Donald Henry Gaskins Jnr

The Fugitive

Mugshot of Donald Pee Wee Gaskins

Whatever Gaskins may have learned from his prison college education, it did not include a course on staying out of trouble. Reunited briefly with his mother and stepfather, he returned to work in the tobacco sheds, until an argument with his stepfather came to blows and Gaskins threatened the older mans life with a pitchfork. From there, he moved in with a cousin and resumed stripping cars, soon reverting to his old pattern of residential burglaries, looking for cheap sex in honky-tonk bars.

Late in 1961 Gaskins had a near-miss brush with salvation. He went to work for circuit-riding preacher George Todd, driving the ministers van and serving as his general assistant, but the gospel had no impact on Pee Wee. Instead, he seized the opportunity to loot homes while they traveled, selling off whatever he could steal to willing buyers on the road. Along the way, in 1962, he met wife number three, a 17-year-old who caught his eye despite the fact that she was old by my standards.

Marriage, like religion, failed to civilize Gaskins. During his second year with Rev. Todd, he was jailed for statutory rape of a 12-year-old girl in Florence County. Taken to the courthouse for arraignment, Gaskins slipped out a window, stole a county car, and fled to Greensboro, North Carolina. There, he soon met and married wife number four -- another 17-year-old -- and abandoned her after three months. It werent that I stopped loving her, he later wrote. It were the edginess and bothersomeness stirring around inside me...I got so edgy and mad at the world, I just had to get away. As for his many wives, Pee Wee maintained, I truly loved them all,

Briefly reunited with his third wife in Georgia, Gaskins was en route to Florida when a highway patrolman tried to stop him for speeding. Fearing arrest as a fugitive, Gaskins drove his car into a swamp and escaped on foot, leaving not-so-ex-wife to the law. From there, he returned to North Carolina and wife number four, but she blew the whistle on him and he was extradited for trial. Jurors in Florence County rejected Pee Wees argument that sex with pre-teen girls was justifiable. Convicted in 1964, he got six years for statutory rape and two more for his flight from custody.

The state pen in Columbia had been renamed the Central Correctional Institute in Gaskins absence, but nothing else had changed. He brought his reputation with him and did easy time as a Power Man, paroled in November 1968 on the condition that he stay out of Florence County for two years. Upon release, Pee Wee later said, I was damned determined I never was going back to prison -- which didnt meant that I wasnt ever going to do anything illegal again. I just wasnt never planning on getting caught.

That meant getting rid of witnesses, and Gaskins reckoned he was equal to the task.

And in the process, he would have some fun.