Donald Henry "Pee Wee" Gaskins,
Jr. (March 31, 1933 - September 6, 1991) was an American
serial killer.
Early life
Donald
Henry Pee-Wee Gaskins was born on March 31, 1933, in Florence
County, South
Carolina
.
Gaskins spent much of his youth in reform school. In adulthood,
Gaskins' small, slight build (5' 4" tall, hence his nickname) would
make him a target for physical and
sexual
abuse in prison.
As a youth, Gaskins was both a poor scholar and a criminal,
committing a number of petty thefts. During one burglary, he hit a
woman on the head with a hatchet and left her for dead, though she
survived. For this crime, Gaskins served his first custodial
sentence at a
reform school. Gaskins
married for the first time in
1951, at
eighteen, and fathered a daughter the following year. Upon his
release from reform school, Gaskins took to committing insurance
fraud, and was arrested for attacking a teenage girl with a hammer
whom he claimed had been insulting him and was charged with
attempted murder. Gaskins was sentenced to six years' imprisonment
at the South Carolina State Penitentiary. During this
incarceration, Gaskins' wife divorced him.
First Murder
Gaskins committed his first murder whilst serving this first prison
sentence in 1953, when he slashed the throat of a fellow inmate
named Hazel Brazell. Gaskins claimed he committed this murder to
earn himself a fearsome reputation amongst his fellow inmates. He
was judged to have acted in self-defense, and sentenced to a
further three years' imprisonment.
Gaskins escaped from prison in 1955 by hiding in the back of a garbage truck and fled
to Florida
, where he
took employment with a traveling carnival. He was
rearrested, remanded to custody, and paroled in
August,
1961.
Second Arrest and subsequent murders
Following his release from prison, Gaskins remarried but soon
reverted to committing burglaries and
fencing stolen property.
Two years after his
parole, Gaskins was arrested for the rape of a twelve-year-old
girl; he absconded whilst awaiting sentence, but was rearrested in
Georgia
, and sentenced to eight years' imprisonment.
Gaskins was paroled in November, 1968.Upon his release, Gaskins
moved to the town of Sumter and began work with a construction
company. In
September 1969, Gaskins began killing a series of hitchhikers he
picked up whilst driving around the coastal highways of the
American South, he classified these
victims as
Coastal Kills: people whom he killed purely for
pleasure, both male and female, whom Gaskins killed on average
approximately once every six weeks, when he went hunting to quell
his feelings of "bothersome-ness". He would torture his victims and
mutilate them, but attempt to keep them alive for as long as
possible; he confessed to killing these victims using a variety of
methods including stabbing, suffocation and mutilation, and even
claimed to have cannibalized some of them.. He later confessed to
killing '
eighty to ninety ' such victims, although this
figure has never been corroborated.
In
November,
1970,
Gaskins committed the first of his
Serious Murders: people
whom he knew and killed for personal reasons.
Gaskins' first
Serious Murder victims were his own niece, Janice Kirby,
aged 15, and her friend Patricia Ann Alsbrook, aged 17, whom he
beat to death after attempting to sexually assault them in Sumter
, South
CarolinaEncyclopaedia
of serial killers ISBN
0-7472-3731</<>ref>. Other Serious Murder
victims were killed for a variety of reasons: because they had
mocked Gaskins, attempted to blackmail him, owed him money, because
they had stolen from him, or because Gaskins had been paid to kill
his victim. Unlike his Coastal Kills, Gaskins simply
executed these victims, usually by shooting them, before burying
them around the coastal areas of South Carolina.
Final Arrest
Gaskins was arrested on
November 14,
1975, when a criminal associate, named Walter
Neeley, confessed to police that he had witnessed Gaskins having
killed two young men named Dennis Bellamy, aged 28, and Johnny
Knight, aged 15. Neeley confessed to police that Gaskins had
confided in him to having killed several people who had been listed
as missing persons over the previous five years, and had indicated
to him where they were buried. On
December
4,
1975, Gaskins led police to land he
owned in Prospect, where police discovered the bodies of eight of
his victims.
Imprisonment
Gaskins
was tried on eight charges of murder on May 24, 1976, found guilty
on May 28 and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life in
prison, when the South Carolina General Assembly's 1974 death
sentence ruling was changed to conform to the United States
Supreme Court
guidelines for the death
penalty in other states.
On
September 12,
1982, Gaskins committed another murder, for which he
earned the title of the "Meanest Man in America". Whilst
incarcerated in the high security block at the South Carolina
Correctional Institution, Gaskins killed a
death row inmate named Rudolph Tyner, who earned
his sentence for killing an elderly couple named Bill and Myrtle
Moon during a bungled armed robbery on the store they owned in the
Burgess community.
Gaskins was hired to commit this murder by Tony Cimo, son of Myrtle
Moon. Gaskins initially made several unsuccessful attempts to kill
Tyner by lacing his food and drink with poison before he opted to
use explosives to kill him. To accomplish this, Gaskins rigged a
device similar to a portable radio in Tyner's death row cell and
told Tyner this would allow them to communicate between cells. When
Tyner followed Gaskins' instructions to hold a speaker (laden with
C-4 plastic explosive, unbeknownst to him) to his ear at an agreed
time, Gaskins detonated the explosives in his cell and killed him.
Gaskins later said, "The last thing he [Tyner] heard was me
laughing."
Gaskins was tried for the murder of Rudolph Tyner and sentenced to
death.
Final Truth
Whilst on death row, Gaskins told his life story to a journalist
named Wilton Earle, confessing to having committed between 100 and
110 murders, one of them being that of Margaret "Peg"
Cuttino
3 (1957-70), the 13 year old daughter of then SC
state senator James Cuttino, Jr. of Sumter, SC, near Florence, SC,
(about 130 miles from the "Fort Sumter" of Civil War fame).
However, law enforcement sources found it impossible to verify all
of his claims. In his
autobiography,
Final Truth (published posthumously), Gaskins wrote that
he had "a special mind" that gave him "permission to kill."
Execution
Gaskins was executed on
September 6,
1991 at 1:10 a.m. He was the fourth person to
die in the
electric chair after the
death penalty was reinstated in South Carolina in 1977. Reportedly,
his final words were "I'll let my lawyers talk for me. I'm ready to
go".
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