Opal Margaret “Peggy” Holder Lowe was a 42-year-old woman working as a savings-and-loan officer at the Unifirst Federal Savings and Loan branch in the Metrocenter shopping area of Jackson, Mississippi, when the ordinary rhythm of a workday morning on September 17, 1981, collided with the path of a traveling killer. She and three co-workers opened the small branch office as usual, handling customers and calls in the busy mall complex, unaware that a man who had chosen their workplace
precisely because it had no male employees was already watching and planning an armed robbery.
That morning, Marion Albert Pruett walked into the branch with a gun and announced a holdup. He had stayed the night before at a nearby motel and decided on this particular savings-and-loan office because he believed female staff were less likely to resist. As the robbery unfolded, Peggy received a phone call from her son and arranged to meet him for lunch, a simple family plan that, in Pruett’s mind, made her the most useful hostage. He forced staff to hand over the institution’s money, then marched Peggy at gunpoint out to her car. After driving a short distance within the shopping center, he shifted her into his own vehicle and pulled away from Jackson, steering east toward Interstate 20 and the state line, while colleagues and family were left in stunned confusion behind him.
What followed was a terror-filled drive of roughly a hundred miles. Pruett ordered Peggy to kneel on the front passenger floorboard with her head and shoulders pressed down on the seat so she could not be seen. When other vehicles approached or passed, he threw his coat over her to conceal any movement. At one point along the interstate, she asked if she could say a prayer, and he allowed it, the car continuing eastward while she quietly prayed for herself and the family she had just spoken to on the phone. After crossing into Alabama, he left the highway and turned onto a gravel road, then a small country track that led into remote woods in Sumter County, far from the mall branch where the abduction had begun.
Deep in those woods, Pruett forced Peggy to remove most of her clothing, leaving her in undergarments so that flight would be unlikely and his control absolute. He returned to the car long enough to inject cocaine, then came back to where she was. According to his own later testimony, he ordered her to kneel, put her face down, and repeat her husband’s telephone number so he could call. As she complied, bent forward on the forest floor, Pruett raised his. 38 and shot her once in the back of the head at close range. He left her body where it fell beneath the trees, drove away, and continued his roaming series of crimes in other states, while those who loved her were left with only the knowledge that she had been taken as a hostage and had not come home. It was not until October 27, 1981, that searchers, guided by information he later provided, found her remains in Sumter County and confirmed what everyone had already feared. An autopsy documented the gunshot wound to the back of her head as the cause of death.
Pruett did not remain at large for long. On October 17, 1981, about a month after the abduction, he was arrested in Texas—described in court records as being apprehended in Stratford and in contemporaneous news accounts as being charged in Amarillo—after a separate bank robbery. Federal agents soon linked him to the Unifirst robbery and the missing savings-and-loan officer from Jackson. He had already been living under the alias Charles “Sonny” Pearson, having been placed in the federal Witness Protection Program in 1979 after testifying about a prison killing in Atlanta. What had been intended as a new start instead gave him a fresh identity from which he launched a cross-country string of robberies, kidnappings, and murders, with Peggy’s killing among the most notorious.
Once in custody, Pruett eventually agreed to lead law enforcement from Jackson out to the remote Alabama site where he had left Peggy. In the middle of the night, he guided officers along back roads and rural tracks and walked them straight to the place in the woods where her body lay, despite having been there only once before. Later, in court, he claimed he had done this so that her family could give her a Christian burial. He also alleged that investigators had promised him cocaine if he revealed the location of the body, but police denied this, and both the trial court and appellate courts concluded that his confession and cooperation were voluntary. The stark fact remained that only he could have led them directly to the scene, and the route he traced for them closely matched his own prior testimony about how the kidnapping and killing had unfolded.
On November 2, 1981, a Hinds County grand jury indicted Pruett for the capital murder of Opal H. “Peggy” Lowe, charging that he had kidnapped her in Jackson and killed her in the course of that kidnapping and robbery. The case was moved from Jackson to Lowndes County for trial. There, in a bifurcated proceeding, he took the stand and described, in chilling detail, how he had selected the branch because there were no male employees, taken a hostage, driven across state lines, and fired the fatal shot. The jury convicted him of capital murder under Mississippi’s felony-murder statute, finding that the kidnapping that began in the Metrocenter office continued unbroken until the moment he pulled the trigger in Alabama. In the penalty phase, jurors heard about his other crimes, his threats, and his own declaration that he was a “mad-dog killer,” and they returned a sentence of death.
The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed his conviction and death sentence in 1983, calling the killing particularly brutal. Some years later, however, a federal court granted habeas corpus relief on the limited ground that a biased juror had sat in the penalty phase, requiring Mississippi to revisit the sentencing issues. Even so, his guilt in Peggy’s abduction and murder was never seriously in doubt; appellate opinions describe his detailed confession, his own trial testimony, and the physical evidence tying him to the Unifirst robbery and to the remote Alabama crime scene.
By then, Pruett’s violent record spanned several states. He was convicted in New Mexico for murdering his common-law wife, Pamela Sue Barker, and in Colorado for the murders of convenience store clerks Anthony Taitt and James Balderson. In Arkansas, he received another death sentence for killing clerk Bobbie Jean Robertson during yet another robbery. Ultimately, it was Arkansas that carried out his execution by lethal injection in 1999, while the Mississippi case that began in a small Metrocenter savings-and-loan office remained one of the defining crimes in his catalogue of violence. For Peggy’s family, friends, and former co-workers, the legal twists and multiple jurisdictions never changed the central truth: on an ordinary Thursday morning, a career criminal walked into her workplace, chose her as a hostage because she was planning to meet her son for lunch, and turned an everyday act of going to work into the beginning of a one-way journey into the woods from which she would never return.
