COLUMBIA, S. C. – At 6:00 a.
m. on September 5, 1991, correctional officers on their final rounds inside South Carolina’s death row noticed something wrong. Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, the man authorities call the meanest in America, lay motionless beneath his thin prison blanket.
The guards hesitated. Then they saw the blood. It had soaked through the mattress and was pooling on the concrete floor in a dark, spreading stain.
For a moment, they thought he was already dead. But Gaskins was still breathing. The tiny razor blade he had smuggled inside his mouth—hidden during his transfer to death row—had done its work.
He had slit both wrists and his elbows during the night. The wounds were deep. The prison medical team rushed to stabilize him, working frantically to keep him alive.
But Gaskins had not intended to die. He had wanted to prove a point.
Nearly a decade earlier, in 1982, while already serving multiple life sentences for multiple murders, Gaskins had orchestrated a killing so 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 it would ultimately lead him to South Carolina’s electric chair. He was already confined to the state’s highest security block, but that did not stop him from taking another life. His target was Rudolph Tiner, a fellow inmate sentenced to death for the fatal attack on an elderly couple during an armed robbery.
The murder of Tiner was not a random act of violence. It was a contract job. The order came from Tony Cimo, the son of one of Tiner’s victims.
Cimo wanted revenge, and Gaskins was more than willing to provide it. He first tried to poison Tiner, but failed repeatedly. So he devised a new plan: “Send me some explosives so I can blow the son of a bitch to pieces,” he told Cimo.
And that is exactly what happened.
Gaskins rigged a bomb inside a radio. He told Tiner the device would allow them to talk between cells. The moment Tiner pressed the radio to his ear, the bomb exploded.
The blast rattled the prison walls. “The last thing he heard before it blew his head off was me laughing,” Gaskins later said. The crime was so gruesome that it made history: Gaskins became the first white man in South Carolina sentenced to death for murdering a black man.
Now, on the morning of September 5, as officers stood over Gaskins bleeding but stable, they knew the execution would go forward as scheduled. The state had spent years fighting for this moment. And Gaskins had spent years planning his final act of defiance.
He had written about it in his book “Final Truth: The Autobiography of Pee Wee Gaskins.” He wrote: “I could have ended it myself if I really wanted to.” He wanted to show that he alone controlled the last hours of his life.
At 8:30 a. m. , the prison doctor arrived to stitch Gaskins back together.
The wounds on his wrists and elbows were cleaned and closed with 20 fresh stitches. His body was patched up, just enough to make it to the chair. Then came the lawyers.
Some he called decent, others he despised. But none of them mattered. They were not there for him.
They were there out of duty, out of obligation. Gaskins had never trusted lawyers. To him, they were predators who thrived on the suffering of men like him.
The law, as he saw it, was nothing but a racket.
Throughout the day, the ritual unfolded. Gaskins placed his final meal order. He chose pizza.
Not because he wanted it—he had no intention of eating it. He chose it for the same reason he did everything else: for control, for defiance. When the pizza arrived, he took a single bite.
Just enough to say he could. Then he shoved it aside, untouched. The meal was never for him.
It was for them, another step in their routine. And if they thought he would play along, they were wrong.
At 11:00 p. m. , the countdown began.
Gaskins was led to the shower for one final rinse. His head was shaved, along with a patch on his right calf where the electrodes would bite. The process was routine, methodical, cold.
Then came fresh prison fatigues—pants and shirt—as if a clean uniform could somehow dignify death.
At 11:30 p. m. , the chaplain arrived, speaking of salvation and forgiveness.
Gaskins barely listened. He had written: “Right before the end, preachers will come to tell me how much Jesus loves me.” The words were dripping with cynicism.
When the chaplain left, Gaskins was given one last phone call. He dialed the number of his daughter, Shirley. The conversation was brief.
What was left to say?
At 1:00 a. m. on September 6, 1991, Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins was led to the electric chair.
His wrists and elbows were wrapped in 20 fresh stitches, souvenirs from the morning’s blade. He lowered himself into the old oak chair, settling in for the last time. Guards strapped him in: waist, wrists, ankles.
A wet electrode was taped to his leg. They secured his head, adjusting the wet sponge to ensure the first surge would strike the center of his brain.
“Do you have any last words?” the warden asked.
“I’ll let my lawyers talk for me,” Gaskins replied. “I’m ready to go.”
Then came a nod. Three executioners pressed three buttons, but only one carried the charge. The power panel hummed to life.
Five seconds of 2,000 volts at 5 amps. Then eight more seconds at 1,000 volts. At 1:10 a.
m. , Donald Gaskins was pronounced dead.
The state of South Carolina had carried out its sentence. But the debate rages on: Was Gaskins truly the meanest man in America, or have we seen worse? The question is not just about one killer.
It is about the nature of evil, the limits of human cruelty, and the system that ultimately brings such men to justice. Gaskins controlled his final hour. But in the end, as the smoke cleared from the old electric chair, he gained nothing.
His legacy is a ledger of blood, a trail of victims, and a lesson in the depth of depravity one human being can reach.
The guards who watched him die will never forget the stillness of that morning. The blood-soaked mattress, the smug defiance, the final spark. And perhaps, somewhere in the dark corners of America’s prisons, another man waits his turn—another who believes he can set himself free by deciding to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 anyone, anytime, anywhere.
But the chair waits for them all.