Donald Henry Gaskins Jnr

Coastal Kills

Gaskins settled in Sumter, South Carolina, working construction and stripping hot cars on weekends, cruising bars for sex. He still suffered them aggravated and bothersome feelings, now accompanied by headaches, stomach cramps, and pain in his groin. Increasingly, he raged and brooded over women who rejected him. He drove compulsively along the Carolina coast, later recalling, It was like I was looking for something special on them coastal highways, only I didnt know what.

In September 1969 he found out.

The hitchhiker was young and blond, bound for Charleston, thumbing rides outside Myrtle Beach. Gaskins picked her up and propositioned her. When she laughed in his face, he beat her unconscious and drove to an old logging road. There, he raped and sodomized his victim, then tortured and mutilated her with a knife. She still clung to life when he weighted her body and sank her in a swamp to drown. Leaving the scene, Gaskin recalled, I felt truly the best I ever remembered feeling in my whole life.

Forensic pathologist working on grave

Gaskins later called that first impulsive homicide his miracle ... a beam of light, like a vision. From that day on, he made a habit of trolling the coastal highways on weekends, seeking victims and exploring future dump sites. By Christmas 1969 he had committed two more coastal kills -- ones where I didnt know the victims or their names or nothing about them. It was recreational murder, refined over time until he could keep his victims alive and screaming for hours on end, sometimes for days.

In 1970 Gaskins averaged one coastal kill every six weeks, experimenting with different torture methods, disappointed when his victims died prematurely. I preferred for them to last as long as possible, he wrote. The next year, Pee Wee claimed 11 nameless victims, including his first kidnap-slaying of two girls at once. Ideas for tormenting his captives came to Gaskins as he browsed through hardware stores, eyeing the tools. I never gave no thought to stopping, he admitted. They was a clock-kind of thing. When it was time, I went and killed.

Bones of another of Gaskins victim

His first male victims were acquired by accident, two long-haired boys whom Gaskins took for girls as he drove up behind them in March 1974. Gender would not save them, though. Gaskins drove them both to a hideout near Charleston, where he sodomized and tortured both, cooking and cannibalizing their severed genitals before he granted them the mercy of death.

Gaskins lost track of the victims he murdered for sport between September 1969 and December 1975. They were hard to recall, he explained, because theyre mostly just a jumble of faces and bodies and memories of things I did to them. In terms of numbers, he said, The closest figure I can come up with is 80 to 90. Sadistic murder was addictive for Pee Wee. I finally reached the point where I wanted the bothersomeness to start, he wrote. I looked forward to it every month, because it felt so good relieving myself of it.

The only coastal victim he recalled by name was 16-year-old Anne Colberson, picked up near Myrtle Beach in 1971. Gaskins was not hunting at the time, but he refused to miss a golden opportunity. Over four days of rape and torture, he became real fond of her. Finally, because she had been so nice to me, Gaskins stunned her with a hammer and cut her throat before dropping Colberson into quicksand.

After search, police rope off area

The coastal kills were always recreation, though. However numerous the victims, however atrocious their suffering, they meant nothing to Gaskins. The focus of his life lay inland, where murder and business mixed.