James L. Sires was a 59-year-old male service station operator in Beaufort County, South Carolina, when his life was cut short in a brutal robbery on August 10, 1970. Genealogical records place his birth on November 24, 1910, and show that he would later be buried at Beaufort Memorial Gardens, a short distance from the community he served.
On that August day, Sires was working at a service station in Beaufort when a drifter named William Joseph “Junior” Pierce pulled in, looking for
more than fuel. Later accounts of Pierce’s crime spree describe how he targeted isolated businesses, especially small gas stations and stores where a lone employee was likely to be on duty and cash was kept close at hand. In Beaufort, the robbery escalated into a savage attack: during the holdup at the station, Pierce hacked Sires to death with an axe, then rifled the premises, escaping with roughly $970 from the day’s takings before disappearing back onto the highway.
In the immediate aftermath, local authorities treated the killing as a particularly shocking act of violence against a well-known working man. Newspaper coverage from the period notes that Beaufort County Sheriff L. W. Wallace led the investigation and that detectives quickly concluded the motive was robbery at the service station Sires operated. Even so, they initially lacked a clear suspect. The murder appeared, at first, to be one more senseless killing on a lonely Southern roadway, and the case rested uneasily in a region already on edge from other violent crimes then surfacing across the Carolinas and Georgia.
What investigators in Beaufort could not yet see was the broader pattern beginning to emerge. In the summer and winter of 1970 and into early 1971, similar attacks were carried out across three states: clerks, service station employees, and women traveling alone were robbed, shot, beaten, or strangled. The man responsible, William Pierce, had only recently been paroled from a Georgia prison in May 1970, despite psychiatric reports warning he might be dangerous to others. Once free, he drifted through South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina, leaving a trail of killings behind him.
Pierce’s rampage came to an end on March 8, 1971, when he was arrested in Baxley, Georgia, shortly after robbing yet another gas station. Under interrogation, he confessed to a series of murders committed between June 1970 and January 1971, including the killing in Beaufort. Reports from that time and later summaries of the case recount that, as he described his crimes, he admitted that during a robbery at a service station in Beaufort he had attacked the employee, James L. Sires, with an axe and left him dead before fleeing with cash from the till.
Once Pierce’s confession tied him to the Beaufort killing, South Carolina authorities moved to formalize the case. The Beaufort County sheriff publicly announced that a warrant was being drawn up charging the 39-year-old Georgian with murdering Sires during the August 10 robbery, and other press accounts and crime references note that a grand jury later indicted Pierce for that murder as part of the broader list of charges he faced. Legal histories of Pierce’s crimes describe how, after his arrest, he was tried in multiple jurisdictions and ultimately received several life sentences for murders in Georgia and South Carolina, with South Carolina prosecutions encompassing the killings tied to his confession, including the Beaufort service station case.
In later years, Pierce attempted to rewrite the story. He renounced his confession in 1974 and pursued appeals, claiming his statements had been coerced, but courts in both Georgia and South Carolina repeatedly upheld his convictions. He would die behind bars in May 2020, an aging prisoner whose name remained linked in court records and crime histories to a string of murders that began with roadside robberies and ended with life sentences. For James L. Sires, the quiet service station man in Beaufort, that meant his killing was eventually folded into the narrative of a multistate serial killer: a single, brutal robbery-murder on an August day that became one of the earliest known stops on William “Junior” Pierce’s violent path.
