December 8, 2025 • 48 mins
Dick Harpootlian might be a name you recognize. He’s from South Carolina, and he’s one of Alex Murdaugh’s defense attorneys. He’s also been a prosecutor. And one of his most disturbing defendants was serial killer Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins. Dick tells me the story from his book: Dig Me a Grave.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
This guy, you know, if you believe in Evil Gaskins,
was it violent? I mean, just extraordinarily violent.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I'm also the co.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and
throughout my career, research for my many audio and book
projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words,
I sit down with the people I've met along the way,
amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and
reported on notorious true crime cases. This is about the
(00:56):
choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a
deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. Dick
Harputlian might be a name you recognize. He's from South
Carolina and he's one of Alex Murdaw's defense attorneys. But
he's also been a prosecutor, and one of his most
disturbing defendants was serial killer Donald pee Wee Gaskins. Dick
(01:21):
tells me the story of his trial from his book
dig Me a Grave. You know this is a big
switch for you is this something that you've been thinking
about a lot of nonfiction book which is part autobiography?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
A little bit for you, it is part of autobiography.
But I don't think you could understand the case without
understanding me a little bit. Number one. Number two, Yeah,
I've been thinking about it for thirty years writing a book.
This book especially was probably the toughest thing I've ever done,
Tougher than any of the fifteen death Ponty cases. I've done,
tougher than the Murdall case, tougher and all that. And
(01:57):
the reason that I came to the conclusion I have
had to do it, and I've been working on it
for a while was the murderer case, where you know,
I've tried murder cases on court TV before. I had
several very high profile cases, but I never saw the
incendiary influence of social media. Twitter ticked to all of that,
(02:20):
creating this tremendous interest where millions of people watch it
every day. And I can remember one morning walking into
the courthouse and there's some folks sleeping on the courthouse
lawn in sleeping bags, and I was just sort of,
you know, this is very early in the try. I
don't think we anticipated, nor did we believe it was
going to be that kind of interest. And so I
(02:40):
said to one of them, what are you doing? He said, well,
I'm waiting to get one of the two hundred seats
in the courtroom. And I said where are you from?
And he said Kansas. I said, you drove all the
way from Kansas to sit in the court and he said,
I want to be part of it. I said, you
know what's on TV. You can walk. You can see
it better on TV. Not the same, not the same.
And we had people there from californ Arizona, Canada. So
(03:04):
you know, I was just knocked back by the interest
in true crime and that sort of got me to
the point where I had to get it done, and
we got it done.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Well, let's start from the beginning, and then I definitely
have some questions around how you, as a prosecutor and
a defense attorney view clients or you know, would be
offenders or suspects, depending on what your role is. But
let's start with the beginning with this story. So you know,
there's no bones about it. We're talking about a serial killer.
(03:34):
Can you tell me? I guess first where he came from?
Because from what I know he had a very difficult childhood.
I had read that he didn't know his first name
until he had to go to a court appearance because
his mother was so neglectful.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Is that right, Well, he didn't know his last name.
His last name was. He thought he was named Parrot,
but didn't find out, so he went to a court
appearance as real fod was a guy named Gaskins, and
he entered. I mean he had a very difficult childhood.
His mother told I don't think he was a psychiatrist,
but told somebody that evaluated him very young in life,
at ten or twelve, that he had drunk some kerosene
(04:11):
when he was a small baby, and she thought that
affected his behavior. He had a temper that went off
like explosively, and it was proved. And when he was fourteen,
he got caught by a little girl, twelve year old
girl next door to his house, breaking into the house.
He took an axe and hit her in the head
with it, put her down, thought she was dead, left
(04:32):
her in a ditch. That's at fourteen, he goes off
to the reformatory that only even performatory that existed at
the time, called the Florence School. For white boys. This
is the South, it's the forties. There is no reformatory
for black kids. It's only for white boys. And it
was a big room that probably fifty of them swept
(04:54):
in every night. And he being at that time he
was probably four foot something and slight of b there's
no question he was sexually assaulted over and over and
over again. He escaped eight or nine times. In one escape,
attempted one of the other little boys with him, want
him to go back, grabbed him. We pulled out a
(05:14):
butcher knife and cut his finger off as he grabbed
him and took off. The report, and I've read the
report and it's cited in the book by the superintendent
of the institution said, this young man has homicidal tendencies
and will no doubt kill one day. Fifteen years old
at the time, So that's in the forties. If somebody
(05:35):
had listened, maybe there'd be fourteen, fifteen or more people
still alive. But so he had, when I say troubled childhood,
more than troubled. Of course. He escaped one time and
went and went to Fard and we had some carnival
down there, met a bunch of people learned how to
be a carnie, and then he was recaptured and brought back.
And then you know, as he goes through life he
(05:56):
becomes a car thief. Well, he learned skills. He can
fix car, he can steal cars. He was a roofer, electrician, plumber,
all these skills. And at the same time he was
when I say married six times, I don't think he
ever really got married, just got a new wife and
had numerous girlfriends. The common theme were young, fourteen, fifteen
(06:18):
years old. He was charged with statutory rate one time
on a fourteen year old who he thought of as
his wife. He was in love with her. So he
had all the markings of somebody who was a sociopath,
antisocial predictably was going to kill.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
You know, people often ask me do you think people
are born evil? They asked me that, and I said no,
I say, I don't think they're born evil. I think
people do evil things. I think there are people who,
you know, are born into awful situations and they go
on to be absolutely incredible people. And you know, the
same can be said, of course for people who grow
up in seemingly great conditions and they turn out to
(06:59):
be you know, murderers or rapists. So do you think that, well,
number one, what do you think about that? And then
number two, there seem to have been opportunities for pee
Wee to have not gone down this road, but it
just feels like, sort of he's he's destined to go
down that road.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
What did you think? I mean, I think he was
destined to go down that road. And now, whether he
was born that way or made that way very young,
and I mean clearly he was molested by the men
that visited his mother. I mean I think he was
sexually abused from probably two years old through that time
at the school for white boys. And I think that
is traumatic and creates a tremendous amount of anger, hate, resentment,
(07:39):
and wants to show that he has the same power
as somebody that isn't five foot two in weigh one
hundred and ten pounds, And the easiest way to do
that is kill somebody, or kill anybody that gets in
your way. By the way, he never confronted somebody and
killed them. Typically it was from behind or large marched
him out at gunpoint and shot out him in the
back of the head. Now, the book starts with a
(08:03):
scenario was a young woman he had dated a number
of years, not saying a couple of years she left,
went somewhere else and showed up on his doorstep a
couple of years later with a two year old child,
and she was pregnant, and clearly the child was of
mixed race, according to Gaskins, and she admitted she was
pregnant by a black man. So he comforted her and
(08:25):
took her down to the pond behind the house, and
while the baby sat on the bank, he pushed her
in the water and drowned her. He then took a
hammer to the baby. But in pee Wee's mind, he
was doing them a favor. I mean, world would be
very cruel to that mixed race. He was doing her
and the baby a favor in his mind.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
So we know that his background was terrible, it sounds like,
and then he starts picking up these criminal skills. When
does this start to turn to murder? Is it the
first woman that you were talking about with a child?
Is that his first victim?
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Pee Wee's first murders occurred in the fall of nineteen seventy.
They began with him pulling into a drive in restaurant
where there was a carful of girls, two of whom
he knew his niece Janice Kirby and her friend Patty Olsborough.
Both of them are teenagers under eighteen. His niece Kirby
told him that Patty had had so much to drink
she couldn't drive. I needed to sober up. Gaskins offered
(09:23):
to take them to his house where Patty could sober up.
When they got to the house, Kirby I think went
to the restroom. When she came back in pee wee
had Patty on the bed, was pulling her pants off,
and he was holding a butcher knife. They pushed him aside,
ran outside, and he ultimately had a pistol, chased them down,
brought them back to the house, where he beat both
(09:44):
of them to death. He then put them in his vehicle,
which was a hearse at the time, drove them into
the swamp, or into an area near the swamp, where
he put both their bodies in a septic tank. One
of the murders, sort of the more famous murder was
he killed a businessman who had a girlfriend named Suzanne
(10:07):
long Legs Owens, and this older businessman had promised Suzanne
that he would give her a bunch of stuff in
the house and all that, and he renegged on him,
so she hired Pee Wee for a thousand dollars to
kill him, which he did. And then he began a
romantic relationship with Suzanne Owens, who was at least almost
(10:29):
a foot taller than him, hence the name long Legs.
And there are love letters, messages and phone calls between
Pee Weee on death row and her, and he advises
her how to escape and she does. Matter of fact,
when the threat to kidnap my daughter came as a
result of Donnie Gaskins, Pee's son, telling somebody that Daddy
(10:52):
wants me to kidnap Swisser Herbebian's daughter and hold her hostage.
And that got uncovered when that kid he talked to
went to the sheriff. We were concerned Owens, Suzanne Longley
Owens was still an escapee and where was she We
didn't know. And he had it wasn't a cult, but
he had people that followed him, the sort of the
(11:13):
miscreants of society, as you'll see in the book. They
none of them were rocket scientists.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
When you talk about he's starting to become paranoid, right
because he's getting deeper and deeper into criminal activity that
would be very serious for him if he's caught, and
he would go to prison. So are these associates at first,
and they are unaware of his boundaries, it sounds like.
And when they cross a boundary, he doesn't let him know.
(11:43):
He just kills them.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Correct and he For instance, he had a young girl
when I say young girl, probably sixteen years old, that
he had a relationship with, but she knew too much
and so she turned up missing, told her parents that
she'd gone. He was in the middle of the state,
and the pd that had gone to Charleston, she never
showed up there any Later on admitted killing her because
(12:06):
he was afraid she was going to talk. He really
can't make this stuff up. Pee Wee drove a hearse.
He drove a hearse that was his vehicle during this
period of time, and everybody laughed at pee Wee because
he's driving aharse. He was doing roofing, he was doing plumbing,
he was doing you know, some auto mechanic stuff. But
he drove ahearse around and from time to time there
(12:27):
was a body in the back of that hearse, which
he drove down to the swamp and bury. So I
mean again five foot two, little guy, and I say affiable,
I mean very friendly, engaging. Several of the people that
I talked to from Sumter, including a judge that had
known him during this period of time, said, man, everybody
loved pee Wee. Everybody was you know he needed something done,
(12:51):
like your roof done, or you needed you know, plumbing
done or whatever, he'd come over and do it for you.
Everybody knew him.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Well, let's talk about the victims here, So tell me
about the girls that he ends up killing. Are these
girls who are not involved with their families or and
nobody was come looking for them.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
These are the folks of the jetsment of our society.
They run aways, They gravitate towards pee Wee. He's older,
he has relationships with him. Primarily there was one I've
just mentioned. The rest of the girls other than his
niece and her friend and the dope dealer, the rest
were men. And there were men involved in either stealing
(13:32):
the cars or fencing the cars, or knew about other
murders he committed. And it's complicated. Take me an hour
just to explain this network of how they all become
related in between Florence, Sumter and North Charleston, South Carolina,
and several different wives Pee Wee had. They're not really
wives because they you never got married. We never had
(13:54):
a merit, you know, a licensed to get married. So yeah,
he calls some girl his wife for five years and
considering years or two years, and then all of a
sudden he had a new wife, and that wife ended
up with one of his friends, one of his associates. Clearly,
Pee Wee was smart. I'm not talking about high IQ cunning, calculating,
(14:15):
and again seems so I mean, I've been victimized by it.
He so friendly to me, so engaging, and a little humor. Dick,
you know, you're a lot like me kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Had you in your past as a prosecutor or any
of your various rules before Pee Wee in the seventies,
had you encountered anybody like him? I understand, not to
the scale of what he was doing, but is this
a familiar character to you?
Speaker 2 (14:40):
The kind of globe No, I mean first and last
again referred to me by my first name, and I
engaged him on his first name. I mean, by the
time I got to Pee Wee, I prosecuted probably over
one hundred murdered cases in eight years, fifteen death public
cases back when, by the way, when I started prosecuting
death the cases in nineteen seventy five, and so my
(15:02):
first murder case Victor Jerry on Monday morning at ten
o'clock sentence to death of two o'clock Tuesday afternoon. Wo
it was a far different time. I don't believe a
defendant ever spoke to me in a courtroom. I mean,
I can remember one who was angry and looked at
me on the way out and said, I'm going to
kill you, you son of a bitch, which you know I'd
(15:24):
be angry too. I mean, it's an expected but not
engaging like Pee Wee. Peewee was unique in the sense
that he could charm anybody and did and charm many
of these folks to take a ride with him. They
never came back from.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
So.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
I mean, I think that the great thing about this
book is explained a little bit about me and how
I got to where I was. You know, I didn't
grow up wanting to be a lawyer or a prosecutor
in the sixties, long hair anti war. Okay, that's not
what you think of when you think of a prosecutor. No,
during law school didn't change much. Helped the guy beat
(15:58):
a twenty five year incumbent DA. He asked me to
come work for him. Why would I want to do that?
And the reason I did it ondly was he paid
me ten five hundred dollars a year, which is about
twenty five hundred bucks more than most warriors are getting
starting in nineteen seventy five. I didn't sell like a
lot of money now, but gas was ten cents a gallon. Okay,
let me put it in perspective for you, say, rests
(16:20):
for ten cents a pack. So I took that job.
Primarily he told me, you know, you can change the
system from the inside. And I started with juveniles, but
within six months I was prosecuting murder cases and putting
the pieces together. And back then, remember no DNA, no fingerprints,
no cameras. I mean, we did it the old fashioned way,
(16:41):
and we had witnesses and you know, you had to
convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. But I enjoyed it.
I loved it, actually, And Gaskins was my third death
pilday case in eighteen months. And so when it was
over with after six weeks. I mean typically a trial
and South Carolina back then was taking a week. But
after six weeks, I was exhausted mentally and fiscally and
(17:05):
decided to do something else, to be a defense attorney.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Well, let's go back to you know, he's got these
two groups it sounds like, which were associates, kind of
criminal associates. He's got these girls we have to describe
as girls essentially, and then you know the crossover of
people who just seem to really piss him off, like
you know, the two young women who were staying with him.
At what point and what years are we talking about
(17:30):
where he finally gets tripped up and gets caught somehow,
because you're describing this as these are all people on
the fringe of society here who it sounds like nobody's
looking for him or rattling the cages of South Carolina
police or anything like that once they all start going missing.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Well, in the early seventies basically when all this was
going on, late sixties, early seventies, there are critical times
when people who knew something got in a hotspot, got
the pressure put on him, and of course he gets
tried on tumor sentenced to death. They don't know how
many you're out there, but he gets sentenced to death.
One is long Leg's boyfriend. He then the Furman versus Georgia,
(18:10):
which for your listeners's case, came down I can think
in nineteen seventy four, which said you get a bifurcated trial.
You can't just got to be guilt or innocence, and
then enunciated aggravating circumstances and mitigating circumstances, and the jury
has to separately decide what the sentence is. And Furman
comes down and I mean it's sentenced to death. Is vacated.
(18:34):
He was convinced, and the DA guy named Kenny Somerford
told him was going to be a retrial and he
could be sentenced to death again. Somerford told him that
his lawyer signed off on it. But somer Ford said this, hewey,
if you'll tell me about all the murders you've committed,
I'll guarantee you a life sentence on all those murders. Now,
if you don't tell us about one, you're going to
be liable for the death building. So in my office
(18:57):
I have the transcript of the two day interview with
Peewee five hundred pages where he gives the details of
every one of these murders. I mean, that's why, in
terms of factual renditions, his words and other statements by
other co defendants pretty well lock him into the thirteen
previous murders. And of course then he gets life. And
(19:18):
in nineteen seventy five or seventy six went after he
pled and got the thirteen life sentences. You were eligible
parole in ten years because prior to that, penalty for
murder was death unless the jury recommended mercy. When they
went to the spiifurcated system, they never changed the penalty
and parole for life life. You're eligible parole in ten years.
(19:42):
So and you can hear on some of the tapes
where pee Wee's talking to his wife about make sure
the kids come, make sure everybody sees you here. I
want to be able to I've got a spotless record.
I'm head trustee for this cell block. Let's just make
a record so I can get parolled one day. He's
very he's calculate about that. But and this was okay.
(20:03):
So he death fell, he vacated. Given these life sentences
could get out in as little as ten years, probably
more like twenty. He and we don't think it was
for money. Undertook a plot to kill a guy on
death row named Tyner, African American from New York who
had killed the parents of a guy named Tony Simo
(20:25):
down on the beach during an arm robbery. He gets
them to smuggle in some poison, and you can hear
on the tapes he just takes it, gets sick. He said,
Now you get me a quarter stick of dynamite in
a blasting cap. Won't be no coming back from that.
Simo says, well, I can get you some plastic explosive.
He said, well, get it to me and just sit
back and listen for the bang. And so he creates
(20:47):
an ingenious let me see if I can describe this
for you, and the FBI did a model of cell
block two for us, which I still have. Where Peewee
was the head trustee in the selback because he could
do plumbing, he could do electrical work, so they made
him the head trustee and he hired all the other
not hired, but appointed all the other trustees the runners.
(21:09):
And so he decided who got to deliver food to
death roat, which was one of the tiers, the second
tier on the cell block on one side. Peewee's cell
was on the other side, and he had a vent
and death row cell bock at a vent on the
back of their cells. And he began yelling to Tinier
to befriend him. Can I get you some marijuana? Can
(21:30):
I get you some food? Can I get you this?
Can I get you that? And he got it to him.
Simo arranged for some poison and he smuggled in. They
killed a dog with it, experimenting with it, and Pee
Wee on the phone call says it's just making him sick.
And so he asked them to get him the explosives.
And so Pee Wee takes an unbreakable prison cup drinking
(21:50):
glass if you will, made out of plastic that's unbreakable.
He had a soldering iron. He melted a hole.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
In the bottom a soldering iron. What is this from
the workshop that he was in.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
No, No, he had in his cell. I have Pee
we sell his toolbox.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
You need to explain steps. There's no recording of phone
calls at this point right in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
No, no, no, he is going to a payphone in
the hall and putting a suction cup on it and
recording his phone calls. No, they're not recording phone calls. Yes,
he's got a soidering iron, screwdriver, wire tools, and so
he makes He puts a female plug there, connects that
to the blasting gap, puts the C four in there,
and then on top of that he puts nails and
(22:32):
screws and all kinds of sharp metal and then glues
a speaker on top of it and tells Tyner it's
a intercom so he doesn't have to yell anymore. And
he runs a wire from his cell to tyner cell
where it's got a male plug on the end of it,
and he tells Tyner to plug it in. Can you
hear me? When? And Tyner apparently, I mean the story
(22:53):
is now. I don't know who confirms this that Tyner.
I know where Tyner ended up holding it up to
his ear because Pee Wee plugs the other end into
the one ten in his cell and it goes off
and literally blows Tyner's hand and most of his head off,
just brutal. Pee Wee pulls the wire back through, quips
it up, flushes it down the commode and then comes
out of a cell with everybody going what was that?
(23:15):
What was that? So the rumors and the way he
gets caught is pretty amazing. The rumors went around to
the guy named Al Waters, investigator and by the way,
when I first got called on this case, there was
the report was that an inmate on death row had
tried to escape, blow his way out with a match
head bomb and killed himself, and pretty quickly the determined
(23:37):
it was C four explosive was then he matched. So
Al had heard pe we was somehow involved, so he
went to Pee Wee Sell made him strip lock to
Sell down and Pee Wee had a collection of thirty
six cassette tapes, but he had been tape recording. You know,
there's gospel music there was. He was a big Tanya
Tucker fan, and you know those thirty six tapes. There's
(23:58):
probably twelve to fourteen minutes of these discussions with Simo,
multiple phone calls where he's arranging to kill Al. To
his credit, sat down personally listened to all of them.
Found the smoking gun. It was pretty easy then to
tie it to Pee Wee. We needed to figure out
how we got the bomb. There was a guy named
James Brown. Again it's a nonfiction book, but couldn't make
(24:21):
these characters up, who was convicted serving two life sentences.
He had two Jehovah's witnesses women come to his house
one afternoon while he was watching a ball game, shot
both of them in the head and then had sex
with them. So he ended up being the guy that
delivers the bomb to death Row because he was the
guy that delivered food and he testified. He also testified
(24:42):
he was Peewee's lover. That was explosive moment in the trial,
which is again recounted in the book. So, I mean,
these are the waste product of society, all of them.
And you know, if you're trying to figure out how
they got there. You know, I've been doing this for
fifty years, and typically you can see somebody do something
because of passion or avarice, greed. Yet rapists that commit
(25:05):
rapes because it's not about the sex, but the violence
to women and the control, all those things are easy
to analyze, not easy to analyze, but much easier to
analyze and diagnose than what I saw here. I've prosecuted
a bunch of strange murders murders that defied well they
(25:25):
didn't defy explanation. They were explainable, but the reasons were bizarre.
This guy, if you believe in evil Gaskins, was it
friendly yet violent? I mean just extraordinarily violent and committed
violence in a very aggressive way.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Well, let's go back to where we are in Gaskin's
life when people turn on him. Can you describe the
turning point where finally he's linked to all of these
murders from different people.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Well, because people that silas the ace would is the
one he originally got the death Ponty four. There were people,
there was a guy that helped pee wee and ended
up testifying against him. That's what got him the first
death penalty that was later overturned, and that was sort
of the beginning of the end for him because after that,
you know, he never got out of jail until he
(26:19):
was executed. So he was committing these murders and getting
away with him. Whether it was the girl that he
said went to Charleston, or the pregnant woman or the baby,
they weren't fighting any bodies. Only after the deal was cut,
after he got convicted the h murder sentenced to death,
overturn did he begin. I mean, he got this deal
to reveal the other twelve or so murders he committed.
(26:40):
So it was that guy Johnny E. Powell, I think
was his name that rolled on pee Wee. But pee
Wee was always suspecting other folks of getting ready to
roll on or talk, and those are folks he just
followed out in the woods and shot him in the
back of the head. The Digmy a Grave title of
this book comes from one of those episodes where he
shoot somebody in the back of a head and he
(27:01):
tells the guy with him, dig me a grave, Paint
that picture for me. Right?
Speaker 1 (27:04):
What year was it? When this kind of finally ends
and Johnny turns on him?
Speaker 2 (27:09):
It ends in like seventy three or seventy four. I'd
have to go back and look at the book to
find the exact dates when he gets convicted on the
siwas Ates murder.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Do you come in with this part of the case
or when do you appear.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
So I don't appear well, I appear in eighty two
when he's charged. Everything you're asking me about is historical.
I wasn't a part of any of that. The rest
of it is primarily garnered from that five hundred page
confession he gave prosecutors Kenny Somerford, which was transcribed and
is an amazing read. And you know, Peewee wrote a
(27:44):
book called The Final Truth, which was published after his death,
where he claimed have killed one hundred people and kidnapped
girls and mutilated their bodies. I think all of that
is totally bs. I think he wanted to be bigger
than what he was. Again, somebody who had suffered abuse
after abuse after abuse wanted to be a dangerous guy.
(28:08):
And of course the best way to exhibit that is
killed people. So Ever, say you killed people.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
What were you doing? In seventy three seventy four.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
I was in law school and I remember reading about Gaskins.
He's a big deal. When he got prosecuted for the
initial orders and then confessed to the rest, it was,
I mean, everybody in the state was going, what the hell?
I killed thirteen people? And he would on occasion I say, well,
I remembered another one. He'd get out of prison taken
(28:36):
by sweat agents to some remote part of the swamp,
and every agent there I've talked to a bunch of
them felt like every one of those trips was an
effort on his part to escape. They remember I talked
to Tom Henderson, who was a sweat agent that took
him out on one of those trips, and they could
see a car across the field going back and forth
(28:58):
and pee wee looking at it and trying to alcolate
whether he could get there or not. Billy Barnes, a
sheriff in Florence, recounts when he was taken to court
on one of the early murders that as he was
shuffling towards the courthouse, something fell and it was a
pair of handcuff keys. Had no idea where he got.
He escaped time and time again. Now when he got
to our courthouse in nineteen eighty two, it was a
(29:21):
new courthouse. No, there were no windows. This is I
mean that opened anyway. I mean no windows in any area.
No cour you know the old days he had these
eighteen foot ceilings with these big windows that opened and
the holding cell at least in one courthouse. He escaped
by getting one of the bars out and then dropping
twenty feet. He broke his ankle, hid under a car
(29:42):
while the cops are looking for him. Next day they
came back, and then the dew on the windshield of
the car pee we had written, ha ha tee wee
was here. And I guess if the book has a message,
it is was he born evil? Or was he made evil?
But he ended up evil?
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Tell me what happens in order from seventy three until
you get this case, which is eighty two eighty three.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
You said, yep, I mean he gets convicted of the
eighth murder and one other murder, sentenced to death. Those
get reversed. He then gives this confession and he gets
to CCI. And now CCI is the prison central Correctional
Institution here in Columbia, long since torn down, but one
of the wings was built in eighteen forty eight. For
you folks from around the country, you don't realize that
(30:28):
Sherman not only burned Atlanta, but he came through Columbia
and burned it to the crown. And he housed his
horses in this prison, so it was not burned down.
A number of cell walks were built after the Civil War,
but they were I mean it was unair conditioned. Having
gone down there a bunch on this case, I can
(30:48):
still smell that odor of that body odor and cigarettes
and unwashed bodies. It was a despicable place and basically
run by the animates. And Pee Wee was one of
the people that ran it. And ccis he pointed out
a moment ago. I mean, here's the guy that's in
charge of the cell block serving thirteen life sentences. He's
(31:11):
got a slider in iron screwdrivers. He's got all the
things he needs to fix the electrical work and the
plumbing work at the prison, but also to make one
hell of a bomb or a weapon. Think about that,
thirteen murders into giving him sharp objects. It boggles the mind.
How they weren't recording phone calls when I got involved.
(31:33):
Got a call from Al Waters at the Department Corrections
as he began to investigate this. Clearly, when you saw
the crime scene photos and FBI reports, clearly this was
a hit. This was an execution. Then Al found the tapes.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
And this is Tyner, right, and he blows them up
on behalf of His name was Simo.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Tony Simo was the Sun of the Moons. And they
were robbed and they were in the middle of an
arm robber. Tyner shot both of them at the shotgun
in this sort of a side story there where Simo
lived near the store and saw Tyner walking towards the
store that night. He knew Tyner not to be a
good guy, but he went back to watching whatever his
(32:13):
television show was and see Tony. Simo was obsessed with
Tyner dying and Tyner was tried, convicted, sentence to death, reversed,
tried and sentenced to death again. Took like eight years
at that point, and Simo just lost his patience. And
I can tell you, having interviewed him, he had no
regret whatsoever. He was a happy man because Tyner had
(32:37):
been sent to hell. As he put it, he had
no regrets and would do it again to kill Tyner.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Did he pay Pee Wee to do this or did
pee Wee just do it because he liked killing people.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Simo never admitted paying him. There's no discussion of money
on any of these calls. And of course we never
never gave a statement on this murder. He did not
testify in the Kildar innocence phase. He did ask the
jury not to kill him in the sentencing phase. But
I suspect Pee Wee did it for fun. If you
(33:09):
come away with one thing from this book, it will
be that there's evil. There's no question there's evil out there,
but ultimately we as a society can deal with it. Now,
it took a while here because we didn't know he's
committing these murders any more than any other serial killer
gets caught after a number of killings. But Gaskins had
(33:30):
gotten a waste so long and so off, you know,
and again trying to kidnap my daughter two weeks before
his execution.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
You got to tell me about that. Let's talk about
that story.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Al Waters finds these tapes that he had recorded himself.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Pee weee?
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Yep? Yep?
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Why did he do that? I don't understand this man.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Why did he do that? Great question? And every cop
worked on this case and me had a theory he
was going to blackmail Simo, as conniving as he was.
That's probably as good a guess as anything else. Another
theory was after he killed him, he just wanted to
listen to it and so he felt good about himself
or maybe play it for one of his minions. I
don't know. But had he not done that, he would
(34:10):
have gotten away with it. Yeah, no question about it.
So you know, he gets prosecuted, sentenced to death In
March of nineteen eighty three, I left the swister's office
and went into practice with Jack Scrolling, a college chumb
of mine who was Pee Wee's defense for We just
spent six weeks together. He was working for a law
(34:32):
firm in town and decided, you know, he'd been doing
it eight years. I'd been out of law school eight
years and thought maybe I wanted to do something else,
And so we went into practice together and had a
very successful criminal defense practice. I'm actually out playing golf
one day and he got a call from head of
our state law enforcement division and said, where are you.
(34:52):
I said, I'm playing golf. He said, where's your daughter?
I said, well, she's in preschool. She's four years old.
He said, are you sure? Now, let me tell you something.
When he said are you sure, oh my god, I
mean your heart seizes up. Why well, you need to
go pick her up right now. We'll have police officers
(35:12):
meet you there, and so I speed back. Police are there,
We get her home and then they debrief me. Two
weeks before he's be executed, Gaskins has his son visited him.
According to the son, who later gave a statement, and
the guy he approached his father said, look, they're going
to kill me unless we come up with a plan.
If you will kidnap the solicitor's four year old daughter,
(35:36):
hold her hostage, put her in the trunk of the car,
hold her hostage. Call Harpooty and tell him you've got
the daughter, and if he doesn't have me brought up
to the courthouse for a meeting in his office, you're
going to kill her. Now, what's interesting about that is
I had a back door to my office nobody knew about.
But if I could get if gaslings would get in
(35:56):
my office, le me tell the guards wait outside. If
he's handcuffs and all that, he could have escaped. I
mean he had a planned. Little Donnie went to a
friend of his. That's his son, right, Little Donnie's pee
Wee's son went to a friend of his and said, look,
daddy says he'll pay us five thousand dollars to do this.
The friend immediately picked up the phone and called the
sheriff for Forrence County, Billy Barnes, who immediately had Little
(36:19):
Gaskins arrested taken into custody. He actually arrested this kid too,
you know, he's the one that called and he got
them in custody, got my daughter and I and my
wife guarded twenty four to seven. Two weeks later he
was executed. Now you know, before he's executed, he sliced
his wrists in an effort to avoid being executed. Doctor
(36:42):
came in. Of course, he cut him this way, which
doesn't do much. He stitched them up. One of the
officers down there talked to us and he said caske
and said, do you want to know where the razor is?
And he said yeah, and he spit it up. He
had it in his odor, in his mouth, not in
his mouth somewhere, spit it up, handed it over and said,
(37:05):
don't blame anybody. Nobody knew I had it. That's about
two hours before he was executed. He was electrocuted in
the electric chair, which was pretty brutal.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Did you witness his execution?
Speaker 2 (37:15):
I did not. I was invited. Why would I want
to do that? I mean, what is it? Why would
I want to watch another human being burn to death?
Basically that's what electric chair does. Or now we have
the firing squad or shot to death or drug to death.
He would have relished that if you'd invited Pee wee
to watch somebody like, oh boy, he'd find that almost
sexually exciting. Let me say this to you, I've done
(37:36):
this for fifty years. Anybody says that they get closure
from something like that doesn't understand they never will get closure.
Watching somebody die is not going to give them closure.
It's going to give them more PTSD. I understand what
they think it's going to do, but in my experience,
it never has.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
You know, I have read several studies that say that
for families who want the death penalty for the person
who murdered someone close to them, when either they see
the execution or the execution has been completed, that the
majority of them say it changed nothing. It didn't give
any kind of comfort, and they're surprised by that.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
I mean, if you know, if somebody tells you he
was executed, that's one thing, and you understand that person's
paid for the crime they committed against your loved one.
But to watch it, I mean, pee we liked watching
people die? Yeah, I've watched too much violence in my life. Yeah,
as a prosecutor and a defense attorney, if it's voluntary,
I'd rather not see it.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Well throughout this discussion, I've heard of only two people
who were close quote unquote as close you could be
to pee Wee who survived and seemed loyal to him.
One was Suzanne long Legs, the woman whom he killed
her boyfriend for, and the other is Donnie the son.
What was the relationships like that stopped him from turning
(39:00):
on them at some point?
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Well, he couldn't. He didn't have a chance to turn
on Donnie because he was executed before he I mean
Donnie was still in custody and Suzanne they had a
romantic relationship. There's some interesting phone calls and letters that
we found later on where he was trying to arrange
to meet her, almost like the Shawshank Redemption where Read
and whatever his name was arranged to meet Mexico. He
(39:24):
told her how to escape, you know, be good, get
on duty working in the garden, which he knew was
near the front gate of the correct Department of Corrections.
I mean when he was on death row, he was
in the scene. He's probably half a mile from where
she was, and he said, you know, you just walk off,
don't run, walk and I'll you know, get out and
(39:44):
meet you. I think that. I don't think he said where,
but I'll find you. And of course she did escape,
and she was gone for years and he never made
it out. He had always gotten away with or gotten
out of whatever he had done until he was executed.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Do you associate that with the fact that the people
he were targeting were people who were just sort of
like on the like I said, on the fringe, or
do you think that it was because he was smart
and he hid bodies and nobody was able to find them,
and sort of the tactic he used with, you know,
the inmate that he blew up.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Absolutely, I mean he would befriend like the inmate or
not give I mean, I think people some of the
people were nervous around him after they'd seen him kill
somebody else. But most of them were on the fringe
of society. They were former convicts or runaways or thieves themselves.
They were people that lived on the fringe of society
(40:41):
and had no family to go back to or no
nobody that would miss them. I mean, it's amazing how
many of these people were not missed after we'd killed
him and buried him in the swamp. You know, you
see these shows or stories about all the missing people
in our society, nobody knows where they are, what happened
to them. I mean, it was just as bad back
(41:02):
in the seventies. Maybe it's worse now because the number
of people. But these are folks that nobody was really
looking for. Now, there was the girl he killed that
he told the friends and family gone to Charleston. Her
father was intent on finding her. But that's the only
one I can remember that really. Maybe one of the
other men, the mother was but nobody really bird dogged
(41:24):
him or asked him hard questions except this mother. So again,
they were on the fringe of society. And I mean,
if they're hanging around with pee Wee Gaskins, good golly.
I mean, it speaks volumes about their judgment, if nothing else.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
We haven't talked at all about Donnie, his son. Do
you think that Donnie would have followed through on kidnapping
your daughter?
Speaker 2 (41:43):
He says not. He says, well, yeah, I mean, he
says in his statement he wasn't intending to do it.
Of course, he did approach somebody to help him. He's
got to be in his early sixties now, I mean,
I'm sure he's out there somewhere I don't particularly want
to go talk to him, but he wanted to help
his father and was willing to at least talk about it.
But I'm not sure he would have gone through with
(42:06):
it had the other boy had not turned them in.
I'd like to think that if I didn't think that,
I'd be a little concerned about going to sleep at night.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
I mean, I hate to ask this, but I'm curious
about what your daughter, who, of course now as an adult,
what does she think about all of this. I mean,
that must have been terrifying for her. Not only that,
but that is the clear illustration of the danger that you,
as a prosecutor or frankly as a defense attorney, could
be in just for doing your job.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Well, if you look when you see the book, when
you get a copy of the book, you'll see it's
dedicated to Kate, my daughter, because she was the one
at risk, not me. I mean, I put my four
year old daughter unknowingly at risk, and it's one of
the reasons I quit prosecuting ever again. I mean I
did by stint as DA and tried to move on
to another office. But as long as there are people
(42:56):
like Guessings out there, prosecutor's family's going to be at risk.
And you know, I admire many many of the prosecutors
I worked with and against. There are people that have
a tough job, and the honorable ones are people that
shouldn't have to worry about where their kids are, but
they do.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Now, I know you know this experience now, and you
know you and your buddy, who is Gaskin's defense attorney,
ended up starting your firm together. What is your experience
switching from being a district attorney prosecutor over to being
a defense attorney as far as struggling with I am
sure you have defended guilty people.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Look, I'm a lawyer, and some people, especially turning the
murder trial, get some really hateful emails from people. How
can you represent that guy? I'm an attorney. I'm a lawyer.
I took an oath and I take that. Oh seriously,
when you're prosecuting, you're there to see justice is done.
That's your duty. Don't hide evidence, don't intimidate witnesses into lying,
(43:56):
don't do any of the stuff that would get a
result in a not based on the facts. And if,
by the way, if you don't believe that you can
convict somebody beyond a reasonable doubt, don't take him to trial.
Dismiss the case. That's your duty. The flip side of
that is, if you're representing somebody, you got a duty
to represent them. But if they've got a story, you
don't help them make a better story. If they've told
(44:18):
you that you know there's evidence somewhere, you've got a
duty to tell the police where it is. I mean,
if you play by the rules and the ethical rules
in every case, and I've done that for over fifty years,
you go to bed every night, put your head down
on the pie, when you go to sweep. You're not
worried about helping some guilty person to get off. Now,
having said that, let me give you an example. Most
(44:39):
people don't understand this. Let's say your client comes in
it says I rob the store. That was me, So
what do you do with that? Well, if he wants
to testify a trial, now you can challenge on a
reasonable doubt basis witnesses, cross examinem You're welcome to question
the relevance or the ad misiabil of evidence. But if
(45:01):
he takes the stand, you can't help him tell that
lie that he wants to tell so and you can
tell with good lawyers, when the lawyer puts his client
on the stand and says, mister Smith, tells the jury
your story, sits down and lets him tell a story.
Never ask the question to help him tell a story.
And when the guy comes off the stand in final argument,
(45:23):
you don't argue his story. You argue reasonable doubt. And
that's what an ethical lawyer does. That is playing by
the rules. And that's the rule of law. We talk
about the rule of law. The system works if people
follow the rule of law. And you know, within a
year less than a year of leaving the swister's office,
(45:46):
the prosecutor's office and sroying going on and sroy and
I go into practice. I helped represent a guy in
a death penalty case who was only executed. So I mean,
it's just you do your job and you do it ethically.
You don't make stuff up, but you don't on either side.
If you do that, it's not about winning. It's about
doing your job and doing your job in an ethical way.
(46:09):
You know, I primarily practice civil law. Now I do
some criminal work, obviously murder all, but it's primarily civil
where it's just about money, and still you've got to
play by the rule. And if you do that, there's
a verdict. The word verdicto means to speak the truth.
You want a verdict that speaks the truth. Now, it
also may be that in a criminal case, the state
(46:32):
has the duty to prove the case, and if they
don't prove it, they're acquitted. I've had that. I had
many cases where I've represented people didn't tell me they
were guilty, but based on everything I saw, I thought
they were guilty who didn't take the stand that were
acquitted because the state didn't prove the case beyond a
reasonable doubt. And that's the system. And you know folks
(46:54):
don't want bad guys to get away with stuff. Well
what that does when you start fucking you undermine the
judicial system, which undermines our democracy.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners All Bow, The
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and
Don't Forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.
(47:37):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis Mrosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer.
Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen
Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and
(47:58):
Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold
More and if you know of a historical crime that
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email us at info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com. We'll
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Words
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
This guy, you know, if you believe in Evil Gaskins,
was it violent? I mean, just extraordinarily violent.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
I'm also the co.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
Host of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and
throughout my career, research for my many audio and book
projects has taken me around the world. On Wicked Words,
I sit down with the people I've met along the way,
amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and
reported on notorious true crime cases. This is about the
(00:56):
choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a
deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. Dick
Harputlian might be a name you recognize. He's from South
Carolina and he's one of Alex Murdaw's defense attorneys. But
he's also been a prosecutor, and one of his most
disturbing defendants was serial killer Donald pee Wee Gaskins. Dick
(01:21):
tells me the story of his trial from his book
dig Me a Grave. You know this is a big
switch for you is this something that you've been thinking
about a lot of nonfiction book which is part autobiography?
Speaker 2 (01:35):
A little bit for you, it is part of autobiography.
But I don't think you could understand the case without
understanding me a little bit. Number one. Number two, Yeah,
I've been thinking about it for thirty years writing a book.
This book especially was probably the toughest thing I've ever done,
Tougher than any of the fifteen death Ponty cases. I've done,
tougher than the Murdall case, tougher and all that. And
(01:57):
the reason that I came to the conclusion I have
had to do it, and I've been working on it
for a while was the murderer case, where you know,
I've tried murder cases on court TV before. I had
several very high profile cases, but I never saw the
incendiary influence of social media. Twitter ticked to all of that,
(02:20):
creating this tremendous interest where millions of people watch it
every day. And I can remember one morning walking into
the courthouse and there's some folks sleeping on the courthouse
lawn in sleeping bags, and I was just sort of,
you know, this is very early in the try. I
don't think we anticipated, nor did we believe it was
going to be that kind of interest. And so I
(02:40):
said to one of them, what are you doing? He said, well,
I'm waiting to get one of the two hundred seats
in the courtroom. And I said where are you from?
And he said Kansas. I said, you drove all the
way from Kansas to sit in the court and he said,
I want to be part of it. I said, you
know what's on TV. You can walk. You can see
it better on TV. Not the same, not the same.
And we had people there from californ Arizona, Canada. So
(03:04):
you know, I was just knocked back by the interest
in true crime and that sort of got me to
the point where I had to get it done, and
we got it done.
Speaker 1 (03:12):
Well, let's start from the beginning, and then I definitely
have some questions around how you, as a prosecutor and
a defense attorney view clients or you know, would be
offenders or suspects, depending on what your role is. But
let's start with the beginning with this story. So you know,
there's no bones about it. We're talking about a serial killer.
(03:34):
Can you tell me? I guess first where he came from?
Because from what I know he had a very difficult childhood.
I had read that he didn't know his first name
until he had to go to a court appearance because
his mother was so neglectful.
Speaker 2 (03:50):
Is that right, Well, he didn't know his last name.
His last name was. He thought he was named Parrot,
but didn't find out, so he went to a court
appearance as real fod was a guy named Gaskins, and
he entered. I mean he had a very difficult childhood.
His mother told I don't think he was a psychiatrist,
but told somebody that evaluated him very young in life,
at ten or twelve, that he had drunk some kerosene
(04:11):
when he was a small baby, and she thought that
affected his behavior. He had a temper that went off
like explosively, and it was proved. And when he was fourteen,
he got caught by a little girl, twelve year old
girl next door to his house, breaking into the house.
He took an axe and hit her in the head
with it, put her down, thought she was dead, left
(04:32):
her in a ditch. That's at fourteen, he goes off
to the reformatory that only even performatory that existed at
the time, called the Florence School. For white boys. This
is the South, it's the forties. There is no reformatory
for black kids. It's only for white boys. And it
was a big room that probably fifty of them swept
(04:54):
in every night. And he being at that time he
was probably four foot something and slight of b there's
no question he was sexually assaulted over and over and
over again. He escaped eight or nine times. In one escape,
attempted one of the other little boys with him, want
him to go back, grabbed him. We pulled out a
(05:14):
butcher knife and cut his finger off as he grabbed
him and took off. The report, and I've read the
report and it's cited in the book by the superintendent
of the institution said, this young man has homicidal tendencies
and will no doubt kill one day. Fifteen years old
at the time, So that's in the forties. If somebody
(05:35):
had listened, maybe there'd be fourteen, fifteen or more people
still alive. But so he had, when I say troubled childhood,
more than troubled. Of course. He escaped one time and
went and went to Fard and we had some carnival
down there, met a bunch of people learned how to
be a carnie, and then he was recaptured and brought back.
And then you know, as he goes through life he
(05:56):
becomes a car thief. Well, he learned skills. He can
fix car, he can steal cars. He was a roofer, electrician, plumber,
all these skills. And at the same time he was
when I say married six times, I don't think he
ever really got married, just got a new wife and
had numerous girlfriends. The common theme were young, fourteen, fifteen
(06:18):
years old. He was charged with statutory rate one time
on a fourteen year old who he thought of as
his wife. He was in love with her. So he
had all the markings of somebody who was a sociopath,
antisocial predictably was going to kill.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
You know, people often ask me do you think people
are born evil? They asked me that, and I said no,
I say, I don't think they're born evil. I think
people do evil things. I think there are people who,
you know, are born into awful situations and they go
on to be absolutely incredible people. And you know, the
same can be said, of course for people who grow
up in seemingly great conditions and they turn out to
(06:59):
be you know, murderers or rapists. So do you think that, well,
number one, what do you think about that? And then
number two, there seem to have been opportunities for pee
Wee to have not gone down this road, but it
just feels like, sort of he's he's destined to go
down that road.
Speaker 2 (07:15):
What did you think? I mean, I think he was
destined to go down that road. And now, whether he
was born that way or made that way very young,
and I mean clearly he was molested by the men
that visited his mother. I mean I think he was
sexually abused from probably two years old through that time
at the school for white boys. And I think that
is traumatic and creates a tremendous amount of anger, hate, resentment,
(07:39):
and wants to show that he has the same power
as somebody that isn't five foot two in weigh one
hundred and ten pounds, And the easiest way to do
that is kill somebody, or kill anybody that gets in
your way. By the way, he never confronted somebody and
killed them. Typically it was from behind or large marched
him out at gunpoint and shot out him in the
back of the head. Now, the book starts with a
(08:03):
scenario was a young woman he had dated a number
of years, not saying a couple of years she left,
went somewhere else and showed up on his doorstep a
couple of years later with a two year old child,
and she was pregnant, and clearly the child was of
mixed race, according to Gaskins, and she admitted she was
pregnant by a black man. So he comforted her and
(08:25):
took her down to the pond behind the house, and
while the baby sat on the bank, he pushed her
in the water and drowned her. He then took a
hammer to the baby. But in pee Wee's mind, he
was doing them a favor. I mean, world would be
very cruel to that mixed race. He was doing her
and the baby a favor in his mind.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
So we know that his background was terrible, it sounds like,
and then he starts picking up these criminal skills. When
does this start to turn to murder? Is it the
first woman that you were talking about with a child?
Is that his first victim?
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Pee Wee's first murders occurred in the fall of nineteen seventy.
They began with him pulling into a drive in restaurant
where there was a carful of girls, two of whom
he knew his niece Janice Kirby and her friend Patty Olsborough.
Both of them are teenagers under eighteen. His niece Kirby
told him that Patty had had so much to drink
she couldn't drive. I needed to sober up. Gaskins offered
(09:23):
to take them to his house where Patty could sober up.
When they got to the house, Kirby I think went
to the restroom. When she came back in pee wee
had Patty on the bed, was pulling her pants off,
and he was holding a butcher knife. They pushed him aside,
ran outside, and he ultimately had a pistol, chased them down,
brought them back to the house, where he beat both
(09:44):
of them to death. He then put them in his vehicle,
which was a hearse at the time, drove them into
the swamp, or into an area near the swamp, where
he put both their bodies in a septic tank. One
of the murders, sort of the more famous murder was
he killed a businessman who had a girlfriend named Suzanne
(10:07):
long Legs Owens, and this older businessman had promised Suzanne
that he would give her a bunch of stuff in
the house and all that, and he renegged on him,
so she hired Pee Wee for a thousand dollars to
kill him, which he did. And then he began a
romantic relationship with Suzanne Owens, who was at least almost
(10:29):
a foot taller than him, hence the name long Legs.
And there are love letters, messages and phone calls between
Pee Weee on death row and her, and he advises
her how to escape and she does. Matter of fact,
when the threat to kidnap my daughter came as a
result of Donnie Gaskins, Pee's son, telling somebody that Daddy
(10:52):
wants me to kidnap Swisser Herbebian's daughter and hold her hostage.
And that got uncovered when that kid he talked to
went to the sheriff. We were concerned Owens, Suzanne Longley
Owens was still an escapee and where was she We
didn't know. And he had it wasn't a cult, but
he had people that followed him, the sort of the
(11:13):
miscreants of society, as you'll see in the book. They
none of them were rocket scientists.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
When you talk about he's starting to become paranoid, right
because he's getting deeper and deeper into criminal activity that
would be very serious for him if he's caught, and
he would go to prison. So are these associates at first,
and they are unaware of his boundaries, it sounds like.
And when they cross a boundary, he doesn't let him know.
(11:43):
He just kills them.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
Correct and he For instance, he had a young girl
when I say young girl, probably sixteen years old, that
he had a relationship with, but she knew too much
and so she turned up missing, told her parents that
she'd gone. He was in the middle of the state,
and the pd that had gone to Charleston, she never
showed up there any Later on admitted killing her because
(12:06):
he was afraid she was going to talk. He really
can't make this stuff up. Pee Wee drove a hearse.
He drove a hearse that was his vehicle during this
period of time, and everybody laughed at pee Wee because
he's driving aharse. He was doing roofing, he was doing plumbing,
he was doing you know, some auto mechanic stuff. But
he drove ahearse around and from time to time there
(12:27):
was a body in the back of that hearse, which
he drove down to the swamp and bury. So I
mean again five foot two, little guy, and I say affiable,
I mean very friendly, engaging. Several of the people that
I talked to from Sumter, including a judge that had
known him during this period of time, said, man, everybody
loved pee Wee. Everybody was you know he needed something done,
(12:51):
like your roof done, or you needed you know, plumbing
done or whatever, he'd come over and do it for you.
Everybody knew him.
Speaker 1 (12:57):
Well, let's talk about the victims here, So tell me
about the girls that he ends up killing. Are these
girls who are not involved with their families or and
nobody was come looking for them.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
These are the folks of the jetsment of our society.
They run aways, They gravitate towards pee Wee. He's older,
he has relationships with him. Primarily there was one I've
just mentioned. The rest of the girls other than his
niece and her friend and the dope dealer, the rest
were men. And there were men involved in either stealing
(13:32):
the cars or fencing the cars, or knew about other
murders he committed. And it's complicated. Take me an hour
just to explain this network of how they all become
related in between Florence, Sumter and North Charleston, South Carolina,
and several different wives Pee Wee had. They're not really
wives because they you never got married. We never had
(13:54):
a merit, you know, a licensed to get married. So yeah,
he calls some girl his wife for five years and
considering years or two years, and then all of a
sudden he had a new wife, and that wife ended
up with one of his friends, one of his associates. Clearly,
Pee Wee was smart. I'm not talking about high IQ cunning, calculating,
(14:15):
and again seems so I mean, I've been victimized by it.
He so friendly to me, so engaging, and a little humor. Dick,
you know, you're a lot like me kind of stuff.
Speaker 1 (14:26):
Had you in your past as a prosecutor or any
of your various rules before Pee Wee in the seventies,
had you encountered anybody like him? I understand, not to
the scale of what he was doing, but is this
a familiar character to you?
Speaker 2 (14:40):
The kind of globe No, I mean first and last
again referred to me by my first name, and I
engaged him on his first name. I mean, by the
time I got to Pee Wee, I prosecuted probably over
one hundred murdered cases in eight years, fifteen death public
cases back when, by the way, when I started prosecuting
death the cases in nineteen seventy five, and so my
(15:02):
first murder case Victor Jerry on Monday morning at ten
o'clock sentence to death of two o'clock Tuesday afternoon. Wo
it was a far different time. I don't believe a
defendant ever spoke to me in a courtroom. I mean,
I can remember one who was angry and looked at
me on the way out and said, I'm going to
kill you, you son of a bitch, which you know I'd
(15:24):
be angry too. I mean, it's an expected but not
engaging like Pee Wee. Peewee was unique in the sense
that he could charm anybody and did and charm many
of these folks to take a ride with him. They
never came back from.
Speaker 1 (15:37):
So.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
I mean, I think that the great thing about this
book is explained a little bit about me and how
I got to where I was. You know, I didn't
grow up wanting to be a lawyer or a prosecutor
in the sixties, long hair anti war. Okay, that's not
what you think of when you think of a prosecutor. No,
during law school didn't change much. Helped the guy beat
(15:58):
a twenty five year incumbent DA. He asked me to
come work for him. Why would I want to do that?
And the reason I did it ondly was he paid
me ten five hundred dollars a year, which is about
twenty five hundred bucks more than most warriors are getting
starting in nineteen seventy five. I didn't sell like a
lot of money now, but gas was ten cents a gallon. Okay,
let me put it in perspective for you, say, rests
(16:20):
for ten cents a pack. So I took that job.
Primarily he told me, you know, you can change the
system from the inside. And I started with juveniles, but
within six months I was prosecuting murder cases and putting
the pieces together. And back then, remember no DNA, no fingerprints,
no cameras. I mean, we did it the old fashioned way,
(16:41):
and we had witnesses and you know, you had to
convince the jury beyond a reasonable doubt. But I enjoyed it.
I loved it, actually, And Gaskins was my third death
pilday case in eighteen months. And so when it was
over with after six weeks. I mean typically a trial
and South Carolina back then was taking a week. But
after six weeks, I was exhausted mentally and fiscally and
(17:05):
decided to do something else, to be a defense attorney.
Speaker 1 (17:07):
Well, let's go back to you know, he's got these
two groups it sounds like, which were associates, kind of
criminal associates. He's got these girls we have to describe
as girls essentially, and then you know the crossover of
people who just seem to really piss him off, like
you know, the two young women who were staying with him.
At what point and what years are we talking about
(17:30):
where he finally gets tripped up and gets caught somehow,
because you're describing this as these are all people on
the fringe of society here who it sounds like nobody's
looking for him or rattling the cages of South Carolina
police or anything like that once they all start going missing.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
Well, in the early seventies basically when all this was
going on, late sixties, early seventies, there are critical times
when people who knew something got in a hotspot, got
the pressure put on him, and of course he gets
tried on tumor sentenced to death. They don't know how
many you're out there, but he gets sentenced to death.
One is long Leg's boyfriend. He then the Furman versus Georgia,
(18:10):
which for your listeners's case, came down I can think
in nineteen seventy four, which said you get a bifurcated trial.
You can't just got to be guilt or innocence, and
then enunciated aggravating circumstances and mitigating circumstances, and the jury
has to separately decide what the sentence is. And Furman
comes down and I mean it's sentenced to death. Is vacated.
(18:34):
He was convinced, and the DA guy named Kenny Somerford
told him was going to be a retrial and he
could be sentenced to death again. Somerford told him that
his lawyer signed off on it. But somer Ford said this, hewey,
if you'll tell me about all the murders you've committed,
I'll guarantee you a life sentence on all those murders. Now,
if you don't tell us about one, you're going to
be liable for the death building. So in my office
(18:57):
I have the transcript of the two day interview with
Peewee five hundred pages where he gives the details of
every one of these murders. I mean, that's why, in
terms of factual renditions, his words and other statements by
other co defendants pretty well lock him into the thirteen
previous murders. And of course then he gets life. And
(19:18):
in nineteen seventy five or seventy six went after he
pled and got the thirteen life sentences. You were eligible
parole in ten years because prior to that, penalty for
murder was death unless the jury recommended mercy. When they
went to the spiifurcated system, they never changed the penalty
and parole for life life. You're eligible parole in ten years.
(19:42):
So and you can hear on some of the tapes
where pee Wee's talking to his wife about make sure
the kids come, make sure everybody sees you here. I
want to be able to I've got a spotless record.
I'm head trustee for this cell block. Let's just make
a record so I can get parolled one day. He's
very he's calculate about that. But and this was okay.
(20:03):
So he death fell, he vacated. Given these life sentences
could get out in as little as ten years, probably
more like twenty. He and we don't think it was
for money. Undertook a plot to kill a guy on
death row named Tyner, African American from New York who
had killed the parents of a guy named Tony Simo
(20:25):
down on the beach during an arm robbery. He gets
them to smuggle in some poison, and you can hear
on the tapes he just takes it, gets sick. He said,
Now you get me a quarter stick of dynamite in
a blasting cap. Won't be no coming back from that.
Simo says, well, I can get you some plastic explosive.
He said, well, get it to me and just sit
back and listen for the bang. And so he creates
(20:47):
an ingenious let me see if I can describe this
for you, and the FBI did a model of cell
block two for us, which I still have. Where Peewee
was the head trustee in the selback because he could
do plumbing, he could do electrical work, so they made
him the head trustee and he hired all the other
not hired, but appointed all the other trustees the runners.
(21:09):
And so he decided who got to deliver food to
death roat, which was one of the tiers, the second
tier on the cell block on one side. Peewee's cell
was on the other side, and he had a vent
and death row cell bock at a vent on the
back of their cells. And he began yelling to Tinier
to befriend him. Can I get you some marijuana? Can
(21:30):
I get you some food? Can I get you this?
Can I get you that? And he got it to him.
Simo arranged for some poison and he smuggled in. They
killed a dog with it, experimenting with it, and Pee
Wee on the phone call says it's just making him sick.
And so he asked them to get him the explosives.
And so Pee Wee takes an unbreakable prison cup drinking
(21:50):
glass if you will, made out of plastic that's unbreakable.
He had a soldering iron. He melted a hole.
Speaker 1 (21:55):
In the bottom a soldering iron. What is this from
the workshop that he was in.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
No, No, he had in his cell. I have Pee
we sell his toolbox.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
You need to explain steps. There's no recording of phone
calls at this point right in the seventies.
Speaker 2 (22:09):
No, no, no, he is going to a payphone in
the hall and putting a suction cup on it and
recording his phone calls. No, they're not recording phone calls. Yes,
he's got a soidering iron, screwdriver, wire tools, and so
he makes He puts a female plug there, connects that
to the blasting gap, puts the C four in there,
and then on top of that he puts nails and
(22:32):
screws and all kinds of sharp metal and then glues
a speaker on top of it and tells Tyner it's
a intercom so he doesn't have to yell anymore. And
he runs a wire from his cell to tyner cell
where it's got a male plug on the end of it,
and he tells Tyner to plug it in. Can you
hear me? When? And Tyner apparently, I mean the story
(22:53):
is now. I don't know who confirms this that Tyner.
I know where Tyner ended up holding it up to
his ear because Pee Wee plugs the other end into
the one ten in his cell and it goes off
and literally blows Tyner's hand and most of his head off,
just brutal. Pee Wee pulls the wire back through, quips
it up, flushes it down the commode and then comes
out of a cell with everybody going what was that?
(23:15):
What was that? So the rumors and the way he
gets caught is pretty amazing. The rumors went around to
the guy named Al Waters, investigator and by the way,
when I first got called on this case, there was
the report was that an inmate on death row had
tried to escape, blow his way out with a match
head bomb and killed himself, and pretty quickly the determined
(23:37):
it was C four explosive was then he matched. So
Al had heard pe we was somehow involved, so he
went to Pee Wee Sell made him strip lock to
Sell down and Pee Wee had a collection of thirty
six cassette tapes, but he had been tape recording. You know,
there's gospel music there was. He was a big Tanya
Tucker fan, and you know those thirty six tapes. There's
(23:58):
probably twelve to fourteen minutes of these discussions with Simo,
multiple phone calls where he's arranging to kill Al. To
his credit, sat down personally listened to all of them.
Found the smoking gun. It was pretty easy then to
tie it to Pee Wee. We needed to figure out
how we got the bomb. There was a guy named
James Brown. Again it's a nonfiction book, but couldn't make
(24:21):
these characters up, who was convicted serving two life sentences.
He had two Jehovah's witnesses women come to his house
one afternoon while he was watching a ball game, shot
both of them in the head and then had sex
with them. So he ended up being the guy that
delivers the bomb to death Row because he was the
guy that delivered food and he testified. He also testified
(24:42):
he was Peewee's lover. That was explosive moment in the trial,
which is again recounted in the book. So, I mean,
these are the waste product of society, all of them.
And you know, if you're trying to figure out how
they got there. You know, I've been doing this for
fifty years, and typically you can see somebody do something
because of passion or avarice, greed. Yet rapists that commit
(25:05):
rapes because it's not about the sex, but the violence
to women and the control, all those things are easy
to analyze, not easy to analyze, but much easier to
analyze and diagnose than what I saw here. I've prosecuted
a bunch of strange murders murders that defied well they
(25:25):
didn't defy explanation. They were explainable, but the reasons were bizarre.
This guy, if you believe in evil Gaskins, was it
friendly yet violent? I mean just extraordinarily violent and committed
violence in a very aggressive way.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
Well, let's go back to where we are in Gaskin's
life when people turn on him. Can you describe the
turning point where finally he's linked to all of these
murders from different people.
Speaker 2 (25:57):
Well, because people that silas the ace would is the
one he originally got the death Ponty four. There were people,
there was a guy that helped pee wee and ended
up testifying against him. That's what got him the first
death penalty that was later overturned, and that was sort
of the beginning of the end for him because after that,
you know, he never got out of jail until he
(26:19):
was executed. So he was committing these murders and getting
away with him. Whether it was the girl that he
said went to Charleston, or the pregnant woman or the baby,
they weren't fighting any bodies. Only after the deal was cut,
after he got convicted the h murder sentenced to death,
overturn did he begin. I mean, he got this deal
to reveal the other twelve or so murders he committed.
(26:40):
So it was that guy Johnny E. Powell, I think
was his name that rolled on pee Wee. But pee
Wee was always suspecting other folks of getting ready to
roll on or talk, and those are folks he just
followed out in the woods and shot him in the
back of the head. The Digmy a Grave title of
this book comes from one of those episodes where he
shoot somebody in the back of a head and he
(27:01):
tells the guy with him, dig me a grave, Paint
that picture for me. Right?
Speaker 1 (27:04):
What year was it? When this kind of finally ends
and Johnny turns on him?
Speaker 2 (27:09):
It ends in like seventy three or seventy four. I'd
have to go back and look at the book to
find the exact dates when he gets convicted on the
siwas Ates murder.
Speaker 1 (27:18):
Do you come in with this part of the case
or when do you appear.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
So I don't appear well, I appear in eighty two
when he's charged. Everything you're asking me about is historical.
I wasn't a part of any of that. The rest
of it is primarily garnered from that five hundred page
confession he gave prosecutors Kenny Somerford, which was transcribed and
is an amazing read. And you know, Peewee wrote a
(27:44):
book called The Final Truth, which was published after his death,
where he claimed have killed one hundred people and kidnapped
girls and mutilated their bodies. I think all of that
is totally bs. I think he wanted to be bigger
than what he was. Again, somebody who had suffered abuse
after abuse after abuse wanted to be a dangerous guy.
(28:08):
And of course the best way to exhibit that is
killed people. So Ever, say you killed people.
Speaker 1 (28:13):
What were you doing? In seventy three seventy four.
Speaker 2 (28:16):
I was in law school and I remember reading about Gaskins.
He's a big deal. When he got prosecuted for the
initial orders and then confessed to the rest, it was,
I mean, everybody in the state was going, what the hell?
I killed thirteen people? And he would on occasion I say, well,
I remembered another one. He'd get out of prison taken
(28:36):
by sweat agents to some remote part of the swamp,
and every agent there I've talked to a bunch of
them felt like every one of those trips was an
effort on his part to escape. They remember I talked
to Tom Henderson, who was a sweat agent that took
him out on one of those trips, and they could
see a car across the field going back and forth
(28:58):
and pee wee looking at it and trying to alcolate
whether he could get there or not. Billy Barnes, a
sheriff in Florence, recounts when he was taken to court
on one of the early murders that as he was
shuffling towards the courthouse, something fell and it was a
pair of handcuff keys. Had no idea where he got.
He escaped time and time again. Now when he got
to our courthouse in nineteen eighty two, it was a
(29:21):
new courthouse. No, there were no windows. This is I
mean that opened anyway. I mean no windows in any area.
No cour you know the old days he had these
eighteen foot ceilings with these big windows that opened and
the holding cell at least in one courthouse. He escaped
by getting one of the bars out and then dropping
twenty feet. He broke his ankle, hid under a car
(29:42):
while the cops are looking for him. Next day they
came back, and then the dew on the windshield of
the car pee we had written, ha ha tee wee
was here. And I guess if the book has a message,
it is was he born evil? Or was he made evil?
But he ended up evil?
Speaker 1 (30:01):
Tell me what happens in order from seventy three until
you get this case, which is eighty two eighty three.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
You said, yep, I mean he gets convicted of the
eighth murder and one other murder, sentenced to death. Those
get reversed. He then gives this confession and he gets
to CCI. And now CCI is the prison central Correctional
Institution here in Columbia, long since torn down, but one
of the wings was built in eighteen forty eight. For
you folks from around the country, you don't realize that
(30:28):
Sherman not only burned Atlanta, but he came through Columbia
and burned it to the crown. And he housed his
horses in this prison, so it was not burned down.
A number of cell walks were built after the Civil War,
but they were I mean it was unair conditioned. Having
gone down there a bunch on this case, I can
(30:48):
still smell that odor of that body odor and cigarettes
and unwashed bodies. It was a despicable place and basically
run by the animates. And Pee Wee was one of
the people that ran it. And ccis he pointed out
a moment ago. I mean, here's the guy that's in
charge of the cell block serving thirteen life sentences. He's
(31:11):
got a slider in iron screwdrivers. He's got all the
things he needs to fix the electrical work and the
plumbing work at the prison, but also to make one
hell of a bomb or a weapon. Think about that,
thirteen murders into giving him sharp objects. It boggles the mind.
How they weren't recording phone calls when I got involved.
(31:33):
Got a call from Al Waters at the Department Corrections
as he began to investigate this. Clearly, when you saw
the crime scene photos and FBI reports, clearly this was
a hit. This was an execution. Then Al found the tapes.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
And this is Tyner, right, and he blows them up
on behalf of His name was Simo.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Tony Simo was the Sun of the Moons. And they
were robbed and they were in the middle of an
arm robber. Tyner shot both of them at the shotgun
in this sort of a side story there where Simo
lived near the store and saw Tyner walking towards the
store that night. He knew Tyner not to be a
good guy, but he went back to watching whatever his
(32:13):
television show was and see Tony. Simo was obsessed with
Tyner dying and Tyner was tried, convicted, sentence to death, reversed,
tried and sentenced to death again. Took like eight years
at that point, and Simo just lost his patience. And
I can tell you, having interviewed him, he had no
regret whatsoever. He was a happy man because Tyner had
(32:37):
been sent to hell. As he put it, he had
no regrets and would do it again to kill Tyner.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Did he pay Pee Wee to do this or did
pee Wee just do it because he liked killing people.
Speaker 2 (32:48):
Simo never admitted paying him. There's no discussion of money
on any of these calls. And of course we never
never gave a statement on this murder. He did not
testify in the Kildar innocence phase. He did ask the
jury not to kill him in the sentencing phase. But
I suspect Pee Wee did it for fun. If you
(33:09):
come away with one thing from this book, it will
be that there's evil. There's no question there's evil out there,
but ultimately we as a society can deal with it. Now,
it took a while here because we didn't know he's
committing these murders any more than any other serial killer
gets caught after a number of killings. But Gaskins had
(33:30):
gotten a waste so long and so off, you know,
and again trying to kidnap my daughter two weeks before
his execution.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
You got to tell me about that. Let's talk about
that story.
Speaker 2 (33:39):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (33:40):
Al Waters finds these tapes that he had recorded himself.
Speaker 2 (33:43):
Pee weee?
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Yep? Yep?
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Why did he do that? I don't understand this man.
Speaker 2 (33:48):
Why did he do that? Great question? And every cop
worked on this case and me had a theory he
was going to blackmail Simo, as conniving as he was.
That's probably as good a guess as anything else. Another
theory was after he killed him, he just wanted to
listen to it and so he felt good about himself
or maybe play it for one of his minions. I
don't know. But had he not done that, he would
(34:10):
have gotten away with it. Yeah, no question about it.
So you know, he gets prosecuted, sentenced to death In
March of nineteen eighty three, I left the swister's office
and went into practice with Jack Scrolling, a college chumb
of mine who was Pee Wee's defense for We just
spent six weeks together. He was working for a law
(34:32):
firm in town and decided, you know, he'd been doing
it eight years. I'd been out of law school eight
years and thought maybe I wanted to do something else,
And so we went into practice together and had a
very successful criminal defense practice. I'm actually out playing golf
one day and he got a call from head of
our state law enforcement division and said, where are you.
(34:52):
I said, I'm playing golf. He said, where's your daughter?
I said, well, she's in preschool. She's four years old.
He said, are you sure? Now, let me tell you something.
When he said are you sure, oh my god, I
mean your heart seizes up. Why well, you need to
go pick her up right now. We'll have police officers
(35:12):
meet you there, and so I speed back. Police are there,
We get her home and then they debrief me. Two
weeks before he's be executed, Gaskins has his son visited him.
According to the son, who later gave a statement, and
the guy he approached his father said, look, they're going
to kill me unless we come up with a plan.
If you will kidnap the solicitor's four year old daughter,
(35:36):
hold her hostage, put her in the trunk of the car,
hold her hostage. Call Harpooty and tell him you've got
the daughter, and if he doesn't have me brought up
to the courthouse for a meeting in his office, you're
going to kill her. Now, what's interesting about that is
I had a back door to my office nobody knew about.
But if I could get if gaslings would get in
(35:56):
my office, le me tell the guards wait outside. If
he's handcuffs and all that, he could have escaped. I
mean he had a planned. Little Donnie went to a
friend of his. That's his son, right, Little Donnie's pee
Wee's son went to a friend of his and said, look,
daddy says he'll pay us five thousand dollars to do this.
The friend immediately picked up the phone and called the
sheriff for Forrence County, Billy Barnes, who immediately had Little
(36:19):
Gaskins arrested taken into custody. He actually arrested this kid too,
you know, he's the one that called and he got
them in custody, got my daughter and I and my
wife guarded twenty four to seven. Two weeks later he
was executed. Now you know, before he's executed, he sliced
his wrists in an effort to avoid being executed. Doctor
(36:42):
came in. Of course, he cut him this way, which
doesn't do much. He stitched them up. One of the
officers down there talked to us and he said caske
and said, do you want to know where the razor is?
And he said yeah, and he spit it up. He
had it in his odor, in his mouth, not in
his mouth somewhere, spit it up, handed it over and said,
(37:05):
don't blame anybody. Nobody knew I had it. That's about
two hours before he was executed. He was electrocuted in
the electric chair, which was pretty brutal.
Speaker 1 (37:13):
Did you witness his execution?
Speaker 2 (37:15):
I did not. I was invited. Why would I want
to do that? I mean, what is it? Why would
I want to watch another human being burn to death?
Basically that's what electric chair does. Or now we have
the firing squad or shot to death or drug to death.
He would have relished that if you'd invited Pee wee
to watch somebody like, oh boy, he'd find that almost
sexually exciting. Let me say this to you, I've done
(37:36):
this for fifty years. Anybody says that they get closure
from something like that doesn't understand they never will get closure.
Watching somebody die is not going to give them closure.
It's going to give them more PTSD. I understand what
they think it's going to do, but in my experience,
it never has.
Speaker 1 (37:55):
You know, I have read several studies that say that
for families who want the death penalty for the person
who murdered someone close to them, when either they see
the execution or the execution has been completed, that the
majority of them say it changed nothing. It didn't give
any kind of comfort, and they're surprised by that.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
I mean, if you know, if somebody tells you he
was executed, that's one thing, and you understand that person's
paid for the crime they committed against your loved one.
But to watch it, I mean, pee we liked watching
people die? Yeah, I've watched too much violence in my life. Yeah,
as a prosecutor and a defense attorney, if it's voluntary,
I'd rather not see it.
Speaker 1 (38:38):
Well throughout this discussion, I've heard of only two people
who were close quote unquote as close you could be
to pee Wee who survived and seemed loyal to him.
One was Suzanne long Legs, the woman whom he killed
her boyfriend for, and the other is Donnie the son.
What was the relationships like that stopped him from turning
(39:00):
on them at some point?
Speaker 2 (39:02):
Well, he couldn't. He didn't have a chance to turn
on Donnie because he was executed before he I mean
Donnie was still in custody and Suzanne they had a
romantic relationship. There's some interesting phone calls and letters that
we found later on where he was trying to arrange
to meet her, almost like the Shawshank Redemption where Read
and whatever his name was arranged to meet Mexico. He
(39:24):
told her how to escape, you know, be good, get
on duty working in the garden, which he knew was
near the front gate of the correct Department of Corrections.
I mean when he was on death row, he was
in the scene. He's probably half a mile from where
she was, and he said, you know, you just walk off,
don't run, walk and I'll you know, get out and
(39:44):
meet you. I think that. I don't think he said where,
but I'll find you. And of course she did escape,
and she was gone for years and he never made
it out. He had always gotten away with or gotten
out of whatever he had done until he was executed.
Speaker 1 (39:59):
Do you associate that with the fact that the people
he were targeting were people who were just sort of
like on the like I said, on the fringe, or
do you think that it was because he was smart
and he hid bodies and nobody was able to find them,
and sort of the tactic he used with, you know,
the inmate that he blew up.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Absolutely, I mean he would befriend like the inmate or
not give I mean, I think people some of the
people were nervous around him after they'd seen him kill
somebody else. But most of them were on the fringe
of society. They were former convicts or runaways or thieves themselves.
They were people that lived on the fringe of society
(40:41):
and had no family to go back to or no
nobody that would miss them. I mean, it's amazing how
many of these people were not missed after we'd killed
him and buried him in the swamp. You know, you
see these shows or stories about all the missing people
in our society, nobody knows where they are, what happened
to them. I mean, it was just as bad back
(41:02):
in the seventies. Maybe it's worse now because the number
of people. But these are folks that nobody was really
looking for. Now, there was the girl he killed that
he told the friends and family gone to Charleston. Her
father was intent on finding her. But that's the only
one I can remember that really. Maybe one of the
other men, the mother was but nobody really bird dogged
(41:24):
him or asked him hard questions except this mother. So again,
they were on the fringe of society. And I mean,
if they're hanging around with pee Wee Gaskins, good golly.
I mean, it speaks volumes about their judgment, if nothing else.
Speaker 1 (41:37):
We haven't talked at all about Donnie, his son. Do
you think that Donnie would have followed through on kidnapping
your daughter?
Speaker 2 (41:43):
He says not. He says, well, yeah, I mean, he
says in his statement he wasn't intending to do it.
Of course, he did approach somebody to help him. He's
got to be in his early sixties now, I mean,
I'm sure he's out there somewhere I don't particularly want
to go talk to him, but he wanted to help
his father and was willing to at least talk about it.
But I'm not sure he would have gone through with
(42:06):
it had the other boy had not turned them in.
I'd like to think that if I didn't think that,
I'd be a little concerned about going to sleep at night.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
I mean, I hate to ask this, but I'm curious
about what your daughter, who, of course now as an adult,
what does she think about all of this. I mean,
that must have been terrifying for her. Not only that,
but that is the clear illustration of the danger that you,
as a prosecutor or frankly as a defense attorney, could
be in just for doing your job.
Speaker 2 (42:33):
Well, if you look when you see the book, when
you get a copy of the book, you'll see it's
dedicated to Kate, my daughter, because she was the one
at risk, not me. I mean, I put my four
year old daughter unknowingly at risk, and it's one of
the reasons I quit prosecuting ever again. I mean I
did by stint as DA and tried to move on
to another office. But as long as there are people
(42:56):
like Guessings out there, prosecutor's family's going to be at risk.
And you know, I admire many many of the prosecutors
I worked with and against. There are people that have
a tough job, and the honorable ones are people that
shouldn't have to worry about where their kids are, but
they do.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Now, I know you know this experience now, and you
know you and your buddy, who is Gaskin's defense attorney,
ended up starting your firm together. What is your experience
switching from being a district attorney prosecutor over to being
a defense attorney as far as struggling with I am
sure you have defended guilty people.
Speaker 2 (43:34):
Look, I'm a lawyer, and some people, especially turning the
murder trial, get some really hateful emails from people. How
can you represent that guy? I'm an attorney. I'm a lawyer.
I took an oath and I take that. Oh seriously,
when you're prosecuting, you're there to see justice is done.
That's your duty. Don't hide evidence, don't intimidate witnesses into lying,
(43:56):
don't do any of the stuff that would get a
result in a not based on the facts. And if,
by the way, if you don't believe that you can
convict somebody beyond a reasonable doubt, don't take him to trial.
Dismiss the case. That's your duty. The flip side of
that is, if you're representing somebody, you got a duty
to represent them. But if they've got a story, you
don't help them make a better story. If they've told
(44:18):
you that you know there's evidence somewhere, you've got a
duty to tell the police where it is. I mean,
if you play by the rules and the ethical rules
in every case, and I've done that for over fifty years,
you go to bed every night, put your head down
on the pie, when you go to sweep. You're not
worried about helping some guilty person to get off. Now,
having said that, let me give you an example. Most
(44:39):
people don't understand this. Let's say your client comes in
it says I rob the store. That was me, So
what do you do with that? Well, if he wants
to testify a trial, now you can challenge on a
reasonable doubt basis witnesses, cross examinem You're welcome to question
the relevance or the ad misiabil of evidence. But if
(45:01):
he takes the stand, you can't help him tell that
lie that he wants to tell so and you can
tell with good lawyers, when the lawyer puts his client
on the stand and says, mister Smith, tells the jury
your story, sits down and lets him tell a story.
Never ask the question to help him tell a story.
And when the guy comes off the stand in final argument,
(45:23):
you don't argue his story. You argue reasonable doubt. And
that's what an ethical lawyer does. That is playing by
the rules. And that's the rule of law. We talk
about the rule of law. The system works if people
follow the rule of law. And you know, within a
year less than a year of leaving the swister's office,
(45:46):
the prosecutor's office and sroying going on and sroy and
I go into practice. I helped represent a guy in
a death penalty case who was only executed. So I mean,
it's just you do your job and you do it ethically.
You don't make stuff up, but you don't on either side.
If you do that, it's not about winning. It's about
doing your job and doing your job in an ethical way.
(46:09):
You know, I primarily practice civil law. Now I do
some criminal work, obviously murder all, but it's primarily civil
where it's just about money, and still you've got to
play by the rule. And if you do that, there's
a verdict. The word verdicto means to speak the truth.
You want a verdict that speaks the truth. Now, it
also may be that in a criminal case, the state
(46:32):
has the duty to prove the case, and if they
don't prove it, they're acquitted. I've had that. I had
many cases where I've represented people didn't tell me they
were guilty, but based on everything I saw, I thought
they were guilty who didn't take the stand that were
acquitted because the state didn't prove the case beyond a
reasonable doubt. And that's the system. And you know folks
(46:54):
don't want bad guys to get away with stuff. Well
what that does when you start fucking you undermine the
judicial system, which undermines our democracy.
Speaker 1 (47:17):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Sinners All Bow, The
Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and
Don't Forget There are twelve seasons of my historical true
crime podcast, Tenfold More Wicked right here in this podcast feed,
scroll back and give them a listen if you haven't already.
(47:37):
This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
is Alexis Mrosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This
episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer.
Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hartstark, Karen
Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and
(47:58):
Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold
More and if you know of a historical crime that
could use some attention from the crew at tenfold more Wicked,
email us at info at tenfoldmore wicked dot com. We'll
also take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked
Words
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
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