Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
five foor four donld pweewee gaskins woule earn himself the title meenst man in americaif you had a bisnuiss dispute you’d soon him .
he would kill him.
a serial kille
who if he’s to tebelives was responsable for a hundred cruel and sickness muerders.
right over here is where he drowend doreen and then he hit the baby in the back of the head and hatchet after he had raped her
the total ammount is a hundrad and five people.
a man who wouldn’t stopp killing
even on death row
it was just of astonishing that all that what able to happened in penitentiary
so what made peewee the man he was and was he born to kill
He called himself vampire, he would have to see blood.
south carolina ,1975
school teacher mary ann dunham reoprts the disappeareance of one of her students ,10 year old kim Ghelkins .
often at the beginning of the school year, teachers want to assess their class writing skills and somethimes you’ll assign them to write about what they did on their summer vacation or whatever and that particular year the children write about he person they admired most .and kim wrote about someone who was donna gaskins.
donna gasking was the common -law wife of a colorful local criminal ,donald peewee gaskins.pewee has always been known as notorious person in the area.
he would came over as different because how many people do you know that drive a hearse for their vehicle.
It was a long black hearse , like they used to drive a long time ago .and on the very back ,he had a little sign that says” i hauled dead bodies.”
everybody joked about it ,everybody thought it was funny.
he always told people that he hauled bodies in it ,but people didn’t pay much attention to them but while they didn’t pay attention to him they were still scared of him in the lower end of the county, every body .
if you talked about peewee they sort of would run and hide ,because he had that kind of reputation.
janice
kim was not the only missing person, five years earlier in 1970, sherliey’s cousin janice kirby had vanished.
Now ,detectives investigating the new disappearance, began to focus on shirley’s father . donald peewee gaskins.
some field agents were working on rumors that had been surfacing,working along with detectives from charleston in an attempt to find kim Gelkins
they started looking for the gelkings girl and of course they didn’t not have peewee at the time,but they did an individual who was runing with peewee at the time.
they pick walter neely up and after a lot of talking,walter finally took the investigators out and showed them where he had helped peewee buty someone.
prosepct
florence county ,south carolina
Detectives knew somebody was buried there ,they didn’t have any idea what they were going to find until they started digging.
” we took probably i guess 10 or 12, 15 deputies and sled agents and we just lined up and started walking slowly into the woods”
-Ira Parnell JR.
sometime during that process in moving through the bushes the undergrowth somebody discovered there were bushes that had been put there ,that weren’t growing there .
They had metal probes that were maybe three feet long with a T-handle on top of rebar with a point on it that you could determine soil consistency.your prolonged prolonging,it’s goes down
” they probed around enough to where they could tell that there was someone buried there , so we sealed the area off and started digging .
-william c barnes
and it turned up that they found six bodies buried there.
It was a gruesome scene.
But the discovery of the six bodies was just the beginning of a shocking tale that would lead to claims that gaskins was the most profilic serial killer in US .history
In 1975, the disappearance of thirteen -year old school girl kim Ghelkins had led detectives to a burial site in the woods od south carolina.
there , investigators including sheriff william barnes would make the shocking discovery.
this is the area where the sic bodies were recovered.
” i have not been back here since everything happened back in 1976 .the graves would have all been within probably 25 foot of each other. they would have all been right in this area here where we’re standing now .under this tree.”
-william barnes
All six had been murdered and buried to a piece in three shallow graves and all six were linked to notorious character donald peewee gaskins.
a diminutive local car thief,who drowve an old hearse and boasted of having his own private cemetery, no one had believed him.
all of the sudden , police found themself in a national limelight
cecil chandler was one of the first reporters on the scene and he got a lot of it firsthand
investigators now had to uncover the identity of the victims. the one they initially found. were in very good condition, apparently they’ve been putting the ground in a cold time of the year
so adipoceae had occured where the fatty tissue sort of turns to ,like a soap-like material that’s firmer and keeps the shape and consistency of the skin and the underlying tissue
“i’ve never been a smoker , but the smell of decaying flesh was so intense in that area that the smoke from the cigars diminished that smell enough to where you could stand it “
-Ira Parnell JR
In the first grave were 25 year old dennis bellamy
and his 15 years half brother johnny knight.
both had been involved in an auto theft ring with gaskins
detectives took them down into the woods went to a big oak tree and sort of pointed up in the tree and was telling hem how they could use that to throw a chain horse over to pull enginges out of the car and and dispose of stolen property.
this would be the tree, where he brough the two fellows out and pointed up to the limv to talk about how they could hoist the motors out of the stolen vehicles here.
as they were looking up in the tree ,he shot one of them in the back of the head and then when the other one ran, he shot him .
this is where he shot him right here.
the other four victims two men
and two women.
but none of the six bodies found was that of missing schoolgirld kim gehlkins
Gaskins was arrested trying to flee the area faced with the prospect of the death penalty for his crimes ,
he struck a deal to lead the investigators to furher bodies.
at an area known as alligator landing. he admitted to burying
23-year old family friend doreen dempsey dempsey
and her two -year -old daughter.robin.
Doreen and robin were both skeletonized because they were very close to the surface,they were not really buried deeply that child had some injuries ti the head that detectives felt were probably pre-mortem.
this hole here that´s an example, something like that he just stuffed the body down in that hole, a small child.
the reason he killed them s because the mother had been with a black man and the baby was half black and half white.
he just didn’t believe in that and that was the reason for doing
eventually gaskins would reveal the truth about the disappearance of the school girl kim gehlkins
“kim was buryied almost in our backyard”
-shirley gaskins
right out in here it’s where they found kim, she walked out shirley’s front door and shirley never saw her again. he took her off from the house and killed her.
eight years after he had killed her ,gaskins gave up the body of his niece fifteen year old jannice kirby.
this is the gravesite where gaskins niece janis was buried, he killed her 1970 and her body was recovered in 1978.
Investigators would ultimately discover the remains of 13 victims, a body count that made peewee gaskins the biggest mass murder in the history of south carolina
But in prison ,gaskins would make an even more shocking claim Gaskin is going to claim that he mudered some 80 to 90 uoung people.torturing them then prolonging their death , torturing them again and then hiding their bodies.
he allegedly started in 1969 killing young women ,primarily later young boys and young women along the coast.
he used to travel up and down the road and pick up hitchhikers and he would torture them.
he always talked about dumping their nude bodies into marsh areas and sinking them deep enough so they’d be unlikely for people to be able to find them .
Gaskins , if we take his word seriously is clearly a process to focus serial killer .
he’s someone who wants to be with the victim to experience the terror that the victim is experienceing for as long as possible.
Gaskins for example would ofthen describe going into a hardware store and eying up , partucular tools
that he felt he would be able to torture his victims vith for longer . w’re dealing with a very very cunning predator who is quite clearly also a sexual sadist and a psychopath.
The allege that he did 10 or 12 year practically every month he killed somebody along the beach.
serial murderers will tell you that there is something inside of them that they have to go kill
and that’s common among serier murderers,its almost like somebody who’s almost so anxious that if they don’t do something they’re going to break into a billion pieces.
it’s a little scary to say that a serial murderer is an addict but if you really look at it in that context in the way they are an addict.that they have to do it .
Donald pewee gaskins wouldn´t even let being in maximum -security prison prevent him from taking human life.
in 1982 , he would plan a murder that was thought to be impossible
no one had believed criminal donal peary gaskins when he boasted of having his own private cemetery in rural souith carolina.
but in the 1970s, detectives had beenled to the graves of 13 of his victims and gaskins would claim there were more than 90 others still undiscovered
so who was peewee gaskins?
most of the family was good christian people , peewee was the only person that ever gotten any trouble
Prospect florence ,south california US.
donald gaskins JR was born on march the 13th, 1933 to an unmarried mother .
Gaskins childhood was punctuated by a series of stepfathers in his life, he never knew his own father and his mother had a series relationships.
Gaskins childhood was also characterized by physical abuse both at home and especially at school.Gaskins was peewee,
he´s a small guy , and so many individuals who live that lifestyle and that culture have to compensate for their small stature
and overcompensate by trying to demonstrate how tough he is how aggressive he is , to gain a reputation and gaskins was pretty good at that.
Gaskins dropped out of school at 11.forming a gang with two friends.together they dubbed themselves “the trouble trio” they would do bulgarized places ,assault people, they would rob
here we´ve got a boy who is clearly what criminologist would call being involved in differential associationin other words,he´s going to gain status not through having peers who are going to do well at school
but instead he’s going to gain status through associating with boys through committing crime. initially petty crime but that would degenerate
Gaskins would eventually commit a sexual offense a rape. gaskin and his two friends , raped one of the boys sisters.
The troubled trio had lured the girls to their hideout and taken it in turns to rape her.
in 1946 aged just 13, gaskins would graduate from rape to attempted murder
whilst burglarizing her house ,gaskins was disturbed by a young girl,he hit her in the head with an axe and left her on the ditch back tinking she was dead.
the only thing that kep t her alive was, there was a little bit of water trickling through and it kept her a live – someone found her or she would have died .
The girl was able to identify her attacker, the juvenile peewee was sent to reform school until his 18ths birhtday.
industrial school for boys are a place where kids who in trouble they went and they made him work on on the farm and the sort of stuff.they made him work hard.
Gaskins claimed that on his second night in custody, he was ambushed in the showers and gang-raped by twenty boys.
he would have have to accept the protection of the dormitories boss boy in return for sexual services.
Gaskin was a really tiny tiny person and the bigger boys hit gaskins.
what often happens as often in prison settings, since you’re put in with a group of indivduals who, who are generally worse then you arevery frequently they were quite brutal
over the next four years gaskins would run away repeatedly, but in 1950 he was due for release .
a report february 28 1960 it says ” dear , dr odom, the subject was committed to this institution on june 18 1946 by the court of general sessions ,the criminal court florence court county under an indictment for assault and battery with intent to kill.
we are not attempting to any diagnosis but we assure from our dealings with abnormal delinquents that this boy is antisocial and there´s something in his past development that is preying upon his mind, we consider him dangerous and also believe he has homicidal tendencies peculiar to a paranoid type.
we requesting psychiatric treatment in requesting proper placement in view of the fact that we have been unable to adjust this boy to a group
on his 18th birthday donald peewee gaskins was set free.his criminal activities took up where he’d left off.
when he´d left off ,when he got out of reform school , he got a job working for a tobaco farmer.and what he would do would be to steal the tobaco and sell it .
and then he set fire to the barn to cover up the theft.
after just one year as free manm gaskinsis teased by a teenage girl and strikes out.
all through his life,you can see that gaskins is particulary angry at women , now perhaps we can t date that back to the fact that his mother was a single mother that gaskins never knew his father that there were multiple stepfathers
but for whatever reasons gaskins shows throughout his life a great deal of hostility towards girls and towards women.
and this poor girl who taunts gaskins about burning down the barns, sees his rough and has her skull opened up by gaskins hitting her with a hammer.
gaskins is convicted of arson , assault with deadly weapon,attempted murdere and sent to the state penitentiar yhere a group of feared convicts known as power men made the rules.
gaskins was chosen by one such violent convict as a sex slave and gaskins realizes that if he wants to avoid being sexually abused for the lenght of a sentence, he too as to become a power man.
Gaskins approached the most feared power man in the prison and slit his throat.in the rules of that particular jail,he’s elevated to the top he becomes a face within that particular penal subculture
and he serves the rest of his time with notoriety, someone not to be messed with
and that really is the beginnings of gaskins overcoming childhood problems upon his size and actually using the fact that´s he’s small but dangerous to his own advantage .
“when he got older and you know ,had guns and stuff he figured” i can be a big man now”
-shirley gaskins , daughter of donald gaskins JR
gaskins would spent the next two decades in and out of prison, frequently escaping and being being recaptured.
“this woods out here is where my daddy would always run, all this woods connnect in some way ,he stay out here for months at the time when he did escape prison.eating snakes, he would take water out of ditches and and stuff and boil it and drink it”
-shirley gaskins, daughter of donald peewee gaskins JR
he was up in the courthouse , the old courthouse for trial and they put him in the waiting room, he pushed the window up and jumped out the second floor and escape.
he went into the swamp and they put bloodhounds on his trail and couple of the deputies back then took a little naop while they were waiting on him and they woke up and found that he written onthe back of the windshield” peewee was here”
durings his times out of prison ,gaskins would frequently take up with a new wife.here you see in these multiple sexual partners that gaskins pursues
normally younger women , you begin to see some of the psychopathy in gaskins character emerging
he´s the classic psychopath who will use women as a opposed to forming serious relationships with women and partly that´s about to reflecting his hatred of women.
then in 1970 the disappearances began.
he kept bringing people to his daughter´s house and asked her daughter to fix something to eat and she did . but they would leave and never come back she would never see them again.
he came home a couple of times with blood on his hands ,when shirley asked, he said “well, i hit a deer or something.
but people started missing and not coming back and gaskins daughter shirley knew something was wrong .
by the end of the 70s gaskin had been tied to 13 murders and was in maximum -security prison serving life.
but in 1982 he determined to add to his total , planning a murder on death row that most thought impossible.
in 1982 serial killer donald peewee gaskins while serving a life sentence in south carolina ,maximum-security prison ,set his sight on another victim.The final murder though Gaskins commits he commits in the extraordinary circumstances
He target a fellow inmate housed in solitary confinement on death row.
Rudolf tyner was a semi-retarded, very low IQ guy from new york , he was passing through south carolina when he and some others decided to rob the moons.
they had a convenience store down on the coast.
he had already left the store turned around and went back in the store and shot them both each in the head with a sawed -off shotgun
the deceased couple’s son ,tony simo wanted justice and he was the adopted son of these folks they treated him great and he was very emotional about this
allthough senthenced to death Rudolf Tyner had avoided execution for years
there were some procedural problems,tony simo. the son . after six or seven years just lost patience and he´d been sentenced to death twice ,time to get on with it.Tony was friends with someone in prison ,they got gaskins and tony together
The moons son and stepson hired peewee to kill rudolf tyner. tyner was housed in solitary confinement in the state´s most secure prison.
shirley gaskins went to the authorities and dolt them that her dad was planning killing someone in there and they told her there is no way that he could do it . that it was impossible.
Initially he befriended tyner and took him food and marijuana and whatever he wanted.and they smuggled in som poison,it didn’t work made him him sick.
with poison not working peewee gaskins comes up with an ingenious plan to end the life of rudolf tyner.
they had made him a maintenance man with all the tools he wanted. in the back of his cell backed up to tyner’s cell .gaskins suggests to tyner that he wants to have an communication system between their cells . almost like a telephone system.
this is an actual cup that they use in the departement of corrections at the time ,they had this size and they had a bigger size
peewee took one of these and melted a hole in the bottom of it with a soldering iron and put in a female plug .like he’d plug in headphones for instance on the other end of that he attached the blasting cap nestled it in the c-4 explosive.
he was able to feed it through the wall through the vent into tyner and in under tha guise of it being an intercom type system
he told tyner if he could hear him hold it up to his ear and then he plug the other end into the 110 socket.
gaskins blowed him off.
pieces of him were blown all over the prison.
fingers went everywhere
peewee then pulled the wire back through the went clipped it up , flushed it down the toalet and came out of his cell like ” what’s going on?”
maybe just kind of astonishing that all that was able to happen in the penitentiary. the only good thing about that was a crime that he could get the death penalty for that time.
peewee had recorded his phone calls with tony simo,planning to later blackmail him.
but the investigators discovered the tapes and Peewee was convicted of tyner’s murder and sentenced to death.
so was donald peewee gaskins a born killer
this is a 1964 report when he’s again committed on another crime and they talked to his mother the patient’s mother said the patient did have a lot og physical difficulties as a young child
when he was about a year old he drank som kerosene and almost died. the doctor who treated him said his nerves would be bad for the rest of his life .
After this incident the patient began to have to have convulsions and would remain unconscious for as long as ten minutes at a time.
Spectators gathered outside the Broad River Correctional Institution on the night of September 6, 1991 to celebrate the execution of Pee Wee Gaskins in the state’s electric chair.
miss hanna said the patient had convulsions until he’s about three years old, he had bad dreams often wake up in the middle of the night and be afraid.
miss hanna said , she had to sleep with him until he’s about 13 years old.
his mother thinks that kerosene drinking early on was the cause of his problems.
but no one knows.
Police checking gravesite with metal detector.
i´ts become a very popular thing to talk about how concussions can change personalities and can change people’s behavior can make them more aggressive and more assertive.
but if it were true that brain trauma had something to do with aggression we would expect that every serial murderer would have had some type of brain trauma or brain insult .and that doesn’t happen.
Forensic pathologist working on grave.
An investigator digs at serial killer Gaskins property. PHOTO BY HANDOUT /SCBI
gaskins is a individual who’s had an antisocial life since he was a child, he began with some sort of small gang that did all sorts of antisocial and criminal sorts of things and he’s very very comfortable not only with committing crime but with killing .
it means absolutely nothing to him.
Searchers identify grave site.
Coroner Eaddy, Sheriff Barnes and Agent Springs.
Bones of Gaskins’ victim.
Grave site before removal of remains.
After search, police rope off area.
the pattern of gaskins life has been of a boy who learned how to commit crime and commit more sophisticated crimes
it’s a pattern of a life whereby a boy learns how to be a power man ,by using violence to ensure that he gets his way in the world.but that doesn’t mean to say that gaskins was born to kill.
This is somebody who was socialized into killing.
Gaskins’ Mug Shot
whatever gene there is in a human being that gives them compassion he whacked .
shirley and her dad, donald peewee Gaskins
lot of people says that shirley daddy didn’t have a conscious that he could not regret what he had done
shirley .says she dosen’t knwo but he never said he was sorry ,that he killed anybody , she thinks that he was born to kill .
she think her daddy was sick. she thinks that her dad had a split personality.her daddy always ,as long she remembered loved to kill something.
Gaskin would go to the electric chair professing to be the single most prolific serial killer in american history
but did the 80 to 90 young hitchhickers he claimed along the coast actually exist.
Donald ” peewee ” Gaskin on Death Row
” he wan to just be notorious he wanted people to think he was a baddest thing ever to live in south carolina , i thnk he was pretty close to the top”
-former sheriff
“this is where my daddy’s ashes is scattered right here., he wanted me to put him here because this was his home old stomping ground and we couldn’t bury him, because people was trying to steal his body because they said that he was the devil sword and they wanted to worship it “
-shirley
“his in right here, right ,right here . i mean ,I’ll always love my dad,i mean ,he was my dad, that’s something you can’t change and you can’t stop love ,if you love somebody , you love them.
-shirley
“and i love my daddy no matter what he done and i didn’t agree with him because i testified against him , I’ll always love my daddy “
-shirley
Pee Wee was executed by the state of South Carolina on Sept. 6, 1991.
His last words before going to the electric chair were “Let’s get this done.”
Hearse carrying the body of Pee Wee Gaskins after execution
more details
In 1983, Richard “Tony” Cimo holds a portrait of his parents, Bill and Myrtle Moon, who were killed in 1978 during a robbery in Murrells Inlet. Cimo is charged in hiring Pee Wee Gaskins to kill their murderer, Rudolph Tyner. Tyner was serving time on death row in Columbia when Gaskins used a home-made bomb to murder Tyner, who was a fellow inmate of Gaskins’ at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia. Harry Becht The State archives.
Inside downtown Columbia’s infamous Central Correctional Institution,
the diminutive murderer was trusted among his fellow inmates and prison staff in Cell Block 2. O’Shea reported that Gaskins ran a pawnshop of sorts within the prison, made loans to other inmates, trafficked in drugs and other contraband and doled out jobs for sex. He was trusted with making repairs in the cell block, so he had a set of tools. He called and wrote letters to news reporters. He’d go on hunger strikes and intentionally overdose on Valium.