Fifteen years later, the pain of burying a murdered son still sharp, Frank Balderson winced as he listened to another story of murder at the hands of a convict released from prison by the federal witness protection program.
"I knew it would happen again, I knew it," said the gentlemanly lawyer at home in Alliance, Neb.Balderson agonizingly reached back to 1981 when police called to tell him his son, James, 24, Eagle Scout, college student, the joy of his life, was shot to death while he worked in a 7-Eleven in Fort Collins, Colo.
The killer netted $33, some beer and a few candy bars.
While no one from the federal government told him anything, Balderson eventually learned through newspaper accounts that the killer, Marion Pruett, was a participant in the federal Witness Security Program.
Pruett, a twice-convicted bank robber, had lied his way out of a prison sentence by implicating another man in a jailhouse murder he later admitted.
Pruett killed at least five others after his release from prison during a drug-fueled, cross-country rampage.
Frank Balderson had not heard of James Red Dog's 1991 crimes, but he quivered at the story of another government witness who killed again. It was eerily similar to the one that changed his life forever.
"What the program has gained has too often not been worth the price we have to pay," Balderson said.
Pruett and Red Dog are just two illustrations of a program that inadvertently unleashes crime even while it is trying to contain it. The pattern of trading prison time for information sometimes leaves in its wake innocent, unsuspecting victims.
Although officials of the witness protection program won't release a count, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette found 20 killings by protected witnesses by tracking court cases, interviewing protected witnesses and surveying law enforcement officers and old government reports.
The horribly violent pasts of some of these protected witnesses raises questions about whom the government is willing to do business with and if it should ever grant freedom to heinous murderers, even if they have useful information to trade.
"The government gives these people opportunity to kill," Balderson said.
A 1983 audit of the witness program by the Controller General of the United States - one of only three audits done on the performance of the program - concludes that the rate of criminal behavior by protected witnesses who are released is about the same as ordinary parolees, if not less.
But, critics say, some protected witnesses would never have been ordinary parolees.
After months of murder and mayhem, Pruett and Red Dog were finally caught again and justice was unflinching the second time around. Red Dog was executed. Pruett is on death row.
Their capture was delayed by the same program that had released them. The program has often protected witnesses even from local law enforcement. It continued to cloak them in secrecy after they became suspects in crime.
In 1978, Gennaro Ferrara was sheriff of the New Mexico county that includes Rio Rancho, the town where the federal government relocated Pruett and his common-law wife, Michelle, as the Charles "Sonny" Pearsons.
The Pearsons were given a monthly government stipend of $800 and enough start-up money for him to purchase a dump truck and for her to open a small cafe.
From the start, Pruett, a heavy drug abuser in the past, was involved in drugs and other petty crimes that raised suspicions of police, but didn't result in charges.
The police thought this cocky man with a North Carolina drawl was just another two-bit criminal. But Ferrara, a former New York City cop who was watching from a distance, was wary.
Two years after settling in Rio Rancho, Pearson reported his wife missing. Ferrara suspected him of having something to do with the disappearance. His story just didn't jibe.
The sheriff jailed Pearson for three days as a material witness. But he had no body and no witnesses and he was scrambling for evidence. Ferrara contacted the FBI, requesting any available criminal records through the National Crime Information Center in Washington. Nothing.
Ferrara couldn't believe this man had no record. Pearson talked in prison jargon and was heavily tattooed with common prison images. And he bragged that he had some connection to the government.
Ferrara had to cut Pearson loose when a judge ruled there wasn't enough evidence to file charges or hold him as a witness.
Later, pieces of the missing woman's body were found. Ferrara continued to badger federal officials for information. Finally, the U.S. Marshals Service, which arranges new lives for protected witnesses, revealed who "Pearson" really was.
Ferrara also found Pruett's accomplice in the murder, who described how Pruett beat his wife with a hammer, cut up her body, and burned the pieces.
By this time, Pruett had disappeared. Over the next six months, he robbed banks in six states and murdered at least five more people. Three were convenience store clerks who apparently didn't even challenge Pruett before they were killed.
First was Bobbie Jean Robertson, 30, of Fort Smith, Ark. Then came Balderson, alone on the overnight shift when Pruett stormed into the store, robbed him and shot him in the head.
Less than an hour later, Pruett murdered Anthony Taitt, 21, a Colorado State University sophomore clerking at another convenience store in Loveland, Colo., just down the road.
Pruett got life sentences in Colorado and Mississippi, and the death penalty in Arkansas. He continues to fight execution with appeals.
In response to a recent letter, Pruett, who said he has become a born-again Christian, refused an interview, saying he is under an exclusive book contract with an author. He did write, "There is nothing I could say or do to right the wrongs I've done."
That provides little solace to Balderson.
"To find out later that he lied his way out of jail ... then when the sheriff in New Mexico was investigating his wife's death, they should have made every effort to cooperate with him and put Pruett behind bars at that time," Balderson said.
"If either one of those policies would have been fulfilled, Pruett would never have been out. Our son would still be alive. There were two missed chances, but because of the bureaucracy in Washington, he got a chance to go on his killing spree."
Ferrara agrees. He believes that if he had been able to learn Pruett's background when he first had him in custody, he could have found a way to hold him, preventing five deaths.
Justice Department officials of the witness protection program would not comment on the case, but during a congressional hearing that followed the murders, they called it an "aberration" and promised to take steps to see it wouldn't happen again.
But over the next decade, it happened again and again and again.
The young prosecutor who finally ended James Red Dog's reign of terror in 1993 remains dumbfounded that officials of the witness protection program would have ever made a deal with him. Red Dog's entire adult life was filled with violence and treachery and, until the end, amazing good luck.
He was convicted in 1973 after he shot to death a pizza store manager during a robbery. He got 15 years because the judge decided the prosecution had mistakenly charged him with involuntary manslaughter instead of first-degree murder. A jury convicted him only of armed robbery.
Seven years later, he and another inmate escaped from prison. Two men allowed Red Dog and his partner to stay at their apartment. The visitors thanked their hosts by stabbing them to death.
For those crimes, a California judge gave Red Dog two concurrent nine-year sentences and returned him to a federal prison where he also had nine more years to do on his original sentence. That meant Red Dog murdered two more people without additional penalties.
Red Dog caused so much trouble, he was bounced from penitentiary to penitentiary, until he landed at Marion, Ill., then the toughest prison in America.
When another inmate stole some things, Red Dog asked his wife to smuggle poison into the prison so he could give it to the thief, who would think it was cocaine. The thief bit, and died.
It may have been Red Dog's luckiest move. When he volunteered to testify against the two inmates who helped in the murder, he was invited into the federal witness protection program. It meant that in exchange for testifying against the other inmates, Red Dog was not charged and would be released from prison within a year, the earliest possible parole date for his original sentence.
His wife wasn't charged. She was put in the witness protection program and relocated to Wilmington, Del.
Upon his release from prison, Red Dog flunked psychological tests and was denied further witness protection. Federal officials decided he was too unstable. They were perceptive. Shortly after, he pointed a gun at a cop in Montana and went back to prison for a year.
Back in Delaware after his re-release, Red Dog went to the home of his wife's best friend, encountered her son, Hugh Pennington, and for reasons never known, hog-tied him, carried him to the basement and slit his throat with a hunting knife. Pennington was nearly decapitated in the violent assault.
Red Dog returned to his apartment where the victim's mother was visiting his wife. He said the son was hurt and he'd take her to him. In fact, he abducted the woman and repeatedly raped her over the next two days.
Prosecutor Steven Wood was outraged by the case, especially because it was several weeks after Red Dog's capture before officials of the witness protection program acknowledged their relationship with him. And this was only after Wood had already learned by accident - officials of the federal Bureau of Prisons mistakenly sent him documents showing Red Dog was under protected status.
Wood said federal officials seemed to want Red Dog turned back over to them for prosecution. Wood and the state of Delaware declined.
"I wanted to make sure justice, which Red Dog had evaded for so long, was served in this matter. Red Dog was going nowhere but the death chamber."
A federal law has since been passed ordering the government to alert local law enforcement about the placement of protected witnesses in their jurisdiction.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)