Donald Henry Gaskins was born in Florence County, South Carolina, on March 13, 1933, unwanted and unnamed for some time, and grew up called Pee Wee because he never got beyond five foot four. He was in reform school at thirteen for an axe attack on a girl, and in and out of state prison through the 1950s and 1960s for burglary, arson and rape, killing at least one inmate along the way. He was known as the Meanest Man in America, a phrase he took for the title of his own book.
After his release in 1968 he drove the coastal highways of South Carolina picking up hitchhikers. He divided the killings himself into two kinds. What he called his Coastal Kills were strangers taken at random for pleasure, tortured and buried in a private cemetery he kept on rented land near Prospect. What he called his Serious Murders were people he knew and had a reason to kill, among them his own niece Janice Kirby, a fifteen-year-old named Kim Ghelkins, and an associate named Silas Barnwell Yates, whom he was paid fifteen hundred dollars to kill.
He was arrested in November 1975 after an accomplice, Walter Neely, told police where the bodies were, and led investigators to eight graves. He was convicted of eight murders in 1976 and sentenced to death, which became life when the South Carolina statute was struck down. He was later convicted of others, fourteen in all.
In 1982, serving life, he murdered another prisoner. Rudolph Tyner was on death row for killing an elderly couple during a robbery, and the son of the victims paid Gaskins to kill him. Gaskins ran a wire between their adjacent cells, gave Tyner a doctored radio speaker packed with plastic explosive, and told him to hold it to his ear at a set time so they could talk. That conviction returned him to death row.
He dictated a book, Final Truth, in which he put his total at over a hundred, a figure never substantiated. He cut his own wrists and neck the night before his execution and was patched up. He was electrocuted at Columbia on September 6, 1991, aged fifty-eight.