This is the story of a little known serial killer named Donald "Pee Wee"Gaskins. A man who could well have been not only the most prolific serial killer in South Carolina history, but quite possibly in the whole United States. Once his brutality was unleashed, he knew no boundaries, torturing, killing, cannibalizing victims, both male and female, young and old. All serial killers are monsters, but some go out of their way to be truly extra evil. As you will read, Gaskins was definitely one very evil man!! This story has many twists and turns. At times you may not believe all this was possible. It really happened!!!His daughters are still living in North and South Carolina.
Donald Henry Gaskins Jr. or "Pee Wee" Gaskins, as many knew him by, was born in Florence South Carolina March 13, 1933. There are some who will say that Gaskins grew up in a loving happy family, but there are many, including family members, who say that is not the case. Pee Wee's mother, Eulea Parrott was a poor girl who quit school at the age of 12 to help her family pick cotton and plant tobacco. She had sex with Mr. Gaskins, a wealthy, well- known neighbor of Eulea, who loved to gamble and drink. He paid Eulea $1 for sex several times a week. Donald was small for his age and immediately gained the nickname "Pee Wee". His early life was one of neglect and poverty living with his prostitute mother. When Pee Wee was only a year old he found a bottle of kerosene and he drank it causing him to have uncontrollable convulsions until he was 3 years old. Many of the men who his mother brought home treated the young boy with disdain, sometimes beating him for just being around. His mother did little to protect him from her lovers, and the boy was left alone to raise himself. When his mother did marry, his stepfather beat him and his four half-siblings regularly. The violence Pee Wee experienced at home soon followed him to school. It was hard growing up in poverty in the south in those days. He fought daily with the other boys and girls and was constantly punished by the teachers. When Pee Wee turned twelve he quit school and he went to work at a local garage. His abuse continued, getting beat when his work did not measure up to the owners standards. His hate for people,especially women grew and grew.
Donald was not without friends. At the garage he met two boys Danny Smith and Henry Marsh who were also Pee Wee's age and dropouts from school. It was not long before the boys were breaking into nearby homes and business and stealing anything not nailed down. They decided to call themselves the "The Trouble Trio." The name fit! The boys, being adolescents, started to explore sex and would often rape young boys threatening then with harm if they told. The boys also started hanging out with prostitutes who enjoyed the company of young boys. Donald actually became a good mechanic and started earning decent money. One day the boys found an old shack in the woods and used it as their hideout, all the while continuing to steal and rape. One story that is often told here is that the Trouble Trio got into very hot water at a local church for peeping in on the girls in the women's outhouse. They were given beatings from their parents but Pee Wee stated that he was not sad for what they did, but sad that they were caught. When Pee Wee was 15 he and the other two boys decided they were no longer interested in having sex with prostitutes and wanted to know what it was like to have sex with a virgin. To fulfill their curiosity, all three boys raped Henry's 13-year old sister, Julie, multiple times and in many different cruel ways. Julie immediately told her mother what the boys did to her. Julie's mother informed the other parents and the boys received intense physical beatings as punishment. Soon after the rape, Henry and Danny's families moved away and the group was split up. This experience was Pee Wee's first violent sex act and he described it as being a very fulfilling part of his life.
In 1948, Pee Wee made another friend named Walt at a Car Shop and they soon created a plan to break into homes and sell the stolen goods for profit. One day the two broke into a house thinking nobody was home. A 16-year old girl was home and attacked Pee Wee with a hatchet when she realized the two men were robbing her family. Pee Wee was able to get the hatchet away from the girl and Pee Wee hit her hard on the head with the hatchet causing her to become unconscious. Walt was able to get away from the robbery untouched but Pee Wee was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and intent to kill. During Pee Wee's trial it was the first time he learned that his name was really Donald Henry Gaskins and not Pee Wee. In 1950 Pee Wee was found guilty and was sent to The South Carolina Industrial School For Boys in Florence, South Carolina.
Reform school did not go well for Pee Wee. He was constantly beat and sodomized by the older boys there.
After a year of abuse he ran away with four other boys. He was soon caught again and received 30 lashes for thirty days, three months hard labor, and three months solitary confinement as punishment for running away. Months later Pee Wee ran away again but this time alone. He met a woman named Mary and soon got married. Not wanting a life on the run, Gaskins turned himself in and finished reform school. Mary and Pee Wee lived with her parents, but soon moved into a house located on a large tobacco farm where he worked in Johnstonville, SC. They had a daughter who was born on April 17th 1952. During this time Pee Wee burned tobacco barns helping farmers collect insurance money. A new owner took over the farm where Pee Wee worked. His daughter harassed Pee Wee and informed him that she would turn him into the police because she knew he was involved in the fires. To shut the girl up, Pee Wee hit her with a hammer knocking her unconscious. He took off so that he would not get arrested; however, he was picked up a few days later and was charged with Assault with a Deadly Weapon, with Intent to Inflict Bodily Harm and/or Arson for setting the barns on fire.
He was sentenced to five years in South Carolina State Penitentiary in Columbia for the charges. While in court, he called the judge a son of bitch and was given an additional year.
While in prison, Mary started to seek a divorce, so Pee Wee escaped in garbage barrels. Unable to reconcile with Mary, Pee Wee stole a 1950 Pontiac in Florida where he met Juney Alice Holden who was 19. She married Pee Wee; even though he was still married to Mary. What a life Pee Wee had, but it just gets worse and worse. The pair go to Tennessee where Pee Wee gets arrested for putting razor blades in a carton of cigarettes and giving them to Juney's brother who was in jail in Tennessee. Police realized he was Pee Wee Gaskin and was wanted and he was charged with being a fugitive from the penitentiary. Pee Wee was sentenced to six months in prison. Donald did his time in Cooksville, TN and then he was extradited back to the State Pen in Columbia, SC. Pee Wee was also charged by the FBI for Interstate Auto Theft for when he stole the car in Lake City and crossed over the Tennessee state line. He was tried in federal court and sentenced to 3 years in the Federal prison in Atlanta, GA after he finished his South Carolina sentence. While in federal prison in Atlanta he became friends with Frank Costello, Godfather of the Genovese crime family in New York. Pee Wee was given the name Little Hatchet Man and was taken under Frank Costello wings. In 1961 Pee Wee was released and he went back to South Carolina, married for the third time to 18-year old Jerri Deloris. Pee Wee started stealing again for a living. 12 year old Patsy Cane lived nearby and in early September on a Saturday he molested her. Pee Wee was taken to Florence County Jail and Pee Wee was charged with Statutory Rape and Carnal knowledge of a Child. While at the Florence County courthouse, a deputy had removed Pee Wee's handcuffs while he waited for his attorney and the prosecutor and Pee Wee escaped by jumping thirty feet out of a window. He then stole a county car with the keys in the ignition and he drove to his mother's house to get money and headed for North Carolina. Pee Wee ditched the car in water off the highway, made it on foot towards the town of Dillon South Carolina. Once in Dillon he stole a 1962 Ford Galaxy and the following day he crossed the state line into North Carolina and the Lumbee Indian Reservation in Pembroke. The following day he drove the stolen car to Charlotte and left it, caught a bus back to Raleigh, bought a 1949 Ford and drove back to Pembroke.
Pee Wee married his fourth wife a 17-year old Lumbee girl named Leni Oxendine. After three months of marriage he grew tired of the married life and he informed her he was going to the store but instead he left her. He then went back to his third wife Jerri to try to get back with her. She takes Pee Wee back, but again he gets in trouble with the law and has to flee. Where does he go? Back to his forth wife Leni. What a soap opera!! When Pee Wee arrived, Leni was none to happy to see him. While he slept she calls the police and again he is arrested and he was then extradited back to the county jail in Florence where he was sentenced to six years for the statutory rape charge and additional two years for his escape from the Florence County Court House. This was now at the end of 1962. Pee Wee was again sent to the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia South Carolina.
Warden Willis McDougald, who believed in rehabilitating and not punishing criminals wrote a letter of recommendation to the Parole Board asking them to release Pee Wee because of his good behavior and he was paroled in November after doing four years. Pee Wee decided he had enough of jails and prisons and got a job doing roofing and painting, but he found time to rework and repaint stolen cars. He would take time to go to Prospect SC. and visit his first wife Mary and his daughter who now had two children.
In the summer of 1968, he began to be troubled by this feeling he described as a bothersome pain in interviews. This bothersome pain that began in his testicles went up his spine and to his head. This pain would settle behind his eyes causing him to have a migraine, then a voice would come. When both the voice and pain came he would have to leave because he did not want to cause harm to Mary or any other family member. The further away he was the better.
Pee Wee started riding along the Coastal Highway that stretched from Myrtle Beach to Savannah Ga, on the lookout for girls hitchhiking. He thought about how he would love to torture the girls The only thing preventing him from doing so was the possibility of going back to prison. He soon began to ignore those fears.
In September 1969, he started to feel his pain and took to the road. Pee Wee picked-up a blond girl in Pawley's Island by the name of "Angie" he sodomized her, bit off her left nipple and forced her to perform oral sex on him, stomped on her pubic bone, slid an eight inch dagger into her rectum then he pulled it until it sliced her vagina. He took her to the water, let her go and she sank. Pee Wee then took her money but tossed the rest of her belongings in the river. His pain and the voice disappeared!! Six weeks after his first murder his head started to hurt and the voice returned and he knew it was his signal to kill. In October he meets "Daisey" from Jacksonville who had been working in Myrtle Beach. He did the same things to Daisey as he did to Angie. He tortured, raped, and bound her and put heavy chains on her and drowned her in the swamp. In his memoirs he wrote: "All I could think about is how I could do anything I wanted to them. Gaskins classified these victims as "coastal kills" people both male and female, whom he killed purely for pleasure. On average, every six weeks, he went hunting to quell his feelings of "bothersome-ness." He tortured and mutilated his victims, while attempting to keep them alive for as long as possible. He confessed to killing these victims using a variety of methods including stabbing, suffocating, mutilating and he even claimed to have cannibalize some of them. In his memoirs he wrote in prison, Pee Wee claims to have committed coastal kills every six weeks, yet he contradicts this claim later in his book by stating he felt the overpowering need to seek out and commit a coastal kill by the tenth day of each calendar month. These coastal kills have not been totally verified.
In November 1970, Pee Wee committed the first of what he calls "serious murders". These were 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. He tortured and raped both girls in very brutal ways. He said he cut off large pieces of flesh while they were still alive and made them eat them. He finally killed them both and buried them. In 1970 Pee Wee remarries again for the fifth time on New Year's Eve; she was three months pregnant.
Pee Wee returned to his old ways of stripping and repainting stolen cars, the pain in his head and the strange voice would come back again and again, so he would head back out on the Coastal Highway and by 1971 he had killed 11 woman in which he tortured in the same manner as the first three. Also in 1971, wife number five gave birth to a son name Donald Lee Gaskins and Pee Wee began to work at a used-car lot rebuilding cars that were clunkers for sale.
Angie and Maria were Pee Wee's next victims that he took from the Costal highway. They were hitchhiking from Wilmington, NC. Both girls had dropped out the 10th grade and they were on their way to Florida to look for work. He mutilated them both while alive even going so far as to pull their intestines out. Death was a welcomed relief to them.
In early 1972, Pee Dee made friends with a woman who was twenty named Martha Ann Dicks but who was known as Clyde. Clyde was a lesbian as well as a drug addict and she had an extensive criminal record. They had a platonic relationship. On March 29,1972 , Clyde went too far with Pee Wee by joking about how she had been knocked up by him and that she was going to name the baby Pee Wee Dicks. Pee Wee did not like this joke because he disapproved of interracial relationships, so Pee Wee poisoned her and dumped her dead body into a drainage ditch. Sometime in June the next known victim was Anne Colberson from Atlanta whom he tortured for 96 hours at the old tenant house. On the fourth day he smashed her head in with a ball peen hammer, dug a grave behind a bar and covered her up. We are still not near the end of this account, and there is much more to Cover. I know this sounds like a B movie, but it's all true and it gets worse.
In 1973, Gaskins purchased an old hearse, telling people at his favorite bar that he needed the vehicle to haul all the people he killed to his private cemetery. At this time he was living in Prospect, South Carolina. Around town he had a reputation for being explosive, but not truly dangerous. People just thought he was mentally disturbed and most tried to avoid being around him. Some actually liked him and considered him a friend. Little did they know the truth of his boasting.
The next victim in this sick story is Jackie Freeman who was 19. After raping her and torturing her for days, he kills her and eats a portion of her calf. This occurred in October 1973. In December 1973 Pee Wee commits his next serious murder and by all accounts his most horrific. Hearing voices again and feeling the pain, he started thinking of murder again and to make it go away. 23-year-old Doreen Dempsey was an unwed mother of a two-year-old baby girl, and 8 months pregnant with a second child. Doreen decided to leave the area and go to Atlanta to be with her mom when she had her baby. She accepted a ride to the bus station from her old friend Pee Wee, but Instead, Gaskins took her to a wooded area, raped and killed her, then raped and sodomized her dead body. After that Pee Wee raped her 2 year old daughter then kills her. Pee Wee then buried the two together with her unborn child. The rape of the little child would later be described by Gaskins as the best sex of his life.
A new year starts and Pee Wee is far from being finished. In July 1974 Pee Wee picks up two boys, raped, castrates, and murders the two young unnamed boys. In the same month he kills Johnny Sellers 36 and Jessie Ruth Judy 22. After raping and tortures both of them. He ties their bodies with heavy chains and throws them into the river. He watch's them as they struggled for air while drowning. In August he kills Horace Jones 40. In the fall of 1974 Pee Wee separates from fifth wife. His son goes to live with his daughter. So far Pee Wee has been able to get away with all these murders because he worked alone, but the next killings he needs help.
In 1975 Pee Wee Gaskins was on the coastal highway 17 when he spots a van broken on the side of the road. A young man and two young women were with the van. Pee Wee stops to offer help then forces the two college girls and 20 year old man to engage in group sex in the van. He savagely Kills them with a knife after castrating the male. Now Gaskins needed help getting rid of the three bodies and enlisted the help of ex-con Walter Neely. Neely drove the van to Gaskins' garage and helps dispose of the bodies. The bodies were put into his graveyard. Pee Wee later refurbished their van and sells it.
In February 1975 Pee Wee was paid $1,500 to kill Silas Yates, a wealthy farmer from Florence County. Suzanne Kipper, the angry ex-girlfriend, hired Pee Wee to do the job. John Powell and John Owens handled all correspondence between Kipper and Pee Wee in arranging the murder. Diane Neely who claimed to have car problems lured Yates out of his home on Feb. 12, 1975. Pee Wee then kidnapped and murdered Yates as Powel and Owens watched, then the three buried his body in the graveyard.
Pee Wee was not a man to mess with. Not long after the last murder Diane Neely and her boyfriend, ex-con Avery Howard, attempted to blackmail Pee Wee for 5,000 dollars. Not a smart thing to do! Pee Wee thought up a plan to get rid of this problem. They agreed to meet him for the payoff. He quickly killed and disposed of their bodies in his graveyard. In the meantime, Gaskins was busy killing and torturing other people he knew, including 13-year-old Kim Ghelkins who was a neighbor. He had lured her to his place and brutally raped and murdered her. He put her body in his private graveyard too.
In October 1975 Pee Wee moves to Charleston SC and it was not long after that two locals, Johnny Knight and Dennis Bellamy make a serious mistake and rob Pee Wee's repair shop. Pee Wee found out who was involved and they were eventually killed and buried along side the other locals Pee Wee had killed. This time he once again called on his friend Walter Neely for help to bury the pair.
The authorities in the South Carolina low country were going nuts with all these missing people and especially Kim Ghelkins! Slowly the police started putting the pieces together and soon Pee Wee was dead in their sights! The Sumter county police issue a warrant to search Pee Wee's residence and they discover underwear and clothing belonging to Kim Ghelkin. On November 14 1975 Pee Wee Gaskins was indicted for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. While awaiting trial in prison, Neely breaks and tries to makes a deal with the prosecuting attorney. He agrees to show them 8 graves he helped with if they drop the charges against him. They refuse to make a deal. On December 4th Pee Wee shows the police where he put the bodies, also trying to make a deal. The police recover the bodies of Sellars, Judy, Howard, Diane Neely, Johnny Knight, Dennis Bellamy, Doreen Dempsey and her 2 year old child and her unborn baby were found in the graves.
On April 27 1976, a coroner's report was issued and verified everything Walter and Pee Wee had told them. Walter and Pee Wee were both charged with the eight murders. Wasting no time, the trial for Pee Wee starts on May 24 1976 and ends on May 28 1976. Pee Wee was convicted of 8 murders and sentenced to life in prison. Now you would think this story is over, but it is not. This story is going to take a stranger then fiction turn, not that it hadn't already.
The story starts in March 1978, Rudolph Tyner, a 24-year-old junkie from New York, robbed a mom-and-pop grocery in Murrells Inlet, S.C. He took $200 and the lives of both mom and pop, Myrtle and Bill Moon. Tyner was apprehended and sentenced to the electric chair. So with all the appeals and the backlog of executions, Tyner was still alive for several years. Cimo, Myrtle's son, did not like this and wanted him killed. After a little research he heard about Pee Wee who was a trustee. Cimo made contact with Pee Wee and they made a deal to have Tyner killed and Pee Wee would get paid money he could use in the prison commissary. At first Pee Wee tried to poison him, but that only made Tyner sick. Pee Wee, who would never let a challenge go by, came up with a plan that even today is considered totally impossible. Somehow, someway, Pee Wee was able to get some C 4 plastic explosive and a blasting cap into the prison. Pee Wee put the explosives into a radio and he gave it to a not too bright Tyner telling him that it was a two way radio so they could talk to each other. Pee Wee told him that all he had to do was at night was to hold the radio up to his ear and plug in the cord to hear Pee Wee. Later he did just as he was told to do. The explosion was enormous blowing Tyner up. It took weeks of cleaning to get his cell clean again. Pee Wee's part in the explosion scheme was discovered and he was sentenced to death by the electric chair. The news outlets labeled him the meanest man in America. While awaiting execution Pee Wee was placed in the dungeon of the prison and he had no contact with anyone other then the guards who beat him weekly. Just before his day of execution, Pee Wee tried to kill himself by cutting his wrists. An alert guard caught him and his plan to cheat the executioner failed. Hands bandaged, Donald "Pee Wee" Gaskins was finally strapped into the electric chair on Sept. 6, 1991.
The last two years of his life, Pee Wee spent a lot of time writing an autobiography. It was published 2 years after his death. The title is Final Truth. Henry Gaskins claims to have killed as many as 110 men, women, and children. He also claimed to have killed Margaret "Peg" Cuttino, the 13-year-old daughter of then South Carolina State Senator James Cuttino Jr. of Sumter. Although his claims have not been verified, many law enforcement officials of coastal Carolina believe that his claims of 110 lives is too small.
BẠN ĐANG ĐỌC
Crime Stories
Phi Hư CấuThe stories you're about to read are not mine. These are all from the popular Facebook page "Spookify" and other references. Enjoy reading! 😊 ciao /sheree
