Gaskins Research Paper

Early Life

Gaskins childhood was characterized by a great deal of neglect. His mother provided instability, neglect and didn’t care for him. When Gaskins was one year old, he drank a bottle of kerosene, which caused him to have convulsions until he was three years old. He also suffered from night terrors. Gaskins also received regular beatings from his mom's boyfriends when he was little. He was small for his age and bullied in school quite often. And classmates gave him the nickname “pee-wee.” At the age of 8, Gaskins dropped out of school. His mother apparently never cared to let him learn his name, the first time he learned his given name was when it was read out in his first court appearance. Then he was charged of a brief crime spree he

Gaskins was paroled in November 1968. Upon his release, Gaskins moved out of this town and began work with Fort Roofing company. His first non-prison-related murder victim was a hitchhiker whom he tortured and murdered in the year 1969, before dumping her body in a swamp. In his memoirs, he wrote: "All I could think about is how I could do anything I wanted to her.” This hitchhiker was the first of many he picked up and killed while driving around the coastal highways of the American South. He classified his victims as "coastal kills.” both male and female, whom he killed only for pleasure, he did this approximately once every six weeks. He tortured and mutilated his victims, while attempting to keep them alive for as long as possible. He confessed to killing these victims using a variety of methods including stabbing, suffocation, mutilation, and even claimed to have cannibalized some of them. He later confessed to killing "eighty to ninety" such victims although his claims to have committed any "coastal kills" have never been corroborated. In his autobiography, Final Truth, Gaskins claims to have committed coastal kills every six weeks, yet contradicts this claim later in the book by stating he felt the overpowering need to seek out and commit a coastal kill by the 10th date of each calendar

In 1973, he committed one of his more gruesome murders when he raped and murdered two of his neighbours: a pregnant 23-year-old and her 1-year-old daughter.That same year, he bought a hearse and put a sign in the window which read: We haul anything, living or dead. With a reputation for being explosive, many tried to avoid him. But nobody suspected he was a serial killer. Two years on, a woman hired Gaskins to kill her boyfriend. He did it but, in order to cover up the murder, he ended up killing four more times. Finally that lead to the associate catching Donald in the act of killing the two. He later led police to the bodies of eight victims. In court he was found guilty of eight murders, and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life in prison. Gaskins was tried on eight charges of murder on May 24, 1976, found guilty on May 28 and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life in prison when the South Carolina General Assembly's 1974 death sentence ruling was changed. Years past he attempted another murder for which he earned the title of the "Meanest Man in America". While on death row, Gaskins told his life story to a journalist named Wilton Earle. He was convicted of only nine murders but in the end he claimed to having committed between 100 and 110