Donald Henry Gaskins Jnr

Pee Wee

Florence South Carolina Welcome Sign

Few observers would agree with Donald Gaskinss claim that he was born special and fortunate on March 13, 1933, in rural Florence County, South Carolina. An illegitimate child who never met his father, Gaskins was known for the first 13 years of his life as Junior Parrott (his mothers maiden name) or simply as Pee Wee, a derisive reference to his size. Gaskins was alternately beaten and ignored by a series of brutal step-daddies until his mother finally married one of them in 1943, the union adding four half-siblings to the family. The new man of the house beat Gaskins and his other children just for practice, as Pee Wee recalled, but the violence was a part of daily life, Gaskins steadfastly insisted that I certainly werent in no way what you could ever call abused.

Still, something was obviously wrong with Junior Parrott. He was pissed off at girls from his earliest memory, unable to explain the rage coherently. By age 10, he suffered from the onset of a lifelong bothersomeness, described as feeling like a ball of molten lead rolling around in my guts and up my spine into my head. That feeling presaged outbursts of erratic violence, sometimes assuaged by forays into criminal activity.

Gaskins was clever with his hands, a natural around machines and motors. He quit school at age eleven to work on cars at a local garage, teaming with two friends named Danny and Marsh in his spare time to form a marauding gang they dubbed The Trouble Trio. Starting off with thefts of gasoline from service stations after closing time, they soon graduated to residential burglaries, counseled along the way by Dannys ex-convict father. Buying an old car with the proceeds from their robberies, they ranged farther afield, visiting prostitutes in Charleston and Columbia. Their sexual experiments also included younger boys, but the Trouble Trio made a critical mistake when they gang-raped Marshs younger sister. Threats and promises of cash failed to secure her silence, and parental wrath descended on the boys in full force. Dannys father defended him with a shotgun, but Gaskins and Marsh were strung up by their wrists in a barn and whipped bloody by parents wielding a leather strap in relays.

Pee Wees cohorts fled the area as soon as Marsh could walk again, and Gaskins soloed for a while before he met another teenage thief, resuming weekend burglaries. One Saturday in 1946, he was prowling a house when one of the tenants -- a girl he knew -- surprised him. She was armed with a hatchet, slashing at Gaskins and chasing him outside, where he disarmed her and struck back, gashing her arms and splitting her scalp. The girl survived to identify Gaskins, whereupon he was jailed for assault with a deadly weapon and intent to kill. The judge found him guilty as charged and consigned him to the South Carolina Industrial School for Boys until his 18th birthday. Junior Parrott heard his true name for the first time in the courtroom, as sentence was pronounced.