True Crime Chronicles: "Mad Dog" killer on a 1981 crime spree brought death to a beloved Fort Smith mom and sister

Bobbie Jean Roam Robertson

Bobbie Jean Roam Robertson was a 30-year-old woman from Fort Smith remembered by her family and friends as a hardworking, kind-hearted person whose life ended far too soon during a late-night shift at a local convenience store.

Born in 1951, Bobbie Jean lived in the Fort Smith area and worked as a clerk at the Convenience Corner (sometimes called Stop-N-Go), a small store on Rogers Avenue. In the early 1980s, she frequently took the solitary midnight shift--a job that required quiet courage in an era when late-night retail work carried hidden risks.

On the night of October 12, 1981, around midnight, Bobbie Jean was alone behind the counter when Marion Albert Pruett, a 32-year-old career criminal operating under the alias Charles "Sonny" Pearson, entered the store armed with a .38 caliber revolver.

Pruett had been placed in the federal witness protection program in 1979 after providing testimony in a prison murder case in Georgia. He was released early from a 23-year federal sentence for bank robbery, only to later admit that he himself had committed the very murder he had testified about--exposing serious flaws in the program that allowed him to move freely while committing new crimes.

Fueled by a crippling $4,000-a-week cocaine addiction, Pruett had already embarked on a violent multi-state crime spree earlier that year.

In March 1981, he murdered his common-law wifeamela Sue Barker (also known as Michelle Lynn Pearson), beating her to death with a hammer and setting her body on fire in New Mexico.

That September, during a bank robbery in Jackson, Mississippi, he kidnapped loan officer Peggy Lowe and later shot her. Just four days after killing Bobbie Jean, on October 16, 1981, he robbed a convenience store in Larimer County, Colorado, and shot to death two young clerks, 21-year-old Anthony Taitt and 24-year-old James Balderson.

In Fort Smith, Pruett robbed the register of approximately $163–$165 in cash, then forced Bobbie Jean at gunpoint to leave with him, taking her purse as well. He drove her to a secluded wooded area near Horseshoe Bend, along a dirt road east of Southside High School.

When she tried to escape, he shot her twice--once in the left thigh and once in the right shoulder. As she lay on the ground, he fired a final, fatal shot to her left temple. Her body was abandoned in thick weeds and brush just feet from the road.Her remains were discovered two days later after an intensive search.

The crime sent shockwaves through the Fort Smith community, a quieter city at the time that was not accustomed to such brutality, and it underscored the vulnerability of late-night retail workers

.Bobbie Jean was laid to rest at Rose Lawn Park Cemetery in Fort Smith, where her memory is still honored. --Pruett fled after the Fort Smith murder but was captured in Florida in 1982.

He received life sentences for the killings in New Mexico, Mississippi, and Colorado. In Arkansas, due to extensive pretrial publicity, the trial was moved to Crawford County Circuit Court.

On September 9, 1982, a jury convicted him of capital murder in Bobbie Jean’s death and sentenced him to death (initially by electrocution, later changed to lethal injection).

In 1997, a federal judge vacated the Arkansas conviction citing the pretrial publicity, but the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated it in 1998, ruling that Pruett himself had contributed to much of the media attention through his own boastful statements and confessions, in which he referred to himself as a “mad-dog killer.”

Marion Albert Pruett was executed by lethal injection at the Cummins Unit in Arkansas on April 12, 1999, at the age of 49 (pronounced dead at 8:09 p.m.).

He was the 19th person executed in Arkansas since the death penalty was reinstated. His last meal was extravagant: stuffed crust pizza, four Burger King Whoppers, large fries, three 2-liter Pepsis, ice, ketchup, salt, fried eggplant, squash, okra, and pecan pie.

He had offered to share it with another inmate scheduled for execution that day.

In his final statement, Pruett asked for forgiveness from the victims’ families and from God

.Bobbie Jean’s story is a somber reminder of the everyday dangers faced by working people, the devastating impact one life can have on a community, and the tragic failures of the witness protection program that allowed Pruett to continue his spree across state lines.

Though the man responsible was eventually captured, tried, and executed, nothing could restore the future stolen from Bobbie Jean on that terrible night.

She is remembered not for how she died, but for who she was: a dedicated woman whose presence was deeply cherished by her family and friends.

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