Donald Henry “Pee Wee” Gaskins was born on March 13, 1933, in Florence County, South Carolina. Pee Wee was an American serial killer and rapist, and was also known as “the meanest man in America.” Gaskins was born to Eula Parrott and earned his nickname as a child due to his small stature. Even when Gaskins reached adulthood, he was only 5 ft 4 inches and weighed approximately 130 pounds.
His early life was marked by considerable neglect, and some have reported that he first learned his given name, Donald, when it was announced during his first court appearance. People have described Gaskins as a con artist who was street-smart with a humorous sense of humor.
Gaskins’s run-ins with the law began early, when he went on a violent crime spree with a group of fellow delinquents, which included burglaries and other criminal activity. At age 13, Pee Wee was convicted of striking a young woman in the head with an axe when she caught him breaking into her home. He was sent to a reform school, where he escaped, eventually married, and voluntarily returned to complete his sentence at the school.
When Gaskins turned 18, he was released and briefly worked in the fields of a tobacco field before being arrested in 1953 for attacking a teenage girl with a hammer. After completing six years for the crime in prison, earning his fellow prisoners’ respect by killing the most feared man in the system, Hazel Brazell, in a reported claim of self-defense, Gaskins escaped in 1955.
The years that followed his 1961 parole would see Gaskins return to crime. By the late 1960s, Gaskins was on his way to earning his infamous nickname, “the meanest man in America,” and in 1973, even purchased a hearse that he used to drive himself around town in…
Gaskins’ first non-prison-related murder victim was a blonde female hitchhiker whom he murdered in September 1969. After brutally killing the woman, Gaskins dumped her body in a swamp. This victim was to be the first of many as he drove around the coastal highways, setting himself on a one-way ticket to the South Carolina electric chair.
Gaskins later confessed to killing as many as eighty to ninety victims, but ultimately, 15 were confirmed. He was arrested on November 14, 1975, when a criminal associate of Gaskins, Walter Neeley, confessed to law enforcement that he knew about Gaskins’ killing of Dennis Bellamy and Johnny Knight. On December 4, 1975, Neeley led authorities to land in Prospect, South Carolina, where eight victims were found.
On May 24, 1976, Gaskins was charged with murder and was found guilty on May 28. He was sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life in prison due to the 1974 ruling on capital punishment.
On September 12, 1982, Rudolph Tyner, a 23-year-old inmate on death row, was murdered by Gaskins for a reported $2000 when he slid plastic explosives with a blasting cap into the man inside a radio speaker.
Pee Wee Gaskins died in the electric chair on September 6, 1991, at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, at the age of 58.
Written By: John G. Clark Jr.