Pee Wee Gaskins: What Turns A Child Into A Monster

Would you recognize a killer if you passed one on the street? Our latest story confronts that unsettling question through the life of Donald “Pee-Wee” Gaskins, a five-foot-three predator whose crimes spread across the Carolinas and whose methods shattered the comfort of criminal profiles. We don’t dwell on gore. Instead, we follow the soil that grew him—Depression-era poverty, a childhood of neglect and abuse, and a culture where crime often shadowed survival—and ask how a person becomes the kind of offender who can manipulate friends, terrify rivals, and even outwit a maximum-security block.

We trace Gaskins’ early violence, the reform school years that rewarded cruelty, and his pursuit of “power man” status behind bars. The most shocking chapter unfolds in prison, where he posed a booby-trapped “radio” as a lifeline to a fellow inmate and detonated it remotely. That single act earned him the title “Meanest Man in America” and forced a reckoning with what criminal profiling misses: adaptable offenders who don’t fit neat molds. Along the way, we examine disputed confessions, the mystery of unidentified coastal victims, and why some offenders inflate body counts while others hide in plain sight.

Beneath the darkness runs a practical thread. Profiling can guide, but it can also mislead. Real prevention starts earlier—child protection, trauma-informed care, stable schools, and communities that close the gaps predators exploit. As we sit on the figurative porch lighted against the dark, we resist sensationalism and look for lessons that make neighbors safer and justice sharper. If this story moved you or made you think differently about nature versus nurture, share it with a friend, hit follow, and leave a quick review. Your support helps us bring thoughtful Southern history and true-crime context to more curious minds.

Transcript

Limits Of Criminal Profiling

A Killer Who Defied The Mold

Why We Share Dark Stories

Florence County In The 1930s

Pee-Wee Gaskins’ Brutal Childhood

From Reform School To Predator

Arrests, Confessions, And Buried Victims

The Prison Radio Bomb Killing

Bloodlust And “Coastal Kills”

Boasts, Doubts, And Execution

Host’s Recovery And Season Plans

Credits And Sources

Carole Townsend 0:08

Let me ask you a question. Would you know a killer if you walked past one on the street? Maybe you have preconceived notions of what a killer looks like. And here's another question for you while you ponder that last. Are killers born or are they made? Is a person born with a killer instinct, or does one become a killer based on life experiences? These are questions that scientists have pondered for generations, and arguments can be made from both points of view. Criminal profiling has helped law enforcement identify and arrest killers for decades. It's a powerful tool indeed. Still, profiling is not foolproof. Innocent people have been arrested and sometimes convicted because they fit the profile of a cold-blooded killer. Others have escaped capture because they don't fit a profile. Almost 100 years ago, just such a man was born in South Carolina. A man who stalked, raped, tortured, and murdered at will for more than 40 years. He was captured many times, and he escaped many times. He murdered some of his victims out of a depraved drive to watch pain and bring death. While he murdered others simply because they somehow crossed him and made him angry. Still others, he murdered for hire and for profit. He didn't fit a profile. Hard to catch a man like that. Tonight we'll examine the interesting case of a man dumped by law enforcement to be the meanest man in America. And very likely he was. But what happened? What went wrong with this man who confessed to killing more than 100 people? Was he born to kill? Or did the events of his life make him a killer? I wanna let you know at the outset of the story I'm about to share that the details of this man's crimes are gruesome. They're gory and they're cruel. But in telling his story, I've decided not to relate those details to you. This podcast really is not a true crime vehicle, but we sometimes do share stories about killers. The point I'm trying to make is that this man's crimes were dreadful enough without painting them with grizzly blood and gold. I want us to focus on the time, the place, and the events, not the sensationalism. I want us to think about the why and the how of the story. I feel like you'll be okay with that. So I hope you'll join me again tonight here on my front porch. As we gather close and enjoy the imagined protection that closeness brings us. After all, it's the familiarity of this old porch. The brave effort the light makes to hold back the dark. As we speak aloud the things that we'd otherwise never dare. Listener discretion is advised. What draws us close as we exchange tales that whispered in the dark stir fear in us? Is it true closeness? Is it the deliciousness of being in the know and of sharing that knowledge with friends? Or is it something else, something a little darker? It's instinctive in us, that need to tell some tales among friends, isn't it? We begin when we're children, when we tell ghost stories by the light of a campfire, or a flashlight, or by candlelight, as if we could push back the dark. Certainly when we were children, we believed we could. Now the stories we tell are no longer ghost stories, shared with the intent of frightening those who listen. No, the topics of the stories we tell as adults are woven of much more frightening fabric. We tell of strange phenomena, of eerie places, and of people gone, well, awry. And we tell these stories when we can, as we're gathered on a friend's porch. We do this driven by the same instinct that drove us as children. We draw close under the safety of the porch light because we believe that there's safety in numbers. But unlike the stories we shared as children, there will be no surprise ending that leaves our friends laughing and relieved. There will be just us, the circle of light that shines down on us and the dark all around. And our words will hang heavy at the edge of that light and the growing dark, and we'll be left to ponder. Was the story we just heard true? Was it a myth, or was it something in between? And instead of walking home alone in that thick darkness, we'll linger just a little bit longer. Maybe there will be time for just one more tale before we leave the safety of the group and strike out on our own. Because really, the tale we just heard couldn't possibly be true, could it? In the 1930s, Florence County, South Carolina was about as small town as you could get. Even though it was becoming a rail hub that would eventually bring commerce and people, it was still a mostly rural area, with cypress swamps, deep woods, and wide expanses of fields. The hauntingly beautiful low country of South Carolina features sturdy live oak trees adorned with lacy Spanish moths. Lakes and rolling pastures round out the bucolic setting, which eventually gives way to the South Carolina coastline. People in that area were farmers, landowners, and small business owners. But most people in Florence County at that time were just poor. Tobacco has been the area's major crop since colonial days. The warm, humid climate and well-drained soil near the coast are perfect for the harvest. In the 1930s and 40s, many young children quit school early on to pick the crops and help out with family expenses. Forty percent of the population lived below the poverty line. In Florence, the crime rate was significantly higher than the national average, but then poverty typically joins hands with crime, doesn't it? Such a place, a rural, small town, poor area with few prospects, produces all kinds of folks. Mostly they're hardworking, God-fearing people with families and homes that they love. Add to a hard scrabble life neglect, harm, and unimaginable abuse, and that individual becomes something so deeply evil, so disturbed, that it's almost impossible to fathom. Pee-wee Gaskins. Not the name of an intimidating man, is it? But as an adult that stood a mere five feet three inches tall, Pee-wee Gaskins was truly a terrifying human being. He claimed to have murdered more than 100 people, though he'd only be tried and convicted of killing just eight. Was he born a killer? Or was he born into circumstances that made him one? Donald Pee Wee Gaskins was born on March 13, 1933, to a woman named Yulia. Yulia was very poor, and she had quit school at age 12 to help her family pick cotton and plant tobacco. At about the same time that she quit school and began working on the farm, Yulia started having sex with a Mr. Gaskins, a wealthy neighbor who enjoyed drinking and gambling and very young girls. Gaskins would pay Yulia $1 a week for having sex with him whenever he pleased. At age 14, not surprisingly, Yulia got pregnant. When Gaskins learned he had impregnated the 14-year-old child, he began paying her $10 a month. He also graciously allowed her and the baby to live in a shack on his property. Yulia, just a child herself when she became a mother, neglected her baby son terribly. In fact, she took so little interest in him that the first time he learned his given name, Donald, was when it was read out loud in his first court appearance at age 13. When he was just one year old, an unattended Donald drank an entire bottle of kerosene. This caused him to have convulsions until he was three years old, and later on in his life, his mother attributed his crime and violence to the kerosene poisoning. And here's a small spoiler alert: neither psychiatrists nor judges ever gave much credence to that explanation. There was clearly a lot more going on in Donald Gaskin's life than an early poisoning incident. Kerosene poisoning aside, Pee Wee's young life was nothing short of torture. His diminutive stature earned him the nickname of Pee-Wee early on, and he'd spend the rest of his life trying to prove himself to be what he called a big man. A power man as they are known in prison. These were men who were known throughout the cell block as untouchable. They were mean and dangerous and therefore safe. It wasn't easy to earn the distinction of a power man. Pee-wee's mother's many boyfriends and even her brothers beat him often. Some of the men who came in and out of his mother's life even sexually assaulted him. He dropped out of school at age 11, and right away he formed a gang with a couple of his friends. Now, you might think that boys this age would get themselves into trouble by stealing or fighting other boys. But this gang was different and very dangerous. Their crimes included burglaries, assaults, the rape and terrorizing of young boys, and even the gang rape of Pee Wee's friend's sister. At age 13, when a young woman caught Gaskins breaking into her home, he attacked her, hitting her in the head with an axe. He didn't kill her, but he was arrested and convicted of assault, and for that attack, he was sentenced to five years in a reform school, the South Carolina Industrial School for White Boys in Florence. Here he was again regularly sexually assaulted, this time by the other inmates. That feeling of being small and helpless festered inside the young boy. He was arrested for the last time in his life on November 14th, 1975, when a criminal associate named Walter Neely confessed to police that he had knowledge of Gaskins killing 28-year-old Dennis Bellamy and his 15-year-old brother Jimmy Knight. These two men regularly stole cars with Gaskins, chopping them for parts and selling them. But one day, for reasons he never explained, Gaskins had begun to suspect that these men would snitch to police. He took them to a remote area in the thick woods of Florence and he shot them both, burying their bodies in a shallow grave right there on the spot. A total of 13, in fact, listed as missing during the previous five years. On December 4th that same year, Neely led police to land near Gaskins' home in Prospect, South Carolina, where police discovered the bodies of eight of Pee-wee's victims. Included in this grisly discovery was the body of 13-year-old Kim Galkins, who disappeared from Pee-Wee's home, and the bodies of his own niece and her friend, whom he had tried unsuccessfully to molest years earlier. Two more bodies were found nearby in a shallow grave. They were a mother and daughter, Doreen Dempsey and her two-year-old baby girl. Doreen had actually been one of Gaskins' few friends in town. She was pregnant with her second child, also fathered by an African-American man, and one day she asked Gaskins to give her a ride to the bus station. She believed it was time for a fresh start. But instead of taking his friend to the bus station, Gaskins took Doreen to a wooded area where he raped and killed her, and then did the same to her baby. The reason, he later said, was that he just didn't agree with a white woman being with a black man. It just wasn't right, he said. He buried the two together in a shallow grave near the other burial site. Probably the reason that he bragged to people that he had his own private cemetery. When he was sent to prison for these murders, Pee-wee knew he had to become what he called a power man. A man so tough and feared that no one dared try to test him. He knew that the only way to become such a man was to establish himself right away as formidable. On September 2nd, 1982, Gaskins committed another murder, for which he earned the title the Meanest Man in America. While incarcerated in the high security block at the South Carolina Correctional Institution, Gaskins killed a death row inmate named Rudolf Tyner, a feat that no one believed possible because of the level of security in that part of the prison. Tyner had received his sentence for killing an elderly couple during a bungled arm robbery of their store. The couple's son, impatient with the slow wheels of justice after waiting six years for it, hired Gaskins to kill Tyner in prison. Gaskins made several unsuccessful attempts to kill Tyner by lacing his food with poison, but all he succeeded in doing was making the man very sick. Eventually, he opted to use explosives to kill him. To accomplish this, Gaskins first befriended Tyner. He then rigged a device similar to a portable radio in Tyner's cell and told him that this radio would allow them to communicate between their cells. What Tyner didn't know was that Gaskins had packed C4 plastic explosive inside the speaker. So when Tyner followed Gaskins' instructions to hold the speaker to his ear at an agreed upon time, Gaskins detonated the explosives from his cell and killed Tyner. He later said, the last thing he heard was me laughing. From his first arrest in 1946 until the end of his days in 1991, Askin's life was a series of crimes, arrests, escapes, more crimes, and more arrests. In between, he found work with a traveling preacher and with carnivals and construction companies. These jobs allowed him to move around the South, in Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida with ease. Some of his crimes were petty, car thefts, burglaries, insurance fraud, but others were heinous. Peewee had no qualms about committing murder, whether his victims were friends or family or fellow criminals. But he also had absolutely no qualms about rape of both women and children. What gets twisted inside a man that allows him to assault an innocent child in such a brutal way? It's been said that just one taste of forbidden fruit is never enough. In Donald Gaskin's case, that forbidden fruit was murder. You see, the murders he committed in the course of his everyday life, killing suspected informants, killing those who might snitch, or killing those whom he believed to have slighted him, eventually stopped quenching his thirst for blood. And he did have that thirst. He told his daughter once that he was a vampire, and that at times he just had to see blood. He described that feeling to a psychiatrist once, saying that about once every month to six weeks, he'd feel his anxiety begin to ramp up. He'd get the shakes and cold sweats, and his need to kill and to see blood became overwhelming. Eventually he'd have to do something about it. He called this feeling bothersomeness. And listen to this, Pee-Wee Gaskins drove around South Carolina in a hearse, and written on the back window of that hearse were the words, I hold dead bodies. He'd also laugh and make reference to his own personal graveyard in Florence. In time, Pee-wee began committing what he called his coastal kills. In his mind, when he killed people he knew, those murders were somehow more serious to him than the random kills he committed strictly out of sadism and bloodlust. Of course, he also murdered for hire, including killing the ex-boyfriend of an acquaintance for $1,500. But his coastal kills, now those were very different indeed. He knew that if he cruised the nearby shoreline long enough, he'd find a hitchhiker or a runaway or even young lovers. They were easy enough to pick up, and once he had them in his car, they were as good as dead. But his coastal kills weren't quick. No, he had begun to enjoy torture, prolonging the victim's fear and misery as long as he could. He had even begun shopping at local hardware stores for tools he could use in this newfound art form he'd discovered. Using stabbing, suffocation, mutilation, and drowning to name a few methods. Pee Week Askins even admitted to cannibalizing some of his victims. Over the years, and especially after he'd been tried for murdering Tyner in prison, Peewee began confessing to many more murders, more than 100 when it was all said and done. While he was on death row, Gaskin said he committed between 100 and 110 murders in his tragic lifetime. His claims have been widely disputed, and while there's been no direct evidence to support them, unidentified bodies have been found buried up and down South Carolina's coast for years. Was he doing what many on Death Road do, claiming responsibility for murders he didn't commit just to buy themselves more time? Was he telling the truth? Or was Pee Wee once again trying to make up for his tiny stature and feelings of inadequacy by making himself appear larger than life? Donald Gaskins was executed on September 6, 1991, at 1.10 a.m. in the electric chair, just hours after he had tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists. It seems he didn't want to give the state the satisfaction of killing him. His last words were, I'll let my lawyers talk for me. I'm ready to go. He was electrocuted with freshly stitched arms as scheduled. Donald Pee Wee Gaskin's body was cremated, the ashes spread in the woods on family land, where he often hid to escape capture for months at a time. He wasn't buried, according to his daughter, because people in the region believed him to be the son of Satan. The family feared his body would be stolen so that Satanists could worship it. He week Askins, in the circle of convicted murderers, at least, grew to be a much larger man in death than he ever was in life. Good evening, listeners. As many of you know, I was involved in a terrible automobile accident last summer, near the very beginning of this season. I suffered numerous injuries and was hospitalized for a month, and my physical therapy continues seven months later. I'm fortunate though, and that's the main thing I want to carry with me going forward in this process of strengthening and healing. I refuse to give in to another, easier way of thinking. Having said this, I underestimated the toll that such an event takes on a person's mind and body, and because of that, I have not been disciplined in inheriting to the every other week publishing schedule we established in season one. For that, you have my most sincere apologies. We'll take a short two-month break before beginning season three, and then I'll meet you back here in the very same spot on my front porch. We'll bring you a new episode every other week, and we hope that you'll pull up a chair with us, because there are some things in our history that can't be explained, but must always be explored. Best to do that with friends, isn't it? I'm Carole Townsend, veteran newspaper journalist and six-time award-winning author. You can find me on social media and check out my website at CaroleTownsend.com. As always, thanks for listening. And if you're enjoying these tales of Southern history and lore, I hope you'll tell your friends. Subscribe to this podcast on Spotify, Apple Play, iHeart, and anywhere you listen. My team and I used the following resources to bring this tale to you. The book Donald Gaskins, the Meanest Man in America by Jack Rosewood, Alcatraz East Crime Museum, Donald Pee Wee Gaskins, and the show Investigation Discovery, Donald Pee Wee Gaskins.