![]() After retiring from the FBI, Jim Huggins was appointed by the Kentucky Attorney General as Director of Investigations for the Public Corruption Unit, where he worked for seven years. He served as the supervisor of the Lexington Resident Agency from 1986 until his retirement. However, while assigned to the Louisville Division, he also conducted or supervised many of Kentucky’s biggest corruption investigations. This case was probably Huggins most infamous. ![]() In this episode, Jim Huggins is interviewed about his investigation of FBI agent Mark Putnam, a new agent assigned to a two-man resident agency in Pikeville, Kentucky, high in Appalachian coal country.īased primarily on Huggins’ ability to elicit a confession, Putnam pled guilty and was convicted of strangling is his pregnant informant, Susan Daniels Smith, in a fit of rage. During his Bureau career, Huggins was assigned to the Minneapolis, Denver and Louisville Divisions, in addition to special assignments on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation during the Wounded Knee takeovers in 1973 and again in 1975 and during the RESMURS investigation of the murder of two FBI agents Jack Coler and Ron Williams. ″In the 28 years that I have been a prosecutor, this is the first experience that I have had where a lawyer called me on a telephone and said I have a man who wants to confess to murder, or homicide, and wants to go to the penitentiary, and we had absolutely no evidence,″ Runyon added.Retired agent Jim Huggins served in the FBI for 28 years. Not one scintilla or shred of evidence to bring a charge or convict this man.″ Prosecutor John Paul Runyon, the Pike County commonwealth’s attorney, said that without Putnam’s June 4 confession, ″we had absolutely no evidence. He said he placed the body in the trunk of his rented car and dumped it the following evening off an old coal mine road about nine miles north of Pikeville. I started choking her and telling her to shut up.″ Putnam said he tried in vain to revive her. The agent recalled that ″in an act of extreme rage. Smith refused, and began slapping Putnam. Putnam said he and his wife would adopt the child but Ms. The couple was driving on a rural eastern Kentucky highway at the time and pulled off the road at Peter Creek Mountain. She said she would tell the FBI, my family and the newspapers,″ Putnam’s statement said. ![]() Smith ″kept telling me the baby was mine and that she was going to ‘hang me’ over this. Putnam had returned to Pikeville for several days to work a car theft case he had investigated. In the statement, he recalled a bitter, violent argument with Ms. Putnam’s confession was attached to an indictment returned Tuesday by the Pike County grand jury. Smith as an informant in a bank robbery and car theft case. Putnam, who resigned Friday, worked in Pikeville for about two years until his transfer to Miami in May 1989. Putnam appeared tense during his 20-minute appearance in Pike County Circuit Court. 38-caliber handgun in the courtroom by Kentucky State Police, and was released. The victim’s sister, Shelby Ward of Freeburn, was cited for trying to conceal a. ![]() They had wanted him to stand trial for murder. The victim’s family expressed outrage they were not consulted in the drafting of Putnam’s plea bargain. is what’s going to govern the way that people think about the FBI,″ O’Connor said. ″As far as the FBI is concerned, this is a difficult day. It was apparently the first case in FBI history in which an agent had been charged with a homicide, said Terry O’Connor, the FBI’s top agent in Kentucky. Immediately after the hearing, Putnam was handcuffed and taken into custody by Kentucky State Police officers. Putnam, 30, of Sunrise, Fla., entered a guilty plea to one count of felony manslaughter in Ms. In a signed confession, Mark Putnam said he choked Susan Daniels Smith, 27, on June 8, 1989, ″in an act of extreme rage″ while the couple arued over support of her expected child. (AP) _ A former FBI agent who solved a year-old homicide by confessing to the crime pleaded guilty Tuesday to strangling a pregnant informant with whom he’d been having an affair.
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