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South Carolina’s most-prolific serial killers · Murder Files Unsealed

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Speaker 1: So picture this. It's June of twenty twenty five, and
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you're an archivist at the College at Charleston, and you know,
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you're just doing what archivists do, right. You're sorting through
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these dusty, forgotten storage boxes deep in the university's basement facilities.
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Speaker 2: Probably expecting to find like old tax records or something.
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Speaker 1: Exactly, old administrative ledgers, maybe some old student files. But
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instead they open this one particular box and they find
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a secret that had been missing for over half a century.
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Speaker 2: Which is just it's staggering to even think about.
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Speaker 1: It, really is, because inside this box they found human remains. Specifically,
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they found the misplaced bones of a murdered woman named
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Martha and Dix. Yeah, for fifty years, the physical evidence
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of her brutal murder had just been sitting right there,
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you know, hidden in plain sight inside a completely normal academic.
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Speaker 2: Building, just filed away.
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Speaker 1: Right. And so today we are doing a deep dive
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into how a state that is globally famous for its
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idyllic front porch hospitality, it's serene, low country marshes, you know,
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these really tight knit communities, the beautiful Palmetto State, exactly,
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how that picturesque environment became the perfect camouflage for some
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the most disturbing predators in American history, predators who left
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their victims in university basements, in shallow graves, beneath pine needles, and,
1:23
as we'll get into later, locked inside metal shipping containers.
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Speaker 2: It really is one of the most jarring contradictions you
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can find in criminal history, honestly, because you have this profound,
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almost cinematic natural beauty in South Carolina and it runs
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perfectly parallel to some of the darkest, most organized predatory
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behavior on record.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like two different worlds occupying the exact same
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physical space.
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Speaker 2: Right, and the discovery of Martha and Dix's remains it
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isn't just a bizarre historical foot note. I mean, it's
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a glaring symbol of institutional failure.
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Speaker 1: It really is.
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Speaker 2: It represents the massive cracks in a system that allowed
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certain individuals to operate not just for weeks or months,
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but for literal decades.
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Speaker 1: Decades. Yeah, and you know, when we talk about these individuals,
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we generally just throw around the term serial killer. Now,
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anyone joining us for this deep dies likely already knows
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the classic FBI definition. We've all heard about the cooling
2:21
off period and that psychological itch that supposedly needs scratching, right.
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Speaker 2: The baseline criteria.
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Speaker 1: But what we are going to do today is actually
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pushback on that neat clinical definition. We want to ask
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is it flawed? Because when you look at the monsters
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who have operated in the Palmetto State, they really don't
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all fit into a clean little box.
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Speaker 2: They absolutely do not. I mean the FBI's baseline, which
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is the unlawful killing of two or more victims in
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separate events with a cooling off period. It's highly structured,
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very rigid, exactly. It implies a significant level of compartmentalization.
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But as we dig into these specific histories today, we
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are going to see that the line between a meticulously
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calculated serial killer and say, a chaotic, opportunistic spree killer
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is just terrifyingly.
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Speaker 1: Thin, so thin it almost disappears sometimes.
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Speaker 2: Right, We're going to examine sadistic opportunists who use rural
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isolation to their advantage, and then we'll contrast them with
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highly organized, white collar predators who actively weaponize modern corporate bureaucracy.
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Speaker 1: And the mission of this deep dive today is to
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really tear apart those systemic failures I want to be clear,
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we aren't here to mythologize these killers or turn them
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into dark anti heroes.
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Speaker 2: No, absolutely not.
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Speaker 1: Our focus is squarely on the mechanics of their crimes,
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the devastating human costs they inflicted, and most importantly, how
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the systems designed to protect the public completely and utterly
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broke down.
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Speaker 2: Because we have to understand how these blind spots function
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if we ever want to close them.
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Speaker 1: Exactly, So, okay, let's unpack this. We need to start
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in the rural, deeply isolated PD region of South Carolina
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with a man named Donald Henry Gaskins Junior, who's notoriously
4:01
known as pee Wee Gaskins. Yes, to really understand the
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absolute chaos he unleashed, we have to start with the
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mechanics of his childhood trauma. Yeah, because it is. It's
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just unbelievable, right.
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Speaker 2: And honestly, trauma is almost too mild a word for
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what Gaskin's experienced.
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Speaker 1: It really doesn't cover it.
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Speaker 2: No, The groundwork for his unprecedented scale of sadism was
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laid back in the nineteen thirties in Florence County. He
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was born out of wedlock in nineteen thirty three, okay,
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And the neglect from his mother was so profound, so absolute,
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that he wasn't even given his own legal name.
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Speaker 1: Wait, really like no name at all?
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Speaker 2: Right, He was just called pee wee or you know,
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other random nicknames. He only discovered his actual birth name,
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Donald Henry Parrett Junior years later when a judge literally
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read it out loud in a courtroom.
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Speaker 1: See. I mean, just think of the psychological devastation of that.
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Your name is the most fundamental building block of your identity.
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Speaker 2: Right exactly.
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Speaker 1: To have the person who brought you into the world
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simply with hold that from you, it's a complete erasure
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of your humanity right out of the gate.
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Speaker 2: It sets a baseline of worthlessness.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, but it wasn't just emotional neglect. The physical neglect
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was catastrophic. When he was just one year old, he
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drank a bottle of kerosene.
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Speaker 2: And we really need to unpack the actual medical and
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neurological implications of that, because it is crucial to understanding
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his brain development.
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Speaker 1: Because it's not just like getting a stomach acreag.
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Speaker 2: No, not at all. Kerosene is a highly toxic hydrocarbon.
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When a toddler ingests it, it doesn't just cause stomach upset.
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It actively attacks the central nervous system. Wow, it strips
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the mucosal linings, causes severe chemical numinitis in the lungs,
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and heavily impacts the brain. Gaskins actually suffered from violent,
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racking convulsions for two full years following that ingestion, up
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until he was three years old.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, that is horrifying. And I mean in the rural
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South in the nineteen thirties. He definitely wasn't receiving like
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top tier neurological rehabilitation.
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Speaker 2: No, absolutely not. He was just a child whose developing
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brain was essentially marinating in neurotoxins and seizure activity during
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the absolute most critical window for emotional and cognitive development.
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Speaker 1: So you essentially have this biologically compromised brain interacting with
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an environment devoid of any love or structure whatsoever. A
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perfect storm, right, and the escalation is exactly what you'd expect,
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but at warp speed. By the time he's a young adolescent.
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He's not just shoplifting candy.
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Speaker 2: No, he's escalating rapidly.
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Speaker 1: He's running with delinquent gangs, committing burglaries and actively participating
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in gang rapes. And it all culminated at age thirteen
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when a girl caught him breaking into a house and
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he attacked her with an axe, which is extreme violence
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for a thirteen year old, seriously, and this landed him
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in the South Carolina Industrial school for white.
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Speaker 2: Boys, which unfortunately was the final fatal ingredient in his development.
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How so, well, we have to look at the mechanics
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of the reform school system during that era. It was
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entirely unregulated, deeply punitive, and honestly just horrific.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, for those places were basically gladiator schools.
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Speaker 2: That's a good way to put it. Gaskins, as a small,
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physically underdeveloped thirteen year old was thrown into a population
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of much older, hardened youths.
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Speaker 1: Oh no, And he.
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Speaker 2: Was systematically and repeatedly raped by older inmates during his
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time there.
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Speaker 1: And this is really where the switch flips, right, because
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up to this point he's a chaotic, violent delinquent. But
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the industrial schools where he learns the absolute terrifying currency
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of power.
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Speaker 2: Precisely from a psychological standpoint, experiencing that level of sustained,
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inescapable sexual violence instills a pathological need.
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Speaker 1: For absolute control because he had none.
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Speaker 2: Exactly when he was the victim. He was completely powerless,
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so his entire subsequent life of crime can be viewed
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as a grotesque over compensation for that powerlessness, like.
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Speaker 1: A vow to never be on the bottom again.
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Speaker 2: Right, the psychology becomes, I will never be the victim again.
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I will be the one inflicting the pain. I will
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control the life and death of the people around me.
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It is the complete eradication of whatever empathy he might
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have had, left, replaced entirely by a drive for dominance.
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Speaker 1: But wait, this is the part that always trips me up,
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and I look at his file. The guy earned nicknames
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later in life like the meanest man in America or
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you know, the redneck Charles Manson.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, his reputation was massive.
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Speaker 1: He had this terrifying aura, but physically he was incredibly small,
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hence the nickname Peewee. As a full grown adult, he
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topped out it maybe five foot four or five foot
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five and weighed around one hundred and thirty pounds.
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Speaker 2: He was a very slight man.
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Speaker 1: So how does a man of that physical stature overpower
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grown men or multiple teenage girls at the exact same time.
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Did he just have this like insane adrenaline fueled brute strength.
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Speaker 2: That is the assumption a lot of people make, but
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it's completely incorrect. He couldn't rely on brute strength.
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Speaker 1: So what did he do well?
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Speaker 2: The FBI Behavioral Science Unit studies this extensively. When an
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offender is physically mismatched against their prey, they have to
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rely on alternative methodologies to cheat. Basically, exactly, they have
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to use weapons, restraints, or deeply deceptive strategies. Gaskins couldn't
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just muscle a grown man to the ground.
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Speaker 1: He had to use cunning. The analogy that perfectly captures
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his methodology for me is the trapdoor spider.
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Speaker 2: Oh that's an interesting comparison.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, because if you watch a trapdoor spider hunt, it's
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not chasing down its prey across the jungle floor, but
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it's small. It's physically disadvantaged in a fair fight, right,
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So it builds a highly camouflaged trap. It sits perfectly
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still in the dark, waiting patiently until a larger insect
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wanders by, completely relaxed and totally off.
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Speaker 2: Guard, and then it strikes.
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Speaker 1: Exactly in a fraction of a second, It explodes out
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of the trap, using absolute surprise and venom to neutralize
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the prey before the victim even knows it's in a fight.
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Gaskins was basically a human trapdoor spider. He didn't overpower people.
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He bypassed their physical defenses entirely.
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Speaker 2: That is an excellent way to conceptualize it. He baited
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the trap meticulously. He used alcohol. He used his vehicles
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to isolate people.
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Speaker 1: He said Southern charm, right he did.
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Speaker 2: He used this surprisingly disarming folksy charmed to get people
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to drop their guard and once he had them in
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a secluded environment like the deep swamps of the Pedee
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region or an abandoned house, he struck with explosive lethal violence,
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usually with a weapon, before they could leverage any physical
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advantage against him.
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Speaker 1: And he had a lot of time to hone this
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method over decades because the criminal justice system essentially treated
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him like a revolving door.
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Speaker 2: The institutional failures here are just staggering, you really are.
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Speaker 1: He gets out of the reform school in nineteen fifty one,
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tries to work at tobacco farm. That lasts about two
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years before he attacks another teenage girl with a hammer
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in nineteen fifty three.
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Speaker 2: Which sends him to the state penitentiary.
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Speaker 1: Right, and in nineteen fifty four, he commits his first
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known murder behind bars. He kills an inmate named Hazel Brazel.
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Speaker 2: And gets away with it essentially totally.
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Speaker 1: He claims self defense, gets a measly three years added
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to a sentence for involuntary manslaughter, and suddenly the ultimate
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taboo of taking a human life is broken.
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Speaker 2: And the institutional failures just compound from there. I mean,
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he was a known flight risk, yet he managed multiple
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audacious escapes.
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Speaker 1: Didn't He escape in a garbage truck once?
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Speaker 2: He literally hid inside a garbage truck to break out
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of prison. He would escape, go on these multi state
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crime sprees across Florida and Georgia, get recaptured, serve a
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fraction of his time, and be paroled again.
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Speaker 1: It's infuriating.
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Speaker 2: By the late nineteen sixties, the parole system had essentially
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regurgitated a fully formed, highly experienced predator right back into
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the South Carolina public.
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Speaker 1: And this is where that camouflage we talked about really
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comes into play. He settles in the town of Sumter,
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He gets a job as a roofer, blending right in
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yeah to the outside world, to the parole officers, who
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were just checking a box on a form. He's a
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success story, a reformed ex con doing hard, honest, blue
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collar labor.
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Speaker 2: But the roofing job was just the cover, exactly.
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Speaker 1: His real day to day was running extensive stolen goods rings,
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fencing stolen property, and throwing these massive illicit parties at
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his property where he supplied alcohol to underage kids.
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Speaker 2: Which was a very calculated move on his part. How So,
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he intentionally built an ecosystem of marginalized, vulnerable people, runaways,
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patty criminals, kids doing things they shouldn't be doing. These
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are people who couldn't easily go to the police if
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something went wrong.
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Speaker 1: He created a target rich environment exactly.
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Speaker 2: And this brings us to the psychology of how he
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compartmentalized his violence, which is honestly one of the most
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chilling aspects.
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Speaker 1: Of his profile. Right the two lanes.
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Speaker 2: Yes, Gaskins categorized his murders into two distinct lanes. The
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first he called his coastal kills. He also referred to
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these as his weekend recreation.
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Speaker 1: Weekend recreation. I mean, just let the absolute detachment of
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that phrase sink in for a second.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, it is the language of a pure psychopath. These
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coastal kills were victims he didn't know at all, usually
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stranger hitchhikers he would pick up along the highways near
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the South Carolina coast.
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Speaker 1: So they were purely crimes of opportunity exactly.
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Speaker 2: And these murders were strictly to satisfy his sadistic urges.
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He admitted to torturing them, mutilating them, and even engaging
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in cannibalism.
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Speaker 1: Oh my god.
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Speaker 2: And he claimed he had to commit one of these
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murders roughly every six weeks to relieve a feeling he
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described as an inner bothersomeness.
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Speaker 1: It's just bothersomeness. I mean, it sounds like he's describing
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a mild headache or like a stiff neck, not this
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overwhelming compulsion to literally butcher a human being.
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Speaker 2: It is the ultimate minimization of horrific acts. The psychological
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tension bills in the offender, the bothersomeness becomes intolerable to him,
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and the extreme violence acts as a release valve.
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Speaker 1: Okay, so that's the first lane. What was the second?
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Speaker 2: The second category he called his serious murders, And this
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is where his criminality deeply intersects with his psychopathy.
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Speaker 1: Because these weren't strangers.
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Speaker 2: Right right. These victims were acquaintances, criminal associates, or loose ends,
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people who threatened his stolen goods ring, people who knew
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too much about the underage parties, or people he was
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actively hired to kill. So it was business, purely business.
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He killed them not for the psychological release, but as
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practical operational maintenance of his criminal empire.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, and this leads to a massive investigative headache. Yeah right,
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Here's where it gets really interesting because the numbers associated
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with Gaskins are just all over the place.
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Speaker 2: The discrepancy is huge.
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Speaker 1: Yeah. Before he was executed, he collaborated on a ghost
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written autobiography where he claimed his body count was somewhere
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between one hundred and one hundred and ten people.
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Speaker 2: Which is an astronomical number right now.
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Speaker 1: A lot of law enforcement and behavioral analysts completely dismissed
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that number. They see it as a narcissist trying to
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inflate his own.
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Speaker 2: Dark legend, which is very common, right.
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Speaker 1: They point to the confirmed documented number of victims, which
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sits between thirteen and fifteen murders spanning from nineteen seventy
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t nineteen eighty two.
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Speaker 2: Right, The duping delight of a psychopath often involves grandiosity.
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He wanted to go down in history as the most
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prolific killer alive.
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Speaker 1: To feed his ego exactly.
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Speaker 2: But we have to be incredibly careful not to let
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the debate over the unverified hundred overshadow the reality of
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the confirmed thirteen to fifteen.
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Speaker 1: Absolutely, because that is still a staggering, devastating human toll.
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Speaker 2: It is, and when you analyze the demographics of those
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confirmed victims, his predatory nature becomes even more glaring. Ten
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of the confirmed victims were under the age of twenty five,
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six of them were teenagers, and one was a two
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year old poddler. He consistently intentionally targeted the vulnerable.
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Speaker 1: We really have to walk through this timeline because these
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were real people with families, and understanding how they were
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taken exposes exactly how his trappdoor spider method actually work.
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It does. Let's start in November of nineteen seventy his
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own fifteen year old niece, Janis Kirby and her seventeen
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year old friend, Patricia an Alsbrook family.
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Speaker 2: He targeted his own family.
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Speaker 1: Yes, he lures these two girls to an abandoned, isolated house,
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and how does he get them there by leveraging his
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familial authority. He's the uncle, He's supposed to be safe.
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Speaker 2: The ultimate betrayal of trust.
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Speaker 1: Exactly, once they are isolated, the trap closes. He beats
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them both to death. Investigators believe it was either over
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a dispute regarding drug use or a failed attempt at
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sexual assault. Either way, he annihilated two children in his
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own extended family circle without a second thought.
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Speaker 2: The complete absence of familial loyalty really highlights his severe psychopathy.
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He viewed them as objects, not relatives.
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Speaker 1: He didn't stop no.
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Speaker 2: Moving to the early nineteen seventies, around nineteen seventy one
16:48
or seventy two, he targets a twenty year old woman
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named Martha and Dix, who went by the nickname Clyde Right.
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He poisoned her, and this brings us right back to
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our opening cook.
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Speaker 1: Exactly, he poisons Martha and Dick's. Her body is eventually recovered,
17:00
but then the criminal justice system commits an act of
17:02
negligence that is almost hard to have them. They lose
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the evidence, They lose her remains. The physical bones of
17:08
a murdered woman are just misplaced within the bureaucratic shuffle
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of evidence storage. They sit in the box, mislabeled or
17:15
entirely forgotten, and eventually end up in a storage facility
17:19
at the College of Charleston until twoenty twenty five.
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Speaker 2: It is the ultimate indignity, truly.
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Speaker 1: First she is murdered by a psychopath, and then she
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is effectively erased by the incompetence of the state. It's
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just sickening.
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Speaker 2: It perfectly illustrates why we must examine the systemic failures
17:36
alongside the criminal acts. The system failed to protect her
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when she was alive and then completely fail to honor
17:42
her remains after her death.
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Speaker 1: It's awful, and as we move down his timeline, the
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sheer cruelty just escalates.
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Speaker 2: Yes. In June of nineteen seventy three, Gaskins murdered a
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twenty two year old woman named Doreen.
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Speaker 1: Dempsey, and the motive for this one was different, right.
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Speaker 2: It was The psychological trigger for this murder was deeply
17:59
embedded racism. Gaskins discovered that Doreen was pregnant with her
18:02
second interracial child. This completely enraged him. He assaulted her
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and then he drowned her. But the truly chilling aspect
18:10
is what he did next. Dreen had her two year
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old daughter, Robin with her. Oh no, Gaskins drowned the
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toddler as well, because.
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Speaker 1: The toddler was a witness or just at a pure
18:20
spite both.
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Speaker 2: Honestly, to a psychopathic Gaskins, a two year old is
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not a human being requiring protection. It is a piece
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of evidence that needs to be disposed of and an
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extension of the racial hatred he held toward the mother.
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It is pure calculated elimination, just.
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Speaker 1: Brutal, and that calculated elimination really takes over in nineteen
18:40
seventy four and seventy five. This is when those serious
18:43
murders we talked about go into overdrive.
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Speaker 2: He's cleaning house exactly.
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Speaker 1: He's running his criminal rings. Yeah. People are starting to
18:49
become liabilities. Yeah. He kills criminal associates like Johnny Seller's
18:53
and Jesse Ruth Judy. He essentially operates as a freelance
18:57
hit man, taking a contract to murder a man named
19:00
Silas Yates by slitting his throat.
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Speaker 2: He's fully weaponized at this point.
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Speaker 1: Yeah. In April nineteen seventy five, he stabs Diane Bellamy
19:09
Neely and shoots her boyfriend, Avery Leroy Howard, and then
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he targets a thirteen year old girl named Kim Gelkin right.
19:16
She had been a regular at those illicit underage parties
19:20
he hosted. She knew way too much about the illegal
19:22
activities happening on his property, so he silenced her permanently.
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Speaker 2: But eliminating Kim Gelkin was actually the tactical error that
19:29
initiated his downfall.
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Speaker 1: Really why her, specifically.
19:32
Speaker 2: Because when a thirteen year old girl goes missing, the
19:34
police pressure intensifies exponentially. The heat in the Peedee region
19:39
was turned all the way up. The community was demanding
19:41
answers aw, and Gaskins responded the only way he knew
19:45
how by trying to tie up even more loose ends.
19:48
In October of nineteen seventy five, he targeted two half brothers,
19:52
Dennis Bellamy and fifteen year old John Henry Knight. He
19:55
drove them out to the remote woods near his property
19:58
in Prospect and executed them with shots to the back.
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Speaker 1: Of the head. But the walls were closing in and
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the paranoia inside Gaskin's inner circle must have been suffocating
20:07
because he wasn't operating entirely alone, right he had cronies,
20:11
people who helped him fence stolen goods he did, and
20:14
one of those guys was Walter Neeley. Now Neeli is
20:17
watching Gaskins systematically execute anyone who might be a liability.
20:22
Neely knows about the murders. He knows exactly where the
20:24
bodies are buried.
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Speaker 2: He sees the writing on the wall.
20:26
Speaker 1: He does the math, and he realizes I am the
20:29
next loose end. So at a sheer desperate self preservation,
20:34
Walter Neely flips. He goes to the police, confesses his
20:37
knowledge of the Bellamy and Night executions, and gives the
20:40
authorities the exact location of Gaskin's personal graveyard.
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Speaker 2: And that was the critical break. On December fourth, nineteen
20:46
seventy five, investigators descended on Gaskins's property in prospect. They
20:50
began excavating the sandy.
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Speaker 1: Rural soil, and what do they find.
20:54
Speaker 2: They ultimately unearthed eight bodies right there on the property.
20:58
Gaskins had actually been arrested a few weeks earlier on
21:01
unrelated charges, but now the police had a mountain of
21:04
physical forensic evidence. The trapdoor spider was finally pinned under
21:09
the glass, and.
21:09
Speaker 1: The trial for the murder of Dennis Bellamy in May
21:12
of nineteen seventy six was almost a formality. The evidence
21:17
was so visceral, the brutality so undeniable, that the jury
21:20
deliberated for exactly thirty seven minutes.
21:23
Speaker 2: Which is incredibly fast.
21:25
Speaker 1: Forty seven minutes that barely gives them time to elect
21:28
a four person and sit down. Yeah, they came back
21:30
with a guilty verdict and he was sentenced to death.
21:32
Speaker 2: But it wasn't over.
21:34
Speaker 1: No, because the American legal system is an endless labyrinth
21:36
of appeals and technicalities, that death sentence was overturned based
21:40
on procedural sentencing guidelines. Right the seat of South Carolina,
21:44
desperately wanting to avoid putting the victims' families through decades
21:47
of traumatic retrials, offered a plea deal. Gaskins admitted to
21:52
eight additional murders and was handed ten concurrent life sentences.
21:55
Speaker 2: At that point, the public breathed a collective sigh of relief.
21:59
He was locked inside the Central Correctional Institution. The assumption
22:03
was that the threat was permanently neutralized. But this is
22:07
where we have to discuss one of the most profound
22:09
institutional security failures in the history of the American penal system. Yeah,
22:14
because Gaskins wasn't done.
22:16
Speaker 1: This part of the story reads like a Hollywood thriller,
22:18
but it actually happened. There was another inmate on death
22:21
row with Gaskins named Rudolph Teyner. Yes, Seiner was serving
22:25
time for the murder of an elderly couple. Now the
22:29
son of those victims, a man named Tony Simo, was
22:32
furious that Tyner was sitting on death row endlessly appealing
22:35
his sentence. Simo wanted immediate revenge.
22:38
Speaker 2: Understandable, but what he did next was unprecedented.
22:41
Speaker 1: Right, So Simo somehow manages to make contact with Gaskins
22:44
inside a maximum security prison and hires him to assassinate Tyer.
22:49
The price two thousand dollars.
22:51
Speaker 2: Let's examine the mechanics of how this was even possible.
22:54
A civilian orchestrates a murder for higher plot with a known,
22:57
highly prolific serial killer who is currently on death row.
23:01
In Gaskins doesn't just stab Tyner in the recreation yard
23:04
with a sharpened toothbrush. He decides to use a bomb.
23:08
Speaker 1: Right, How does a death row inmate acquire high explosives? Yeah,
23:12
I mean in September of nineteen eighty two, Gaskins manages
23:16
to get his hands on SEA four plastic.
23:18
Speaker 2: Explosives inside a maximum security facility.
23:21
Speaker 1: Yes, he constructs a functional, homemade explosive device. He meticulously
23:26
disguises this bomb inside a portable radio. He gives this
23:30
radio to Tyner, telling him as a gift or like
23:32
a way to communicate between cells, a trojan horse exactly.
23:36
And when Tyner takes it back to his cell and
23:39
puts it to his ear, Gaskins detonates it. He literally
23:42
blew Rudolph Tyner apart inside the state penitentiary.
23:45
Speaker 2: The level of systemic compromise required for that to happen
23:48
is just staggering. Sea four does not spontaneously generate in
23:52
a prison cell, No it doesn't. It had to be
23:54
smuggled in piece by piece, likely through compromised guards or
23:57
severely negligent package inspections. Gaskins weaponized the corruption and incompetence
24:02
of the prison staff to carry out a hit.
24:04
Speaker 1: It's just a total failure at every lover.
24:06
Speaker 2: For that assassination, he was tried, convicted, and handed a
24:10
new death sentence in nineteen eighty three. He spent another
24:14
eight years on death row, continuing to brag about his
24:17
unverified one hundred plus victims until he was finally executed
24:21
in the electric chair on September sixth, nineteen ninety one.
24:25
Speaker 1: You know Dick Rputlian, the prosecutor who eventually nailed him
24:29
on the Tiner assassination, and who went on to become
24:31
a very well known politician and lawyer in South Carolina.
24:34
He wrote a fascinating book about this in twenty twenty
24:37
five called Dignia Grave.
24:39
Speaker 2: It's a great read.
24:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, Harputliin paints this incredibly disturbing picture of Gaskins. He
24:44
wasn't some raving lunatic foaming at the mouth, you know,
24:48
he was intensely charismatic.
24:49
Speaker 2: He had to be to lure his victim right.
24:51
Speaker 1: He was a master manipulator who could sit into court
24:54
room and charm the jury, charmed the guards, all while
24:56
being completely utterly devoid of a soul. He left a
24:59
legac sea of terror in the PDE region that is
25:02
still vibrating today. There are families who still wonder if
25:05
their missing loved one was one of those unverified coastal kills.
25:08
Speaker 2: Gaskins thrived in the blind spots of a rural, somewhat
25:12
analog world. The underfunded jurisdictions, the isolated swamps, the chaotic
25:17
parole system of the sixties and seventies. These were the
25:20
dark corners he operated in. Yeah, But as we transition
25:24
to our next subject, we are going to look at
25:26
a terrifying evolution and predatory.
25:28
Speaker 1: Behavior a completely different environment.
25:31
Speaker 2: Exactly what happens when the system isn't just rural and underfunded,
25:35
what happens when the system is corporate, digitized and actively
25:39
handing the keys over to the predator.
25:41
Speaker 1: Exactly we are moving from the tin roof shacks and
25:44
swamps of the PDE region to the manicured subdivisions and
25:48
corporate offices of.
25:49
Speaker 2: The Upstate, a very different world.
25:51
Speaker 1: We are going to look at a highly organized, deeply calculated,
25:55
twenty first century killer, a man who hid behind professional
25:59
lightening and corporate respectability. We are talking about Todd Christopher.
26:04
Speaker 2: Coleheth colhep represents the modern monster hiding in plain sight.
26:09
Let's examine his profile, because the warning signs were flashing
26:11
bright red for the very beginning. He was born Todd
26:14
Christopher Samsel in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in nineteen seventy one.
26:19
His early childhood was deeply unstable. His parents divorced, his
26:23
mother remarried, and Todd began exhibiting the classic triad of
26:27
markers that behavioral analysts look for when identifying severe future pathology.
26:31
Speaker 1: You're talking about the McDonald triad, right, Yeah, fire setting, bedwetting,
26:35
and cruelty.
26:36
Speaker 2: To animals exactly, the McDonald triad. The cruelty to animals
26:40
is particularly significant because it is a mechanism for a
26:44
disturbed child to practice absolute control over a vulnerable, non
26:49
verbal subject without immediate legal consequence.
26:52
Speaker 1: And he was doing this a lot.
26:53
Speaker 2: Yes, Young Todd was shooting neighborhood dogs with Beabie guns,
26:57
he was poisoning petfish, had explosive violent aggression, and a deep,
27:02
unsettling preoccupation with sexual violence. He was evaluated by psychiatrists
27:06
and diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
27:09
Speaker 1: And when he was twelve, things got even worse, right, Yeah,
27:11
he was sent to Arizona to live with his biological father.
27:14
Speaker 2: Yes, which was disastrous.
27:16
Speaker 1: Because instead of getting this kid intense residential therapy, his
27:20
father reportedly taught him how to shoot guns and amazingly,
27:24
how to blow things up.
27:25
Speaker 2: It defies logic.
27:26
Speaker 1: So you have a highly disturbed kid with violent impulses
27:30
and you are actively teaching him tactical destructive skills. But
27:34
the really dangerous part of Colheb's profile is his intellect.
27:38
Speaker 2: Yes, who wasn't cognitively impaired, quite the opposite. He had
27:41
an above average IQ.
27:42
Speaker 1: Of one eighteen, which is pretty high.
27:44
Speaker 2: It is, and it's a lethal combination. You have the
27:47
profound emotional dysregulation and extreme rage of borderline personality disorder
27:53
masked and weaponized by a high intellect that allows him
27:55
to plan, deceive, and manipulate systems.
27:58
Speaker 1: He knows how to play the game exactly.
28:00
Speaker 2: A juvenile court judge reviewing his file actually saw this
28:03
clearly and explicitly warned the court that Colehep was behaviorally
28:07
and emotionally dangerous.
28:08
Speaker 1: And that judge was incredibly prophetic because at age fifteen,
28:12
on November twenty fifth, nineteen eighty six, Colehep commits his
28:16
first catastrophic crime.
28:17
Speaker 2: He escalates to human victims.
28:19
Speaker 1: Right. He kidnaps a fourteen year old girl named Christy
28:23
Grenado in Tempe, Arizona, holds her at gunpoint, and brutally
28:28
wapes her he has tried as an adult, convicted and
28:32
sentenced to fifteen years in prison, and.
28:34
Speaker 2: He serves fourteen of those years.
28:36
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, Now while inside he uses that one eighteen IQ.
28:40
He doesn't just lift weights in the yard. He earns
28:42
a bachelor's degree in computer science. In two thousand and one,
28:46
he is released. He is mandated to register as a
28:49
violent sex offender.
28:50
Speaker 2: As he should be.
28:52
Speaker 1: He packs up, moves across the country to South Carolina.
28:54
And this is where I need you to explain how
28:56
this system failed so spectacularly.
28:58
Speaker 2: The systemic failure here revolves around the siloing of information
29:02
and the lack of robust interstate background verification in the
29:06
early two thousands.
29:07
Speaker 1: I mean, he applies for a real estate license in
29:08
South Carolina and he gets it.
29:11
Speaker 2: It's hard to believe.
29:12
Speaker 1: Handing a registered violent sex offender a real estate license
29:15
is like it's like giving a hacker the administrative passwords
29:19
to your bank server.
29:19
Speaker 2: That's a very accurate analogy.
29:21
Speaker 1: Well, you aren't just ignoring his past. You are legally
29:24
granting him the exact isolation and access he needs to
29:28
offend again. A real estate agent has the keys to
29:31
vacant homes. They are expected to meet strangers alone in
29:34
empty properties. How did the licensing board not flag him?
29:39
Speaker 2: Well, at that time, many professional licensing boards relied heavily
29:43
on self reporting. An applicant would check a box stating
29:46
whether they had felony conviction.
29:48
Speaker 1: Obviously he lied, right.
29:50
Speaker 2: If they lied, the board would run a background check. However,
29:53
in the early two thousands, state databases were not seamlessly
29:57
integrated with national registries, especially for crimes commit in a
30:00
different state decades prior, sometimes with juvenile adjacent.
30:04
Speaker 1: Records, so they just missed it.
30:06
Speaker 2: Colhap exploited these administrative blind spots. He lied on his application,
30:10
The background check failed to pull his Arizona conviction, and
30:14
the state of South Carolina handed a highly intelligent, violent
30:17
sexual predator the keys to hundreds of empty homes.
30:20
Speaker 1: And he didn't just scrape by. He thrived. He built
30:24
a highly successful real estate firm.
30:26
Speaker 2: He was a top producer.
30:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was charismatic, though his colleagues often noted a
30:30
deeply arrogant, condescending streak. He openly obsessed over firearms, and
30:35
he would occasionally make wildly inappropriate sexual comments that people
30:40
just brushed off. As you know, Todd.
30:42
Speaker 2: Being Todd they normalized his red flags.
30:44
Speaker 1: He even got a pilot's license. He built an entire
30:47
facade of white collar success. But underneath that, the rage
30:52
was still boiling, and it exploded on November sixth, two
30:55
thousand and three, in what became known as the Superbike murders.
30:59
Speaker 2: This crime haunt the Upstate region for thirteen years. Colhap
31:02
walked into Superbike Motorsports in the town of Chesney. Right
31:06
inside were four innocent people, Scott Ponder, the thirty year
31:09
old owner, Brian Lucas, the twenty nine year old service manager,
31:13
Chris Sherbert, a twenty six year old mechanic, and Beverly
31:16
guy who was fifty two, the bookkeeper, and Scott Ponder's mother.
31:20
Speaker 1: A family business.
31:21
Speaker 2: Yes, Colehap systematically executed all four of them, leaving eighteen
31:25
nine millimeter shell casings on the showroom floor.
31:28
Speaker 1: Let's talk about the thirteen year gap between the murders
31:31
and his capture, because for over a decade this was
31:33
the ultimate cold case.
31:35
Speaker 2: It was baffling.
31:36
Speaker 1: The police were chasing ghosts. They were looking into rival
31:39
biker gangs, international drug cartels, disgruntled ex employees. Why did
31:45
it go cold for so long?
31:47
Speaker 2: Because the sheer, brutality and efficiency of the execution suggested
31:51
a professional hit or a deep organized crime grievance. Law
31:55
enforcement looks for logical motives, money, drugs, or a major
32:00
interpersonal conflict.
32:01
Speaker 1: They weren't looking for him.
32:02
Speaker 2: No, they were not looking for a socially awkward but
32:05
highly successful real estate agent who got his feelings hurt.
32:09
Speaker 1: Right. The motive is the most pathetic terrifying part. When
32:12
he finally confessed years later, he said he annihilated four
32:15
people because of a perceived slight.
32:17
Speaker 2: Over a motorcycle.
32:18
Speaker 1: He claimed he was trying to return a stolen or
32:20
damaged motorcycle and the staff the shop mocked him or
32:23
made him feel foolish. It is the.
32:25
Speaker 2: Ultimate manifestation of narcissistic injury. For someone with his psychological profile,
32:30
public humiliation is an existential threat.
32:33
Speaker 1: It shatters his ego exactly.
32:35
Speaker 2: The rage is entirely disproportionate to the event. He felt slighted,
32:39
so he returned with a nine millimeter and extinguished four lives.
32:43
And because there was absolutely no logical connection between a
32:46
real estate agent and a biker shop massacre, he slipped
32:49
right through the investigative met.
32:51
Speaker 1: And that success that evasion. It emboldened him. He started
32:56
using his real estate wealth to build a literal fortress compound. Yeah,
33:01
he bought a nearly one hundred acre tract of remote
33:04
wooded land near Moore, South Carolina. He put up heavy
33:08
duty fencing around the entire perimeter. He brought in heavy machinery,
33:12
and he started dotting the property with these massive metal
33:15
shipping containers.
33:17
Speaker 2: And what did he tell people he was doing.
33:18
Speaker 1: He told people he was building a prepper compound, like
33:21
he was getting ready for the apocalypse. But in reality,
33:23
he was using his corporate wealth to build a privatized
33:26
hunting ground and torture facility.
33:28
Speaker 2: The physical isolation of that compound provided the perfect operational
33:32
security for his next phase of escalation, which began in
33:35
late twenty.
33:36
Speaker 1: Fifteen right with the Coxys.
33:38
Speaker 2: Yes, he hired a young couple twenty nine year old
33:41
Johnny Joe Coxy and twenty six year old Meghan Lee
33:43
mccracoxy to do some manual labor on his property.
33:47
Speaker 1: He brings them out to this hundred acre fenced in property,
33:50
and the timeline we have shows that around December nineteenth,
33:53
twenty fifteen, he murders Johnny Joe coxy right. He then
33:57
keeps Meghan alive for about a week, likely subjecting her
34:00
to horrific abuse, before murdering her around Christmas Day. He
34:05
buries them both right there on the land using his
34:07
own backo.
34:08
Speaker 2: He turns his real estate investment into a graveyard exactly, and.
34:12
Speaker 1: The cycle repeated violently. In August of twenty sixteen, he
34:15
hired another couple, thirty two year old Charles David Carver
34:18
and thirty year old Cala Brown to come clear.
34:21
Speaker 2: Brush similar setup.
34:22
Speaker 1: Yes, once he had them deep inside the compound, colhep
34:26
shot Charles David Kerver multiple times in the chest, right.
34:29
Speaker 2: In front of Calla and motive for Carver.
34:32
Speaker 1: The motive he later gave he claimed Carver had a
34:34
smart mouth.
34:35
Speaker 2: Unbelievable.
34:36
Speaker 1: It is an exact echo of the superbike murders. Fragile,
34:40
lethal narcissism, reacted violently to perceive disrespect.
34:43
Speaker 2: But he doesn't shoot Kala No Well.
34:46
Speaker 1: Cayleab Brown endured over the next two months is a
34:48
nightmare that just defies comprehension. He drags her into one
34:52
of those metal shipping containers.
34:54
Speaker 2: The ones he bought for the compound.
34:56
Speaker 1: Yeah, he chains her by the neck and ankles, securing
34:59
her to the wall of this dark, sweltering metal box.
35:03
For two entire months, he keeps her locked in there months.
35:06
He rapes her repeatedly, he feeds her, He literally shows
35:10
her the graves of his other victims. He methodically tries
35:13
to break her mind, telling her she will be his
35:16
property forever.
35:17
Speaker 2: The psychology of captive survival is immenser. Kaylea Brown had
35:20
to navigate an impossible psychological tightrope, doing whatever was necessary
35:25
to keep herself alive day by day while trapped with
35:28
a sadistic psychopath.
35:29
Speaker 1: She is incredibly strong.
35:31
Speaker 2: Her survival is a testament to extraordinary resilience, and the
35:34
break in the case finally came because investigators tracking the
35:38
cell phone pangs of the missing couple started looking hard
35:41
at Todd Colehep.
35:42
Speaker 1: On November third, twenty sixteen, a search party executes a
35:46
warrant and steps onto his hundred acre property. They were
35:50
walking through this quiet rural field and Kaylee hears them.
35:54
Speaker 2: She realizes this is it.
35:56
Speaker 1: She is chained inside this metal box, but she knows
35:59
this is her an only chance. She starts violently banging
36:02
on the metal walls of the container. The deputies hear
36:05
this hollow, metallic booming sound echoing across the field.
36:08
Speaker 2: It's an incredible moment.
36:09
Speaker 1: They find the container, they cut the locks, and they
36:12
find her chained inside. It is one of the most
36:15
harrowing rescue videos you will ever see.
36:17
Speaker 2: Her rescue initiated the rapid, complete collapse of his double life.
36:21
He was arrested on the property, and as investigators began
36:25
to dismantle his life, they discovered the true depth of
36:28
his hubris.
36:29
Speaker 1: This is where it gets so twisted.
36:30
Speaker 2: What's fascinating here is where the intersection of modern technology
36:34
and psychopathy becomes incredibly apparent. They found his Amazon account.
36:38
Speaker 1: This part is so sickening. He wasn't just buying normal supplies.
36:42
He was buying padlocks, heavy duty chains, folding shovels, and
36:46
bulk quantities of cat litter. But it's not just what
36:48
he bought, No, it's that he was leaving product reviews.
36:52
He left reviews making thinly veiled, horrific jokes. For a padlock,
36:58
he wrote a review saying solid lie have five on
37:01
a shipping container. Won't stop them, but sure we'll slow
37:04
them down.
37:05
Speaker 2: Just blatantly mocking the situation.
37:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, for a shovel. He joked about keeping it in
37:10
his car for hiding bodies.
37:11
Speaker 2: It's known as duping delight. It's the thrill a psychopath
37:15
gets from hiding in plain sight. They feel a sense
37:18
of supreme intellectual superiority by leaving breadcrumbs, knowing the public
37:22
is reading them and completely missing the sinister reality behind
37:26
the joke.
37:26
Speaker 1: He thought he was untouchable.
37:28
Speaker 2: He was using a massive global e commerce platform to
37:31
silently brag about his crimes.
37:33
Speaker 1: Well, when the full weight of the evidence finally crushed him,
37:35
coulheb took a plea deal to spare the family is
37:38
the trauma of a trial and to avoid the death penalty.
37:41
He pleaded guilty in May twenty seventeen to all seven murders. Right,
37:45
He was hit with seven consecutive life sentences plus sixty
37:49
years for the kidnapping and assault of Caleb Brown. He
37:52
is never walking free again. But of course, his narcissism
37:56
couldn't handle being forgotten.
37:57
Speaker 2: No, the need for control and relevance persist even behind bars.
38:02
He immediately began taunting law enforcement, claiming his body count
38:06
was significantly higher.
38:07
Speaker 1: Trying to stay in the spotlights.
38:09
Speaker 2: Exactly he told investigators they do not have enough fingers
38:12
to count all his victims. This forced agencies to spend
38:17
massive resources cross referencing unsolved homicides across his travel routes
38:22
and his time in Arizona.
38:23
Speaker 1: Did they ever find any others?
38:25
Speaker 2: To date, no concrete links to additional murders have been
38:28
proven that the psychological warfare continues.
38:30
Speaker 1: And as of twenty twenty six, he's sitting in a
38:33
cell trying to monetize his own infamy. He's been caught
38:36
running schemes to sell SKTK merchandise, shirts and memorabilia standing
38:40
for serial killer Todd colehap It's grotesque. He views his
38:44
monstrous acts not as a tragedy, but as a brand.
38:47
It is utterly repugnant.
38:48
Speaker 2: It perfectly aligns with his diagnosis. He demands an audience. Now,
38:52
we have looked at the rural chaos of Gaskins and
38:55
the corporate fortifications of Coal Hope, the two extremes. But
38:58
to truly understand the scope of predatory behavior in the state,
39:02
we need to question the rigid boundaries of those FBI
39:04
definitions we established at the beginning.
39:06
Speaker 1: Okay, let's do that.
39:07
Speaker 2: We need to look at how the line between a
39:09
methodical serial killer and a rapid fire spree killer can
39:13
become dangerously blurred.
39:15
Speaker 1: Right. We often think of serial killers as these masterminds
39:19
who plan for months, kill and then retreat into a long,
39:22
quiet hibernation. But that's not always the reality.
39:26
Speaker 2: Now it's often much more condensed.
39:28
Speaker 1: Let's step back in time briefly to the late nineteen
39:30
sixties and look at Leroy Martin, known as the Gaffney Strangler. Now,
39:35
Martin was the exact opposite of Gaskins or coalheb in
39:39
terms of his public profile. How So, he wasn't a
39:42
career criminal, and he wasn't a wealthy real estate broker.
39:45
He was a thirty year old married textile mill worker
39:47
with three children. He lived in Gaffney, South Carolina. He
39:51
was the literal definition of nineteen sixties blue collar normalcy.
39:54
Speaker 2: And that normalcy was his camouflage. Between May nineteen sixty
39:58
seven and February nineteen six, Martin abducted, sexually assaulted, and
40:03
strangled four victims in the Upstate.
40:05
Speaker 1: Four young women, yes.
40:07
Speaker 2: Thirty two year old Annie Lucille Deadmond, fourteen year old
40:10
Nancy Carroll Paris, fifteen year old Mary Elizabeth Reinhardt and
40:14
fourteen year old Diane Buckson. He operated under the cover
40:19
of night, dumping their bodies in rural wooded areas. He
40:23
absolutely paralyzed the community.
40:25
Speaker 1: And what fascinates me about Martin is his absolute arrogance.
40:29
Speaker 2: He couldn't know himself.
40:30
Speaker 1: The police were actually investigating the husband of one of
40:33
the victims. They had an innocent man in their crosshairs,
40:37
and Martin couldn't stand it. He couldn't stand someone else
40:39
getting the credit for his terror.
40:41
Speaker 2: The ego took over, so he picks.
40:42
Speaker 1: Up a telephone and calls a local newspaper. He feeds
40:46
the reporter's specific details of the crime scene that only
40:49
the killer would know, explicitly to clear the husband and
40:52
ensure the police knew the real Gaffey strangler was outsmarting them.
40:55
Speaker 2: The psychological need to be recognized as the boogeyman totally
41:00
eclipsed his desire for self preservation, and that need to
41:03
interact with his own chase is what ultimately caused his downfall.
41:06
Speaker 1: It's always a mistake like that.
41:08
Speaker 2: During one of his attacks, a victim who managed to
41:11
survive the encounter had the extraordinary presence of mind to
41:15
memorize his license plate number.
41:17
Speaker 1: Wow.
41:17
Speaker 2: Think about the psychological fortitude required to focus on a
41:20
string of letters and numbers while fighting for your life.
41:24
She gave that plate to the police. They traced it
41:27
directly to Martin's driveway, and the terror ended. He was
41:31
convicted in nineteen sixty nine and ultimately stabbed to death
41:34
in prison in nineteen seventy two.
41:37
Speaker 1: Martin fits the classic serial killer profile, separate events, distinct
41:42
cooling off periods. But what happens when that cooling off
41:45
period vanishes? What happens when the violence compresses into a single,
41:49
terrifying timeline.
41:50
Speaker 2: That's where we get into spree killers.
41:52
Speaker 1: Right. Let's look at Dellan Forest Bounds in nineteen ninety nine. Bounds,
41:56
when on a rampage in the Upstate over just six months,
41:58
he killed four people every tight window. He stabbed a
42:01
young woman working at a radio shack. He slipped the
42:04
throat of a clerk at a flower shop. He shot
42:06
an acquaintance in her ex husband before finally killing himself
42:09
during a police standoff.
42:11
Speaker 2: And then you have Quincy Jason Allen. In two thousand
42:14
and two, Allan engaged in a multi state run of violence.
42:18
He killed four people in a highly compressed time frame weeks. Right, Yes,
42:22
the level of dehumanization was staggering. At one point, he
42:26
shot a homeless man and later explicitly stated he did
42:29
it merely for practice breaks. He treated a human being
42:33
like a target on a firing range. Alan was ultimately caught,
42:36
survived in escape attempt, and is now serving life in
42:39
South Carolina.
42:41
Speaker 1: So we have Bounds killing four people in six months
42:44
and Alan killing four people in a matter of weeks.
42:47
The FBI rigidly defines a serial killer by that cooling
42:50
off period, but is there really a psychological difference?
42:54
Speaker 2: This raises an important question, right like is.
42:57
Speaker 1: A spree killer just a serial killer who didn't have
42:59
the patients to wait or the luck to evade the
43:02
police long enough to establish a pattern.
43:04
Speaker 2: That is the crux of the debate. In modern behavioral science,
43:07
the cooling off period is essentially a refractory period. For
43:10
a traditional serial killer, the murder relieves the tension and
43:13
they return to their baseline normalcy for months or years.
43:17
Speaker 1: That makes sense.
43:18
Speaker 2: For offenders like Bounds or Allen, there is no refractory period.
43:22
There is only a sustained mannic high of violence. The
43:26
sadistic impulse. The need for absolute control is identical.
43:30
Speaker 1: So it's just the timeline that shifts exactly.
43:33
Speaker 2: The strict boundaries of the FBI definition begin to look
43:36
more like administrative semantics rather than deep psychological distinctions. If
43:42
a spree killer isn't caught in month six, do they
43:44
eventually slow down and become a serial killer in year two?
43:48
The sliding scale.
43:49
Speaker 1: Is terrifying, and the sheer volume of these cases in
43:52
South Carolina is deeply unsettling. We focused on the most
43:55
notorious today, but the sources point to an undercurrent of
43:58
violence that is much much wider.
44:00
Speaker 2: There are many more.
44:01
Speaker 1: You have William Pierce Junior, who admitted to at least
44:03
six murders between nineteen seventy nineteen seventy one. You have
44:06
Patrick Tracy Burris, who killed five people in six days
44:09
in two thousand and nine.
44:10
Speaker 2: And those are just the known ones.
44:11
Speaker 1: If you look at Wikipedia right now, there are nineteen
44:14
distinct names listed in the category of South Carolina serial
44:17
killers alone. That is nineteen separate individuals who decided human
44:22
life was entirely expendable for their own gratification.
44:26
Speaker 2: It is a heavy reality to process. We have explored
44:30
the granular details of their childhoods, their methodologies, and their downfalls.
44:35
But we must step back and synthesize these disparate pieces.
44:39
We have to examine the macro level.
44:41
Speaker 1: So what does this all mean. We've looked at the
44:43
blood and the mechanics of the horror, But what does
44:45
this mean for society today?
44:46
Speaker 2: It means we have to look at the systems exactly.
44:49
Speaker 1: We established early on that these predators did not operate
44:52
in a vacuum. They thrived because the systems designed to
44:55
protect us had massive gaping holes. With Pewey Gaskin's we
44:59
saw the catastrop failure of an underfunded, unregulated parole system
45:03
that continually released a highly dangerous psychopath back into vulnerable
45:08
rural communities.
45:09
Speaker 2: And with Todd Colhep, we witnessed the terrifying reality of
45:13
modern digitized bureaucratic failure.
45:15
Speaker 1: The real estate license right.
45:17
Speaker 2: We saw licensing boards prioritizing fees and paperwork over rigorous
45:22
interstate background verification. We saw how easily a documented predator
45:27
could use corporate respectability as a shield. It's all connected
45:31
and across all the older cases, from Martin to Gaskin's,
45:34
we saw the historical vulnerability of delayed forensics and limited
45:38
investigative resources in isolated jurisdictions.
45:41
Speaker 1: But the critical takeaway is that the system did not
45:44
fix itself out of goodwill. The system evolved because it
45:48
was violently broken and the people left behind refused to
45:51
be silent.
45:51
Speaker 2: The families drove the change right.
45:53
Speaker 1: The immense organized grief of these victim networks, the mothers, fathers,
45:58
and siblings who demanded accountability directly catalyze the modern criminal
46:02
justice infrastructure.
46:03
Speaker 2: If we connect this to the bigger picture, the horrors
46:06
inflicted by these men underscored the desperate need for integrated
46:09
national DNA databases.
46:11
Speaker 1: Which we rely on so heavily now.
46:13
Speaker 2: They force the creation of specialized cold case units that
46:16
use genetic genealogy to track down predators. Decades after the fact,
46:21
they mandated sweeping changes to how agencies communicate across state
46:25
lines regarding sex offender registries.
46:28
Speaker 1: The tragedies that these systemic advancements were paid for in blood.
46:32
The system is undeniably more robust today, but is built
46:35
on the hard lessons learned from the absolute worst failures
46:39
we've discussed.
46:39
Speaker 2: It's a dark legacy and.
46:41
Speaker 1: There is a massive cultural footprint left behind De Carpoutlan's
46:45
book The Endless documentaries about Coleep's compound, the podcasts, these
46:49
stories become part of our true crimes like geist.
46:51
Speaker 2: Yet to be careful how we consume them.
46:53
Speaker 1: Exactly as we consume this content, we have an obligation
46:56
to recenter the conversation on the victims Janis Kirby, Patricia Anolds,
47:00
Charles David Carver, Beverly Guy.
47:02
Speaker 2: They cannot be forgotten.
47:03
Speaker 1: These were not mere plot points in a killer's dark biography.
47:07
They were human beings with futures, families, and dreams that
47:11
were violently truncated. The graves dug by these men may
47:14
have been physically shallow, but the psychological and cultural scars
47:18
they left on the Palmetto State run incredibly deep.
47:22
Speaker 2: That is the ultimate truth of this deep dive. The
47:25
focus must always return to the human cost, ensuring that
47:28
their memories are not eclipsed by the infamy of their murderers.
47:32
Speaker 1: And as we wrap up this incredibly heavy hour, I
47:35
want to address you directly the most unsettling reality we
47:39
have to face, the thing that fundamentally shifts how you
47:41
view the world after researching these cases. Is it evil?
47:45
Rarely looks like the Boogeyman. It really doesn't. It doesn't
47:47
always lurk in the dark alleys. Evil very often wears familiar,
47:51
comforting faces. It looks like the friendly neighbor who waves
47:53
from his porch. It looks like the quiet, hard working
47:56
roof for fixing your shingles. It looks like the charming,
47:59
successful real estas state agent eagerly unlocking the door to
48:02
show you your dream home. You can never truly know
48:05
the entirety of a landscape hidden behind someone else's eyes.
48:08
Speaker 2: And I will leave you with one final lingering thought
48:11
to consider. Drawing on the darkest intersections of the histories
48:15
we've examined today. Okay, we have Donald Gaskins, who went
48:20
to the electric chair, claiming an unverified number of coastal
48:23
kills that authorities could never definitively track down, and decades later,
48:29
we have Todd Colheps sitting in a cell, taunting investigators
48:33
with the claim that they do not have enough fingers
48:35
to count all of his victims. Right, Both men were
48:38
masters of apartmentalization. Both were adept at burying their secrets. Now,
48:43
remember our starting point, the remains of Martha and Dix
48:47
a known victim of Gaskins sat completely misplaced in an
48:50
academic storage box at a university until the year twenty.
48:53
Speaker 1: Twenty five, hidden plain sight.
48:55
Speaker 2: If the bureaucratic system can completely lose the physical bones
48:58
of a known murder victim for over fifty years, you
49:01
have to ask yourself how many more answers are currently
49:04
sitting in plain sight. How many terrifying truths are locked
49:07
away in dusty archival boxes, are buried just beneath the
49:11
surface of our everyday picturesque landscapes, just waiting for the
49:15
right cold case investigator to finally connect the dots.
49:18
Speaker 1: It is a terrifying question, and one that proves this
49:21
history is far from settled. Thank you for joining us
49:24
as we navigated the darkest currents of the Palmetto State.
49:27
Keep your eyes open, stay safe, and we will catch
49:29
you on the next deep dive.