Every Town - MEANEST Man in America: The Terrifying Story of Pee Wee Gaskins

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

Whenever someone got into the car with Gaskins, by the time they understood what was happening, I mean really understood, they were already miles away from anywhere and anyone who could save them. That was the plan all along and Gaskins loved knowing that no matter how much they cried, no one would hear them and he could comfortably do whatever it is he wanted. 👀 Watch This Episode On Youtube: https://youtu.be/P5xklTIB__4 👁 Check out our movie AN ANGRY BOY: https://www.anangryboy.com 💀 MERCH: https://scary-mysteries-merch.dashery.com 💀 Scary Mysteries SECRET VAULT: https://www.patreon.com/c/scarymysteries/collections   🎧 Our Other Podcast Scary Mysteries: ⁠https://open.spotify.com/show/3ZooEZMoZ421WdsOVJhVkT⁠ 👁 Instagram: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/andrew.fitzg⁠ 👁 TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewfitzgerald⁠ 👁 Facebook: ⁠https://www.facebook.com/scarymysteriesofficial⁠ 👁 X: ⁠https://x.com/ScaryMysteries1⁠  🗣 Business Inquiries, questions and comments hit us up at ⁠[e-mail]⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster. If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Every town has a dark side. South Carolina, 1975.

And back then especially, the roads out in this area the country stretched long and empty between towns, cutting through farmland, swamp, and dense walls of pine trees that stretched on for what seemed like forever. And for people here without many options, hitchhiking wasn't risky, it was just life. A practical decision.

as they stuck out their thumb, and trusted that the next person to slow down was just a neighborly individual, going somewhere ordinary. Now, most of the time they were, but sometimes the person picking them up is a man named Donald Gaskins, who will go on to be named the meanest man in America,

and not just because he killed dozens of people, but because of how he did it. Hey, guys, it's Andrew. Welcome to another episode of Everytown. Thanks for tuning in. And whenever someone got into the car with Gaskins by the time they understood what was happening. And I mean really understood, they were already miles away from anywhere and anyone who could save them. And that was the plan all

along, and Gaskins loved knowing that no matter how much they cried, no one would hear them, and he could comfortably do whatever it is he wanted. So, let's head on over to South Carolina and dig into the meanest man in America, the terrifying true story of Donald Gaskins. Disappearances in rural South Carolina back in the day didn't always make headlines. The reality was that people could vanish quietly and nobody would necessarily put it together. There were no smartphones or social media, no digital footprint to trace. And sometimes people just left town and that was it. They moved on or so everyone assumed.

You never really knew what happened to them or where they went and for a long time, nobody looked too hard. But eventually, here in South Carolina, while the numbers started adding up to an absurd amount that couldn't be ignored. And as it turns out, these missing persons all had one thing in common. Donald Henry Gaskins was born on March 13, 1933 in Florence County. And from the very first moments of his life, nothing was ever stable. He never knew his biological father, his mother was still a teen when she had him, and struggled

to hold things together. And because of this, they moved constantly. constantly drifting from place to place, and wherever they landed, well, new men seemed to follow. And most of them were abusive, and Donald was small and physically weak for his age, which made him an easy target, both at home and everywhere else. Violence was the norm for him, neglect came to be expected, and safety was something that happened to other people.

One of the earliest details about his childhood tells you everything you need to know about the environment he was raised in. At just one year old, Donald drank kerosene, toxic fuel commonly used in homes at the time. The poisoning triggered severe convulsions that reportedly lasted for two years. Whether it caused lasting neurological damage is something nobody ever fully determined, but what it does tell you is how little supervision this child actually had. And things only got worse from there.

His mother's partners came and went and many of them treated Donald harshly. Sometimes it was verbal, other times it turned physical. There are even claims that he didn't fully know his own name until he heard it spoken aloud in a courtroom for the first time. Now, that detail is hard to verify, but it tells you something. This was a child who was barely seen or acknowledged as someone whose existence was more of an inconvenience than anything else. The school, of course, wasn't any better.

Donald was significantly smaller than the other kids. He eventually talked out around five, foot four as a grown man. That made him a target from the start. The nickname Peewee followed him everywhere. And not in the harmless way nicknames sometimes do. It was meant to diminish him, and it did exactly that. So by 11 years old, he'd had enough of school and just dropped out entirely, picking up work at a local garage where he fell in with two other boys named Danny and Marsh. And none of them were in school, and none of them had much in the way of supervision. And together, they called themselves the Trouble Trio, and that name wasn't all just to act cool.

It started small at first, breaking into homes, petty theft. The kind of thing you could still chalk up to kids just acting out. But over time, things escalated, and when Donald was 13 years old, well, he crossed a line that he'd never come back from. During one of their routine break-ins, a young woman came downstairs and confronted the teens. Instead of running, Donald attacked her with an axe, hitting her in the head and leaving her for dead. She survived, though, and ultimately was able to identify him. He was arrested, convicted of assault with intent to kill, and on June 18th of 1946, he was sent to a juvenile correctional facility where he would remain until his 18th birthday. But as you can imagine for a kid like Donald, while prison didn't go all that smoothly, and most certainly didn't reform.

him. If anything, it just made him worse. His time there was pretty brutal. He was repeatedly assaulted by other inmates and tried to escape multiple times, failed every time, until one attempt finally worked. After getting out, he went straight back to what he knew, the stealing, the violence. At one point he began seeing a 13-year-old girl. But freedom didn't last too long, and in an unexpected move, he actually turned himself in and went back to finish his sentence. When he was finally released at 18, it seemed like he might try to build something resembling a normal life.

He found work on a tobacco farm, but pretty quickly he started stealing from them and selling tobacco on the side for extra money. Over time, that small hustle turned into something much bigger and more calculated. Donald started working with local farmers, offering to burn down their barns so they could claim insurance payouts. And for a while, it worked until it didn't. Suspicion started a build, and in 1953, the daughter of the tobacco farmer that Donald worked for, confronted him about what he was doing, and he reacted the only way he seemed to know how, with violence. He grabbed a hammer and cracked the girl in the skull. She survived, but he was arrested and sentenced to

six years in prison. And once again, it didn't slow him down much, only hardened her. inside, and this is where something in him shifted even further. He later wrote this down in a book he wrote titled Final Truth, the autobiography of a serial killer. He said he began to believe survival came down to one simple thing. Fear, and that's it. The way he sought, if people feared you, they wouldn't touch you. Which isn't all that wrong, but when you think about that in terms of what it does to a person's

Psyche? That's pretty messed up. But in order to prove to himself that his theory was correct, well, he had to test it out. So he killed one of the most feared men in prison by slitting his throat and leaving him to bleed out. It got him solitary confinement, plus an additional three years, but it also gave him what he wanted, a reputation and respect. In 1961, after serving his time, he was released, and two years later, sent back to prison for him. for assaulting a 12-year-old girl. He got eight more years, but released in 1968. By this time he was 35 years old,

and this is when the real crimes begin. He moved to Sumner, South Carolina, a small town where he found work with a roofing company, and began presenting himself as just another local worker. On the surface, he was putting on a facade for everyone, but underneath it all, nothing had really changed. It was September of 1969 when Donald claimed he committed his first murder. He was driving toward Myrtle Beach when he spotted a young woman hitchhiking along the road.

The late teens, maybe 18 or 19, and he pulled over. As she told him she was heading to Charleston, and he made small talk, even offered to take her the whole way despite it being well out of his route. But he had a condition. He wanted her to have dinner with him and share a hotel room for the night. She said no, and, well, that pissed him off. He then told her he'd let her out soon, but he never stopped. The road got quieter as traffic thinned out.

The signs of life along the roadside disappeared one by one. Then he turned off onto a dirt track and kept going. And what happened next comes entirely from Donald's own account, so keep that in mind. He said that something changed in him in that moment. that he made a decision, and once he made it, there was no hesitation left in him at all. When the woman reached into the back seat to grab her bag, he attacked, slamming his fist into the side of her head, and then driving her face into the dashboard. He did it again and again until she went limp and slid down onto the floorboard.

He then used her belt to bind her hands behind her back and looped his own belt around her neck. and then he kept driving. About a quarter mile down that dirt road, he went until it dead ended into nothing. What happened after that was something else entirely. At this point, the woman began coming back into consciousness. Donald claimed that he parked the car, got out, went over to the passenger's side,

and pulled her out of the car by the belt around her neck. Every time she screamed, he just pulled it tighter, cutting off the sound before it could carry anywhere. And what followed was a prolonged assault of an extreme and brutal nature, the kind of violence that investigators who spent careers in law enforcement said they had never encountered anything quite like. When he was done, he put her in the trunk of his car and drove to a nearby swamp. He tired her to a tree stump and pushed her body down into the water until she sank beneath the surface.

Then he went back to the car, cleaned up what he could, and went through a duffel bag. He found $300 in cash in an ID from Massachusetts. He later claimed he couldn't fully remember her name. Said it might have been something like Lila or Lila, which tells you everything about how little this moment actually meant to him. She was not a person to him. She was an experience. After that, he drove away.

No case has ever been to feel. definitively linked to this account. The victim has never been identified, but Gaskins described it as the beginning, the moment he understood what he was capable of and what he intended to keep doing. By the end of 1969, he claimed he had killed three people, the ones he called his coastal kills.

These were strangers, hitchhikers, people who generally wouldn't be reported missing right away. Whether that number is accurate, it. Nobody can say for certain, but what investigators would later confirm is that this period marked the beginning of a pattern. That pattern was about to get a lot more personal. In November of 1970, two teenage girls disappeared. There were 15-year-old Janice Kirby and 17-year-old Patricia Alsbrough. And Janice, well, she was Donald's niece. He had made himself a fixture in their lives by buying them alcohol and giving them rides, presenting himself.

as the cool uncle they could come to when they needed something. They trusted him completely, and on the night they disappeared, the girls went to see him. What happened next was pieced together later through Donald's confession and the evidence that supported it. The girls, they had been drinking. Janice was intoxicated, and Patricia was out past her curfew. Donald offered them a ride, and they got in the car,

but he didn't take them home. Instead, he drove them to a secrequent. included property. When he made advances towards Janice, Patricia fought back, hitting him hard enough over the head to knock him unconscious for a few minutes. Both girls then ran. When he came to, they were gone, and he grabbed his gun, got in the car, and went after them. They were running down a dirt road toward the tree line when he spotted them. He fired a shot into the air and ordered them to stop, and they did. He then put them both in the trunk and drove them to back to the secluded area. The girls fought, but they were no match for the grown man,

even though he was small. He beat them until they stopped, and by the end of that night, both girls were dead. He disposed of them separately, Patricia in a septic tank, and Janice in a shallow grave on his property. When they were reported missing, suspicion briefly landed on Donald, and people knew the girls had been with them, but there were no bodies and no witnesses. So they were labeled runaways. And for a while, that explanation was enough to make everyone lose interest in the case. By 1971, Donald was working at a used car business, rebuilding old vehicles and keeping himself busy enough to look like a man with a normal life. But in reality, this was one of his most active and violent periods yet. He said he carried out at least 11 more

coastal kills during this stretch. The strangers picked up along the high. highways of South Carolina who were just never seen again. The details he provided in his confessions were extreme, prolonged torture, burning, cutting, even waterboarding. He liked to try out new ways to inflict pain. This is what brought him pleasure. One of his victims during this time was a woman named Martha. Now Martha wasn't a stranger,

but she knew Donald and spent time around the shop, and the two of them had an ongoing casual relationship. But at some point that relationship became a problem. Martha told people she was pregnant with Donald's kid, and shortly after making that claim, well, she disappeared. Donald later admitted to what happened. He told her he wanted to talk things through and took her out to his rural property under that pretense. She went with them because she trusted him enough. Once they were there, though, he restrained her, forced handfuls of pills down her throat. made her wash them down with beer.

She lost consciousness pretty quickly. He then drove her out to a ditch and left her there along with everything she had on her. Nobody came looking. Nobody knew where to look. And Donald, well, he just went back to work on Monday morning like nothing ever happened. In October that same year,

16-year-old Anne Colberson had been hitchhiking when Donald picked her up. Unlike others, he kept her alive for four days. inside an abandoned house. He tortured her and said he actually grew quite fond of Anne for how calm she managed to stay throughout the entire process, likely thinking she'd get out alive if she played along. But in the end, he hit her in the head with a ball peen hammer and then slid her throat.

And by 1972, Donald had started to worry that the walls were closing in, so he packed up and moved to Charleston, taking a job with a construction company. A fresh start, so to speak, but in reality he'd just moved himself closer to the coastal highways where he'd already been hunting for years. And maybe that was a subconscious move because the violence didn't slow down. It accelerated. In December of 73, he killed 22-year-old Doreen Dempsey and her two-year-old daughter, Robin. Doreen was seven months pregnant, and had come to Donald for help finding somewhere to stay. He told her he knew of a place and offered a driver there, and neither of them ever arrived.

He strangled Robin and slid Doreen's throat and buried them together in a shallow grave. In his book, Donald described this as the hardest murder for him to discuss, so make of that what you will. In 1974 brought two more. Johnny Sellers reportedly owed him money and was lowered out under the pretense of settling the debt. He didn't make it home, and Jesse Ruth followed shortly after. And then came 1975, the year Donald would later call one of his busiest. More victims, more claims, and most of them impossible to verify, but some of what happened that year is documented. For example, he took a contract killing.

A wealthy landowner named Silas Yates and stopped giving his mistress expensive gifts, so she paid Donald $1,500 to solve that problem permanently. And he stabbed Silas multiple times, cut his throat, and buried the body. Months later, he killed Diane Neely, the wife of his own best friend. See, Diane had found out about Silas and came to Donald with a demand. $5,000 or she'd talk, which isn't the smartest move when you're talking to a serial killer. While Donald smiled and agreed to pay, told her to meet up with him the next day. And she showed up, smartly with a friend named Avery Howard for protection.

Donald drove them out to a dirt road, and shot them both and put them in the ground. By this point, the pattern was clear. Coastal kills, strangers on the highway and people nobody was immediately looking for, and personal kills, people who knew them, trusted them, and got too close. two completely different categories of murder, and for years the system that was supposed to catch him never connected the dots. But then came the case that was impossible to brush aside. In the summer of 1975, Donald killed 13-year-old Kim Geckins.

Kim was a runaway from North Charleston, who ended up crossing paths with Gaskins, and he offered her his place. People in the area knew she was there, and then one day, She was just gone. No one heard from her again. Well, police from North Charleston, started poking around, and their investigation brought them

right to Gaskin's front door. Right to a man with a messed up criminal history, and a guy who had been on people's radar for potentially all the other stuff he did they didn't have proof of. Well, he told them that Kim had run away. And maybe that would have been the end of that one, except Gaskins just couldn't chill out.

for one second. Because not long after, two more men vanished. Dennis Bellamy and John Knight, arranged to meet Donald over a deal involving stolen guns. Donald had no intention of paying what he owed. When they arrived, he killed them both and buried them in shallow graves on his property. He was running out of Rome, and he was running out of time.

The Kim Geckin's story wasn't going away, and investigators started digging into those who were close with gasket. to try to get the real story. That's when they talked to Walter Neely, who was Donald's best friend. When police first spoke to Walter, he claimed he knew nothing. But almost the moment that conversation ended,

he picked up the phone and called Donald and told him the questions it started. For Donald, that was all he needed to hear, and he decided to leave. But this time, he didn't get far. Police caught up with him as he was climbing into a taxi, bags in hand trying to get out of town. And he was arrested on the spot.

At first, the case was limited, but that all changed fast. Because three weeks later, Walter Neely came back, and this time, he told the truth. He admitted that Donald had spoken to him about multiple murders, specific names, specific locations, and then the detail that changed everything. He told investigators there were bodies buried on Gaskin's property, a private little cemetery. Gaskins agreed to a plea deal in exchange that he would take investigators to those graves, and he did, leading them to remote locations that without him may never have been found at all. Any bodies were recovered. On May 24th of 76, Gaskins was then sentenced to death.

Before they took him away, he looked at the court and said something that nobody in that room ever forgot. There are quite a few more bodies that have never been mentioned. he said, but you've got enough for now. Nobody knew how much of that was true, and the honest answer is they still don't. Even behind bars, the violence didn't stop. In 82, while on death row, Gaskins killed again. It was a fellow inmate named Rudolph Tiner, using a homemade explosive device disguised as an intercom speaker, while he detonated it through the prison wall when Tiner put it to his ear. That was the end of him. It was the kind of audacious, calculated act that had to find Gaskins' entire life,

and it earned him a second death sentence. Nearly a decade later, while it was finally carried out. At 110 in the morning, on September 6th of 91, Donald Henry Gaskins was strapped into the electric chair at the Broad River Correctional Institution. He was 58 years old, and his last words were simple. I'll let my lawyer talk for me, and then he was gone. At the time of his death, he had been convicted of nine murders, but he claimed far more. Sometimes he said 80, sometimes 100, sometimes higher.

Most of those claims were never proven, and many likely never will be. So the question that remains, the one investigators have never been able to fully answer, is how many victims did Donald really have? And more unsettling than that, how many of them are still out there somewhere, and shallow graves along those quiet back roads just waiting to be found. So that's going to do it for this week's episode of Everytown. I appreciate you tuning in.

If you want more insane true crime stories, well, we got a ton. So subscribe and go check some others out. Remember to come on back here next week for another episode of Everytown filled with scary, strange, and mysterious stories because you never know. Maybe your town will be next.