50 Shades of Evil: South Carolina - Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins

0:15 I walk a straight line, shackled chain. Oh, gruesome Gertie is calling my name. There is no mercy in this penitentiary. Just ask the hill string gang, a wrangle of three. to die. Inside these. Walls inside the wild.

0:56 And when the wolf cries Hey everyone and welcome back to Bloody Angola. I'm Jim Chapman and we are back with another Fifty Shades of Evil series episode. In Fifty Shades of Evil, we take one state and one of the most dangerous inmates in that state. And y'all, this week we're going to South Carolina. Now, Donald Henry Gaskins, known everywhere as Pee Wee Gaskins, was a small man.

1:56 He was only about 5'4. He was about 130 pounds. Hence the nickname Pee Wee. He killed people he knew. His own niece, a mother, and her two-year-old daughter. Friends, neighbors, criminal associates. Right there in South Carolina, one after another. From November of 1970 to October of 1975. He then went to prison for life and he killed again himself. inside a prison. Now look, Gaskins later claimed he killed 100 to 110 people, hitchhikers, up and down the coast. But the record does not support that. 15 confirmed victims.

2:37 That's what we're going to talk about. Confirmed victims. We're going to talk about who the person was and how Gaskins got to them. So let's get into it. And Donald Henry Parrott Jr. was born in March of 1933 in Florence County, South Carolina, near a little community called called Prospect. He was the last child of his mother Eula Parrot's children. He was born outside of marriage in a poor rural household. And he was small even throughout his childhood. And that is where the name Pee Wee came from. It would follow him his entire life. Now, a lot of what we hear about his childhood comes from Gaskins himself. He retold it to journalists and biographers.

3:24 He said he first learned his given name, Donald, when it was read out at his first court appearance. Now, he left school early, and I mean early, about the age of 11, and he went to work in a garage. And by his early teens, he was already running with other boys, committing burglaries and assaults all over the place. in the Prospect, South Carolina area. I mean, this is not a man who woke up one day at 35 years old and suddenly turned violent. He had been violent his entire life. As a matter of fact, in 1946, Donald Gaskins, at the age of 13, broke into a family home, and when a young woman caught him he attacked her with an axe. Now, she survived, and he was sentenced to five years at the South Carolina Industrial School for Boys in Florence, South Carolina. Now, Gaskins would later say he was repeatedly raped by fellow inmates inside of that reform school. And what he took from it, by his own telling, was that survival in prison meant aligning with or becoming a feared inmate. He would eventually escape from reform school. He would get married, and then he would voluntarily return. I know that sounds crazy, but he would voluntarily return to finish his sentence. He was released in 1951 at the age of 18. He had

4:57 also married for the first time in that year, fathered a daughter the next year, and briefly worked on a tobacco plantation. Now, that marriage did not last, as you might have assumed just from his lifestyle, his first wife divorced him during his next prison term. But let's go back to 18 because by 18, he had already done five years inside of prison and he had no trade, no family structure, no supervision that the record showed when he was released. And so he basically had nothing outside of robbing and stealing. that he was good at. So let's go to 1953. In that year, Gaskins attacks a teenage girl with a hammer over allegedly an insult. He was charged with attempted murder and he was sentenced to six years at a South Carolina penitentiary. Inside that prison, he killed his first confirmed victim, a fellow inmate by the name of Hazel Brazil. Now, the detail on this killing is limited. Gaskins would claim self-defense. He would actually say that Brazil, who was the most feared man in that prison, had attacked him. So he was charged and convicted of involuntary manslaughter. and he got three more years added to his sentence. Now, in 1955, he actually escaped

6:28 that prison by hiding in the back of a garbage truck. He then fled to Florida, where he worked as a carny for a traveling carnival, and he was recaptured. He was brought back to prison. and he was paroled in August of 1961. So, after that August 1961 parole, Gaskins goes back to what he knows best, burglary and fencing stolen property. About two years later, in 1963, he was arrested again, this time for the rape of a 12-year-old girl. He absconded while awaiting sentence and was re-arrested in Georgia.

7:11 and finally, he was sentenced to eight years in prison. He was paroled yet again in 1968 in November, and at this point in time, he was 35 years old. He moves to Sumter, South Carolina, and he goes to work for a roofing company. Now, by this time, y'all, in his history, he had spent his teens and His 20s and his early 30s cycling through reform school and prison for everything from burglary to assault to escape to child rape. He was not free for any long, unbroken stretch. until 1968. Now, after November 1968, Gaskins later claimed that in September of 1969, he picked up a blonde female hitchhiker, murdered her, and sank her body in a swamp. This is years later, he would admit to this. And this was the first of many hitchhiker killings along coastal highways that he would admit to. Now, this is the single most important road in this whole story. Gaskins called these his, quote, coastal kills. He said he killed strangers for pleasure about once every six weeks. And he said he did this to stop feelings he called, quote, bothersome feelings, unquote. He later said he tortured victims, kept some alive for a time, and even cannibalized some of them. Now, in his book,

8:44 he can't even agree with himself on how often he did this. Every six weeks in one part of that book, by the 10th day of the month in another part of that book, he actually contradicts himself many times in this book that was written. on his life that he had a part in. Now, none of this has been corroborated. No named hitchhiker victim, no body, no court findings. So there's no evidence to support any statement by Gaskins that he committed any murders other than Hazel Brazil and the 14 victims we're about to walk through, 13 from 1970 to 1975, plus one more in prison in 1982. We'll get there. What I think we can all agree on is that's enough. 15 victims is enough for anybody. So let me take you to November 10th of 1970. This is in Sumter, South Carolina, and I'm gonna tell you about Janice Kirby. Janice Kirby was a 15-year-old girl, and she was Donald Pee-wee Gaskin's niece. That night, November 10th of 1970, she was out with her close friend, 17 year old Patricia Ann Allsbrook. And these two girls were tight.

10:05 They ran around together. And on this night, They disappeared. Now, that case would stay cold until 1976 after Donald Pee Wee Gaskins was already in custody for other murders and he began cooperating. Gaskins told investigators he found them both high on drugs. He said he got mad about it. They fought and he beat them to death with his fist in his hands. Now, that's the version he gave when he was trying to sound like he had some kind of code. And he was actually doing, you know, this favor in his mind because they were all high on drugs and he was trying to discipline them for that. Now, other accounts, including things he said himself at different times, point to something else that he tried to sexually assault them, that they fought back and he killed them when they wouldn't submit. What we do know for sure is. is he beat both of these poor girls to death. He stuffed Patricia's body in what he called a cement pit.

11:08 which was a septic tank in his town of Sumter. And he said he couldn't bring himself to do the same with his own niece. So he put Janice's body in the trunk of his car, drove back to the prospect area near his childhood home. He went inside, sat down with his family, had coffee and cake while Janice's body was still in that trunk, outside. He said he buried her later not far from the house. Now as I said police found Patricia's remains in that septic tank and she was still wearing the pantyhose that had held part of her skeleton together and they pulled out her high school ring with her name on it. A little later Gaskins led them to Janice's grave in the woods near Prospect and her remains were recovered roughly Eight years after she was last seen. Let's go to March of 1972.

12:05 And I'm going to tell you about Martha Ann Dix Jr., who was 20 years old, known by the nickname Clyde. Now, Martha was a little bit different. She dressed in men's clothes. She ran in the same circles as a lot of the local kids. And she was known on the street. One night, she told her sister she was going to a club, and she never came home. Now, Pee Wee never knew her. He knew her family, and after he killed his niece Janice and her friend Patricia, he decided Clyde would be next. He told people that he had a surprise for her. He got his hands on some liquid a photographer would use to develop pictures. It's the kind of acid the photographer had warned people never to handle because it would kill you. Gaskins poured it into a bottle of Coca-Cola. gave it to her and watched her drink it. And she died. Now he later claimed different reasons at different times. One version was that she had been supplying drugs to Janice and Patricia. Another was a rumor that he was the father of the child that she was carrying. And another was simply that she had gotten married and left. Whatever the story he told, the result was the same. He poisoned her, drove her body out to Sumter, and dropped her in a drainage ditch about 10 feet deep. It wasn't even a mile from where he had dumped Patricia Allsbrook. And for six years,

13:38 she was missing. No body, no answers. Then in 1977, while Gaskins was already locked up and talking, he confessed. He told them about Clyde and he led investigators to the ditch. They found the remains. She was identified through skeleton and a piece of jewelry. But the story didn't end there. The remains were actually sent to Charleston for study. First to the Medical University of South Carolina. Then they ended up in a storage closet at the College of Charleston and they sat there forgotten for almost 50 years. In June of 2025, Sumter County Coroner Robbie Baker was handed a cardboard box at a conference and inside were fragments of skull and bones left. And it was Martha Ann Dix. Her family finally got her back. And in August of 2025, they buried her at Walker Cemetery in Sumter, giving her death. The funeral that she never had. So let's go to June of 1973, and we're going to start with Doreen Dempsey and Robin Dempsey. Now, Doreen Dempsey was 22 years old, and she already had a two-year-old daughter named Robin Michelle. And she was seven or eight months pregnant with her second child. Now, she knew Donald Peewee Gaskin. She had stayed in his place before. So

15:09 when she needed a place to kind of hang for a little while, some friends, including Johnny Sellers and his brother, remember those names? They drove her and Robin out to Gaskin's home in Prospect. And they left him there. Now, what those friends didn't know was that Gaskins had already decided Doreen was a problem. One thing I haven't mentioned yet, but we're going to talk about this now. Donald Peewee Gaskins was openly racist. And I'm talking like KKK racist. Now, Robin was white. But I'm going to get to what he later told investigators, which was he was angry because the father of Robin and the father of the baby she was carrying were black. His words was, when you go mixing, I don't hold with that one bit in the world. Just a total fucking racist. Now, while the friends sat in the car out front, Gaskins walked Doreen behind the house to a fish pond. He shoved her in and he held her underwater until she stopped moving.

16:16 He drowned her. Then he walked back to the car. He told the friends that she was welcome to stay, lifted little Robin out of the car and waved goodbye, and carried the toddler back to the same pond. And this sick sumbitch did the exact same thing to that little baby. He drowned both a pregnant woman and her two-year-old daughter in his own backyard pond. Then he just goes about his business. And for a couple of years, the two of them were just gone. No one had tied it to Gaskins yet. Then in late 1975, after Gaskin's associate Walter Neely started talking, and we'll get into that, police would dig up a private cemetery on Gaskin's land in Prospect, and among eight bodies, they would find Doreen and her daughter. They had been buried together. So let's go to June of 1974, and we're going to talk about Johnny Sellers. He was 36 years old. He was Gaskins' friend and a criminal associate. Now, Jessie Ruth Judy was 22 and she was Sellers' ex-girlfriend. In June of 1974, Sellers asked for money he was owed from the sale of a stolen boat. Now, Pee Wee Gaskins, he feared Sellers would reveal Gaskins' involvement in a boat theft in a sale. So Gaskins, to solve this problem like he

17:48 did all his others, he shoots Sellers in the back of the head. And he murders Judy at the same time, though she was stabbed to death. Because in his mind, she could have told police about Gaskins' criminal activities, including Sellers' murder. Now Gaskins was also involved in an auto theft ring at that time, which is the context for the boat Both of these people were buried in the same spot as the prior two victims that I just told you about. Now, I need you to keep two claimed victims separate right here so nobody... mistakes them for confirmed ones. Gaskins also named among his serious murders a couple he called Eddie and Bertie Brown, who were 24 and 20, whom he said he murdered in 1972, and a man named Horace Jones, 40, whom he murdered in 1974.

18:45 These were some claims that if you research all this, you'll see those names, but it's important to keep in mind, we have no bodies for these people. No identifications and no court findings support either claim, but they are referenced in some reporting that I came across. So I wanted to mention them. So let's go to February of 1975. And I'm going to tell you about Silas Barnwell Yates, who was 45 years old. Now in February of 1975, he was murdered in a murder for hire scheme. Apparently, Yates was in a dispute with his ex-girlfriend named Suzanne Kipper Owens. Owens and her husband, John Owens, paid Gaskin $ 1, 500 to murder Yates. A woman named Diane Neely helped lure Yates, and two guys by the name of John Owens and John Powell actually dug the graves. The forensic findings showed a knife killing. This guy's throat was slit. Gaskins disputed the method, claiming it was done by, get ready for this, a karate chop. Which, come on. Yates' remains were later found in Williamsburg County, South Carolina, after Gaskins would provide information about the location. Now, one more claimed incident belongs in the Gaskin files, and that was in January of 1975.

20:15 Gaskins would claim he killed three strangers from a broken down van. Again, I came across this. No evidence supports this. Nothing in the official records support this. but it's worth mentioning. So let's go to April of 1975. And I'm going to tell you about Diane Bellamy Neely, who was 25 years old. She was separated from her husband, Walter Neely. You've already heard that name. That was the guy I mentioned was one of Gaskin's closest friends and a criminal conspirator. And we're also going to talk about Avery Leroy Howard, who was 34 and Diane's boyfriend. In April of 1975, Gaskins would stab Diane Bellamy Neely to death and would shoot Avery Howard dead just to stop them from talking. Apparently, Diane Neely had threatened to report to police that Gaskins was allowing underage teenagers to have sex in his home.

21:16 And in addition, she and Howard demanded $ 5, 000 in hush money over the Yates murder and Howard also apparently was also killed because he asked for money for attorneys after his arrest for fraud and auto theft, which he accused Gaskins of being the ringleader of. And Gaskins, he was worried Howard would tell police about all this criminal activity. So he did, in his mind, what he had to do. Now, Diane Neely was the sister of Dennis Bellamy. and the half-sister of John Henry Knight. And I want you to keep those names in mind, because they'll come up later.

21:56 But for now, we're going to go to September of 1975, and I'm going to tell you about 13-year-old Kim Gelkin, who is really the murder that got Gaskins ultimately caught. So Kim Gilkins was 13 years old in the fall of 1975 and a girl from North Charleston, South Carolina who had somehow drifted into the orbit of Pee Wee Gaskins. She was actually staying inside his home. And it was during this time that Pee Wee, along with several other adult men in his group of friends, started sexually abusing her.

22:39 Word started to get out and Gaskins was getting nervous about this. And he made the decision he was going to have to kill this 13-year-old girl. He got together with a couple of his friends and they formed a plan. And they lured this 13-year-old girl out to a dirt road. And once she got there, they shot her in the back of the head and then stabbed her in the stomach. She died on the road in September of 1975 and would not be found until a year later. later. So, let's go to October 10th of 1975, and we're going to talk about the two people I told you to keep in mind earlier, 28-year-old Dennis Bellamy and 15-year-old John Knight. Now, these two were half-brothers, and Diane Neely, who Gaskins had already killed, was their sister. So on the night of October 10th of 1975, the two brothers showed up at Pee Wee's trailer and they were pissed because Pee Wee owed them some money for some guns that he bought from them and they showed up to collect the money.

23:57 Now they had no idea Pee Wee was the person that killed their sister. She had not even been found yet. So they go over there and they start pressing Pee-wee about this money owed to them. And Pee-wee says, look, I will just give you the guns back. I hid them in the woods behind my trailer. So one of the brothers stays back at the trailer and the other one, Dennis, he follows Pee-wee into the woods. And Pee-wee just keeps walking deeper and deeper into the woods. And once they got deep enough where Johnny, The brother still at the trailer could not hear anything. Pee-wee shoots Dennis in the back of the head. Dennis dies. Gaskins then goes back to the trailer and he tells Johnny that Dennis was waiting for him at the gun spot in the woods.

24:51 Johnny then says, okay, show me where he's at. He follows Pee-wee back to the same spot and the same thing happens. bullet to the back of the head. So by this time, what Gaskins did not know was that detectives were already on to him. They had already been looking into Pee Wee since the disappearance of 13-year-old Kim Gelkins. And while investigating that case, they actually searched Gaskins' home and And they found some clothing that belonged to this 13-year-old. But they couldn't tie Pee Wee directly to her disappearance. And they didn't have a body yet. So they just started looking into his circle of friends. And one of those people that detectives would question several times... was an ex-con by the name of Walter Neely. Now, at first, Neely told the detective that he didn't know anything. He wasn't going to talk, right? He was scared of Pee Wee.

25:49 But they would keep hauling him back into the station for questioning. And eventually, he told detectives, that Gaskins had shot brothers Dennis Bellamy and Johnny Knight, and that Gaskins had told him about a private graveyard where he had buried other people. Not only that, he also told police he could lead them to that graveyard. So on the strength of what Neely had told them, on November 14th of 1975, police arrest Donald Pee Wee Gaskins himself. and hold them while they look into all of Neely's allegations. Three weeks later, on December 4th of 1976, Neely leads detectives to land near Gaskin's home where police discover the bodies of eight of his victims, including Johnny Sellers, Jesse Judy, Avery Howard, Diane Neely, John Knight, Dennis Bellamy, Doreen Dempsey, and her daughter, Robin Dempsey. Can you imagine the shock that shuddered through South Carolina when eight bodies were found on this guy's property? Now, one thing is interesting and really chilling as it relates to Pee Wee. He actually drove a hearse. as his daily driver, and he would tell people, though most assumed he was joking, that the

27:20 hearse was what he used to haul his dead bodies to his private cemetery in. He would even drive around y'all with a sign on the hearse that said, quote, dead or alive. So in April of 1976, both Gaskins and Neely, they are formally charged in eight murders. Now for Gaskins, first up on that list of murders he would face trial for was the murder of Dennis Bellamy. And y'all, there was a ton of evidence, a ton of people testified, and it was clear that that he did this. And on the 27th of May, 1976, Gaskins was found guilty in the murder of Bellamy and Walter Neely.

28:08 He wasn't far behind. He was also found guilty the following month. Now, initially, Both men were sentenced to death. However, not long after this verdict, those sentences were actually commuted to life after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned death sentences throughout the United States. So let's go to November of 1976. And Gaskin, he had been in prison a good while now. And let's just say he had some pressing needs in the way of a conjugal visit from his wife. He was so desperate, in fact, for a conjugal visit that he cuts a deal with detectives. He actually agrees to make a partial confession to several murders of people they had not found, but they suspected him of being responsible for those murders. So they weren't people that their bodies were found on the property where those eight original bodies were found. So in exchange for For this information, what he wanted in return was to get laid and get a conjugal visit. So detectives agree to this, and Pee Wee tells them where the body of several people were, including Trish Ann Alsbrook and Janice Kirby, who I told you earlier was found in the septic tank. He also let them know where he buried 13-year-old Kim Gelkins on

29:40 others including silas barnwell yates in which he was found guilty in that murder in 1977 receiving another life sentence now altogether at this point he is tied to 14 killings and he is in prison right So, that should be it. Well, not so fast. I'm going to tell you about Rudolph Tyner. So, Rudolph, on March 18th of 1978, he robs a convenience store in South Carolina. And during that robbery, he had killed the owners, Bill and Myrtle Moon, which they were an elderly, very well-loved couple in that area. So, eventually...

30:26 He gets convicted of that. He gets sent to the same prison that Gaskins is housed. Now, this couple, they had a son, and his name was Tony Ciro. Tony, of course, he's very distraught at the murder of his parents. He wanted some payback because after Tyner was sentenced, which he was sentenced to death because the death penalty got reinstated by the time his sentencing came around. But the problem was appeals. This guy could not stand the fact that he was sentenced to death and now we're going to have to sit through 20 years of appeals. So through other prisoners, Tony Simo gets word to Pee Wee Gaskins that, hey, I would like Tyner killed and I'll pay for it. This word gets back to Gaskins and he accepts the murder for hire offer and he starts developing a plan in prison to poison Tyner. which he actually tries to do this on a couple of occasions, but the attempts kept failing. So Gaskin has to regroup and come up with another plan to make this happen.

31:38 And he finally comes up with a plan that involved explosives. So the plan worked like this. Gaskins intentionally befriends Tyner and he tells Tyner, look, man, I've got some walkie talkies that I was able to smuggle in the prison. so we can communicate with these walkie-talkies anytime we want from ourselves. Which, he wasn't lying about having walkie-talkies. He did have some smuggled in. What Tyner didn't know is he also had some explosives smuggled in. And at least on Tyner's end, that walkie-talkie that Tyner had was packed with plastic explosives. And y'all know, convicts are... like MacGyver's man, they have some ingenuity and they can make anything out of anything. And this thing had matchsticks tied together and all kinds of stuff. It was a legit explosive. So he gets all this ready and he tells Tyner, I have to plug these in and then we can talk.

32:40 So somehow he keys up the walkie talkie one night, plugs it in. Tyner puts it to his ear. And as that electricity is running through this plug, It hits the match sticks, and it causes this walkie-talkie to explode right at the right moment, and it actually blew the side of Tyner's head clean off. So Pee-Wee did his job, and he was due $ 2, 000 for this killing from Simo, but... Detectives figured this one out pretty quick. And like I told y'all, by the time that this killing came around, the death penalty had been reinstated. This is in 1982.

33:23 So six months after that killing in 1993, Pee Wee is sentenced to death for Tyner's murder. Now you may wonder what happened to Tony Simo. Well, for his part as the potential payee, he was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder He actually got sentenced to eight years in prison in 1983, but he was paroled in 1986. And Simo contended ever since that he had no remorse and he would do it again. And honestly, who could blame him? That's probably why he only spent three years in prison to start with. So Pee Wee, he sat on death row from 1983 until his execution in 1991. On September 5th of that year, his last night alive, Gaskins tries to speed up the process and kill himself. He had swallowed some razor blades at some point prior to this.

34:23 He regurgitates the razor blades and he slices his wrist. But guards, they notice this pretty fast. He gets treated and his wounds are sewed up. And if you wonder why he would go to such extreme measures, it's because he was scared shitless of the method that was going to be used to execute him. Old Pee-wee was going to have to ride the lightning, the electric chair, what South Carolina named Old Sparky. But despite his efforts to take things into his own hand as far as method, he was going to have to face music. And the very next day, September 6th of 1991, Donald Peewee Gaskins was in fact executed at Broad River Correctional, this is in Columbia, South Carolina, at 1.10 in the morning. He was 58 years old and the fourth person executed in South Carolina's electric chair since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. His last words were, quote, I'll let my lawyer talk for me. I am ready to go. And go he did, y'all. And interesting to me was his lawyer, who was none other than Dick Harpootlian. Now, if that name sounds familiar to you, well, it should. It gained fame 35 years later as the defense lawyer for none

35:58 other than Alec Murdoch. And if you don't know who that is, go listen to Exposed. I've done 30 episodes on Alec Murdoch. But back to it, Gaskin's remains were cremated and then they were scattered in an undisclosed location. So there you have it. A quick look into the life of Pee Wee Gaskins and the death of Pee Wee Gaskins. I want to thank you so much for listening. Check out the Patreon, commercial-free early releases, patreon.com slash Bloody Angola podcast. And until next time, for Bloody Angola, I'm your host, Jim Chapman. Much love.

36:56 I walk a straight line, shackled chain. Oh, gruesome Gertie is calling my name. There is no mercy in this penitentiary. Just ask the hill. String gang, a wrangle of three. to die inside these walls inside the wild and when the wolf cries