Donald Henry Gaskins Jnr

Crime School

South Carolina map, with Florence in red

Gaskins would later say that he received his real education at the state reformatory near Florence, a few miles from where he grew up. His second night in custody, Gaskins was ambushed in the shower, beaten and gang-raped by a group of 20 boys. Afterward, he accepted protection from his dormitorys Boss-Boy, who demanded daily sex and other services while sometimes loaning Gaskins out to friends.

With no escape from torment inside the walls, Gaskins plotted his first escape. Thirteen months after his arrival, he fled the reform school with four other inmates. All were captured the next afternoon, but Gaskins leaped from the truck on his way back to Florence, this time running as far as the hideout he had once shared with his cronies of the Trouble Trio. A local lawman found him there and persuaded Gaskins to surrender. His reward: 30 lashes with a strap and 30 days hard labor isolation, digging ditches in the broiling daytime heat, with whippings every night for trivial infractions. After serving his penalty time, Gaskins went back to his dorm and the Boss-Boy who owned him.

For his second escape, Gaskins chose a single accomplice and remained at large for six days before bloodhounds tracked him down. The punishment this time was 50 lashes and four months hard labor. Returning to his dorm, Gaskins found a new Boss-Boy who wasnt so easy to please. This one, Pee Wee recalled, particularly liked to watch gang-rapes with me on the bottom.

Gaskins made his third escape alone, fleeing south to an aunts home in Williamsburg County. She convinced him to return after the warden promised leniency, but the promise was a lie. Back in Florence, Gaskins faced more isolation and a nightly regimen of 20 lashes. On the seventh day he punched a guard and was beaten unconscious, packed off to the state mental hospital in Columbia for five weeks. While there, Gaskins suffered a ruptured appendix, his life saved by emergency surgery.

Deemed sane and fit for normal custody, Gaskins was shipped back to the reformatory in 1950. Light duty soon gave way to threats of whipping in reprisal for his prior conduct, fleeing to Sumter, where he joined a traveling carnival. He fell in love with a 13-year-old member of the crew and married her -- the first of his six wives -- on Jan. 22, 1951. After one night together, for his brides sake, Gaskins surrendered to authorities and spent the last three months of his sentence in solitary confinement.

Released on his 18th birthday, Gaskins tried four different jobs in his first six months of freedom, finally settling down to work on a tobacco plantation. Soon, he joined forces with a reformatory bunkmate to loot and burn tobacco barns, collaborating with landowners on insurance fraud. They torched six barns before Christmas 1956, but rumors spread quickly and Pee Wees partner wisely fled the state. Gaskins stayed on, but he soon had cause to regret it.

One day on the job, his employers teenage daughter and a girlfriend cornered Gaskins in the barn, taunting him with rumors of his barn-burning forays. Gaskins snapped, lashed out with a hammer and cracked the girls skull. Jailed for arson, assault with a deadly weapon and attempted murder, he beat the first charge at trial, then struck a bargain on the others. The prosecutor promised Gaskins 18 months confinement in return for a guilty plea, but Pee Wee failed to get the deal in writing and Judge T.B. Greniker had other ideas. He pronounced a five-year sentence, then added another year for contempt when Gaskins cursed him.

Pee Wee was on his way to the Big House.