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True Crime Blueprint - The Boy They Called Pee Wee: A Serial Killer's Origin Story · 10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hi, it's Joe and what you're about to hear is
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: a sample of an episode from a new podcast created now.
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  Speaker 1: to the new one. You can find links for it
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  Speaker 1: in the episode notes here, or you can just search
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  Speaker 1: for True Crime Blueprint. I'll be releasing weekly episodes there,
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  Speaker 1: full deep dives, no ten minute restriction. So again, if
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  Speaker 1: search for and go to True Crime Blueprint and follow
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: subscribe to the new podcast. He weighed just four pounds
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: when he came into the world, grew up without knowing
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: his own legal name, and walked out of childhood so
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: damaged that murder eventually felt to him like a relief.
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  Speaker 1: Donald Henry Gaskins killed and rule South Carolina for years
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: before anyone noticed, and by the time they did, the
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: number of victims was almost impossible to count. This is
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: the story of Pee Wee Gaskins. Donald Henry Gaskins was
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: a teenager. The first time he heard his own full
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: legal name, it came from a judge. A judicial officer
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  Speaker 1: read it out loud during his first court appearance, and
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: Gaskins reportedly had no idea that's who he was. He
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: had been Peewee his entire life, a nickname added to
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: him at birth because he weighed just four pounds, and
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: nobody expected much more from him than that. You reach
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: your teenage years and you genuinely don't know your own name.
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  Speaker 1: That's not a quirky footnote on the edge of a
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: larger story. That's the foundation. And here's what I want
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: you to hold on to as we go through this.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: Understanding where someone came from is its own separate conversation
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: from accountability for what they did. Gaskins murdered people, multiple people.
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  Speaker 1: He described murder as something he did for pleasure and
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: for relief, and the number of victims he claimed runs
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: into the triple digits. We're going to get there, but
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: going straight to the crime scenes skips the part that
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: actually matters, how a human being arrives at that place.
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: That's what this episode is about. Florence County, South Carolina,
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: in the early nineteen thirties was a place with a
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: very narrow set of options available for the people who
• 2:24
  Speaker 1: live there. The depression had hit the entire country hard,
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: but in the rural South. The depression arrived into conditions
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: that were already punishing. Share cropping, tenant farming, and field
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: labor defined the economic landscape of communities like Prospect. These
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: were livelihoods built on exhaustion and exploitation, and they had
• 2:46
  Speaker 1: been for generations. Eula Parrot, who went by Mollie, had
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: dropped out of school at twelve years old to work
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: in the fields. She was a teenager herself when she
• 2:56
  Speaker 1: became pregnant with the baby who would eventually become Donald
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: Henry Gaskins. The father was reportedly a local man with
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: more money than most people in Prospect, had access to
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  Speaker 1: someone known for gambling and drinking who reportedly paid Molly's
• 3:11
  Speaker 1: small amounts for sexual access. He was exploiting this girl,
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: and it happened in the same cramped, three bedroom shack
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: where young pee Wee Gaskins spent his earliest years observing
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  Speaker 1: how adults related to each other. He was born on
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  Speaker 1: March thirteenth, nineteen thirty three, four pounds, sickly and barely
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: expected to survive. The people around him responded the way
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: people often do when a new baby arrives and nobody
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: actually prepared for one. They largely ignored him. At one
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: year old, Gaskins reportedly drank a bottle of kerosene. The
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: supervision required to prevent that simply wasn't there. The incident
• 3:51
  Speaker 1: triggered convulsions that reportedly continued until he was three years
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: old three years of chronic seizures in infancy. That kind
• 3:59
  Speaker 1: of prolonged neurological disruption can carry real lasting consequences for
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: brain development, for impulse regulation, for cognitive function. Now, we
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: obviously can't say with any certainty with the long term
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: effects were for Gaskins specifically, but it's worth sitting with
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: the fact that the first chapter of his life involved
• 4:19
  Speaker 1: accidental poisoning in years of seizures in a home where
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: anyone paying attention would have been the anomaly his mother
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: cycled through men. Gaskins had multiple stepfathers throughout his childhood,
• 4:33
  Speaker 1: and the whole atmosphere he described later in interviews and
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: writings was one of ongoing chaos and neglect and periodic violence.
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: No stable adult figure ever looked at this small, scrawny
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  Speaker 1: kid and decided that he was worth consistent attention. School
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  Speaker 1: was not the refuge it might have been for another
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  Speaker 1: kid in different circumstances, Gaskins was visibly small. His poverty
• 4:56
  Speaker 1: was the kind that you could see from across the
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  Speaker 1: school yard, and he had no social footing to stand on.
• 5:02
  Speaker 1: Other kids noticed it. The bullying he experienced was relentless
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: and physical, and it continued for years. Rather than tapering
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: off the way that a lot of childhood cruelty does,
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: chronic bullying, particularly the sustained physical kind, does something very
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: specific to the way a person understands the world. If
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: the only lesson getting reinforced every single day is that
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: weakness invites the punishment and that size determines your value,
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  Speaker 1: eventually a person starts looking for a way to change
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: that equation. For Gaskin's that change came through the discovery
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: that the threat of violence commanded a kind of respect
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: that being likable never had. He found that probably earlier
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: than most kids find anything significant about themselves. He eventually
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: fell in with two other boys from similar rough backgrounds,
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  Speaker 1: and together they started getting into the kind of trouble
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  Speaker 1: that teenagers in any era find when there's nothing constructive
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: in front of them, breaking into homes and petty theft,
• 6:01
  Speaker 1: which in nineteen forty six South Carolina got them in
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  Speaker 1: front of a judge in short order. Gaskins was around
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: thirteen when the legal system engaged with him in a
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  Speaker 1: serious way for the first time. He and his friends
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  Speaker 1: were caught, and the court's response to a traumatized, neglected
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  Speaker 1: thirteen year old from an abusive home was to send
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  Speaker 1: him away to the South Carolina Industrial School for Boys
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  Speaker 1: in Columbia. And I said school, but the word school
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  Speaker 1: in that institution's name was doing an enormous amount of
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  Speaker 1: work it had not earned. The South Carolina Industrial School
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: for Boys was a correctional facility full stop. It was
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  Speaker 1: not built around any meaningful therapeutic or rehabilitative model. Its
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  Speaker 1: primary tools were hard labor and strict rules, and the
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  Speaker 1: hierarchy of violence that existed among the boys housed there
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  Speaker 1: was something the institution either couldn't manage or didn't really
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  Speaker 1: care about. For a boy who was small and young
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  Speaker 1: and arriving with zero support system behind him, the Industrial
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  Speaker 1: School functioned like an advanced course in being victimized. Gaskins
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  Speaker 1: was sexually abused by older boys at the facility. He
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  Speaker 1: arrived already carrying neglect, poverty, a chaotic home, years of bullying,
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  Speaker 1: and a neurologically disrupted early childhood, and then he was
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  Speaker 1: placed in an environment where sexual assault by peers was
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  Speaker 1: part of his experience while the adult in charge of
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  Speaker 1: his care were occupied elsewhere. Apparently, the word failure genuinely
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  Speaker 1: feels inadequate here. The system didn't fail Gaskins in a
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  Speaker 1: passive or accidental way. It took a damaged kid, added
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  Speaker 1: new layers of damage, and eventually released him back into
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  Speaker 1: the wild. He ran from the school at various points,
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  Speaker 1: got caught, sent back. The cycle continued until it didn't.
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: Somewhere across those years, the psychological architecture that would eventually
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: produce a serial killer was being laid in place. Piece
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: Gaskins was developing a worldview built entirely around dominance and submission,
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  Speaker 1: around the idea that power was the only real currency
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  Speaker 1: and that you were either always wielding it or suffering
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: from someone else wielding it. After Reform school, Pee Wee,
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: Gaskins moved through his young adulthood in a way that
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: should have sent more of a clearer signal to the
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: systems around him. He reoffended quickly. He attacked a young
• 8:28
  Speaker 1: girl with a hammer, which resulted in additional incarceration, he escaped,
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: at least once he was recaptured, he went back in.
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  Speaker 1: This was the rhythm of his life for years, in out,
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  Speaker 1: in out, with each cycle producing a version of Gaskins
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  Speaker 1: that was harder and more fixed in his view of
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  Speaker 1: what the world was and what he was allowed to
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  Speaker 1: do in it. Something was happening during those years that
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: matters for understanding what came later. Every experience of the
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  Speaker 1: institutional violence, every mist intervention, every time an authority figure
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: looked at him and saw only a problem to be contained,
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  Speaker 1: it compounded. By the time Gaskins reached his thirties, he
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  Speaker 1: had a criminal record spanning pages, a psychological profile that
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: would require a very long appointment to unpack, and a
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  Speaker 1: compulsion toward violence that he later described to something living
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  Speaker 1: inside him. He described it as a pressure, a buzzing feeling.
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  Speaker 1: He called being bothered and killing as the thing that
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  Speaker 1: relieved it. He also, and this is genuinely important to
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  Speaker 1: the story, got married multiple times. Gaskins had long term
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  Speaker 1: relationships with women, He had children, held down jobs, and
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  Speaker 1: existed as a recognizable member of communities in rural South Carolina.
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  Speaker 1: He moved through the world in a way that didn't
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: consistently flag him as dangerous. That surface level normalcy is
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: one of the most disturbing aspects of this case, because
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  Speaker 1: it meant he had access neighbors, coworkers, people on the
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: road who needed a ride. Pee Wee. Gaskins eventually described
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  Speaker 1: his murders in two distinct categories, and his own taxonomy
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: tells you quite a bit about how his mind operated.
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  Speaker 1: The first category he called his coastal kills. These were
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: strangers people he encountered on the back roads of South Carolina,
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  Speaker 1: often hitchhikers, often young women or couples who accepted a
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: ride from a small, ordinary looking man and had no
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: way of knowing what they'd stepped into. All right, or
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• 10:40
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• 10:43
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• 10:47
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• 10:57
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