By 1970, Gaskins was averaging one ‘coastal kill’ every six weeks, experimenting with different torture methods, disappointed when his victims died prematurely. ‘I preferred for them to last as long as possible,’ he wrote. The following year, he claimed 11 nameless victims, including his first kidnap-slaying of two girls at once. Ideas for tormenting his captives came to Gaskins as he browsed through hardware stores, eyeing the tools. ‘I never gave no thought to stopping,’ he admitted. ‘They was a clock-kind of thing. When it was time, I went and killed.’
Up until now all of his victims had been young females. His first male victims were by accident, two long-haired boys whom Gaskins took for girls as he drove up behind them in March 1974. Gender would not save them, though. Gaskins drove them both to a hideout near Charleston, where he buggered and tortured both, cooking and cannibalising their severed genitals before he granted them the mercy of death.
Gaskins lost track of the victims he murdered for sport between September 1969 and December 1975. They were hard to recall, he explained, ‘because they’re mostly just a jumble of faces and bodies and memories of things I did to them’. In terms of numbers, he said, ‘the closest figure I can come up with is 80 to 90’. Sadistic murder was addictive for Gaskins. ‘I finally reached the point where I wanted the bothersomeness to start,’ he wrote. ‘I looked forward to it every month, because it felt so good relieving myself of it.’
The only coastal victim he recalled by name was 16-year-old Anne Colberson, picked up near Myrtle Beach in 1971. Gaskins was not hunting at the time, but he refused to miss a golden opportunity. Over four days of rape and torture, he became ‘real fond of her’. Finally, ‘because she had been so nice to me’, Gaskins stunned her with a hammer and cut her throat before dropping her body into quicksand. The coastal kills were always recreational, though. However numerous the victims, however atrocious their sufferings, they meant nothing to Gaskins. The focus of his life lay inland, where murder and business mixed.
Before 1970, despite sporadic incidents of violence with family and friends, Gaskins maintained that he never gave ‘any real serious thought whatsoever’ to killing a personal acquaintance. ‘The most important thing about 1970,’ he wrote from prison, ‘was that it was the year I started doing my “serious murders”’ – defined as slayings of people he knew, whose deaths required more planning to avoid detection.
His first two ‘serious’ victims were a 15-year-old niece, Janice Kirby, and her 17-year-old friend, Patricia Alsobrook. Gaskins had entertained thoughts of raping Kirby but saw no opportunity until one night in November 1970, when the girls were out drinking, in need of a ride home. Gaskins volunteered, taking them instead to an abandoned house where he ordered both to strip. The girls fought for their lives, clubbing Gaskins with a board before he drew a gun and overpowered them and beat them unconscious. After raping both, he drowned the girls and buried them in separate locations. Police questioned him about the double disappearance and, while he admitted talking to the girls on the last night they had been seen alive, he claimed they had left him and driven off in a car with several unknown boys. Lacking bodies or other evidence, the police investigation went cold.
A month later, Gaskins kidnapped, raped and murdered Peggy Cuttino, the 13-year-old daughter of a politically prominent family. This time, he left the body where it would be found. His alibi looked solid when police came calling, and they later focused on another suspect, William Pierce, already serving life in Georgia for a similar offence. Conviction of Cuttino’s murder brought Pierce his second life sentence, a moot point since Georgia had no intention of releasing him. Years later, when Gaskins later confessed to the murder, embarrassed prosecutors rejected his statement, insisting Gaskins claimed the murder ‘for publicity’.
Gaskins interrupted the murder spree to marry his pregnant girlfriend on 1 January 1971, but it was only a momentary distraction. His next ‘serious’ murder victim – and the first African-American he ever killed – was 20-year-old Martha Dicks, who frequented the garage where Gaskins worked part-time. For reasons best known to herself, Dicks seemed infatuated with Gaskins, boasting falsely to friends that they were lovers. Gaskins tolerated the jokes until Dicks claimed to be carrying his child. Inviting her to stay on one night after work, he fed Dicks a fatal overdose of pills and liquor, discarding her body in a roadside ditch. Rumours of sex and racism aside, Gaskins insisted, ‘I didn’t kill her for no reason besides her lying mouth.’
In late 1971, Gaskins moved to Charleston with his wife and child, committing his next two ‘serious murders’ there in 1972. The victims were Eddie Brown, a 20-year-old gunrunner, and his wife Bertie, described by Gaskins as ‘the best-looking black girl I ever saw.’ Gaskins sold guns to Brown, including stolen military weapons, but he grew nervous when Brown informed him that federal agents were making enquiries in and around Charleston, seeking illicit arms dealers. Fearing apprehension, Gaskins shot the Browns and left their bodies behind the barn where he had buried Janice Kirby in 1970.
Gaskins moved to Prospect, South Carolina, in July 1973, after his Charleston home burnt down. (He blamed arsonists for the fire, but never identified the culprits.) Before the year’s end, he murdered three more victims, starting with 14-year-old runaway Jackie Freeman. Gaskins picked her up hitchhiking, in October, and held her captive for two days of rape, torture and cannibalism. ‘I always thought of Jackie as special,’ he recalled in his memoirs, ‘not really a serious murder, but likewise not just another coastal kill.’
The weekend after Freeman’s slaying, Gaskins bought a used hearse and put a sign in the window: ‘WE HAUL ANYTHING, LIVING OR DEAD’. When asked about it over drinks, he explained that he wanted the vehicle ‘because I kill so many people I need a hearse to haul them to my private cemetery’.
His first passengers were 23-year-old Doreen Dempsey and her two-year-old daughter, Robin Michelle. Gaskins knew Dempsey from his circus days. An unwed mother pregnant with her second child in December 1973, she planned on leaving town that month and accepted Gaskins’s offer of a ride to the local bus station. Instead, he drove into the woods and there demanded sex. Doreen agreed and then balked when Gaskins started to undress her child. Gaskins killed Doreen with a hammer, then raped and buggered the child before strangling her to death and burying both of them together. Years later, he would recall his brutal assault on Robin Michelle as the best sex of his life.
Gaskins’s ‘serious murders’ continued in 1974, beginning with 30-year-old car thief Johnny Sellars. Sellars owed Gaskins $1,000 for car parts, but he was slow to pay. Finally, tired of excuses, Gaskins lured Sellars to the woods and shot him with a rifle. Later the same night, hoping to forestall investigation into his disappearance, Gaskins called on Sellars’s girlfriend, 22-year-old Jessie Ruth Judy, and stabbed her to death, taking her body to the forest for burial beside her lover.
Horace Jones, another car thief, made the fatal mistake of trying to romance Gaskins’s current wife in 1974. ‘That pissed me off,’ Gaskins recalled, ‘but the way he went about doing it. I mean if he had come straight to me like a man and asked to make a deal with me for my wife, I would probably have given her to him, for a night or a week, or to keep, if the offer was good enough.’ As it was, he shot Jones in the woods and took $200 from the body before leaving it in a shallow grave.
By December 1974, Gaskins was a grandfather, settled into a routine that suited him and satisfied his needs. That Christmas season, he recalled, was ‘the happiest and peacefullest I can remember’. He didn’t know it yet, but he was running out of time. 1975 was his busiest killing year. He started January with a threesome, a man and two women, describing them as ‘hippie types’. Their van had broken down near Georgetown. Gaskins offered them a lift to the nearest garage, then detoured to a nearby swamp and handcuffed his captives at gunpoint. Before he drowned the trio, Gaskins said, ‘It was hard to say which one suffered most. I tried to make it equal.’
Gaskins made a critic
al mistake when he recruited ex-convict Walter Neely to help him dispose of the van. Neely drove the vehicle to Gaskins’s garage, where Gaskins customised and repainted it for sale out of state. The drive made Neely an accessory after the fact and Gaskins trusted his simple-minded helper to keep a secret. Before the year’s end, he would regret that choice.
Gaskins’s first ‘serious murder’ of the year involved a contract to kill Silas Yates, a wealthy Florence County farmer. He accepted $1,500 for the job, on behalf of 27-year-old Suzanne Kipper, furious at Yates for taking back a car, two horses and other gifts he had given her while they were romantically involved. Two go-betweens on the contract, John Powell and John Owens, handled negotiations between Gaskins and Kipper. Gaskins recruited Diane Neely, his friend Walter’s ex-wife, to lure Yates from home on the night of 12 February 1975, by claiming that her car had broken down near his house. Gaskins waited in the darkness to abduct Yates at gunpoint and drive him to the woods, where Powell and Owens watched him knife Yates to death; they then helped Gaskins bury the body. Kipper subsequently married Owens, while Gaskins used his knowledge of the murder to blackmail her for sex.
This contract killing came back to haunt Gaskins when Diane Neely moved in with Avery Howard, a 35-year-old ex-convict whom Gaskins knew from state prison. She told Howard about the murder and together they approached Gaskins with a demand for $5,000 to remain silent. Gaskins agreed to meet them in the woods outside Prospect and bring the cash. The blackmailers arrived to find an open grave and Gaskins with a pistol in his hand. Both were shot and then buried.
Still Gaskins continued his relentless killing. Kim Ghelkins was the next to die; she was a 13-year-old friend of Gaskins who angered him by rejecting his sexual overtures. He reacted in typical style by raping, torturing and strangling her, disposing of her body in the woods. Diane Neely’s brother, 25-year-old Dennis Bellamy, teamed up with 15-year-old half-brother Johnny Knight to burgle Gaskins’s garage that summer, thus earning themselves a death sentence. Gaskins took Walter Neely along to help bury the pair in his ‘private cemetery’, taking the time to point out the surrounding graves of Johnny Sellars, Jessie Judy, Avery Howard and Walter’s ex-wife. Again, for reasons never clear, he trusted Neely and allowed him to survive.
By October 1975, Kim Ghelkins’s parents knew enough of her movements to suspect Gaskins of murder. A Sumter deputy sheriff searched Gaskins’s home and found some of Kim’s clothes in his wardrobe, afterwards securing statements that she was often seen in his company. The evidence would not support a murder charge, but Gaskins was indicted for contributing to the delinquency of a minor. He returned from Georgia on 14 November 1975 to find police waiting for him at his house. Gaskins made his way to the local bus station, planning a return to Georgia, but officers detained him before he could leave.
Gaskins remained in custody for three weeks before the death knell sounded on him. Under intense interrogation, Walter Neely had finally told all to police on advice from a neighbourhood minister. He led authorities to Gaskins’s graveyard, where Bellamy and Knight were unearthed on 4 December. A day later, diggers found the bodies of Sellars, Judy, Howard and Neely. On 10 December, Walter led them to the graves of Doreen Dempsey and her child. Gaskins struck a pose of injured innocence, but all in vain. Looking back on that chaotic month, he would recall, ‘the coroner had the bodies, Jesus had Walter, and the law had me’.
On 27 April 1976, Gaskins and Walter Neely were each charged with eight counts of first-degree murder. Police also detained James Judy, husband of the murdered Jessie, on one count of murder and an accessory charge. Prosecutor T Kenneth Summerford arranged for Gaskins to be tried alone in the Bellamy case, because bullets from the victim’s body matched a pistol Gaskins had been carrying at his arrest in December 1975.
At his trial, on 24 May 1976, Gaskins feigned innocence, blaming Bellamy’s murder on Walter Neely. Bellamy and Johnny Knight were both alive the last time he saw them, Gaskins testified, leaving his garage with Neely. For all he knew, Walter had stolen his pistol to murder the men and then replaced it without his knowledge. Jurors dismissed his explanation and convicted him on 28 May, whereupon he was sentenced to die.
Gaskins’s attorney urged him to make a deal with prosecutors to avoid another death sentence on his seven pending murder charges. Gaskins agreed, confessing to the crimes and adding details under the influence of ‘truth serum’, but he could have saved the effort. In November 1976, the US Supreme Court invalidated South Carolina’s death penalty statute and his capital sentence was commuted to life, with seven more consecutive life terms added for good measure.
That was not to be the end; the law came after him next for Silas Yates’s murder, indicting him with John Owens, John Powell and Suzanne Kipper (now married to Owens). At trial, in April 1977, Gaskins claimed he was the decoy who lured Yates from his home in 1975, while Powell and Owens did the killing, but all four defendants were sentenced to life. (Powell and Owens were paroled in the late 1980s, prompting Gaskins to remark, ‘some life sentences don’t last as long as others’. Kipper escaped in October 1990 and remained at large until February 1993, when she was recaptured in Michigan.)
In 1978, South Carolina passed a new death penalty statute and new charges were filed against Gaskins for Johnny Knight’s murder. The state was now seeking the death penalty. However, Gaskins was not made aware that such retroactive prosecutions are forbidden. Bargaining for life imprisonment, he confessed to still more murders, giving police the whereabouts of a hitchhiker’s body in place of Janice Kirby’s since he feared discovery of other victims buried near her grave site, yet unnamed. This last round of confessions made Gaskins South Carolina’s most prolific serial killer to date.
With his reputation and his mechanical skills, it was easy to become a maintenance trusty, an inmate with the freedom to move around the confines of the prison. However, despite being incarcerated he had one further opportunity to kill. Another convicted killer, Rudolph Tyner, was awaiting execution but the appeals process was never-ending and there was also a suggestion that he may even earn a reprieve. Tyner’s worst problem on death row was the need continually to feed his insatiable drugs addiction.
Outside the prison walls, Tony Cimo, the son of the victims murdered by Tyner, was hatching a plan to accelerate Tyner’s execution. Through prison contacts, he negotiated for a contract to be put out on Tyner. The word finally got to Gaskins, who agreed to kill Tyner for the right price.
In his work in the prison, Gaskins had free access to condemned inmates, mending broken pipes, toilets, light fixtures; anything at all. Unknown to Cimo, Gaskins also had a tape recorder, capturing their conversations for posterity; a blackmail tool as good as money in the bank if he should ever manage to escape from custody.
Gaskins decided poison was the way to go. Befriending Tyner on his visits to death row, Gaskins began to slip Tyner junk food, marijuana, pills and heroin. Tyner received the gifts, unquestioning, and begged for more. Cimo supplied a box of candy laced with poison ‘strong enough to kill a horse’, but Tyner merely suffered stomach pains. Over the following 12 months, Gaskins repeated the experiment five times, spiking his target’s food and drugs with ever-larger toxic doses, all in vain. Tyner lived on, oblivious to the ‘coincidences’ linking the gifts and with stomach-churning trips to the hospital.
Gaskins gave up on poison and decided to construct a bomb. Cimo supplied the wiring, hardware and C-4 plastic explosive (smuggled past distracted guards in the hollowed-out heels of cowboy boots). Tyner agreed to let Gaskins connect a homemade intercom between their cells. Gaskins strung wire through prison heating ducts, constructed a ‘receiver’ for his target from a plastic cup and packed it with C-4. The two men synchronised their watches for a test run on the evening of 12 September 1982. At the appointed hour, Tyner pressed the loaded plastic cup against his ear and spoke to Gaskins, on the far side of the wall between their cells. ‘The last thing he heard through that speaker cup before it blew
his head off,’ Gaskins later said, ‘was me laughing.’
Press reports initially described Tyner’s death as suicide, but there are no real secrets in prison. Prisoners started talking, and Tony Cimo was arrested and soon confessed his role in the plot. A grand jury was empanelled, indicting Gaskins and Cimo with two inmate accessories for murder and conspiracy. The state of South Carolina had failed to execute Donald Gaskins for his previous murders. Now, it was prepared to try again.
Tony Cimo received a 25-year prison sentence with parole eligibility after 30 months. He served the minimum and returned to the seaside town of Murrell’s Inlet, where he died from a prescription drug overdose on 10 June 2001.
Gaskins, meanwhile, spent the first three years of his new sentence not on death row, but in a rat-infested isolation unit. His attorneys appealed the confinement in 1985, but the authorities cited ‘reliable information’ that Gaskins planned to have accomplices kidnap the prosecutor’s child and bargain for his release. Only after his petition for release from solitary was rejected did police ‘determine the report was an empty threat’. A year later, freed from solitary after the isolation unit was condemned as not fit for human habitation, Gaskins found death row ‘a lot nicer’ than his previous quarters. In 1990, Gaskins and the state’s electric chair were moved again, this time to the Broad River Correctional Institute outside Columbia.
Gaskins filled his last months with an art scam, tracing cartoon characters for sale to collectors of death row memorabilia, and dictating his memoirs on tape for author Wilton Earl to publish in 1993. As death approached, Gaskins became philosophical. ‘I truly don’t mind dying,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve lived a damned full and good life.’ In fact, he decided, it was even better than that. ‘I have walked the same path as God,’ Gaskins raved. ‘By taking lives and making others afraid, I became God’s equal. Through killing others, I became my own master. Through my own power I come to my own redemption.’ He was even optimistic about his date with the chair, saying, ‘When they put me to death, I’ll die remembering the freedom and pleasure of my life. I’ll die knowing that there are others coming along to take my place, and that most of them won’t never get caught.’
The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers Page 23
