Hi, I'm Holly and I'm Hailey. Welcome to Mountain Mysteries Tales from Appalachia. And we're live. Welcome back.
You know, I had my wisdom tooth out for you, so... Yeah. How does that hurt? Oh, yes.
I just won. Yes, it was just one. Don't judge me. I mean, it's fine.
You're like, come talk to me when you've had all four of them. But mine was fine. Like, I got all four of them. I cut out.
They put me to sleep. Oh, no, no, no. No, no, no. No.
No. They numbed the area and took it out. Because you had to suck her out of there. Yeah.
With players. Oh, wait, wait. Yeah. No.
Why'd wake? They said, why don't you put in some earbuds? And I was like, why? Because it sounds...
And they were like, so you may not want to hear that sound because it's not good. It's like a crunching. Oh, yeah. It's bad.
Yeah. There's a lot of... So at one point, the dentist grabs on to the front of my teeth because they were shaking so hard. I was like, the front of my teeth are gonna fall out.
Like, they're gonna fall out. Oh my God. And so she grabs on to the front of my teeth and starts yanking. And then she was like, I heard her say, let's take a break.
And so she takes a break, stops for a minute, comes back, starts yanking again, stops, comes back, holds on to my teeth. Yeah. And like, it was a process. And then says, okay, we're done.
And I was like, oh, okay, great. And you know, I did like pack it with gauze for a little bit and like keep taking it out and repacking. The bleeding, it took probably like a day for the bleeding to stop. And then the pain did not stop for like a week.
Like the pain was bad. And I was terrified I would get a dry stop. Yeah, that's bad. Luckily, I didn't.
But it was not fun. I had like a headache for an entire week. Yeah, it was not fun. Let me tell you, I have weathered through like, I'm pretty pain tolerant.
I really am pain tolerant. This is not great. No, it is the things that I think I am going to sail through that usually take me out that seem easy. Well, and we've both been like sick recently.
I had the flu a couple weeks ago. Yeah, you would strip my dad had COVID and I was around him and I was like, well, crap. So I've been I was testing like every day because I just have a million and one COVID testing around. But I've never got it.
So that's good. I was very grateful for that. But it's been Christmas. I know.
I know how was your Christmas? It was good. Yeah. Yeah.
It was good. It was good. You know, it's just a busy time of year. I mean, it's good to spend time with family and you know, have that time.
But it's a busy time of year. It is. Well, I love we do a tradition where Santa will wrap the doorway with it's so much fun with wrapping paper. And so in the morning, my son, and it's every year since he was about a year old, you know, he gets to bust through the wrapping paper and then see what Santa brought him.
And it's so magical and really sweet. And so he was so excited. And so he was, but you know, this year, you know, he's old enough to wear. He has to wait and like wake me up.
Like he cannot just bust through it. Like I want to record it. And so he did. And it's just very sweet.
He's so excited. So it's fun. Like magic seeing it through his eyes is really exciting because it's reinvigorating. Like it's not just like, okay, it's Christmas.
It's truly exciting. Yeah. So any good gifts? Some books.
A couple of murder books. I'm a big book giftor as well. Like I like to pick out a book that I think somebody else will enjoy. So I like to gift books.
But I also like to receive books. It's like my, I have your love language. It is books. I have so many.
I have a whole like, I mean, I have shelves and shelves full of books and most of them like I thrift. Yeah, like good wills and things like that. But like, yeah, I've got more books than I could ever read ever. But I just like to have books.
I've always like, since I was like a little kid, wanted a library in my house. And you go and now I have one. So here's a fun fact. And I don't know if you know this about me.
I don't like to read. I feel like I didn't know that about you. Yeah. But it's like, I love it.
Like I could, I mean, I hate it. That's what I'll do. That's what I've done most of Christmas break from because we're not in this. I don't have work for two weeks.
I mean, I feel like I read all the time. I read on the internet. I research things. But I mean, actually like sit down with a chapter book and just start reading it.
Yeah. Oh, it's just my favorite thing. I love it. I love it.
But yeah, that's all that's my like, I like to get to them. I think because I'm an auditory person. So I will listen to a book. I don't want to sit down and read it.
I think I also have a A.D.D. I think I just can't vote this. Interesting. I used to pretend to read in school.
Oh, yeah. Like it would be like, everybody sitting down for reading time and I would like pretend to read. Silent reading is my favorite time of the day. It was the worst thing for me ever because I could not vote.
Oh, I loved it. I loved it. I was like, because my brain would be like, I wonder what they're reading. Yeah.
Like, and my brain would think other things like, I can't wait tonight to go home and watch, you know, whatever, like TGIF. I wonder what Earls do tonight. I did not give two crafts about my book. Oh, sorry, y'all.
Read kids reading is good. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's discuss some murder in mayhem.
Why don't we? Why not? We're going to go to South Carolina. Okay.
We're in there in a minute, I feel like. Yeah. We're going to talk about serial killer. Yes.
Okay. Done. All right. I would like to thank Wikipedia for their services to my research.
Have you ever seen that little thing of a lady graduating and she was like, I would like to thank Google and Wikipedia for getting me here? Absolutely. That's me. 100% thank you Wikipedia.
Every time I opened Wikipedia, I was researching and like writing this stuff out. The little thing was like there to donate to Wikipedia and I was like, man, I really should do that. It's because of how much they have given me. You should.
Yeah, but I didn't. Sorry. So, you got to be bucks with a throw at Wikipedia. Maybe.
Why are you telling our listeners to do that? You should be doing it. I'm not going to, but they want to. Actually, no.
Does it support our Patreon? Yeah. Throw a couple bucks. Are we?
Yeah. Sure. We're the one. All right.
So we're going to talk about Donald Henry Gaskins. What a terrible name. Right. It's even worse because he was also called Pee Wee.
Was it for reasons other than just a nickname? No, he was very short. We'll get into it. All right.
So, Donald Gaskins, he was born in Florence County in South Carolina. He was the last in a line of illegitimate children. Okay. So, I think his mom kind of, you know, thrown it in, got around.
Oh, yeah. Well, that too. I mean, also that. Gaskins is very small for his age and pretty immediately gained the nickname Pee Wee.
Well, you know, as an adult, he's between five foot four inches and five foot five. He's little. Yeah. I mean, not like I expected.
My mom's five four. Yeah, but I mean, I thought he would, you know, be like five one or something. No, five four. He weighed about 130 pounds.
Yeah, a little. I don't remember the last time I went with 130 pounds yesterday. Wow. It's like half of my body.
No, no, no. I mean, yeah, it was been a minute. All right. So, Gaskins early life, he had a pretty good deal of neglect from his mother and abuse from some male relatives.
His mother took very little interest in him and that so much so was sad. The first time he learned his given name, which was Donald, was when it was read out in his first court appearance. How old was he? He was, I think 13.
No, I'm not sure how old he was. Also, the fact that his first court appearance, he was in his early teens is troubling. Yeah. Yeah.
He was often described as a great manipulator and con artist and was pretty street smart. Probably had to be. Yeah. He also had a very keen sense of humor and a friendly entertaining personality.
So he very easily got people to like him. So he'll have right. Yeah, right. When he was a year old, Gaskins reportedly drank a bottle of kerosene, which caused him to have seizures until he was about three years old.
So clearly, yeah, no one was watching him. Yeah. In his adolescence, he engaged in a violent crime spree with a group of fellow delinquents, which included burglaries, assaults, and a gang rape. My God.
At age 13, he was convicted for assaulting a young woman by hitting her in the head with an axe when she caught him breaking into her family's home. He was sentenced to five years in a reform school, which was called the South Carolina Industrial School for white boys. So I guess they had one for black children as well. What year was this?
This was in so his 13 and he was born in um, he was released from there in 1951. And he went in at 13? Yes. Went in at 13 and sentenced to five years.
So 18, 1951, five years. So he went in 1946. So, yeah, I mean, yeah, segregation. Yeah.
So this reform school was in Florence, South Carolina. And he was apparently repeatedly sexually assaulted by fellow inmates there. So he escaped from the reform school. And somehow got married while he was escaped.
Why not? Just for fun, I guess. But then he voluntarily returned to the school to complete his sentence. Okay.
He was released in 1951 at the age of 18. So I'm not sure who he got married to or was it legal age, but that was just a fun little tidbit that was thrown in there that was like, oh, also he got married. And if he got married prior to finishing his sentence, did he get married underage and was illegal? I guess.
I mean, probably. That time, you know. And who did he marry? Who knows?
He just got married. Oh, okay. You look good. You want to get hitched?
Yeah. I just got out of the reformatory. Well, so he was released at 18 in 1951. From there, he briefly worked on a tobacco plantation until he was arrested again in 1953 for attacking a teenage girl with a hammer over some alleged insult.
What does it deal with the what? I don't know. I don't know. He was sentenced to six years imprisonment in the South Carolina penitentiary.
While he was there, he earned his fellow inmates respect by killing the most feared men in the prison, Hazel Brazel. And what Gaskin's claimed was his self defense. As a result of that, he got, you know, three additional years tacked on, which feels like not enough. So I got three years tacked on for involuntary manslaughter.
But from that point on, he became the aggressor instead of the victim. He escaped from prison in 1955 by hiding in the back of a garbage truck and then fled to Florida, where he took employment with a traveling carnival. Oh my God. What a wild ride.
What a terrible fear of mine. Got arrested, murdered a guy in self defense, then becomes the like big and bad escapes in a duck garbage truck. Yeah, joins the carnival. Great.
Wild. What your children are going to these carnivals. And this man just so happens to conveniently always have an axe or hammer on. Yeah.
Well, he didn't last very long at the carnival. And he was re-arrested and then put back into prison, but then paroled in August of 1961. Do we know what he did to get arrested this time? I think they just finally caught up with us in a skid and they were like, Oh, yeah, I hear you found him.
He's not the carnival. Let me guess your weight freeze. Yeah. So following his release, he reverted to committing burglaries.
Stick with what you know. Yeah. And just, you know, kind of selling stolen property two years after his parole, he was arrested again for the sexual assault and rape of a 12 year old girl. But he absconded while awaiting his sentence.
He was re-arrested in Georgia and sentenced eight years in jail, was then paroled again in November of 1968. And upon release, he moved to the town of Sumter, South Carolina and began working with a roofing company. All right. Well, let's get into the murders, shall we?
Why the heck not? Let's do it. All right. So his first non-prison-related murder victim, this is like a year after he gets out of jail, which again, like this guy's been in and out so much.
Like, why can't we just keep him there? I don't understand why he can't get longer sentence. Right. But I guess, I mean, the, I don't know what the time, like, the sentence was for rape back in the day, but I don't feel like it was a lot.
No, let's not be. And he probably, I don't know, yeah, I'm just a good behavior or time server, right? Something like that. So he murdered a blonde female hitchhiker whom he also tortured in September of 1969.
He then sunk her body in a swamp. In his memoirs that he wrote in jail, he said, quote, all I could think about is how I could do anything I wanted to her. End quote. So the hitchhiker was the first of many.
He said he picked up and killed while driving around the coastal highways in the south. He classified these victims as his, quote, coastal kills. And these were people, both men and women who he killed for pleasure. He said he killed someone on average approximately once every six weeks and went hunting to quell his feelings of, quote, bothersomeness.
You don't say he had feelings of bothersomeness. So he decided every six weeks I just need to torture and kill somebody. Here's a thought. Now, takes a medicine.
Yeah, maybe that. Maybe that. Little therapy. He said he tortured and mutilated his victims while attempting to keep them alive for as long as possible.
He confessed to killing victims using a variety of methods, including stabbing, suffocation, mutilation. And he said he even ate some of them. Now, did he, who knows, you know, or are they just saying this for the shock vector? Potentially.
But still, not great. Gassins later confessed to killing 80 to 90 people. Again, is that shock vector? His statements to have committed any, quote, coastal kills have never been corroborated.
Gassin said he committed coastal kills every six weeks yet contradicts the statement later in his memoir that he wrote by stating he felt the overpowering need to seek out and commit a coastal kill by the tenth date of each calendar month. So we've gone from six weeks to four weeks to who knows. He also specifically named three other individuals whom he classified among his, quote, serious murders. He said an African American couple that he said were named Eddie and Birdie Brown 24, age 24 and 20, so that he murdered them in 1972 and buried them beneath a tenant house, which was never really found.
And a man named Horace Jones, who was 40, who he said he murdered in 1974. There's no evidence to support any of the statements made by Gassins that he had committed any murders other than that of Hazel Bressel and the 14 victims that we're going to talk about here in a minute. His bodies have been found and identified. So he's saying he killed 80 to 90 people.
They can't prove that, but they can prove 14, which is still a lot of people. That's a lot of victims. Wow. A lot, a lot.
I got some water before we get into this. Yeah. You need to hydrate for this story. Holy cow, I've never heard of this man before.
I hadn't either. But let's get into it. Okay. 1970.
We're going to go by year. Thank you again with a PDF, broke it down in a nice timeline for me. Really appreciate you. 1970, November.
He committed his first murder in the series. And most of the people he killed were people that he knew and killed them for personal reasons. First confirmed victims were his own niece, Janice Kirby, who was 15, and her friend Patricia Ann Alsbrook, who is 17, both of whom he beat to death. He said he was enraged at their drug abuse.
Apparently they he claimed that they were using drugs. I don't know if they were not. While others say he was attempting to sexually assault them. I like that he's taking a stand against their drug use.
Sure. Yeah, by beating them to death. Yeah, I'm not sure how you handle that. 1971 or 1972, they aren't sure, you know, when exactly this one happened.
He claimed to have poisoned Martha and Dick's junior, who was also known as Clyde. Okay. Was 20 in either 1971 or 1972. And the rumor was that Gaskins was the father of her unborn child.
Okay. And apparently she generally dated only women, but also was known to mess around with men from time to time. So I'm not sure maybe if this was she was a trans woman. But there's some fluid sexuality stuff going on there.
So not sure if that's why he killed her or if it was out of revenge, because she was a little edge drug dealer who supplied Kirby and Alsbrook the niece and the friend. Or because she got married and left for Texas to be with her wife. Who knows why? But he knew her somehow.
But her bones were found in a ditch. But they were lost when given to a university to study. Interesting. So her bones are gone, which is sad.
Very. All right. So in 1973, we've got Doreen Hope Dempsey, age 22, and her two-year-old daughter, Robin Michelle Dempsey, who killed in June of 1973. Gaskins apparently befriended Doreen several years earlier and was angry upon hearing that she'd become pregnant a second time with an African-American man.
Gaskins was extremely racist. And so this really just enraged him. So she had been living with Gaskins friend Johnny Sellers and his brother Carl in North Charleston in South Carolina. They brought her to Gaskins home in prospect and left her there to speak with Gaskins about staying with him for a short time while she was pregnant.
Upset that Doreen was having a second biracial child. Gaskins responded by walking her to his backyard pond where he drowned both her and her two-year-old daughter. Gosh, I don't like this man. I like this man.
1974. Also in June. He shot his friend and criminal associate Johnny Sellers, age 36 in the back of the head, and stabbed death. Johnny's ex-girlfriend, Jesse Ruth Judy, who was 22.
After Sellers apparently asked for money, he was owed from the sale of a stolen boat. Gaskins feared that Sellers would reveal that he was involved in an auto-theft ring. So he murdered him. And Jesse was murdered at the same time because she could help police about the criminal activities.
So just, you know, had to take care of him. Alright, 1975 was a wild year. We've got four, six actually to talk about in 1975. Silas Barnwell Gates, who was 45, was murdered in February of 1975.
His throat was slit in a murder for Hire's scheme. The forensic showed it was, the murder weapon was a knife, but Gaskins disputed this saying it was done by Corotty Chop. What? Corotty Chop's throat.
It's not funny. It's bad. This guy. This guy.
Yeah, so he was in a dispute with his ex-girlfriend, Suzanne Owens, and she and her husband, John Owens, paid Gaskins $1,500 to murder Gates. So, okay. Just swift $1,500 from Corotty Chop's throat. So bad.
So bad. Okay. They called me. Diane Nealey, who was 25, was separated from her husband, Walter, who was one of Gaskins' closest friends and another criminal, co-conferior.
On April 10th, 1975, Gaskins stabbed her to death and shot her boyfriend, Avery Howard, who was 34. Among some of the reasons that he decided to do this was because Diane had apparently threatened to report to police that Gaskins was allowing underage teenagers to have sex in his home. So apparently he was a brothel owner as well. Avery was murdered because he asked for money to pay attorneys and cover legal expenses following his arrest for fraud.
Great. Yeah. Kim Gilkins, who was 13, was stabbed to death to keep her from telling police that Gaskins had moved her from North Charleston without permission to keep her from telling police she was being sexually abused by several men. So, yeah.
Denise Bellamy, who was 27 and John Henry Knight, who was 15. They were half brothers, and Diane Bellamy was her sister who was killed earlier in the year. Within minutes of each other, Gaskins shot the two brothers in the back of the head on October 10th. Gaskins had promised to pay Dennis for some stolen guns when confronted by Bellamy at Gaskins' trailer in South Carolina.
He responded by offering to return the guns from the woods behind his home. He then took Bellamy into the woods to get the guns, but murdered him instead. John Henry Knight was directed to the same area to go meet his brother, but he was also murdered to cover up. This is almost like there's absolutely no self-control.
It's like a kid in a candy store. He just can't control himself. 1982, we got Rudolph Tynor, who was 23. He was on death row in prison for a March 1978 double murder when he was murdered by Gaskins on September 12, 1982.
Tynor was appealing his own death sentence after being convicted for robbing a Merle's Inlet Convenience store and killing store owners Bill and Myrtle Moon. The moon sun Tony Simmo hired Gaskins for $2,000 to kill Rudolph Tynor because in his view the appeals process was taking too long. So the son of the couple that was murdered hired this guy, Gaskins to kill him. Interesting story to look into.
Yeah, that one in itself, I got that one right now to just like look at because that's crazy. So the sun asked Gaskins what he needed to kill Tynor and Gaskins told him to insert some C4 inside the heel of a shoe and mail it to him. This way Gaskins could obtain plastic explosives with a blasting cap, a long wire, and a radio speaker to create an imitation intercom speaker that Tynor put in his ear to test. Gaskins indented the makeshift bomb by plugging the wire into a prison cell power outlet.
And then just blew him up. This guy's getting even more creative. It's wild. Like gee, he doesn't stop.
I mean even behind bars. He doesn't stop. It's crazy. Wow.
Yep. Crazy, crazy. All right. Final arrest.
He was arrested on November 14, 1975 when a criminal associate named Walter Nealey confessed to police that he had knowledge of Gaskins killing Dennis Bellamy and Johnny Knight, the 28 and 15 year old brothers that he killed in the woods over the guns. Yeah. Nealey confessed to police that Gaskins had confided in him to having killed several people who had been listed as missing people during the previous five years and had indicated to him where they were buried. On December 4th of 1975, Nealey led police to land near Gaskins home in Prospect where police discovered the bodies of eight of his victims.
So he buried them all on his, those eight on his property. Of course he hit up. All right. He went in Rome.
Went in Rome. Yeah. So he was tried on one charge of murder in May, on May 24th, 1976. He was found guilty on May 28th and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to a life sentence in prison when South Carolina General Assembly is ruling on capital punishment was changed in 1974.
So they overturned it. Yeah. On September 2nd, 1982, Gaskins committed another murder for which he earned the title of the quote, Meanest Man in America. This was while he was incarcerated in the high security block at the South Carolina Correctional Institution.
Gaskins killed a death row inmate that was Rudolph Tiner. So right. That was that one. So he received the other murder sentence for that.
He was already arrested. Was he just put in like solitary? Because I mean, it seems to me like he shouldn't even be around general. Right.
Well, right. Like if he's in high security, he's killing people. Yeah. So the son who had hired Gaskins to, you know, commit that murder.
Yeah. He was actually initially charged with murder, but pled guilty to lesser charges and was actually only sentenced to eight years in prison for that. Interesting. And was paroled in 1986.
So Gaskins apparently made several unsuccessful attempts to kill Tiner by lacing his food with poison before he opted to use the explosives to kill him. Interesting. Yep. So wow.
While on death row, Gaskins said he committed between 100 and 110 murders, including that of Margaret Peg Catino, the 13-year-old daughter of then South Carolina State Senator James Catino Jr. So he claimed to have killed her too. Obviously these murders have been widely disputed and there has been no evidence to support Gaskins statements of killing 110 people. He was executed on September 6, 1991 at 1-10 in the morning in the electric chair.
This was hours after he tried to kill himself by slitting his own wrists. Because he wanted to go his own way. Yeah. Interesting.
The electric chair. His last words were quote, I'll let my lawyers talk for me. I'm ready to go. He's ready to go, but he wanted to go his own way.
Yep. And that is the story of Henry Donald Hiner Gaskins or P.E.G.G.S.Kins. Wow. Wow.
Wow. Yep. So the story goes. Nature versus nurture.
Mm-hmm. We look at if his mother hugged him. If his mother loved him. If that's what I learned his name.
If his mother knew who he was and really gave him affection and time. If he had a daddy, like maybe things would have been different. If he had affection from a parental figure, if his A-Score was it so damn high. If he had resiliency.
It was taller. If he didn't have such a shitty nickname. Yeah. I'm a shitty real name.
Right. Maybe he could have been, you know, a human being. But the last he was not. The last here we are.
Here we are. Here we are. But like, I mean, even if it is really just those 14 confirmed. I feel like there probably is more.
I do too. I don't think we're at the 100 level. Yeah. I think he's full of crap.
I think he's full of crap on that. I think he's full of inflated, you know, some of that. Well, when your name is Peewee, you have to inflate a lot. Yeah.
I think there's probably more than the 14. That was a fun visual. That was terrible visual. I won't explain.
Anyway, yeah. I do think there's more. I would say probably in the 30s. But because someone like that cannot control themselves, it's like more and more and more and more.
Anybody who would come to his property, it seems like. Yeah. Like you're just done. Yeah.
It's like you just have this need until you're just going to kill. Yeah. Yeah. Well, if a exciting story that was, that's a merry Christmas.
Y'all hope you had a great one. Well, actually, you know, Christmas was like three days ago. I hope you had a great Christmas. Oh, hope you had a great one.
Here's this terrifying story. Have a new year. Watch your back. Watch your back, Jack.
Sir, yikes. Be careful of men who randomly have hammers and axes and watch your own ones on for that. I've shopped a lot of Merles and Lids. Yeah, same there.
Yeah, quite a bit. This is very close to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. It is. It is.
Well, if you would like to, you know, send us an email about your thoughts and feelings. Karate, John. It's got me. Got me.
Yeah, that just, no, no, no, no. So if you'd like to send us an email, you can do so by emailing us at Mount Mysteries dot appleatchin at gmail dot com. Find us on our Facebook at Mount Mysteries, Tales from Appalachia. Find us on Instagram, Mount Mysteries dot appleatchin and check us out on Patreon for some bonus content at patreon.com slash Mount Mysteries.
And I'm going to give our shout out to Rushville, Indiana. Hi, it's Indiana. Yep. Thank you for listening.
Thanks, Indiana. And you know what, this is the last year we're spending with you folks. This is it. We're done for 2023.
We are. So we'll catch you in 2024. That's crazy. Yeah.
Wow. So happy new year, y'all. Happy new year. See you then.
Bye. Bye.