Gaskins said his first non-prison-related murder victim was a blonde female hitchhiker whom he tortured and murdered in September 1969 before sinking her body in a swamp. In his memoirs, he said: "All I could think about is how I could do anything I wanted to her." This hitchhiker was to be the first of many he said he picked up and killed while driving around the coastal highways of the
American South. Gaskins classified these victims as "coastal kills": people, both men and women, whom he killed purely for pleasure, on average once every six weeks, when he went hunting to quell his feelings of "bothersome-ness". He said 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, and mutilation, and even said he
cannibalized some of them. Gaskins later confessed to killing "eighty to ninety" such victims, although his statements to have committed any "coastal kills" have never been corroborated. In his memoirs, Gaskins said he committed coastal kills every six weeks, yet he contradicts this statement later in the book by stating he felt the overpowering need to seek out and commit a coastal kill by the tenth day of each calendar month. He also specifically named three further individuals whom he classified among his "serious murders": an
African-American couple he named as "Eddie and Bertie Brown" (aged 24 and 20 respectively) that he murdered in 1972 and buried "behind the Tenant House" (a location Gaskins failed to precisely pinpoint in his autobiography beyond once stating was a "shortcut to go around Columbia"), and a man named Horace Jones (40), who he said was murdered in 1974. There is no evidence to support any of the statements made by Gaskins that he had committed any murders other than that of Hazel Brazell and the fourteen victims listed below, whose bodies have been found and identified, and whose law enforcement records and Gaskins's sworn testimony substantiate.
1970 In November 1970, Gaskins committed the first of a series of confirmed murders, primarily people whom he knew and killed for personal reasons. His first confirmed victims were his own niece,
Janice Kirby (aged 15), and her friend,
Patricia Ann Alsbrook (aged 17), both of whom he beat to death. He said he was enraged at their drug abuse, while others say he was attempting to
sexually assault them in Sumter.
1971 or 1972 Gaskins claims to have poisoned
Martha Ann Dicks Jr. (also known as "Clyde"), 20, in March 1971 or 1972, because of a rumor Gaskins was the father of her unborn child, because she was an alleged drug dealer who had supplied Kirby and Allsbrook, and/or because she got married and left for Texas to be with her wife. Dicks' bones were found in a ditch, but lost when given to a university to study. The box containing her remains was recovered on June 13, 2025, from a closet at the
College of Charleston campus.
1973 Gaskins raped and drowned
Doreen Hope Dempsey, 22, and her two-year-old daughter
Robin Michelle Dempsey in June 1973. Gaskins had befriended Doreen Dempsey several years prior and became angry upon hearing she had become pregnant a second time by an African American man. She had been living with Gaskins's friend Johnny Sellers and his brother Carl Sellers in North Charleston, South Carolina. They brought her to Gaskins's home in Prospect, and left her there to speak with Gaskins about staying with him for a short time while she was pregnant. Upset that Doreen was having a second biracial child, Gaskins responded by walking her to his backyard pond where he drowned both the mother and her toddler. when he was murdered by Gaskins on September 12, 1982. Tyner was appealing his own death sentence after being convicted of robbing a
Murrells Inlet convenience store and killing store owners Bill and Myrtle Moon on March 18, 1978. The Moons' son, Tony Cimo, hired Gaskins for $2,000 to kill Rudolph Tyner because in Cimo's view, the appeals process was taking too long. Tony Cimo asked Gaskins what he needed to kill Tyner, then Gaskins told him to insert some C4 inside the heel of a shoe and mail it to him. This way Gaskins obtained plastic explosives with a blasting cap, a long wire, and a radio speaker to create an imitation intercom speaker that Tyner put to his ear to test. Gaskins then detonated the makeshift bomb by plugging the wire into a prison cell power outlet. This murder was dramatised as the 1986 made-for-television movie
Vengeance: The Story of Tony Cimo, where
Brad Dourif played Gaskins; however, Gaskins' name was not used in the program because Gaskins was appealing his death sentence and the state did not allow his
personality rights to be used by producers. David Bruck, chief lawyer of the South Carolina Office of Appellate Defense, described the murder of Tyner as a "high tech lynching." ==Final arrest==