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« I have walked the same path as God; by taking lives and creating fear in others, I became equal to God. By killing I became my own teacher. Through my power I obtain my own redemption .”
Donald Gaskins was a thief, rapist, kidnapper and a serial killer, perhaps the most important in South Calorina, in the United States.
a troubled childhood
Donald Gaskins was born on March 13, 1933 in Florence County, South Carolina, United States. His mother was not married when she became pregnant with Donald, and she lived on and off with various men during Gaskins’ childhood, who consistently abused him. His mother did little to protect him and the boy grew up on his own. When his mother got married, it was common for his stepfather to beat him and his four half-siblings.
Donald Gaskins was nicknamed Pee Wee as a child due to being small. When he started school, the violence he suffered at home continued in the classroom. He often fought with the other children, and the teachers constantly punished him. At age 11 he dropped out of school, worked in a local garage and helped out on the family farm. During his work in the garage, Gaskins met Danny and Marsh, two boys his age who also didn’t go to school. They formed a gang and started robbing houses and looking for prostitutes in nearby towns. They also raped children and then threatened them so they wouldn’t tell the police.
They were caught after gang-raping Marsh’s younger sister; her parents tied them up and beat them. After the beatings, Marsh and Danny left the area, and Gaskins continued robbing surrounding houses alone. When Gaskins was 13 years old, in 1946, a girl he knew discovered him when he was burglarizing her house. She attacked him with an axe, but he managed to wrest it from her and hit her on the head and her arm before fleeing the scene.
Interned in a reformatory
The girl survived the attack, and Gaskins was arrested, tried, and convicted of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill. He was sent to a reform school, the South Carolina Industrial School for Boys until he turned 18.
Juvie was particularly cruel to the young Gaskins. Almost immediately twenty of his new classmates gang-raped him. He spent the rest of the time under the protection of the ” Boss-Boy ” (head) of the dormitory in exchange for sex, or trying unsuccessfully to escape from reform school. He was repeatedly beaten by his escape attempts and sexually exploited by the ” Boss-Boy ” gang.
Elopement and first marriage
Gaskins’ desperate attempts to escape led to regular fights with guards, and he was sent to a state mental hospital for evaluation. Doctors found no psychiatric problems in Gaskins, and he was transferred back to juvie. A few days later he escaped again, and being released he married a 13-year-old girl. After the wedding he turned himself in to the police to complete his sentence in juvie. He was released on March 13, 1951, his 18th birthday.
After leaving reform school, Gaskins got a job on a tobacco plantation, but re-offended. He and an associate engaged in insurance fraud, teaming up with tobacco growers to burn down their barns for remuneration. People began talking about the fires and becoming suspicious of Gaskins’ involvement.
In these circumstances, the daughter of his employer, with whom he had become friends, questioned Gaskins about the rumors. Gaskins freaked out and hit her over the head with a hammer, for which he was sent to prison for five years, charged with assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder.
Life in prison was not very different from life in juvie. Gaskins had to have sex with one of the jail gang leaders in exchange for protection. There he realized that the only way he could survive in prison was to become a ” strong man “, and he acquired a reputation for being so brutal and dangerous that other inmates stayed away.
Gaskins’ small physical presence prevented him from intimidating the other inmates by flaunting his physique; he could only do it with his actions. He fixed her attention on one of the worst inmates in the jail, Hazel Brazell. Gaskins found a way to gain her trust, and then he slit her throat. He was found guilty of manslaughter, spent six months in solitary confinement and thus became a ” strong man ” among the prisoners. From then on he had an easier life in jail.
Elopement and second marriage
Gaskins’ first wife filed for divorce in 1955, which upset him extraordinarily; he escaped from jail, stole a car, and headed for Florida. There he married a second time. His second marriage lasted two weeks, after which Gaskins became involved with a woman from the criminal world, Bettie Gates. Together they traveled to Cookeville, Tennessee, to free Bettie’s brother from jail.
Gaskins visited the jail with his bail money and a box of cigarettes. When he returned to the hotel, Gates and the vehicle stolen from him were missing. Gates did not return, but the police did show up. Gaskins discovered that she had been tricked: Gates’ ” brother ” was actually her husband, who had escaped from prison with the help of a razor blade hidden inside a cigarette box.
The little man with the ax
Once apprehended, it didn’t take long for the police to learn that Gaskins was a convicted fugitive and he was sent back to jail. He received an additional nine months in prison for escaping and stabbing a fellow prisoner. He was later convicted of driving the stolen car across state lines and received a three-year sentence in federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia. While there, he met mob boss Frank Costello, who called him ” The Little Ax Man ” and offered him a job.
Gaskins was released from prison in August 1961 and returned to Florence, South Carolina. He got a job in the tobacco barns and started committing crimes again. He soon began robbing houses while working as a driver and assistant to an itinerant preacher. This gave him the opportunity to break into homes in different towns where the minister preached, making his crimes more difficult to trace.
In 1962 Gaskins married a third time and continued his criminal conduct. He was arrested for raping a 12-year-old girl, but managed to escape to North Carolina in a stolen car. There he met a 17-year-old girl and married for the fourth time. She turned him in to the police and Gaskins was convicted of statutory rape. He served six years in prison and was paroled in November 1968.
« Bad feelings, exasperating and annoying «
Donald Gaskins suffered from what he described as ” exasperating and bothersome feelings “, which he claimed drove him to commit crimes. He was rediscovered with those feelings in September 1969, when he picked up a young woman on a highway in North Carolina.
The young woman mocked Gaskins when he proposed to have sex. Gaskins beat her unconscious, then raped, sodomized and tortured her. While still alive, she dumped her body in a swamp, in which she drowned.
This brutal act was what Gaskins later described as ” a bout of bad feelings “, which haunted him throughout his life. He finally figured out how to satisfy his impulses and from then on that was the engine of his life. He developed his skill as a torturer, often keeping his mutilated victims alive for days. As time passed, his depraved mind grew darker and more horrible. He practiced cannibalism, often eating severed parts of his victims while forcing them to watch or participate in the food.
Relieve ” bad feelings”
Donald Gaskins preferred female victims, but that didn’t stop him from attacking men. He later claimed that up to 1975 he had killed more than 80 boys and girls that he encountered on the highways of North Carolina. He looked forward to her “bad feelings” because he was satisfied that he could alleviate them through torture and murder. He considered the murders of him on the highway as a weekend diversion, but considered ” serious murders ” Those in which he attacked people he knew personally.
Those serious murders included his 15-year-old niece, Janice Kirby, and her friend Patricia Alsobrook. In November 1970 he offered to drive them home from a bar, but actually took them to an abandoned house where he raped, beat and eventually drowned them. His next serious murder of hers was that of 20-year-old Martha Dicks, who was attracted to Gaskins and accompanied him to her job at an auto repair shop. She was also the first African-American victim of hers.
In 1973, Gaskins bought an old hearse and told the people at the bar he attended that he needed the vehicle to transport all the people he had killed to his private cemetery. This occurred in Prospect, South Carolina, where he lived with his wife and his child. In the city he had a reputation for being hotheaded, but not really dangerous. People thought he was mentally disturbed, but some liked him and considered him a friend.
One of these cases was that of Doreen Dempsey. Dempsey, 23, a single mother of a two-year-old girl and pregnant with her second child, decided to leave, accepting a ride from her friend Gaskins to the bus station. But Gaskins took her to a wooded area, raped and killed her; then he raped and sodomized her daughter. After killing the girl he buried them both together.
The accomplices; his mistake
In 1975 Gaskins was 42 years old and already a grandfather; he had been killing constantly for six years. He was unscathed up to that point because he never involved any other accomplices in his highway killings. But he changed his criminal ways after he murdered three people whose truck he had broken down. Gaskins needed help disposing of the bodies and asked ex-con Walter Neely for help. Neely drove the victims’ truck to the Gaskins garage, where Donald painted it so he could sell it.
That same year, Gaskins was paid $1,500 to kill Silas Yates, a wealthy Florence County farmer. Suzanne Kipper, a spiteful ex-girlfriend, hired Gaskins to assassinate Silas Yates. John Powell and John Owens were involved by handling communication between Kipper and Gaskins and arranged the murder. On February 12, Diane Neely, Walter’s wife, who also participated in the crime, said she had vehicle trouble getting Yates out of her house. Gaskins kidnapped and murdered Yates while Powell and Owens looked on; the three buried his body.
Shortly thereafter, Diane Neely and her boyfriend, ex-con Avery Howard, attempted to blackmail Gaskins for $5,000 not to report him. Gaskins disposed of them without undue trouble when they met to give them the money. Meanwhile, Gaskins continued to kill and torture other people he knew personally, such as 13-year-old Kim Ghelkins, who sexually rejected him.
Not knowing Gaskins’ background, Johnny Knight and Dennis Bellamy attempted to rob his shop; they were killed and buried alongside other locals that Gaskins had previously killed. Again, Pee Wee asked Walter Neely for help in burying them. Gaskins obviously believed that Neely was a trusted friend, and showed him the graves of the other victims he had buried there.
how it was discovered
Meanwhile, the investigation into the disappearance of Kim Ghelkins was turning up leads pointing to Gaskins. Using a search warrant, authorities searched Gaskins’ apartment and discovered Kim Ghelkins’ clothing. He was prosecuted and remained in jail awaiting trial.
While Gaskins was in jail, and therefore unable to influence Walter Neely, the police questioned his accomplice. Walter Neely broke down during questioning and led police to Gaskins’ private cemetery, on land he owned in Prospect. Police discovered the bodies of eight of his victims, including Howard, Diane Neely, Knight and Bellamy, plus Dempsey and his son. On April 27, 1976, Donald Gaskins and Walter Neely were charged with eight murders. Gaskins’ attempts to appear as an innocent victim failed, and on May 24 a jury found him guilty of Bellamy’s murder. He was sentenced to death. He later confessed to the other seven murders.
sentenced to death
In November 1976 his sentence was commuted to seven consecutive life sentences, after the United States Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty in South Carolina was unconstitutional. During the following years Gaskins was treated well by the other inmates, probably due to his reputation as a ruthless killer.
The death penalty was reinstated in South Carolina in 1978. This change in law did not affect Gaskins until he was found guilty of murdering Rudolph Tyner, a fellow prisoner who was on death row awaiting execution. Rudolph Tyner had been convicted of murdering an elderly couple, Bill and Myrtle Moon. Myrtle Moon’s son hired Gaskins to assassinate Tyner, and after several failed attempts Gaskins managed to kill him with a homemade bomb, made from a radio that he had planted explosives in. Now dubbed ” the worst guy in America ,” Gaskins was once again sentenced to death.
In an attempt to prevent his execution, Gaskins confessed to further murders. If his claims had been true, he would have become the worst murderer in South Carolina history. He admitted to murdering 13-year-old Peggy Cuttino, the daughter of a prominent South Carolina family. William Pierce had already been convicted of the crime and sentenced to life in prison. Authorities were unable to corroborate the details of Gaskins’ confession and rejected it, claiming he did so to attract media attention.
During the last months of his life, Gaskins, together with the writer Wilton Earle, wrote his book Final Truth , which is actually his memoir. In the book, which was published in 1993, Gaskins talks about the murders and his feeling that something was wrong with him. As the date of his execution approached, he became more reflective about his life, about the reason for his murders, and about his appointment with death.
The execution of Donald Gaskins
On the day scheduled for his execution, Gaskins slit his wrists in an effort to postpone the execution. However, unlike what happened in 1976 when his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, this time he could not escape execution. He had his wrists stitched up and he was executed as scheduled.
It will probably never be known whether Gaskins’ anecdotes in Final Truth were true or fabricated, in his desire to be known as one of the bloodiest serial killers in American history. He claimed to have killed more than 100 people, though he never provided any evidence or information on the location of most of the bodies.
Sources
Gaskins, Donald H. Final Truth: The Autobiography of a Serial Killer Editor Wilton Earle. 1992.
Gregg, Wildred, Lane, Brian. The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers . 1992. archive.org/details/encyclopediaofse00lane/
Greg, Charlotte. Evil Serial Killers: In the Minds of Monsters . New York City, Foulsham & Co Ltd. 2005.
