The Hitchhiker's Killer： Pee Wee Gaskins - Serial Killer Documentary

The Hitchhiker's Killer： Pee Wee Gaskins - Serial Killer Documentary

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
Five foot four Donald pee Weee Gaskins would earn himself
the title the meanest man in America.

Speaker 2 (00:18):
If you had a business dispute, you'd sew him. Pee
Wee'd kill him.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
A serial killer who, if he's to be believed, was
responsible for over one hundred cruel and sickening murders.

Speaker 3 (00:34):
Right over here is where he drowned Doe Rhen and
then he hit the baby in the back of the
head hatchet at the head rater. The total amount is
one hundred and five people.

Speaker 1 (00:49):
A man who wouldn't stop killing, even on death row.

Speaker 2 (00:55):
We played that fun.

Speaker 4 (00:56):
Of a big cabin to play money in the hell.

Speaker 5 (00:59):
They would just astonishing that all that was able to
happen in the penel temptrary?

Speaker 1 (01:04):
So what made Peewee the man he was? And was
he born to kill.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
My daddy? He called himself a bad power. He would
have to see the Lord.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Nineteen seventy five, school teacher Mary Anne Dunham reports the
disappearance of one of her students, thirteen year old Kim Gelkins.

Speaker 6 (02:02):
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, uh petite. Her mother
had died, I think the previous spring. I think she
was lonely for her mother and and sad, you know,

(02:26):
so she was looking for somebody who to pay attention
to her. Often at the beginning of the school year,
teachers want to assess uh their class s writing skills,
and so sometimes you'll assign them to write about what
they did on their summer vacation or whatever. In that
particular year, I remember asking my children to write about

(02:48):
the person they admired most, and Kim wrote about someone
who was named Donna Gaskins.

Speaker 1 (03:00):
Donald Gaskins was the common law wife of a colorful
local criminal, Donald pee Wee Gaskins.

Speaker 5 (03:13):
Pee Wee has always been known as a notorious person
in our area. I think he would you would have
to say he came over as different because how many people,
you know, to drive a hearse for their vehicle.

Speaker 3 (03:25):
It was a long black hurse, you know, like they
used to you know, drive a long time ago. Was
in on the very back. He had a little sign
that says, I all dead bodies. Everybody joked about it,
you know, everybody just you know, thought it was funny.

Speaker 5 (03:48):
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 little b end of the county, everybody,
if you talked about Pee Wee, they sort of would
run and hide because they were scared of He had
that kind of reputation.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Gaskin's daughter Shirley remembers the day Kim Gelkins vanished.

Speaker 3 (04:17):
Her mom had died and she got to be friends
with daddy because daddy was living in Charleston. She was
a sweet little girl. 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

(04:39):
seen Kim, and she just walked out the door and disappeared,
and Daddy said, well, you know, don't worry about it.
She probably run away.

Speaker 1 (04:55):
Kim was not the only missing person five years earlier.
In thenineteen seventy, Shirley's cousin Jannie Kirby, had vanished.

Speaker 3 (05:08):
Jennison I I mean, when we were little, we did
everything together. She was a sweet girl of very smart girl,
very good in school, I mean, and she was just
you know, an all American country girl. When she first disappeared,
everybody said that, you know, she'd run away from home.

(05:29):
We were all out looking for, you know, searching for everybody,
was calling everybody that they needed to, you know, try
to find her. But you know, after six seven months,
we knew something right.

Speaker 1 (05:47):
Now, detectives investigating the new disappearance began to focus on
Shirley's father, Donald p Wee Gaskins.

Speaker 4 (05:56):
Some of our field agents were working on on rumors
that had been surfacing UH, working along with detectives from
Charleston in in an attempt to find Kim Gelkins.

Speaker 5 (06:10):
We UH started looking for the Gelkins girl. And course
we didn't 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 UH pick Walter
and nearly up and after a lot of talking and
and everything, Walter finally took the investigators out in show

(06:32):
'em where he had helped pee we bury someone. They
knew somebody was buried there. We didn't have any idea
what we were gonna find until we started digging.

Speaker 4 (06:50):
We took uh be i guess ten or twelve fifteen
deputies and sled agents and we s just lined up
and started walking slowly into the woods. Sometime during that process,

(07:10):
in 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 that were maybe
three feet long with a tea handle on top, piece
of rebar with a point on it that you could
determine soil consistency. Your prolonge prolonged it sh it goes down.

Speaker 5 (07:40):
They probed ground enough to where they could tell that
there was someone buried there. So we sealed the area
off and started digging, and it turned up that we
found six bodies buried there. Yeah, it's pretty gruesome scene.

(08:10):
I was, ah, I guess I was overwhelmed because you know,
I had been in law enforcement for some twelve and
a half years prior to this, and I'd never seen
anything of that magnitude.

Speaker 1 (08:26):
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.

(08:49):
In nineteen seventy five, the disappearance of thirteen year old
schoolgirl Kim Gelkins had led detectives to a burial site
in the woods of South Carolina. They're investigators, including Sheriff

(09:09):
William Barnes.

Speaker 5 (09:11):
They would have been right there by that tree. That's
where it would have been.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
Would make a shocking discovery.

Speaker 5 (09:19):
This is the area where the six bodies were 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 foot of each each other. They
would have all been right in this area here where

(09:40):
we're standing now, under this tree.

Speaker 1 (09:46):
All six had been murdered and buried to a piece
in three shallow graves, and all six were linked to
notorious character Donald pee Wee Gaskins, diminutive local car thief
who drove an old hearse and boasted of having his
own private cemetery. No one had believed him.

Speaker 3 (10:12):
I was six months pregnant at the time with my
last child, and we were 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 in shock. I
went into labor. My baby was born. I wasn't even
several months pregnant. She didn't weigh but she weighed two

(10:35):
pounds or something.

Speaker 5 (10:37):
All of a sudden, we found ourselves in a national limelight.

Speaker 7 (10:44):
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 1 (11:01):
Investigators now had to uncover the identity of the victims.

Speaker 8 (11:08):
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 adapacia 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 4 (11:32):
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
could stand it.

Speaker 1 (11:51):
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 anto theft ring with Guskins.

Speaker 3 (12:03):
Daddy said they were gonna steal a car and they
came by the house and I had just cooked some
biscuit and cough and they ate some biscuit and coffee
and they left it. I never seen him again.

Speaker 5 (12:17):
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 fellaws
out and pointed up to the limb talk about how

(12:38):
they could hoist the motors out of stolen vehicles. Here
as they were looking up in the tree, he shot
one of them in the back of the head, and
then when the other one ran, he shot him. This
is where he shot him right here.

Speaker 3 (12:57):
If he'd think that they were gonna, you know, they
get tired of they was going to tell only did
he get rid of.

Speaker 1 (13:11):
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

(13:35):
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
Dorin Dempsey and her two year old daughter, Robin.

Speaker 8 (14:04):
During Dempsey and Robin were both skeletronized 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 primortum.

Speaker 3 (14:20):
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 and hatchet at the head raped her. He said

(14:46):
that he just could not resist raping the baby. He
said he just couldn't resist it.

Speaker 5 (15:03):
You see this hole 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,

(15:23):
and he just didn't believe in that, and that was
his reason for doing away with them.

Speaker 1 (15:32):
Eventually, Gaskins would reveal the truth about the disappearance of
schoolgirl Kim Gelkins.

Speaker 3 (15:39):
Kim was beard almost in our backyard, right out in here.
It's where they found Kim Gallichud. She walked out my
front door and I never seen her again. He took
her off from the house and killed her.

Speaker 1 (16:13):
Eight years after he had killed her, Gaskins finally gave
up the body of his niece, fifteen year old Janie Kirby.

Speaker 5 (16:29):
This is the gravesite where his niece Janis 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 tough to take. It's hard not
to get involved. Just a little girl here, You're just

(16:49):
a young teenager. Really, life snuffed out, stuck in a
hole in the woods. Nobody knew where she was what
happened to her.

Speaker 1 (17:02):
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 3 (17:22):
I I just shievered. I mean, I said, daddy, I
don't want to hear this, and he would say, half Pat,
I need to get it off by jais I need
to tell somebody.

Speaker 9 (17:36):
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 8 (17:52):
He allegedly started in nineteen sixty nine killing young women,
primarily later young boys and young women along the coast.

Speaker 3 (18:04):
He used to travel up and down the road and
pick up the hikers and he would torture them.

Speaker 8 (18:14):
He always talked about dumping their nude bodies into marsh
areas and seeking them deep enough so that it would
be unlikely for people to be able to find them.

Speaker 9 (18:30):
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 up

(18:50):
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 8 (19:05):
He alleged that he did ten or twelve a year.
Practically every month, he'd kill somebody along the beach.

Speaker 3 (19:12):
He said, every so often he would get dis urged
that he would have to see blood. He called himself
a vampire. He said his stumblet 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 kills somebody.

Speaker 10 (19:34):
Serial murderers will tell you that there is something inside
of them that they have to go kill, 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

(19:57):
to say that a serial murderer is an addict, but
if you really look at it in that context, in
a way, they are an addict. They have to do it.
They have to do it.

Speaker 1 (20:13):
Donald pee 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 hearst driving criminal

(20:45):
Donald pe Wee Gaskins when he 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. Gaskins would claim there were more
than ninety others still undiscovered. So who was Peewee Gaskins?

Speaker 3 (21:14):
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 1 (21:34):
Donald Gaskins, Junior was born on March thirteenth, nineteen thirty three,
to an unmarried mother.

Speaker 3 (21:43):
My daddy was a bad boy when he was lily.
My grandma said he was always always doing something he
was supposed to do, and you know, he used to
get up whipping 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 weren't Libsen.

Speaker 9 (22:05):
Gaskin'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. Gaskins's childhood was also
characterized by physical abuse, both at home and especially at school.

Speaker 11 (22:27):
Gaskins was a peewee who 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

(22:48):
good at that.

Speaker 1 (22:51):
Gaskins dropped out of school at eleven, forming a gang
with two friends. Together, they dubbed themselves the Trouble Trio.

Speaker 10 (23:04):
What they would do would be burglarized places I saw
people they would rob.

Speaker 4 (23:10):
Here.

Speaker 9 (23:11):
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,

(23:31):
initially petty crime, but that would degenerate. Gaskins would eventually
commit a sexual offense, a rape.

Speaker 3 (23:42):
I know Daddy and his two friends they raped one
of the boy's sisters.

Speaker 1 (23:52):
Together. The trouble trio had lured the girl to their
hideout and taken it in terms to rape her.

Speaker 3 (24:04):
And they used to, you know, get together and do all,
you know, do all kinds of mean things together.

Speaker 1 (24:11):
In nineteen forty six, aged just thirteen, Gaskins would graduate
from rape to attempted murder. Whilst burglarizing her house, Gaskins
was disturbed by a young girl.

Speaker 5 (24:28):
He hit her in the head with an axe and
left her on the ditch back, thinking she was dead.

Speaker 3 (24:34):
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 1 (24:48):
The girl was able to identify her attacker. The juvenile
peewee was sent to reform school until his eighteenth birthday.

Speaker 5 (25:00):
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 mispreedom, but they made them work hard.

Speaker 1 (25:14):
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 3 (25:33):
Daddy was a really tiny, tiny person, and you know,
the bigger boys heat down, and.

Speaker 5 (25:40):
You've always got bullies overwore.

Speaker 10 (25:44):
Well, what often happens, as often happens in prison settings,
is that you're put in with a group of individuals
who are generally worse.

Speaker 3 (25:52):
Than you are.

Speaker 10 (25:53):
Very frequently they were quite brutal.

Speaker 1 (25:58):
Over the next four years, the Eskins would run away repeatedly,
but in nineteen fifty he was due for release.

Speaker 2 (26:06):
I'm holding my hands a report February twenty eighth, nineteen fifty.
It says, dear Doctor odem 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, but we are

(26:28):
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 were requesting psychiatric treatment in requesting proper
placement in view of the fact that we have been
unable to adjustice Boid or our group.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
On his eighteenth birthday, Donald p.

Speaker 6 (26:53):
Wee.

Speaker 1 (26:53):
Gaskins was set free. His criminal activities took up where
he'd left.

Speaker 10 (27:01):
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 1 (27:20):
After just one year as a free man, Gaskins is
teased by a teenage girl and strikes out.

Speaker 9 (27:28):
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, Gaskin shows throughout his life a

(27:50):
great deal of hostility towards girls and towards women. And
this poor girl who taunts Gaskins about burning down the barn,
sees his wrath and has her skull opened up by
Gaskins hitting her with a hammer.

Speaker 1 (28:08):
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 9 (28:31):
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 1 (28:44):
Gaskins approached the most feared power man in the prison
and slit his throat.

Speaker 9 (28:51):
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

(29:12):
about his size and actually using the fact that he's
small but dangerous to his own advantage.

Speaker 3 (29:19):
When he got older and you know, had gone and stuff,
he figured, hey, I can be a big man now.

Speaker 1 (29:27):
Gaskins would spend the next two decades in and out
of prison, frequently escaping and being recaptured.

Speaker 3 (29:43):
These woods out here is where my daddy would always run.
All these woods connect in some way, and I mean
he'd stay out here for moths at the time. When
he'd escape from prison, he'd ride a snake. He would

(30:03):
take water out of ditches and stuff and boil it
and drink it.

Speaker 5 (30:09):
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 the window
and escaped. He went into the swamp, and they put
the bloodhounds on the trail, and a couple of the

(30:33):
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
Peebe was here in the dew.

Speaker 3 (30:47):
I mean, you could hide out for a long long
time out here, and people scared out here because of
the snake festation. They didn't scare him. I mean, Daddy
said he used to sleep with the snakes.

Speaker 1 (31:00):
During his times out of prison, Gaskins would frequently take
up with a new wife.

Speaker 9 (31:07):
Here you see in these multiple sexual partners that Gaskins pursues,
normally younger women, you begin to see some of the
psychopathy in Gaskin'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 1 (31:37):
Then in nineteen seventy, the disappearances began.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
He kept bringing people to my house and you know,
he would say, will he call me Halpa? And he
said he pay. 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

(32:06):
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 miscing, you know,
and not coming back. I knew something. I knew something
was wrong.

Speaker 1 (32:24):
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 Peewee Gaskins,

(32:59):
whil serving a life sentence in South Carolina's maximum security prison,
set his sights on another victim.

Speaker 9 (33:10):
The final moment of that Gaskins commits, he commits in
the most extraordinary circumstances.

Speaker 1 (33:17):
His target a fellow inmate housed in solitary confinement on
death row.

Speaker 2 (33:27):
Rudolph Tyner was a 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 coast.

Speaker 4 (33:45):
He had already left the store, turned around and went
back in the store and shot them both each in
the head with a sod Off shotgun.

Speaker 1 (33:58):
The deceased couple's son, Tony's Smo, wanted justice.

Speaker 2 (34:04):
Tony Simo he was the adopted son of these folks.
They treated him great and he was very emotional about this.

Speaker 1 (34:11):
Well, those sentenced to death, Tya had avoided execution for years.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
There were some procedural problems. Simo. The son after I
think it had been six or seven years, just lost patience. Uh,
and he'd been sentenced to death twice. Time to get
on with it.

Speaker 3 (34:34):
Tony was friends with someone in prison. They got Daddy
and Tony to gather.

Speaker 7 (34:43):
You collector, Tony, my name is GERL McCormick.

Speaker 2 (34:47):
Thank you, Bill, I have a coach calls you Tony
from Jill McCormick for you.

Speaker 4 (34:53):
Thank you, Thank you, Tony. Girl going in the moon's
sun and step son hired Peewee to kill Rudolph.

Speaker 1 (35:11):
Tyner China was housed in solitary confinement in the state's
most secure prison.

Speaker 3 (35:21):
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 2 (35:33):
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 5 (35:43):
We give that sound of a bitch, all of them
but one dose and all of them.

Speaker 4 (35:47):
Doing it, making that sound of a bitch sick.

Speaker 5 (35:50):
We put it in some damn buck burned.

Speaker 3 (35:52):
To drink the other night and he drank and two
more drank than all it was made.

Speaker 6 (35:56):
All through up second.

Speaker 1 (35:57):
Hell with poison not working, Pee Wee Gaskins comes up
with an ingenious plan to end the life of Rudolph Tyner.

Speaker 5 (36:07):
They had made him a maintenance man with all the
tools he wanted.

Speaker 2 (36:13):
In the back of his cell backed up to tyiner cell.

Speaker 9 (36:18):
Gaskins suggests to Tyna that he wants to have a
communication system between their cells, almost like a telephone system.

Speaker 6 (36:27):
I come up with something.

Speaker 7 (36:28):
It can't be no damn making stick on end.

Speaker 4 (36:31):
I need won elected camp and.

Speaker 6 (36:34):
As much of him sticking damn Dyna mine as you
can get in.

Speaker 1 (36:37):
Okay, I'll probably.

Speaker 9 (36:39):
Get this plastic.

Speaker 2 (36:40):
Explosion will be good. This is an actual cop that
they use in the Department of Corrections. At the time,
they had this size, and they had a bigger size.
Pee Wee took one of these and melted a hole
in the bottom of it with a soidering iron and
put in a female plug like you plug in headphones

(37:02):
for instance. On the other end of that, he attached
the blasting cap, nestled it in the C four explosive.

Speaker 4 (37:09):
Was able to feed it through the wall through the
vent into Tyner and the under the guise of it
being an intercom type system. I'll take it down radio
and rig it into bump and when he plugged that
sound of a.

Speaker 2 (37:23):
Bitch over to blow him one in the hall. He
uh told Tyner 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 3 (37:35):
Just listened for a bune. He blowed him up.

Speaker 2 (37:50):
Pieces of him were blown all over the prison. Fingers
went everywhere. Pee Wee then pulled the wire back through
the van, clipped it up, flushed it down the toilet
and came out, what's going on?

Speaker 5 (38:09):
Maybe it 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 4 (38:20):
That time, pee Wee.

Speaker 1 (38:24):
Had recorded his phone calls with Tony Simo planning to
later blackmail him, but investigators discovered the tapes and Peewee
was convicted of Tinner's murder and sentenced to death. So
was Donald pee Wee. Gaskin's a born killer.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
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 was about
a year old, he drank some care pkerosene and almost died.
The doctor who treated him said his nerves would be
bad for the rest of his life. After this incident,

(39:07):
the patient began to have convulsions and would remain unconscious
for as long as ten minutes at a time. Mss
Hannah said the patient had convulsions until he's about three
years old. He had bad dreams, often wake up in
the middle of the night and be afraid. Miss Hannah
said she had to sleep with him until he was
about thirteen years old. His mother thinks that kerosene drinking

(39:28):
early on was the cause of his problems.

Speaker 11 (39:30):
I don't know.

Speaker 10 (39:31):
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

(39:55):
doesn't happen.

Speaker 11 (39:58):
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. It means absolutely

(40:18):
nothing to him.

Speaker 9 (40:19):
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

(40:43):
socialized into killing.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
Whatever gene there is in a human being that gives
them compassion, he.

Speaker 3 (40:50):
Lacked a lot of people says, my daddy 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. I think he was
born to kill. I really do. I think my daddy

(41:11):
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 something.

Speaker 1 (41:26):
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 4 (41:41):
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 missing, been missing for
so long and then last thing would pee wee like

(42:03):
we had with some of the others. I don't believe
that happened.

Speaker 5 (42:08):
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 8 (42:21):
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 skeletonized and sink

(42:42):
back down, and so it's certainly possible that it would
not be seen.

Speaker 11 (42:48):
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

(43:12):
be very consistent with his personality. It's possible, but not probable.

Speaker 3 (43:17):
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. The
total amount is one hundred and five people.

Speaker 5 (43:33):
He wanted to just be notorious. He wanted people to
think he was the baddest thing ever to live in
South Carolina. I think he was pretty close to the top.

Speaker 3 (43:46):
This is where my daddy's ashes is scattered right here.
He wanted me to put him here because this was
his old stomping ground and we couldn't bury him because
people was trying to steal his body because they said
that he was the devil's son and they wanted to
worship it. He's in right in here, right right in here.

(44:10):
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
because I testified against him. I always love my daddy.