Columbia, South Carolina
How does a fierce opponent of capital punishment become someone who puts a serial killer to death by electrocution? In my case, it happened slowly, but with singular precision.
A waitress is shot in the head by a customer who doesn’t like the way his eggs get served. A pair of elderly missionaries are raped and murdered—and not in that order—after knocking on the door of a sociopath who doesn’t want to be interrupted while he’s watching football. A cop gets snuffed out on Christmas Eve while his kids wait for him to unwrap presents.
Ice picks. Farm tools. Piano wire. You name it. I’ve seen someone killed by it.
And then I wake up one day and I realize I’m different. My capacity for empathy is nearly gone. I’ve become a changed man—unrecognizable from the one who went to law school to fight the system as a public defender. Now, I’m capable of sending a man to the electric chair. And sleeping soundly on the night that two thousand volts course through his body.
That man was Pee Wee Gaskins. And this is the story of how he changed me.
I was introduced to Pee Wee Gaskins when I was the chief deputy prosecutor in Columbia, South Carolina. On a fall afternoon in 1982, I was going through crime scene photos in an unrelated murder case when I got a call from our state’s maximum-security prison.
The captain on the line was talking way too fast for anything to be good.
I asked him to slow down, straining to follow.
An explosion?
Where?
Death row?
A homemade bomb had killed an inmate named Rudolph Tyner in what appeared to be a botched escape attempt. Officials were placing the entire maximum-security facility on lockdown as they tried to figure out how he’d smuggled the explosives into his cell.
I thanked the officer for the news and went back to the crime scene photos on my desk. There were twenty-seven inmates from around the state lingering on death row, and each of them had some plan. I shrugged. Apparently, this one just went sideways.
A few days later, however, a strange new detail emerged. The bomb that blasted Tyner’s head turned out to be made of military grade plastic C-4. At best, Tyner had an intellectual disability. At worst, he had the intelligence of a fifth grader. How could someone like that smuggle C-4 into the most secure prison in the state?
I was still considering that when I got a visit from an old friend who worked as an investigator for the prison. Pulling up a chair, he threw a cowboy boot on my desk and said, “Looks like one of Tyner’s neighbors on the cell block had something to do with smuggling the C-4.”
An accident was one thing. A conspiracy among killers to smuggle military explosives onto death row was another. It represented a complete and unfathomable breakdown of the state’s security apparatus.
“Who?” I asked, my stomach sinking.
“You’re not going to like this, Dick. It was the inmate in charge of the cell block where they house death row. Pee Wee Gaskins.”
At a slight five-foot-three, Pee Wee was a jumble of paradoxes: uneducated yet intellectual, cold but courtly, a loner who loved company, and an outcast who valued community. Diagnosed with “derangement” as a child, he did his first stint in prison at fourteen after burying an axe into the head of a girl who caught him burglarizing her family’s home.
Still, if he’d grown up to be only no-good, I wouldn’t be telling this story. With a razor-sharp mind and gift for organization, Pee Wee was also a master of intimidation and illusion.
During the 1970s, hiding in plain sight as a roofer, he built a crime family out of the detritus of the rural South—teenage runaways, deadbeats, and lost souls. He collected more wives and mistresses than he knew what to do with and more ex-cons than he could reasonably hide. Eventually, they rewarded him with intrigues and affairs, jealousy and betrayal. Things became so unwieldy, in fact, that he had to dismantle the outfit that he created by killing them— sometimes two at a time.
Shot. Drowned. Poisoned. Strangled. It was all in the confessions he gave when he was finally caught. But it was the murder he did as an inmate that cemented his place as the most brazen killer I’d ever seen.
The prison investigator reached into his jacket for a cassette tape. Pee Wee had a curious habit of recording calls he made on a pay phone that inmates could use. This one, found in his cell, captured him speaking to a bricklayer whose parents had been murdered by Tyner.
Tyner had fatally shot the couple, Bill and Myrtie Moon, in a small grocery store they ran near Myrtle Beach and got sentenced to die in the electric chair for it. But every time his execution neared, there was another appeal, another delay.
The Moons’ son, Tony Cimo, finally had enough. He contacted Pee Wee through intermediaries and begged him to finish the job. On the tape, I heard Pee Wee saying, “I need one electrical cap and as much damn dynamite as you can get.” His voice was high and reedy, unmistakably low-country.
“Get an electric radio that’s got a pretty good-sized speaker and mail it to me,” he went on. “Just make sure that it looks like it ain’t been tampered with or nothing like that. Then I’ll give it to him, and when he plugs that son-of-a-bitch in, it’ll blow him on into hell.”
It was an extraordinary piece of evidence. I knew right then that it would guarantee a conviction.
But it also guaranteed that I’d be thrown into a national debate about the failures of the American justice system. Reporters couldn’t get enough of Tony and the traits he embodied to them: fairness, honesty, a need for closure. He was cast as a humble but desperate victim, pushed too far by a justice system that coddled the guilty. Seen that way, Pee Wee was merely finishing the state’s unfinished business.
In the decades since then, I’ve become a politically active Democrat and a South Carolina state senator. I’ve worked on four presidential campaigns—those of Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Along the way, I’ve come to learn that capital punishment, like abortion, is one of the rare issues that people are either for or against. There’s simply no middle ground.
I made my choice after playing my boss the tape of Gaskins plotting Tyner’s assassination. I was thirty-four, and politically ambitious enough to want his job as the top prosecutor in Columbia, South Carolina. But more importantly, I’d seen enough murder to ask a basic question: Why were we in this job if we weren’t willing to exact the ultimate punishment on an ultimate killer?
The wheels of justice moved slowly for the Moon family. But once Jim Anders, the elected solicitor who I worked for, agreed to make Tyner’s killing a death penalty case, I made sure those wheels moved fast for Pee Wee. Just six months after the murder, I was in a Columbia courtroom, beginning the process of finding twelve jurors who would be willing to send him to the electric chair.
Half the seats in the gallery were filled by cops and lawyers who’d had a role in pursuing Pee Wee at some point in his life. The media wedged into whatever space was left. On the second day of jury selection, I was thumbing through some papers during a break when Pee Wee called to me from his defense table.
Without looking up, I answered, “What is it, Pee Wee?”
“Dick, you know what? You’re a lot like me.” His eyes twinkled behind thick black glasses. “You like killing, just like me. You’re gonna enjoy killing me, Dick. I know you will.”
“No, Pee Wee,” I said. “What I’m trying to get is justice.”
He tilted his chair back onto two legs. “You know, Dick. In prison, justice is like a hard cock. Your feeling about it depends on whether you’re giving it or getting it.”
I looked over. “Nothing personal, Pee Wee.”
He whistled under his breath. “Whatever you say, Dick.”
Pee Wee was a survivor. All those nights sleeping on death row had bent but not broken him. He truly believed he was doing the same work as me, just with different tools.
I couldn’t allow myself to think that he might be right.
From Dig Me a Grave by Dick Harpootlian. Reprinted with permission from Kensington Books, copyright 2025.
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