The Green River Killer’s 19-Year Reign of Terror - Serial Killer Documentary

The Green River Killer’s 19-Year Reign of Terror - Serial Killer Documentary

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
You are a loser, You're a coward, you are nobody,
You're an animal.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
These are relatives of victims of the Green River Killer.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
May God have mercy on your pathetic soul, because the
rest of us who know the truth about.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
You won't the most prolific serial murderer America has ever known.

Speaker 4 (00:23):
The one thing that I want you to know, I
was that daughter at home waiting.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
For my mom to come home, whose nineteen year reign
of terror left the area surrounding Seattle littered with corpses.

Speaker 4 (00:37):
I don't wish for him to die. I wish for
him to have a long, suffering, cruel death.

Speaker 2 (00:43):
But who was the Green River Killer? And was he
born to kill?

Speaker 5 (00:48):
When he went through the door and left to go
to work.

Speaker 6 (00:51):
He wasn't the man that I knew.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
The Old Highway ninety nine, adjacent to Seattle's Sea Tech
Airport thirty years ago a notorious spot.

Speaker 6 (01:41):
This area back in the early eighties was very.

Speaker 7 (01:46):
I had a very transient population. There were topless bars
over here. There were a lot of hotels where you
could rent rooms for an hour or two.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
Faye Brooks, then a detective assigned to sex crime cases,
was regularly called to the streets known simply as the strip.

Speaker 7 (02:09):
There were a lot of young women who were work
in the street.

Speaker 8 (02:19):
All the girls were young, and you know, some of
them had troubled past, but all of them are somebody's
daughter and somebody's sister.

Speaker 7 (02:31):
A lot of the young girls had grown up in
abusive homes and that was why they were running away.
And I could relate to that. I'm a survivor of
child sex abuse, and you know, there but for the
grace of God were I, and so I could certainly
empathize with them, and I also wanted to help them.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
One such woman was Marsha Chapman, a street worker who
claimed to have been raped.

Speaker 7 (03:03):
And the apartment building where she lived was right here.

Speaker 9 (03:14):
For she was a beautiful, statuesque Black woman. She was
thirty one. Uh, she had three children. She couldn't support
them on the job she could get, and she was
working as a prostitute.

Speaker 7 (03:29):
She was living in a h an apartment that was
sparsely furnished. So I think she was like down on
her lot. She seemed to have a kind heart and
was a nice person. But you know, under the circumstances,
she did what she had to do.

Speaker 10 (03:46):
To make ends meet.

Speaker 2 (03:48):
Marsha's alleged rape was typical of the hazards working girls
on the strip faced. At the time, best selling crime
writer and Rule lived just blocks from the area.

Speaker 9 (04:02):
I would sometimes stop and warn them and say, do
you know what I.

Speaker 6 (04:07):
Do for a living?

Speaker 9 (04:07):
I write about murder, and you don't have a chance
out of here? How do you know who you're getting
in with? And usually they would just shrug and walk away.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
In nineteen eighty two, the dangers of working the strip
would be brought home by a discovery in the nearby
Green River.

Speaker 7 (04:35):
There was a man on the water in a boat
and he saw in underneath the water what he thought
was a mannequin. It wasn't a manequin and it was
a human being. And there were two of them there well.
One of the victims in the water. Her hand was
just waving with the current of the water, and it

(04:59):
was like, here, I please help me. But it, of
course it was too late.

Speaker 2 (05:07):
As police investigated the crime scene, they made another grim find.

Speaker 7 (05:12):
Processing the scene where the victims were in the water
was where we found the third victim on the banks.

Speaker 8 (05:21):
They were all within a few feet of each other,
and so clearly, you know, the same killer had put
all three of the bodies there.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
All three women had been picked up from around the
strip by what the FBI dubbed an organized serial killer.

Speaker 11 (05:36):
The organized defender was more planned, more pronaditated, was able
to conceptualize crimes and carry them out very efficiently, namely
because of the fact that they had very little feeling
for another human being. They looked at a victim as
an advot for their excitement. Basically, you're talking about a
sexual psychopath.

Speaker 2 (05:59):
The victims were sixteen year old Opal Mills, seventeen year
old Cynthia Jane Hines, and thirty one year old Marsha Chapman.

Speaker 7 (06:12):
When I found out that it was Marsha, I was
I don't think I had any words that I could say.
It was like, oh my god, somebody killed her. It
was really sad.

Speaker 9 (06:30):
We did not know this was only the beginning of
a reign of cherub and we wouldn't know who was
doing this for a.

Speaker 6 (06:38):
Very long time.

Speaker 2 (06:42):
On Seattle's Strip, the Green River Killer had found a
rich hunting ground that would enable him to amass a
body count unrivaled by any serial killer in American history.
By autumn of nineteen eighty two, the bodies of five
young women had been discovered in or beside Seattle's Green River.

(07:07):
They had disappeared from a notorious highway known as the Strip,
an area where prostitution was rife and the Green River
killer had only just begun. On the fifteenth of September
nineteen eighty two, eighteen year old Mary Bridget Mean Vanishes.

Speaker 9 (07:35):
Bridget was the much loved daughter of a Catholic family
in Bellevue, a very rich a suburb of Seattle. She
skipped school. She joined up with a boyfriend named Ray,
and they were living in a cheap motel on Highway
ninety nine.

Speaker 6 (07:58):
She left.

Speaker 9 (08:00):
I think she was still possibly churning a few tricks,
and she didn't come back. Her family was so upset
because she was eight and a half months pregnant.

Speaker 12 (08:13):
To every serial killer, human beings or objects, there's no
emotional connection, there's nothing there.

Speaker 2 (08:24):
On the twentieth of September, another girl, fifteen year old
Deborah Lorrain Estes, disappeared, yet police was still unable to
identify a killer.

Speaker 7 (08:37):
This was the area that I was working in. This
is the area where the bulk of the Green River
victims were picked up from and we would sit here
and look, you know, trying to identify.

Speaker 10 (08:50):
Who might be the suspect.

Speaker 7 (08:51):
We had very dedicated detectives who were determined to solve
this case.

Speaker 2 (09:00):
On the twenty sixth of September, sixteen year old Linda
Jane Rule vanishes.

Speaker 9 (09:07):
Linda Ruhle was a slender, blonde girl who lived up
in the North End. She had been working in the
streets and she had a boyfriend who kind of served
as a pimp. She disappeared from an area near the
Northgate Mall. Like all serial killers, he seemed to have

(09:32):
the ability to sense voulderability in potential victims. He didn't
take the street wise girls. He was looking for the
younger women.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
By the end of nineteen eighty two, fifteen girls would
be missing or found dead and pressure was mounting on
the Sheriff's task Force.

Speaker 13 (09:56):
People hoped that law enforce would be successful. There were
different rumors that were passing around of who the person
might be. There was rampant speculation and that it might
be even a law enforcement officer because of the easy
access that the individual had to the number and variety
of women in the community.

Speaker 7 (10:16):
You know, the unfortunate thing is, some of the women
of the street felt like the Sheriff's office wasn't investigating
the case as hard as we could have because they
were street kids and runaways, and that's not true. Everybody
assigned to that investigation was committed to solving it, committed

(10:39):
to bringing this person to justice because these were, you know,
somebody's daughter, somebody's sister, somebody's mother, and we cared about them.
We cared about them like they were our own kids
or our own family members, and we wanted to solve it.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
Then, on the thirtieth of April nineteen eighty three, a
young girl was spotted being taken from the strip.

Speaker 9 (11:05):
Maria Melvar with her boyfriend at a restaurant on the highway.
Her boyfriend went to make a phone call. When he
came back, Maria wasn't in the restaurant, and he was
very concerned, and he thought, well, I'll go on the
highway and see if I can find her. And he

(11:26):
realized that Maria was in the truck ahead of him.
There was a man driving, and then she was talking
to the man, and so he determined to follow the
truck because he wasn't sure what was going on. He
worried about her, and they got up to the stoplight
at ninety nine and to sixteenth, but when he turned left,

(11:49):
he couldn't see the car.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
Marie's boyfriend returned with her family to search the streets
for the pickup truck she'd left in, and in a
quiet cul de sac just a few blocks from the strip,
they found it parked outside the modest home of a
local truck painter, and.

Speaker 9 (12:11):
They asked local police pleased to go there because they
believed Maria was in that house. One of the sergeants
did go there, knocked in the door. A man answered,
and he said there's nobody here but me, and they
didn't press it.

Speaker 12 (12:31):
All serial killers have the ability to appear so normal
that they throw off even people who are considered experts.
The serial killer is the olympiad of the pathological liar.

Speaker 2 (12:45):
The man's details joined hundreds more in the task forces files.
A saliva swab would later be added. Still, girls continued
to vanish, and the.

Speaker 7 (12:56):
Lists kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger.

Speaker 2 (13:00):
By June nineteen eighty three, at least twenty six girls
had disappeared.

Speaker 11 (13:05):
They learned from their crimes as their murders grow in number,
their efficiency increases.

Speaker 7 (13:11):
The m remains were being found in secluded, quiet, dark areas.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
That summer, five girls went missing.

Speaker 11 (13:22):
By the time they were up to five or six
or ten, homicides had become very difficult to catch.

Speaker 10 (13:26):
The fear was tremendous and deep throughout the entire community.

Speaker 2 (13:32):
Autumn, five more vanished.

Speaker 9 (13:35):
Some of them were in the mountain foothills. Some of
them were down in the Green River Valley.

Speaker 10 (13:42):
It was, you know, ahead of us.

Speaker 7 (13:44):
We wanted to catch him, We wanted to stop them.

Speaker 2 (13:48):
Winter and spring nineteen eighty four, four more girls gone.

Speaker 9 (13:54):
It would be three or four or maybe even five
in one spot on believable.

Speaker 14 (14:02):
He was outsmarting the homicide detectives. They were everybody was
looking for.

Speaker 7 (14:07):
He was dumping women like they were garbage. This was
a gunsight. It's not far from the airport, it's not
far from the strip where the young girls were missing.
In the evenings, it was dark, very secluded. Very few
people came down here. You could come dump something and

(14:30):
be gone, and that's what happened in this location here,
they were just dumped.

Speaker 2 (14:43):
Among the dozens of buddies found was the sixteen year
old Linda Jane Rule. A skeletal remained hidden under a
bush and in the scrubland south of the airport. The
fate of the pregnant eighteen year old Mary Bridget Mehan
was finally discovered.

Speaker 9 (15:04):
Someone rip Chirp killed her and buried her and herbanborn
baby in a shallow grave on the west side of
the highway.

Speaker 2 (15:18):
By spring nineteen eighty four, the killer had amassed more
than forty victims, but then something changed.

Speaker 14 (15:26):
The killings appeared to have stopped. Really thought that he
was gone.

Speaker 15 (15:35):
It's incredibly unusual for a serial killer simply to stop killing.
A serial killer will usually only cease murder when he's
apprehended or when he dies himself.

Speaker 2 (15:56):
In nineteen eighty five, the truck painter from the house
in the quiet cul de Sac began dating forty year
old divorced mother Judith.

Speaker 5 (16:07):
When I first met him, I thought he was quite
the gentleman, and so polite and nice.

Speaker 16 (16:14):
He loved the country music and the dancing.

Speaker 5 (16:18):
And he was always smiling. He never got angry, and
I just thought he was the greatest.

Speaker 6 (16:28):
Is like love at first sight.

Speaker 2 (16:32):
Within months the house became Judith's home.

Speaker 5 (16:36):
He offered to help me move in that I can
move in with him if.

Speaker 6 (16:41):
I like.

Speaker 5 (16:43):
There was no carpet in his house, so he let
me pick out some carpet because he had previous renters
in there, and he had told me that the little
one had went on the carpet. The house needed a
woman's touch.

Speaker 2 (17:03):
After three years living together, the couple wed.

Speaker 5 (17:08):
Who were married nineteen eighty eight. It seemed like the
perfect marriage, and so he was good to my daughters,
played with my grandchildren.

Speaker 6 (17:19):
My dreams are coming through.

Speaker 2 (17:23):
Judith would enjoy thirteen happy years of marriage. While most
of the world forgot about the Green River Killer, most
that is, except the men and women of the Green
River Task Force, And in two thousand and one, advances
in DNA profiling enabled them to compare samples taken from

(17:47):
the early victims, including Marsha Chapman, with swabs that had
been taken from several men questioned during the investigation, this.

Speaker 7 (17:59):
Is the DNA from Marsha Chapman, and this is the
DNA from the Green River Killer. And we looked at
him and we're like, they're the same, They're the same.
Scary Ridgeway, I just.

Speaker 5 (18:25):
I couldn't believe it. I was just devastated and in shock,
and I think I went into denial. I wasn't believing it.

Speaker 2 (18:44):
Only now would the world discover the shocking truth about
Judith's husband, Gary Ridgeway, the most prolific serial killer in
US history. During the nineteen eighties, the mysterious Green River
Killer had prowled the red light district of Seattle's Strip unchecked,

(19:08):
amassing a terrifying body count. In two thousand and one,
a DNA match had connected fifty two year old truck
painter Gary Ridgeway with the first few victims.

Speaker 13 (19:22):
He'd been identified as the most prolific serial killer in
the history of the United States. Each of us recognized
that this would be the biggest criminal case in the
history of the state of Washington.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
The prosecution and defense teams would now be able to
interview the man suspected of over four dozen homicides.

Speaker 14 (19:45):
I'm walking down a corridor and I'm going to open
the door and be introduced to the supposed Green River Killer.
A one hundred things are going through your mind and wondering,
why is it going to be mean? It's going to
be crying? Is he going to be crazy? And I
walked in and like, wow, this isn't what I expected.

Speaker 9 (20:10):
All right, pretty good.

Speaker 8 (20:12):
All of us kind of looked at each other and said,
that's the guy that's been eluding everybody for twenty years.

Speaker 14 (20:18):
What was remarkable was that he was He was so
normal sleep.

Speaker 9 (20:23):
Okay, no, no, no, no, Well that.

Speaker 11 (20:26):
Didn't look like the Hilton him there.

Speaker 17 (20:28):
I got a glimpse of it.

Speaker 18 (20:29):
Well, apostrophedic mattress in yours serious?

Speaker 14 (20:33):
You know it's a little bit hot in airbit. If
you did not know what he had done, you would
like him. The monster within him was was well hidden.

Speaker 19 (20:47):
People want to ascribe extraordinary traits and qualities to these people.
These are, for the most part, very ordinary individuals, except
for the extraordinary, very crime that they get involved in.

Speaker 2 (21:05):
So who was the suspected Green River killer? Gary Ridgeway
was born in nineteen forty nine, the middle of three boys.
He lived in a small house not far from the Strip.

Speaker 8 (21:22):
His mom was kind of stay at home and then
part time she worked at a department store. His dad
drove a bus for the county.

Speaker 14 (21:32):
Gary sometimes would ride with him on the bus and
his dad would say, and see her, she's a prostitute.
She's you know, the scum of the earth and would
be rate prostitutes and talk about how filthy.

Speaker 10 (21:42):
And dad they were.

Speaker 14 (21:43):
And then there are a couple of episodes where Gary
recalls him leaving him in the in the vehicle while
he while dad went and had sacks.

Speaker 10 (21:53):
For the prostitute.

Speaker 2 (21:56):
School friend Terry Rochelle recalls that Gary Ridge was more
inward than his siblings.

Speaker 20 (22:04):
His brother was very outgoing and you know, a bright personality,
and Gary was more quiet and withdrawn, I.

Speaker 6 (22:10):
Would say, is a good word.

Speaker 20 (22:12):
He was just a little pipsqueak guy, just you know,
somebody's little brother. Basically, you know, you didn't pay a
whole lot of attention to him, just kind of in
the shadows, I would say.

Speaker 10 (22:25):
Most of his life.

Speaker 2 (22:29):
At school, the struggling Ridgeway failed to make an impression. However,
at parents' evenings his mother Mary did, all.

Speaker 20 (22:38):
The women kind of sat back and looked at her
strange because she would wear a big boufont hairdow and
lots and lots of makeup, short skirts, which were not
really the style in those days, especially for a mom.
She just always seemed like she was trying to be
very glamorous and not like our moms at all.

Speaker 8 (22:59):
I always remember her wearing kind of the really tight
shorts and low cut.

Speaker 6 (23:05):
Tops and longer hair. She was very, very attractive.

Speaker 2 (23:09):
Lady Ridgeway admitted wetting the bed throughout his childhood and
well into his teens.

Speaker 14 (23:18):
When he would wet the bed, his mother would put
him in the kind of get in the bath up
and wash him and wash his genitals.

Speaker 9 (23:27):
During one bath, her robe fell open and she was
naked underneath, and he felt arousal at that, and at
the same time knew that it probably wasn't that wasn't
a good thing to feel, but he felt it.

Speaker 8 (23:43):
He talked about having some sexual feelings towards her. He
described in some detail watching her when she was in
a bathing suit and looking at her and thinking that
she dressed pretty provocatively.

Speaker 12 (23:57):
This overly sexualized purse and washing her son's genitals, And
you realize that most teenage boys are having an awful
time with dealing with their own emerging sexuality. Has to
have had an impact in some way.

Speaker 19 (24:15):
Boys need to see their mothers as a sexual It
is very, very destabilizing for an adolescent boy to see
his mother in a sexual manner. It's very hard for
an adolescent boy to imagine his mother having sex with anybody,
including his father, and so when a mother behaves in
a sexualized or hyper sexualized way, it's very unsettling for

(24:37):
an adolescent boy.

Speaker 2 (24:40):
As Ridgway got older, he started showing signs of destructive behavior,
starting fires, and as a teenager, he took his first
step towards murder.

Speaker 8 (24:53):
He approached a first grader, a six year old boy
that he saw a plane in a lot near his house.
The boy was dressed up playing cowboys and indians, and
he kind of lured him into the bushes and completely unprovoked,
stabbed the little boy in the stomach and I nearly
killed him. He told the boy that he just wanted

(25:17):
to know what it felt like to kill somebody. And
after he stabbed him, he took the knife and kind
wiped the blade off on the little boy's shoulder, and
you know, just walked away and actually nobody ever connected
him to that.

Speaker 12 (25:31):
Serial killers need to have some concrete proof of what
they're doing. I mean, you can think about something, but
until you've done it, you don't know how it's going
to turn out. And so what the serial killer does
is experiment. Often they will commit an act like a
trial run.

Speaker 2 (25:54):
Ridgeway eventually finished school two years late due to his
slow progress. The following year, age twenty one, he married
his steady girlfriend and joined the Navy.

Speaker 8 (26:06):
When he returned from his deployment to the Philippines, his
wife admitted that she had had an affair with a
friend of theirs. That was when he first started kind
of referring to her as a war and using other
derogatory terms, and that was kind of the beginning of
a series of relationships that never quite panned out for him.

Speaker 2 (26:28):
During the early nineteen seventies, Ridgeway got a job spray
painting at the Kenworth truck manufacturers. He then met and
married his second wife.

Speaker 8 (26:38):
He was very much into having sex, often repeatedly throughout
the day as frequently pretty much as women would agree.

Speaker 9 (26:47):
They would go out in the truck, and he'd loved
to have sex in public where they could be discovered
at any time.

Speaker 2 (26:57):
But after having a child, their relationship to terror rated.

Speaker 14 (27:02):
His wife left him when his side was about five,
and that really hurt him, and that was when he
started to go frequent prostitutes.

Speaker 2 (27:14):
Ridgeway claimed he became addicted to prostitutes. He had, in
fact been quizzed by police about his activities on the
strip several times during the eighties, even passing a line
detector test when grilled about the Green River murders.

Speaker 9 (27:32):
When you're subject to someone without a conscience, who has
no regrets and no remorse and no real concern, they
can pass them.

Speaker 14 (27:44):
He was a magnificent liar. He had an ability just
to go and talk, and he would just talk and
tell stories, and I, you know, for a while, I
assume they were true.

Speaker 5 (27:55):
And when I would go in to visit Gary at
the jail, he would tell me that everything's okay. He
didn't do it. He didn't hurt those women, he didn't
kill him. He didn't and I would believe him.

Speaker 2 (28:19):
As he was questioned in two thousand and one, Ridgeway
continued to protest his innocence.

Speaker 14 (28:25):
Up to this point, Gary had been maintaining that they
had the wrong person, that he had well, he had
had sex with many prostitutes, he hadn't killed any, and
that was essentially going to be the defense.

Speaker 2 (28:38):
But when forensic evidence surfaced tying him to three more victims,
Ridgeway's story changed.

Speaker 14 (28:45):
Myself and another attorney were in the meeting room waiting
for mister Ridgway. I don't recall what we were talking about,
but we both had smiles on our faces when he
walked in, and he said, Oh, you won't be smiling
when we're done. I've been lying to you all. I've
been manipulating everyone for all these years. I killed them all.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
Only now would investigators discover the true shocking horror of
the Green River Killer's crimes. In two thousand and three,
fifty four year old truck painter Gary Ridgway admitted he
was the Green River Killer that had eluded capture for

(29:30):
almost two decades. A man responsible for the murder of
more than four dozen women. Faced with the death penalty,
Ridgeway offered to tell the truth about all his crimes
in return for his life. On behalf of the victims'

(29:51):
families who wanted to know the fate of their loved ones.
The prosecution agreed Ridgeway would now reveal the true horror
of his crimes. Investigators now learned how the Green River
Killer had so easily abducted and killed his victims, even

(30:12):
at the height of the public terror.

Speaker 7 (30:18):
He came across as being a very meek and mild
safe person. As a matter of fact, in one situation,
he had his child in the car with him when
he picked up a prostitute.

Speaker 9 (30:34):
He looks like a mousey little man. He doesn't look
like the kind of person that if you were a prostitute,
that you would be afraid of.

Speaker 7 (30:43):
They thought, well, he's a family man, you know, he's safe, and.

Speaker 6 (30:49):
Turns out he wasn't.

Speaker 14 (30:53):
He preferred to take them to his house. Some said
no to that, and they would drive to a remote
location and he had a pickup truck with a canopy
on the back, and he would convince him to go
into the back of the canopy so they could have
more room to have sex. But what he would do
is once he got them in the position, either in

(31:15):
his bed at home where he had pictures of his
son on the wall and they felt a little more secure,
or whether they were just hopping in the back of
the truck, get naked, begin with oral sex. A missionary
at some point convinced them that he would be able
to finish sooner if they would agree to the rear

(31:39):
entry position.

Speaker 21 (31:41):
When I got through having a climax with her, I
jumped on her.

Speaker 14 (31:48):
He hit his arm around the girl's neck.

Speaker 4 (31:51):
How would you pulling on her neck?

Speaker 6 (31:53):
Pulling really hard on her neck, just like this. What
are you saying to her?

Speaker 13 (31:57):
Don't don't fight, don't fight and dot and I'll let
you go.

Speaker 14 (32:03):
And then choked them with his forearm.

Speaker 6 (32:07):
I'm feeling I got a killer.

Speaker 10 (32:09):
I got a killer.

Speaker 14 (32:10):
I got a killer.

Speaker 10 (32:18):
You'll need to go.

Speaker 18 (32:19):
Up to kind of like at the top of the hill.

Speaker 6 (32:21):
On this and pull in.

Speaker 2 (32:24):
Rich Way guided the investigators to where he dumped dozens
of young women.

Speaker 22 (32:34):
I just drove, drove in my pickup and camper and
parked it, brought her body over and put it a
little bit.

Speaker 10 (32:42):
Over the hill.

Speaker 14 (32:43):
His method of recollection was, uh, where he had left
their bodies.

Speaker 10 (32:49):
Between this one and that one up there? You think
you put like.

Speaker 6 (32:53):
Five five of them in there. He essentially said, the
victims didn't mean anything.

Speaker 8 (32:59):
I have no idea who are I don't know if
they're black, if they're white, if how old they are,
how young they are. I mean, they really meant nothing
to me as an individual.

Speaker 16 (33:08):
What you're getting is what you're going to get, and
that's all you can get.

Speaker 17 (33:11):
Because I don't remember.

Speaker 12 (33:12):
To every serial killer. Human beings are objects in the
homicides and that they commit. They're never going to remember
the name, They're never going to remember the face. They'll
remember the concrete action of where those bodies are.

Speaker 2 (33:31):
One of the dump sites that Ridgeway identified was that
of Marie Malvar, the eighteen year old whose boyfriend had
spotted Ridgeway abducting her. He admitted that when he strangled her,
she had fought back harder than any of his victims.

Speaker 14 (33:48):
I put battery as of myself right here there. Cover
up scratches. There's a scratch here, scratches here from millbar.

Speaker 2 (33:58):
Ridgeway claimed he was filled with rage and had wanted
to hurt his victims even after their deaths. He admitted
he'd tried to set the lifeless sixteen year old Linda
Rule's hair on fire.

Speaker 8 (34:13):
You know, he seemed throughout the interviews to try to
blame a lot of what had happened on the women
in his life, that the women that he actually killed
were kind of an extension of all the women before
who had disappointed him in some way.

Speaker 16 (34:28):
All the pressure just build and build and build and build.

Speaker 13 (34:32):
My releasing putt was killing, killing, them.

Speaker 6 (34:41):
He did talk about a number of the.

Speaker 8 (34:43):
Victims that he would go back and have sexual relations
with them for a number of days after he killed them.

Speaker 6 (34:51):
Gary, and did you revisit any of these I revisited
at least one of them. And when we say we revisit,
what did you come back to do.

Speaker 17 (35:00):
Have sex with her?

Speaker 8 (35:01):
He's like, oh, yeah, you know, but then the flies
would come and the maggots, and then I'd be like, oh,
I don't you know, like he didn't want to do
it after that, you know.

Speaker 6 (35:08):
You were just I mean, that's the thing.

Speaker 8 (35:10):
He said it in this like I'm talking to you,
but as if it's totally normal.

Speaker 19 (35:19):
Now, why do individuals do this? The standard explanation for
necrophilia had been sex with someone dead you can have
total control over it. There's no resistance at all, and
so you can live out those sorts of feelings with
a dead, lifeless body.

Speaker 14 (35:41):
He's not the one that you're going to turn to
and ask why did you do this and get the
deep psychological answer. But one of the things that frequently
came up was that he wouldn't have to pay for
the sex.

Speaker 2 (35:57):
Ridgeway's murderous spree had continued on of a until he
met his third wife, Judith in the mid eighties.

Speaker 6 (36:06):
Gary was so.

Speaker 5 (36:09):
Straight, normal and loving and gentle. He was so kind
around me all the time. He didn't get mad or
upset about anything. It seemed like the perfect marriage.

Speaker 14 (36:28):
When he first met her, he stopped patronizing prostitutes and
stopped killing. And then, as he put it, he fell
off the wagon.

Speaker 5 (36:39):
Gary would call home and say that, you know, he
he he's going to be late coming home, so he's
going to grab a bike, grab a hamburger, and you
know he'll be late. When I think back now, that
was probably one time when he was out picking up

(36:59):
some one off of the off of the Highway ninety nine.

Speaker 14 (37:05):
Strip and then.

Speaker 10 (37:08):
He killed again.

Speaker 6 (37:10):
I'm right in here's where I killed her, here.

Speaker 10 (37:16):
Twenty feet He would tell me.

Speaker 5 (37:18):
He'd call home and say he's going to stop at
the junkyard on my home from work, and then when
he got home he didn't really have any parts from that,
so that may have been another occasion.

Speaker 14 (37:30):
And so after having killed maybe sixty girls from eighty
two to eighty five, From eighty five to when he
was caught in two thousand and one, the number of
victims is more like ten or eleven.

Speaker 13 (37:52):
Mister Ridgeway, how do you plead to the charge of
aggravated murder in the first degree?

Speaker 10 (37:57):
Asked charge and count one guilty?

Speaker 2 (38:02):
In two thousand and three mission, Gary Ridgeway made his
plea to the forty eight charges of murder that investigators
could conclusively tie him to.

Speaker 13 (38:12):
How do you plead to the charge of aggravated murder
in the first degree?

Speaker 10 (38:15):
As charge in count five guilty?

Speaker 5 (38:18):
When he confessed and I sat, When I sat and
listened to him say guilty.

Speaker 13 (38:25):
Mister Ridgway, how do you plead to the charge of
aggravated murder in the first degree for the death of
Marcia Chapman guilty?

Speaker 5 (38:33):
After every one of the names that.

Speaker 13 (38:35):
They had said for the death of Mary b mehad guilty.

Speaker 5 (38:40):
I just sat there and cried. And that's when hitation
finally sunk in that.

Speaker 6 (38:48):
This is real.

Speaker 16 (38:49):
He did it.

Speaker 5 (38:52):
There's someone else inside of him. When he went through
the door and left to go to work, he wasn't
the man that I know.

Speaker 13 (39:00):
Count nineteen for the death of Linda Rule guilty.

Speaker 5 (39:05):
I would think back and think about all those years
that I was with him, Were they real? Or was
he just choosing me?

Speaker 13 (39:13):
How do you plead the charge with aggravated murder in
the first degree as charge of count forty eight guilty?

Speaker 5 (39:21):
I lived with him all those years.

Speaker 6 (39:27):
He could have killed me.

Speaker 5 (39:29):
He could have killed my daughters, He could have killed
my grandbabies.

Speaker 2 (39:36):
So what made the monster? Was it his unusual upbringing
or was Gary Ridgeway born to kill?

Speaker 9 (39:46):
I still don't believe that any child is born to kill,
But I think some children have a predisposition to violence.
If the child grows up in a safe place for them,
where they feel loved, where they attach, we're never going
to know that that predisposition for violence is there. But

(40:07):
if that child is born into a home where they're afraid,
where they're neglected, where they're abused, then you have the
perfect soil to grow a serial killer.

Speaker 20 (40:20):
I think that a boy and his mother have a
certain relationship, and when that relationship is different, then I
think that's when we start seeing those kind of switches
turning on and off.

Speaker 19 (40:35):
This is one of my ominous signs. She was somewhat
seductive and so on, these sorts of unhealthy relationships with
a maternal figure.

Speaker 8 (40:47):
People that I've encountered that have prosecuted for murder. I
think that their circumstances have driven them to do what
they have done. In the maturity of cases that I
have handled, I would say.

Speaker 6 (41:00):
I did not see that in ridge way.

Speaker 8 (41:02):
I truly believed that he was worn that way, hardwired
that way, whatever you want to say.

Speaker 12 (41:09):
The Green River killer was definitely born to kill. He
was an individual who has this changed gene and culminated
in a tremendous number and intensity of homicides.

Speaker 14 (41:27):
His brain is definitely wired differently. He's a psychopath. That
has to be a brain miswiring from the beginning.

Speaker 7 (41:38):
I don't know about the nurture nature piece. I think
at some point is a decision and let me think,
we all have some propensities for violence, but you can
decide you can control it. And he decided how he wanted.

Speaker 10 (41:52):
To control it.

Speaker 2 (41:56):
Nineteen years after Marsha Chapman's body was discovered beneath the
surface of the Green River, Gary Ridgeway was sentenced to
serve forty eight consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.

Speaker 9 (42:13):
In the end, Marcia got her justice because it was
DNA found on her that they could match with Gary
Ridgeway and Marcia got her day.

Speaker 7 (42:26):
That was a good day.

Speaker 10 (42:27):
It was a good day.

Speaker 2 (42:29):
Before Ridgeway was led away, Judge Richard Jones instructed him
to face the victims' families.

Speaker 13 (42:35):
There's a tremendous amount of emotion that these family members
wanted to pour out for Gary Ridgeway to hear.

Speaker 1 (42:42):
I can only hope someone gets the opportunity to choke
you unconscious so you can live through the horror that
you put our daughters, our sisters, our mothers through.

Speaker 10 (42:54):
The pain would not go away, but it brought them closure.

Speaker 4 (43:00):
The one thing that I want you, you're a rige
way to know. I was that daughter at home waiting
for my mom to come home.

Speaker 6 (43:11):
I think for all of us.

Speaker 8 (43:13):
As we brought the families up and introduced him, it
was really emotional.

Speaker 10 (43:19):
I recall Linda Rule's father. There are people here that
hate you. I'm not one of them who's.

Speaker 13 (43:31):
Very sympathetic, very compassionate individual.

Speaker 21 (43:34):
What God says to do and that's to forgive all,
So you are forgiven, sir.

Speaker 14 (43:44):
On one hand, I'm sitting next to a person who's
done the most inhumane things to other human beings, and
then fifteen feet away is a person doing the most
humane and merciful thing.

Speaker 13 (43:58):
I wanted him to look out, see the pain, see
the anger, and see all the agony that he.

Speaker 10 (44:04):
Had caused in his lifetime.

Speaker 13 (44:06):
I wanted him to take the visual image with him
back to prison, so for the balance of his life,
that would be the last public image that he had.

Speaker 23 (44:15):
You took from me my first born child.

Speaker 4 (44:18):
May her soul in the soul of the other forty
seven victims.

Speaker 3 (44:21):
First in peace.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
Five foot four. Donald pee Wee Gaskins would earn himself
the title the meanest man in America.

Speaker 21 (44:42):
If you had a business dispute, you'd see him pee
Wee kill him.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
A serial killer who, if he's to be believed, was
responsible for over one hundred cruel and sickening murders.

Speaker 16 (44:58):
Right over here is.

Speaker 24 (45:01):
He drowned Dorhene and then he hit the baby in
the back of the head, hatchet at the head raped her.
The total amount is one hundred and five people.

Speaker 2 (45:13):
A man who wouldn't stop killing even on death row.

Speaker 17 (45:19):
We played got kind.

Speaker 21 (45:20):
Of a big cabin play one in the hell.

Speaker 23 (45:23):
They were just kind of astonishing that all that was
able to happen in the pen of tempary.

Speaker 2 (45:28):
So what made Peewee the man he was? And was
he born to kill.

Speaker 16 (45:35):
My daddy?

Speaker 24 (45:36):
He called himself a vampire. He would have to see blood.

Speaker 2 (46:12):
Nineteen seventy five, school teacher Mary Ann Dunham reports the
disappearance of one of her students, thirteen year old Kim Gelkins.

Speaker 3 (46:26):
Kim was in a class of fifth graders, most of
whom were ten or eleven years old, but she was thirteen.
As I recall, she was quiet, petite. Her mother had died,
I think the previous spring. I think she was lonely

(46:46):
for her mother and sad, you know, so she was
looking for somebody to pay attention to her. Often, at
the beginning of the school year, teachers want to assess
their class writing skills, and so sometimes you'll assign them
to write about what they did on their summer vacation

(47:08):
or whatever. In that particular year, I remember asking my
children to write about the person they admired most, and
Kim wrote about someone who was named Donna Gaskins.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
Donna Gaskins was the common law wife of a colorful
local criminal, Donald pee Wee Gaskins.

Speaker 23 (47:37):
Pee Wee has always been known as a notorious person
in our area.

Speaker 6 (47:43):
I think he would.

Speaker 10 (47:43):
You would have to say he.

Speaker 23 (47:44):
Came over was different because how many people do you
know to drive a hearse for their vehicle.

Speaker 24 (47:49):
It was a long black hurse, you know, like they
used to, you know, drive a long time ago is
on the very back.

Speaker 16 (47:57):
He had a little sign that says I hold dead bodies.

Speaker 24 (48:06):
Everybody joked about it, you know, everybody just you know,
thought it was funny.

Speaker 23 (48:12):
He always told people that he hold bodies in it,
but people didn't pay much attention to them. But while
they didn't pay attention to him, they were still scared
of him. In the litwer end of the county, everybody,
if you talked about pee weee, they sort of would
run and hide because everybody's scared of me.

Speaker 10 (48:28):
He had that kind of reputation.

Speaker 2 (48:34):
Gaskin's daughter Shirley remembers the day Kim Gelkins vanished.

Speaker 24 (48:41):
Her mom had died and she got to be friends
with daddy because daddy was living in Charleston.

Speaker 16 (48:47):
She was a sweet little girl.

Speaker 24 (48:49):
We had just come back from the park and my
mother in law lived next door, and the children was
going to go up there and get something to eat.
So I said, we're gone over there, and I'll be
there in a minute. And when I went over there,
I said, where's Kim. Nobody had seen Kim, and she
just walked out the door and disappeared. And Daddy said, well,

(49:14):
you know, don't worry about it. She probably run away.

Speaker 2 (49:20):
Kim was not the only missing person. Five years earlier,
in nineteen seventy, Shirley's cousin Janie Kirby had vanished.

Speaker 24 (49:32):
Jennison. I. I mean, when we were little, we did
everything together.

Speaker 16 (49:36):
She was a sweet girl of very smart girl, very.

Speaker 24 (49:41):
Good in school, I mean, and she was just, you know,
all American country girl. When she first disappeared, everybody said that,
you know, she'd run away from home. We were all
out looking for you know, searching for her. Everybody was
calling everybody that they.

Speaker 16 (49:59):
Need to try to find her. But you know, after
six seven months, we knew something right.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
Now, Detectives investigating the new disappearance began to focus on
Shirley's father, Donald pee Wee Gaskins.

Speaker 18 (50:20):
Some of our field agents were working on rumors that
had been surfacing, working along with detectives from Charleston in
an attempt to find Kim Gelkins.

Speaker 23 (50:34):
We started looking for the Gelkins girl, and of course
we did not have pee Wee at the time, but
we did have an individual who was running with pee
Wee at the time. We did pick Walter and Neelie up,
and after a lot of talking and everything, Walter finally

(50:54):
took the investigators out in show them where he had
helped pee Wee bury someone. They knew somebody was buried there.
We didn't have any idea of what we were gonna
find until we started digging.

Speaker 18 (51:14):
We took probably I guess ten or twelve fifteen deputies
and sled agents and we just lined up and started
walking slowly into the woods. Sometime during that process, in

(51:35):
moving through the bushes to undergrowth, somebody discovered that there
were some bushes that had been put there that weren't
growing there. We had metal probes were maybe three feet
long with a tea handle on the top piece of
rebar with a point on it that you could determine

(51:55):
soil consistency, your problonge prolong it ch, it goes down.

Speaker 23 (52:04):
They probed around enough of where they could tell that
there was someone buried there, so we sealed area off
and started digging, and it turned up that we found six.

Speaker 10 (52:18):
Bodies buried there.

Speaker 23 (52:23):
Yeah, it was that's pretty gruesome scene. I was, I
guess I was overwhelmed, because, you know, I had been
in law enforcement for some twelve and a half years

(52:44):
prior to this, and I'd never seen anything of that magnitude.

Speaker 2 (52:50):
But the discovery of the six bodies was just the
beginning of a shocking tale that would lead to claims
that Gaskins was the most prolific serial killer in US history.
In nineteen seventy five, the disappearance of thirteen year old

(53:10):
schoolgirl Kim Gelkins had led detectives to a burial site
in the woods of South Carolina. Their investigators, including Sheriff
William Barnes.

Speaker 23 (53:28):
They would have been right about that tree, That's where
it would have been.

Speaker 2 (53:32):
Would make a shocking discovery.

Speaker 23 (53:37):
This is the area where the six bodies recovered. I
have not been back here since everything happened back in
nineteen seventy six. The graves would have all been within
probably twenty five.

Speaker 10 (53:53):
Foot of each other.

Speaker 23 (53:55):
They would have all been right in this area here
where we're standing now on this street.

Speaker 2 (54:03):
All six had been murdered and buried to a piece
in three shallow graves, and all six were linked to
notorious character Donald p. Wee Gaskins, a diminutive local car
thief who drove an old hearse and boasted of having
his own private cemetery. No one had believed him.

Speaker 24 (54:29):
I was six months pregnant at the time with my
last child, and we were, you know, when the cops
came up there, and you know, they were telling me, oh,
you know that they were looking for my daddy for
murder and stuff like that. I mean, I went a shock.
I went into labor. My baby was born. I wasn't
even several months pre She didn't weigh but she weighed

(54:52):
two pounds or something.

Speaker 23 (54:55):
All of a sudden, we found ourselves in a national limelight.

Speaker 17 (55:01):
I was one of the first reporters on the scene,
and I got a lot of it firsthand, and it
was just to me, it was so shocking, you know,
you know that that's pretty wild, and that's hard to
believe in South Carolina. You don't find stuff like that
around here.

Speaker 2 (55:18):
Investigators now had to uncover the identity of the victims.

Speaker 22 (55:26):
The ones we initially found were in very good condition.
Apparently they've been putting the ground in a cold time
of the year, so that ata pacia had occurred, where
the fatty tissue sort of turns to like a soap
like material that's firmer and keeps the shape and consistency
of the skin and the underlying tissue.

Speaker 18 (55:50):
I've never been a smoker, but the smell of decaying
flesh was so intense in that area that the smoke
from the cigars diminished that smell enough to where you
can stand it.

Speaker 2 (56:08):
In the first grave were twenty five year old Dennis
Bellamy and his fifteen year old half brother Johnny Knight.
Both had been involved in an auto theft ring with Gaskins.

Speaker 24 (56:21):
Daddy said they were going to steal a car and
they came by the house and I had just cooked
some biscuit and car and they ate some biscuit and
coffee and they left and I never seen them again.

Speaker 23 (56:35):
We took them down into the woods and went to
a big oak tree and sort of pointed up in
the tree and was telling them how they could use
that to throw a chain horse over to pull engines
out of the car and dispose of stolen property. This
would be the tree where he brought the two fellows
out and pointed up to the limb talk about how

(56:56):
they could horse the motors out of stolen vehicles.

Speaker 10 (56:58):
Here as they.

Speaker 23 (56:59):
Were looking up in the tree, he shot one of
them in the back of the head and then one
the other one ran he shot him.

Speaker 10 (57:10):
It was not already shot up right here.

Speaker 24 (57:15):
If he'd think that they were gone, or you know,
they were getting tired of they was gonna tell on him?

Speaker 16 (57:20):
Did he get rid of?

Speaker 2 (57:29):
The other four victims, two men and two women, were
all people Gaskins thought had wronged him or might betray him,
but none of the six bodies found was that of
missing schoolgirl Kim Gelkins. Gaskins was arrested trying to flee

(57:53):
the area. Faced with the prospect of the death penalty
for his crimes, he struck a deal to lead investigators
to further bodies at an area known as Alligator Landing.
He admitted to burying twenty three year old family friend
Dorian Dempsey and her two year old daughter, Robin.

Speaker 22 (58:22):
Duran Dempsey and Robin were both skeletonized because they were
very close to the surface. They were not really buried deeply.
That child had some injuries to the head that we
felt were probably primorum.

Speaker 24 (58:38):
Right here is where my daddy used to live. And
right over here is where he drowned Doreen. Just held
her under the water until she had drowned it and
then he hit the baby in the back of the
head hatchet at the head.

Speaker 16 (58:57):
Writer.

Speaker 24 (59:03):
He said that he just could not resist raping the baby.
He said, he just couldn't resist it.

Speaker 23 (59:20):
You see this whole here, stump hole. Uh, that's an
example something like that. He just stuffed about it down
in that hole, just a small child. The reason he
killed them is because the mother had been with a
black man and the baby was half black and half white,

(59:41):
and he just didn't believe in that, and that was
his reason for doing away with them.

Speaker 2 (59:50):
Eventually, Gaskins would reveal the truth about the disappearance of
schoolgirl Kim Gelkins.

Speaker 24 (59:57):
Kim was bearded almost in our back a right out
in here.

Speaker 16 (01:00:04):
It's where they found Kim Gallicud.

Speaker 24 (01:00:07):
She walked out my front door and I never seen
her again. He took her off from the house and
chilled her.

Speaker 2 (01:00:31):
Eight years after he had killed her, Gaskins finally gave
up the body of his niece, fifteen year old Janie Kirby.

Speaker 23 (01:00:46):
This is the gravesite where his niece, Janie Kirby was buried.
He killed her in nineteen seventy and her body was
recovered in nineteen seventy eight. Dealing with a child or
a small kid, that's that's tough to take.

Speaker 10 (01:01:02):
It's hard not to get involved.

Speaker 23 (01:01:05):
Just a little girl here, you're just a young teenager. Really,
life's luffed out, stuck in a hole in the woods. Nobody
knew where she was, what happened to her.

Speaker 2 (01:01:20):
Investigators would ultimately discover the remains of thirteen victims, a
body count that made Pee Wee Gaskins the biggest mass
murderer in the history of South Carolina. But in prison,
Gaskins would make an even more shocking claim.

Speaker 6 (01:01:40):
I just shivered.

Speaker 24 (01:01:43):
I mean, I said, daddy, I don't want to hear this,
and he would say, half pot, I need to get
it off by chaise, I need to tell somebody.

Speaker 15 (01:01:54):
Gaskins is going to claim that he murdered some eighty
to ninety young people, torturing them, then prolonging their death,
torturing them again, and then hiding their bodies.

Speaker 22 (01:02:09):
He allegedly started in nineteen sixty nine, killing young women,
primarily later young boys and young women along the coast.

Speaker 24 (01:02:22):
He used to travel up and down the road and
pick up his shikers, and he would torture them.

Speaker 22 (01:02:32):
He always talked about dumping their nude bodies into marsh
areas and sinking them deep enough so that they'd be
unlikely for people to be able to find them.

Speaker 15 (01:02:48):
Gaskins, if we take his word seriously, is clearly a
processed focused serial killer. He's someone who wants to be
with the victim, to experience the terror that the victim
is experiencing for as long as possible. Gaskins, for example,
would often describe going into a hardware store and eyeing

(01:03:08):
up particular tools that he felt he would be able
to torture his victims with for longer. We're dealing with
a very, very cunning predator who is quite clearly also
a sexual sadist and a psychopath.

Speaker 22 (01:03:23):
He alleged that he did ten or twelve a year.
Practically every month he'd kill somebody along the beach.

Speaker 24 (01:03:30):
He said, ever so often he would get this urged
that he would have to see blood. He called himself
a vampire. He said he his strumbach would get hurting.
He said he would just get tie up in knots.
He said he just couldn't be steeled. He would just
tremble all over and it would not stop until he

(01:03:51):
kills somebody.

Speaker 12 (01:03:52):
Serial murderers will tell you that there is something inside of.

Speaker 7 (01:03:56):
Them that they have to go kill.

Speaker 12 (01:04:00):
And that's common among serial murderers. It's almost like somebody
who's almost so anxious that if they don't do something,
they're going to break into a billion pieces. It's a
little scary to say that a serial murderer is an addict,
but if you really look at it in that context,

(01:04:23):
in a way, they are an addict. They have to
do it. They have to do it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:31):
Donald pe Wee Gaskins wouldn't even let being in maximum
security prison prevent him from taking human life. In nineteen
eighty two, he would plan a murder that was thought
to be impossible. No one had believed herst driving criminal

(01:04:57):
Donald pee Wee Gaskins when he'd i boasted of having
his own private cemetery in rural South Carolina, But in
the nineteen seventies, detectives had been led to the graves
of thirteen of his victims, and Gaskins would claim there
were more than ninety others still undiscovered. So who was

(01:05:22):
Peewee Gaskins.

Speaker 24 (01:05:26):
Most of my family was good Christian people. I mean,
my daddy's the only person I know in my family
that ever got in any trouble. He did enough for everybody.

Speaker 2 (01:05:46):
Donald Gaskins, Junior was born on March thirteenth, nineteen thirty three,
to an unmarried mother.

Speaker 16 (01:05:55):
My daddy was a bad boy when he was lily.

Speaker 24 (01:05:58):
My grandma said, he was always always doing something he
was supposed to do, and you know, he used to
get up with him a lot. But you know, my
grandma was a very good woman. She was very good
to him, but her brothers was a little bit hard
on and they used to beat him a lot because
he wren't Libsen.

Speaker 15 (01:06:17):
Gaskins's childhood was punctuated by a series of stepfathers in
his life. He never knew his own father, and his
mother had a series of relationships. Gaskin's childhood was also
characterized by physical abuse, both at home and especially at school.

Speaker 19 (01:06:39):
Gaskins was a Peewee is a small guy, and so
many individuals who lived that lifestyle and that culture have
to compensate for their small stature and over compensate by
trying to demonstrate how tough he is how aggressive he
is to gain a reputation, and Gaskins was pretty good

(01:07:00):
at that.

Speaker 2 (01:07:03):
Gaskins dropped out of school at eleven, forming a gang
with two friends. Together, they dubbed themselves the Trouble Trio.

Speaker 12 (01:07:16):
What they would do would be burglarized places, AsSalt people.

Speaker 6 (01:07:20):
They would rob.

Speaker 15 (01:07:22):
Here, we've got a boy who is clearly what criminologists
would call being involved in differential association. In other words,
he's going to gain status not through having peers who
are going to do well at school, but instead he's
going to gain status through associating with boys through committing crime,

(01:07:43):
initially petty crime, but that would degenerate. Gaskins would eventually
commit a sexual offense, a rape.

Speaker 24 (01:07:54):
I know daddy and his two friends they raped one
of the boy's sisters.

Speaker 2 (01:08:04):
Together. The Trouble Trio had lured the girl to their
hideout and taken it in terms to.

Speaker 24 (01:08:11):
Rape her, and they used to, you know, get together
and do all, you know, do all kind of mean
things together.

Speaker 2 (01:08:23):
In nineteen forty six, aged just thirteen, Gaskins would graduate
from rape to attempted murder. Whilst burdlarizing her house. Gaskins
was disturbed by a young girl.

Speaker 23 (01:08:40):
He hit her in the head with an axe and
left her on the ditch back, thinking she was dead.

Speaker 24 (01:08:46):
The only thing that kept her alive was there was
a little bit of water trinkling through there, and it
kept her alive to someone found her, or she would
have died.

Speaker 2 (01:09:00):
The girl was able to identify her attacker. The juvenile
Peewee was sent to reform school until his eighteenth birthday.

Speaker 23 (01:09:11):
In our industrial school for boys was a place where
kids who got in trouble they went and they made
them work on the farm and the sort of stuff.
I don't think they mispred them, but they made them
work hard.

Speaker 2 (01:09:26):
The diminutive Gaskins claimed that on his second night in custody,
he was ambushed in the showers and gang raped by
twenty boys. He would have to accept the protection of
the dormitori's boss boy in return for sexual services.

Speaker 24 (01:09:45):
Daddy was a really tiny, tiny person, and you know
the bigger boys heat on.

Speaker 23 (01:09:52):
You've always got bullies everywhere.

Speaker 12 (01:09:56):
Well, what often happens, as often happens in prisons, is
that you're put in with a group of individuals who
are generally worse.

Speaker 16 (01:10:04):
Than you are.

Speaker 12 (01:10:05):
Very frequently they were quite brutal.

Speaker 2 (01:10:10):
Over the next four years, Guesskins would run away repeatedly,
but in nineteen fifty he was due for release.

Speaker 21 (01:10:18):
I'm holding in my hands a report February twenty eighth,
nineteen fifty. It says, dear Doctor Odom, the subject was
committed to this institution on June eighteenth, nineteen forty six,
by the Court of General Sessions the Criminal Court of
Florence County, under an indictment for assault and battery with
intent to kill. We are not attempting to any diagnosis,

(01:10:39):
but we are sure from our dealings with abnormal delinquents
that this boy is antisocial and there's something in his
past development that is preying upon his mind. We consider
him dangerous and also believe he has the homicidal tendencies
peculiar to a paranoid type. We are requesting psychiatric treatment
in requesting proper placement in view of the fact that
we have been un able to justice boid or a group.

Speaker 2 (01:11:03):
On his eighteenth birthday, Donald pe Weee Gaskins was set free.
His criminal activities took up where he'd left.

Speaker 12 (01:11:13):
Off when he got out of reform school. He got
a job working for a tobacco farmer, and what he
would do would be to steal the tobacco and sell it,
and then he set fire to the barn to cover
up the theft.

Speaker 2 (01:11:33):
After just one year as a free man, Gaskins is
teased by a teenage girl and strikes out.

Speaker 15 (01:11:40):
All through his life, you can see that Gaskins is
particularly angry at women. Now, perhaps we can date that
back to the fact that his mother was a single mother,
that Gaskins never knew his father, that there were multiple stepfathers.
But for whatever reasons, Gascon shows throughout his life a

(01:12:02):
great deal of hostility towards our girls and towards women.
And this poor girl who taunts Gaskins about burning down
the barnes sees his wrath and has her skull opened
up by Gaskins hitting her with a hammer.

Speaker 2 (01:12:20):
Gaskins is convicted of arson, assault with a deadly weapon,
and attempted murder and sent to the state penitentiary. Here,
a group of feared convicts known as power men made
the rules. Gaskins was chosen by one such violent convict
as a sex slave.

Speaker 15 (01:12:43):
And Gaskins realizes that if he wants to avoid being
sexually abused for the length of his sentence, he too
has to become a power man.

Speaker 2 (01:12:56):
Gaskins approached the most feared power man in the prison
and slit his throat.

Speaker 15 (01:13:03):
In the rules of that particular jail. He's elevated to
the top. He becomes a face within that particular penal subculture,
and he serves the rest of his time with notoriety,
someone not to be messed with. And that, really, I
think is the beginnings of Gaskin overcoming these childhood problems

(01:13:24):
about his size and actually using the fact that he's
small but dangerous to his own advantage.

Speaker 24 (01:13:31):
When he got older and you know, had gone to
and stuff, he figured, hey, I can be a big
man now.

Speaker 2 (01:13:39):
Gaskins would spend the next two decades in and out
of prison, frequently escaping and being recaptured.

Speaker 24 (01:13:55):
These woods out here is where my daddy would always run.
All these woods connected in some way, and I mean
he he'd stay out here for months at the time.
When he'd escape from prison, eating snakes. He'd rattle snake.

(01:14:15):
He would take water out of ditches and stuff and boil.

Speaker 16 (01:14:17):
It and drink it.

Speaker 23 (01:14:21):
He was up in the courthouse and the old courthouse
for trial, and they put him in the waiting room,
and while he was in there, he pushed the window
up and jumped out the second store uh window and escaped.
He went into the swamp, and they put the bloodhounds

(01:14:41):
on his trail, and a couple of the deputies back
then took a little nap while they were waiting on him,
and they woke up and found that he had written
on the back of the windshield that Pheebe was here
in the dew.

Speaker 24 (01:14:59):
I mean you could high out for a long long
time out of here, and people scared out here because
of the snake testation. They didn't scare him, I mean
did say he used to sleep with the snakes.

Speaker 2 (01:15:12):
During his times out of prison, Gaskins would frequently take
up with a new wife.

Speaker 15 (01:15:19):
Here you see in these multiple sexual partners that Gaskins pursues,
normally younger women, you begin to see some of the
psychopathy in Gaskins's character emerging. He's the classic psychopath who
will use women as opposed to forming serious relationships with women,
and partly that's about reflecting his hatred of women.

Speaker 2 (01:15:49):
Then in nineteen seventy, the disappearances began.

Speaker 24 (01:15:57):
He kept bringing people to my house and you know,
he would say, well, he called me halfy and he
said hal peye. He said, well, you fix this one
so and so something to eat, and I would do.
But you know, they would leave and never come back.
I would never see him again. He came home a

(01:16:18):
couple of times with blood on his hands, and you know,
I'd ask him. He said, well, I hit a deer
or something like that. But people started missing, you know,
and not coming back, and I knew something.

Speaker 16 (01:16:31):
I knew something was wrong.

Speaker 2 (01:16:36):
By the end of the seventies, Gaskins had been tied
to thirteen murders and was in maximum security prisons serving life,
But in nineteen eighty two, he determined to add to
his total, planning a murder on death row that most
thought impossible. In nineteen eighty two, serial killer Donald pee

(01:17:04):
Weee Gaskins, while serving a life sentence in South Carolina's
maximum security prison, set his sights on another victim.

Speaker 15 (01:17:17):
The final moment of that Gaskins commits, he commits in
the most extraordinary circumstances.

Speaker 2 (01:17:24):
His target, a fellow inmate housed in solitary confinement on death.

Speaker 21 (01:17:29):
Row, Rudolph Tyner, was semi retarded, I mean, very low
IQ guy from New York. He was passing through South
Carolina when he and some others decided to rob the Moons.
They had a convenience store down on the coat.

Speaker 18 (01:17:52):
He had already left the store, turned around and went
back in the store and shut them both each and
the Here the sot off shotgun.

Speaker 2 (01:18:04):
The deceased couple's son, Tony Simo, wanted justice.

Speaker 21 (01:18:11):
Tony Simo and he was the adopted son of these folks.
They treated him great, and he was very emotional about this.

Speaker 24 (01:18:18):
Well.

Speaker 2 (01:18:18):
Though sentenced to death, Tya had avoided execution for years.

Speaker 21 (01:18:25):
There were some procedural problems. Simo, the son, after I
think had been six or seven years, just lost patience.

Speaker 10 (01:18:34):
Uh.

Speaker 21 (01:18:35):
And he'd been sentenced to death twice. Time to get
on with it.

Speaker 24 (01:18:41):
Tony was friends with someone in prison. They got Daddy
and Tony to gather.

Speaker 6 (01:18:51):
Collected Tony, my name is JERL McCormick.

Speaker 9 (01:18:54):
Thank you, I have a coach.

Speaker 21 (01:18:57):
Calls you Tony from Jill McCormick for your son.

Speaker 18 (01:19:00):
Thank you, Thank you, Johnny.

Speaker 6 (01:19:03):
Yeah, they don't want me to call this.

Speaker 18 (01:19:06):
Got the coin in the moon's sun and step son
hired Peewee to kill Rudolph Tyner.

Speaker 2 (01:19:22):
Tyina was housed in solitary confinement in the state's most
secure prison.

Speaker 24 (01:19:27):
I went to the authorities and I told them that
Daddy was planning on, you know, killing someone in there,
and they told me there was no way that he
could do it, that you know, it was impossible.

Speaker 21 (01:19:40):
Initially, he befriended Tyer and took him food and marijuana
and whatever he wanted, and they smuggled in some poison.
It didn't work, made him sick.

Speaker 23 (01:19:49):
We give that son of a bitch, all of them,
but one does and all of us doing and making
that sound of a bitch sick.

Speaker 18 (01:19:56):
We put it in some damn buck burned to drink.

Speaker 16 (01:19:59):
The other night he drank, and two more drank than all.

Speaker 6 (01:20:01):
It was made, all three of the thick of hail.

Speaker 2 (01:20:05):
With poison not working. Pee Wee Gaskins comes up with
an ingenious plan to end the life of Rudolph Tyner.

Speaker 23 (01:20:14):
They had made him a maintenance man with all the
tools he wanted.

Speaker 21 (01:20:19):
In the back of his cell, backed up to Tyer cell.

Speaker 15 (01:20:24):
Gaskins suggests to Tyna that he wants to have a
communication system between their cells, almost like a telephone system.

Speaker 22 (01:20:34):
I come up with something.

Speaker 20 (01:20:35):
It can't be no damn making stick on end and
he won elected camp and as much of them sticking
damn dynamite as you can get in.

Speaker 2 (01:20:44):
Okay, well, I'll probably get this this plastic.

Speaker 15 (01:20:47):
Explosion be good.

Speaker 21 (01:20:49):
This is an actual cop that they use in the
Apartment of Corrections at the time. They had this size,
and they had a bigger size. Pee Wee took one
of these and melted a whole in the bottom of
it with with a soldering iron and put in a
female plug like he plug in headphones for instance. On

(01:21:10):
the other end of that, he attached the blasting cap,
nestled it in the C four explosive was.

Speaker 18 (01:21:16):
Able to feed it through the wall through the vent
into Tyner and under the guise of it being an
intercom type system.

Speaker 23 (01:21:26):
I'll take it down radio and rig it end up
bump and when he plugged that froun of a bitch over.

Speaker 24 (01:21:30):
To blow him into hell.

Speaker 21 (01:21:33):
He told Tyner to if he asked him, if he
could hear him, hold it up to his ear, and
then he plugged the other end into the one tin socket.

Speaker 6 (01:21:42):
Just listen for a bun.

Speaker 16 (01:21:52):
He blowed him up.

Speaker 21 (01:21:57):
Pieces of him were blown all over the prison, fingers
went everywhere. Pee Wee then pulled the wire back through
the band, quipped it up, pushing down the toilet and
was came out and what's going on?

Speaker 23 (01:22:15):
Maybe just kind of astonishing that all that was able
to happen in the penitentiary. The only good thing about
that was that you know that was a crime that
he could get the death penalty for it.

Speaker 2 (01:22:26):
That time, pee Wee had recorded his phone calls with
Tony Simo, planning to later blackmail him, but investigators discovered
the tapes and pee Wee was convicted of Tina's murder
and sentenced to death. So was Donald pee Wee. Gaskin's

(01:22:49):
a born killer.

Speaker 21 (01:22:51):
This is a nineteen sixty four report when he again
committed on another crime and they talked with mother. The
patient's mother said the patient did have a lot of
physical difficulties as a young child. When he's about a
year old, he drank some kerosene and almost died. The
doctor who treated him said his nerves would be bad
for the rest of his life. After this incident, the

(01:23:14):
patient began to have convulsions and would remain unconscious for
as long as ten minutes At a time. Ms Hannah
said the patient had convulsions until he was about three
years old.

Speaker 1 (01:23:23):
He had bad.

Speaker 21 (01:23:23):
Dreams, often wake up in the middle of the night
and be afraid. Ms Hannah said she had to sleep
with him until he was about thirteen years old. His
mother thinks that kerosene drinking early on was the cause
of his problems.

Speaker 14 (01:23:37):
I don't know.

Speaker 12 (01:23:38):
It's become a very popular thing to talk about how
concussions can change personalities and can change people's behavior, can
make them more aggressive and more assertive. But if it
were true that brain trauma had something to do with aggression,
we would expect that every serial murderer would have had
some type of brain trauma or brain insult, and that

(01:24:02):
doesn't happen.

Speaker 19 (01:24:04):
Gaskins is a individual who's had an antisocial life since
he was a child. He began with some sort of
a small gang that did all sorts of antisocial and
criminal sorts of things, and he's very, very comfortable not
only with committing crime, but with killing.

Speaker 10 (01:24:23):
It means absolutely nothing to him.

Speaker 15 (01:24:26):
The pattern of Gaskin's life has been of a boy
who learned how to commit crime and to commit more
sophisticated crimes it's the pattern of a life whereby a
boy learns how to be a power man by using
violence to ensure that he gets his way in the world.
But that doesn't mean to say that I think that
Gaskins was born to kill. This is somebody who was

(01:24:49):
socialized into killing.

Speaker 21 (01:24:51):
Whatever gene there is in a human being that gives
them compassion, he lacked.

Speaker 24 (01:24:58):
A lot of people says ed didn't have a conscious
that he could not regret what he had done. I mean,
I don't know, but he never said he was sorry
that he killed anybody.

Speaker 16 (01:25:13):
I think he was born to kill. I really do.

Speaker 24 (01:25:17):
I think my daddy was sick. I think my daddy
had a split personality. My daddy always, I mean ever
since I can remember, I always loved to kill sometan.

Speaker 2 (01:25:32):
Gaskins would go to the electric chair, professing to be
the single most prolific serial killer in American history. But
did the eighty to ninety young hitchhikers he claimed to
have killed along the coast actually exist?

Speaker 18 (01:25:48):
The coastal killings, I personally don't believe any of that's true.
We've never had any physical evidence or rumor or conjecture
from anybody that you know, my niece or my nephew
or any of my kin people were missing, been missing
for so long, and it lasting with pee wee like

(01:26:10):
we had with some of the others. I don't believe
that happened.

Speaker 23 (01:26:15):
If there had been any more victims, he would have
called me and tried to work out a deal to
where you know, he wanted to go out and look
for a body and show somebody, and it just wasn't
anything there for it.

Speaker 22 (01:26:28):
It's amazing. It's extremely difficult to weight a body down
with enough weight for it not to bloat as it
decomposes and float up. But now in theirs he's talking
about putting them, it certainly could have floated up he
composed the rest of the way becomes skeletonisks and sink

(01:26:49):
back down, and so it's certainly possible that it would
not be seen.

Speaker 19 (01:26:55):
Without corroboration. Could he have killed one hundred people, Sure
he could have, but he would be an outlier. That's
a very very high number of victims, even for a
prolific serial killer. But since he is so inadequate and
has to compensate constantly his entire life, to lie and
exaggerate your killings wouldn't surprise me at all. That would

(01:27:18):
be very consistent with his personality. It's possible, but not probable.

Speaker 24 (01:27:24):
Everything my daddy said was true. I could tell him
my daddy was telling a lie. I could tell there
was something about his face that I could tell you.
The total amount is one hundred.

Speaker 16 (01:27:38):
And five people.

Speaker 10 (01:27:39):
He wanted to just be notorious.

Speaker 23 (01:27:41):
He wanted people to think he was the baddest thing
ever to live in South Carolina.

Speaker 10 (01:27:47):
I think he was pretty close to the top.

Speaker 24 (01:27:53):
This is where my daddy's ashes is scattered right here.
He wanted me to put him here because this was
his o old stomping ground and we couldn't bury him
cause people was trying to steal his body because they
said that he was the devil's son and they.

Speaker 16 (01:28:10):
Wanted to worship it.

Speaker 24 (01:28:12):
He's in right in here, right right in here. I
mean I always love my daddy. I mean he was
my dad. You know that's something you can't change, and
you can't stop love. If you love somebody, you love him.
And you know I love my daddy no matter what
he done. And I didn't agree with him, cause I
testified against him. I always love my daddy.