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):
Peewee. Gaskins implicated Jim Batty in the two assassination of
death row inmate Rudolph Tyner. When poison snuck into the
prison didn't work, Gaskins Conjim into mailing him fifty ft
a wire that he used to detonate the bomb that
blew off Tyner's head. Mortified at his unwinning involvement in
(00:27):
the murder, denied from ever communicating with Peewee again, and
concerned 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 death Row awaiting
(00:49):
his fate. Peewee was a proponent of the death penalty,
believe it or not, except his own, and when that
first bolt hit him, she jumped out of her seat
and screen just grab slow. But the grand letter tell
(01:13):
you there's nobody's friend. From my heart radio and doghouse pictures,
this is is not my friend. My name is Jim
Batty and I'm Jeff Keating. The Peewee saga left a
(01:45):
full impression on everyone in the Beatty family. Jim was
nearly finished with the manuscript about the life and times
of Peewee Gaskins when he heard the shocking news about
Peewee's final murder. I learned from the newspaper that Phebe
Gastons had committed this murder of Rudolph Kiner, and quite frankly,
(02:08):
my first thought was, well, there goes my manuscript. I
somehow always wanted to see some good or something worthwhile
in Gaston's himself, 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
(02:31):
heard what had happened, I realized I would never get
to visit him again. Jim was barred from visiting the
prison for a second time in his life. The first
was as a child when two inmates killed the prison
captain in a failed attempt to assassinate his grandpa Wilson,
(02:51):
the prison warden. The second as a forty two year
old professor when pe We implicated him in the murder
of Rudolph Tyner. These events weighed heavily on Jim, and
in spite of Anita's encouragement, he didn't have the heart
to finish the book. I said, it just looks like
(03:15):
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.
We discussed that and she said, oh no, the book,
that's not over. But I did put it aside. Not
(03:36):
only did Jim put the manuscript on the shelf, but
he and Anita decided it was time to move. We
visited Atlanta every Christmas and loved it. We loved to Atlanta.
I worked at Georgia Tech on this right away in
their grant division. I wrote grants all my adult life.
(03:59):
It was just something that I knew how to do.
I taught to the freshman English classes and they wonderful
Western lived class. I think they called it English to
oh one. Those are the only three courses that I
taught at Georgia State, always console my students and telling
them that they were not in the lowest form on
(04:20):
the campus, the part times instructure. I left Georgia State
to teach it as a wonderful place called it was
people heightst Bible College then and it became university. But
that's the reason stop teaching at Georgia State. I had
a full time canue job at Bull Heights. I did
(04:44):
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 sheltering.
A bitter winter day in teen eight five, proof of
life changing. We were volunteering at the Open Door Community
(05:07):
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 old he was. He looked old enough to
(05:29):
be walking, but he couldn't walk because he hadn't learned.
And he smiled the whole time. It was cold. His
eyes were running his room me it. He was putting
on his ears, and it was freezing cold that day
had been nine degrees a night. She asked me to
come over and she puts him out to me to take,
(05:50):
and I took him, and he smelled like a urnal,
and he was putting his little ears and his big
blue eyes were so gorgeous, but there's running those jeff
A mesh. 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
(06:13):
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 wind burned from the cold. And he
reached back, not at me, but you know the warmth,
I'm sure, and she slapped him and said bad boy.
And I just stood there weeping. I found myself looking
(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 this weather, and unknownst to me, they
called Defects and I had called the Effects too, and
Defects took custody of him and called me and said
you put your money where your mouth is. We have
(06:56):
a baby and we need you to take him now tonight,
and I need to call me out 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 riding my motorcycle into the driveway and our
(07:17):
little house on Moor's Mill Road, and I opened the door,
and here comes this little toddler toward me, and he
puts out his alarms when he gets to me, and
I picked him up, and I'll remember telling my grave,
(07:37):
it's a 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 sh it.
And sure enough he never left, and we immediately got
into the adoption track. Adopting a homeless child had fired
(08:00):
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 This
group soon became the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless,
(08:23):
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
(08:44):
Andrew Young 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 Beau of the Heights,
and returned to his passion as a writer. He authored
(09:05):
a faith based English grammar book called Sacred Ground that
he used to teach adults in preparation for g E
ED exams. I learned through Peewee an entire level of
societies that I didn't know anything about, and then from
there we grew into our contact with homeless people. I
(09:29):
didn't dream that people lived like this, and I didn't
dream that there would be a myriad of our society
who have 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 Wee Gaskins,
(09:53):
Letting go of the book and letting go of the
story would be difficult for Jim. Of worse, there was
a lesson Jim Batty learned through his fifty plus interviews
with the murderer, dubbed the meanest man in America. Peay says,
there was Nobody's friend. I've written that so many people
(10:32):
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 was against that. Brian, Brian, Brian,
(10:58):
the ticket love is kind of right by the minion,
shave his head and apply the town. Peewee Gaskins murdered
fourteen people. His victims were mostly poor with little education.
(11:23):
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 under twenty five years old.
Janis Kirby and Patty Allsbrook were beaten to death. Peewee
(11:45):
poisoned Clyde Dix and threw her body on the side
of the road. He drowned pregnant Dorrian Dempsey and her
two year old biracial daughter Robin. He shot dead his
friend Johnny Sellers. He stabbed Jesse Judy, supposedly the love
of his life. He killed Barnwell Yates and a murder
for hire. He stabbed Diane Bellamy and her boyfriend Avery
(12:09):
Howard with a campbell soup knife. Peewee killed Kim Gelkins
with that same knife. He shot Dennis Bellamy and his
brother Johnny Knight, and finally he blew up Rudolph Tyner
in prison with a handmade bomb. Police discovered that Pewee
(12:30):
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 a dead man walking for
killing Rudolph Tyner. And right before he was put to death,
(12:53):
it was reported that Donald Pewee Gaskins tried to commit
suicide by slashing his arms about only four hours before
his slated execution. He was found unconscious but alive and
received twenty stitches. Here's Brenda Peyton Chase. She interviewed Peewee
Sun for the local news and was chosen to join
(13:15):
a pool of witnesses for the execution. In nineteen 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.
(13:41):
People I was trying to right for the opinions. 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. A rowdy crowd of about four people in
(14:02):
favor of the death penalty came to the Broad River
Correctional Institution to cheer Peewee Gaskin's death, but some had
personal reasons to come, like family members of some of
Gaskin's murder victims, Dennis Bellamy, Johnny Knights, and Diane Nearly
Why our sister and brothers killed a long time ago,
(14:24):
so good night ain't gonna bring them back. 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
(14:46):
driven to the very back where they housed the electric
chair at the time. We had to sign these forms
and they put us in this room and it was
almost 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
(15:07):
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. South Carolina's
electric chair was purchased in nineteen twelve. It's made of
oak and copper, and it's the size of a standard
(15:30):
rocking chair. Over the past hundred years, it is killed
more than two hundred and fifty people, including two women
and a fourteen year old boy. After we were seated,
they brought him in. A much smaller crowd gathered outside
the governor's mansion for a candlelight vigil against the death penalty,
(15:57):
and there were three or four employees who brought him
in to the room. And it was amazing because at
that point he 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. But no last minute stays came
through and Peewee Gaskins was strapped into the electric chair
(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. When asked
if he had any last words, pee Wee said, I'll
let my lawyers talk for me. I'm ready to go.
(17:08):
And then they put the covering over his head and
started attaching the piece 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,
(17:29):
because she 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 second. The
first vault of electricity went into him, the body does
(17:50):
kind of 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 vaults
of electricity just to make sure it's complete, and there
(18:11):
was no reaction at that, and then they came in
and pronounced him dead. Electricity was turned on to the
electric chair at one oh four, that turned off at
one oh six. He was pronounced dead at one. We
(18:34):
have carried out this execution with as much humanity and
dignity as possible. 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
(18:55):
out of her seat and screamed and then faced away
to the wall. She wouldn't look anymore. And 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 and then offered to any interested
next of ken. If not, they are interred on prison grounds.
(19:22):
The jeering applause from spectators as his body was driven
away seemed to end the saga that would forever leave
its mark on the state. Peewee Gaskin's ashes were claimed
by his daughter and scattered near Prospects, South Carolina. Jim
(19:53):
and Anita move their family to South Carolina in nearly
a decade before Peewee was executed. The day of Peewee's execution,
they were out of town. Anita and I were visiting
our son Frank, in New York City, and we happened
to read New York Times, uh not knowing that the
(20:15):
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 the state having executed him.
And the reason that he made the front page of
the New York Times is that he was one of
(20:37):
those rare and unbelievable instances where a white person was
executed for killing a black person in America. This is
highly unusual, rare, but it happened that New York Times
article is entitled rarity for US executions White dies for
(21:02):
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 been executed for killing a black
person since eighteen eighty. He loved making the front page,
(21:24):
but not for the reason that it really happened. The
ultimate irony is he experienced the justice of the state
on him for killing an African American teenager. The Peewee
saga was the biggest news story in South Carolina between
(21:45):
nineteen seventy and ninety 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 Aareence Morning News. Sometimes think
this story is behind me, And then I got an
(22:07):
email from the husband of Doreen Dempsey's half sister, and
this was a few months ago. I really felt that
we needed to find out where Doreen was buried, and
there was no information about that anywhere. So I spent
a few years kind of looking into it a little
bit and renames. Where is Doreen's body and the baby?
(22:32):
They can't find a grave, they can't find a paper
trail for where the remains may be, where they cremated,
Are they in the funeral or like I would really
like to find the resting place the names. I think
Laurence Cecil Chandler was a TV reporter in Myrtle Beach.
This is something you read about our watch on television,
(22:56):
but you don't actually think it happens in your area.
Let me tell you this happened in Florence County and
it was a real deal for a man that killed
more than a dozen people. And Margaret O'sheay was in
her twenties and a newspaper reporter in the late nineteen seventies.
Even though bringing it up again is hurtful to some people,
(23:17):
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 happened sooner or later Down the road.
Eventually we may understand it as a piece of a
big repuzzle. But my assignment was that Irah Parnell was
(23:39):
twenty two years old when he searched Peewee's burial ground.
We were not able to give Peewee to destinalty for
all these other frolks that he killed because of the
strangeness of the law at the time, But since he
did do a murder for higher of a convicted murderer
himself in prison, we were able to give him the
(24:00):
definitely and executed. So just a grand slow, but it
does grand. It was quite to tell you. Dick harpoot
Lean was the lawyer who sought the death penalty for
Rudolph Tyner's murder. You're doing your job. If it becomes personal,
you need another kind of work to do. Mean, frankly,
(24:22):
his execution wasn't something I'd written down. I mean, I
prosecuted the case. I'd been invited to go to the execution.
I just thought that was ghoulish. I wasn't going to
do that. So Chief Stewart calls me and says, Peewee's dead.
We've just been executed. Next morning, world run back to normal.
(24:46):
As the world went back to normal, Jim and Anita
were deeply involved working for homeless and underserved people, and
the Peewee story would forever remain a family conversation here's
Jim Beatty Jr. Talking with his dad and sister Lisa.
There was a moment when Dad described to me the
(25:10):
knife going through the neck and throat of one of
the victims and how it gave as it went through.
And it may have been the torso I can't remember,
but there was something about the description of how pee
wee killed that particular victim that had a great deal
(25:30):
of impact on me. That was Jesse Judy. He stabbed
her in an abdomen and lifted up. Yeah. I could
have gone the rest of my life without hearing that one.
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. One time, it was late, it was dark.
(25:53):
You're at a desk and the lamp was there, and
I walked up and You're like, how about us? And
you plopped down a black and white and it was
a police photo. 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 just kind
(26:14):
of wanted to joke me a little bit, you know
what I mean. I was in college. It was Okay,
it wasn't like I was eight. Well. 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 because remember Dad's desk, and
he locked most of those horrible things in his desk.
(26:36):
You ever looked at it? I knew they were there,
I never looked. Well, somehow the little wins got hold
of it. The younger ones were scared to death to
pe They pretended they could seem little tiny hands at
the windows him so, but it wasn't because Dad didn't
protect everybody. He protected us extremely well. As we began
(27:00):
this season of our true crime podcast series called Crime Traveler,
Jim was back editing the manuscript about Peewee 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. Jim wrote and rewrote chapter
(27:23):
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 much to depend on
(27:45):
Peewee's own storytelling, and how much to rely on legal
documents and Jim's own research. The characters around pee Wee
bring to mind the various characters in Charles Pickens, the
marvelous way that he has depicted so many different people.
(28:06):
And I saw or felt as all was writing the
same kind of thing with these characters that surrounded Peewee.
Everybody from Johnny Sellers to Dennis Bellamy to Diane Bellamy
nearly my gym is so wonderful in capturing everything about Peewee,
(28:31):
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 redeem
him because he wasn't redeemable, but he did bring those
in and I think that's part of the genius of
(28:51):
the way Jim wrote that book. 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. Johnny Sellers,
he was a cut above all the others. He was
(29:13):
the one that I thought had most promise. And I
also like 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 Peewee, stealing Delon's Peewee would say,
and just walked out one night to his death. I
(29:34):
beg your pardon. That was on a Sunday around noon him,
right before he killed Jesse. 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
(29:55):
have the airtime or printed words to develop. A fellow
professor encouraged Jim to finish polishing 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
(30:17):
the interviews between these two men, Peewee and Jim. The
day that I didn't return the radio to Peewee's mother
as I promised I would. I was going to make
a talk that night at Coastal to somebody about the book,
and people waited for the book and wanted it, and surely,
(30:41):
here enough, forty years later, is going to be 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 five birthday in the spring of two
(31:01):
thousand twenty one. Three weeks later, with his family at
his bedside, he heard the first episode of Pee Wee
Gaskins Was Not My Friend, just a few hours before
he passed away. I think that those two years that
I was with Peewee helped cement what I considered to
(31:25):
be the theme of our family through it all. At
the end of the day, when the sun goes down,
the love that can hard to say it without crying.
Love that we have for each other is constant and
(31:47):
will remain always. We are a family whose foundation is love.
Pee Wee Gaskins Was Not My Friend? Is a joint
(32:08):
production from My Heart Radio and Doghouse Pictures produced and
hosted by Jeff Keeping. Executive producers are Courtney DeFries and
Noel Brown. Written by Jim Roberts, Courtney DeFries and Terry James, Edit,
mix and sound design by Jeremiah Kolani. Prescott music composed
by Diamond Street Productions, Spencer garn and Ian Newberry. Special
thanks to Jim and Anita Baby. Additional thanks to the
(32:31):
University of South Carolina, Moving Image Research Collections and the
University of South Carolina.
Peewee. Gaskins implicated Jim Batty in the two assassination of
death row inmate Rudolph Tyner. When poison snuck into the
prison didn't work, Gaskins Conjim into mailing him fifty ft
a wire that he used to detonate the bomb that
blew off Tyner's head. Mortified at his unwinning involvement in
(00:27):
the murder, denied from ever communicating with Peewee again, and
concerned 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 death Row awaiting
(00:49):
his fate. Peewee was a proponent of the death penalty,
believe it or not, except his own, and when that
first bolt hit him, she jumped out of her seat
and screen just grab slow. But the grand letter tell
(01:13):
you there's nobody's friend. From my heart radio and doghouse pictures,
this is is not my friend. My name is Jim
Batty and I'm Jeff Keating. The Peewee saga left a
(01:45):
full impression on everyone in the Beatty family. Jim was
nearly finished with the manuscript about the life and times
of Peewee Gaskins when he heard the shocking news about
Peewee's final murder. I learned from the newspaper that Phebe
Gastons had committed this murder of Rudolph Kiner, and quite frankly,
(02:08):
my first thought was, well, there goes my manuscript. I
somehow always wanted to see some good or something worthwhile
in Gaston's himself, 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
(02:31):
heard what had happened, I realized I would never get
to visit him again. Jim was barred from visiting the
prison for a second time in his life. The first
was as a child when two inmates killed the prison
captain in a failed attempt to assassinate his grandpa Wilson,
(02:51):
the prison warden. The second as a forty two year
old professor when pe We implicated him in the murder
of Rudolph Tyner. These events weighed heavily on Jim, and
in spite of Anita's encouragement, he didn't have the heart
to finish the book. I said, it just looks like
(03:15):
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.
We discussed that and she said, oh no, the book,
that's not over. But I did put it aside. Not
(03:36):
only did Jim put the manuscript on the shelf, but
he and Anita decided it was time to move. We
visited Atlanta every Christmas and loved it. We loved to Atlanta.
I worked at Georgia Tech on this right away in
their grant division. I wrote grants all my adult life.
(03:59):
It was just something that I knew how to do.
I taught to the freshman English classes and they wonderful
Western lived class. I think they called it English to
oh one. Those are the only three courses that I
taught at Georgia State, always console my students and telling
them that they were not in the lowest form on
(04:20):
the campus, the part times instructure. I left Georgia State
to teach it as a wonderful place called it was
people heightst Bible College then and it became university. But
that's the reason stop teaching at Georgia State. I had
a full time canue job at Bull Heights. I did
(04:44):
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 sheltering.
A bitter winter day in teen eight five, proof of
life changing. We were volunteering at the Open Door Community
(05:07):
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 old he was. He looked old enough to
(05:29):
be walking, but he couldn't walk because he hadn't learned.
And he smiled the whole time. It was cold. His
eyes were running his room me it. He was putting
on his ears, and it was freezing cold that day
had been nine degrees a night. She asked me to
come over and she puts him out to me to take,
(05:50):
and I took him, and he smelled like a urnal,
and he was putting his little ears and his big
blue eyes were so gorgeous, but there's running those jeff
A mesh. 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
(06:13):
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 wind burned from the cold. And he
reached back, not at me, but you know the warmth,
I'm sure, and she slapped him and said bad boy.
And I just stood there weeping. I found myself looking
(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 this weather, and unknownst to me, they
called Defects and I had called the Effects too, and
Defects took custody of him and called me and said
you put your money where your mouth is. We have
(06:56):
a baby and we need you to take him now tonight,
and I need to call me out 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 riding my motorcycle into the driveway and our
(07:17):
little house on Moor's Mill Road, and I opened the door,
and here comes this little toddler toward me, and he
puts out his alarms when he gets to me, and
I picked him up, and I'll remember telling my grave,
(07:37):
it's a 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 sh it.
And sure enough he never left, and we immediately got
into the adoption track. Adopting a homeless child had fired
(08:00):
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 This
group soon became the Metro Atlanta Task Force for the Homeless,
(08:23):
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
(08:44):
Andrew Young 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 Beau of the Heights,
and returned to his passion as a writer. He authored
(09:05):
a faith based English grammar book called Sacred Ground that
he used to teach adults in preparation for g E
ED exams. I learned through Peewee an entire level of
societies that I didn't know anything about, and then from
there we grew into our contact with homeless people. I
(09:29):
didn't dream that people lived like this, and I didn't
dream that there would be a myriad of our society
who have 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 Wee Gaskins,
(09:53):
Letting go of the book and letting go of the
story would be difficult for Jim. Of worse, there was
a lesson Jim Batty learned through his fifty plus interviews
with the murderer, dubbed the meanest man in America. Peay says,
there was Nobody's friend. I've written that so many people
(10:32):
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 was against that. Brian, Brian, Brian,
(10:58):
the ticket love is kind of right by the minion,
shave his head and apply the town. Peewee Gaskins murdered
fourteen people. His victims were mostly poor with little education.
(11:23):
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 under twenty five years old.
Janis Kirby and Patty Allsbrook were beaten to death. Peewee
(11:45):
poisoned Clyde Dix and threw her body on the side
of the road. He drowned pregnant Dorrian Dempsey and her
two year old biracial daughter Robin. He shot dead his
friend Johnny Sellers. He stabbed Jesse Judy, supposedly the love
of his life. He killed Barnwell Yates and a murder
for hire. He stabbed Diane Bellamy and her boyfriend Avery
(12:09):
Howard with a campbell soup knife. Peewee killed Kim Gelkins
with that same knife. He shot Dennis Bellamy and his
brother Johnny Knight, and finally he blew up Rudolph Tyner
in prison with a handmade bomb. Police discovered that Pewee
(12:30):
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 a dead man walking for
killing Rudolph Tyner. And right before he was put to death,
(12:53):
it was reported that Donald Pewee Gaskins tried to commit
suicide by slashing his arms about only four hours before
his slated execution. He was found unconscious but alive and
received twenty stitches. Here's Brenda Peyton Chase. She interviewed Peewee
Sun for the local news and was chosen to join
(13:15):
a pool of witnesses for the execution. In nineteen 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.
(13:41):
People I was trying to right for the opinions. 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. A rowdy crowd of about four people in
(14:02):
favor of the death penalty came to the Broad River
Correctional Institution to cheer Peewee Gaskin's death, but some had
personal reasons to come, like family members of some of
Gaskin's murder victims, Dennis Bellamy, Johnny Knights, and Diane Nearly
Why our sister and brothers killed a long time ago,
(14:24):
so good night ain't gonna bring them back. 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
(14:46):
driven to the very back where they housed the electric
chair at the time. We had to sign these forms
and they put us in this room and it was
almost 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
(15:07):
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. South Carolina's
electric chair was purchased in nineteen twelve. It's made of
oak and copper, and it's the size of a standard
(15:30):
rocking chair. Over the past hundred years, it is killed
more than two hundred and fifty people, including two women
and a fourteen year old boy. After we were seated,
they brought him in. A much smaller crowd gathered outside
the governor's mansion for a candlelight vigil against the death penalty,
(15:57):
and there were three or four employees who brought him
in to the room. And it was amazing because at
that point he 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. But no last minute stays came
through and Peewee Gaskins was strapped into the electric chair
(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. When asked
if he had any last words, pee Wee said, I'll
let my lawyers talk for me. I'm ready to go.
(17:08):
And then they put the covering over his head and
started attaching the piece 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,
(17:29):
because she 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 second. The
first vault of electricity went into him, the body does
(17:50):
kind of 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 vaults
of electricity just to make sure it's complete, and there
(18:11):
was no reaction at that, and then they came in
and pronounced him dead. Electricity was turned on to the
electric chair at one oh four, that turned off at
one oh six. He was pronounced dead at one. We
(18:34):
have carried out this execution with as much humanity and
dignity as possible. 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
(18:55):
out of her seat and screamed and then faced away
to the wall. She wouldn't look anymore. And 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 and then offered to any interested
next of ken. If not, they are interred on prison grounds.
(19:22):
The jeering applause from spectators as his body was driven
away seemed to end the saga that would forever leave
its mark on the state. Peewee Gaskin's ashes were claimed
by his daughter and scattered near Prospects, South Carolina. Jim
(19:53):
and Anita move their family to South Carolina in nearly
a decade before Peewee was executed. The day of Peewee's execution,
they were out of town. Anita and I were visiting
our son Frank, in New York City, and we happened
to read New York Times, uh not knowing that the
(20:15):
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 the state having executed him.
And the reason that he made the front page of
the New York Times is that he was one of
(20:37):
those rare and unbelievable instances where a white person was
executed for killing a black person in America. This is
highly unusual, rare, but it happened that New York Times
article is entitled rarity for US executions White dies for
(21:02):
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 been executed for killing a black
person since eighteen eighty. He loved making the front page,
(21:24):
but not for the reason that it really happened. The
ultimate irony is he experienced the justice of the state
on him for killing an African American teenager. The Peewee
saga was the biggest news story in South Carolina between
(21:45):
nineteen seventy and ninety 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 Aareence Morning News. Sometimes think
this story is behind me, And then I got an
(22:07):
email from the husband of Doreen Dempsey's half sister, and
this was a few months ago. I really felt that
we needed to find out where Doreen was buried, and
there was no information about that anywhere. So I spent
a few years kind of looking into it a little
bit and renames. Where is Doreen's body and the baby?
(22:32):
They can't find a grave, they can't find a paper
trail for where the remains may be, where they cremated,
Are they in the funeral or like I would really
like to find the resting place the names. I think
Laurence Cecil Chandler was a TV reporter in Myrtle Beach.
This is something you read about our watch on television,
(22:56):
but you don't actually think it happens in your area.
Let me tell you this happened in Florence County and
it was a real deal for a man that killed
more than a dozen people. And Margaret O'sheay was in
her twenties and a newspaper reporter in the late nineteen seventies.
Even though bringing it up again is hurtful to some people,
(23:17):
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 happened sooner or later Down the road.
Eventually we may understand it as a piece of a
big repuzzle. But my assignment was that Irah Parnell was
(23:39):
twenty two years old when he searched Peewee's burial ground.
We were not able to give Peewee to destinalty for
all these other frolks that he killed because of the
strangeness of the law at the time, But since he
did do a murder for higher of a convicted murderer
himself in prison, we were able to give him the
(24:00):
definitely and executed. So just a grand slow, but it
does grand. It was quite to tell you. Dick harpoot
Lean was the lawyer who sought the death penalty for
Rudolph Tyner's murder. You're doing your job. If it becomes personal,
you need another kind of work to do. Mean, frankly,
(24:22):
his execution wasn't something I'd written down. I mean, I
prosecuted the case. I'd been invited to go to the execution.
I just thought that was ghoulish. I wasn't going to
do that. So Chief Stewart calls me and says, Peewee's dead.
We've just been executed. Next morning, world run back to normal.
(24:46):
As the world went back to normal, Jim and Anita
were deeply involved working for homeless and underserved people, and
the Peewee story would forever remain a family conversation here's
Jim Beatty Jr. Talking with his dad and sister Lisa.
There was a moment when Dad described to me the
(25:10):
knife going through the neck and throat of one of
the victims and how it gave as it went through.
And it may have been the torso I can't remember,
but there was something about the description of how pee
wee killed that particular victim that had a great deal
(25:30):
of impact on me. That was Jesse Judy. He stabbed
her in an abdomen and lifted up. Yeah. I could
have gone the rest of my life without hearing that one.
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. One time, it was late, it was dark.
(25:53):
You're at a desk and the lamp was there, and
I walked up and You're like, how about us? And
you plopped down a black and white and it was
a police photo. 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 just kind
(26:14):
of wanted to joke me a little bit, you know
what I mean. I was in college. It was Okay,
it wasn't like I was eight. Well. 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 because remember Dad's desk, and
he locked most of those horrible things in his desk.
(26:36):
You ever looked at it? I knew they were there,
I never looked. Well, somehow the little wins got hold
of it. The younger ones were scared to death to
pe They pretended they could seem little tiny hands at
the windows him so, but it wasn't because Dad didn't
protect everybody. He protected us extremely well. As we began
(27:00):
this season of our true crime podcast series called Crime Traveler,
Jim was back editing the manuscript about Peewee 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. Jim wrote and rewrote chapter
(27:23):
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 much to depend on
(27:45):
Peewee's own storytelling, and how much to rely on legal
documents and Jim's own research. The characters around pee Wee
bring to mind the various characters in Charles Pickens, the
marvelous way that he has depicted so many different people.
(28:06):
And I saw or felt as all was writing the
same kind of thing with these characters that surrounded Peewee.
Everybody from Johnny Sellers to Dennis Bellamy to Diane Bellamy
nearly my gym is so wonderful in capturing everything about Peewee,
(28:31):
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 redeem
him because he wasn't redeemable, but he did bring those
in and I think that's part of the genius of
(28:51):
the way Jim wrote that book. 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. Johnny Sellers,
he was a cut above all the others. He was
(29:13):
the one that I thought had most promise. And I
also like 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 Peewee, stealing Delon's Peewee would say,
and just walked out one night to his death. I
(29:34):
beg your pardon. That was on a Sunday around noon him,
right before he killed Jesse. 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
(29:55):
have the airtime or printed words to develop. A fellow
professor encouraged Jim to finish polishing 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
(30:17):
the interviews between these two men, Peewee and Jim. The
day that I didn't return the radio to Peewee's mother
as I promised I would. I was going to make
a talk that night at Coastal to somebody about the book,
and people waited for the book and wanted it, and surely,
(30:41):
here enough, forty years later, is going to be 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 five birthday in the spring of two
(31:01):
thousand twenty one. Three weeks later, with his family at
his bedside, he heard the first episode of Pee Wee
Gaskins Was Not My Friend, just a few hours before
he passed away. I think that those two years that
I was with Peewee helped cement what I considered to
(31:25):
be the theme of our family through it all. At
the end of the day, when the sun goes down,
the love that can hard to say it without crying.
Love that we have for each other is constant and
(31:47):
will remain always. We are a family whose foundation is love.
Pee Wee Gaskins Was Not My Friend? Is a joint
(32:08):
production from My Heart Radio and Doghouse Pictures produced and
hosted by Jeff Keeping. Executive producers are Courtney DeFries and
Noel Brown. Written by Jim Roberts, Courtney DeFries and Terry James, Edit,
mix and sound design by Jeremiah Kolani. Prescott music composed
by Diamond Street Productions, Spencer garn and Ian Newberry. Special
thanks to Jim and Anita Baby. Additional thanks to the
(32:31):
University of South Carolina, Moving Image Research Collections and the
University of South Carolina.
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