Last June, at a South Carolina coroners’ conference, a fellow county coroner handed Sumter County’s Robbie Baker a cardboard box, which Baker carried to his car to open. What he found inside gave him chills: fragments of a skull and bones—recovered after decades of misplacement—belonging to Martha Ann Dicks, a nineteen-year-old Sumter woman last seen alive in 1972. Chills, because Dicks was one of thirteen confirmed victims of Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins, the South’s most prolific serial killer—“the redneck Charles Manson,” some called him—who’d left a trail of shattered lives and shallow graves in the Palmetto State. Chills, Baker says, because a half-century-plus after Gaskins’s first murder and thirty-four years after his execution, “Pee Wee is still haunting us.”
Dick Harpootlian is familiar with those chills. Harpootlian is a trial lawyer, most notably representing infamous Lowcountry lawyer turned convicted murderer Alex Murdaugh. Forty-some years before that, however, Harpootlian was the deputy prosecutor who sent Pee Wee Gaskins to the electric chair. Dig Me a Grave, cowritten with Shaun Assael, is Harpootlian’s account of that prosecution intertwined with a chronicle of Gaskins’s crimes. It’s a haunted and haunting read.
Author — Journalist — Producer
