by Ray Black
A few months before her mother died, Cheryl decided she had to do something about the ordeal her father was putting her through. She had often fantasized about having her father killed and her resentment and rage came to a head one day in November 1985 when Pierson and fellow classmate Sean Pica, were sitting in the classroom at their school. They were discussing an article in a local paper about an abused wife who enlisted someone to murder her husband. Pierson wondered aloud who would be crazy enough to undertake such a deadly commission and Pica promptly said he would volunteer – if the price was right.
Sean was sixteen years old, wore braces, and was working towards getting an Eagle Scout badge. Both his father and stepmother were members of the NYPD.
Cheryl told Sean she wanted her father dead because he had been sexually abusing her since she was eleven years old. She promised to pay him the sum of $1,000 when he had completed his assignment, and Sean agreed to do it, not for the money, he said, but to end a good friend’s suffering.
On a wintry morning on February 5, 1986, Sean Pica waited behind a tree in front of a house on Magnolia Drive in Seldon, shivering from the cold. The Boy Scout carried a .22-calibre rifle and had one thing on his mind, murder.
James Pierson emerged from his house and as he was opening his car door to go to work, Pica shot him five times in the head, at close range. James, then 42, slumped to the icy ground in his driveway. Pica walked over to the inert body and fired four more bullets into his body to ensure that he had completed his task, and then ran away. Sean ditched the gun and then went to school as normal.
Cheryl immediately rushed out of the house, acting as if she had been woken by a loud noise, and ran across the street to her neighbours. She told them she thought that her father had slipped on some ice and appeared quite badly injured. When the neighbours crossed the road and found Mr Pierson lying in a pool of blood they immediately called the police.
The next day, Cheryl, along with her boyfriend, Rob Cuccio, met up with Sean at a local pizza parlour and paid him the sum of $400. Cheryl had taken the money from her father’s safe earlier that day.not a convincing act.
The police department were not convinced by Cheryl’s ham acting, and she was taken into the police station for questioning. After several hours of intense questions she succumbed to the pressure and pleaded guilty to having arranged for the death of her father.
On Cheryl’s evidence, Sean was arrested and they were both charged as adults with second-degree murder. When the case came to trial the pleas were reduced to manslaughter in exchange for reduced sentences. Cheryl was sentenced as a youthful offender to six months in Suffolk County jail and served three-and-half months. Sean was sentenced as an adult to eight to 24 years in prison, and served 16.
It was 19 months since the murder of her father that the case actually came to trial. Due to her age and the fact that she had been sexually abused, the case drew the attention of the press nationwide. Just before the case opened a sympathetic article was run in one of the local papers portraying the teenager as an innocent angel and her father as Satan. During the hearing they called on more than a dozen witnesses who confirmed that they had seen signs of abuse. The most powerful testimony of all was from her own brother, who said his sister had confided in him that she felt her kidneys were weakening from too many beatings.
When Cheryl was called to take the stand she cried throughout most of her deposition.
‘When he was on top of me he used to breathe in my face,’ she sobbed to the jury. ‘I used to put a pillow on my face and block it out until it was all over.’
Three weeks into the trial, on October 5, 1987, Judge Sherman told Cheryl he was going to be lenient and he had received more than a hundred letters from people who had suffered from incest.
Cheryl served 106 days and was released on January 19, 1988. Her boyfriend, Rob Cuccio, who had waited for her throughout her ordeal, picked her up from the correctional centre in a white limousine. They were married in a Catholic church nine months later.
Today Cheryl Cuccio, now thirty-four, has two young daughters of her own. Cheryl and Rob celebrated their fifteenth wedding anniversary on October 9, 2003. She has worked as a beautician, a bank teller and a sales clerk in a department store.
The Pierson/Pica case came into the spotlight once again in 1989, when a TV film was made from the story, called Deadly Silence. Once more Cheryl was portrayed as an innocent victim with no choice but to murder her paedophile father. But what was never brought to attention was the fact that her father left an estate worth over $600,000, which Cheryl was well aware she would inherit when she hired her classmate, Sean Pica.
SEAN’S BACKGROUND
Sean was only five years old when his father first walked out on his mother. Although the Picas were reconciled, they eventually divorced when Sean was nine. His mother married again and, although Sean was fond of his stepfather, there was a dark side to the relationship. His stepfather beat his mother and then left the family after only three years. This affected Sean badly and he became a quiet and very angry child. In an attempt to find some sort of acceptance he turned to the streets and got involved with a bad crowd of boys. He took to burglary, breaking into homes in his local neighbourhood, and also turned to the comfort of cocaine. Eventually he added murder to his list of crimes.
There were some people who believed that Sean was actually Cheryl’s saviour, performing an act to put an end to his friend’s suffering. On the other hand there were those who believed that Pica was nothing more than a drug addict who killed for the cash to fund his addiction. Whichever way you look at it the years that Sean spent in prison were not wasted and he managed to make something of himself.
Sean Pica served sixteen years in prison and is now 34 years old. He was paroled from Sing Sing on Friday 13 in December 2002. He was eligible for parole after he had served only six years of his sentence, but it was denied five times over a period of ten years because of the severity of his crime.
While Sean was in the New York State prison he managed to obtain a high school equivalency diploma. He was then sent to a prison upstate where he earned a bachelor’s degree in organizational management and a master’s degree in professional services. He has counselled high school pupils and college children for the past ten years.
Sean’s last seven years behind bars were spent in Sing Sing, on Cellblock A, one of the toughest and largest blocks in the world, and yet he had survived and come out on top. When he was eventually released he spent a couple of months in a Catholic halfway house and then got a job as a counsellor in East Harlem for an organization called Strive. It is a non-profit organization that helps ex-convicts, troubled children, receivers of welfare and others who are not so fortunate to get and hopefully keep jobs through a change of attitude. He lives with an aunt and uncle in Pleasantville and is currently working on another master’s degree at the Hunter College School of Social Work.
Although as a youth Sean Pica was seen as a drugged-up sociopath with a $200-a-day cocaine habit, but as an adult he is a respected member of society. The New York State prison houses over 70,000 men and women, most of whom get released back onto the streets with not much claim or dignity of worth. Sean Pica is one of the exceptions who managed to use the system to his advantage.
The West Memphis Three
On May 5, 1993, the Robin Hood Hills area of West Memphis, Arkansas, was the site of the brutal sexual assault and murder of three eight-year-old boys.
It was May 6, 1993, when the mutilated bodies of three eight-year-old boys were found in West Memphis. The three boys in question, Michael Moore, Christopher Byers and Steve Branch, had left their homes on bicycles early on the evening of May 5. After a couple of hours, Christopher’s stepfather, John Mark Byers, reported to the police that his son was missing. The police along with the families of all three boys, searched for them throughout the night and into the next morning. It was around 1 p.m. the next day that the bodies were found. They had been beaten, sexually molested,
mutilated and were left for dead in a wooded ditch not far from the boys’ homes.
The crime scene left a lot of unanswered questions. For a start there was no blood, even though two of the boys had apparently bled to death. Also there were no mosquito bites on their skin, even though they had been found in a damp area and that the bleeding bodies had been left there overnight. There were no obvious footprints at the scene of the crime, even though the area was exceptionally muddy and one of the children had been drowned at a creek on the site. All three of the boys had been tied up with black and white shoelaces. They all had cuts and abrasions some of which indicated that they had been forced to have oral sex. One child, Christopher Byers, had been castrated and his penis skinned – possibly the work of a master cutter.
The atrocious nature of the crime had the police determined to apprehend the victim before he could possibly do any more harm.
THE SUSPECTS
By 12.00 p.m. the following day the police were questioning their first suspect. A juvenile probation officer who was present during the investigation had come to the decision that this had all the markings of a Satanic murder and led the police to a local youth named Damien Echols. He was an eighteen-year-old who liked to read occult books, listen to heavy metal music, and always wore black. Over the years the police had blamed him for anything that went wrong in town simply because he was a little ‘different’. Although there was no evidence to prove that he had anything to do with the murders, police leaked his name and rumours soon started spreading. The next day police brought Damien in for questioning for no other reason than the fact that he was different. He was subjected to intense questioning and then released.
Meanwhile a man who owned a restaurant near the site of the crime called the police station on May 5 to report a black man, covered in mud and blood, who had wandered into the ladies’ toilet and remained in there for about an hour. The police went to the Bojangle’s restaurant, but the officer did not bother to get out of the car and investigate. The following day, after the three boys had been discovered, a detective returned to the restaurant and took some blood samples from the said toilet. These samples were subsequently – or conveniently – lost. There was a negroid hair found on one of the boys’ corpses, and yet not one of the accused boys were black.
The next suspect to be brought in for questioning several weeks later was an associate of Echols named Jessie Misskelley. He was seventeen years old and was described as being ‘learning disabled’. After a long period of questioning he finally caved in to the pressure and admitted to the murders, also implicating another friend, sixteen-year-old Jason Baldwin, along with Damien Echols. He said that the three of them were fellow ‘Devil worshippers’ who allegedly visited cult meetings, sacrificed animals on makeshift altars and planned the brutal murder of the little boys. Jason and Damien were subsequently arrested the same day.
The media and public condemned the three teenagers even before their case went to trial. For the nine months since the attack the local press had been releasing stories of blood-drinking, devil worshipping, and sexual orgies involving demons.
On January 19, 1994, Jessie Misskelley went to trial after an attempt to have his confession quelled was denied. Jessie was tried separately from the other two as it was his confession that had implicated them. The trial lasted for two weeks and, although there was absolutely no evidence to incriminate him, Jessie was convicted of one count of first degree capital murder and two counts of second degree capital murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without any possibility of parole.
The trial of Jason Baldwin and Damien Echols began on February 4, 1994. Jason, who asserted that his only crime was that he knew Damien, was convicted of three counts of capital murder. Due to his young age, he was given a life sentence plus forty years.
Damien Echols, who at eighteen was considered an adult, was found guilty of three counts of capital murder and was sentenced to death by lethal injection. Since his internment, Damien has been repeatedly beaten and raped while prison guards just looked on and did nothing about it. Echols said, ‘I was sent here to die. I would just like to be left alone until that time comes.’ He now spends most of his time reading and writing to his friends and family.
More than five years after these three teenagers were handed their sentences, they still proclaim their innocence and are still trying to get retrials granted due to the original lack of evidence. Although it is not unusual for guilty men to proclaim their innocence vehemently, what is different about this case is that they are not alone in proclaiming their innocence. It appears thousands of American citizens are also convinced that Jessie, Jason and Damien were wrongly convicted and are now offering support in their fight for justice.
ANOTHER POSSIBLE SUSPECT
Another interesting fact in this case that seems to have been totally overlooked is that the victim Chris Byers appears to have been beaten by his stepfather, John Mark Byers, just prior to the boys’ disappearance. During the trial it came to the fore that Mr Byers was receiving treatment for a brain tumour. The alibi that Mr Byers provided for the time in question was unstable, and he contradicted his own testimony on several occasions.
There was certainly some circumstantial evidence pointing towards John Mark Byers. He owned a knife on which had been found some blood which was the same group as that of his son and himself, and a hair found at the scene of the crime was very similar to that of Mr Byer’s. Very low amounts of a drug that the stepfather used were found in the boy’s bloodstream at the time of his death. The drug, Carbamazepine, depresses the central nervous system and can cause drowsiness if administered in large doses. Chris Byers also had evidence on his body of healed past physical abuse.
The Byers were both subsequently convicted of stealing $20,000 worth of antiques from a house. Mr Byers also attacked a five-year-old child in his own neighbourhood shortly after they moved away to a small town. Melissa Byers died mysteriously last year and the autopsy showed that she had drugs in her system, but apparently not enough to kill her.
Although it does seem that there were many items of evidence that could have linked John Mark Byers to the murders, he was never considered by the police as a suspect or indeed ever thoroughly investigated. It is quite interesting to note that at the time John Byers was a drug-informant for the WMPD, so maybe it was bias in favour of Byers that blinded the police to any evidence they had.
Finally, the one imprint they did find of a tennis shoe on the bank near the bodies, did not match with any shoes owned by Damien, Jessie or Jason. This fact alone should have meant that the police started investigating in another direction.
SUMMING UP
It is obvious from this brief picture that there are serious flaws in the case. The trial itself was somewhat bizarre, especially with the focus on the occult and Satanism.
The problems started right from the moment the bodies were first discovered. Due possibly to a lack of experience or perhaps professionalism on the part of the police at the crime scene, meant that the area was not properly protected and vital evidence was either destroyed or not collected at all. A prime example of this is the fact that they failed to keep the sticks which had held the boys clothing down in the creek. Also the removal of the bodies from the creek before the medical examiner had arrived, meant even more vital information was lost. But it doesn’t end there. Even the incompetence of the medical examiner himself confused the investigators even further. He failed to take the temperature of the bodies at the scene and also ignored vital aspects of the victims’ injuries.
Vital information regarding the case, which should have only been known by the offender, was made public knowledge. This meant that any information the police received from witnesses and suspects alike, may have only been their own information coming back to them.
In their fervour to get their man the police used many dubious tactics to obtain the corroborative evidence they needed.
The information the jury had been su
bjected to before the trial, i.e. what they read in the newspapers, saw on television and heard via the police, possibly reinforced their belief that this case was part of a brutal Satanic ritual.
To allow this community to feel safe again, the only course to be taken was to come back with a guilty verdict. Possibly the three boys are to blame for the deaths of three small children, but it does not seem feasible that a jury could have found them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt with the evidence that was supplied.
It takes time, around ten years, for a judicial system to reverse a guilty sentence. But possibly with extreme public pressure and outrage at the injustice of this case, the system will look within itself and acknowledge that it has weaknesses and flaws. Jessie and Jason have many years ahead of them, but it is possible that Damien’s time will run out before this very slow process ever comes about.
Cindy Collier & Shirley Wolf
‘Today Cindy and I ran away and killed an old lady. It was lots of fun’
Cindy Collier was fifteen and Shirley Wolf was fourteen when they first met. Although they knew nothing about one another they were certainly two of a kind. Cindy, since the age of seven, had been constantly molested by her stepbrother. She had been neglected and abused by both of her parents and by the time she was twelve she had been arrested for assault and battery as a result of a fist fight at school. Further arrests followed for theft and delinquency, for which she received several short stays in a juvenile hall, longer stays in foster care, and numerous weekends of community service. During her stints of community service, Cindy was renowned for running away from the project sites and hitchhiking her way out of the state. However, she was always caught and returned to either the juvenile hall or taken back into a foster group home.