The phone rang at the sheriff’s department in Florence County, and the voice on the other end was a teacher from Charleston. She was calling to report a missing student, a thirteen-year-old girl named Kim Gilkins who had never come home. Kim’s sister had walked into school that morning and said the words that would crack open a case no one knew existed: “My sister Kim is gone. ”
The teacher did what teachers do.
She reported it. And within days, two detectives from Charleston were tracing the girl’s last steps into the tiny farming community of Prospect, South Carolina. That’s where they kept hearing the same name, over and over again. The last person seen with Kim Gilkins was a small, wiry man with a limp and a reputation so dark that people in Prospect crossed the street when they saw him coming.
Donald Henry Gaskins. Peewee, everyone called him. I grew up hearing that name. My daddy was in law enforcement, and he was the one who put Peewee Gaskins in jail the first time he ever went.
Years later, I was the one who put him there for the last time. It became a family affair, bringing that man to justice. And when we finally did, we uncovered things that made the whole state of South Carolina go quiet for a while. But to understand what happened in those woods outside Prospect, you have to understand who Donald Gaskins was from the very beginning.
He was born on the thirteenth of March, 1933, a tiny baby weighing barely over four pounds. He never got much bigger. On his best day, standing straight, he was barely over five feet tall and weighed maybe a hundred and thirty pounds. His family called him Peewee because of his size, and the name stuck for the rest of his life.
He grew up in Prospect, South Carolina, with his mother and his grandmother. Prospect is the kind of town you drive through without even noticing. There’s no stoplight. If you blink while you’re driving, you’ve missed the sign.
All the little towns around it are farm towns, known for tobacco. The people there worked hard, went to church, and kept to themselves. The Gaskins family was regular at the church in Prospect Crossroads. They were known as a loving family.
His grandmother doted on him. He loved her more than anybody, I think, for his entire life. He stayed with her most of the time. But from the moment he could walk, Peewee was different.
Not in a way that made people proud. He was troublesome as a small child, always into something. He pulled the legs off frogs and hurt animals. He had a temper on him that would flare up out of nowhere.
When he got mad, he got violent. He stabbed a teacher with a pencil once, and when he did, he jumped out the window of the schoolhouse and ran off. He was barely old enough to be in grade school. By the time he was eleven, he had fallen in with a couple of boys who were up to no good.
And it didn’t take long for the crimes to turn sexual. He was raping other young children before he was even a teenager. The local police knew his name by the time he was twelve. He was a burglar, always running afoul of the law.
By thirteen, he was already a career criminal, which is highly unusual for a boy that age. When you add in the cruelty to animals, the violence at school, and the sexual assaults, the picture becomes clear. This was a personality disorder that was only going to get worse. One of the people who knew him back then was my great aunt, Mary Alice.
She was born in 1930, just a few years before Peewee. Her family home sat right next to the house where he was raised. Their houses were so close together that my uncle used to say you could pass a cup of sugar from one window to the next. Mary Alice grew up with Peewee as her neighbor, and for a long time, he was just the small, odd boy next door.
In 1946, when Mary Alice was sixteen, she caught him breaking into her family’s house. She grabbed a hatchet to defend herself. When he came in, he took the hatchet from her. Then he raped her, hit her in the head with the hatchet, and left her in the ditch next to a cornfield.
He thought she was dead. I’m pretty positive he thought he had killed her. But some men happened to be coming along the side of the road, and they found her. They got her help, and she survived.
She healed up just fine, and she lived to tell her story. That attack sent Peewee to reform school at the age of thirteen. Reform school didn’t change anything. He escaped multiple times.
On one occasion, he came back claiming he had married a girl he got pregnant. He stabbed a fellow student who he said attacked him sexually. The violence never stopped. Everything he did was impulsive, instant gratification, total recklessness.
He dealt with things as they came along, and the way he dealt with them was usually with his hands or a weapon. In 1951, he was released. The years in reform school hadn’t curbed anything. He went right back to committing crimes.
In 1952, he got involved in insurance fraud, burning down barns so the owners could claim the money. One day, the owner’s daughter discovered what he was doing. He lost his temper and hit her over the head with a hammer. That got him five years in adult prison.
He pleaded guilty to attempted murder, then got involved in the murder of another inmate and pleaded guilty to being an accessory. That added another three years to his sentence. The other prisoners started to fear him. If this small man could take another guy down, the rest of them needed to watch their backs.
He was paroled in 1961, and for a little while, he dropped off the radar. But not for long. In June of 1964, he made the papers again. He was caught molesting a teenage girl and charged with statutory rape.
He jumped out of the second-story window of the Florence County courthouse to escape. That’s how he hurt his leg. He walked with a distinct limp for the rest of his life, but I always believed that limp was part of his act. He would limp when you were looking at him, but the moment you turned your head, he could run.
He was on the run for two months before they caught him and sent him back to jail. By the age of thirty-five, he had spent more than half his life incarcerated. When he was released in 1968, he was free again. But he didn’t turn over a new leaf.
He was ready to escalate. Only this time, he planned not to get caught. In the early 1970s, people started disappearing in rural South Carolina. Girls went missing in Charleston.
Janice Kirby and Patricia Alsbrook, both teenagers, vanished in Sumpter. Others disappeared from Prospect and the surrounding areas. They just vanished into thin air. It took five years for police to realize that all the missing people had one acquaintance in common.
Donald Peewee Gaskins. He had a tendency to kidnap and kill young people, especially runaways, the kind of individuals who wouldn’t have someone crying out that they were missing right away. He was just an evil person. He killed people for no significant reason.
It didn’t bother him. He had no remorse. The urge to kill had started in him when he was just a boy, and it never stopped. Despite his reputation in the quiet farming community, Peewee had the power to charm and deceive the people he crossed paths with.
He was pleasant to talk to. You could talk about digging a well, putting on a roof, the weather, whatever was going on, and he would carry on a conversation like any normal man. He was a hard worker. He worked all the time as a handyman, carpenter, roofer.
He had bad habits when he wasn’t working, but when he was working, he could be charming. But you always had to remember that in the back of his mind, all he was looking for was a small opening to cut your throat or kill you or choke you. He wasn’t smart. He wasn’t educated.
But he was sly like a fox. In the spring of 1975, a thirteen-year-old girl named Kim Gilkins went on a trip with Donald Gaskins. Kim was from Charleston. Her mother had died, and her father had spent time in prison.
She had become friendly with Peewee’s new wife, who was only nineteen. Peewee met Kim in Charleston where he was working, and he brought her back to Florence County with him. She stayed with him and his family. Then one night, he just told his family he was taking her to the bus station and sending her back to Charleston.
She never arrived. Her sister went to school and said, “My sister Kim is gone. ” That’s how the investigation started. That’s what brought the Charleston detectives to Prospect, and that’s what put the spotlight on Peewee Gaskins.
When they searched property he owned in Lake City, they found some of Kim’s clothes. On November 14, 1975, a warrant was issued for his arrest on suspicion of contributing to the delinquency of a minor. But as the investigators started asking questions, they began to suspect that Kim Gilkins wasn’t the only one. If she hadn’t just run away, and if she had come to harm, then she wasn’t the only one who had disappeared around Peewee.
In November 1970, two teenage girls failed to return to their homes in Sumpter. Janice Kirby was Peewee’s niece. She was fifteen years old. Her best friend, Patricia Alsbrook, was seventeen.
They were really close friends. Peewee had been in the neighborhood working as a roofer on a project just a mile from where Janice disappeared. When family members contacted him looking for the girls, he told them he had seen them that day and believed they had run away. The family was suspicious, but they had no proof of foul play.
In March 1972, another local teen disappeared. Martha Dicks, who everyone called Clyde, liked to wear men’s clothes. She hung out at the auto repair shop where Gaskins worked. She was never seen again.
By then, people in Prospect were scared of Peewee. He was pretty tough in the community. Everybody in Prospect was scared to death of him. He drove a hearse, and he used to tell people that was what he hauled his bodies to his private cemetery in.
He had a sign on it that said, “I’ll haul anything dead or alive. ” He told everybody he had a shovel in there just waiting on them, so they better not tell anything they saw him doing. In June 1974, Johnny Sellers and his girlfriend, Jesse Ruth Judy, disappeared. She was only twenty-one or twenty-two.
Their mothers reported the disappearance. Johnny and Jesse had been spending a lot of time with Gaskins. The couple was never found. In March 1975, Gaskins recruited a local man named Walter Neely to help him repaint some stolen cars.
Walter Neely and Peewee were very good friends. They did crimes together. Walter was about the same size as Peewee, but he was the kind of buddy who was there to boost Peewee up, to make him feel big. The following month, two more associates of Gaskins vanished.
Diane Neely was Walter’s wife. She disappeared along with Avery Howard, the man she’d been having an affair with. Just like Martha Dicks, no one reported them missing right away. The kind of people Gaskins mixed with were on the fringes of society.
They traveled in the same circles he did. There wasn’t anyone who could tell you much about them. When the investigators started peeling back the layers on Kim Gilkins’s disappearance, they found more layers and more layers. Just more things they could attribute to Peewee.
All these people had been last seen with him. Agents from the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, known as SLED, were brought in to help. They had a connection to the case. My father was the sheriff in Sumpter County.
There was a close working relationship between all the sheriffs. Every chance I got to go to Sumpter and help do something, I was on my way. By November 20, 1975, they had plenty of suspicions about Gaskins, but no evidence. What they had was the warrant related to Kim Gilkins.
A tip-off led them to a house in Sumpter where Gaskins was doing business. They let him get out of the house to prevent a hostage situation. He got in a cab and left the house. As soon as he got far enough away, they swooped down and arrested him.
He surrendered to my father. He was genuinely afraid. He knew he was caught because he was surrounded. He just went straight to my daddy and gave himself up.
He had a ticket to Tupelo, Mississippi in his pocket. I assume he was trying to make a getaway. When they arrested him, he had a cardboard box with some clothes, a pistol, and a rifle with the stock removed. Peewee Gaskins was charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor and remanded in custody.
But he wasn’t talking. The detectives had at least eight missing people connected to him, but no clues about their whereabouts and no evidence. They needed something. Anything.
So they started leaning on his known associates, including his sidekick, thirty-year-old Walter Neely. They brought him in just because he was an associate of Peewee’s, to find out what he knew. And it turned out to be profitable to question him. Walter Neely explained that he had been present when Gaskins killed two men, and that Gaskins had asked him to cover up the crimes.
Dennis Bellamy and Johnny Knight were helping Peewee with a car ring operation. They would steal cars, strip the parts, and sell them. Working from a spot in Prospect close to where he grew up, Gaskins had figured out a way to lift motors out of stolen vehicles. He used large limbs from old oak trees and ropes to pull the motors out.
On October 10, 1975, Gaskins turned on Dennis, who was twenty-seven, and Johnny, who was only fifteen. The two boys were brought to the spot by the big oak tree. He got them to look up at a branch to see if it would hold a car motor. As they were looking up, he pulled out his pistol and shot them both in the back of the head.
He buried them right there. They knew too much about him, so he decided he needed to kill them. The story was incredible. But was it true?
The two alleged victims weren’t among the names the detectives had been looking for. But they were the brothers of Diane Neely, Walter’s wife, who had disappeared six months earlier. Walter Neely finally confessed to where the grave site was. That led to a search of the Prospect area.
Florence County officials, along with experts from SLED, began searching the woodland on Thursday, December 4th. The very same day, the first grizzly discovery was made. The first two we found were the boys, John Henry Knight and Dennis Bellamy. They were each shot in the back of the head one time.
The following day, four more bodies were unearthed in what investigators began to call Gaskins’s private graveyard. Most of the ones found were skeletal remains and fragments of clothing. Some had been killed more recently and had some flesh left. We found bullets and bullet fragments, and we were able to work with that.
We got fingerprints from some of them. We took the dirt exhumed from around the bodies and sifted through it to make sure we hadn’t lost any bullets, jewelry, or any other identifying things. We did that for each grave, each hole. Within a few days, the four bodies were identified.
Jesse Ruth Judy had been murdered along with her boyfriend, Johnny Sellers. They were both killed in June 1974. Johnny was shot with a . 30-30 rifle.
Jesse’s throat was cut. The other couple was Avery Howard and Diane Neely. Diane was Walter Neely’s wife. They were both killed in April 1975.
Diane had been shot and stabbed. Avery’s cause of death was difficult to ascertain. There was no ballistics evidence, so we thought he was probably stabbed. Just under a week later, the searchers made a discovery that was even more horrifying.
We found a mother and her two-year-old child. They were skeletons, just wrapped in plastic. The child was stuffed in a stump hole, an old rotted-out tree stump that created a hole in the ground. Very shallow graves.
Investigators poured through police reports for stories of missing mothers and babies, but nothing matched. It wasn’t until January 1976 that the young woman was identified. Dorene Dempsey. She was killed in June 1973, along with her baby.
She and the child had been living with Peewee and his grandmother in the Prospect area at the time. With poor winter weather setting in, the search was halted. Though eight bodies had been found, the three teenage girls, Janice, Patricia, and Kim, were still missing. Their families had no answers.
Gaskins still denied involvement in any of the cases. In April 1976, he and Walter Neely were charged with the eight murders. Gaskins’s first trial was for the murder of Dennis Bellamy. I testified about how I had recovered the body.
I helped dig it up and went to Charleston for the autopsy. I watched the doctor section the body and remove the bullet from the brain. The bullet was placed in my hand. I cleaned it up and put it in a container.
SLED agent Parnell had compared the bullets with the pistol Gaskins had been carrying the day he was arrested. I had the gun at the time to show him. It was a Beretta . 32 semi-automatic pistol.
I found sufficient individual identifying characteristics to conclude, based on my examinations, that these two bullets were fired by this gun and no other gun. Gaskins’s adult daughter testified that the gun was his and that he always kept it by his side. He had a nickname for the gun. He never let baby too far out of his hip pocket.
She also placed Bellamy and his half-brother Johnny Knight with Gaskins the night they vanished. He went to his daughter’s house one night with two strange boys she had never met, and they went off into the woods. There were many nights he came over with blood on him, claiming he had hit a deer. She would go outside, and there would be nothing wrong with his car.
Gaskins’s defense was to blame the murders on his friend Walter Neely. On May 27, 1976, the jury deliberated for less than an hour before finding Donald Henry Peewee Gaskins guilty of the murder of Dennis Bellamy. The following month, Walter Neely was also found guilty of murder. Both men were sentenced to death.
But months later, the sentences were commuted to life in prison after the US Supreme Court overturned South Carolina’s death statute. In November 1976, reportedly in return for a conjugal visit from his wife, Gaskins made a partial confession. He told us about his first victim, Patricia Alsbrook. She was killed in 1970.
She had been last seen with Gaskins’s niece, Janice Kirby, who was also missing. On November 4, 1976, Patricia’s remains were recovered after local law enforcement deciphered a cryptic clue Gaskins had given them. He kept referring to a cement slab. One of my daddy’s deputies lived less than half a mile behind an old house spot where there were three or four concrete slabs over a septic tank in the front yard.
We pried up the concrete slab, shined a light down there, and sure enough, there was a skeleton. She had on a pair of pantyhose that contained her whole skeleton. They brought in a septic tank suction truck to clean out the tank. After they sucked the tank clean, they found her high school ring with her name in it.
That’s how they identified her body. The discovery brought answers for Patricia’s family. But the roll call of grizzly revelations was far from over. There were many victims left to find, and Peewee Gaskins was ready to confess once and for all.
That same month, investigators finally had an answer to the disappearance that had launched the case. Kim Gilkins’s body was discovered not far from where she’d been living with Gaskins. The body was badly decomposed, but it was pretty certain she’d been stabbed. There were rumors she had been abused, not just by Gaskins but by other men.
The rumor was that Gaskins had murdered Kim to stop her reporting the abuse. Just a few weeks later, Gaskins directed law enforcement to another body, a local farmer named Silas Barnwell Yates. Barn Yates was killed in February 1975. Peewee was hired by Barnwell’s ex-girlfriend to kill him.
Her name was Suzanne Owens. Her nickname was Long Legs. She paid Peewee one thousand dollars to kill Silas Yates. Without batting an eye, he did it.
She went with him to the house and knocked on the door. When Yates came to the door, Peewee and another fella pulled him out, handcuffed him, put him in the trunk of a car, and drove him to a field. They cut his throat and buried him. Suzanne Owens went to jail too.
Yates’s skeletal remains were still handcuffed when he was found in Williamsburg County, just a quarter of a mile from where Kim Gilkins’s body had been found. With eleven bodies now recovered, detectives struggled to understand the pattern. Peewee didn’t need a reason to kill you. Some he had a reason for, some he didn’t.
I think it was just a way of life for him. I don’t know that he enjoyed it, but it didn’t bother him. He didn’t have a conscience about it. He was a violent thug who enjoyed frightening people, enjoyed hurting people.
If you annoyed him in any way, that could be how he responded. In April 1977, Gaskins was found guilty of Silas Yates’s murder. He received another life sentence and returned to Central Correctional. During his testimony, he boasted of another murder and gave hints as to where the body could be found.
Two days later, SLED agents began searching close to where Patricia Alsbrook’s remains had been recovered in Sumpter County. Going out the dirt road from the septic tank, there was a canal ditch leading off to the right side of the road. We had a bunch of convicts out with bush axes and stuff, cleaning it out so we could start looking for bones. I looked down and thought I saw a rock.
I scraped the leaves off, and it was a skull. The body was identified as Martha Dicks. She disappeared in 1972. He killed her because she said she was having his baby.
He put poison in a Coke bottle, gave it to her, and killed her. He put her in a ditch, and her body laid there until we recovered it. Gaskins boasted that he killed Martha because he did not wish to have a child with a black woman. He had no tolerance for interracial marriages, relationships, or children.
In 1978, the death penalty was reinstated in South Carolina. Facing trial for the murder of fifteen-year-old Johnny Knight in April 1978, Gaskins offered full confessions for that and seven other murders. The deal was that he would get consecutive life sentences and spend the rest of his life in jail. He told us about all the other bodies he had.
It wasn’t overnight. It took him a while to tell us about everybody he’d killed. It was hard to determine what was truth and what was false. We did everything we could to determine if he was telling the truth.
We ran him on polygraphs. We gave him sodium pentothal, a truth serum, and he just acted like he was supposed to act, like what he’d seen on TV and in the movies. He talked slurred, but he still wouldn’t tell the whole thing. One thing that could be verified was the information he gave on the location of his niece, Janice Kirby’s body.
He killed her in Sumpter County, but he brought her back to Prospect the next day and buried her in the woods around his childhood home. Fifteen-year-old Janice Kirby’s remains were recovered eight years after she was last seen by her family. Gaskins confessed that he’d killed both Janice and Patricia by beating them to death. He maintained that they had been taking drugs, but I think it was far more likely that his motivations were sexual.
He also confessed to the killing of Dorene and Robin Dempsey. He took them to a pond that sits less than ten yards off the side of a main highway. He drowned Dorene Dempsey, and he hit the child in the head with a shovel. That was the only time I’m aware of that he used the hearse to haul bodies.
The reason he gave was that the child was biracial, a white mother and a black father. On April 18, 1978, Gaskins was handed a further eight life sentences on top of the two he was already serving. At just forty-five years old, he was facing the prospect of a long incarceration in the notoriously harsh Central Correctional Institution. But Donald Peewee Gaskins’s story did not end there.
In September 1982, a fellow inmate caught his attention. Rudolph Tiner had robbed and murdered the owners of a mom-and-pop convenience store. The son of the victims hired Peewee while he was in prison to kill Rudolph. Peewee acted like he was befriending him.
They made plans one night that he would call him. Gaskins had packed a transistor radio with plastic explosives he had somehow smuggled into prison, and taped a wad of match heads to it to act as an ignition. He gave Rudolph the transistor radio and told him he needed to plug it in so they could talk more clearly. At a certain time, Rudolph was supposed to answer the phone.
As soon as he put it up to his ear, it blew up. That was the end. It blew the side of Rudolph’s head off. Six months later, in March 1983, Donald Peewee Gaskins was sentenced to death for Tiner’s murder.
I just remember feeling quite elated that he was finally going to get his execution, like he should have all along. On Thursday, September 5, 1991, Donald Peewee Gaskins made one final attempt to thwart the state’s punishment. The night before he was going to be put to death, he tried to take his own life. He cut his wrists and his elbows, trying to bleed to death.
But that’s not surprising at all. He would want control over his own death. He wasn’t going to let anybody else end his life. That would have been beyond the pale for him.
He was patched up in the nick of time with twenty stitches. Early the following morning, Gaskins faced his final punishment. Sheriff Billy Barnes was there to see justice done. He walked on his own to the electric chair.
He crawled up into it. The electric chair is a pretty big chair, and he was a small fella, so he crawled up in it, sat down, and they strapped him in. They asked him if he had any last words. He said, “Let’s go.
” And they followed through with the electrocution. Even after his death, Gaskins was keen to tell his side of the story. He had been barred by the courts from publishing his book, The Final Truth, until after his death. In it, he claimed to have killed more than one hundred people.
He was very detailed in the things he claimed he did. He claimed to have had many victims who would never be found. He said that in the late 1960s, he was driving the coastal roads of South Carolina, picking up young hitchhikers and killing regularly, one every six weeks. A lot of people who were hitchhiking on the interstates at that time were runaways who wouldn’t be missed if anything happened to them.
They were estranged from their families or had no family. He gravitated toward that type of person. Even though he was a tiny thing, he wasn’t a bad-looking young fella. He had the charm to get them in the car.
But once you were in the car, you weren’t coming out alive. For the men who brought Donald Peewee Gaskins to justice, the claims don’t ring true. It’s conceivable that there might have been a few, but I don’t think it was anywhere near what he said. I think he did that only to make himself look big and police look small.
I don’t think there’s a word of truth in it. I think he was trying to build himself up to be the biggest, baddest criminal ever in South Carolina, in the United States. But he claimed something like sixty people he killed in that book. I don’t think he killed anything more than what we found.
A man who killed for expedience, deviance, prejudice, or any other reason that took his fancy. Donald Peewee Gaskins confessed to at least thirteen murders and was put to death for murder number fourteen. From innocent babies to wealthy middle-aged men, Gaskins had no limits on who he would kill.
Brought to justice in 1976, Gaskins has gone down in history as one of the world’s most evil killers.
