Donald Henry Gaskins was an American serial killer active from the mid-1950s through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, who claimed responsibility for scores of murders and was convicted on multiple counts. Known by the nickname “Pee Wee,” he was executed in South Carolina in 1991 after receiving a death sentence.

Key Facts

• Gaskins later claimed to have killed as many as 100–160 people, though official convictions were far fewer.
• He was widely known by the nickname “Pee Wee.”
• Authorities arrested him following a 1975 break-in that triggered investigation into other crimes.
• He was convicted on multiple counts of murder and was sentenced to death.
• Gaskins was executed by electric chair in South Carolina in 1991.
• Many of his alleged victims were young men, including hitchhikers and acquaintances.
• Reports and Gaskins’s own statements describe a long span of offending, beginning in the 1950s.
• He had a long criminal record before the murder convictions, including robbery and other offenses.
• Gaskins grew up in rural South Carolina in a sharecropping family and experienced early abuse and instability.
• His case has remained a subject of true-crime books, articles, and debate over the accuracy of his claims.

Crimes and Victims

Gaskins admitted to a very large number of killings, and investigators confirmed a subset of those claims during later inquiries. His admitted victims and the ones for which he was convicted overlap but do not match in number, leaving uncertainty about the full scope of his actions.

Victims frequently included young men and transient individuals such as hitchhikers, people who were vulnerable or on the margins of society. Accounts of his crimes describe patterns of opportunistic targeting rather than a single consistent method, and some killings appear to have served different motives at different times.

Capture and Trial

Law enforcement detained Gaskins after a 1975 burglary arrest, and questioning during that process opened broader investigations into past unsolved disappearances and killings. Information he provided, combined with corroborating evidence, led to formal murder charges in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

He was tried and convicted on several counts of murder and was ultimately sentenced to death by a jury in South Carolina. Gaskins spent more than a decade on death row before his execution in 1991.

Psychology and Motives

Observers and experts have pointed to a mix of factors in attempts to explain Gaskins’s behavior, including a history of early abuse, longstanding criminality, and personality pathology consistent with antisocial traits. Gaskins himself offered varying accounts of his motives, sometimes describing impulsive violence and at other times claiming calculated intent.

Because Gaskins both exaggerated and contradicted details at times, assessments of his motives rely on a combination of his statements, criminal records, and evaluations by professionals. The variability in his accounts makes definitive psychological conclusions difficult and has left aspects of his case open to continued analysis.

Background / Early Life

Donald Henry Gaskins was born in 1933 in Florence County, South Carolina, into a poor sharecropping household and experienced family instability and abuse during childhood. He left formal education early and encountered the criminal justice system as an adolescent, with convictions for robbery and related offenses in his teens.

Those early experiences—economic hardship, family turbulence, and time in juvenile and adult institutions—shaped the trajectory that led him into repeat offending. Over subsequent decades he alternated between periods of incarceration and release, during which some of the crimes later attributed to him are reported to have occurred.

Legacy and Media Coverage

Gaskins’s case has attracted attention from true-crime writers, journalists, and documentary producers interested in both the scope of his claims and the social context of his offenses. Coverage has explored the challenges in verifying his confessions, the experiences of victims’ families, and the workings of law enforcement in rural areas over several decades.

Debate continues about the accuracy of Gaskins’s self-reported victim count and about how his story has been told in books and media accounts. His case remains a reference point in discussions about serial murder, criminal self-presentation, and the ethical responsibilities of reporting on violent crime.