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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast. The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did and how. Episode 193.
We continue our sojourn into the American South tonight with our expose covering Donald Peewee Gaskins, the meanest man in America. Last episode we detailed his childhood and youth, and in this installment of his saga I bring to you the full bloom of his most depraved and heinous acts of murder. Enjoy.
As always, I want to publicly thank my elite TSK Producers Club. Their names are...
Kylie, Lance, Lisa, Lisbeth, Magic Man, Madeline, Meow, Missy, Nick, Oakley, Operation Brownie Pockets, Robert O., Robert R., Russell, Sabina, Skortnia, Scott, Sputnik the Radio, Susanna, The Duggletons,
Trent, Val, and Vanessa, you are the backbone of the Serial Killer podcast, and without you, there would be no show. You have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.
I am forever grateful for my elite TSK Producers Club, and I want to show you that your patronage is not given in vain. All TSK episodes will be available 100% ad-free to my TSK Producers Club on patreon.com slash the serial killer podcast. No generic ads, no ad reads, no jingles. I promise.
And of course, if you wish to donate $15 a month, that's only $7.50 per episode, you are more than welcome to join the ranks of the TSK Producers Club too. So don't miss out and join now. Imagine, if you will, their listener. A small, thin man standing on a dusty sidewalk. Behind him lies a large complex of buildings, a federal penitentiary.
"'In his hands is a bag with his meager belongings. "'It's hot and humid, and the man known to everyone as Pee-wee is brooding. "'He is angry, and he wants payback for all the suffering he has gone through. "'After his parole was granted, Gaskins only had to follow one condition. "'He was barred from entering into Florence County, South Carolina, for two years.'
As with many other things in his life, this angered Gaskins greatly. He wanted to see his daughter, Shirley, who was married and had two children of her own. Not one to care much for the law, he still went to visit his mother, daughter, and other family members. Soon he moved to the nearby town of Sumter, where he got a job working as a roofer for a construction company.
On the weekends, he still stole, repainted, and sold cars. During the summer of 1968, Pee-wee was feeling troubled by a bothersome pain. The pain began, according to him, in his testicles, traveled up his spine, into his stomach and head, where it would settle behind his eyes like a migraine.
According to Peewee in later interviews, it was then that a voice telling him to kill and or harm, someone started to speak to him. The quote-unquote pain told him to kill his first wife, Mary. Very much tempted, but still having some moral scruples, he left her and other family members alone.
The urge to kill only grew stronger. So Pee-wee started cruising his future hunting ground, the coastal highway that ran between Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia. Here he would look for hitchhikers to be his future victims. Like some serial killers have described, he did not know exactly who or what he was looking for.
The person he chose had to trigger something inside. The person had to be, quote-unquote, the one. Kind of like speed dating, only with far more sinister angles. The following year, Pee-wee gave in to his urges. In September 1969, he killed his first victim, a blonde girl, who told him her name was Angie, whom he'd picked up on Pauley's Island.
"'Aggie was not a prostitute, although reading sources online seemed to hint at this. She was a young woman—I have not managed to ascertain her age—looking for a ride. Pee-wee found her very attractive, and asked her if she would have sex with him in return for him giving her a ride. The girl laughed in his face.'
This triggered a tidal wave of pent-up anger and desires inside Pee-wee. He stopped smiling and soon turned off the highway and onto a gravel road, going into a deserted area. The girl was by now terrified and pleaded with him to let her go. Pee-wee did not respond, but after a short drive stopped the car and got out. He went around the car and dragged the banal screaming girl out
and at knife-point told her to strip, which she did. Then he forced her to perform oral sex on him, before violently raping her both vaginally and anally. Just before climaxing, he pulled out and stabbed his dagger into her rectum and sliced the girl open through her vagina. The shock...
Pain was unimaginable, and blood was bursting out in huge quantities. He kept her lying down, and as she was howling in pain and fear, he bit off her left nipple and spat it out. He masturbated over her as she lay whimpering, spasming, and bloody beneath him, and after he ejaculated, he stomped hard on her pelvic bone so that it broke.
By now, Angie was unconscious. He sank her and the rest of her belongings into a river and took her money. Angie was still breathing when Pee-wee placed her underwater and came to life from the shock of the cold water. Pee-wee simply held her thrashing body under until she went still. He dragged the lifeless body to a nearby swamp
and weighed down the corpse with stones so that it sank into the swampy marsh. After his first murder, Peewee recalled in later interviews, and here I quote, I felt truly the best I ever remember feeling in my whole life. End quote. After this first murder, Peewee was ravenous.
The urge he had felt for so many years — he was by now thirty-six years old — had finally been released, and he wanted more. Much more. Only six weeks after the murder of Angie, he picked up another hitchhiker named Daisy. She was from Jacksonville, Florida. She suffered the same fate as Angie. First, she was tortured by being sliced open with a knife.
Then he bit her almost as if he wanted to eat her, and then he drowned her in a nearby swamp and sank her body into the marsh. Six weeks after this, he killed yet another woman hitchhiking. It was by then Christmas. I have tried to find more details about the latter two victims, but they are victims only verified by Peewee, as their bodies were never found.
All three victims were murdered near the coast of South Carolina, hence why he sank their bodies into swampland. In 1970, Peewee kept up his pace of a new coastal kill every six weeks. He experimented with different weapons, rape, and cannibalism. The 1970s victims were never identified, and
method of murder is repeated here, as Peewee himself described them in later interviews. I have little doubt that most of his descriptions are real, knowing what we do know about his verified murders later on. Sometimes Peewee would keep his victims alive for several days, keeping them tied to a tree or inside an abandoned building. Some of his unnamed and unknown victims are
He would slice off parts of their body while they were still alive. Then he would force them to watch as he cooked and ate the body parts. Although Pee Wee seemed to prefer female victims, he did not shy away from victimizing other men and young boys. He killed two boys with long hair because at first he thought they were girls. The boys were sodomized and tortured in extreme ways.
the most gruesome being pee-wee slicing off their penis and testicles while they were still alive then cooking and eating the penises in front of both boys before finally murdering them by cutting their throats according to pee-wee himself he had difficulty remembering each individual victim as there were so many of them
The only one of his coastal victims Peewee could ever recall by their full name was Ann Culberson, a 16-year-old he picked up near Myrtle Beach in 1971. At the time, he was not actively on the hunt, but he did not want to pass up a potential victim to feed his addictions.
So he tortured Anne for four days before finally killing her with a hammer and dumping her body in quicksand. Very few of the early coastal kills are verified by law enforcement, and although Peewee claims to have killed around 100 people in total, he might also have been exaggerating. As I like to say on this podcast,
Serial killers all share one trait. They lie. One thing that bothers your humble host is how many of the most famous serial killers, like Pee-Wee Gaskins, are not infamous for their pedophilia, but simply the fact of their many murders.
During this podcast I have discovered to myself a shocking amount of clear evidence that many of the most infamous serial killers, from BTK to Jeffrey Dahmer and now Pee-wee Gaskins, were rabid pedophiles. Pee-wee had lusted after his own family members for years, but not until he had started killing and killing again, feeling powerful and invincible, did he act on those desires.
One night in November 1970, Pee-wee's niece, fifteen-year-old Janice and her seventeen-year-old friend Patricia, had been out drinking with friends and called home for a rye. Pee-wee saw a murderous opportunity that he wasted no time acting upon. Some people might argue with me that lusting after a fifteen-year-old is not pedophilia, and perhaps there are grey zones.
But for the purpose of this podcast, I define anyone under the age of 16, the age of consent in Norway, as a child and sexual crimes against them as pedophilia.
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as a family man with three kids i know first-hand how extremely difficult it is to make time for self-care but it's good to have some things that are non negotiable for some that could be a night out with the boys chugging beers and having a laugh for others it might be an eating night
For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it. But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever.
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Visit BetterHelp.com slash Serial Killer today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash Serial Killer. Instead of driving the girls home, Pee-wee drove to an abandoned house where he forced them to strip completely naked.
The girls, however, did not willingly go into the night and fought bravely for their lives. They each managed to pick up a wooden plank and hit Pee-wee on the head when he was momentarily distracted with unbuttoning his trousers. Pee-wee was a small man, and the girls might have succeeded if not for Pee-wee having a gun.
Bleeding from the head and furious, he slammed the gun against the girls' head and they fell unconscious to the ground. Then he handcuffed them behind their back and took his time raping each girl anally and vaginally. The girls woke up from the searing pain the rape caused and he probably tortured them, although little information is available about this. When he felt sexually sated, he dragged the girls to a nearby septic tank.
A septic tank is filled with human excrement, i.e. feces and urine. While the girls were flailing and begging for their lives, he one by one lowered them headfirst into the human waste and watched them drown. He then buried their bodies in two different locations in shallow graves.
The police eventually questioned him about his involvement in his niece's and her friend's disappearances. He told police that he had seen them the night of their disappearance, but said he saw them get into a car full of boys he did not know. With no evidence or bodies, the police did not have anything else to go on, and the case went cold for several years.
Killing young girls turned out to be Pee-wee Gaskin's favorite kind of murder. Only a month after the rape and murder of his young niece, he was once more out on the hunt. This time it was 13-year-old Peggy Coutinho, the daughter of South Carolina Senator James Coutinho. Pee-wee abducted her, raped her, strangled and beat her until she was dead.
sated and feeling wonderful. He left her body in the woods in Sumter, South Carolina. Based on Pee-wee's criminal past, the police questioned him in the murder, but he had an alibi. I have not found out, dear listener, what this alibi was, but it could not have been a very strong one. The police eventually pinned the murder on William Junior Pierce, another local serial killer for Peggy's murder.
Pierce denied killing Coutinho at first, but later falsely confessed, after a local sheriff, who wanted the case solved as soon as possible, beat and tortured him into confessing. Yes, you heard that right.
People have this idea that in the West, police never misbehave when questioning suspects. It might be that today, with all interrogations by law, must be fully recorded, that we see less mistreatment of suspects, but I have my doubts.
Here in Norway, it has recently come to light several high-profile murder cases, where it turns out the alleged criminals, in actuality, had nothing to do with the crime. But brutal police methods during questioning, as well as tampering with evidence, and a compliant media who loves to condemn suspects before any legally binding verdict, caused innocent men and women to be convicted.
So, it does not surprise me in the least that known serial killers have been attributed crimes they had nothing to do with. On New Year's Eve 1970, Pee-wee married his fifth wife. Later that year, she gave birth to his second child, a son they named Donald Lee Gaskins.
Even though he had an outward appearance of being a family man, those who knew Pee-wee were aware of his criminal past and reputation. Shortly after his son was born, Pee-wee went back to stealing and reselling stolen cars to make some extra money. In 1971, he continued terrorizing the South Carolina coastal highway. This year, Pee-wee murdered a local African-American woman.
This was 20-year-old Martha Dix, who sometimes went by the name Clyde. Dix was later identified as either a lesbian or a trans person. This was in the early 70s, so it is difficult to ascertain what was the case. In any case, Martha was not a random stranger. Martha was infatuated with Pee-wee and told friends they were expecting a child together.
This was all a fantasy, and Pee-wee grew enraged by her lies. One night, Pee-wee invited her over to spend the night. She excitedly accepted, thinking that he was finally going to give in to her romantic advances. Once at his house, Gaskin offered her five dollars for oral sex and some pills. Pee-wee then handcuffed her, punched her, and force-fed her a bottle of pills.
I've not managed to find out what type of pills he forcefully gave her, but I can speculate that they were probably sleeping pills. After she died from the purposeful drug overdose, Pee-wee dumped her body in a ditch. This is one of Pee-wee's less brutal murders, one he committed not out of pure bloodlust, but because he wanted her to stop lying and obsessing about him.
The same year, Pee-wee moved himself and his family to Charleston, South Carolina. There he continued as he had for a good while, stealing cars, repainting them, and hunting for humans to murder. The first murders after the move was two more African-American people. Eddie Brown had sold several guns to Pee-wee, including some that were stolen from the military.
Peewee grew increasingly nervous after Eddie told him that federal agents had heard about the stolen weapons in Charleston and were investigating. Worried that Eddie Brown was setting him up or selling him out to the feds, he shot both Eddie and his wife, Bertie Brown, and dumped their bodies behind a barn where his niece, Janice, was buried. While in Charleston, he also killed another young woman,
Anne Culberson. He kept and tortured Culberson in an abandoned house for four days, after which he killed her by bashing her in the head with a ball-peen hammer. He buried Culberson in the same grave with Janice. Let us pause for a moment, dear listener. Try to imagine, if you will, being kept against your will in a decrepit, abandoned house where no one can hear you scream.
You're probably naked and tied up so you cannot move. A small, gangly-looking man is the one who abducted you, and he has raped you over and over again, in every possible way, forced you to perform sexual acts on him and on yourself while he masturbates. Then he started cutting you. The pain is extreme as he cuts off pieces of your body and a pool of sticky blood forms beneath you.
Then the man leaves, after again tying you up. The wounds he inflicted upon you hurt more than anything you have ever felt, and as night falls, you freeze. Not enough to die, but enough to cause significant discomfort. You pass out more than sleep from the shock, pain, and fear. When you wake up, it's warm again, but you're still bound, and your wounds throb.
Then the man returns and repeats what he did yesterday. This time he cuts off one of your breasts. A bit later, after more rape and more cutting, you cry and shake and shiver, again all tied up. The man is lighting a fire, and he takes your breast and puts it on a stick. Then he starts cooking it over the fire. Afterwards, he eats it in front of you. Then he forces you to take a bite.
You vomit afterwards. Two more days this goes on for. The final day, day four of this living hell, he returns, and this time you are so cut up and sick from all the infections in your wounds, malnourishment and lack of water, that you are in a daze. He rapes you again, and you have no strength to resist. When he's done, he picks up a hammer.
Even though you are dazed and tired beyond what you thought possible, adrenaline still courses through you like ice as fear flares up from the sight of the hammer. You beg him for one last time to let you live, but he only sneers at you as he raises the hammer. He hammers down on your head. Your hands are bound behind you so you cannot shield yourself. The pain is immediate and the world flashes white.
More blows land, and the world grows dark, and then you are gone. The Gaskins family moved back to Prospect, South Carolina, in July 1973, after their house in Charleston burned down. Pee-wee never admitted to committing arson against his own property, but claimed some neighborhood boys burned it down. Considering his past with arson,
It is highly plausible that he was responsible for the fire. Once back in prospect, Pee-wee picked right back up and continued with his coastal kills. One of the many murders that followed was that of a fourteen-year-old runaway named Jackie Freeman, whom he raped and tortured.
Eventually, he cannibalized a piece of her calf muscle after keeping her alive for two days. What makes his torture and murder of young Jackie even more despicable is that he later told investigators that he liked Jackie. He described her as, quote-unquote, special. Still, he treated her worse than any non-psychopath would treat even their worst enemies.
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And with that, we come to the end of part two of this expose covering Pee Wee Gaskins. I hope you enjoyed listening to me telling it to you. Next episode will continue this grim saga. So as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. What follows is a message to my dear Norwegian listeners in Norwegian.
I remind you that my Norwegian-language podcast, Seriemordepodden, is available to listen to both on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and all other places you listen to podcasts. We are starting with a new saga, this time about no ringer but Albert Fish. As they say in Radio Land, follow along.
