Dark Stories: On This Day In True Crime History - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1991: Pee Wee Gaskins Executed for a Murder Committed Behind Bars

Donald Henry Gaskins Jr., known as Pee Wee Gaskins, was executed in the electric chair at Broad River Correctional Institution in South Carolina at 1:10 a.m. on 6 September 1991, aged 58. A serial killer confirmed to have murdered at least thirteen people between 1970 and 1975, including six teenagers and a two-year-old, he had originally been sentenced to death in 1976 for one of eight bodies found buried near his home in Prospect, South Carolina. That sentence was overturned, and he pleaded guilty to nine murders in exchange for life imprisonment.

His second death sentence came after he murdered a fellow death row inmate, Rudolph Tyner, using C4 explosive while incarcerated at Central Correctional Institution in Columbia. Hours before his execution, Gaskins attempted suicide by slitting his wrists. He claimed to have killed 110 people, a figure widely dismissed by law enforcement and journalists as a bid for notoriety.

His last words were: ‘I’ll let my lawyers talk for me. I’m ready to go.’

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Execution Murder Prison Serial Killer USA

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1971: Man Commits Mass Murder: Freed Eight Years Later to Start a New Life

On the night of 6 September 1971, dairy farmer Clifford Bartholomew murdered ten members of his family at their Hope Forest property south of Adelaide, including his wife, seven children aged between four and 19, his sister-in-law and his infant nephew. When police arrived, Bartholomew was sitting calmly at the kitchen table drinking beer; one detective later described him as “cool, calm and collected.”

Bartholomew admitted the killings and was sentenced to death, but his sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment. Despite the scale of the crime, he was released on parole in 1979 after serving just eight years.

Under the new identity Clifford Palmer, he rebuilt his life, remarried and became stepfather to seven children. He lived quietly until his death in 2002. Years later, his second family learned the full extent of his past and discovered that the man they had known as “Poppy Cliff” had been responsible for one of Australia’s worst family massacres.

Abandoned farmhouse with hangmans noose under dark sky

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Adelaide Australia Family Homicide Hope Forest Massacre Murder SA Trial

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1924: John Dillinger Commits His First Crime: A Robbery That Set a Legend in Motion

On 6 September 1924, twenty-one-year-old John Dillinger joined his friend Edgar Singleton in robbing a local grocer, Frank Morgan, as he returned home carrying the week’s takings. Dillinger struck Morgan with a cloth-wrapped iron bolt. Both men were arrested, but despite Dillinger having no prior record, he received the harsher sentence: between 10 and 20 years. Singleton, the experienced criminal who had planned the job, hired a lawyer and walked away with a lighter term.

Inside the Indiana State Reformatory, Dillinger kept his head down, worked as a seamster in the shirt factory, and carefully cultivated friendships with hardened criminals including Harry Pierpont, Homer Van Meter, and Charles Makley. These men would later form the core of the Dillinger gang. He later wrote to his father: ‘if I had gotten off more leniently when I made my first mistake this would never have happened.’

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1842: Man Hanged at Melbourne for the Killing of an Overseer at Mount Rouse

On 5 September 1842, a man known as Figara Alkapareet was hanged in the Port Phillip District for his alleged part in the killing of an overseer named Codd at Mount Rouse two years earlier. Witnesses placed Figara among a group of men who attacked Codd, although questions surrounded his identification and Figara maintained that it was his brother who had been at Mount Rouse while he was elsewhere washing sheep. After a jury found him guilty, Figara was sentenced to death. Contemporary accounts described him as meeting his fate with a sense of “natural resignation,” apparently accepting his approaching death without outward resistance. His execution provoked criticism in the newspapers, which questioned the justice and usefulness of the punishment amid the violent conflict and dispossession of the period. Even at the time, Figara’s death prompted debate over whether the law was being applied justly.

View from Mount Rouse summit over Southern Grampians plain

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Australia Execution Hamilton Melbourne Mount Rouse Murder Port Fairy Trial VIC

1991: Pee Wee Gaskins Executed for a Murder Committed Behind Bars

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1971: Man Commits Mass Murder: Freed Eight Years Later to Start a New Life

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1924: John Dillinger Commits His First Crime: A Robbery That Set a Legend in Motion

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1842: Man Hanged at Melbourne for the Killing of an Overseer at Mount Rouse

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