July 26, 2021 • 32 mins
Jim struggles to finish his book while Pee Wee sits on death row. The Beaty's reflect on how Pee Wee impacted their lives.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Pee Wee Gaskins implicated Jim Batty in the nineteen eighty
two assassination of death row inmate Rudolph Tyner. When poison
snuck into the prison didn't work, Gaskin's conjum into mailing
him fifty feet a wire that he used to detonate
the bomb that blew off Tyner's head. Mortified at his
(00:26):
unwinning involvement in the murder, denied from ever communicating with
Peewee again, and concern for his family, Jim ditched the
book he was writing about Peewee, and the family moved
from South Carolina for a fresh start. As the babies
began this new phase of their lives, Peewee sat on
(00:47):
death Row awaiting his fate.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Peewey was a proponent of the death penalty, believe it
or not, except his own.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
And when that first bolt hit him, she jumped out
of her seat and screen.
Speaker 4 (01:09):
Just grand slow, but the grand quiet.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I tell you, pee Wee, there's nobody's frian.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
From iHeartRadio and doghouse Pictures.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
This is pee Wee. Gashins was not my friend. My
name is Jim Batty.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
And I'm Jeff Keating the pee Wee saga left a
full impression on everyone in the Batty family. Jim was
nearly finished with the manuscript about the Life and Times
(01:53):
of pee Wee Gaskins when he heard the shocking news
about pee Wee's final murder.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I learned from the newspaper that Phebe Gaston's had committed
this murder of Rudolph Heiner, and quite frankly, my first
thought was whole, there goes my manuscript. I somehow always
wanted to see some good or something worthwhile in Gaston's himself,
(02:20):
and I spent so many hours with him finding out
that there were human traits that no one ever mentioned
or ever talked about. So when I heard what had happened,
I realized I would never get to visit him again.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Jim was barred from visiting the prison for a second
time in his life. The first was as a child
when two inmates killed a prison captain in a failed
attempt to assassinate his grandpa Wilson, the prison warden. The
second as a forty two year old professor, when pee
Wee implicated him in the murderer of Rudolph Tyner. These
(03:03):
events weighed heavily on Jim, and in spite of Anita's encouragement,
he didn't have the heart to finish the book.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
I said, it just looks like the way I wanted
to go with the book, I can't and here he's
murdered again. And she really was very consoling, that she
always has been with this entire project. But we discussed
that and she said, oh no, the book, that's not over.
But I did put it aside.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Not only did Jim put the manuscript on the shelf,
but he and Anita decided it was time to move.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
We visited Atlanta every Christmas and loved it, and we
worked to Atlanta.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
I worked at Georgia Tech almost right away in their
grant division.
Speaker 6 (03:57):
I wrote grants all my adult life. It was It's
just something that I knew how to do.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I taught to the freshman English classes and the wonderful Western
Lit class. I think they called it English two to
oh one. Those were the only three courses that I
taught at Georgia State, always console my students and telling
them that they were not the lowest form on the
campus of the hard Times instructure. I left Georgia State
(04:27):
to teach it a wonderful place called It was Budlea
Heights Bible College then and it became Budle Heights University.
But that's the reason I stopped teaching at Georgia State.
I had a full time tenured job at Budle Heights.
Speaker 7 (04:44):
I did poverty work all my life. So we went
to the Open Door Community, which is legendarily historic, and
it's opening up Atlanta to homelessness as an issue, and
they're offering shelter.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
A bitter winter day in teen eighty five, proof life changing.
Speaker 5 (05:04):
We were volunteering at the Open Door Community on a Saturday,
taking our children to do their community duty. The mother
walked in and she had this blond, blue eyed baby
in her arms. So I just reached out and she
thrust him into my arms. He was dripping wet with
no diaper, but he was young. I couldn't tell how
(05:27):
old he was. He looked old enough to be walking,
but he couldn't walk because he hadn't learned.
Speaker 6 (05:32):
And he smiled the whole time.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
It was cold, his eyes were running, his roomy, it
was putting on his ears, and it was freezing cold
that day.
Speaker 6 (05:41):
It had been nine degrees a night.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
She asked me to come over and she puts him
out to me to take and I took him, and
he smelled like a urinal and was putting his little
ears and his big blue eyes were so gorgeous. But
there's running those jes a mesh.
Speaker 5 (06:03):
So when she got ready to leave, she grabbed him,
took him out, tied him in a metal stroller with
a rope of rags, and he was going back out
in this bitter cold, freezing weather with no cap, no scarf,
no gloves, nothing, and his little hands were red, his
face was windburned.
Speaker 6 (06:23):
From the cold.
Speaker 5 (06:24):
And he reached back, not at me, but you know
the warmth, I'm sure, and she slapped him and said
bad boy.
Speaker 6 (06:31):
And I just stood there weeping. I found myself looking.
Speaker 5 (06:36):
For this little mom and baby on the streets, and
so I called the TV station and said, you got
to do something about this baby. This mother, the baby's
gonna die out in this weather, and unknownst to me,
they called Defects, and I'd called Defects too, and Defects
took custody of him and called me and said you
put your money where your mouth is. We have a
(06:57):
baby and we need you to take him now tonight.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
And Anita called me. I was at Georgia State working.
She said, can we have a baby this weekend? And
I said, I don't know, but I'll certainly give it
a try. And she said, that's not what I mean.
So I ride my motorcycle under the driveway and our
little house on Moor's Mill Road, and I opened the
door and here comes this little toddler toward me, and
(07:24):
he puts out his little arms when he gets to me,
and I picked him up, and I remember my grave,
his little hot hand on the back of my neck.
And I walked into the living room and said to
the worker there who had brought him, holy shit. And
(07:49):
sure enough he never left. And we immediately got into
the adoption track.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Adopting a homeless child fired and changed Jim and Anita.
While looking to save a toddler from the freezing streets,
Anita met members of an ad hoc group formed by
Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young after seventeen people on the street
froze to death in nineteen eighty one. This group soon
(08:20):
became the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, and
Jim and Anita were the first two people hired to
run the nonprofit leadership positions they held for over thirty years.
As the nonprofits executive director, Anita opened the doors wide
to those others cast aside. Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young
(08:44):
said Anita didn't just adopt a child, She adopted thousands
of people whom she accepted responsibility for. Jim worked for
the Task Force, taught at the Heights, and returned to
his passion as a writer. He authored a faith based
(09:06):
English grammar book called Sacred Ground that he used to
teach adults in preparation for GED exams.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
I learned through Peewee an entire level of society that
I didn't know anything about, and then from there we
grew into our contact with homeless people. I didn't dream
that people lived like this, and I didn't dream that
there would be a myriad of our society who are
(09:38):
totally left out. But I learned of a world of
people that I would have never been introduced to. Had
it not been for those interviews with Pee.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Wee Gaskins, letting go of the book and letting go
of the story would be difficult for Jim. Course, there
was a lesson Jim Batty learned through his fifty plus
interviews with the murderer dubbed the meanest man in America.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Pee Wee. Yes, this was nobody's friend. I've written that
(10:32):
so many people in South Carolina, where I grew up,
loved the sizzle of the electric chair. Pee Wee did.
He believed that people deserve to die for things that
they did, and he of course proved that with his
own behavior. Pee Wee was a proponent of the death penalty,
believe it or not. Except his own he of course
(10:55):
was against that.
Speaker 8 (10:56):
Ryal brie a bye like a chicken.
Speaker 5 (11:00):
Mom was kind of right for the pigot.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Shave his head and apply the jim oh the.
Speaker 9 (11:06):
Lever, sell him the hell.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Pee Wee Gaskins murdered fourteen people. His victims were mostly
poor with little education. They were friends, lovers, carnival workers,
crew members from his burglary ring, and murder for hire.
Eight of his victims were women, and most of them
(11:37):
under twenty five years old. Janus Kirby and Patty Alsbrook
were beaten to death. Peewee poisoned Clyde Dix and threw
her body on the side of the road. He drowned
pregnant Dorian Dempsey and her two year old biracial daughter Robin.
He shot dead as friend Johnny Cellars. He stabbed Jesse Judy,
(12:00):
supposedly the love of his life. He killed Barnwell Yates
and a murder for hire. He stabbed Diane Bellamy and
her boyfriend Avery Howard with a campbell soup knife. Peeweek
killed Kim Gelkins with that same knife. He shot Dennis
Bellamy and his brother Johnny Knight, and finally he blew
(12:22):
up Rudolph Tyner in prison with a handmade bomb. Police
discovered that pee Wee Gaskins murdered these victims while they
were searching for Kim Gelkins. He was a liar and
a killer, and while he avoided the death sentence for
murdering thirteen friends, family and theft ring members, he was
(12:45):
a dead man walking for killing Rudolph Tyner. And right
before he was put to death, it was reported that
Donald Peewee Gaskins tried to commit suicide by slashing his
arms about two twenty four hours before his slated execution.
He was found unconscious but alive and received twenty stitches.
(13:09):
Here's Brenda Payton Chase. She interviewed Peewee's sun for the
local News and was chosen to join a pool of
witnesses for the execution.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
In nineteen ninety one, I was working at the Florence
Morning News. We found out that I was going to
get to witness the execution maybe a couple of weeks beforehand.
We didn't have a lot of notice, so that's when
we really started ramping up the coverage and kind of
going back and reviewing all of the different cases that
he was involved with.
Speaker 10 (13:39):
By by by a Chicket people.
Speaker 9 (13:42):
I was kind of right my opinion.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
The night of the execution. I can still see a
lot of that night in my mind because we met
at the very front of the Central Correctional Center in Columbia,
South Carolina.
Speaker 11 (14:00):
Rowdy crowd of about four hundred people in favor of
the death penalty came to the Broad River Correctional Institution
to cheer pee Wee Gaskin's death. But some had personal
reasons to come, like family members of some of Gaskin's
murder victims.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Dennis Bellamy, Johnny Knights, and dian neely Wire our sister
and brothers and made I killed a long time ago,
so good night.
Speaker 6 (14:25):
I ain't gonna bring them back.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
It was midnight or so. We met at the front
and then they loaded us all onto a van and
we were driven back. It felt like about a mile.
We were driven to the very back where they housed
the electric chair at the time. We had to sign
(14:56):
these forms and they put us in this room and
it was almost like like little miniature movie theater kind
of a venue. There were three or four rows of seating,
and I was on the second row, and the curtains
were drawn at the time, and then all of a sudden,
the curtains opened and this chair is just sitting there,
and it was kind of ominous at the time.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
South Carolina's electric chair was purchased in nineteen twelve. It's
made of oak and copper and is the size of
a standard rocking chair. Over the past hundred years, it
has killed more than two hundred and fifty people, including
two women and a fourteen year old boy.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
After we were seated, they brought him in.
Speaker 11 (15:47):
A much smaller crowd gathered outside the governor's mansion for
a candlelight vigil against the death penalty.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
And there were three or four employees who brought him
in to the room. And it was amazing because at
that point they had shaved his head, and he had
put on a lot of weight in jail over the years,
and he kind of looked like a grandpa. It was
kind of like, Oh my gosh, this man couldn't hurt anybody.
What are they doing? And he kind of shuffled in
because they had him in handcuffs and chains and he
(16:18):
still had some bandages on his wrist where he had
tried to kill himself. And they put him in the
chair and I've always wondered to this day if they
had given him some type of sedative because he seemed
way too calm or relaxed.
Speaker 11 (16:35):
But no last minute stays came through, and Pee Wee
Gaskins was strapped into the electric chair.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
And his attorney sat right in front of me Kelly,
and he gave her a little thumbs up sign like
I'm okay, it's okay, because she was visibly upset and
she was just trying to hold it together.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
When asked if he had any last words, Pee Wee said,
I'll let my lawyers talk for me. I'm ready to go,
And then.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
They put the covering over his head and started attaching
the peace that went on top that was going to
electrocute him. When they covered his face, she really became
very upset, and I found the reaction of her more
disturbing than what was going on with him, because she
(17:30):
had worked with him for years trying to get him
off and just get it commuted to a life sentence.
They left the room, and I believe there were three
short vaults of electricity that lasted seconds. The first vault
of electricity went into him, the body does kind of
(17:51):
reflex even though he was strapped down, and then it
was like all the breath went out of him. And
then I believe they do two more like volts of
electricity just to make sure it's complete, and there was
(18:11):
no reaction at that, and then they came in and
pronounced him dead.
Speaker 12 (18:24):
Electricity was turned on to the electric chair at one four,
that turned off at one o six. He was pronounced
dead at one ten. We have carried out this execution
with as much humanity and dignity as possible.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
I think one of the most dramatic things for me
and the most disturbing. I can still see it to
this day. His attorney, Kelly, was right in front of me,
and when that first vault hit him and she saw
the reaction of him. She jumped out of her seat
and screamed and then faced away to the wall. She
wouldn't look anymore, and that was.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Probably not All witnesses were required to sign off on
the death certificate and then driven back to the prison entrance.
In South Carolina, executed inmates are cremated, then offered to
any interested next of ken. If not, they are interred
on prison grounds. The jeering applause from spectators as his
(19:24):
body was driven away seemed to end the saga that
would forever leave its mark on the state. Pee Wee
Gaskin's ashes were claimed by his daughter and scattered near
prospects South Carolina. Jim and Anita moved their family to
(19:55):
South Carolina in nineteen ninety one, nearly a decade before
Pewe was executed. The day of Peewee's execution, they were
out of town.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Anita and I were visiting our son Frank, in New
York City, and we happened to read a New York Times,
not knowing that the execution had taken place the day before,
and the left hand column of the first page of
the New York Times had an article about in the
(20:27):
state having executed him, and the reason that he made
the front page of the New York Times is that
he was one of those rare and unbelievable instances where
a white person was executed for killing a black person
(20:48):
in America. This is highly unusual, rare, but it happened.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
That nineteen ninety one New York Times article is entitled
rarity for US executions white dyes for killing black Of
the nearly sixteen thousand executions carried out in the United States,
only thirty have been whites who killed blacks. The paper reported,
in the history of South Carolina, no white person had
(21:16):
been executed for killing a black person since eighteen eighty.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
He loved making the front page, but not for the
reason that it really happened.
Speaker 5 (21:28):
The ultimate irony is he experienced the justice of the
state on him for killing an African American teenager.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
The Pee Wee saga was the biggest news story in
South Carolina between nineteen seventy five and nineteen eighty three,
and then again for the month leading up to his execution.
The whole saga impacted many people. In this podcast, Holly
Gatling had been a young police reporter for the Flolaurance Morning.
Speaker 13 (22:00):
News sometimes think this story is behind me. And then
I got an email from the husband of Dorian Dempsey's
half sister, and this was a few months ago.
Speaker 14 (22:15):
I really felt that we needed to find out where
Dorian was buried, and there was no information about that anywhere.
So I spent a few years kind of looking into
it a little bit.
Speaker 13 (22:27):
And that really remains. Where is Dorian's body and the baby.
They can't find a grave, They can't find a paper
trail for where the remains may be, where they cremated?
Speaker 14 (22:40):
Are they in a funeral like I would really like
to find the resting place?
Speaker 1 (22:45):
The names I think blaren Cecil Chandler was a TV
reporter in Myrtle Beach.
Speaker 15 (22:52):
This is something you read about our watch on television,
but you don't actually think it happens in your area.
Let me tell you, this happened in Florence County and
it was a.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
Real deal for a man that killed more than a
dozen people.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
And the book Margaret O'Shea was in her twenties and
a newspaper reporter in the late in eighteen seventies.
Speaker 9 (23:13):
Even though bringing it up again is hurtful to some people,
it offers closure to others. It's definitely not a glorification
of a criminal, but something that kind of puts into
historical context why things happen sooner or later down the road.
Eventually we may understand it as a piece of a
(23:34):
bigger puzzle. But my assignment was that.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
One Ira Parnell was twenty two years old when he
searched Peewee's burial ground.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
We were not able to give pee Wee to death
penalty for all these other approaches to be killed because
of the strangeness of the law at the time, but
since he did do a murder for hire of a
convicted murderer himself in prison, we were able to give
him the deathly in executed. So justice grand slow, but
it does grant. That was quite a tale.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Dick Harpoutlian was the lawyer who sought the death penalty
for Rudolph Tyner's murder.
Speaker 15 (24:16):
If you're doing your job, if it becomes personal, you
need another guy of work to do, I'll be frank
with you. His execution wasn't something I'd written down. I mean,
I prosecuted the case, I had been invited to go
to the execution. I just thought that was ghoulish.
Speaker 16 (24:29):
And I wasn't going to do that.
Speaker 15 (24:31):
So Chief Stewart calls me and says, pee Wee's dead.
We've just been executed. Next morning, the world went back
to normal.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
As the world went back to normal, Jim and Anita
were deeply involved working for homeless and underserved people, and
the Pee Wee story would forever remain a family conversation.
Here's Jim Beatty Jr. Talking with his dad at sister Lisa.
Speaker 17 (25:06):
There was a moment Dad described to me the knife
going through the neck and throat of one of the
victims and how it gave as it went through. It
may have been the torso I can't remember, but there
was something about the description of how pee Wee killed
(25:27):
that particular victim that had a great deal of impact
on me.
Speaker 7 (25:32):
That was Jesse Judy.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
He stabbed her in an abdomen and lifted up Yay.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
I could have gone the rest of my life without
hearing that one.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Mark Beatty is one of the older children in the family.
Here he reminds his parents of a particular time in
Jim's home office.
Speaker 10 (25:51):
One time it was late, it was dark. You're at
the desk and the lamp was there, and I walked
up and you were like, how about this, yes, and
you plopped down a black and white and it was
a police photo of I'm not sure which young woman
it was. Now he had poured acid on her. It
was almost unrecognizable as a person. And I think he
(26:14):
just kind of wanted to joke me a little bit,
you know what I mean. I was in college.
Speaker 7 (26:17):
It was okay.
Speaker 10 (26:18):
It wasn't like I was eight.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Well.
Speaker 7 (26:20):
One of the things that happened was the younger three
needed more protection because y'all were older. And I'm not
sure who dared him to look at autopsy photograss, because
you remember Dad's desk, and he locked most of those
horrible things in his desk. I never looked at it.
Speaker 17 (26:37):
I knew they were there, I never looked.
Speaker 7 (26:39):
Well, somehow the little ones got hold of it. The
younger ones were scared to death. The pee we They
pretended they could seem little tiny hands at the windows
off the time. So but it wasn't because Dad didn't
protect everybody. He protected us extremely well.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
We began this season of our true crime podcast series
called Crime Traveler. Jim was back editing the manuscript about
pee Wee Gaskins there were so many stories to tell,
so many characters to introduce, and so many facts to
flesh out, that Jim and Anita talked through it regularly.
(27:21):
Jim wrote and rewrote chapter after chapter with number two
pencils on yellow legal notepads. Anita typed and retyped each page.
Every decision about the story was reviewed together. How to
unfold the characters and how they talked, how the murders
were tied together, and how much detail to give, how
(27:44):
much to depend on Peewee's own storytelling, and how much
to rely on legal documents and Jim's own research.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
The characters around Peewee bring to mind the various characters
in Charles day Dickens, the marvelous way that he has
depicted so many different people. And I saw or felt
as I was writing the same kind of thing with
(28:14):
these characters that surrounded Peewee. Everybody from Johnny Sellers to
Dennis Bellamy to Diane Bellamy neely.
Speaker 16 (28:24):
My, Jim is so wonderful in capturing everything about Peewee,
not just the horror, not just the seemingly emotionless killer,
but also an aspect of Peewee that shouldn't be just
ignored in discussing him as a mass murder. He didn't
(28:44):
redeem him because he wasn't redeemable, but he did bring
those in and I think that's part of the genius
of the way Jim wrote that book.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
The attention given to the victims and their intimate moments
became part of Jim and Anita's own relationship. They discussed
the people Jim wrote about in this book. He had
his favorites.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Johnny Sellers, he was a cut above all the others.
He was the one that I thought had most promise.
And I also liked Jesse Judy because she was based
on Anita. Anita was Jesse Judy. Johnny Sellers was Carl
Seller's older brother who was never in trouble with the
law and went to work for pee Wee stealing Deelan's
(29:30):
pee Wee would say, and just walked out one night
to his death. Yeah, I beg your pardon. That was
on a Sunday around nooon, kill him right before he
killed Jesse.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
So much time spent thinking about these real life victims
became a focal point in Jim's view of the world.
His voice in this podcast gives them a humanity that
television and newspaper reporters didn't have the airtime or printed
words to develop. Fellow professor encouraged Jim to finish polishing
(30:02):
his manuscript, which he did as he battled with lymphoma
and began this podcast. His friend encouraged him to send
it to a publisher. It sits ready to be read.
The story born from the interviews between these two men,
Peewee and Jim.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
The day that I didn't return the radio to Pewee's
mother as I promised I would, I was going to
make a talk that night at coastal to somebody about
the book. The people waited for the book and wanted it,
and surely, here enough, forty years later, is going to be.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Our podcast has been the story of how a murderer
influenced a writer. While Jim's battle with cancer was going well,
he was diagnosed with COVID pneumonia and hospitalized two days
after his eighty fifth birthday in the spring of twenty
twenty one. Three weeks later, with his family at his bedside,
(31:07):
he heard the first episode of Pee Week. Gaskins was
not my friend, just a few hours before he passed away.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
I think that those two years that I was with
Pee Wee helped cement what I consider to be the
theme of our family through it all. At the end
of the day, when the sun goes down, the love
and I can hardly say it without crying. The love
(31:42):
that we have for each other is constant and will
remain always. We are a family whose foundation is love.
Speaker 8 (32:06):
Pewey Gaskins was Not My Friend as a joint production
from iHeartRadio and Doghouse Pictures, produced and hosted by Jeff Keening.
Executive producers are Courtney De Freese and Noel Brown. Written
by Jim Roberts, Courtney De Freese and Terry James, Edit,
mix and sound design by Jeremiah Koulani Prescott music composed
by Diamond Street Productions, Spencer Garne and Ian Newberry. Special
(32:28):
thanks to Jim and Anita Baby. Additional thanks to the
University of South Carolina, Moving Image Research Collections and the
University of South Carolina.
Pee Wee Gaskins implicated Jim Batty in the nineteen eighty
two assassination of death row inmate Rudolph Tyner. When poison
snuck into the prison didn't work, Gaskin's conjum into mailing
him fifty feet a wire that he used to detonate
the bomb that blew off Tyner's head. Mortified at his
(00:26):
unwinning involvement in the murder, denied from ever communicating with
Peewee again, and concern for his family, Jim ditched the
book he was writing about Peewee, and the family moved
from South Carolina for a fresh start. As the babies
began this new phase of their lives, Peewee sat on
(00:47):
death Row awaiting his fate.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
Peewey was a proponent of the death penalty, believe it
or not, except his own.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
And when that first bolt hit him, she jumped out
of her seat and screen.
Speaker 4 (01:09):
Just grand slow, but the grand quiet.
Speaker 2 (01:12):
I tell you, pee Wee, there's nobody's frian.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
From iHeartRadio and doghouse Pictures.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
This is pee Wee. Gashins was not my friend. My
name is Jim Batty.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
And I'm Jeff Keating the pee Wee saga left a
full impression on everyone in the Batty family. Jim was
nearly finished with the manuscript about the Life and Times
(01:53):
of pee Wee Gaskins when he heard the shocking news
about pee Wee's final murder.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
I learned from the newspaper that Phebe Gaston's had committed
this murder of Rudolph Heiner, and quite frankly, my first
thought was whole, there goes my manuscript. I somehow always
wanted to see some good or something worthwhile in Gaston's himself,
(02:20):
and I spent so many hours with him finding out
that there were human traits that no one ever mentioned
or ever talked about. So when I heard what had happened,
I realized I would never get to visit him again.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Jim was barred from visiting the prison for a second
time in his life. The first was as a child
when two inmates killed a prison captain in a failed
attempt to assassinate his grandpa Wilson, the prison warden. The
second as a forty two year old professor, when pee
Wee implicated him in the murderer of Rudolph Tyner. These
(03:03):
events weighed heavily on Jim, and in spite of Anita's encouragement,
he didn't have the heart to finish the book.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
I said, it just looks like the way I wanted
to go with the book, I can't and here he's
murdered again. And she really was very consoling, that she
always has been with this entire project. But we discussed
that and she said, oh no, the book, that's not over.
But I did put it aside.
Speaker 1 (03:36):
Not only did Jim put the manuscript on the shelf,
but he and Anita decided it was time to move.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
We visited Atlanta every Christmas and loved it, and we
worked to Atlanta.
Speaker 5 (03:52):
I worked at Georgia Tech almost right away in their
grant division.
Speaker 6 (03:57):
I wrote grants all my adult life. It was It's
just something that I knew how to do.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
I taught to the freshman English classes and the wonderful Western
Lit class. I think they called it English two to
oh one. Those were the only three courses that I
taught at Georgia State, always console my students and telling
them that they were not the lowest form on the
campus of the hard Times instructure. I left Georgia State
(04:27):
to teach it a wonderful place called It was Budlea
Heights Bible College then and it became Budle Heights University.
But that's the reason I stopped teaching at Georgia State.
I had a full time tenured job at Budle Heights.
Speaker 7 (04:44):
I did poverty work all my life. So we went
to the Open Door Community, which is legendarily historic, and
it's opening up Atlanta to homelessness as an issue, and
they're offering shelter.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
A bitter winter day in teen eighty five, proof life changing.
Speaker 5 (05:04):
We were volunteering at the Open Door Community on a Saturday,
taking our children to do their community duty. The mother
walked in and she had this blond, blue eyed baby
in her arms. So I just reached out and she
thrust him into my arms. He was dripping wet with
no diaper, but he was young. I couldn't tell how
(05:27):
old he was. He looked old enough to be walking,
but he couldn't walk because he hadn't learned.
Speaker 6 (05:32):
And he smiled the whole time.
Speaker 5 (05:34):
It was cold, his eyes were running, his roomy, it
was putting on his ears, and it was freezing cold
that day.
Speaker 6 (05:41):
It had been nine degrees a night.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
She asked me to come over and she puts him
out to me to take and I took him, and
he smelled like a urinal and was putting his little
ears and his big blue eyes were so gorgeous. But
there's running those jes a mesh.
Speaker 5 (06:03):
So when she got ready to leave, she grabbed him,
took him out, tied him in a metal stroller with
a rope of rags, and he was going back out
in this bitter cold, freezing weather with no cap, no scarf,
no gloves, nothing, and his little hands were red, his
face was windburned.
Speaker 6 (06:23):
From the cold.
Speaker 5 (06:24):
And he reached back, not at me, but you know
the warmth, I'm sure, and she slapped him and said
bad boy.
Speaker 6 (06:31):
And I just stood there weeping. I found myself looking.
Speaker 5 (06:36):
For this little mom and baby on the streets, and
so I called the TV station and said, you got
to do something about this baby. This mother, the baby's
gonna die out in this weather, and unknownst to me,
they called Defects, and I'd called Defects too, and Defects
took custody of him and called me and said you
put your money where your mouth is. We have a
(06:57):
baby and we need you to take him now tonight.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
And Anita called me. I was at Georgia State working.
She said, can we have a baby this weekend? And
I said, I don't know, but I'll certainly give it
a try. And she said, that's not what I mean.
So I ride my motorcycle under the driveway and our
little house on Moor's Mill Road, and I opened the
door and here comes this little toddler toward me, and
(07:24):
he puts out his little arms when he gets to me,
and I picked him up, and I remember my grave,
his little hot hand on the back of my neck.
And I walked into the living room and said to
the worker there who had brought him, holy shit. And
(07:49):
sure enough he never left. And we immediately got into
the adoption track.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
Adopting a homeless child fired and changed Jim and Anita.
While looking to save a toddler from the freezing streets,
Anita met members of an ad hoc group formed by
Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young after seventeen people on the street
froze to death in nineteen eighty one. This group soon
(08:20):
became the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless, and
Jim and Anita were the first two people hired to
run the nonprofit leadership positions they held for over thirty years.
As the nonprofits executive director, Anita opened the doors wide
to those others cast aside. Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young
(08:44):
said Anita didn't just adopt a child, She adopted thousands
of people whom she accepted responsibility for. Jim worked for
the Task Force, taught at the Heights, and returned to
his passion as a writer. He authored a faith based
(09:06):
English grammar book called Sacred Ground that he used to
teach adults in preparation for GED exams.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
I learned through Peewee an entire level of society that
I didn't know anything about, and then from there we
grew into our contact with homeless people. I didn't dream
that people lived like this, and I didn't dream that
there would be a myriad of our society who are
(09:38):
totally left out. But I learned of a world of
people that I would have never been introduced to. Had
it not been for those interviews with Pee.
Speaker 1 (09:50):
Wee Gaskins, letting go of the book and letting go
of the story would be difficult for Jim. Course, there
was a lesson Jim Batty learned through his fifty plus
interviews with the murderer dubbed the meanest man in America.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
Pee Wee. Yes, this was nobody's friend. I've written that
(10:32):
so many people in South Carolina, where I grew up,
loved the sizzle of the electric chair. Pee Wee did.
He believed that people deserve to die for things that
they did, and he of course proved that with his
own behavior. Pee Wee was a proponent of the death penalty,
believe it or not. Except his own he of course
(10:55):
was against that.
Speaker 8 (10:56):
Ryal brie a bye like a chicken.
Speaker 5 (11:00):
Mom was kind of right for the pigot.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Shave his head and apply the jim oh the.
Speaker 9 (11:06):
Lever, sell him the hell.
Speaker 1 (11:16):
Pee Wee Gaskins murdered fourteen people. His victims were mostly
poor with little education. They were friends, lovers, carnival workers,
crew members from his burglary ring, and murder for hire.
Eight of his victims were women, and most of them
(11:37):
under twenty five years old. Janus Kirby and Patty Alsbrook
were beaten to death. Peewee poisoned Clyde Dix and threw
her body on the side of the road. He drowned
pregnant Dorian Dempsey and her two year old biracial daughter Robin.
He shot dead as friend Johnny Cellars. He stabbed Jesse Judy,
(12:00):
supposedly the love of his life. He killed Barnwell Yates
and a murder for hire. He stabbed Diane Bellamy and
her boyfriend Avery Howard with a campbell soup knife. Peeweek
killed Kim Gelkins with that same knife. He shot Dennis
Bellamy and his brother Johnny Knight, and finally he blew
(12:22):
up Rudolph Tyner in prison with a handmade bomb. Police
discovered that pee Wee Gaskins murdered these victims while they
were searching for Kim Gelkins. He was a liar and
a killer, and while he avoided the death sentence for
murdering thirteen friends, family and theft ring members, he was
(12:45):
a dead man walking for killing Rudolph Tyner. And right
before he was put to death, it was reported that
Donald Peewee Gaskins tried to commit suicide by slashing his
arms about two twenty four hours before his slated execution.
He was found unconscious but alive and received twenty stitches.
(13:09):
Here's Brenda Payton Chase. She interviewed Peewee's sun for the
local News and was chosen to join a pool of
witnesses for the execution.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
In nineteen ninety one, I was working at the Florence
Morning News. We found out that I was going to
get to witness the execution maybe a couple of weeks beforehand.
We didn't have a lot of notice, so that's when
we really started ramping up the coverage and kind of
going back and reviewing all of the different cases that
he was involved with.
Speaker 10 (13:39):
By by by a Chicket people.
Speaker 9 (13:42):
I was kind of right my opinion.
Speaker 3 (13:45):
The night of the execution. I can still see a
lot of that night in my mind because we met
at the very front of the Central Correctional Center in Columbia,
South Carolina.
Speaker 11 (14:00):
Rowdy crowd of about four hundred people in favor of
the death penalty came to the Broad River Correctional Institution
to cheer pee Wee Gaskin's death. But some had personal
reasons to come, like family members of some of Gaskin's
murder victims.
Speaker 2 (14:13):
Dennis Bellamy, Johnny Knights, and dian neely Wire our sister
and brothers and made I killed a long time ago,
so good night.
Speaker 6 (14:25):
I ain't gonna bring them back.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
It was midnight or so. We met at the front
and then they loaded us all onto a van and
we were driven back. It felt like about a mile.
We were driven to the very back where they housed
the electric chair at the time. We had to sign
(14:56):
these forms and they put us in this room and
it was almost like like little miniature movie theater kind
of a venue. There were three or four rows of seating,
and I was on the second row, and the curtains
were drawn at the time, and then all of a sudden,
the curtains opened and this chair is just sitting there,
and it was kind of ominous at the time.
Speaker 1 (15:22):
South Carolina's electric chair was purchased in nineteen twelve. It's
made of oak and copper and is the size of
a standard rocking chair. Over the past hundred years, it
has killed more than two hundred and fifty people, including
two women and a fourteen year old boy.
Speaker 3 (15:42):
After we were seated, they brought him in.
Speaker 11 (15:47):
A much smaller crowd gathered outside the governor's mansion for
a candlelight vigil against the death penalty.
Speaker 3 (15:57):
And there were three or four employees who brought him
in to the room. And it was amazing because at
that point they had shaved his head, and he had
put on a lot of weight in jail over the years,
and he kind of looked like a grandpa. It was
kind of like, Oh my gosh, this man couldn't hurt anybody.
What are they doing? And he kind of shuffled in
because they had him in handcuffs and chains and he
(16:18):
still had some bandages on his wrist where he had
tried to kill himself. And they put him in the
chair and I've always wondered to this day if they
had given him some type of sedative because he seemed
way too calm or relaxed.
Speaker 11 (16:35):
But no last minute stays came through, and Pee Wee
Gaskins was strapped into the electric chair.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
And his attorney sat right in front of me Kelly,
and he gave her a little thumbs up sign like
I'm okay, it's okay, because she was visibly upset and
she was just trying to hold it together.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
When asked if he had any last words, Pee Wee said,
I'll let my lawyers talk for me. I'm ready to go,
And then.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
They put the covering over his head and started attaching
the peace that went on top that was going to
electrocute him. When they covered his face, she really became
very upset, and I found the reaction of her more
disturbing than what was going on with him, because she
(17:30):
had worked with him for years trying to get him
off and just get it commuted to a life sentence.
They left the room, and I believe there were three
short vaults of electricity that lasted seconds. The first vault
of electricity went into him, the body does kind of
(17:51):
reflex even though he was strapped down, and then it
was like all the breath went out of him. And
then I believe they do two more like volts of
electricity just to make sure it's complete, and there was
(18:11):
no reaction at that, and then they came in and
pronounced him dead.
Speaker 12 (18:24):
Electricity was turned on to the electric chair at one four,
that turned off at one o six. He was pronounced
dead at one ten. We have carried out this execution
with as much humanity and dignity as possible.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
I think one of the most dramatic things for me
and the most disturbing. I can still see it to
this day. His attorney, Kelly, was right in front of me,
and when that first vault hit him and she saw
the reaction of him. She jumped out of her seat
and screamed and then faced away to the wall. She
wouldn't look anymore, and that was.
Speaker 1 (19:01):
Probably not All witnesses were required to sign off on
the death certificate and then driven back to the prison entrance.
In South Carolina, executed inmates are cremated, then offered to
any interested next of ken. If not, they are interred
on prison grounds. The jeering applause from spectators as his
(19:24):
body was driven away seemed to end the saga that
would forever leave its mark on the state. Pee Wee
Gaskin's ashes were claimed by his daughter and scattered near
prospects South Carolina. Jim and Anita moved their family to
(19:55):
South Carolina in nineteen ninety one, nearly a decade before
Pewe was executed. The day of Peewee's execution, they were
out of town.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
Anita and I were visiting our son Frank, in New
York City, and we happened to read a New York Times,
not knowing that the execution had taken place the day before,
and the left hand column of the first page of
the New York Times had an article about in the
(20:27):
state having executed him, and the reason that he made
the front page of the New York Times is that
he was one of those rare and unbelievable instances where
a white person was executed for killing a black person
(20:48):
in America. This is highly unusual, rare, but it happened.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
That nineteen ninety one New York Times article is entitled
rarity for US executions white dyes for killing black Of
the nearly sixteen thousand executions carried out in the United States,
only thirty have been whites who killed blacks. The paper reported,
in the history of South Carolina, no white person had
(21:16):
been executed for killing a black person since eighteen eighty.
Speaker 2 (21:22):
He loved making the front page, but not for the
reason that it really happened.
Speaker 5 (21:28):
The ultimate irony is he experienced the justice of the
state on him for killing an African American teenager.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
The Pee Wee saga was the biggest news story in
South Carolina between nineteen seventy five and nineteen eighty three,
and then again for the month leading up to his execution.
The whole saga impacted many people. In this podcast, Holly
Gatling had been a young police reporter for the Flolaurance Morning.
Speaker 13 (22:00):
News sometimes think this story is behind me. And then
I got an email from the husband of Dorian Dempsey's
half sister, and this was a few months ago.
Speaker 14 (22:15):
I really felt that we needed to find out where
Dorian was buried, and there was no information about that anywhere.
So I spent a few years kind of looking into
it a little bit.
Speaker 13 (22:27):
And that really remains. Where is Dorian's body and the baby.
They can't find a grave, They can't find a paper
trail for where the remains may be, where they cremated?
Speaker 14 (22:40):
Are they in a funeral like I would really like
to find the resting place?
Speaker 1 (22:45):
The names I think blaren Cecil Chandler was a TV
reporter in Myrtle Beach.
Speaker 15 (22:52):
This is something you read about our watch on television,
but you don't actually think it happens in your area.
Let me tell you, this happened in Florence County and
it was a.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
Real deal for a man that killed more than a
dozen people.
Speaker 1 (23:05):
And the book Margaret O'Shea was in her twenties and
a newspaper reporter in the late in eighteen seventies.
Speaker 9 (23:13):
Even though bringing it up again is hurtful to some people,
it offers closure to others. It's definitely not a glorification
of a criminal, but something that kind of puts into
historical context why things happen sooner or later down the road.
Eventually we may understand it as a piece of a
(23:34):
bigger puzzle. But my assignment was that.
Speaker 1 (23:37):
One Ira Parnell was twenty two years old when he
searched Peewee's burial ground.
Speaker 4 (23:45):
We were not able to give pee Wee to death
penalty for all these other approaches to be killed because
of the strangeness of the law at the time, but
since he did do a murder for hire of a
convicted murderer himself in prison, we were able to give
him the deathly in executed. So justice grand slow, but
it does grant. That was quite a tale.
Speaker 1 (24:08):
Dick Harpoutlian was the lawyer who sought the death penalty
for Rudolph Tyner's murder.
Speaker 15 (24:16):
If you're doing your job, if it becomes personal, you
need another guy of work to do, I'll be frank
with you. His execution wasn't something I'd written down. I mean,
I prosecuted the case, I had been invited to go
to the execution. I just thought that was ghoulish.
Speaker 16 (24:29):
And I wasn't going to do that.
Speaker 15 (24:31):
So Chief Stewart calls me and says, pee Wee's dead.
We've just been executed. Next morning, the world went back
to normal.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
As the world went back to normal, Jim and Anita
were deeply involved working for homeless and underserved people, and
the Pee Wee story would forever remain a family conversation.
Here's Jim Beatty Jr. Talking with his dad at sister Lisa.
Speaker 17 (25:06):
There was a moment Dad described to me the knife
going through the neck and throat of one of the
victims and how it gave as it went through. It
may have been the torso I can't remember, but there
was something about the description of how pee Wee killed
(25:27):
that particular victim that had a great deal of impact
on me.
Speaker 7 (25:32):
That was Jesse Judy.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
He stabbed her in an abdomen and lifted up Yay.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
I could have gone the rest of my life without
hearing that one.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
Mark Beatty is one of the older children in the family.
Here he reminds his parents of a particular time in
Jim's home office.
Speaker 10 (25:51):
One time it was late, it was dark. You're at
the desk and the lamp was there, and I walked
up and you were like, how about this, yes, and
you plopped down a black and white and it was
a police photo of I'm not sure which young woman
it was. Now he had poured acid on her. It
was almost unrecognizable as a person. And I think he
(26:14):
just kind of wanted to joke me a little bit,
you know what I mean. I was in college.
Speaker 7 (26:17):
It was okay.
Speaker 10 (26:18):
It wasn't like I was eight.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Well.
Speaker 7 (26:20):
One of the things that happened was the younger three
needed more protection because y'all were older. And I'm not
sure who dared him to look at autopsy photograss, because
you remember Dad's desk, and he locked most of those
horrible things in his desk. I never looked at it.
Speaker 17 (26:37):
I knew they were there, I never looked.
Speaker 7 (26:39):
Well, somehow the little ones got hold of it. The
younger ones were scared to death. The pee we They
pretended they could seem little tiny hands at the windows
off the time. So but it wasn't because Dad didn't
protect everybody. He protected us extremely well.
Speaker 1 (26:59):
We began this season of our true crime podcast series
called Crime Traveler. Jim was back editing the manuscript about
pee Wee Gaskins there were so many stories to tell,
so many characters to introduce, and so many facts to
flesh out, that Jim and Anita talked through it regularly.
(27:21):
Jim wrote and rewrote chapter after chapter with number two
pencils on yellow legal notepads. Anita typed and retyped each page.
Every decision about the story was reviewed together. How to
unfold the characters and how they talked, how the murders
were tied together, and how much detail to give, how
(27:44):
much to depend on Peewee's own storytelling, and how much
to rely on legal documents and Jim's own research.
Speaker 2 (27:53):
The characters around Peewee bring to mind the various characters
in Charles day Dickens, the marvelous way that he has
depicted so many different people. And I saw or felt
as I was writing the same kind of thing with
(28:14):
these characters that surrounded Peewee. Everybody from Johnny Sellers to
Dennis Bellamy to Diane Bellamy neely.
Speaker 16 (28:24):
My, Jim is so wonderful in capturing everything about Peewee,
not just the horror, not just the seemingly emotionless killer,
but also an aspect of Peewee that shouldn't be just
ignored in discussing him as a mass murder. He didn't
(28:44):
redeem him because he wasn't redeemable, but he did bring
those in and I think that's part of the genius
of the way Jim wrote that book.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
The attention given to the victims and their intimate moments
became part of Jim and Anita's own relationship. They discussed
the people Jim wrote about in this book. He had
his favorites.
Speaker 2 (29:08):
Johnny Sellers, he was a cut above all the others.
He was the one that I thought had most promise.
And I also liked Jesse Judy because she was based
on Anita. Anita was Jesse Judy. Johnny Sellers was Carl
Seller's older brother who was never in trouble with the
law and went to work for pee Wee stealing Deelan's
(29:30):
pee Wee would say, and just walked out one night
to his death. Yeah, I beg your pardon. That was
on a Sunday around nooon, kill him right before he
killed Jesse.
Speaker 1 (29:41):
So much time spent thinking about these real life victims
became a focal point in Jim's view of the world.
His voice in this podcast gives them a humanity that
television and newspaper reporters didn't have the airtime or printed
words to develop. Fellow professor encouraged Jim to finish polishing
(30:02):
his manuscript, which he did as he battled with lymphoma
and began this podcast. His friend encouraged him to send
it to a publisher. It sits ready to be read.
The story born from the interviews between these two men,
Peewee and Jim.
Speaker 2 (30:24):
The day that I didn't return the radio to Pewee's
mother as I promised I would, I was going to
make a talk that night at coastal to somebody about
the book. The people waited for the book and wanted it,
and surely, here enough, forty years later, is going to be.
Speaker 1 (30:43):
Our podcast has been the story of how a murderer
influenced a writer. While Jim's battle with cancer was going well,
he was diagnosed with COVID pneumonia and hospitalized two days
after his eighty fifth birthday in the spring of twenty
twenty one. Three weeks later, with his family at his bedside,
(31:07):
he heard the first episode of Pee Week. Gaskins was
not my friend, just a few hours before he passed away.
Speaker 2 (31:19):
I think that those two years that I was with
Pee Wee helped cement what I consider to be the
theme of our family through it all. At the end
of the day, when the sun goes down, the love
and I can hardly say it without crying. The love
(31:42):
that we have for each other is constant and will
remain always. We are a family whose foundation is love.
Speaker 8 (32:06):
Pewey Gaskins was Not My Friend as a joint production
from iHeartRadio and Doghouse Pictures, produced and hosted by Jeff Keening.
Executive producers are Courtney De Freese and Noel Brown. Written
by Jim Roberts, Courtney De Freese and Terry James, Edit,
mix and sound design by Jeremiah Koulani Prescott music composed
by Diamond Street Productions, Spencer Garne and Ian Newberry. Special
(32:28):
thanks to Jim and Anita Baby. Additional thanks to the
University of South Carolina, Moving Image Research Collections and the
University of South Carolina.
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