Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Serial Killer Tried To Kidnap Daughter of Alex Murdaugh's Lawyer

Episode Date: December 24, 2025

Before Dick Harpootlian represented Alex Murdaugh in South Carolina's "Trial of the Century" he served as an assistant solicitor. During that time, he prosecuted one of the South's most notorious serial killers: Donald "Pee Wee" Gaskins. The experience would change Harpootlian. Gaskins even plotted to have Harpootlian's four-year-old daughter kidnapped. Now Harpootlian has written about the experience in a new book "Dig Me A Grave." Law&Crime's Angenette Levy talks with Harpootlian about the book and his experience in this episode of Crime Fix — a daily show covering the biggest stories in crime.PLEASE SUPPORT THE SHOW:If you’re ever injured in an accident, you can check out Morgan & Morgan. You can submit a claim in 8 clicks or less without having to leave your couch. To start your claim, visit: https://www.forthepeople.com/CrimeFixHost:Angenette Levy  https://twitter.com/Angenette5Guest:Dick Harpootlian https://x.com/HarpootlianSCCRIME FIX PRODUCTION:Head of Social Media, YouTube - Bobby SzokeSocial Media Management - Vanessa BeinVideo Editing - Daniel CamachoGuest Booking - Alyssa Fisher & Diane KayeSTAY UP-TO-DATE WITH THE LAW&CRIME NETWORK:Watch Law&Crime Network on YouTubeTV: https://bit.ly/3td2e3yWhere To Watch Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3akxLK5Sign Up For Law&Crime's Daily Newsletter: https://bit.ly/LawandCrimeNewsletterRead Fascinating Articles From Law&Crime Network: https://bit.ly/3td2IqoLAW&CRIME NETWORK SOCIAL MEDIA:Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lawandcrime/Twitter: https://twitter.com/LawCrimeNetworkFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/lawandcrimeTwitch: https://www.twitch.tv/lawandcrimenetworkTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lawandcrimeSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Here is the law. He didn't do it. He is presumed innocent. You probably recognize Dick Haputlian from watching trials right here on Law and Crime, especially if you watched Alec Murdoch's double murder trial and the aftermath. Harputin represented.

double murderer Alec Murdoch during his 2023 trial for the murders of his wife Maggie and son Paul. Harputlian's defense may not have been successful. Murdoch, of course, was convicted of the murders and he's appealing. But the trial catapulted Harputian onto the national stage. Now he's written a new book and its main character is just as fascinating as Alec Murdoch, a real-life serial killer and rapist who terrorized the people of South Carolina for years. At least 13, confirmed victims with the killer claiming to have murdered nearly a hundred more. Dick Harputtly and dug into his past and now we're digging in to the new release, Dig Me a Grave, the inside story of the serial killer who seduced the South. I'm Janette Levy and this is crime fix.

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Dick Arputlian, who's known for his work as a state lawmaker, a prosecutor, and criminal defense attorney in South Carolina is adding a new line to his resume, published author. Harputlian has seen a lot during his time in the justice system and he's never shied away from cold, hard facts, no matter how gruesome. Like during his opening statement at Murdoch's trial back in 2023, when he tried to convince the jury that there was no way in hell that Murdoch could have killed two of his closest family members. Take a listen. The second shot ended up, and there's going to be some question about the direction of that shot, but ended up entering

his skull cavity and the gases from that shot literally exploded his head like a watermelon hit with a sledgehammer all that was left was the front of his face

everything else was gone his brain exploded out of his head hit the ceiling in the shed and dropped to his feet horrendous horrible butchering so

to find Al McRaw guilty of murdering his son you're going to have to accept that within an hour of having a extraordinarily bonding you can see it in the

Snapchat that he executes him in a brutal fashion not believable, not believable. But it's a different man at the center of Harputlian's new novel. He teamed up with investigative journalist Sean Assail to dig through hundreds of case files connected to Donald Gaskins, better known as Peewee. Gaskins was infamous in South Carolina in the late 70s and the years after. Part of what some refer to as the state's dark underbelly of crime, a career criminal from a

young age, investigators confirmed that Gaskins killed more than a dozen people, although Gaskins himself tried to insist that he killed a hundred or more. Many of the confirmed victims were younger than 25 and one was just two years old, a little girl. Gaskin's first criminal trial was held in 1976 with the jury finding him guilty of one of the murders and sentencing him to death, but the Supreme Court vacated that sentence instead sentencing Gaskins to life in prison. He would eventually plead guilty to 13 murders to avoid having to repeatedly go to trial. But when he killed a man on his cell block, that man was Rudolf Tyner, using explosives hidden inside a radio, it was Harputlian who would prosecute him.

And this time, Harputlian wanted to make sure that the death penalty was going to stick. But his experience dealing with the sick serial killer changed him, and it made for a hell of a story. So I'd like to bring in Dick Harputlian to discuss his beautifully written new book. It's entitled Dig Me a Grave, and he's written it along with Sean Assail. Dick, talk to me if you would about why you decided to write this book. Well, having been a prosecutor, the district attorney here in Columbia, South Carolina, I prosecuted many, many, many murder cases. But never as a prosecutor or in the past 40 years as a defense attorney, have I,

ever encountered anyone like Donald Pee Wee Gaskins, the largest mass murder or serial killer in the history of South Carolina. He was such a unique personality and his series 14 murders, the last one being the one I convicted him of, which was assassinating a death row inmate with a quarter of a pound of C4 explosive in a blasting cap blew his head off. He was cunning, very friendly, very, just a very disarming character. And I thought for some time about, and of course we prosecuted me, sentenced to death and only executed. In the decades since then, I started and stopped trying to write a book about them.

And then during when the pandemic came, I got serious about it. I got Sean involved. And we began writing the book and had to start. stop for the Murdoch trial. What I saw during the Murdoch trial and after the Murdoch trial was this huge community of true crime officinados, people that were hooked on true crime. And so when I came out of that, we decided to finish the book because we thought there'd be a market for it. And people would be interested in this story because it's so unique and so on one level, gruesome on the other philosophical sort of wrestling with the death penalty. So that's how it came

about and that's what motivated it. I thought it was a story that people would like to hear and see and read about. And I think we're right about that. I think you're right too because this Peewee Gaskins guy, I mean, he is horrific. I mean, he's a horrific character. And what really stuns me about him is that had he maybe been wired a little differently or maybe if he hadn't you know you write about how he like drank that turpentine and then he was just never right again i mean he was born to like a very young mother who knows if it's it's nature versus nurture i just have no idea um but if he had put all of his smarts and his intelligence that he had and like he was able to fix anything he was not a dumb guy But if he had directed that in a positive way, he could have been a very positive force in

life. Instead, he made choices to kill people. And he committed horrific, horrific crimes, including murdering that poor little two-year-old girl after killing her mother. I mean, this guy was a monster. And so... Well, I mean, on one hand, look, I've read about all the previous murders, I watched what he did on the murder we convicted him of, and I had the opportunity to talk to him from time to time. You know, his personality, sort of a affable, hale fellow, well-met kind of guy, the first time I saw him was in a bond hearing in October of 1982, and as he walked into the courtroom, his hands shackled and feet with shackles also sort of have shuffled in. He looked over at me and said, hi, Dick. And of course, my reflection,

he said, hey, Pee Wee, how you doing? And from that point forward, it was Dick and Peewee when we were not in front of a jury. And I think in the book, I recount sitting there at lunch during the trial. And again, he was such a persuasive con man. He convinced the guards to let him eat in his lunch in the courtroom rather than down the holding cell. And I'm sitting there scribbling away, working on getting ready for the witness the afternoon, and I hear Pee Wee in that high-pitched voice, and I remember it as if it were yesterday, Dick, Dick, I said, what do you want, peewee? He said, you know, you're a lot like me. I said, I sort of looked over, Adam recoiled, and I said, what are you talking about? He said, you like killing. You know, like me, you like killing. I said, no, no, no, no.

That's ridiculous. He said, well, you look like you really like killing me. you're enjoying it and I said no no I'm here to do justice and he he said oh no you're enjoying this too much and you know your view of justice where I've been in prison most of my life your view of justice depends on whether you're giving it or getting it sort of a sexual innuendo there and he just cackled I mean this is a guy on trial for his life and he's trying to get in my head about the death penalty and about me being a killer like him So, and that wasn't the only encounter I had with him, as detail in the book. And I just think he was such a unique, and I really never bore him any personal ill will,

even though he did beat a two-year-old to death with a hammer and drown her mother, and, you know, stabbed, shot, poison, blew up, 14 people. All the while, driving around his community over in Florence and Sumter, what we call the PD part of South Carolina, and his vehicle of a choice? A hearse. This guy many times had bodies in the back of that hearse, and people were just yucking it up about old pele. He'd be driving that purple hearse around, and he had a horn, a siren on it, and he'd get kids and ride them around and blow the siren and entertain them. I mean, he was unique. He sort of a, and, of course, married six times, never divorced, and most

that several of them were under, when I say underage. One was 14. So he had an obsession with young girls. He killed people. He's not a Bundy or a Jeffrey Dahmer with this pattern of certain kinds of people wanted to kill. His response to what he thought broke the social morays like the pregnant woman was pregnant by a white woman, pregnant by a black woman, pregnant by a black man the child was half black half white and he just thought that violated the code of of his code of conduct of racial segregation and they are better off dead than alive he had people that did drugs or sold drugs that he he which he didn't do drugs hated drugs he poisoned a woman who had been selling drugs put battery acid in her Coca-Cola so

he's a complicated guy, smart guy, cunning guy, and got away with murder for, you know, five or six years. Murder after murder after murder. So you're right, he could have been something else, but he was probably sexually abused as a small child. We know when he went to reform school, the Florence School, Industrial School for white boys in the 40s. There were no It was obviously segregated back then. One big dorm, he was the smallest guy there, obviously sexually assaulted numerous times. He escaped eight times. The superintendent, I think this is telling you, in 1945, I believe, wrote after he escaped the last time they were sending him to the mental hospital to be evaluated, said clearly this young man has homicidal tendencies and will in the future kill somebody.

I mean, they could see it back then when he was 14 years old. Yeah, some things just don't change, right? I mean, human beings are human beings. They could spot it back then. Right. Even back then, right. I mean, they could see it coming. So I thought it was a fascinating character.

I thought it was a fascinating case. And I think the book, I'm very proud of this book. It comes out next Tuesday to 16th. And I'll be all over the state and all over the country signing books and trying to promote it. I think it's worth a read. I think it's based on the pre-orders. I think a lot of people want to read it. Yeah, I think a lot of people probably do want to read it because this is like somebody that I think that a lot of people aren't aware of.

And he is somebody who is, I mean, all of these serial killers are incredibly terrifying. but this is somebody if you are interested in this subject matter it's not somebody that a lot of people have heard of so you kind of are one of the first people to really tell this story and you had a front row seat to it because you were so intimately involved in the case i want you to talk to me a little bit about you know pursuing the death penalty against this guy even though you were morally opposed to it but you said look i took an oath i swore to uphold the law and this was the law at the time and and I was the prosecutor. Well, and I talk about this in the book. My dad was a B-17 pilot during World War II from England. He went on the first two Berlin raids, horrific, horrific losses. And while I was a prosecutor and doing death penalty cases, we had this discussion about, you know, my dad was the most gentle,

not pacifist, but certainly wasn't somebody that would relish killing anybody. And yet, when I talked to him about that first Berlin raid, I said, you know, y'all got shot up real bad. And what was the military target in Berlin that was so important? He said, I said, would you bomb in Berlin? He said, Berlin. He said, you know, the Germans were bombing the Blitzkrieg of 19, They bombed London every night, every night, V2's coming in.

They were trying to demoralize the population. Their role was to bomb Berlin and make the Germans pull their fighter defenses back from the channel to defend Germany, which would give the opportunity for D-Day. So I said, well, you just bomb Berlin, you killed women and children and civilians. He said it was an act of self-defense. You will kill when it's an act of self-defense. The most pacifistic person will do that if it's them or us. And so I always looked at, after that discussion,

I always looked at the death penalty as an act of self-defense. And that's why Gaskins, who had been convicting sentenced to death in the late 70s, had those sentences reversed after the Furman v. Georgia decision by the U.S. Supreme Court and then allowed to plead guilty to life sentences. He's given that break. He's eligible for parole. There was no life without parole back then, and yet he undertakes this effort to kill a guy on death row. Not for money, but I mean, I think he did it. The guy on death row was a black guy who killed two white folks a couple during an armed robbery. It was the son of those two folks that got Gaskins to do it.

I think he did it for the challenge and it satisfied some racial animus he had. So I point this out, I'm convinced even more today than even back then that the death penalty was appropriate for Gaskins. two weeks before he was to be executed, he tried to get his son to kidnap my four-year-old daughter and hold her hostage in exchange for me getting him brought up to the courthouse from where he thought he could escape. And he told, and the son in his statement said, when he asked his father what he should do if I wouldn't do that, and he said, kill her. He was telling his son to kill a four-year-old girl, my daughter, who, so, you know, am I? Do you have any remorse over him being put in the electric chair and basically burned to death?

No. But at the same time, I don't relish it. I think that's the important thing. I have always been concerned about prosecutors with little gallows on their desk or, you know, or go, I didn't go watch. I could have watched Gaskins executed. Why would I do that? I'm not, I don't like killing people. Why would I want to watch that?

I have no idea why any prosecutor who's supposed to be a professional would want to go watch somebody execute it. There's no, is there some satisfaction? If you get satisfaction from that, you're no better than they are. Well, Dick, I agree with you on that point. The book is fascinating, and I hope so many people will check it out. Thank you so much for your time. Well, thank you so much for having me on. Again, this was a labor, not of love, but certainly one that I enjoyed,

doing. I enjoyed writing it. I loved working with Sean. And I think we've got a book that's very readable and should be entertaining, maybe not the right word, but fascinating. Indeed. Dig Me a Grave is on sale now. You can find it wherever most books are sold. And that's it for this episode of Crime Fix. I'm Ann Jeanette Levy. Thanks so much for being with me. I'll see you back here next time. Thank you.