Donald Gaskins: The Life of a Serial Killer
Donald Gaskins was a serial killer, arguably one of America’s most notorious. Although he had only been convicted of eight murders, he may well have killed over fifty men, women, and children. So why was he able to commit so many murders? We expect our criminal justice system to promptly apprehend criminals, and place them into a system where they will no longer commit crimes. So what went wrong? To what extent did society create or enable such behavior? To what extent was this person born this way, but even so, couldn’t something have been done, before the behavior resulted in so many victims? The questions are easy to ask and difficult, arguably impossible, to fully answer.
Crime scenes typically
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He was born out of wedlock and never knew his biological father. He grew up in a small three-bedroom shack in Florence County, South Carolina. His mother rarely supervised him, and at the age of one, he drank a bottle of kerosene, causing him to have convulsions until the age of three. His mother married multiple men, and each of the men would randomly beat Gaskins, sometimes until he was unconscious. The brain damage he experienced as a child leads many forensic psychologists to believe it caused his deviant and abnormal behavior. Early onset brain injuries are linked to “severe behavioral deficits and aggressive tendencies,” which can lead to “acquired sociopathy” (Meadows, 2005, p. …show more content…
157). The guards allowed other inmates to gang rape him, and he performed sexual favors on the strongest inmate, protecting himself from violence. During this time, he learned about “human behavior and the criminal underworld” and knew that he never wanted to return (Rosewood, 2015, p. 12). He took what he learned from prison and applied it to his criminal activities throughout his life, and once he reached eighteen, the facility reluctantly released him, arguably a significant downfall to the juvenile detention system. His release report stated: “[he was] anti-social and there is something in his past development that is preyed upon his mind” and “we consider him dangerous and also believe that he has the homicidal tendencies peculiar to a paranoid type” (Rosewood, 2015, p.
That same year, he molested a girl with his friend during school. By 11 years old, his father beat him so badly that he blacked out and since then he would have fainting spells. Gacy’s teenage years were spent in the hospital due to a burst appendix and his congenital heart defect which prevented him from exercising. By
In 1951, Gaskins was released from reform school and he and his wife Marry decided to move in with her parents in Georgetown, SC. Donald was able to land a job working construction after reform school but quickly found a better job in Georgetown at a logging company. Donald eventually decided he would work on a tobacco farm in Johnstonville, SC. He was offered the job by an old friend from reform school who promised him a three-bedroom house and a pick-up truck. Gaskins and his friend wanted to make some extra money so they started committing insurance fraud.
He lived with parents whom constantly fought, those fights ending up physical many times. Ridgeway maintained an IQ of 82 throughout his childhood, much below average. He was a bed wetter up until the age of fourteen, and once he had an episode, she would make him march naked to the bathroom. She would then hand wash him and his genitals, causing Ridgeway to be frustrated and aroused. This lead to sexual and violent dreams about his mother.
First, Jonathan W. Nobles was sentenced to death row. His crime? He had murdered two people in cold blood. Now, he is in prison awaiting his punishment. In prison, he starts out aggressive, violent, and out of control to get attention.
Gary Ridgway is known as the most prolific serial killer in the United States. Over the course of approximately ten years (1980s-1990s), Ridgway self-reported that he killed at least 71 women, if not more, claiming in his court statements to having “lost count”. Gary Ridgway was convicted for the murders of 49 women despite his confessions. The victims of these murders were found to be mostly prostitutes and sex workers that were drawn in to Ridgway’s car, raped, strangled, and dumped into the woods near the Green River (hence the alias name provided to Ridgway by law enforcement). In an interview conducted by police, Ridgway stated how unfair it was that “everyone knows about Ted Bundy, but not about the Green River Killer”, leaving police
Lauren Monroe Wendy L. Eddy English 1213 Section 21 March 2016 Gacy on Trial John Wayne Gacy is famously known for the sadistic murders of thirty-three young men. He would lure each of them in, some with the promise of a job with his self-made construction business and others with the promise of sex. On December 13th 1978, detectives requested a search warrant of Gacy’s home. The judge ordered the warrant, and when detectives arrived to the scene they discovered plenty of suspicious items in his house.
Emily Decius Sociology 361 Term Paper November 16, 2017 Of the many serial killers that have terrorized the nation throughout history, there are a few that stand out from the rest, one being Theodore Bundy. He became much more famous than others, and his story is rather interesting but has been constantly changed and promoted by the media. In total, it is estimated that Bundy murdered anywhere between 36 to 100+ victims, and there are still many bodies that have not been found (Sullivan, 2009). Bundy had always seemed to be a somewhat normal person through his younger years, and it seemed to most people like he would be successful in life (Sullivan, 2009). He excelled in school, attended college, and at one point even enrolled in law school (Sullivan, 2009).
He did it but, in order to cover up the murder, he ended up killing four more times. Finally that lead to the associate catching Donald in the act of killing the two. He later led police to the bodies of eight victims. In court he was found guilty of eight murders, and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life in prison. Gaskins was tried on eight charges of murder on May 24, 1976, found guilty on May 28 and sentenced to death, which was later commuted to life in prison when the South Carolina General Assembly's 1974 death sentence ruling was changed.
Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy are all infamous American serial killers, but none of these serial killers legacy comes close to H. H. Holmes’s legacy. H. H. Holmes was America’s first documented serial killer who was activated during the Gilded Age. However, not many people know much about H. H. Holmes and how he changed America’s Culture of the Gilded Age. Holmes embodied the dark side of the late 1980s in America, which most Americans wanted to hide. When told about the I-search assignment, Holmes’ legacy and impact he had on America’s culture were one of the first ideas I had.
Donald Henry Gaskins was a serial killer who killed over fifty people. Donald’s early life is what effected his future. Gaskins was never a normal kid. He was bullied in school and never was able to fit in there. He committed many crimes as a kid with other kids who influenced his bad behavior.
Between the years of 1972-1978 there was a string of murders that involved over 33 young men. This man named John Wayne Gacy was also nicknamed the Clown Killer for his activities in the community. Gacy was a very different person, who lived a very hard childhood, that led him to become the monster that he was. John Wayne Gacy was born in 1942 where he lived in a working class neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois. His father John Gacy Sr. was a very difficult man to deal with.
Richard "Iceman" Kuklinski was viewed as a normal man by society for much of his adult life. This man was far from normal. Kuklinski was a psychopath and a sociopath who was driven to kill by his troubled childhood and his lifestyle as a paid hit man. This paper will focus on the criminological theory of why Kuklinkski committed these murders. Richard Leonard Kuklinski was born in 1935 to Stanley and Anna Kuklinski ("Meet Notorious Contract Killer Richard Kuklinski").
Murder, willingly taking another human's life, is considered a heinous crime in the United States, and from the sociological perspective, breaks an important more. Serial Murder, therefore, is a sociologically deviant phenomenon where a person kills two or more people in distinct events, and an FBI overview of serial killers states “No single cause, trait, or even a group of traits can differentiate or identify serial killers … from other types of violent offenders” (FBI). However, use of the sociological perspective to identify potential factors in these cases is possible. As a boy, Jeffrey Dahmer was described as being a loner and a poor student- and had been sexually abused by a neighbor. He is homosexual, which carried a negative stigma during most of his lifetime: he was described as appearing to be a gentle, suave man in homosexual circles.
in “Terrifying quotes”). Ted, believed he was playing the role of god in taking away his victims' lives. Many serial killers such as Ted Bundy and Donald Gaskin are very foul human beings because of the horrific things they did to innocent people. While both Donald Gaskin and Ted Bundy were notorious serial killers, Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskin was substantially more menacing.
This essay will examine the case study of the convicted serial killer Gary Ridgway, who was eventually caught and convicted for the murders 48 women. Ridgway, went on a killing spree of women without getting caught for over two decades, he went on to become the Green River Killer (Reichert, 2004). The essay will explore and evaluate the characteristics including the attribution of Garry Ridgway’s horrific crimes. In the 1980s and 1990s Ridgway targeted prostitutes, runaway girls, hitchhikers and vulnerable women in the locality of where he lived in Washington State, USA (Reichert, 2004). It baffled the authorities as to how he was able to commit these crimes whilst working and living in the locality of his crimes however, he was not suspected