10 Horrifying Serial Killers You've Never Heard Of

4. The Meanest Man In America

Donald Henry "Pee Wee" Gaskins - so called because of his small stature, which caused him no end of grief - was a rapist and killer, active in America in the 1950s and 1960s.

Before he was twelve, he was part of a boys club that stole and raped outside of class: Gaskins would be sent to reform school for a hatchet attack at the age of thirteen, and was sent to a mental hospital after escaping from the reformatory three times.

A little more than a year after escaping yet again, he was back in prison: this time for attacking a woman with a hammer. Escaping once more, he ran away with the circus, leaving a horrific trail of rapes and assaults behind him as the carnival travelled.

In late 1969, Pee Wee picked up a hitchhiker, tortured and raped her, then threw her into a swamp, still alive. He claimed it was the best he'd felt in his whole life, and pursued his new hobby with a passion, killing hitchhikers, tourists and anyone else he felt like murdering: twenty people between 1970 and 1972.

The following year, he bought himself a hearse, joking that he needed it to carry the corpses of his victims. That was more or less accurate: Gaskins would claim to have killed over a hundred people.

Gaskins loved to boast, and would often take on contract killing as well as his own murders, occasionally working with accomplices. It was one of them who would turn him into police, having shown him his private graveyard, where the authorities found the bodies of eight people, including a toddler.

He was sentenced to life in 1976, because South Carolina had recently abolished the death penalty, however, hired to kill another death row inmate by the son of one of the man's victims, he was tried for that killing just as the state reintroduced the death penalty, and given the electric chair for murdering another murderer.