South Carolina’s infamous serial killer, “Pee Wee” Gaskins

He was a little man with a squeaky voice, dead eyes and a black heart.

Infamous killer “Pee Wee” Gaskins was the definition of a human paradox. At first glance, Donald Henry Gaskins was less than menacing.

But his barely 5-foot-5, 130-pound frame packed a lot of meanness. He confessed in 1978 to murdering 15 people and burying their corpses in three Pee Dee counties. At least four of his victims were 15 or younger. Gaskins admitted waiting for hours beside a dirt road until accomplices lured a 13-year-old girl close enough to apprehend her.

He once told a judge, “There’s quite a few bodies that’s never been mentioned ... but you’ve got enough for now.”

Gaskins jumped in 1964 from a second-floor window at the Florence County Courthouse when on trial for carnal knowledge of a 13-year-old girl. He scampered to nearby swamps, where he eluded police for weeks. Authorities thought he was cornered when they heard bloodhounds baying, but Gaskins had tied them to a tree.

He drove a hearse around his native Prospect, a community in Florence County.

Gaskins was serving 10 life sentences at notorious Central Correctional Institution in Columbia when, in 1982, he carried out a contract, revenge killing of Death Row inmate Rudolph Tyner. Gaskins blew up Tyner by giving him a plastic cup he had told Tyner was an intercom. It exploded when Tyner put it to his ear.

That murder landed Gaskins on Death Row. But prison walls never stopped his scheming.

Two weeks before he became the 245th South Carolina prisoner to die in the electric chair, Gaskins plotted with his son to kidnap the 3-year-old daughter of then-Columbia-area solicitor Dick Harpootlian, whose prosecution moved Gaskins from a life sentence to his own date with death.

In his last night, Gaskins slashed his wrists and the crooks of his arms with a razor blade he had lodged in his throat and regurgitated. It took 20 stitches to save him for the electric chair at 1:10 a.m. Sept. 6, 1991.

This story was originally published November 10, 2015 at 11:18 AM with the headline "South Carolina’s infamous serial killer, “Pee Wee” Gaskins."