Witsec (29 page)

The “Pearsons” had arrived in New Mexico on November 15, 1979, and were paid a monthly allowance for nine months, until Pruett had landed a job as a dump truck driver. At that point, they were terminated from the program. No one in WITSEC had heard from them again until Michelle’s panicky call to Deputy Chavez on March 1, 1981.

The fact that a relocated WITSEC witness had gone on a multistate murder spree brought an immediate public outcry. Pruett fanned the flames when he bragged to reporters from the
Denver Post
that he had lied to get into the protection program.

“I actually killed William Zambito,” he declared. “I framed an innocent man and I got rewarded for doing it.”

Pruett now described the murder this way: “Big Al [Benton] said he’d pay me to kill Zambito when he found out they’d put the snitch in my cell. I took my shank [homemade knife] and started stabbing him in the morning while he was sleeping. He stuck his hand up to block the blows. I cut his hand real bad. Then I stabbed him in the face about three or four times. I hit him in his throat and he suddenly bolted up and was gurgling and I spit on him and said, ‘Die, you motherfucker!’ Then he fell back and stopped gurgling.”

Pruett said he had turned against Benton after the murder when he reneged on paying him, and instead hired another inmate to kill him. In a written statement, the U.S. attorney’s office in Atlanta said it did not believe Pruett’s newest version of the killing. But even if it were true, Benton still was guilty of conspiring to kill Zambito, and that made reopening the Zambito case pointless.

“People were really furious at WITSEC,” recalled Shur.

They got even angrier when Sheriff Ferrara accused WITSEC of tampering with Pruett’s fingerprint records to help hide his true identity. “When I read the sheriff’s accusation, I immediately called up the FBI and asked it to check on what had happened,” said Shur, “because I knew it wasn’t going to lie to protect a WITSEC witness and neither was I.”

Shur and the FBI had worked out a simple procedure for keeping track of WITSEC witnesses’ fingerprints. Shur’s staff gave the FBI the name of every criminal enrolled in WITSEC, and their fingerprint records were flagged. If fingerprints were sent to the
FBI for review and they matched the prints of a WITSEC witness, the FBI examiners would spot the flag and immediately notify Shur’s office and the Marshals Service. At least, that was how the system was supposed to work. “I was worried that maybe someone had made a mistake,” said Shur, “and someone had—but it wasn’t my staff or the FBI.” The FBI told Shur that Pruett’s fingerprints had arrived smudged, which caused an FBI examiner to misread them. They had been smudged, the FBI added, at Ferrara’s jail. “There was nothing devious about any of this,” said Shur. “There was no WITSEC cover-up, no conspiracy or secret scandal.” However, there was another ironic bit to the story. The FBI said Ferrara had mailed Pruett’s fingerprints to Washington by regular mail. “Even if they had not been smudged and an examiner had identified them as matching Pruett’s, there still was no way the FBI’s report would have gotten back to the sheriff within the three-day time limit; it had taken three days for the prints to reach the FBI in the first place. The crimes were horrible, but I still felt we were being made a scapegoat.”

Senator Thad Cochran, whose hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, had been the site of Pruett’s first hostage murder, held a special congressional subcommittee hearing to investigate WITSEC’s handling of Pruett. “As I had done before,” Shur said, “I met in advance with Cochran’s staff and told them everything we knew.” At the hearing, he explained that the Marshals Service did not routinely notify local law enforcement when it relocated a witness within its borders because that would have been prejudicial to witnesses who were trying to make a fresh start. WITSEC inspectors were also concerned that dishonest cops might tip off the mob. Howard Safir told Cochran
that Inspector Chavez had been following WITSEC procedures when he had refused to tell Ferrara about Pruett’s past. His decision to tell him about Michelle’s call had been correct because it did not reveal anything about her new identity.

Shur reminded Cochran that Pruett was out of WITSEC when he murdered his wife, having been terminated from it eight months earlier. Finally he hammered home what he believed was a critical point. Yes, Pruett had been paroled eleven months early, apparently because he had testified against Benton. But he would have been released from prison in eleven months even if he hadn’t been granted an early parole or relocated because he would have finished serving his sentence. Who was to say that he would not have killed Michelle and gone on a rampage then, even if the government had not helped him?

“While I deeply regret what Pruett did,” Shur said, “we are not to blame. Pruett is to blame for what he did.” Shur assured Cochran that the Pruett case was atypical. A recent study had found that fewer than 21 percent of protected witnesses had been arrested within two years after they were relocated (in later years this figure would fall to 18 percent). That meant 79 percent stayed out of trouble. “Given the criminal backgrounds of our witnesses,” he declared, “these are amazing statistics.”

Cochran’s hearing was conducted during the July 4 weekend at a local Ramada Inn in Jackson, and Cochran was the only senator who attended it. Moreover, none of Pruett’s victims was called to testify. While the hearing made front-page news in the local paper, no one in the national media paid any attention to it, and the Pruett scandal began to become yesterday’s news. It seemed as though WITSEC had ridden out the worst of the media
storm. Better yet, six weeks later Safir and the Marshals Service found themselves being feted in the press and on television for a daring arrest that seemed to overshadow the bad press the Pruett rampage had spawned.

Acting on an informant’s tip, Safir’s fugitive-hunting deputies had finally tracked escaped spy Christopher Boyce to Port Angeles, Washington, a coastal town in the Pacific Northwest across the strait from Victoria, British Columbia. He had evaded them for nineteen months, but the deputies now felt confident that they were about to capture “the Falcon.” However, Boyce did not show up at the apartment where he had reportedly been living, and it looked as if they were about to fail once again. And then fate intervened. On impulse, two deputies pulled into the Pit Stop, a neighborhood hamburger joint, to show its carhops photographs of Boyce. As they were waiting for one of the carhops to roller-skate out to their car, the agents glanced at the driver in the car parked next to theirs. Sitting behind the steering wheel was Christopher Boyce. He was reading a book and eating a hamburger. Deputy Dave Neff slipped next to Boyce’s open car window and stuck a pistol next to the fugitive’s left ear. “Drop the hamburger!” he ordered. Minutes later, Safir’s phone rang at home. It was after midnight. “The Falcon is back in his cage,” a deputy told him. “It’s over.”

•   •   •

Geraldo Rivera was not about to let Shur and Safir off the hook when it came to Marion Pruett. The ABC newsman was convinced the case proved just how out of control and dangerous WITSEC was. He decided to interview Pruett and his victims’ family members, and
in early 1983 ABC broadcast another segment on
20/20
, this time called “A Deal with the Devil.”

“Two years ago we told you how a significant number of supposedly protected federal witnesses were turning up dead,” Rivera began. “Tonight’s report deals with another sometimes fatal defect in the witness program: the apparent lack of screening of potential witnesses.”

After describing Pruett’s rampage and showing viewers photographs of his murder victims, Rivera turned his camera on the victims’ families.

“It is unbelievable that a person like Pruett would be out—them knowing the type of person he is—and turning him loose on society,” said Ed Lowe of Jackson, Mississippi. “It’s unimaginable.”

“I want Pruett in the electric chair, the sooner the better,” said another relative.

The parents of the two college students murdered at the 7-Eleven stores in Colorado spoke angrily about WITSEC.

Now it was Shur’s turn to be angry. Rivera’s producer had asked to interview him for the show, but Shur had said he would only appear on
20/20
live so Rivera could not edit his remarks. ABC declined. Rivera then asked associate attorney general Rudolph Giuliani, who had been appointed by President Reagan in 1981 to be the third in command at the Justice Department, if he would grant
20/20
an interview, since he had oversight over the Marshals Service. But he, too, refused unless he could appear live. Having failed to get either official, Rivera had taken a clip from the network’s archives that had been filmed when Shur testified before Senator Cochran’s hearing in Mississippi. He spliced Shur’s testimony into the
20/20
broadcast.

“To the families of these victims and to the local cops sometimes frustrated by the witness program,” Rivera had told
20/20
’s viewers, “Justice Department official Gerald Shur had this to say.”

Placed as it was, Shur’s comment had come across as flippant when shown after the highly charged scenes of the victims’ suffering families. What Rivera never told viewers was that Shur had not been talking about Pruett. He had been answering Cochran’s totally unrelated question about witnesses who had refused to pay their debts after they were relocated.

“In the first
20/20
broadcast, Rivera made Safir look like a liar, and in the second, he made me look callous about the people Pruett had murdered,” Shur recalled. “Millions of viewers saw the broadcast, and I couldn’t go out and tell every one of them how Geraldo had spliced together my answer. He made it look as if I didn’t care that people were harmed. Believe me, I cared. I felt terrible about what Pruett had done, and I resented what Rivera had now done to my words. To me, Rivera was the best example of the worst kind of journalist.”

Shur had another reason to be upset. The ABC newsman had tried to pressure Giuliani into granting him an interview by using an old reporter’s tactic. In a letter, Rivera had told Giuliani that Marion Pruett had accused Shur of knowing that “Big Al” Benton was being framed and that he [Pruett] was the real killer. Rivera then wrote that if Giuliani did not come on television
to refute Pruett’s charge and defend Shur,
20/20
would have no choice but to broadcast Pruett’s accusation unchallenged. Turning up the heat, Rivera had sent a copy of the letter to the U.S. attorney general.

The letter didn’t work. Giuliani did not grant him an interview, and Rivera never broadcast the accusation. Still, Shur felt used.

“Rivera was accusing me of sitting quietly by and doing nothing during a frame-up,” said Shur. “He was besmirching my reputation in an attempt to twist Rudy Giuliani’s arm and force him on camera. It was sleazy.”