Donald Henry Gaskins, known all his life as Pee Wee, was a small, wiry roofer from the Pee Dee region of South Carolina who killed people in his own circle during the first half of the 1970s. When investigators dug in the woods near the Florence County community of Prospect in December 1975, they opened what was described at the time, as the Post and Courier recalled in 2025, as the largest mass murder case in South Carolina history. Over the next three years he was convicted of murder by two juries and pleaded guilty to eight more counts of murder.
That might have been the end of his story, but in September 1982, while serving life sentences at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, he killed Rudolph Tyner, a death-row prisoner, with an explosive device hidden in a cup. Tyner had been condemned for the murder of a couple near Myrtle Beach, and their son had arranged, through intermediaries, for Gaskins to kill him. A jury in Columbia sentenced Gaskins to death in 1983. After eight years of appeals he was electrocuted on September 6, 1991.
Gaskins later claimed to have killed about 100 people. The prosecutor who sent him to the electric chair has called much of that claim exaggeration or lies, and investigators have confirmed only a fraction of that number.
Gaskins was born on March 31, 1933, near Prospect, a rural community in Florence County, according to the South Carolina Encyclopedia, published by the University of South Carolina. A South Carolina Public Radio history segment gives his birth year as 1931. The 1978 State Supreme Court opinion in his first murder appeal styles him Donald H. Gaskins, Jr.
He was barely five feet tall, the encyclopedia says, and the nickname Pee Wee stayed with him until his death. Dick Harpootlian, the prosecutor in his last trial, has put him at about 5 feet 2 inches and roughly 140 pounds. The book Harpootlian wrote with the journalist Shaun Assael gives his height as about five feet three.
He was in trouble with the law from boyhood. The encyclopedia says that after he was arrested for viciously beating another youth, he spent several years in a reform school in Florence, then went back to Prospect to live with his grandmother. Harpootlian's book says he first went to prison at fourteen, after an attack with an axe on a girl who had caught him burglarizing her family's home. Over the following decades his record grew to include petty larceny, auto theft and aggravated assault, according to the encyclopedia, and he lived at various times near Sumter, Florence, Columbia and Lake City and in North Charleston.
By the 1970s he was working as a roofer. Harpootlian has recalled that a judge once told him Gaskins had put the roof on the judge's own house, and that people around Gaskins found him pleasant company. "What a really nice guy he was to everybody around him," Harpootlian said in a 2025 radio interview, describing how Gaskins presented himself.
The record of who Gaskins killed comes mainly from three places: the trial of Dennis Bellamy's murder in 1976, the trial over the death of Silas Yates in 1977, and a long confession Gaskins gave in 1978 to avoid a death-penalty trial for the murder of Johnny Knight. In its 1985 opinion the South Carolina Supreme Court listed the seven earlier killings covered by that confession: Doreen Dempsey, Michelle Dempsey, John Henry Sellers, Jesse Judy, Avery Howard, Diane Neeley and Barnwell Yates. Together with Bellamy and Knight, those are the killings on which he was convicted or pleaded guilty. He also admitted at trial in 1977 that he had killed a young woman from Sumter called Clyde, whose remains were found where he said they would be.
Little was reported about most of these people as individuals.
Doreen Dempsey was a mother. The SC Daily Gazette, reporting on Harpootlian's book in 2025, said she was pregnant when Gaskins killed her, and that he also killed her two-year-old daughter. The State Supreme Court's opinion names the child Michelle Dempsey; the SC Daily Gazette's report of the book launch names her Robin. Harpootlian said at the launch that he had included material from her autopsy report in the book because he believed it was necessary to show what Gaskins was.
Silas Yates was a farmer in Florence County. He was killed in 1975. The SC Daily Gazette reported that a jury convicted Gaskins of his murder about a year after the first trial, and the Supreme Court's list of confessed killings names him as Barnwell Yates.
Dennis Bellamy and Johnny Knight were brought to Florence County from North Charleston. On October 10, 1975, Bellamy was shot. His body was found in a shallow grave in woods near Ropers Crossroads, in the Prospect community, beside the body of Knight, according to the State Supreme Court. The court spells Knight's first name Johnnie in one opinion and Johnny in another.
The court also refers to the death of a woman it calls Dianne Bellamy, whose killing Walter Neeley attributed to Gaskins alone in a statement to police in November 1975. The 1985 opinion lists a Diane Neeley among the seven people Gaskins confessed to killing. The reports do not say in plain terms whether these are the same woman, and they give no more about her or about John Henry Sellers, Jesse Judy and Avery Howard than their names.
Gaskins was never charged with the death of Martha Ann Dicks, known as Clyde.
The investigation that ended Gaskins's freedom began with a missing person case in North Charleston in the autumn of 1975. Police there uncovered information that implicated him in a series of killings, the South Carolina Encyclopedia says.
The first step in the court record came on November 24 or 25, 1975; the State Supreme Court's opinion in Neeley's appeal gives both dates. Detective Rufus Stoney of North Charleston, who was investigating missing persons, went to a house in the city and asked Walter Leroy Neeley to come to the police station and answer questions about a missing girl. Stoney told him he did not have to come. At the station an agent of the State Law Enforcement Division, Tom Henderson, read Neeley his rights, and Neeley said he was more than willing to talk. His statement was written down, read back to him and signed. In it, Neeley blamed Gaskins alone for the death of Dianne Bellamy.
On the morning of December 4, 1975, Stoney and another North Charleston detective, Roy Green, picked Neeley up and took him to the Williamsburg County Sheriff's Department. Earlier searches had found nothing. Neeley went out with Deputy Glenn Ard, and Ard testified that Neeley led him to a wooded area beside a field. The graves were there. Dennis Bellamy and Johnny Knight lay side by side.
That evening, Sheriff William Barnes held Neeley at the North Charleston Police Department as a material witness for the coroner. After he was again read his rights, he waived them and gave a second signed statement. He was arrested and charged with murder on December 8, 1975.
Officers seized a pair of shoes from a trailer belonging to Gaskins, and a gun and other items from Gaskins himself when he was arrested; all were later put in evidence at Neeley's trial. In 1978 an Associated Press photograph showed officers in an area of Florence County near Johnsonville where human bones had been found after Gaskins directed them there, South Carolina Public Radio noted in 2025.
According to the South Carolina Encyclopedia, Gaskins was charged in Florence County in 1975 with five murders. Harpootlian said in 2025 that the people Gaskins killed had been carried in his hearse to a swamp and buried there.
Gaskins and Neeley were each tried in May 1976 for the murder of Dennis Bellamy; Neeley's trial was in Florence County. The State's theory, as the Supreme Court later summarized it, was that the two men had lured Bellamy and Knight from North Charleston to Florence County to kill them. Neeley's defense was that he had brought the two men to Florence County because Gaskins told him to, that he had not known what Gaskins planned, and that he had taken no part in the killings. Neeley did not testify.
A jury found Gaskins guilty of murder and he was sentenced to death by electrocution; the South Carolina Encyclopedia dates the sentence May 28, 1976. Neeley was also found guilty and sentenced to death. Both sentences were imposed under the death-penalty law South Carolina had passed in 1974.
That law did not survive. In July 1976 the United States Supreme Court decided Woodson v. North Carolina, and on July 21, 1976, the South Carolina Supreme Court decided State v. Rumsey; under those two rulings the 1974 statute could not support a death sentence.
On February 15, 1978, in State v. Gaskins, the State Supreme Court decided Gaskins's appeal from the Bellamy verdict, in an opinion by Justice Littlejohn. The conviction stood. The death sentence did not: in its Neeley decision that May, the court described Gaskins as convicted of murdering Bellamy and serving a sentence of life imprisonment. On May 18, 1978, in State v. Neeley, the court affirmed Neeley's murder conviction, rejecting challenges to his statements, the jury and the evidence, and sent his case back for resentencing to life imprisonment.
About a year after the Bellamy trial, a second jury found Gaskins guilty of killing the farmer Silas Yates, according to the SC Daily Gazette. Because South Carolina still had no valid death-penalty law, he received another life sentence. The federal appeals court later noted that the jury at his last trial heard of a second murder conviction by jury verdict.
A woman named Susanne Owens was convicted for setting up the 1975 murder of Silas Yates. She was released on parole in 2007, about three decades after her conviction, WIS News 10 reported at the time. Harpootlian, by then a former prosecutor, called her a minor player. "She was just one of the people who participated with him in the killings," he said.
At one of his 1977 trials, Gaskins admitted on the witness stand that he had killed a young woman known in Sumter as Clyde and left her in a drainage ditch, the Post and Courier reported in 2025, drawing on the Charleston News and Courier's coverage of 1977. He said he poisoned her, both in court and in his autobiography, WIS News 10 reported.
Her name was Martha Ann Dicks. She was 17 or 18, by different reports, when she disappeared from her home in Sumter in 1971 or 1972. Her family says she was a transgender Black woman; her niece, who has spoken for the family, uses she and her, as her own mother did. The niece told the Post and Courier that the police put little effort into the case until Gaskins admitted killing her.
In late April 1977, Sumter County authorities went to the place Gaskins described and found a skull and bones. Her sister went to the sheriff's department to ask whether they were Martha's. The remains were sent to the Medical University of South Carolina for an autopsy, but no positive identification was made, and from there they passed to anthropologists at the College of Charleston for study. They were never returned to the coroner.
Decades later, an adjunct professor of anthropology raised concerns about remains held by the college, and the Charleston County Coroner's Office took custody of about 25 boxes. Only one held Dicks's remains, with the autopsy and anthropology reports that confirmed who she was. The coroner's office held that box for close to four years, and in June 2025 it was handed to the Sumter County coroner, Robbie Baker. He did not know whose remains they were until he read the paperwork. "I started reading the paperwork and realized that these were skeletal remains from a Pee Wee Gaskins homicide victim," he told ABC News 4.
"It's sad to think that we're looking at a box that holds the remains of somebody that's been missing for 54 years," Baker said. "A mistake was made." The College of Charleston said one of its professors had received the remains from a University of South Carolina professor, presumably for research; both professors have died. Baker said that her siblings had all died and that he had found her nieces and nephews, who were glad to be able to bring her home. Baker believes she was the last of Gaskins's victims to be returned to a family. Her god-sister, Adrienne House Clark, said: "It's just painful that it's coming back up after all of these years." The niece said the family wanted to let her soul rest.
In 1978 Gaskins faced a third trial, this time for the murder of Johnny Knight, in Florence, and the prosecution was again seeking death. The solicitor, Kenneth Summerford, negotiated a plea. Under the agreement Gaskins confessed to seven earlier murders in return for life sentences and a promise that he would not be prosecuted for others, the State Supreme Court recorded in 1985.
The confession ran to 341 pages and was taken over four days. It covered the killings of Doreen Dempsey, Michelle Dempsey, John Henry Sellers, Jesse Judy, Avery Howard, Diane Neeley and Barnwell Yates, and it supported seven guilty pleas. The Supreme Court's opinion describes him as having pleaded guilty to eight counts of murder. Contemporary and later reports give different page counts for the confession and different numbers of life sentences.
When the federal appeals court reviewed his case in 1990, it said that before the Tyner killing he was serving ten life sentences, nine for murder and one for burglary.
Gaskins served his sentences at the Central Correctional Institution in Columbia, which the SC Daily Gazette has described as the state's most secure prison. By 1982 he was working as a building or maintenance man in the death-row cell block, known as CB-2, a job that gave him a good deal of freedom to move around the unit, according to the State Supreme Court. The federal appeals court described a later prosecution witness, James Arthur Brown, as the inmate who delivered meals to the condemned men and who worked under Gaskins.
Harpootlian said in 2025 that, with the sentences he was serving, Gaskins could have become eligible for parole in about ten years.
On March 18, 1978, William B. Moon and his wife were shot and killed during an armed robbery of their convenience store near Myrtle Beach. Harpootlian's book calls them Bill and Myrtie Moon; WIS News 10 places the store in Murrells Inlet. Police arrested Rudolph Tyner and another man at a house about a mile from the store early the next morning and seized a shotgun linked to the killings. Tyner gave police a statement admitting the crimes.
An Horry County jury convicted Tyner of conspiracy, armed robbery and murder and sentenced him to death. In August 1979 the State Supreme Court affirmed his convictions but set aside the death sentence because of the prosecutor's closing argument and the judge's instructions, and ordered a new sentencing hearing. By 1982 he was again on death row at the Central Correctional Institution, sentenced to death for the Moons' murders, with his appeals still running.
Tony Cimo, the Moons' son (the federal court calls him their stepson), was unhappy that Tyner was still alive, the State Supreme Court said.
In August 1981 an acquaintance of Cimo's from Horry County made contact with a prisoner who was a friend of Gaskins, and through him reached Gaskins, according to the State Supreme Court. The three conspirators outside and inside the prison first planned to poison Tyner. The poisoning failed, repeatedly in the federal court's account, and the plan moved to explosives.
The plotters talked by telephone, and Gaskins recorded several of the calls on cassette tapes. The State's evidence included recordings dated February 23, July 9 and July 14, 1982, and one other. On the calls Gaskins gave the operator the name of his prisoner friend, but Cimo and the acquaintance called him Pee Wee, and the State identified the voice as his. Telephone records showed collect calls between Gaskins and Cimo or the acquaintance. On one tape, as Harpootlian's book quotes it, Gaskins asked for one electrical cap and as much dynamite as could be got.
The federal court said the jury's verdict implied that the bomb was built from electronic components kept in Gaskins's cell and dynamite he had received by mail. Harpootlian's book and WIS News 10 describe the explosive as C-4.
On the afternoon of September 12, 1982, Gaskins handed James Brown a plastic cup with a small radio-type speaker built into it. In the bottom was a female electrical socket of the kind that takes an extension cord. Gaskins led Brown to believe the device would let Tyner talk to him in the next cell instead of shouting through the air vent the two cells shared. Brown was to tell Tyner that the wire was in the bottom vent in his cell.
Brown delivered the cup and the message. Tyner found the wire in the shared vent and plugged it into the cup, and the device exploded. He died soon after being taken to the prison hospital. A pathologist, Dr. Edward W. Catalano, testified that Tyner died from the impact of explosives held near his left shoulder and head. Right after the explosion, Brown said, he saw Gaskins pulling a wire out of the vent in his own cell, heard the toilet flush, and saw Gaskins go downstairs.
Harpootlian, then the chief deputy prosecutor in Columbia, got a call about the explosion. At first, his book says, it looked as though a homemade bomb had killed an inmate in a failed escape attempt.
Gaskins was moved to maximum security as a suspect and told to take his belongings out of his cell. Officers inventoried what was there: electrical components, tools, tape recorders, 38 cassette tapes, razor blades and marijuana, among other things. While the inventory was going on, an officer named Tallon, who was bringing Gaskins a letter, saw the name Tony and a telephone number in an address book; the number matched Tony Cimo's, and the book was seized. The State Supreme Court later upheld the search, holding that a prisoner has a very limited expectation of privacy and that officials faced a real threat after an explosive had been brought into the cell block.
Tony Cimo was charged with conspiracy to commit murder and served several years in prison, WIS News 10 reported in 2025. Amnesty International, writing in August 1991, said that the victims' son had reportedly received an eight-year sentence and had been released after less than three years.
The solicitor for the Fifth Circuit, Jim Anders, agreed that the State would seek the death penalty, and Harpootlian tried the case. Harpootlian has said he personally opposed the death penalty but felt bound by his oath. He concluded that a death sentence was justified here as a kind of self-defense, because prison walls had not stopped Gaskins from killing. "If not Pee Wee, who?" he said at his book launch in 2025.
Jury selection began in a Columbia courtroom about six months after the killing. The trial lasted about six weeks. Several jurors were excused because they could not consider a death sentence or because they had already decided Gaskins was guilty; two who said they believed he should have been executed for his earlier murders, but who said they could be fair, were allowed to sit. Gaskins did not testify. He called prisoner witnesses, mostly about where he had been when the bomb went off.
James Brown was the State's chief witness. He had a murder conviction of his own and admitted having lied in the past. He testified that Gaskins had had him take marijuana cigarettes and other items to Tyner before the day of the explosion.
At the sentencing stage the former solicitor Kenneth Summerford read the jury excerpts from the 1978 confession, and photographs of the victims were shown. Summerford also told the jury that Gaskins's earlier death sentence had been reversed, and why the State had accepted guilty pleas. The confessions contained racially derogatory remarks about victims; the trial judge questioned the jurors about racial prejudice before they heard them. Gaskins's lawyers tried to put Tyner's own confession to the Moon murders before the jury, and the judge refused.
During a break, Harpootlian has said, Gaskins called him over and told him the two of them were alike. "You like killing," Gaskins said. Asked what he meant, he answered: "You like killing me."
The jury found Gaskins guilty of murder. In the sentencing phase it found two aggravating circumstances: his prior murder convictions, and that he had killed for hire. The South Carolina Encyclopedia gives the date of the verdict as March 24, 1983; Amnesty International gives the date of the death sentence as March 26, 1983. Tyner was Black and Gaskins was white.
On January 22, 1985, the South Carolina Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and the death sentence in State v. Gaskins. Gaskins's lawyers, W. Gaston Fairey and Jack B. Swerling, had raised numerous issues: the excusal and seating of jurors, the cell search, the limits placed on cross-examining Brown, the judge's questioning of witnesses, the prosecutor's description of the State's evidence as undisputed, a jury instruction that malice could be presumed, Summerford's testimony, the racial remarks in the confessions, double jeopardy, and the exclusion of Tyner's confession. The court found some errors but held them harmless, and on proportionality review it found the sentence neither excessive nor disproportionate. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case later in 1985.
A state post-conviction application failed in a letter order of January 7, 1987, and the United States Supreme Court again declined review. Gaskins filed a federal habeas corpus petition on August 11, 1987. The district court dismissed it, and on October 15, 1990, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed in Gaskins v. McKellar, in an opinion by Judge Phillips. His lawyer, John H. Blume III, argued that a coerced confession to seven murders had been read to the sentencing jury; that the trial judge had shown bias, including a newspaper quotation in which the judge asked what could be given to a man who already had ten life sentences; and that the jury instructions were flawed. The court called the confession claim facially incredible and held that any error was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. It said it seriously questioned the judge's remark to the press, but found no sign that any juror had read it.
On June 3, 1991, the United States Supreme Court denied certiorari. Justice Thurgood Marshall dissented, restating his view that the death penalty is always unconstitutional. Justice Harry Blackmun would have sent the case back for reconsideration in light of a recent decision on jury instructions, and Justice John Paul Stevens wrote separately to explain why the reasonable-doubt question raised did not arise on this record. Rehearing was denied on August 2, 1991.
About two weeks before his execution date, Harpootlian has said, Gaskins plotted to have Harpootlian's four-year-old daughter kidnapped and hold her hostage so that Gaskins could escape while being moved to a courthouse. Before that, Harpootlian said, Gaskins had sent him Christmas cards and telephoned his office and home, and called him by his first name.
On August 30, 1991, Amnesty International issued an urgent appeal asking Governor Carroll Campbell to commute the sentence, noting that all legal appeals had been exhausted. Gaskins's lawyers brought a final round of petitions. The South Carolina Supreme Court denied his last state habeas petition late in the afternoon of September 4, 1991. On September 5, the Fourth Circuit, in Gaskins v. Evatt, refused a stay. His lawyers had argued that the exclusion of Tyner's confession violated a new Supreme Court ruling on victim-character evidence, and they had challenged evidence of his racist views and the validity of his earlier murder convictions. The court called the last claim "clearly an abuse of the writ" and ordered its mandate issued at once. The execution was set for 1 a.m. the next day.
Hours before he was due to die, Gaskins cut his wrists and arms with a razor blade. Robyn Zimmerman, a spokeswoman for the Corrections Department, said officials did not know whether he was trying to kill himself or to delay the execution. "He's a very unpredictable, cunning person," she said. He went to the electric chair with 20 stitches in his wrists and elbows, the Deseret News reported.
He was taken to the chair at 1 a.m. on Friday, September 6, 1991, and electrocuted. He was 58. ABC News 4 reported in 2025 that the execution took place at Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. His remains were cremated and scattered at a place that has not been made public, according to the South Carolina Encyclopedia.
The St. Petersburg Times reported that it was the first execution in the country of a white man for killing a Black victim in nearly half a century and at least 1,000 executions.
Harpootlian did not attend. He has said he did not want to watch a man die and also feared for his family's safety. "I regret the taking of any life, but his particularly needed to be ended," he said in 2025. "I'm fully satisfied we did the right thing." He also said he regrets the way Gaskins died in the electric chair.
His autobiography, Final Truth, written with Wilton Earle (spelled Winton in the text of the South Carolina Encyclopedia entry), was published in January 1992, four months after his execution, the SC Daily Gazette reported. In it, and in statements from prison, he claimed to have killed about 100 people or more. That claim has never been proven, and no court has found him responsible for any killing beyond those for which he was convicted.
Investigators linked him definitively to 13 killings, the SC Daily Gazette reported in 2025, and Harpootlian has said only 13 deaths had been confirmed when he took on the case. The Post and Courier has described him as linked to at least 14 deaths. Harpootlian has been blunt about the rest. "He, as you know, wrote a book, half of which, at least the parts I know about, were exaggerated or downright lies," he told WIS News 10 in 2007. In 2025 he told the Free Times that Gaskins enjoyed the myth.
Gaskins became the subject of national news coverage and of a CBS Movie of the Week, according to the South Carolina Encyclopedia. Frances Swain Hall wrote about the case in Slaughter in Carolina (Hummingbird, 1990).
In December 2025 Harpootlian, by then a former state senator, published Dig Me a Grave: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer Who Seduced the South, written with Shaun Assael and published by Kensington. Harpootlian had kept the case files, photographs and arrest records after the execution, and he and Assael reviewed them and interviewed police officers and other witnesses. "I think there's less speculation in this book than any other true crime book I've ever read, because I was there," he said. He called Gaskins the most evil man he had ever met. The book was launched in Columbia on December 16, 2025, at an event with Dawn Staley, the University of South Carolina women's basketball coach, before about 200 people.
Proven by final judgment: the murder of Dennis Bellamy (jury, 1976); a second murder by jury verdict in 1977, reported as that of Silas Yates; eight counts of murder by guilty plea in 1978, covering Johnny Knight and the seven people named in the 1985 opinion; and the capital murder of Rudolph Tyner (jury, 1983).
Admitted, never charged: the killing of Martha Ann Dicks, which Gaskins described in court testimony in 1977.
Claimed, unverified: the killings of about 100 or more other people, described in Final Truth and in statements from prison. Harpootlian, who prosecuted him, considers much of this account false.
Details that vary between accounts: his birth year (1933, South Carolina Encyclopedia; 1931, South Carolina Public Radio); his height (barely five feet to about 5 feet 3 inches); the number of pages in the 1978 confession (341, State Supreme Court; about 300, SC Daily Gazette); the number of life sentences he was serving before the Tyner trial (ten, nine for murder and one for burglary, in the 1990 federal opinion; nine in the 1991 federal opinion; thirteen, as Harpootlian recalled it in 2025); whether Silas Yates's killing was the subject of a jury verdict, a guilty plea or both (the SC Daily Gazette reports a jury verdict, while the 1985 opinion lists Barnwell Yates among the seven killings covered by the 1978 pleas); the first name of Dempsey's daughter (Michelle in the 1985 opinion; Robin in 2025 reporting); whether Tyner was killed with dynamite (the federal court's reading of the verdict) or C-4 (Harpootlian's book and WIS News 10); Mrs. Moon's first name (Myrtie in Harpootlian's book); and Martha Ann Dicks's age (17, WIS News 10 and ABC News 4; 18, Post and Courier).
March 31, 1933: Donald Henry Gaskins is born near Prospect, Florence County (some accounts give 1931).
Boyhood: sent to a reform school in Florence; first imprisoned at about fourteen.
1971 or 1972: Martha Ann Dicks, known as Clyde, disappears from her home in Sumter.
1970s: the killings later covered by his 1978 confession.
1975: Silas Yates, a Florence County farmer, is killed.
October 10, 1975: Dennis Bellamy is shot; he and Johnny Knight are buried near Ropers Crossroads.
November 24 or 25, 1975: Walter Neeley gives North Charleston police a statement blaming Gaskins for the death of Dianne Bellamy.
December 4, 1975: Neeley leads a deputy to the graves of Bellamy and Knight.
December 8, 1975: Neeley is charged with murder. Gaskins is charged in Florence County with five murders in 1975.
May 1976: Florence County juries convict Gaskins and Neeley of Bellamy's murder; Gaskins is sentenced to death on May 28.
July 1976: Woodson v. North Carolina and State v. Rumsey strike down mandatory death sentences.
1977: a second jury convicts Gaskins of murder, reported as the killing of Silas Yates; life sentence. He testifies that he killed Clyde.
Late April 1977: remains are found in a Sumter County drainage ditch at the place he described.
February 15, 1978: State v. Gaskins; the Bellamy conviction stands and he serves life imprisonment.
1978: facing a death-penalty trial for Johnny Knight's murder, he gives a 341-page confession and pleads guilty to eight counts of murder.
March 18, 1978: William B. Moon and his wife are killed in a robbery of their store near Myrtle Beach.
May 18, 1978: State v. Neeley; Neeley's conviction affirmed and his sentence reduced to life.
August 23, 1979: State v. Tyner; Tyner's convictions affirmed, new sentencing ordered.
August 1981: the plot to kill Tyner begins.
February to July 1982: Gaskins records telephone calls with the plotters.
September 12, 1982: Rudolph Tyner is killed by the device Gaskins sent him.
March 1983: a Columbia jury convicts Gaskins of Tyner's murder; he is sentenced to death.
January 22, 1985: the South Carolina Supreme Court affirms.
January 7, 1987: state post-conviction relief denied.
August 11, 1987: federal habeas petition filed.
October 15, 1990: Gaskins v. McKellar; Fourth Circuit affirms denial of relief.
June 3, 1991: United States Supreme Court denies certiorari; rehearing denied August 2.
August 30, 1991: Amnesty International appeals for clemency.
September 4 and 5, 1991: last state petition denied; Fourth Circuit refuses a stay.
September 6, 1991: Gaskins is electrocuted in Columbia after cutting his wrists hours earlier.
January 1992: Final Truth is published.
2007: Susanne Owens, convicted for setting up the Yates murder, is paroled.
June 2025: Martha Ann Dicks's remains, found in a College of Charleston storage room, are returned to the Sumter County coroner.
December 16, 2025: Dig Me a Grave is published.