June 7, 2021 • 38 mins
Pee Wee's upbringing and the origin of his nickname is explored. Jim recollects Pee Wee's hijinks when he evaded law enforcement.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Through weekly phone calls, regular prison house visits, and his
own hours spent pouring over everything he could read. Jim
Batty learned a lot about Peewee Gaskins. He learned that
they grew up in proximity to each other, that Peewee
spent time with the Carnival, that he was an exemplary employee,
(00:22):
and that they worked at the same factory at different times.
Peewee's own history and image both were inflated by media.
Some of these stories are true prison escapes and child endangerment,
and some stories are legends unsupported by evidence, like cannibalism.
(00:46):
He didn't have an demo, didn't have a trigger that
figured into his killing. You can point at some things
and peery life that at least made these things possible.
I couldn't get it. That's country for that. God's a childhood.
I know seven things that he give over his whole life.
(01:07):
I think he thought of himself as a legend in
his own mind. From my heart radio and doghouse pictures,
this is Peewee Gaskins was not my friend. I'm Jeff
Keating m HM. Jim Batty had many questions when he
(01:37):
agreed to author Peewee gaskins biography. To his own surprise,
rather than find the media hyped killer, Jim found something
very different. The paradox, the contradiction of this being this
creature that I sat with for so many hours, is
(01:59):
absolutely fascinating to me. These two men would quickly discover
that they had a lot in common and some very
stark differences. I wanted to know about the life of
this man. This man a year older than I, grew
up eighty miles apart, somewhat geographically and environmentally the same people.
(02:27):
Here I am blessed with a family and career in teaching,
and here was a man who grew up and became
a mass murderer. They may have grown up in the
same area, in a similar environment, but their beginnings were
vastly different. Here's Peewee Gaskins talking about the abuse he
(02:48):
received as a child from his sister's cruelty and the
many other adults who lived together with his mother in
the early nineteen forties. My sister told him I had
done anything, no more if I had or I had not,
that beat hell out of me. And I go around
the house at the corner and start to cry, and
(03:11):
uh and the red, these big red welts on me.
She'd come around where I was at and she'd tell
me goody, goody, goody and uh. And most of the
times I'd flat hell out of her for doing there,
and I knew when I did it, it was gonna
beat me again. And even even if I didn't do it,
a lot of times she'd run into the house making
mine she was crying and should tell my mother that
(03:33):
I had slapped her. I beat her, and they come
out and beat me so I couldn't hardly get up.
I had red wealth over my find back. Never thing.
That's the kind of treatment I was got of the childhood.
I never ever once remember being spanked severely. I was
(03:53):
never punished physically, never any kind of physical harm or
danger in my home. I was utterly obedient and wouldn't
have thought of breaking a rule. Part of Jim's discipline
was because he was raised by a Presbyterian minister. His
(04:15):
family attended church every week period. Despised the church or
anything to do with it, and started back when his
mother would drag him to church every Sunday. Jim and
his wife, Anita, had been married over fifty years and
as it turns out Peewee had somewhere around six wives.
(04:38):
I loved what he told me on divorce. I'll never
forget it. I said, Peobe, how in the world do
you get divorced and married six times and deal with that?
He said, Oh, you don't get divorced in South Carolina,
So all you gotta do in South Carolina and just
go buy another marriage license. Surprisingly, Jim and Peewee also
(05:00):
worked in the same Campbell Soup factory at different times.
Stranger enough, Campbell soup was not manufactured there. The only
thing manufactured there were Swanson chicken pot pies. And my
job at Campbell Soup plant was to clean the wing machine.
(05:23):
And during my interviews, pee Wee admissioned a Campbell soup
knife and he pointed out to me that the Campbell
soup knife was used in several of the deaths and
I was fascinated with this, and he explained to me
that the Campbell soup knife is a butcher knife, but
(05:46):
it has razor sharp blade is more like a razor
than a knife, and that was what he used to
clean the raw meat of the chickens as they are
prepared to become swans and chicken pot pies, and I've
had occasion to say to pee Wee, You're not gonna
believe this, but I worked at Camel soup plant also.
(06:11):
He said you did not, I said yes, I did.
So we decided then that Pee Wee and I together
had been responsible for feeding the world Swanson chicken pot pies.
These men were contrasts in history and demeanor, a minister
and a murderer, a literary professor and a self taught man,
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and they shared a certain amount of respect as well.
I also think that he had respect for me. For instance,
I never heard Peewee one time, not once, in all
of my interviews. I never heard him used profanity. He
was gracious actually in those areas, which would be very
(07:00):
surprising two millions of people who thinks about Peewee. Earning
and keeping Peewee's respect would prove challenging. After all, Jim's
first task as a writer was to listen and avoid
confrontation with a killer. Sometimes the stories he told Jim
were verifiably true, others less. So here's one of the
(07:22):
first stories he told Jim. It resulted in Peewee's incarceration
at the age of thirteen. Sunday afternoon, Peewee was on
his way to his friend's house down the road. They're
gonna work on bicycles and bee. We noticed a young
woman in the corn field in one of the corn rows.
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She was struck, he thought, by the buddi end of
an axe, and fell to the ground, and whoever hit
her disappeared. Peewee ran to her, held her head initially
have she of course, was bleeding. He got brought on
him and on his clothes. The person was gone, and
(08:07):
we left the girls he thought dead, went down the
road to work on the bicycles, came back and there
were dozens of people at the old pir at home place.
Sunday afternoon, police cars, neighbors, everybody, and they questioned him
and arrested him and took him away. Peewee was tried
(08:34):
for the crime based on a different version of the
story for prosecutors. In their view. Gaskins broke into a
home to steal some items, believing the family was gone
for the weekend, but a young woman slightly older than
Gaskins and a student at his school, came home during
the burglary and attacked him with an axe. Gaskins fought
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back and hit her in the head with the weapon.
A Florence County judge sentenced pee Wee Gaskins, or as
he was known at the time, Donald Henry Parrott Jr.
To four years incarceration at the South Carolina Industrial School
for White Boys. When he called the judge a son
(09:17):
of a bitch for the sentence, he earned another year
that sentence, from June until May fifty one would be
just the beginning of his incarceration history. Here's Jim Batty
looking back on the story. He of course admitted to
(09:39):
many other things that he didn't do, so I don't
think that he had any reason to lie about that.
I think it's fifty fifty whether or not he was
really guilty or not on that early charge that put
him in reform school. My view of the Reform School,
it was a terrible institution created and invented by people
(10:02):
who are first of all racists and certainly had no
sense of equality in social values poor people, um black people.
These were the reasons for the creations. In my opinion
of children's prisons, Jim had good reason to question the
(10:25):
justice system for children. In ninety pee Wee Gaskins joined
two d and fifty other boys in a facility that
was right for abuse. It's impossible to say if things
would have turned out differently had Gaskins avoided the children's
prison sentence, but at least Peewee thought so. He commented
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offering the fact that this was the first time that
he was ever in prison and that it was under
a false charge. And he reiterated to me that we
would not be sitting in the penitentiary had it not
been first of all incarcerated in the reform school, he
was abused by guards, He was abused by a nurse,
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seriously brutally mistreated. Donald Gaskins had several monikers, Peewee the Redneck,
Charles Manson, the meanest man in America. Most were ascribed
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to him as testament to either his physical stature or
the gruesome nature of his crimes, and the continual retelling
of his horrors, real or fabricated, has given birth to
myths and legends. Like many legends, there's often a threat
of truth. Gaskin's life of crime began early. At the
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age of thirteen, he was sent to reform school. He
was reported that he successfully escaped a total of four
times Florence County Deputy Sheriff Ray Schup testified that he
arrested Gaskins and returned him to the industrial school so
many times that he eventually gave up, figuring they didn't
(12:18):
want him there anyway. Gaskins escaped the first time after
receiving a telling letter from his mother. Here's reporter Holly
Gatling and Jim Batty. Peewee's backstory is that he was
raised by the name of Junior Parrot, and then he
(12:41):
found out later that his father was named Gaskins, and
he changed his name to Gaskins. But he was raised
Junior Parrot, so at some point along the line changed
his name to Peewee Gaskins. I have no record or
any indication that anyone ever called Junior Parrot anything but
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Junior until he was in prison years later, and at
age thirteen, he changed his name to Donald Henry Gaskins
when he confronted his father. So Donald Henry Gaskins, Jr.
Was sentenced to a violent reform school. He fought constantly
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with other boys, and there were beatings from guards. One morning,
Gaskins eluded patrol after breakfast and escaped. Stories like these
became common people getting me kicked out of He been
able to trick the law over and over and over again,
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and he was elated with that. I just love talking
about it and telling me about it. After another bloody
encounter at reform school, Gaskins was sent to us Kiatric
Hospital for evaluation, but he was found insane enough to
return to the industrial Home. He immediately ran away again.
(14:09):
This time he took cover as a mechanic in a
traveling carnival that had set up in Florence. It was
his first involvement with Amusements of America. He met a
fourteen year old girl there. Once the girl's father found
out about their relationship, Peewee agreed to marry her. They
went to a Justice of the Peace and the father
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signed off on the marriage. When the carnival left South Carolina,
Gaskins returned to the industrial Home to complete his sentence.
The nickname Peewee came about years after he changed his
name from Parrot to Gaskins. Here's Jim again. Then some
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six eight years after that, in the Columbia prison, Peewee
told me that he got the name Peewee because a
reporter stated to a guard or the guard to the
reporter one way or the other that little Peewee fella,
and the reporter wrote that, and that caused the name
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to stick. But every other prison, from reform School until
the last, he was able to escape at time or two.
And one of the more humorous ones I've always found
was in the cc I in Columbia. In one of
his earlier incarcerations, he was involved somehow with a tour
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of church folks who were in certain areas of the prison.
So he realized if he could just get right in
that group, that he could walk out when they walked out,
and he did. Peewee was clever and a master manipulator.
He soon developed something of a flare for his antics.
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He found great enjoyment in pulling the rug out for
under his captors. It's no wonder the press joined in
disseminating gaskins wild tales. These stories and images look good
in print. In reference to his many escapes. In ninety five,
the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported, quote, long before the bodies
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were found, Junior Parot Gaskins had become a piece of
local folklore. End quote. It goes on to report a
fantastical story where Peewee jumped out of a second story
window of a courthouse. Soon after, police released the bloodhounds,
and Peewee caught them and tied them to a tree.
While police were still on foot searching the woods, Gaskins
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circled back and wrote, Peewee was here on the roof
of one of the patrol cars. And then there's a
story when Gaskins got away by fooling authorities into thinking
he was at the bottom of a pit of quicks
and quicksand man. When Peeley turned himself in in the
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Farence Prison, one of the guards said to him, you know,
pee Wee, they dug for you for about a week.
And pee Wee said, well did they find me? And
you guys said no, And he said why couldn't he? He
He said, of course, you peele we are smarter than
they are. After Peewee jumped out of the courtroom window,
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he complained of an injury. Jim mockingly refers to this
as Peewee's forever limp. When they were alone, the limp
would often mysteriously disappear. Ira Parnell also recalled the limp
to be just another one of gascon stunts. Oh he
had a limp all right, until you turned him loose.
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He took your hands up over and gone to redit.
Let it be known that every opportunity that he was
crippled did is couldn't play dope. All of this celebrity
in Bolden Peewee even more, he took great pleasure and
causing confusion and mayhem at a courthouse. The authorities once
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again got caught chasing their tail. So they're in this room,
picked with law enforcement people probably, and they've been going
since that morning. And one of the attorneys said, and
we take a break. So everybody gets up and leaves
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the room. And they realized when everyone was in the
hall with the door closed, the peewee's in the room
by himself. He's handcuffed, ankle chains. But there are two
loaded revolvers in the desk besides where the solicitor was sitting.
And one of the sheriffs bursts in and says, who's
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guarding peewee? He said, so listen to do you realize
there are two loaded weapons in that desk drawer. They
put their heads together and they say, all right, five
of us burst the door open with our weapons pointed
at him. And that's exactly what they did, and Peewee
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is there with his feet on the desk and he said, boys,
you all know I would not hurt a fly. Pee
We enjoyed telling that story. He loved it. Ira Partnell
recalls another time Pee Wee tried to escape pe We
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agreed to show authorities where more bodies were buried. Gaskins
and ten members of the sled forensic team combed an
open field near Florence. Peewee was often shackled at the waist.
He was anxious and kept trying to create space between
himself and the guards. He was like a little dog
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trying to pull on his leash. But he wanted to
get away from everybody, to get gone and go go. Look.
But what we didn't know, what's time was there was
at least two people in a little small pick up
trug that would try to take him away from us.
And we saw that little drug circle there and we
were in twice. We are all spread out. I was
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seventy five hundred yards in a line with Taily in
the middle and our Lieutenant Old Bailey. More than anybody
tries to take you from me, you will be the
first one shot. And want you to remember that he
he kind of slowed up a little bit then and
calmed down some with that little trug. We found out
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later because people had plan to take him from us,
try to take him, but there was too many of
us and we weren't munched up enough for him to
just shooting their most. That was a situation making hair
standard after you thought about it. The internet is replete
with horrific larger than life chronicles of Donald Peewee. Gaskins.
(21:14):
Folks these financial opportunities to report that Peewee raped babies,
and some of the wilder stories tell that the meanest
man in America was also a cannibal, eating his victims
after he murdered them. No law enforcement brought any charges
or evidence like this and official legal proceedings, and Jim
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Batty refutes many of them. In his writings and retellings
of his personal experiences with Peewee, he often speaks of
a kindness, a civil exchange of sorts. It could be
difficult to see a monster as a man, but Jim
was more interested in discovering truth and redemption than reveling
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in gascon savagery. The media, which relies on larger than
life coverage just couldn't gel with Jim Battis approach to
the story. I had reported to them that he related
to me acts of kindness, which pleasantly surprised me. A
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newspaper and television reports saw Jim's input on the whole saga,
but he wasn't melodramatic to suit media needs for vibrant,
over the top stories. Peewee wasn't a deranged killer, always
on the prow for his next victim. He was seen
and heard and known in his community. Peewee weaved his
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associates and family members into his crimes, and he didn't
hesitate to kill anyone who would get in his way.
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Peewee's myth thrived in the media his recordings for a
book called The Final Truth, who were accepted as ultimate
testimony for the public. At least, law enforcement never corroborated
the stories from that book beyond those for which they
were legal proceedings. Peewee had open access to the recording
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equipment and several hours of tape to fill with all
sorts of stories and claims, and when the author turned
on his recorder, he just let Peewee speak. Here's Cecil
Chandler and Holly Gatling recalling Peewee's image the books with
the recording. I think that made you really feel a
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part of being near or around Peewee because you actually
heard his voice on the recordings. Hearing was believing the
recordings gave the stories authority and or of testimony, and
then the author boldly called it the final truth. A
mass murderer. Well, I don't believe that. I really don't
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believe he killed that many people. What they're talking about
somewhere up in the hundreds. Pee Wee Gaskins was clever.
I think he had a very hi I Q was
he smart? Why? I don't know. To me, smart people
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live normal, productive lives. They don't go around killing people.
So I would describe pee Wee as clever and cunning. Now,
when he was in prison, he would call Sheriff Barnes
and say, I'm going to lead you to another body.
But the sheriff always told me he said he didn't
believe him. He just thought he wanted to get out
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of prison, and that's what he would do to go
out to look for more bodies. Pee Wee got investigators
to take him out of prison on several occasions on
the promise he'd lead them to another body, a body
they could take off of their files. Sure if Billy
Barnes couldn't pass up on the possibility that he would
(25:12):
actually deliver a body, here's investigator Irah Parnell. I think
it was his attempt to make it flash look bad
in him to look smart, and I don't think he
was anywhere close to that mean more people. There might
be a few more, but I don't think there was
anywhere near where he was claiming. I do not believe
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that I know of seventeen that were going to attribute
to him that he gives over his whole life. His
web of stories had the law's attention and the media's.
Part of my interest in getting a master's degree, completely
unrelated to journalism or politics, was trying to figure out
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what makes people do these evil things. Well, first of all,
I recognized him as a human being, and I was
never afraid to talk to him. I'm pretty savvy, I
know when I'm being manipulated, and I was certainly willing
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to listen to what he had to say. My feelings
about him were actually sort of clinical, like somebody doing
a psychological evaluation, which I certainly wasn't doing But those
thoughts were running through my mind. You know, when is
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he lying? When is he telling the truth? Why did
he think that he had the right to do these
things that he did. I think he thought of himself
as a legend in his own mind. I think that's
a calm and personality trait with a lot of people
(27:05):
with criminal personalities. Here's Mark and Jim Baty Jr. Like
so many people involved in this story, they helped shed
greater detail in understanding and explaining this sort of tail
and its central character. My first reaction is identifying Peewee
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as a bit of a coward. In other words, taking
the lives of young people probably a little bit easier
than taking on a grown person. He killed plenty of
grown people, but there were a lot of young people
that were killed. The age of his victims used to
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bother me, especially the young girls, and I think at
some point I'm might have mentioned that to Dad, what's
the deal? How did this keep going on and on
and on in the news. If if there's a young
girl missing somewhere, guess what. Pull all the plugs, let's
find out what's going on. Dad explained to me that
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these are kids on the edge. These are kids on
the periphery, These are marginalized individuals in many ways, And frankly,
I think that told me one day is the day.
Just don't have a whole lot of people to care about.
And if they've got a foul pee wee, well you're
really playing with fire because you may have nobody to
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care about you or defend you. And it didn't seem
to me that Peewee ever woke up in the morning going, Okay,
I'm gonna go find somebody to kill. I think it
seemed like he might have woken up in the morning
and going, do you know what that thing that happened yesterday,
I'm gonna have to kill that guy for that. That's
what I think. Margaret o'sheay covered Peewee Gaskins for the
(28:57):
State Columbia, South Carolina's Daily News. I fully believed that
he was one of those people in this world who
felt nothing much for others. He considered killing as something
that met his needs and was not overly concerned about
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how much he hurt somebody or the people who might
have loved them and missed them after they were gone.
In fact, in the case of his own niece and
her friend, whom he killed together. His family was distraught
that they had disappeared and was worried about them, and
he just casually went through life saying, you know, I
guess they ran away. Janice Kirby and Patricia Allsbrook disappeared
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in December. Janice was Peewee's niece, daughter of his sister
Inez gas Agains Kirby. They moved from the area near
Peewee's burial field just eight weeks before the girls went missing.
Janice was classmates with Patricia an All'sbrook at Edmonds High School.
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Kidney Janice Kirby's. He loved her in whatever way he
could love somebody. He found out one thing he didn't
like about her, and she was gone. These girls showed
up at Peewee's trailer near Prospect and hung out for
several days around Christmas. He was living there at the
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time and known as a festive guy who hosted parties,
and the girls were on the lookout for some fun.
They were at his house together and they were on
drugs for some reason. Drugs were one thing that was
sort of against his code if he had one that
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had something to do with it, and they had a
fight and he beat both girls to death, But it
seems to me that there had to have been more
to it than that. What strikes me about his victims
was that most of them, however long or however briefly
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they knew him, didn't have a whole lot of reason
to be afraid of him that they knew of I mean,
you know, they were not aware of his activities outside
the sphere that they shared with him. But it didn't
take much to find out the truth about him, and
then they were gone. Yeah. As part of his plea
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deal to avoid the electric chair, pee Wee told authorities
to look for a concrete slab in the area around
his killing field and they'd find a body. Ira Partnell
was there with one of Peewee's attorneys when authorities found
Patricia Allbrook's body inventive, five years after she went missing.
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Pee Wee kept telling his turney about a body under
seeing that lab, and one of day deputies lived not
a half mile across the field from where this old
half spot was. That everybody was trying to rack the
brains figuring out where I seeing its lab was no
Bill Prestid, He said, only assume its slab by little
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bit wound in front yard that old house there by
media up there. It was a cover for a safety
tame ful five of us went over there, who took
a prip bar and moved it. Seeing it lit over
and shined a light down and there there was her
old skeleton right there in the set. Thankfully it was
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the old safety thing hadn't been in using quite a while.
But we had to let the sexton down and look
at the rebacco to do his preliminary examination. Gathered up
everything could initially, and then you clean safety tank truck
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sucked up everything else out of the tank and it
was dry and through a screen that in the field
as well, he found her high school rang with our
initials in it, which allowed us to make identification on
her m Several weeks after her body was found, Patricia
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Allbrooks family buried her remains. Unfortunately, authorities didn't find Peewee's
niece Janice right away. He killed those two girls on
the same day, and he took the body of Patricia
Hall's Brook and stuffed it in a septic tank. But
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for some reason he decided he couldn't do that to
his needs, so he buried or somewhere else Janice Kirby's
body was found fifty yards away in an area adjacent
to the Gascon family graveyard. To some, it seemed he
had tried to give her the mere semblance of a
family burial. Not a lot surprises me about what people
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are capable of doing, and at that point in my
life I had written about many, many others who had
done distasteful things, illegal and grizzly things. I was a
little surprised that people called him a serial killer. He
didn't have an m O. He didn't have a trigger
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or desire to be met, and you know that that
figured into all his killings. Jim Batty's enthusiasm never wavered.
He wrote as quickly as he could during his regular
meetings with Pee Wee. His steely i'd focus produced a
(35:14):
multifaceted picture of this mass murderer. I think that saw
him as a really bad guy. But the process of
telling the story requires that you share every side of
the main character's life, and regardless of how heinous these
(35:38):
crimes are, you can point to some things in Peewee's
life that at least made these things possible, that does
not exonerate or horrify what he has done what he did,
but it does share the full story of Peewee and
where his life ultimately took. I think he's crafty, and
(36:06):
it's developed as a tortured and abused little boy. I
think that he became so clearly defensive. As he told me,
Mr Jim, I never shed a tear after age seven,
he said, I decided that day in the front yard,
on that Sunday afternoon, that they never would see me
(36:27):
cry again. And he said, nobody ever did I think
that that was formed during those terrible, terrible years of
child abuse. My prayer was that through what I wrote,
what I had studied, what I thought I had learned,
(36:49):
is it one child, one child would have been spared
from ever becoming another pea, we gascons and as a
society and as a people, rather than hold this individual
up as a monster, period hold him up as a monster,
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and see why and how we could do otherwise. With
a four year old little boy who lived eighty miles
from another little boy his same age, who turned out
a little bit differently, only because of the way I
(37:33):
was loved and raised and brought up. I believe that
love conquers all. Peee Gaskins was Not My Friend as
(37:58):
a joint production from Heart Radio and Doghouse Pictures, produced
and hosted by Jeff Keaty. Executive producers are Courtney Dufries
and Noel Brown. Written by Jim Roberts, Courtney Duffries and
Terry James edit, mix and sound designed by Jeremiah Kolani Prescott.
Music composed by Diamond Street Productions, Spencer garn and Ian Newberry.
Special thanks to Jim and Anita Bade. Additional thanks to
(38:21):
the University of South Carolina, Moving Image Research Collections and
the University of South Carolina.
Through weekly phone calls, regular prison house visits, and his
own hours spent pouring over everything he could read. Jim
Batty learned a lot about Peewee Gaskins. He learned that
they grew up in proximity to each other, that Peewee
spent time with the Carnival, that he was an exemplary employee,
(00:22):
and that they worked at the same factory at different times.
Peewee's own history and image both were inflated by media.
Some of these stories are true prison escapes and child endangerment,
and some stories are legends unsupported by evidence, like cannibalism.
(00:46):
He didn't have an demo, didn't have a trigger that
figured into his killing. You can point at some things
and peery life that at least made these things possible.
I couldn't get it. That's country for that. God's a childhood.
I know seven things that he give over his whole life.
(01:07):
I think he thought of himself as a legend in
his own mind. From my heart radio and doghouse pictures,
this is Peewee Gaskins was not my friend. I'm Jeff
Keating m HM. Jim Batty had many questions when he
(01:37):
agreed to author Peewee gaskins biography. To his own surprise,
rather than find the media hyped killer, Jim found something
very different. The paradox, the contradiction of this being this
creature that I sat with for so many hours, is
(01:59):
absolutely fascinating to me. These two men would quickly discover
that they had a lot in common and some very
stark differences. I wanted to know about the life of
this man. This man a year older than I, grew
up eighty miles apart, somewhat geographically and environmentally the same people.
(02:27):
Here I am blessed with a family and career in teaching,
and here was a man who grew up and became
a mass murderer. They may have grown up in the
same area, in a similar environment, but their beginnings were
vastly different. Here's Peewee Gaskins talking about the abuse he
(02:48):
received as a child from his sister's cruelty and the
many other adults who lived together with his mother in
the early nineteen forties. My sister told him I had
done anything, no more if I had or I had not,
that beat hell out of me. And I go around
the house at the corner and start to cry, and
(03:11):
uh and the red, these big red welts on me.
She'd come around where I was at and she'd tell
me goody, goody, goody and uh. And most of the
times I'd flat hell out of her for doing there,
and I knew when I did it, it was gonna
beat me again. And even even if I didn't do it,
a lot of times she'd run into the house making
mine she was crying and should tell my mother that
(03:33):
I had slapped her. I beat her, and they come
out and beat me so I couldn't hardly get up.
I had red wealth over my find back. Never thing.
That's the kind of treatment I was got of the childhood.
I never ever once remember being spanked severely. I was
(03:53):
never punished physically, never any kind of physical harm or
danger in my home. I was utterly obedient and wouldn't
have thought of breaking a rule. Part of Jim's discipline
was because he was raised by a Presbyterian minister. His
(04:15):
family attended church every week period. Despised the church or
anything to do with it, and started back when his
mother would drag him to church every Sunday. Jim and
his wife, Anita, had been married over fifty years and
as it turns out Peewee had somewhere around six wives.
(04:38):
I loved what he told me on divorce. I'll never
forget it. I said, Peobe, how in the world do
you get divorced and married six times and deal with that?
He said, Oh, you don't get divorced in South Carolina,
So all you gotta do in South Carolina and just
go buy another marriage license. Surprisingly, Jim and Peewee also
(05:00):
worked in the same Campbell Soup factory at different times.
Stranger enough, Campbell soup was not manufactured there. The only
thing manufactured there were Swanson chicken pot pies. And my
job at Campbell Soup plant was to clean the wing machine.
(05:23):
And during my interviews, pee Wee admissioned a Campbell soup
knife and he pointed out to me that the Campbell
soup knife was used in several of the deaths and
I was fascinated with this, and he explained to me
that the Campbell soup knife is a butcher knife, but
(05:46):
it has razor sharp blade is more like a razor
than a knife, and that was what he used to
clean the raw meat of the chickens as they are
prepared to become swans and chicken pot pies, and I've
had occasion to say to pee Wee, You're not gonna
believe this, but I worked at Camel soup plant also.
(06:11):
He said you did not, I said yes, I did.
So we decided then that Pee Wee and I together
had been responsible for feeding the world Swanson chicken pot pies.
These men were contrasts in history and demeanor, a minister
and a murderer, a literary professor and a self taught man,
(06:37):
and they shared a certain amount of respect as well.
I also think that he had respect for me. For instance,
I never heard Peewee one time, not once, in all
of my interviews. I never heard him used profanity. He
was gracious actually in those areas, which would be very
(07:00):
surprising two millions of people who thinks about Peewee. Earning
and keeping Peewee's respect would prove challenging. After all, Jim's
first task as a writer was to listen and avoid
confrontation with a killer. Sometimes the stories he told Jim
were verifiably true, others less. So here's one of the
(07:22):
first stories he told Jim. It resulted in Peewee's incarceration
at the age of thirteen. Sunday afternoon, Peewee was on
his way to his friend's house down the road. They're
gonna work on bicycles and bee. We noticed a young
woman in the corn field in one of the corn rows.
(07:46):
She was struck, he thought, by the buddi end of
an axe, and fell to the ground, and whoever hit
her disappeared. Peewee ran to her, held her head initially
have she of course, was bleeding. He got brought on
him and on his clothes. The person was gone, and
(08:07):
we left the girls he thought dead, went down the
road to work on the bicycles, came back and there
were dozens of people at the old pir at home place.
Sunday afternoon, police cars, neighbors, everybody, and they questioned him
and arrested him and took him away. Peewee was tried
(08:34):
for the crime based on a different version of the
story for prosecutors. In their view. Gaskins broke into a
home to steal some items, believing the family was gone
for the weekend, but a young woman slightly older than
Gaskins and a student at his school, came home during
the burglary and attacked him with an axe. Gaskins fought
(08:56):
back and hit her in the head with the weapon.
A Florence County judge sentenced pee Wee Gaskins, or as
he was known at the time, Donald Henry Parrott Jr.
To four years incarceration at the South Carolina Industrial School
for White Boys. When he called the judge a son
(09:17):
of a bitch for the sentence, he earned another year
that sentence, from June until May fifty one would be
just the beginning of his incarceration history. Here's Jim Batty
looking back on the story. He of course admitted to
(09:39):
many other things that he didn't do, so I don't
think that he had any reason to lie about that.
I think it's fifty fifty whether or not he was
really guilty or not on that early charge that put
him in reform school. My view of the Reform School,
it was a terrible institution created and invented by people
(10:02):
who are first of all racists and certainly had no
sense of equality in social values poor people, um black people.
These were the reasons for the creations. In my opinion
of children's prisons, Jim had good reason to question the
(10:25):
justice system for children. In ninety pee Wee Gaskins joined
two d and fifty other boys in a facility that
was right for abuse. It's impossible to say if things
would have turned out differently had Gaskins avoided the children's
prison sentence, but at least Peewee thought so. He commented
(10:47):
offering the fact that this was the first time that
he was ever in prison and that it was under
a false charge. And he reiterated to me that we
would not be sitting in the penitentiary had it not
been first of all incarcerated in the reform school, he
was abused by guards, He was abused by a nurse,
(11:10):
seriously brutally mistreated. Donald Gaskins had several monikers, Peewee the Redneck,
Charles Manson, the meanest man in America. Most were ascribed
(11:34):
to him as testament to either his physical stature or
the gruesome nature of his crimes, and the continual retelling
of his horrors, real or fabricated, has given birth to
myths and legends. Like many legends, there's often a threat
of truth. Gaskin's life of crime began early. At the
(11:56):
age of thirteen, he was sent to reform school. He
was reported that he successfully escaped a total of four
times Florence County Deputy Sheriff Ray Schup testified that he
arrested Gaskins and returned him to the industrial school so
many times that he eventually gave up, figuring they didn't
(12:18):
want him there anyway. Gaskins escaped the first time after
receiving a telling letter from his mother. Here's reporter Holly
Gatling and Jim Batty. Peewee's backstory is that he was
raised by the name of Junior Parrot, and then he
(12:41):
found out later that his father was named Gaskins, and
he changed his name to Gaskins. But he was raised
Junior Parrot, so at some point along the line changed
his name to Peewee Gaskins. I have no record or
any indication that anyone ever called Junior Parrot anything but
(13:06):
Junior until he was in prison years later, and at
age thirteen, he changed his name to Donald Henry Gaskins
when he confronted his father. So Donald Henry Gaskins, Jr.
Was sentenced to a violent reform school. He fought constantly
(13:27):
with other boys, and there were beatings from guards. One morning,
Gaskins eluded patrol after breakfast and escaped. Stories like these
became common people getting me kicked out of He been
able to trick the law over and over and over again,
(13:47):
and he was elated with that. I just love talking
about it and telling me about it. After another bloody
encounter at reform school, Gaskins was sent to us Kiatric
Hospital for evaluation, but he was found insane enough to
return to the industrial Home. He immediately ran away again.
(14:09):
This time he took cover as a mechanic in a
traveling carnival that had set up in Florence. It was
his first involvement with Amusements of America. He met a
fourteen year old girl there. Once the girl's father found
out about their relationship, Peewee agreed to marry her. They
went to a Justice of the Peace and the father
(14:30):
signed off on the marriage. When the carnival left South Carolina,
Gaskins returned to the industrial Home to complete his sentence.
The nickname Peewee came about years after he changed his
name from Parrot to Gaskins. Here's Jim again. Then some
(14:51):
six eight years after that, in the Columbia prison, Peewee
told me that he got the name Peewee because a
reporter stated to a guard or the guard to the
reporter one way or the other that little Peewee fella,
and the reporter wrote that, and that caused the name
(15:11):
to stick. But every other prison, from reform School until
the last, he was able to escape at time or two.
And one of the more humorous ones I've always found
was in the cc I in Columbia. In one of
his earlier incarcerations, he was involved somehow with a tour
(15:34):
of church folks who were in certain areas of the prison.
So he realized if he could just get right in
that group, that he could walk out when they walked out,
and he did. Peewee was clever and a master manipulator.
He soon developed something of a flare for his antics.
(15:57):
He found great enjoyment in pulling the rug out for
under his captors. It's no wonder the press joined in
disseminating gaskins wild tales. These stories and images look good
in print. In reference to his many escapes. In ninety five,
the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported, quote, long before the bodies
(16:21):
were found, Junior Parot Gaskins had become a piece of
local folklore. End quote. It goes on to report a
fantastical story where Peewee jumped out of a second story
window of a courthouse. Soon after, police released the bloodhounds,
and Peewee caught them and tied them to a tree.
While police were still on foot searching the woods, Gaskins
(16:44):
circled back and wrote, Peewee was here on the roof
of one of the patrol cars. And then there's a
story when Gaskins got away by fooling authorities into thinking
he was at the bottom of a pit of quicks
and quicksand man. When Peeley turned himself in in the
(17:06):
Farence Prison, one of the guards said to him, you know,
pee Wee, they dug for you for about a week.
And pee Wee said, well did they find me? And
you guys said no, And he said why couldn't he? He
He said, of course, you peele we are smarter than
they are. After Peewee jumped out of the courtroom window,
(17:28):
he complained of an injury. Jim mockingly refers to this
as Peewee's forever limp. When they were alone, the limp
would often mysteriously disappear. Ira Parnell also recalled the limp
to be just another one of gascon stunts. Oh he
had a limp all right, until you turned him loose.
(17:51):
He took your hands up over and gone to redit.
Let it be known that every opportunity that he was
crippled did is couldn't play dope. All of this celebrity
in Bolden Peewee even more, he took great pleasure and
causing confusion and mayhem at a courthouse. The authorities once
(18:13):
again got caught chasing their tail. So they're in this room,
picked with law enforcement people probably, and they've been going
since that morning. And one of the attorneys said, and
we take a break. So everybody gets up and leaves
(18:35):
the room. And they realized when everyone was in the
hall with the door closed, the peewee's in the room
by himself. He's handcuffed, ankle chains. But there are two
loaded revolvers in the desk besides where the solicitor was sitting.
And one of the sheriffs bursts in and says, who's
(18:57):
guarding peewee? He said, so listen to do you realize
there are two loaded weapons in that desk drawer. They
put their heads together and they say, all right, five
of us burst the door open with our weapons pointed
at him. And that's exactly what they did, and Peewee
(19:24):
is there with his feet on the desk and he said, boys,
you all know I would not hurt a fly. Pee
We enjoyed telling that story. He loved it. Ira Partnell
recalls another time Pee Wee tried to escape pe We
(19:48):
agreed to show authorities where more bodies were buried. Gaskins
and ten members of the sled forensic team combed an
open field near Florence. Peewee was often shackled at the waist.
He was anxious and kept trying to create space between
himself and the guards. He was like a little dog
(20:10):
trying to pull on his leash. But he wanted to
get away from everybody, to get gone and go go. Look.
But what we didn't know, what's time was there was
at least two people in a little small pick up
trug that would try to take him away from us.
And we saw that little drug circle there and we
were in twice. We are all spread out. I was
(20:31):
seventy five hundred yards in a line with Taily in
the middle and our Lieutenant Old Bailey. More than anybody
tries to take you from me, you will be the
first one shot. And want you to remember that he
he kind of slowed up a little bit then and
calmed down some with that little trug. We found out
(20:51):
later because people had plan to take him from us,
try to take him, but there was too many of
us and we weren't munched up enough for him to
just shooting their most. That was a situation making hair
standard after you thought about it. The internet is replete
with horrific larger than life chronicles of Donald Peewee. Gaskins.
(21:14):
Folks these financial opportunities to report that Peewee raped babies,
and some of the wilder stories tell that the meanest
man in America was also a cannibal, eating his victims
after he murdered them. No law enforcement brought any charges
or evidence like this and official legal proceedings, and Jim
(21:35):
Batty refutes many of them. In his writings and retellings
of his personal experiences with Peewee, he often speaks of
a kindness, a civil exchange of sorts. It could be
difficult to see a monster as a man, but Jim
was more interested in discovering truth and redemption than reveling
(21:56):
in gascon savagery. The media, which relies on larger than
life coverage just couldn't gel with Jim Battis approach to
the story. I had reported to them that he related
to me acts of kindness, which pleasantly surprised me. A
(22:23):
newspaper and television reports saw Jim's input on the whole saga,
but he wasn't melodramatic to suit media needs for vibrant,
over the top stories. Peewee wasn't a deranged killer, always
on the prow for his next victim. He was seen
and heard and known in his community. Peewee weaved his
(22:44):
associates and family members into his crimes, and he didn't
hesitate to kill anyone who would get in his way.
(23:06):
Peewee's myth thrived in the media his recordings for a
book called The Final Truth, who were accepted as ultimate
testimony for the public. At least, law enforcement never corroborated
the stories from that book beyond those for which they
were legal proceedings. Peewee had open access to the recording
(23:26):
equipment and several hours of tape to fill with all
sorts of stories and claims, and when the author turned
on his recorder, he just let Peewee speak. Here's Cecil
Chandler and Holly Gatling recalling Peewee's image the books with
the recording. I think that made you really feel a
(23:47):
part of being near or around Peewee because you actually
heard his voice on the recordings. Hearing was believing the
recordings gave the stories authority and or of testimony, and
then the author boldly called it the final truth. A
mass murderer. Well, I don't believe that. I really don't
(24:10):
believe he killed that many people. What they're talking about
somewhere up in the hundreds. Pee Wee Gaskins was clever.
I think he had a very hi I Q was
he smart? Why? I don't know. To me, smart people
(24:30):
live normal, productive lives. They don't go around killing people.
So I would describe pee Wee as clever and cunning. Now,
when he was in prison, he would call Sheriff Barnes
and say, I'm going to lead you to another body.
But the sheriff always told me he said he didn't
believe him. He just thought he wanted to get out
(24:51):
of prison, and that's what he would do to go
out to look for more bodies. Pee Wee got investigators
to take him out of prison on several occasions on
the promise he'd lead them to another body, a body
they could take off of their files. Sure if Billy
Barnes couldn't pass up on the possibility that he would
(25:12):
actually deliver a body, here's investigator Irah Parnell. I think
it was his attempt to make it flash look bad
in him to look smart, and I don't think he
was anywhere close to that mean more people. There might
be a few more, but I don't think there was
anywhere near where he was claiming. I do not believe
(25:33):
that I know of seventeen that were going to attribute
to him that he gives over his whole life. His
web of stories had the law's attention and the media's.
Part of my interest in getting a master's degree, completely
unrelated to journalism or politics, was trying to figure out
(25:59):
what makes people do these evil things. Well, first of all,
I recognized him as a human being, and I was
never afraid to talk to him. I'm pretty savvy, I
know when I'm being manipulated, and I was certainly willing
(26:21):
to listen to what he had to say. My feelings
about him were actually sort of clinical, like somebody doing
a psychological evaluation, which I certainly wasn't doing But those
thoughts were running through my mind. You know, when is
(26:43):
he lying? When is he telling the truth? Why did
he think that he had the right to do these
things that he did. I think he thought of himself
as a legend in his own mind. I think that's
a calm and personality trait with a lot of people
(27:05):
with criminal personalities. Here's Mark and Jim Baty Jr. Like
so many people involved in this story, they helped shed
greater detail in understanding and explaining this sort of tail
and its central character. My first reaction is identifying Peewee
(27:29):
as a bit of a coward. In other words, taking
the lives of young people probably a little bit easier
than taking on a grown person. He killed plenty of
grown people, but there were a lot of young people
that were killed. The age of his victims used to
(27:54):
bother me, especially the young girls, and I think at
some point I'm might have mentioned that to Dad, what's
the deal? How did this keep going on and on
and on in the news. If if there's a young
girl missing somewhere, guess what. Pull all the plugs, let's
find out what's going on. Dad explained to me that
(28:15):
these are kids on the edge. These are kids on
the periphery, These are marginalized individuals in many ways, And frankly,
I think that told me one day is the day.
Just don't have a whole lot of people to care about.
And if they've got a foul pee wee, well you're
really playing with fire because you may have nobody to
(28:36):
care about you or defend you. And it didn't seem
to me that Peewee ever woke up in the morning going, Okay,
I'm gonna go find somebody to kill. I think it
seemed like he might have woken up in the morning
and going, do you know what that thing that happened yesterday,
I'm gonna have to kill that guy for that. That's
what I think. Margaret o'sheay covered Peewee Gaskins for the
(28:57):
State Columbia, South Carolina's Daily News. I fully believed that
he was one of those people in this world who
felt nothing much for others. He considered killing as something
that met his needs and was not overly concerned about
(29:21):
how much he hurt somebody or the people who might
have loved them and missed them after they were gone.
In fact, in the case of his own niece and
her friend, whom he killed together. His family was distraught
that they had disappeared and was worried about them, and
he just casually went through life saying, you know, I
guess they ran away. Janice Kirby and Patricia Allsbrook disappeared
(29:50):
in December. Janice was Peewee's niece, daughter of his sister
Inez gas Agains Kirby. They moved from the area near
Peewee's burial field just eight weeks before the girls went missing.
Janice was classmates with Patricia an All'sbrook at Edmonds High School.
(30:14):
Kidney Janice Kirby's. He loved her in whatever way he
could love somebody. He found out one thing he didn't
like about her, and she was gone. These girls showed
up at Peewee's trailer near Prospect and hung out for
several days around Christmas. He was living there at the
(30:38):
time and known as a festive guy who hosted parties,
and the girls were on the lookout for some fun.
They were at his house together and they were on
drugs for some reason. Drugs were one thing that was
sort of against his code if he had one that
(30:59):
had something to do with it, and they had a
fight and he beat both girls to death, But it
seems to me that there had to have been more
to it than that. What strikes me about his victims
was that most of them, however long or however briefly
(31:20):
they knew him, didn't have a whole lot of reason
to be afraid of him that they knew of I mean,
you know, they were not aware of his activities outside
the sphere that they shared with him. But it didn't
take much to find out the truth about him, and
then they were gone. Yeah. As part of his plea
(31:50):
deal to avoid the electric chair, pee Wee told authorities
to look for a concrete slab in the area around
his killing field and they'd find a body. Ira Partnell
was there with one of Peewee's attorneys when authorities found
Patricia Allbrook's body inventive, five years after she went missing.
(32:13):
Pee Wee kept telling his turney about a body under
seeing that lab, and one of day deputies lived not
a half mile across the field from where this old
half spot was. That everybody was trying to rack the
brains figuring out where I seeing its lab was no
Bill Prestid, He said, only assume its slab by little
(32:34):
bit wound in front yard that old house there by
media up there. It was a cover for a safety
tame ful five of us went over there, who took
a prip bar and moved it. Seeing it lit over
and shined a light down and there there was her
old skeleton right there in the set. Thankfully it was
(32:55):
the old safety thing hadn't been in using quite a while.
But we had to let the sexton down and look
at the rebacco to do his preliminary examination. Gathered up
everything could initially, and then you clean safety tank truck
(33:18):
sucked up everything else out of the tank and it
was dry and through a screen that in the field
as well, he found her high school rang with our
initials in it, which allowed us to make identification on
her m Several weeks after her body was found, Patricia
(33:43):
Allbrooks family buried her remains. Unfortunately, authorities didn't find Peewee's
niece Janice right away. He killed those two girls on
the same day, and he took the body of Patricia
Hall's Brook and stuffed it in a septic tank. But
(34:07):
for some reason he decided he couldn't do that to
his needs, so he buried or somewhere else Janice Kirby's
body was found fifty yards away in an area adjacent
to the Gascon family graveyard. To some, it seemed he
had tried to give her the mere semblance of a
family burial. Not a lot surprises me about what people
(34:33):
are capable of doing, and at that point in my
life I had written about many, many others who had
done distasteful things, illegal and grizzly things. I was a
little surprised that people called him a serial killer. He
didn't have an m O. He didn't have a trigger
(34:54):
or desire to be met, and you know that that
figured into all his killings. Jim Batty's enthusiasm never wavered.
He wrote as quickly as he could during his regular
meetings with Pee Wee. His steely i'd focus produced a
(35:14):
multifaceted picture of this mass murderer. I think that saw
him as a really bad guy. But the process of
telling the story requires that you share every side of
the main character's life, and regardless of how heinous these
(35:38):
crimes are, you can point to some things in Peewee's
life that at least made these things possible, that does
not exonerate or horrify what he has done what he did,
but it does share the full story of Peewee and
where his life ultimately took. I think he's crafty, and
(36:06):
it's developed as a tortured and abused little boy. I
think that he became so clearly defensive. As he told me,
Mr Jim, I never shed a tear after age seven,
he said, I decided that day in the front yard,
on that Sunday afternoon, that they never would see me
(36:27):
cry again. And he said, nobody ever did I think
that that was formed during those terrible, terrible years of
child abuse. My prayer was that through what I wrote,
what I had studied, what I thought I had learned,
(36:49):
is it one child, one child would have been spared
from ever becoming another pea, we gascons and as a
society and as a people, rather than hold this individual
up as a monster, period hold him up as a monster,
(37:12):
and see why and how we could do otherwise. With
a four year old little boy who lived eighty miles
from another little boy his same age, who turned out
a little bit differently, only because of the way I
(37:33):
was loved and raised and brought up. I believe that
love conquers all. Peee Gaskins was Not My Friend as
(37:58):
a joint production from Heart Radio and Doghouse Pictures, produced
and hosted by Jeff Keaty. Executive producers are Courtney Dufries
and Noel Brown. Written by Jim Roberts, Courtney Duffries and
Terry James edit, mix and sound designed by Jeremiah Kolani Prescott.
Music composed by Diamond Street Productions, Spencer garn and Ian Newberry.
Special thanks to Jim and Anita Bade. Additional thanks to
(38:21):
the University of South Carolina, Moving Image Research Collections and
the University of South Carolina.
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Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com