Thousands of names of criminals were run through the computer. Then Horgas came upon a case with which he had been involved in the early 1980s—a young black burglar named Timothy Spencer, who had started his career with arson. Horgas had been to the home of Spencer’s mother to investigate a burglary in which Spencer—born 1962—was a possible suspect. And although Spencer had not been charged, Horgas had entered his name into the system.
Now Horgas realized that he had a hit. Spencer had gone to jail in January 1984 for burglary, and had been released to a halfway house in Richmond two weeks before the murder of Debbie Davis. When Horgas checked the dates Spencer had signed out of the halfway house, each was the date of a murder. And when Susan Tucker was murdered in Arlington in December 1987, Spencer had been allowed back to his home in Washington on furlough for Thanksgiving.
When the DNA test results came back from Lifecodes, they showed that the same person had committed all of the five rapes.
Spencer was picked up for questioning in January 1988. When authorities requested a blood sample, he asked: “What has blood got to do with rape?” But no one had mentioned rape.
His blood sample had the same genetic code as that of the Susan Tucker rapist, and he was charged with her murder.
The defense took the line that DNA fingerprinting was new and untested, and therefore unreliable. The prosecution replied that in that case, they would have to submit the evidence from the other rape-murder cases to prove their point. Understandably, the defense team dropped their objection.
Timothy Spencer was found guilty in July 1988 and sentenced to death; he was executed in the electric chair on April 27, 1994.
In due course, the efficiency of DNA testing improved until results came back in a matter of days rather than weeks. It also became possible to make copies of the DNA molecule, so that in cases where only a small quantity was available, an indefinite amount could be created. In the case of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer (see chapter 14) this was to prove crucial.
It also became possible to open up “cold cases” that had long ago been abandoned, so that most police departments created Cold Case teams to look into murders that might be several decades old.
The Virginia police files provide a striking example.
On July 25, 1980, forty-seven-year-old Dorothy White was found stabbed and raped in her trailer; her throat had also been slashed. But a careful search by the physical evidence recovery team failed to find any clues to her murder. Although unmarried, she had been for years in a stable relationship with a used-car salesman, who was eliminated from the enquiry. Dozens of possible suspects were interviewed, but none detained. Over the years the case went cold.
In 1999, nineteen years after the murder, the victim’s sister-in-law, Doris White, telephoned the local police department to ask whether they might try DNA fingerprinting. She spoke to Detective Sergeant Edgar Browning, who had worked on the case. Browning went back to the file for the original “perk” kit (physical evidence recovery) and sent off the swabs taken from Dorothy White to the laboratory for testing.
Immense strides had been taken in DNA testing since Timothy Spencer had been convicted ten years earlier. In those days, a fairly large quantity of semen was required—enough to cover a nickel. Now a spot almost invisible to the eye was sufficient, for it was possible to churn out copies by a method know as STR, or short tandem repeats (also known as PCR, polymerase chain reaction).
Since 1989, Virginia had also started to build a DNA fingerprint database, which now contained samples from 100,000 offenders.
Almost immediately, Browning had a match—a man named William Morrisette. He had, in fact, been among the suspects originally interviewed, for he did odd jobs for Dorothy White’s boyfriend, and occasionally mowed her lawn.
Morrisette was in the database because in 1985, he had approached a woman called Virginia Brown, who had been sitting in her car waiting for her daughter to come out of school. Morrisette had tried to gag her, and forced his way into the car, with the obvious intention of abducting and raping her; she had thrown her keys out of the car window. The approach of another car motivated him to run away. Arrested a few days later, he had been sentenced to eight years for attempted abduction. But it was not until after his release, when he was re-arrested for parole violation, that Browning had asked for a blood sample to enter into the database.
Morrisette was found guilty of Dorothy White’s murder on the DNA evidence and sentenced to death.
In 1993, I became involved—retrospectively—in the case of a man who may be the worst serial killer of all time. If sadistic killers are the great white sharks of deviant murder, then Donald (“Pee Wee”) Gaskins probably qualifies as its Jaws. Yet until 1992, a year after his execution, his name remained completely unknown to the public at large. This changed with the publication of Final Truth: The Autobiography of a Serial Killer, whose descriptions of his crimes were so horrific that when I first tried to read it, I gave it up after a few dozen pages.
In the summer of 1993, I was working as a contributing editor on a part-work called Murder in Mind. (A part-work is a magazine published in single issues, which the reader can collect and bind together in a series of folders.) I suggested Gaskins as the subject of an issue, but this soon ran into problems. Most of the photographs of Gaskins were the copyright of the author of Final Truth, Wilton Earle Hall, a South Carolina writer who wrote under the pen name Wilton Earle. He not only owned the photographs, but he also felt that, since he had “discovered” and researched the case, copyright on its details belonged to him. He had successfully sued one writer who had used his work.
When the publisher of Murder in Mind spoke to Earle on the telephone, he learned that he was an admirer of my books, and so asked me to ring him and see if I could persuade him to allow us to go ahead. Later that day I spoke to him from the publisher’s office, and immediately established a warm relationship that has lasted to the present time.
What he had to tell me was this:
Pee Wee Gaskins had come to Earle’s attention when he was under sentence of death in the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, for murdering a fellow prisoner. He had been sentenced originally for killing a number of “business associates,” people involved with him in a racket involving respraying and selling stolen cars. Earle wrote to ask him if he would like to collaborate on his autobiography. Gaskins invited Earle to visit him in prison, and in unsupervised conversations revealed that he was a sadistic killer who had often cooked and eaten parts of his victims—sometimes while they were still alive. And since he was scheduled for execution, Gaskins had decided to tell the whole story, which involved around 110 murders.
But listening to this recital of torture and murder proved more than Wilton Earle had bargained for.
In Whoever Fights Monsters, Ressler writes:
Nearly everyone in our unit fell victim to its situational stress. One woman profiler bailed out after a few years because the work was giving her nightmares. She found herself unable to deal rationally with cases in which someone broke into a house and raped a woman; she, too, went on to other work for the FBI. Several of our people developed bleeding ulcers and three had anxiety attacks that were so severe that they were initially misperceived as heart attacks. Four of us, myself included, had periods of rapid and unexplained weight loss, some twenty to forty pounds in six-month periods. We went for batteries of tests, including the standard gastrointestinal series, and no purely physical reasons for the weight loss were discovered; it was all stress-related.
Something of the sort had happened to Earle. After listening to Gaskins’s horrific stories for months, he sank into a state of stress and anxiety that wrecked his marriage and led to a nervous breakdown. Even after Gaskins had been executed, the problems continued—at which point medical tests revealed that Earle was suffering from cancer. He regards this as one outcome of those days spent closeted with the man who told him: “My name is goin
g to live as long as men talk about good and evil.”
A harmless-looking little man with a high voice, Gaskins enjoyed torturing his victims, mostly hitchhikers, to death.
Born in the backwoods of South Carolina in 1933, Gaskins had been sent to reform school for burglary as a teenager, and had been gang-raped by twenty youths; this was the first of many terms in prison, although he later compelled the respect of fellow inmates when he murdered a particularly dangerous fellow prisoner, one of the jail’s “power men.” After a prison sentence for raping an underage girl, he resolved in future to kill women he raped and to hide the bodies. The first time he did this he was so carried away by the sensation of power that he began doing it regularly.
It seems likely that his predisposition to sadism was inborn. When he was a five-year-old, he went to a carnival where he saw a cobra in a glass cage kill a rat with a single strike of its fangs, and he found that the sight gave him an erection.
I suspect (as does Earle) that if Gaskins had been subjected to a postmortem, he would have been found to be brain damaged. As noted in an earlier chapter, a significant number of violent killers have suffered brain lesions due to blows to the head or birth defects.
The human brain has the consistency of jelly, and a violent blow—particularly on the forehead—can cause it to surge forward against the skull, creating scars. Such people often experience a total personality change, becoming prone to explosions of violence. It seems plausible that this may explain what Gaskins called his “bothersomeness”—a feeling as if he had a ball of molten lead in his stomach, which created tension and severe pain.
In Final Truth, Gaskins says:
When I was younger, there was always one or another of a bunch of different step-daddies around. I called them all sir and never bothered to learn most of their names because I knew my Mama wasn’t married to them, and they wouldn’t likely be around for long. The one she finally did marry was one mean son-of-a-bitch. He used to backhand me and knock me clean across the room just for practice. But then everybody knocked me around: my uncles, my other step-daddies, and nearabout all the boys and girls I played with and went to school with. They beat up on me just because I was so damned little.
When Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins was arrested on November 14, 1975—charged with contributing to the delinquency of a minor—it was for suspected involvement in the disappearance of Kim Ghelkins, a thirteen-year old girl last seen leaving her home in Charleston with an overnight bag.
Kim’s parents told the police of a married man named Donald Gaskins, whose stepdaughter was a friend of Kim’s.
Twelve years before this, Gaskins had been imprisoned for the statutory rape of a twelve-year-old girl named Patsy. A week later, he had escaped by jumping from an open window of a second-story waiting room in the Florence County courtroom. He was at liberty for six months before being recaptured and sentenced to four years in the South Carolina Central Correctional Institution. In November 1970, he was again questioned by the police, this time about the disappearance of his own fifteen-year-old niece, Janice Kirby, but denied all knowledge of her whereabouts.
A month later, he had again been under suspicion—this time, of a horrifying sex murder. Peggy Cuttino, the thirteen-year-old daughter of a prominent local politician, had disappeared in the small town of Sumter; her mutilated and tortured body was found in a ditch. Again, Gaskins was questioned and released.
It was when some of Kim Ghelkins’s clothes were found in a mobile home rented by Gaskins that a warrant was issued for his arrest. Yet even when taken into custody, police were unable to find enough evidence to charge him. Just as they were preparing to release him, his trusted friend and fellow convict Walter Neely experienced a sudden conversion as a born-again Christian, and decided to tell everything he knew about Gaskins. That same afternoon—December 4, 1975—he led the police to the graves of two young men who had been shot in the head and buried in the swamp. The following day he led them to four more corpses, two men and two women. On December 10, he was able to help them locate two more graves.
On May 24, 1976, Gaskins went on trial in the Florence County Courthouse, and was sentenced to die in the electric chair.
On death row, Gaskins began to think hard about how he could escape execution. One possibility was to confess to more murders, and engage in plea-bargaining. So he confessed to the murder of his niece, Janice, and her friend, Patty Ann Alsbrook. He claimed he had killed them as a result of an argument when he had caught them taking drugs. (In fact, as he later admitted to Wilton Earle, both had been sex crimes.) In exchange for his confession, Gaskins’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. With a known score of eleven murders, he prepared to face a lifetime behind bars.
In late 1980, there came a welcome diversion. He was asked if he would undertake to murder a fellow prisoner, Rudolph Tyner, a twenty-four-year-old black drug addict, who had killed an old couple in the course of holding up their grocery store. Now Tyner was on death row, hoping that the sentence would be commuted to life.
The son of his victims, Tony Cimo, was embittered at the thought of Tyner escaping the electric chair, and decided to take justice into his own hands. Through a friend of a friend, he approached Gaskins. Bored and frustrated in prison, Gaskins rose to the challenge of committing a murder under the nose of the wardens.
The first step was to get to know Tyner and gain his trust, which Gaskins did by slipping him reefers. The murder itself was brilliant in its ingenuity. Gaskins suggested he install a homemade telephone between their cells, running through a heating duct. Tyner’s phone contained plastic explosive, supplied by Tony Cimo. When, at a prearranged time, Tyner said, “Over to you,” Gaskins plugged his end of the wire into an electric socket, and the explosion rocked the whole cellblock. Tyner was blown to pieces.
At first the authorities believed that it had been an accident. Then rumors of murder began to spread. Soon, Tony Cimo was arrested, and confessed everything. He and Gaskins stood trial for the murder of Rudolph Tyner. Cimo received eight years. Gaskins was sentenced to the electric chair.
During his early days in prison, after his arrest for the murder of Kim Ghelkins, Gaskins had often been interviewed by reporters; now he was almost forgotten—a mere car thief and contract killer who had murdered a number of crooked business acquaintances. One or two criminologists had talked about writing about him, but it had all come to nothing. Gaskins disliked his loss of celebrity status as South Carolina’s worst mass murderer; he felt he deserved to be famous.
So in 1990, when Wilton Earle, who felt that his story might be worth telling, approached him, Gaskins cautiously agreed. He was running out of appeals, and his appointment with the electric chair could not be long delayed—a year at the most. As he came to trust him, Gaskins agreed to tell Earle what he called “the final truth.” But there was one stipulation: that nothing should be published until after Gaskins had been executed. Among other things, his rape of a small child would disgust his fellow prisoners.
Earle agreed. What he did not know when they made the agreement was that he was about to hear the most appalling and terrifying story of serial murder in the history of twentieth-century crime. What was revealed over many sessions with the tape recorder was that Gaskins was not simply a killer of crooked business associates; he was a compulsive and sadistic sex killer, whose list of victims amounted to three figures. The story of “the final truth” was so nauseating that Earle must have doubted many times whether it could be published.
Gaskins’s problem, as it emerged in the tapes, had always been an overdeveloped sex-impulse. His need for sex was so powerful and compulsive that, whenever it came on him, he experienced a heavy feeling that rolled from his stomach up to his brain, and down again. He compared it to the pain women suffer before menstruation. When this happened, he would drive up and down the coastal highway cruising for female hitchhikers.
But having served two terms for rape, he had vowed it should never h
appen again. His solution was simple: to kill his victims. And having raped and killed his first with a knife, he discovered, like so many serial killers before him, that torture and murder were an addiction. “I felt truly the best I ever remembered feeling in my whole life.”
With his next female hitchhiker, “I took my time and did some of the extra things I had thought up, so I enjoyed myself more, and after I finished, I felt the same good relief I felt the first time.”
These “extra things” soon came to include melting lead and pouring it on his victims’ flesh.
After a while, it made no difference whether the hitchhiker was male or female; it was the torture—and the sense of power—that gave the pleasure. In effect, he became a character out of one of the novels of the Marquis de Sade, working out new ways to satisfy his desire to torture and degrade.
Gaskins estimated that in the six years between September 1969 and his arrest in November 1975, he committed between eighty and ninety “coastal kills,” an average of fourteen a year. He distinguished these murders of hitchhikers picked up on the coast road from his “serious murders,” those committed for business or personal motives such as revenge.
Hours before his execution, Gaskins tried to commit suicide with a razor blade that he had swallowed the previous week, and then regurgitated. He was found in time, and given twenty stitches.
He had assumed that Earle would attend his execution, as his “official witness,” so that he could die looking at a friendly face. But Earle, who had been forced to conceal his feelings of revulsion during the tape-recorded confessions, had no intention of giving Gaskins this comfort. At their final meeting, he told Gaskins: “You are mistaken, Pee Wee, if you think I was ever your advocate. Not for a moment did I ever approve of you.” Gaskins tried to get at him from around the conference room table, but Earle was cautious enough to keep it between them (and proved to be correct—Gaskins had a concealed razor blade).