Pee-Wee Gaskins: America’s Most Heartless Serial Killer HT
5’4, Donald Pew Gaskins would earn himself the title the meanest man in America. >> If you had a business dispute, you’d sue him. He would kill him. >> A serial killer who, if he’s to be believed, was responsible for over a hundred cruel and sickening murders. Right over here is where uh he drowned a doine and then he hit the baby in the back of the head hatchet at the H.
The total amount is 105 people. >> A man who wouldn’t stop killing even on death row. >> When he plugs that son of a [ __ ] out, it’ll blow him on into hell. It was just kind of astonishing that all that was able to happen in the penitentiary. >> So, what made Peewee the man he was? And was he born to kill? >> My daddy, he called himself a vampire.
He would have to see blood. You are in God. 1975 school teacher Mary Anne Dunham reports the disappearance of one of her students 13-year-old Kim Gelkins Kim was in a class of fifth graders most of whom were 10 or 11 years old but she was 13 as I recall um she was quiet u petite her mother had died I think the previous spring.
I think she was lonely for her mother and and sad, you know, so she was looking for somebody who to pay attention to her. Often at the beginning of the school year, um teachers want to assess uh their class writing skills. And so sometimes you’ll assign them to write about what they did on their summer vacation or whatever.
And that particular year, I remember asking my children to write about the person they admired most. And Kim wrote about someone who was named Donna Gaskins. Donna Gaskins was the common law wife of a colorful local criminal, Donald Pew Gaskins. Pee-Wee has always been known as a notorious person in our area.
I think he would you would have to say he came over as different because how many people do you know that drive a hearse for their vehicle? It was a long black horse just you know like they used to you know drive long time ago is a and on the very back he had a little sign that says I hold dead bodies. Everybody joked about it.
You know everybody just you know thought it was funny. >> He always told people that he hauled bodies in it but people didn’t pay much attention to him. But while they didn’t pay attention to him, they were still scared of him in the lower end of the county. Uh, everybody, if you talked about peewee, they sort of would run and hide because they were scared of him.
He had that kind of reputation. >> Gaskin’s daughter, Shirley, remembers the day Kim Gelkins vanished. her mom had died and she got to be friends with daddy cuz daddy was living in Charleston. She was a sweet little girl. We had just come back from the park and um my mother-in-law lived next door and uh the children was going to go over there to get something to eat.
So I said, “Well, go on over there and I’ll be there in a minute.” And when I went over there, I said, “Where’s Kim?” Nobody had seen Kim and she just walked out the door and disappeared. And daddy said, “Well, you know, don’t worry about she probably run away.” Kim was not the only missing person. 5 years earlier in 1970, Shirley’s cousin, Janice Kirby, had vanished.
Janice and I, I mean, when we were little, we did everything together. She was a sweet girl. uh very smart girl, very good in school. I mean, and she was just, you know, all American country girl. When she first disappeared, um everybody said that, you know, she’d run away from home.
We were all out looking for, you know, searching for her. Everybody I Everybody was calling everybody that they knew to, you know, try to find her. But you know after 6 7 months we knew something wasn’t right. Now detectives investigating the new disappearance began to focus on Shirley’s father, Donald Peewee Gaskins. Some of our field agents were working on rumors that had been surfacing uh working along with detectives from Charleston in an attempt to find Kim Gilkins.
>> We uh started looking for the Gelkins girl and of course we didn’t did not have peewee at the time but we did have an individual who was running with pee-wee at the time. We did uh pick Walter Neely up and after a lot of talking and and everything, Walter finally took the investigators out and show them where he had helped PB bury someone.
They knew somebody was buried there. We didn’t know have any idea what we were going to find until we 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. Sometime during that process in moving through the bushes, the undergrowth, somebody discovered that there were some bushes that had been put there that weren’t growing there.
We had metal probes that were maybe 3 ft long with a tea handle on top, piece of rebar with a point on it that you could determine soil consistency. You probe along, probe along, and it 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. And it turned up that we found six bodies buried there. Yeah, it was a it’s a pretty gruesome scene. >> >> I was I I guess I was overwhelmed because, you know, I had been in law enforcement for some 12 and a half years prior to this and I’d never seen anything of that magnitude.
>> 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 prolific serial killer in US history. In 1975, the disappearance of 13-year-old school girl Kim Gelkins had led detectives to a burial site in the woods of South Carolina. there.
Investigators, including Sheriff William Barnes. >> They would have been right there by that tree. That’s where he would have been. >> Would make a shocking discovery. >> This is the area where the six bodies were recovered. I have not been back here since everything happened back in 1976. The graves would have all been within probably 25 ft of each each other.
They would have all been right in this area here where we’re standing now under this under this tree. 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 dimminitive local car thief who drove an old hearse and boasted of having his own private cemetery.
No one had believed him. I was 6 months pregnant at the time with my last child and we were, you know, when the cops came up there and, you know, they were telling me, oh, you know, that they were looking for my daddy for murder and stuff like that. I mean, I went in shock. I went into labor. My baby was born.
I wasn’t even seven months pregnant. She didn’t weigh but uh she weighed 2 lbs and something. All of a sudden, we found ourselves in the national limelight. >> I was one of the first uh reporters on the scene and uh I got a lot of it firsthand and u it was just to me it was so shocking.
You know, you know that that that’s pretty wild and that’s hard to believe in South Carolina. You don’t find stuff like that around here. >> Investigators now had to uncover the identity of the victims. The ones we initially found were in very good condition. Apparently, they’ve been putting the ground in a cold time of year.
So, that adapacia had occurred where the fatty tissue sort of turns to like a soaplike 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 the smell of decaying flesh was was so intense in that area that the the smoke from the cigars diminished that smell enough to where you could you could stand it.
>> In the first grave were 25-year-old Dennis Bellamy and his 15year-old half-brother, Johnny Knight. Both had been involved in an autotheft ring with Gaskkins. >> Daddy said they were going to steal a car and um they came by the house and I had just cooked some biscuit and co and they ate some biscuit and coffee and they left and I never seen them again.
We took them down into the woods and went to a big oak tree and sort of pointed up in the tree and was telling them how they could use that to throw a chain horse over to pull engines out of the car and dispose of stolen property. This would be the tree where he brought the two fells out and pointed up to the limb talk about how they could horse the motors out of 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. >> If he think that they were going to, you know, they were getting tired or they was going to tell on him, then he’d get rid of them. The other four victims, two men and two women, were all people Gaskins thought had wronged him or might betray him.
But none of the six bodies found was that of missing school girl Kim Galkkins. Gaskkins was arrested trying to flee the area. Faced with the prospect of the death penalty for his crimes, he struck a deal to lead investigators to further bodies at an area known as Alligator Landing. He admitted to burying 23-year-old family friend Dorine Dempsey and her 2-year-old daughter Robin.
Dorene Dempsey and Robin were both skeletonized uh because uh they were very close to the surface. They were not really buried deeply. That child had some injuries to the head that we felt were probably premortem. >> Right here is where my daddy used to live. Um and right over here is where uh he drowned Dorene.
Just hel held her under the water until she had drowned it. And then he hit the baby in the back of the head and hatch it at the he said that um he just could not resist. He said it he just couldn’t resist it. You see this this hole here? Stump hole. Uh that’s an example of something like that.
He just stuffed the body down in that hole. Just a small child. The reason he killed them is because the mother had been with a black man and the baby was half black and half white and he just didn’t didn’t believe in that and that was his reason for doing away with them. >> Eventually, Gaskins would reveal the truth about the disappearance of schoolgirl Kim Gelkins.
Kim was buried almost in our backyard. Right out in here is where they found Kim Gillicanin. She walked out my front door and I never seen her again. He took her off from the house and killed her. 8 years after he had killed her, Gaskins finally gave up the body of his niece, 15-year-old Janice Kirby. This is the grave site where his niece Janice Kirby was buried.
He killed her in 1970 and her body was recovered in 1978. Dealing with a child or a small kid, that’s that’s tough to take. It’s hard not to get involved. Just a little girl here. She’s just a young teenager really. Life snuffed out, stuck in a hole in the woods. Nobody knew where she was, what happened to her. Investigators would ultimately discover the remains of 13 victims.
A body count that made Pee-Wee Gaskins the biggest mass murderer in the history of South Carolina. But in prison, Gaskins would make an even more shocking claim. >> I just I just shivered. I mean, I said, “Daddy, I don’t want to hear this.” And he would say, “Half pon, I need to get it off my chest.
I need to tell somebody.” >> Gins is going to claim that he murdered some 80 to 90 young people, torturing them, then uh prolonging their death, um torturing them again, and then hiding their bodies. He allegedly started in 1969 killing young women, primarily later young boys and young women, uh, 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 bodies into marsh areas uh and sinking them deep enough so that it’d be unlikely for people to be able to find them. Gaskins, if we take his word seriously, is clearly a processed focus serial killer.
He’s someone who wants to be with the victim to experience the terror that the victim is experiencing for as long as possible. Gaskins, for example, would often describe going into a hardware store and eyeing up particular tools that he felt he would be able to torture his victims with for longer. We’re dealing with a very, very cunning predator who is quite clearly also and a psychopath.
He alleged that he did 10 or 12 a year. Uh practically every month he’d kill somebody along the beach. >> He said every so often he he would get this urge that he would have to see blood. He he called himself a vampire. He said he just his stomach would get to hurting. He said he would just get tie up in knots.
He said he just he just couldn’t be still. He would just tremble all over and it would not stop until he killed somebody. Serial murderers will tell you that there is something inside of them that they have to go kill. And that’s common among serial murderers. It’s almost like somebody who’s almost so anxious that if they don’t do something, uh, 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 a way, they are an addict. They have to do it. They have to do it. Donald Peewee 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 hearing criminal Donald Pew Gaskins when he boasted of having his own private cemetery in rural South Carolina. But in the 1970s, detectives had been led to the graves of 13 of his victims, and Gaskins would claim there were more than 90 others still undiscovered. So, who was Pee-Wee Gaskins? Most of my family was good Christian people.
I mean, u I My daddy’s the only person I know in my family that ever got in any trouble. He did enough for everybody. Donald Gaskins Jr. was born on March the 13th, 1933 to an unmarried mother. My daddy was a bad boy when he was little. My grandma said he was always always doing something he wasn’t supposed to do. And you know, he used to get a whipping a lot.
But you know, my grandma was a very good woman. She was very good to him. But her brothers was a little bit hard on him. They used to beat him a lot because he wouldn’t listen. >> Gaskin’s childhood was punctuated by a series of stepfathers in his life. He never knew his own father and his mother had a series of relationships.
Gaskin’s childhood was also characterized by uh both at home and especially at school. Gaskins was a pee-wee. He was 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 uh 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. >> What they would do would be burglarize places, assault people, they would rob. >> Here we’ve got a boy who is clearly what criminologists would call being involved in differential association.
In 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 offense. I know um Daddy and um his two friends uh one of the boy’s sisters.
Together the troubled trio had lured the girl to their hideout and taken it in turns. >> And they used to, you know, get together and do all, you know, do all kind of mean things together. In 1946, aged just 13, Gaskins would graduate rape to attempted murder. Whilst burglarizing a house, Gaskins was disturbed by a young girl.
He hit her in the head with an ax and left her on the ditch bank thinking she was dead. The only thing that kept her alive was there was a little bit of water trinkling through there and it kept her alive till someone found her or she she would have died. The girl was able to identify her attacker.
The juvenile Peewee was sent to reform school until his 18th birthday. In our area, the industrial school for boys was a place where kids who got in trouble, they went and they made them work on the farm and this sort of stuff. I don’t think they mistreated them, but they made them work hard. The dimminitive Gaskins claimed that on his second night in custody, he was ambushed in the showers and by 20 boys.
He would have to accept the protection of the dormator’s boss boy in return services. >> Daddy was a really tiny tiny person and you know the bigger boys he peakedked on him. >> You’ve always got bullies everywhere. >> Well, what often happens as as often happens in prison settings is you’re put in with a group of individuals who are generally worse than you are.
Very frequently. They were quite brutal. >> Over the next four years, Gaskkins would run away repeatedly. But in 1950, he was due for release. >> I’m holding in my hands a report. Uh February 28th, 1950. It says, uh, “Dear Dr. ODM. The subject was committed to this institution on June 18th, 1946 by the Court of General Sessions, the Criminal Court of Florence County under an indictment for assault and battery with intent to kill.
We are not attempting any diagnosis, but we are sure from our dealings with abnormal delinquents that this boy is antisocial and there’s something in his past development that is praying upon his mind. We consider him dangerous and also believe he has the homicidal tendencies peculiar to a paranoid type. We were requesting psychiatric treatment um and requesting proper placement in view of the fact that we have been unable to adjust this boy to our group.
On his 18th birthday, Donald Peewee Gaskins was set free. His criminal activities took up where he’d left off. When he got out of reform school, he got a job working for a tobacco farmer. And what he would do would be to steal the tobacco and sell it. And then he set fire to the barn to cover up the theft. >> After just one year as a free man, Gaskins is teased by a teenage girl and strikes out.
>> All through his life, you can see that Gaskins is particularly angry at women. Now, perhaps we can 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, Gaskin shows throughout his life a great deal of hostility towards uh girls and towards women.
And this poor girl who taunts Gaskins about burning down the barns sees his wrath and has her skull opened up by Gaskins hitting her with a hammer. Gaskins is convicted of arson, assault with a deadly weapon, and attempted murder and sent to the state penitentiary. Here, a group of feared convicts known as powermen made the rules.
Gaskkins was chosen by one such violent convict. >> And Gaskins realizes that if he wants to avoid being for the length of his sentence, he too has 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, I think, is the beginnings of Gaskin overcoming these childhood problems about his size and actually using the fact that he’s small but dangerous to his own advantage >> when he got older.
and you know had guns and stuff. He figured, hey, I can be a big man now. >> Gins would spend the next two decades in and out of prison, frequently escaping and being recaptured. These woods out here is where my daddy would always run. I mean, all these woods connect in some way. And I mean, he he’d stay out here for months at a time when he’d escape from prison, eating snakes. He he he rattlesnake.
He would take water out of ditches and stuff and boil it and drink it. >> He was up in the courthouse in the old courthouse for trial and they put him in the waiting room. And while he was in there, he pushed the window up and jumped out the second story uh window and escaped. He went into the swamp and they put the blood hounds on his trail.
And a couple of the deputies back then took a little nap while they were waiting on him. And they woke up and found that he had written on the back of the windshield that Peavey was here in the Jew. I mean, you could hide out for a long, long time out here. And people scared out here because of the snake festation.
They didn’t scare him. I mean, Daddy said he used to sleep with the snakes. >> During his times out of prison, Gaskins would frequently take up with a new wife. Here you see in these multiple that Gaskins pursues normally younger women, you begin to see some of the psychopathy in Gaskin’s character emerging.
He’s the classic psychopath who will use women as opposed to forming serious relationships with women. And partly that’s about reflecting his hatred of women. Then in 1970, the disappearances began. He kept bringing people to my house. And you know, he would say, well, he called me halfpie. He said, half pine.
He said, will you fix this one so and so something to eat? And I would do, but you know, they would leave and never come back. I would never see them again. He came home a couple of times with blood on his hands and you know I’d asked him he said well I I hit a deer or something like that but people started missing you know and not coming back and I knew something I knew something was wrong.
By the end of the 70s, Gaskins 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 Pew Gaskins, while serving a life sentence in South Carolina’s Maximum Security Prison, set his sights on another victim.
>> The final murder that Gaskins commits, he commits in the most extraordinary circumstances. >> His target, a fellow inmate housed in solitary confinement on death row. Rudolph Tiner was a semi-retarted I mean very low IQ guy from New York. He was passing through South Carolina when uh 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 saw off shotgun. >> The deceased couple’s son, Tony Simo, wanted justice. >> Tony Simo, these he was the adopted son of these folks. They treated him great. He was very emotional about this.
Although sentenced to death, Tina had avoided execution for years. >> There were some procedural problems. Simo, the son, after I think it’d been six or seven years, just um lost patience. Uh and he’d been sentenced to death twice. Time to get on with it. >> Tony was friends with someone in prison. They got Daddy and Tony together.
Can I help you? >> My pedal is collected Tony. My name is Jerry McCormick. >> Thank you. >> I have a phone call to Tony from Joe McCormic. Will you accept? >> Yes, I will. >> Thank you. Are you Tony? >> Yes. >> Thank you. >> Tony. >> Yeah. J wanted me to call you said Tony. This is the doctor calling you. The Moon’s son and stepson hired Pee-Wee to kill Rudolph Tiner.
Tiner was housed in solitary confinement in the state’s most secure prison. >> I went to the authorities and I told them that Daddy was planning on, you know, killing someone in there and they told me there was no way that he could do it. that, you know, it was impossible. >> Initially, he befriended Tiner and took him food and marijuana and whatever he wanted and they smuggled in some poison. It didn’t work. Made him sick.
>> We give that son of a [ __ ] all of it but one dose and all this is doing is making that son of a [ __ ] sick. We put it in some damn book for him to drink the other night and he drank and two more drank and all it was made all three of them sick as hell. >> With poison not working, Peewee Gaskins comes up with an ingenious plan to end the life of Rudolph Tiner.
>> They had made him a maintenance man with all the tools he wanted >> and the back of his cell backed up to Tiner cell. Gaskins suggests to Tina that he wants to have an communication system between their cells, almost like a telephone system. >> I come up with something. It can’t be no damn making sick on it.
I need one electric cap and as much of a stick of damn dynamite as you can get. >> Okay. Well, I I’ll probably get this plastic explosion. >> Well, that’d be good. >> This is an actual uh cup that they used in the Department of Corrections at the time. and they had this size and they had a bigger size.
Um, Peewee took uh one of these and melted a hole in the bottom of it with uh with a soldering iron and put in a female plug like you plug in uh headphones for instance. On the other end of that, he attached the blasting cap, nestled it in the C4 explosive, >> was able to feed it through the wall, through the vent into Tiner and uh in under the guise of it being an intercom type system.
>> I’ll take a damn radio and rig it into a bomb and when he plugs that son of a [ __ ] out, it’ll blow him on in hell. He uh told Tiner to if he ask him if he could hear him, hold it up to his ear and then he plugged the other end into the 110 socket. >> Just listen for the bind. [laughter] He blowed him up.
Pieces of him were blown all over the prison. Fingers went everywhere. Um, Peewee then pulled the wire back through the vent, clipped it up, flushed it down the toilet, and was uh came out when I was just kind of astonishing that all that was able to happen in the penitentiary. The only good thing about that was that, you know, that was a crime that he could get the death penalty for at that time.
Peewee had recorded his phone calls with Tony Simo, planning to later blackmail him, but investigators discovered the tapes and Peewee was convicted of Tina’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 um they talked to his mother.
The patient’s mother said the patient did have a lot of physical difficulties as a young child. When he was about a year old, he drank some 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 convulsions and would remain unconscious for as long as 10 minutes at a time.
Miss Hannah said the patient had convulsions until he was about 3 years old. He had bad dreams, often wake up in the middle of the night and be afraid. Miss Hannah said she had to sleep with him until he was about 13 years old. His mother thinks that kerosene drinking early on was the cause of his problems. I don’t know.
It’s 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. Gaskins is a individual who’s had an antisocial life since he was a child. He began with some sort of a small gang that did all sorts of antisocial and criminal sorts of things. And uh he’s very very comfortable not only with committing crime but with killing. It means absolutely nothing to him.
The pattern of Gaskin’s life has been of a boy who learned how to commit crime and to commit more sophisticated crimes. It’s the 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 I think that Gaskins was born to kill.
This is somebody who was socialized into killing. Whatever gene there is in a human being that gives them compassion, um, he lacked. >> A lot of people says my daddy didn’t have a conscience, that he could not regret what he had done. I mean, I don’t know, but he never said he was sorry that he killed anybody. I think he was born to kill.
I really do. I think my daddy was sick. I think my daddy had a split personality. My daddy always I mean ever since I can remember always loved to kill something. Gaskins 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 hitchhikers he claimed to have killed along the coast actually exist? the coastal killings.
I personally don’t believe any of that’s true. We’ve never had any physical evidence or rumor or conjecture from anybody uh that you know my niece or my nephew or any of my kin people are missing been missing for so long and then last seen with Peewee like we had with some of the others. I I don’t believe that happened.
If there had been any more victims, he would have called me and tried to work out a deal to where, you know, he wanted to go out and look for a body and show us a body. And there just wasn’t anything there for him. It’s amazing. It’s extremely difficult to weight a body down with enough weight for it not to bloat as it decomposes and float up.
But now in the areas he’s talking about putting them, it certainly could have floated up, decomposed the rest of the way, become skeletonized, and sink back down. And so it’s it’s certainly possible that it would not be seen without corroboration. Could he have killed a hundred people? Sure, he could have. Um, but he would be an outlier.
That’s a very, very high number of victims, even for a prolific serial killer. But since he is so inadequate and has to compensate constantly his entire life, to lie and exaggerate uh your killings wouldn’t surprise me at all. That would be very consistent with his personality. It’s possible, but not probable.
>> Everything my daddy said was true. I could tell when my daddy was telling a lie. I could tell there’s something about his face that I could tell. The total amount is 105 people. >> He wanted to just be notorious. He wanted people to think he was the baddest thing ever to lived in South Carolina. I think he was pretty close to the top.
>> This is where my daddy’s ashes is scattered right here. He he wanted me to put him here because this was his 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’s son and they wanted to worship it.
You see in right here right right in here. I mean I’ll always love my dad. I mean he was my dad. You know that’s something you can’t change and you can’t stop love. If you love somebody you love them. And you know, I love my daddy no matter what he done. And I didn’t agree with him cuz I testified against him. I’ll always love my daddy.