Donald Henry Gaskins

What the record shows

Donald Henry "Pee Wee" Gaskins was a South Carolina serial killer who was convicted of ten murders: nine killings committed between 1970 and 1975, for which he was serving life sentences, and the 1982 bombing death of fellow inmate Rudolph Tyner at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia. A Richland County jury sentenced him to death for the Tyner killing in 1983, and he was executed in South Carolina's electric chair on September 6, 1991, aged 58. Gaskins later claimed to have killed around 100 people, but the Wikipedia article notes that law enforcement and journalists have discredited most of those claims.

Gaskins was born on March 31, 1933, in Florence County, and grew up near the rural community of Prospect. According to the South Carolina Encyclopedia, he stood barely five feet tall, which earned him his nickname, and he spent several years in a Florence reform school as a youth. The Wikipedia article says he served prison terms in the 1950s and 1960s for assault, the killing of a fellow inmate that was classed as manslaughter, and the rape of a 12-year-old girl, and that he was paroled for the last time in November 1968.

The Wikipedia article lists the killings attributed to him between 1970 and 1975, most of them in the Sumter and Florence areas. They include his 15-year-old niece Janice Kirby and Patricia Ann Alsbrook, 17, in November 1970; Martha Ann Dicks; Doreen Hope Dempsey, 22, and her two-year-old daughter Robin Michelle in 1973; Johnny Sellers and Jessie Ruth Judy in 1974; Silas Barnwell Yates in a 1975 murder for hire; Dianne Bellamy Neeley and Avery Leroy Howard in April 1975; 13-year-old Kim Gehlken; and Dennis Bellamy, 28, and John Henry Knight, 15, who were shot near Prospect in October 1975. WIS reported in June 2025 that Gaskins had admitted in court to poisoning Dicks, and that her remains, long lost after being sent to a college for study, had been found in a box on the College of Charleston campus.

Gaskins was arrested on November 14, 1975, after his associate Walter Neeley told police that Gaskins had killed Bellamy and Knight and had described other killings and burial sites, according to the Wikipedia article. On December 4, 1975, Neeley led investigators to land near Prospect where eight bodies were recovered. The South Carolina Encyclopedia says he was charged in Florence County with five murders and was sentenced to death on May 28, 1976, after a jury convicted him of killing Dennis Bellamy. That death sentence did not stand. The Fourth Circuit later recorded that Gaskins pleaded guilty under a plea bargain to several murders and was serving ten life sentences, nine for murder and one for burglary. In the sworn confession tied to that plea, he admitted killing 13 people between 1970 and 1975, according to the Wikipedia article; the Deseret News described him in 1991 as the confessed killer of 13.

While serving those sentences at the Central Correctional Institution, Gaskins worked on death row. There he was hired by Tony Cimo, the son of Myrtle Moon, to kill Rudolph Tyner, who had been sentenced to death for the 1978 robbery killings of Bill and Myrtle Moon at their grocery store in Murrells Inlet. The State newspaper reported that a first attempt with poison only made Tyner sick. According to the Fourth Circuit, Gaskins then had another inmate pass Tyner a cup-shaped speaker rigged with a wire, telling him it would let the two men talk between cells; when Tyner held it to his ear, the device exploded and killed him on September 12, 1982. Recorded collect calls between Gaskins and Cimo became key evidence. Cimo pleaded guilty to conspiracy, received eight years and was paroled after less than three, The State reported.

Gaskins was tried in the Richland County Court of General Sessions, prosecuted by Dick Harpootlian, and on March 24, 1983, was convicted of Tyner's murder and sentenced to death, with prior murder convictions and murder for hire found as aggravating factors. The South Carolina Supreme Court affirmed in State v. Gaskins (1985), state post-conviction relief was denied in 1987, and the Fourth Circuit rejected habeas petitions in 1990 and again on September 5, 1991, when it also refused a stay of execution.

Hours before his execution, Gaskins cut his wrists and arms with a razor blade, and he went to the electric chair with about 20 stitches, the Deseret News reported. He was pronounced dead at 1:10 a.m. on September 6, 1991. The Wikipedia article notes that his was the first execution in South Carolina in more than a century of a white defendant for killing a Black victim. The State reported in 2022 that he was convicted of ten murders, including Tyner's, confessed to 15 and led authorities to the remains of at least 13 people.