On September 12, 1982, in the maximum-security block at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, a twenty-three-year-old death row inmate named Rudolph Tyner held a speaker to his ear at an agreed time, believing it was an intercom his neighbor had rigged so they could talk between cells. The neighbor was Donald Henry Gaskins, already serving life for nine murders. Packed inside the speaker was C-4 plastic explosive, and Gaskins set it off by plugging a wire into the power outlet in his own cell. "The last thing he heard was me laughing," he said later. He had been hired by Tony Cimo, whose parents, Bill and Myrtle Moon, Tyner had killed in the robbery of their convenience store in Murrells Inlet on March 18, 1978. Cimo thought the appeals were taking too long. He paid two thousand dollars and mailed the explosive in the heel of a shoe; earlier attempts to poison Tyner's food and drink had failed. The state public defender David Bruck called it a high-tech lynching. It was the killing that earned Gaskins the name the Meanest Man in America, and it took him to the electric chair.
He was born Donald Henry Parrott Jr. in Florence County on March 31, 1933, the last of Eulea Parrott's children, all born outside marriage. His mother took so little interest in him that he first heard his given name read out at his first court appearance, and he was called Pee Wee all his life; as an adult he stood about five feet four and weighed about 130 pounds. As a boy he was neglected by his mother and abused by a male relative. At thirteen, caught breaking into a house, he hit a young woman on the head with an axe and was sent for five years to the South Carolina Industrial School for White Boys, where other inmates raped him repeatedly. He escaped, married, went back voluntarily and was released at eighteen in 1951.
In 1953 he attacked a teenage girl with a hammer over a supposed insult and got six years in the state penitentiary, where he won respect by killing the most feared man in the prison, Hazel Brazell; he claimed self-defense and got three more years for manslaughter. He escaped in 1955 in the back of a garbage truck, worked for a traveling carnival in Florida, was caught and was paroled in August 1961. Two years later he was arrested for raping a twelve-year-old girl, fled before sentencing, was caught in Georgia and got eight years. He was paroled again in November 1968 and went to work for a roofing company in Sumter.
He later described hundreds of what he called Coastal Kills, strangers picked up on the highways and tortured for pleasure, starting with a hitchhiker in September 1969; he put their number at eighty to ninety. Not one has been corroborated, and his own accounts of how often he did it contradict each other. The murders that were proved were of people he knew. In November 1970 he beat to death his niece Janice Kirby, fifteen, and her friend Patricia Ann Alsbrook, seventeen. In 1971 or 1972 he poisoned Martha Ann Dicks, twenty, known as Clyde; her bones were given to a university to study and lost, and the box holding them was found in a closet at the College of Charleston on June 13, 2025. In June 1973 he raped and drowned Doreen Hope Dempsey, twenty-two, and her two-year-old daughter, Robin, in the pond behind his house at Prospect, angry that Doreen was pregnant again by a Black man. In June 1974 he shot his associate Johnny Sellers, thirty-six, in the back of the head over money from a stolen boat and stabbed Sellers's former girlfriend, Jessie Ruth Judy, twenty-two, so that she could not talk.
In February 1975 he cut the throat of Silas Barnwell Yates, forty-five, for fifteen hundred dollars paid by Yates's former girlfriend, Suzanne Kipper Owens, and her husband. On April 10, 1975, he stabbed Dianne Bellamy Neeley, twenty-five, who had threatened to tell the police he was letting teenagers have sex at his home, and shot her boyfriend, Avery Leroy Howard, thirty-four. He stabbed Kim Gehlken, thirteen, whom he had taken from North Charleston without permission, to keep her from telling police about him and the other men abusing her. On October 10, 1975, he shot Dianne's brothers, Dennis Bellamy, twenty-eight, and John Henry Knight, fifteen, minutes apart, in the woods behind his trailer.
He was arrested on November 14, 1975, for contributing to the delinquency of a minor in the search for Kim Gehlken, and his associate Walter Neeley told police that Gaskins had killed the Bellamy brothers and had confided the burial places of several people missing over the previous five years. On December 4 Neeley led officers to land near Gaskins's home in Prospect, where they found eight bodies in shallow graves. On May 28, 1976, a Florence County jury took forty-seven minutes to convict him of Dennis Bellamy's murder, and he was sentenced to death. The South Carolina Supreme Court overturned the sentence in February 1978, and rather than face a new trial he pleaded guilty to nine murders and a burglary and received ten concurrent life sentences. In sworn testimony under a plea agreement over John Henry Knight, he was confirmed to have killed thirteen people between 1970 and 1975. Of his fifteen known victims ten were under twenty-five, six were teenagers and one was two years old.
He was convicted of Tyner's murder and sentenced to death. On death row he claimed between one hundred and one hundred and ten killings, among them Margaret Cuttino, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a state senator, for whose murder another man had already been convicted; law enforcement and journalists have dismissed nearly all of it as a bid for notoriety. Hours before his execution he tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists. He was electrocuted at 1:10 in the morning on September 6, 1991, at fifty-eight. His last words were: "I'll let my lawyers talk for me. I'm ready to go." It was the first time in 111 years that South Carolina had executed a white man for killing a Black victim. Tony Cimo pleaded guilty to conspiracy and was paroled in 1986.
His dictated autobiography, Final Truth, written with Wilton Earle, was published in 1992. Dick Harpootlian, the former solicitor, published an account of the case, Dig Me a Grave, in December 2025.