Famous Serial Killers — Donald Henry Gaskins aka Pee Wee

In my novels, I write about serial killers. Sometimes I let real murderers inspire myself. I write about these killers here now. Today it’s about Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, also known as “The Meanest Man in America.”

Life and first violent crimes

Donald Henry Gaskins Jr. was born in 1933 in the city of Manning, South Carolina.

His childhood was marked by an indifferent mother and her changing partners. The men often mistreated Donald while his mother looked away and ignored his suffering.

At school, the slim boy was no different. His classmates, who nicknamed him Pee Wee, beat and mobbed Donald until he dropped out of school at the age of eleven to work in a garage.

During this time, Donald Henry Gaskins made friends with two boys of his age from the surrounding area. Together with them, Donald committed numerous burglaries and rapes. The fact that boys under the age of thirteen raped women together indicates the degree of the brutalization of this trio.

His cronies were called Danny and Marsh, and it was not until they had raped Marsh’s younger sister together that the friends broke up. Danny and Marsh disappeared, and Donald remained alone.

He continued the burglaries on his own. At the age of thirteen, he was caught in a robbery by a girl whom he then attacked with an ax to cover up his crime. The girl survived seriously injured, and Gaskins was caught.

He was taken to a penitentiary to stay until his eighteenth birthday.

But in the institution, Gaskins became the target of the other inmates, as he had been in school before. They beat him up and raped him several times. Gaskins tried several times to flee but was caught and in the meantime, committed to a mental hospital.

From there, he finally managed to escape. He joined a group of land travelers and married a thirteen-year-old girl. But fickle as he was, he changed his mind on the run and voluntarily returned to the Correctional Institution. As initially planned, he stayed there until his eighteenth birthday.

Soon after, Gaskins committed his first murder, which, however, is not yet attributed to his later serial murders. He worked on a tobacco plantation and was caught there as an arsonist. His boss confronted him, after which Gaskins freaked out and killed the five-year-old daughter of the plantation owner with a hammer.

During the subsequent five-year prison sentence, he committed another murder. He cut a fellow inmate’s throat to gain respect in prison and not be mistreated by the other inmates.

For this murder behind bars, he was given an additional six months in prison.

In 1955 Gaskin fled the prison. He had learned that his wife had divorced him. One can only speculate what he had in mind. Maybe he wanted to take revenge on his wife and do something to her. But Gaskins met another woman during his escape and was persuaded by her to get her supposed brother out of prison. Gaskins was willing to pay the bail.

In reality, this woman used him to get her husband out of prison. Gaskins paid the bail unsuspectingly while being robbed by the brothers of his supposed new girlfriend. They ran away with Gaskin’s car.

Gaskins was subsequently arrested again. In 1961 he was released from prison. In the following years, he was charged with rape again and again and was sentenced to jail repeatedly. When he was released from prison in 1968 on probation, nobody suspected that a monster had just been unleashed on humankind, because Gaskins began his serial murders in 1969.

The serial murders

The Coastal Kills

In September 1969, Gaskins raped, tortured, and killed a hitchhiker. This murder was the prelude to a series of murders which, according to Gaskins, claimed the lives of some sixty to eighty people.

Gaskins killed men, women, and children indiscriminately. He found his victims by taking hitchhikers with him or by pretending to want to help with car breakdowns.

Gaskins distinguished himself in these murders by extreme sadism, because he was anxious to keep his victims alive as long as possible and to torture them as bestially as possible until their death. Sometimes his victims were in his grip for several days before he killed them.

Later, in court, he testified that he had tried to alleviate his depression with these murders. Allegedly, the crimes helped him to keep the low under control.

The “Serious Murders

Gaskins assigned his numerous murders to different series. While the victims of his “Coastal Kills” came into his sights by chance, and he tortured them long and hard, things were a bit different with his so-called “Serious Murders.”

According to him, he started these murders around 1970.

Gaskins killed people he hated. They could be people who owed him money, to whom he owed money, who stood in his way or had otherwise made themselves unpopular with him.

Gaskins also accepted and executed murder orders for money during this time.

Unlike his random victims from the highway, he simply shot the victims of his “Serious Murders.” He neither tortured them nor abused them.

To what extent the actions of both series overlapped in time could not be clearly determined during my research on this article.

Some authors talk about successive series; others don’t even mention this division. The fact is that Gaskins had these different motives. He sometimes killed out of cruelty and sometimes out of calculation and personal reasons.

But it can be assumed that Gaskins drove both series parallel since he dates the beginning of the “Serious Murders” to 1970. On the other hand, he claims to have murdered between sixty and eighty people in the course of the “Coastal Kills.”

Considering that he murdered his first hitchhiker in 1969, it’s doubtful that he killed all these people in less than a year.

Arrest and conviction

Gaskins owed his final arrest to a confidant. Walter Neeley was a Gaskin buddy who committed minor crimes with him again and again.

One day Neeley helped Gaskins remove three bodies. From then on, Gaskins saw his accomplice as a trustworthy friend to whom he could entrust everything.

So he finally brought Neeley to his private “cemetery,” as he called it. Gaskins probably wanted to brag about it. There he had hidden six corpses at that time.

Later, when the police suspected Gaskins long ago in connection with several unsolved murders, his trust in Neeley became his downfall.

Since the police had not been unaware of the connection between Gaskins and Neeley, they also investigated him. Neeley then told the police the location of Gaskins Cemetery to save his skin. But then Neeley was accused as well.

Gaskins was sentenced to death in the subsequent trial for a murder that could be proved to him without any doubt. However, he later confessed to the other seven murders and numerous others.

When the death penalty was abolished in South Carolina in 1976, it looked at first as if Gaskins would once again part from the death. His sentence was commuted to seven life sentences.

But then the death penalty was reintroduced in 1978, and Gaskins made the mistake of murdering a fellow inmate during that time. He killed an inmate on death row on behalf of a fellow inmate and was finally sentenced to death.

In 1991 Gaskins was executed on the electric chair.

Sources

http://kulturmeister.de/kartenspiele/serienkiller/articles/donald-henry-gaskins-1933-1991.html

http://www.serienkillers.de/serienm%C3%B6rder/g-j/gaskins-donald/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Henry_Gaskins

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