Neely was with them.

(11:13):
Mrs ethel Knight, mother of the two victims Dennis and Johnny,
broke down in tears when asked to identify the bloody
shirt that belonged to Dennis. Ira Parnell testified that ballistics
matched the bullets that killed Dennis Bellamy to Peewee's handgun,
two in the head and one in the heart. Shirley

(11:34):
Anne Gaskins testified against her father. Shirley Anne lived in
Prospect with her husband, Howard Evans, just across the road
from Peewee's Prospect home. He had a house trailer very
close to his daughter's house trailer, and then there was
a third house trailer that Peewee let some of his

(11:57):
younger girlfriends used. Peewee lived in North Charleston most of
the time, but his Prospect home, and it's a dozen
acres or so, is where he stored stolen goods and
where he killed and buried many of his victims. When
his daughter took the stand, she placed him at the

(12:17):
scene of the crime at the time of the murder.
When asked about the murder weapon, the gun etched with
Peewee on the side, she said, quote that was his baby.
End quote here's deadly salibi, describing as Peewee was called
to testify, so he took the stand in a very

(12:40):
cool and collected manner, had a response, a seemingly logical
answer to everything that implicated him. And yet during the testimony,
one of the most telling memories of the trial was
When there was a pause, he reached in his pocket
and pulled out what appeared to be no as if.

(13:02):
During his time awaiting trial in jail, he had to
come up with what would be the most plausible explanation
other than his guilt. Pee Wee denied everything and tried
to pen the blame on Walter Neely, but the Florence
County jury didn't buy it. It took them just forty

(13:23):
seven minutes to return a verdict of premeditated murder. The
verdict came with an automatic death sentence and an automatic
appeal to the state Supreme Court. A few years later,
pee Wee confided to Jim, he said, yes, I killed him,

(13:45):
and he said I'd shoot him every day if I
had the opportunity. And when he told me this, he
was rigid, look right through you when he said this,
And it was really frightening to him say those words.
But he regretted very much that Johnny Knight had to die.

(14:09):
He didn't say sad, He just said it was a
shame Johnny, and to die, I don't. In June two,

(14:43):
the U. S. Supreme Court ruled the death penalty was
illegal without new specific standards. They ruled that the death
penalty violated the Constitution's eighth Amendments, which safeguarded against cruel
and unusual punishment. How Boykin delivered this report on the
day of the ruling. Public opinion may be sharply divided

(15:06):
on this issue, was indicated by the Supreme courts five
to four split decision. Some people are likely to say
that the decision came too late, while others will say
it is still too soon. Hell Boykin Channel ten News.
The Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty was illegal
without new specific standards on June two, in the case

(15:33):
Firm and versus Georgia. In this argument from the case,
Justice Potter Stewart asked attorney Anthony Amsterdam a question, Dude,
I just want to be sure that I had a
tenure alternate argument that, even even assuming that retribution is

(15:53):
a is a premissible ingredient. I'm funny. Even assuming that
rational people could conclude that the death sentence is the
maximum deterrent with the minimum unnecessary rule deasiny electric chair,

(16:13):
even assuming we're dealing with somebody who is not capable
of being rehabilitated, incorrigible person, you say it is still violated,
then that is correct here owner following the firm in case.
In order to reinstate the death penalty, states added new

(16:36):
requirements to satisfy the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution. This
would prove hard to do for our story. This would
mean the death sentence for Gaskins would have to be
put on hold. So, just in time for Independence Day,
on July four, South Carolina lawmakers passed the law that

(16:58):
made the death senate mandatory in most cases. As it
turns out, Pee Wee Gaskins got arrested and convicted of
killing Dennis Bellamy in nineteen seventy six. His trial was
based on that same independent state law, and he was
automatically sentenced to death by electric chair. But this law

(17:22):
had one major flaw. It declared the death penalty was mandatory.
The state Supreme Court would soon rule, you can't do that.
To meet the requirements of the U. S. Supreme Court,
some discretion must be left to the judge and jury,
and the trial itself has to be separated from the

(17:43):
sentencing phase, known as a bifurcated trial. So the determined
lawmakers passed another law and the state Supreme Court ruled
it was good. The death sentence was back. However, they
also said that the case against Peewee Gaskins was subject
to the law in the books at the time he

(18:05):
was convicted. In other words, the court said, you can't
just go pass a new law and impose it on
a guy already convicted under an old law. That old
law was legal except for the death penalty part. So
while his conviction was good, his death sentence was not.

(18:27):
The court ruled there would be no do over. Peewee
Gaskins would not die. Instead, he would get a life
sentence for killing Dennis Bellamy. Here's attorney Dick harpoot Lean
to explain. I tried my first death penalty case in
the fall of nineteen seventies six in South Carolina. At

(18:49):
that time, every murdered trial or person charged murdered faced
the death penalty unless the jury recommended mercy. I prosecuted
a guy named Thomas Earl Rogers, who has a soldier
at Fort Jackson, who got angry at a waitress at
a huddle house and shot and kilder. We picked at
Jerry at eleven o'clock on Monday morning. He was sentenced
to death on Tuesday, afternoon, No bifurcated drial, none of

(19:11):
the stuff that we think is a routine today. The
Roger's case was the case that our Supreme Court used
to overturn the death penalty here, and we went to
a bifurcated process guilder innocence trial and then a sentencing
trial with all kinds of constraints that have been mandated
by the United States Supreme Court once the firm and

(19:33):
versus Georgia process went into effect, I guess I did
three death penalty cases prior to Gaston's, and each one
of them went on far longer than the very difficult
in Richmond County. Here in Columbia to get a death penalty.
Always has been. Public sentiment towards capital punishment is constantly changing,

(19:54):
in part because the Cruel and Unusual Punishment Clause of
the Eighth Amendment is controvers and vague. The courts are
tasked with determining whether punishment reflects society's shifting attitudes. Over
the years, there's been a sharp decline in support of
the death penalty, but in nineteen seventy four, a large

(20:15):
portion of South Carolinians still approved it. Following State versus Rogers.
There were nine requirements for death sentence in a capital case.
The two most relevant to this case stipulated that a
juror could not be excused based on a pre existing
attitude towards capital punishment, and secondly, a capital punishment trial

(20:41):
must be separate from its sentencing phase. Here's the lead
prosecutor from the case, Ken Somerford, discussing those requirements as
I interpreted the latest decision. The court stated in that opinion,
as I do it, that if the defendant had been

(21:02):
given a bifecated trial, that it would have been constitution
We still have a death penalty, although it was declared invalid,
it was a procedure that for the reason that it
was declared invalid, as I interpreted the decision, Apparently he
did not understand these new stipulations beforehand. Perhaps this misunderstanding

(21:27):
was prompted by moving quickly after the State Supreme Court
took away Gaskin's death sentence. Since Gaskins could not be
resentenced for the murder of Dennis Bellamy, the state quickly
decided to try him for the murder of Johnny Knight.
When choosing the jury for the case trial, he did
not keep in mind that the same jury would serve

(21:49):
in the sentencing trial, so some Reford approved a prospective
juror during selection, even though she was on record as
opposing the death penalty. This step left an open door
for Peewee's defense to push for a plea deal, and
since the prosecution had significantly reduced the odds of winning
a destinence in the case, Somerford needed to bargain. Here,

(22:15):
State attorney Deadly Salibi, speaking soon after the plea was announced,
there was an interest in providing closure to the families
of the victims of the other homicides, and for that
reason he was allowed to in a replete of those
other homicides and receive a sentence of life in prison.

(22:37):
The confusion about which jurors would sit in the sentencing
phase of the Johnny Night trial opened the door for
a plea deal. Both sides would benefit from a deal
where pee Wee told everything in return for avoiding the chair,
but the state needed assurance that Peewee would be honest.
They also knew from experience he could cheat a lie

(22:58):
detector test. Here's Jim Batty. Pee we mentioned to me
lie detective test and then he concentrated on wiggling his
right big toe. How did you do it? Peewee said,
don't you just think about your right big toe? I said, oh,
how you doing it? Yeah? But he beats the lie

(23:19):
detective tests several times, and he said that was his method.
Knowing pee Wee had never failed a lie detector test,
some of her decided to go with different routes. Following
the plea agreement, Gascon's attorneys and the prosecution had a
meeting to discuss further terms. It was this meeting when

(23:39):
Peewee was unintentionally left alone in the Sheriff's office with
a gun in the desk drawer during a meeting break.
After re securing calm, the state demanded that Peewee undergo
sodium amatol to confirm his testimony to the murders. Sodium amatol,
the drug commonly known as truth serum, is a barbiturate

(24:02):
once thought to make people unable to censor themselves. The
belief was that those that minister the drug would be
unable to lie. In nineteen sixty three, the U. S.
Supreme Court ruled that confessions produced by true serums were
unconstitutional and therefore inadmissible. Over the years, experts have generally

(24:26):
agreed that these types of serums are not reliable for
lie detection, but since Gaskins had already confessed to the murders,
there was little reason to suggest coercion. The controversial admission
and plea deals announcement was not received well by everyone
outside the courtroom. Here, State Representative Ralph Anderson, the plea

(24:51):
bargain arrangement between the solicitor and the attorneys for Donald
pee Wee Gaskins is an incorrect resolution of this particular case.
I'm totally dissatisfied and dismayed with this kind of arrangement
where a mass murderer who has pled guilty to atrocious,

(25:11):
ambitious crimes is now escaping the death penalty. Peewee later
discovered he may have not needed a plea deal because
the state Supreme Court could have ruled the death sentence
does not apply to any of the eight people he killed.
Here's Dick harput Lean. Pee Wee was always bitter about

(25:32):
that because his lawyers convinced him to tell about other
murders they didn't know about or hadn't beenned on him,
and put guilty to those in exchange for a guaranteed
life sentence. As a practical matter, Peewee probably could not
have been prosecuted under the new death penalty law for
crimes committed prior to that going into effect. Peewee's logic

(25:55):
was that his life sentence for murder would potentially make
him eligible for role. At some point, he had to
know that the plea deal for eight consecutive life sentences
would lessen those odds. And there are many of these conversations.
He's talking to his wife about bringing the kid and
I want everybody to see the kids. So when I
go for parole, they understand I'm rehabilitated. I mean, just

(26:17):
a very cynical approach to using his family to try
to get out again. It was not unheard of of
people now, not as many murders as he had, but
I'm not unheard of his people to get parole intent
or two olver fourteen years, so he was working on
that um As part of his plea deal. Peewee Gaskins

(26:56):
confessed to murdering the victims found in this burial field.
He also confessed to several other murders that were corroberated
by investigators. Here's Dudley Salibi, who was on the prosecution team.
Once we found the victims, then things started snowballing. They
all tied back to a common reference point, and that

(27:19):
was Peewee Gaskins. Margaret O'Shea, who wrote numerous articles about
Peewee Gaskins, talks about how the media covered the victims.
I had dealt with people who've committed horrible crimes or
families of victims. From early on, I felt a great

(27:44):
need to try to tell the whole story. And I
don't know that the whole story in a newspaper. Shedding
really never gets told. There's not that much ink on
a daily basis in that kind of business. But I
always felt there's more to this than that. There's always

(28:09):
more to it. When dealing with Peewee during his confessions,
he admitted to killing peg Cutting No. In nine seventy.
Here's a Needa Baby discussing the confounding, painful story of
her death. I remember these very very well. Pee Wee
was the source of the information that Jim wrote, and

(28:33):
autopsy pictures which I did not look at, and the
peg cut No story, which is sort of peripheral but
very political. Peg Cut No was thirteen when she went
missing Friday, December eighteenth, seventy. She was walking to her
younger sister's school to have lunch, five blocks away from

(28:54):
her own school, which had led out for the day.
She never reached her sister's school. Peg was the daughter
of state Representative James Cuttin No and Margaret pool Cuttine
of Sumter. An Associated Press story ran in local newspapers,
quoting Sumter police who saw no evidence of foul play.

(29:17):
Patrols from several local and state authorities participated in the
search for the girl. Sled investigator Ira Parnell and his dad,
Bird Parnell, Sumter County Sheriff, were on the scene. Helicopters,
police on horseback, and bloodhounds also searched for the girl.

(29:39):
They scoured a four square mile area. The AP story
said she was five to weigh a hundred and thirty pounds,
with shoulder length brown hair and blue eyes. She was
wearing a blue blouse, white skirt and a polka dot sash.
The next day to send her nineteen, Sumter police chief

(30:02):
said they were assuming a kidnapping, so the FBI got involved.
Investigators detailed a report by a classmate that he had
seen the girl on Friday afternoon, approximately fifteen minutes after
she left her house, in the backseat of a car
with a man and a woman in the front seat.
The police said they had confidence in his eyewitness account.

(30:26):
Her disappearance dominated the news in South Carolina. Local and
national wire services wrote numerous articles covering every aspect of
the investigation. On December, a five thousand dollar reward was
offered for her safe return. One week later, on December

(30:49):
nineteen seventy two, airmen from nearby Shaw Air Force Base
found peg cutting nose body fourteen miles away for where
she was last seen. The airmen were trail riding in
the remote northern portion of Manchester State Forest and found
her in a landfill near a motorcycle trail Pathologists from

(31:10):
the South Carolina's Medical University made a preliminary on site
investigation before removing the body from the scene, and it
was taken to Charleston for a complete autopsy. They soon
reported that she had been strangled and her skull had
been crushed by a heavy object. Her funeral was held

(31:36):
on January two. One. More than five people attended. Paul Bears,
included officers from sled the Highway Patrol, the Sumter Police,
the governor and governor elect of South Carolina, as well
as the president of Clemson University, since PEG's maternal grandfather,

(31:57):
Robert Poole, was the immediate vice president of Clemson. Thirty
days later, James Cutting now advanced a bill in the
South Carolina House of Representatives to mandate fingerprinting all children
in the state. Here he is talking to w l
t X in South Carolina in the thing of printing

(32:20):
of children is necessary for their own protection. I might
just write the instance of the uh fact that my
daughter was missing for a period of prayer of days.
We did not have any idea about who had her
or what they were doing to and there was a
good possibility that she could have never been found where
we finally did located. Now, had we found a suspect

(32:43):
with her latent prince and numbers on his car, we
would not have been able to have identified them as
her prince. That she had no record or thing of
prince prior to this. More than fifty days after pet
Cutting was reported missing, a Sumter newspaper called The Item
ran a front page story that provided updates on the case.

(33:07):
Police reported more than thirty leads they were working, and
that they were meeting three times a week with multiple
state and local authorities. They polygraphed twenty four suspects, not
all of whom could have been able to prove their activities.
On the eighteenth of December, the article mentions a widely
circulated drawing of a suspect that failed to amount to anything,

(33:30):
and the five thousand dollar reward did not increase the
number of callers to the tip line, so Sheriff Parnell
felt the public was being as helpful as they could.
On January nine, William Pierce robbed a service station in Baxley, Georgia,
killed the store owner, and beat her five year old granddaughter.

(33:54):
He was spotted by an eye witness leaving the scene
and arrested several weeks later. After hours of interrogation. Junior Pierce,
as he was known, confessed to that murder and nine
others in Georgia and the Carolinas. It was a stunning
collection of murders the sheriff heard that day. One admission

(34:14):
was to peg cut nose killing. Authorities in Georgia opened
a trial for his last killing in Baxley in September one,
they presented eyewitness testimony and belongings of the victims found
in Pierce's car and apartment. They got a conviction and

(34:36):
life imprisonment, and they lined up the next case. During
that trial, he recanted his confession, saying he was forced
into them while he was drunk and that his Miranda
rights had been violated. Regardless, he was convicted and received
another life sentence. He was extradited in seventy three to

(34:56):
South Carolina, where he was convicted of killing peg No.
Other trials and convictions followed. The South Carolina's Supreme Court
supported a lower court decision and rejected Pierce's appeals for
a new trial in nineteen seventy four based on new
testimony from witnesses. One of those witnesses was Carrie Lenore

(35:24):
from Horatio, South Carolina. She was the town's postmistress, and
she and her husband claimed they saw Kutno two days
after Pierce was said to have killed the girl. Lenora
was a member of a twelve person group who called
themselves the Concerned Citizens of Sumter County, and their main
focus was trying to disprove the case against Junior Pierce.

(35:46):
They believed he was innocent and worked to find new
evidence to get him a new trial. Carrie Lenore was
cited in an article in the Charlotte Observer in nineteen
seventy four saying that Pierce's conviction was quote the biggest
miscarriage of justice in the Southeast and maybe in the
whole United States. My motive for justice is stronger than

(36:09):
my motive for sympathy end quote. She even kept autopsy
and other photos displayed in her post office to keep
the story alive and so that others could see the
travesties she saw. She based her theories on the slow
rate of decomposition. She said, quote it's just common sense.

(36:29):
There's no way that body could have lain in those
woods for two weeks end quote. Sled agents visited her
post office with the court order for her to hand
over all pictures and documents she had about cutting those
death She refused, and later appeared before the judge who

(36:49):
issued the order, steadfastly refusing to turn over anything. The
judge had her arrested, and she spent five days in
the Sumter County Correctional Center. She was released, and the
South Carolina Supreme Court rendered a reverse and remanded decision
that required law enforcement to return to her all evidence

(37:10):
taken from Lenore's business. The concerned citizens got reignited again
in nineteen seventy seven, as Peewee Gaskins claimed from the
witness stand in the murder trial for Barnwell Yates that
he had in fact killed peg Cutting. No specifically, Peewee
claimed he killed the girl as a contract hit for

(37:33):
a law enforcement man. Here he is talking about peg Cutting. No,
jan your Paris did not killed Petty Cutting. He took
Junior Parish and uh tried him for that and everything. Uh,
he just had to be an unlucky man. She last
Google peg with drugs and taken to a seen him
block house about tim the conference. Uh that house was

(37:57):
empty as ready where living in it. I read it
for ten dollars a month throughout in the east side
of Sanker and to keep some of our party through
another stuff in. I had several cars part doubt let
a jump card as there were. Pee Wee said he
was approached by two men who said they wanted her

(38:19):
out of the way, that the girl was still alive
at the time. He claimed to have raped her, choked
her with the scarf that she was wearing, then dumped
her body where it was later found. Pee Wee also
claimed that Sheriff Parnell had questioned him about the murder
in nineteen seventy and it even administered pee Wee allowed
detector test, which he passed without a problem. In nine eighty,

(38:44):
pee Wee talked to Jim Batty about the murder. Pee
Wee confessed that he killed pet cutting No. Then he
retracted that said that he did not kill pet cutting No.
And my conversation with him, he said, I was the
last person to see her alive. And I gasped. I said, Peewee,

(39:11):
you mean you? He said, I did not bury her alive.
I'll never forget. That gives me chills. He said, I
did not bury her alive. They brung her to me
and she died. And I said, who brought her to you?

(39:31):
And he said, we don't need to go no further
into that, Mr Jim, this is for your protection. No
authorities believed Peewee's seventy seven confession. Bird Parndell said that
Peewee's confession was quote preposterous. He was a very vindictive man,

(39:55):
and he's wanting publicity end quote IRA Partnell and it.
Carput Lean also recalled the unexpected and unsubstantiated confession. I
remember that, well, he didn't have nothing to do with that.
That was Junior Piers all the way to start with.
It wasn't Pewee style. Plus we had witnesses that saw

(40:20):
Junior Piers at the body. Dumb side, you wouldn't have
to do with Peewee. He basically claims he killed pet
Cut not too try to ask paid the Junior Pierce.
Always been some debate about that. I mean, look, if
you read Peewee's book, The Final Truth, you know there

(40:41):
ain't much true in there based on my independent knowledge
of what he talks about. Margaret O'shay and Holly Gatlin
also remember Peewee's confession. He swore that he had killed
Peggy Cutting, daughter of a state legislator. Junior Pierce was

(41:03):
convicted of that. There was confusion and discrepancy between the
forensic reports and what was found, but he remembered enough
about who was where to be both truthful and devious,
if that makes sense. I can tell you one thing.

(41:28):
He did not kill Peg Cutting. No, I know that
for a fact. And he was trying to take the
rap for Junior Peers. In the years following the murder
in Carrie, Lenore had filled her home with scrapbooks, letters,

(41:50):
photos of petitions that she said all pointed to Pierce's innocence.
Others in the area continued to have doubts about the case.
One of the jurors who returned a guilty verdict in
the Pierce trial told reporters in nineteen seventy seven that, quote,
I was never convinced that he was guilty. My opinion

(42:11):
hasn't changed since I should have stayed in there and
hung the jury end. Quote with Peewee's confession and other
lingering doubts about Pierce's conviction, Though Lenore and other concerned
citizens demanded an investigation, they actually got a hearing with
the Sumter County Grand Jury, who would hear from county

(42:33):
residents who had information on grievances. Eighteen people registered to
be heard. Twelve others were subpoena, including the Georgia sheriff
who got Junior Pierce's confession, and Peewee Gaskins himself. The
grand jury deliberated for a month after the hearing and
ultimately cleared law enforcement of any wrongdoing. And decided not

(42:57):
to reopen the case. Lenore continued to display evidence of
her personal crusade in her business, but Junior Pierce's appeals
were denied and he was serving eight hundred and eighty
years for his murders when he died in prison in
the spring of two thousand and twenty. Pee Wee might
not have killed Peg Cutnoh, but he found a way

(43:19):
to be a part of the story. Another story that
he was definitely a part of involved his theft ring,
a rotating door of women and girls and this thing
called love. Pee Wee Gaskins was Not My Friend is

(43:46):
a joint production from My Heart Radio and Doghouse Pictures,
produced and hosted by Jeff Keeping. Executive producers are Courtney
Dfries and Noel Brown. Written by Jim Roberts, Courtney Dfries
and Terry James, Edit, mix and sound designed by Jeremy
at Kulani Prescott. Music composed by Diamond Street Productions, Spencer
garn and Ian Newberry. Special thanks to Jim and Anita Bade.

(44:08):
Additional thanks to the University of South Carolina, Moving Image
Research Collections and the University of South Carolina