Editor's note: This story originally was published in The Dallas Morning News on Sept. 20, 1998.

LIVINGSTON, Texas – Leon "Pistol Pete" Dorsey says the two Blockbuster Video employees he killed during an April 1994 robbery in East Dallas could be alive today.

"But they didn't use their choice wisely," he said.

Mr. Dorsey was charged this week with two counts of capital murder for shooting James Armstrong, 26, and Brad Lindsey, 20, as he robbed the video store at the Casa Linda Plaza Shopping Center.

He was serving a 60-year prison term for the unrelated September 1994 shooting death of an Ennis store owner when Dallas police confronted him this summer with new evidence connecting him to the Blockbuster slayings. He said he confessed to police last month.

In a two-hour interview at the Terrell Unit, about 40 miles east of Huntsville, he said he feels no remorse for killing Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Lindsey and encouraged their families not to dwell on their deaths.

He compared it to losing $1,000 in a craps game.

"They're dead. That's over and done with," he said. "Why are you going to sit there and worry yourself about that? Move on.

"I could have came in here and been, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm so bad.' But I don't feel like that. That's not being honest with myself."

Mr. Dorsey, who turns 23 in two months, said he was drunk and high the night of April 4, 1994, when he went to the Blockbuster in search of cash. Mr. Armstrong or Mr. Lindsey probably angered him, but he doesn't remember who or how.

"One of them had to be bumping me or talking . . . [expletive]," he said. "One of them did, or I wouldn't have did it like that. I killed the second person because the first person . . . [expletive] up."

The victims' families say Mr. Dorsey's profane explanations mean little to them now.

"That is just about par for the course," said Greg Armstrong, Mr. Armstrong's brother. "If he has no remorse about it, then he deserves the death penalty."

Joan Lindsey Coleman said she has felt better this week than she has in 41/2 years, finally knowing who killed her son.

"I'll feel even better when I watch him die," she said. "They'd better not screw this up. Now that they've got him, they'd better kill him."

Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Lindsey were closing the Blockbuster about midnight when an armed man in a multicolored jacket entered and took $392 from a cash register.

Store security cameras show Mr. Armstrong and Mr. Lindsey being forced into a back room. There, they talk briefly before the gunman shoots them at close range.

"I had a tendency to dehumanize a person in a situation," Mr. Dorsey said. "If I was robbing you, and you studded up, I could . . . [expletive] you up and say that was business. If you cooperated, you could walk away from it easily."

The Blockbuster security videotape - a fuzzy series of still photographs - produced more than 300 tips for detectives in the first few months. Among the early leads was the name of Leon David Dorsey IV, a Waxahachie gang member with a penchant for robbing and shooting people.

Sgt. Jerry King, a supervisor in the Dallas police homicide unit, said detectives interviewed Mr. Dorsey that summer of 1994 but lacked the evidence and credible witnesses to pursue charges. His name was tucked away with the mounds of other leads until March 1998, when a veteran detective resurrected the investigation.

Authorities declined to discuss their evidence, but a police source said the case against Mr. Dorsey gained strength when his former girlfriend told detectives he was the killer.

Mr. Dorsey said he wishes he'd never opened his mouth around her.

"It ain't my homeboys that turned on me," he said. "It's this bitch that I used to put $100 shoes on her feet and take care of her kids. She better hope I never get out of this penitentiary."

He said he would never turn on anyone. But in 1993, court records show, he escaped with probation in a Garland car burglary case by giving up two accomplices.

The night of April 4, 1994, Mr. Dorsey was visiting friends in East Dallas but said he was alone when he robbed the Blockbuster.

He said he saw that store as a greater challenge than the mom-and-pop places he usually hit. He said greed also played a role - he compared himself, in a street sense, to Donald Trump and Bill Gates - considering he had $4,500 in his pocket from robbing a drug dealer that day.

"If the opportunity presents itself, that's called maximization," he said. "If I don't get it, somebody else is going to get you later on. Better me than someone else."

Today, he remembers little about the Blockbuster robbery or shooting two young men to death. His general rule, he says, is to kill anyone who doesn't cooperate and eliminate witnesses, if necessary.

When asked, he cannot name the two young men he killed.

"That was just another face," he said. "I don't know them. I can't sit there and ... empathize. I can't feel sympathy for something that I don't know. The world's a cruel place."

Mr. Dorsey attributes his view of life to several factors. He doesn't blame his parents' 1979 divorce but says he did miss out on a stable family life and often got himself in trouble just to get attention. Today, he has his mother's name tattooed on his neck.

"Watching the Cosby Show , that's something I never had," he said. "My mom did her best as a parent to bring me up. Everything I did was by my own choice. My mom knows what kind of person I am."

Mr. Dorsey's mother, an Air Force master sergeant, is stationed in Germany and could not be reached for comment. His father, Leon "Pete" Dorsey III, declined to comment about his son but did offer an apology to the Armstrong and Lindsey families.

"It is a senseless killing," said the elder Mr. Dorsey, a truck driver and part-time mortician for his family's chain of funeral homes near Waco. "I hope they will accept my apology."

The younger Mr. Dorsey said he thinks he was born with a violent, unconscious attitude. He recalled stabbing a pee-wee football teammate in kindergarten, trying to burn down his baby sitter's house at age 10 and almost shooting a teacher as a sixth-grader.

Waxahachie police Sgt. Joe Wiser said investigators there began gathering information on Mr. Dorsey when he was 12, before he started his own gang.

Sgt. Wiser said he's not surprised by the way Mr. Dorsey turned out.

"In my opinion, he is a typical sociopath," he said. "What he says just furthers that."

During the prison interview, Mr. Dorsey admitted to five other unsolved capital murders. With a grin, he said he's not about to rat on himself to the police.

"I'm not going to tell you a ... [expletive] thing," he said. "Do your job. If you're a detective, it's your job to catch me doing what I'm doing. Work for it."

When not living with his grandparents in Waxahachie, Mr. Dorsey lived with his mother until his actions got him kicked off military bases and sent back to Texas. He said he was evicted in Germany when he was 12 and in South Dakota when he was 17.

He said he spent at least nine years in boys' homes or juvenile halls, where he would read crime stories and teach himself forensic science.

Knowing what police look for, he said, led him to burn the distinctive jacket he wore during the Blockbuster slayings.

"There was blood on that coat," he said.

Although he never graduated from high school, Mr. Dorsey said he once had a 3.8 grade-point average in a South Dakota boys' home. He still enjoys beating other people at chess, which he compares to life.

"School was easy. I wasn't challenged," he said. "My mind is more complex than yours, therefore I'm going to win. If your mind is smarter than mine, I'm going to watch you and learn from that.

"I could have been a good doctor or lawyer because I'm not going to do anything I can't excel at. But due to the fact that I was caught up with the crime blast and that gang ... [expletive], that's what I was doing, and I was doing it good."

Sgt. Wiser agrees Mr. Dorsey is ruthless, not stupid.

"He is one of the worst persons I've ever dealt with," Sgt. Wiser said. "But he's not alone; there are others just like him in the system: A person with a lot of time on their hands likes to play games."

Mr. Dorsey is proud he got away with the Blockbuster slayings for so long.

"There's people in Waxahachie who could tell other ... [expletive] right now, but they are scared to," he said.

He does hate the Terrell Unit, where disciplinary problems had him in solitary confinement for three years until recently. He can't stand that the guards order him around or that fellow inmates can't match his intelligence.

"I'm not in control here, so I'm not happy," he said. "Therefore if I die, then maybe I'll have peace."

Mr. Dorsey says he doesn't want to be remembered as a heartless, deranged individual. Moments later, he says he doesn't know how he wants to be portrayed.

"I'm not interested in the notoriety anymore," said Mr. Dorsey, who did enjoy seeing his Blockbuster crime on America's Most Wanted. " 'Pistol Pete' came from me popping that pistol. I did that there because I wanted to be seen."

He worked only a few days in his life, including three days at a McDonald's in Waxahachie. He also spent 18 months at Timberlawn Psychiatric Hospital as a preteen; doctors there told him he had a problem with authority.

"I don't like being in a position where I have to take orders from you or no one else," he said, glancing at a prison guard a few feet away.

Mr. Dorsey said that he has matured in prison, where he reads Newsweek and studies law but that he still doesn't like himself.

"I've done cut folks; I've done stabbed folks; I've killed folks, but it don't bother me," he said. "There's something wrong with that, don't you think? There's something missing."

Staff writer Dave Michaels contributed to this report.