Loved Her To Death

Several women in Pee Wee's life suffered the same brutal fate, including his one true love, Jessie Judy.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
In the six years of Peewee's murderous streak, he killed
several women in his circle. At least a dozen of
them moved in and out of his bedroom, whether his
wives or live in lovers, often at the same time,
often in abusive ways. Like property. He gave women to
other men around him, including Walter Neely. Jesse Judy moved

(00:26):
out of Peewee's house to live with Johnny Sellers, her
new lover. They were later found buried together in Peewee's
Field of death. Jesse Juet was thrown away to a
happy life. He killed them. If anybody knew what he

(00:47):
was doing inside the house, it would never believe me.
Everybody knew that half what he talked about. Whishop had
just made up. Would you ever lie to me, he said, yes,
I would from my heart radio and doghouse pictures. This

(01:12):
is pee Weee. Gaskins was not my friend. I'm Jeff
Keating in Peewee claimed that he killed peg Cut. No. No No,

(01:36):
he didn't, of course, but he was banking on the
goodwill it would generate with his fellow inmates. Once in prison,
taking blame for somebody else's crime was a big deal,
But for Peewee to stay out of prison was a
different story altogether. It meant manipulating, threatening, and controlling people.

(01:58):
Those skills were never more evident. It then with Peewee's
three friends, Sandy Snell Gaskins, Walter Neely, and Donna Carulo.
Sandy Snell Gaskins, the fifth wife, who was at that
time living in the same house with the six wife,
told the police Nip, Peewee and Kim were often in Prospect,

(02:22):
so that's how the case opened. Sandy Snell was married
to pee Wee Gaskins before Donna Carulo came along. Sandy
and Donna accepted the arrangement, and we're both living with Peewee.
When the Charleston police knocked on their door and asked
them about a missing girl, Sandy told them she had
recently seen Peewee with thirteen year old Kim Gelkins and

(02:45):
that the two of them had gone to Prospect. That's
when the entire investigation shifted to Peewee Gaskins and his
friend Walter Neely. Sandy was very talkative, the one who
really spilled the means they got him locked up. When
they first began the investigation, you took quite the risk

(03:08):
when you went jawing to the police about Peewee gaskets,
but tying him to an investigation of a missing girl
could prove deadly. And I said, well, what was the
problem with miss Snell? He says to her joy in
He said she couldn't keep her mouth shut. He was
careful to tell me several times, but the first time

(03:30):
was the most poignant. He said, I should have gone
ahead and done when I knew I should do, and
blowed her up. We were talking about dynamite, and he said,
if he just used dynamite to blow up old Lady Snell.
Old Lady Snell was Sandy Snell's mother. Peewee thought she
was the primary informant, when in fact Sandy is the

(03:52):
one who spilled most of the means so to speak
with the North Rolston police. Sandy had good reason to
turn on Peewee, and her tip to the police that
Peewee was with the missing girl, Kim Gelkins, may have
been more than a simple slip of the tongue. Their
relationships started out in typical Peewee fashion. Doring Dempsey had

(04:16):
recently moved out because Peewee's work took him away from home.
Too often. That's when he met Sandy Snell. Her family
had worked for the Amusements of America Carnival, and as
the fair moved on, Sandy stayed behind and soon fell
in love with Peewee. Ten months later, they had a son,
and the trio moved to North Charleston, where Peewee landed

(04:39):
a roofing job. These were good times, but it wouldn't
be long before Peewee was chasing other women. Here's his
former employer from the weekends. They used to like to
go to the honky tonks and fool around with the women.
I think when I was up there one time, I
made it, and then his wife outside and some other girls.

(05:01):
Because a lot of times he'd have his wife living there,
and sometimes he'd have other woman living in the house too,
so you know, we think he was a womanizer. Soon
after their relationship started, Sandy heard a rumor that pee
Wee had gotten another girl pregnant. That girl may have
been Martha and Dix, known as Clyde. The sheriff Department's investigator,

(05:24):
Hugh Mathis, reported that Sandy began dating another man because
pee Wee quote gone out with a black girl end quote.
That rumor, combined with Sandy dating another man, proved too
much for Gaskins. According to the domestic abuse report Sandy
filed against him, pee Wee took Sandy to a spot

(05:45):
near the Sunrise Race track on US South, about five
miles from Sumter. He tied her to a tree and
beat her with quote branch limbs bigger than your thumb
end quote. The investigator said. She appeared to be beaten badly,
but Sandy would later refuse to press charges. This abusive,

(06:09):
volatile relationship would continue. One report stated that Sandy burned
down Peewee's North Charleston house because he allowed her sister
wanted to stay there and began having an affair, and
Peewee soap opera world women often died. This is Jennifer Hawes,

(06:33):
a reporter at the Post and Courier newspaper an author
of the award winning book Grace Will Lead Us Home.
Here she talks about the Pulitzer Prize winning investigation she
authored with three other writers called Till Death Do Us Part.
We decided to begin till Death to Us Part because
of a press release saying that South Carolina had ranked

(06:55):
number one in the country in terms of men killing women,
and in fact it had been in the top and
as long as these records were kept this way, we
need to really sit down and explore why this is.
And so the others got a team together to discuss
different ways of looking at this. One of the things
that we found was this strong idea that women should

(07:20):
be sort of seen and not heard in the household,
that women were viewed more as property, that women were
not empowered within these households, and really domestic violence comes
down to power and control. There's a common misperception that
abusers have anger management problems, but of the victims that

(07:41):
we talked to, that was just not the case. There
was a common scenario where a woman would say, my husband, boyfriend, whatever,
um was a great guy and everybody thought he was
a great guy. If anybody knew what he was doing
inside the house, they would never believe me. And then
within the house, he's manipulating her her, Uh, you know,

(08:01):
she's not good enough, nobody else would love her. You know,
you're ugly, you're fact and at the same time restricting
her access to friends and family and often income, so
that she's trapped. And that's the idea. When I say
that it's a power struggle, and so when we think
of somebody's property, that's what we're talking about is someone

(08:22):
who's completely disempowered in the household and not treated as
an equal human being. That power struggle happened at pee
Wee Gaskin's household. He controlled and manipulated and even bragged
about his property, proclaiming he had quote given Sandy to
his buddy Walter Neely. That's correct. The ultimate gifts that

(08:45):
we gave were women. He gave Sandy, his former wife,
to Walter. The main gift was the Jesse Judy given
to Johnny Sellers. So Sandy moved in with Walter all
a new woman. Jesse Judy would soon move in with Peewee.
Within a year, Jesse would move on to live with

(09:07):
Johnny Sellers. It wouldn't end well. James Connoy. Judy was
Peewee's friend, co worker and neighbor who had two women
who loved him, Jesse and Donna, but then leave him
as he fell back into his drug addictions. Peewee Gaskins
would take in both women, only this time he and

(09:29):
Donna Carulo would get married until death did them part.
Here's Holly Gatling, the state newspaper reporter who covered the
story from the beginning. We asked her about Donna Crulo,
who was twenty years younger than Gaskins and became his
sixth and final wife. I think that when someone is

(09:53):
in love, the whole mechanism of the emotion of love
is to blind yourself to the faults of the person
you love. I can't speak to Donna at all, but
I think just generally speaking, many many people will excuse

(10:18):
the faults and the activities of the people that they
love because they love them. I know many people in
prison have families on the outside, families who love them,
regardless of what they've done, will stand by them, will

(10:39):
do what they can to help rehabilitate the person, because
that's what love is all about. It's love till death
do us part. You know, they love this man and
they see him in terms of the men he could be,
or the man that he was, the men who might
return if he could stop drinking, or if he could

(11:01):
stop doing drugs, or if he wasn't under so much stress,
or if she could be a better wife, for better mother.
Fill in the blank, that she still loved the man
that she saw possible in there, and I think that
a lot of people don't understand that that the relationship
was born of something, and in many cases it was love.

(11:22):
Donna Carulo apparently did fall in love with pee Wee Gaskins.
At the time. Peewee had four women coming and going
from his home and backyard trailer. There were bedrooms for each.
Besides Sandy and Donna, there were two other women, Marie
and Sherry, and many children. The women were all much

(11:43):
younger than Peewee, and he covered most expenses for everybody,
including food, shelter, and stolen cars for transportation. But it
wasn't just money he used to control women. One of
the big misconceptions with domestic violence is that women who
are victims are low income, and that is true in

(12:05):
many scenarios, but it's not universally the case. And that's
what we found was that domestic abuse occurs in every
socioeconomic strata. It's a relationship in which a man is
trying to exert tremendous amount of control over a woman.
The idea that it's only low income women is really
off the mark. Why wouldn't the women just leave? Well, then,

(12:32):
in now leaving could literally get the abused victim killed.
And the number one reason that women don't leave is fear,
because they know in their heart of hearts and actually,
in terms of the statistics about domestic common sides occur
after the relationship bends, So either because she's tried to

(12:54):
leave or file charges, they know that that's when they're
going to be at the greatest danger. Sandy had enough
abuse and didn't bother to cover for Peewee when telling
detectives about the missing girl, Kim Gilkins, Walter couldn't take
it anymore and led the police to Johnny Knight's grave.

(13:15):
But Donna didn't leave. In fact, she continued her relationship
with Peewee Gaskins even after he'd been indicted for killing
eight friends and associates, even after he was convicted for
killing Dennis Bellamy. Whether she knew it or not, she
would soon serve a critical role in finding Kim Gilkins,

(13:36):
as would Walter Neely Walters A little slow is all?
How was the way pee we described Walter. Neely, a psychiatrist,
would later testify that Walter had an i Q of
fifty six and was quote moderately mentally retarded end quote
with a personality disorder that leaves him socially inept and

(14:00):
dependent on other persons. It wasn't easy for Walter Neely,
it was hard for him to hold down a job,
so it's not surprising he became skilled at stealing delons.
That life meant he was running with a rough crowd
and also bullied a lot by Dennis Bellamy, his ex

(14:21):
wife Diane Bellamy. Even his closest friend, Peewee. Peewee gave
him Sandy Gelkins as a girlfriend, but then later killed
Walter's common law wife Diane Bellamy and blamed him for
the murder. In the end, Walter went to prison because
he was always with the wrong people at the wrong time,

(14:44):
and he was the perfect scapegoat. Walter made the mistake
of traveling with Dennis Bellamy and Johnny Knight to prospect
the night Peewee Gaskins unexpectedly killed Dennis in a dispute
over money. A crazy scene. Peewee and Dennis leave Johnny
Knight and Walter alone in the trailer where there watching

(15:05):
TV and having fun. Peewee returns a short while later
and invites them outside to hang out with him and Dennis.
Here's Walter's statement to the police about what happened next.
Johnny and I were looking up into a tree and
I heard a gunshot right beside me, and I turned
and Johnny fell backwards on the ground. He made no

(15:27):
noises and lay very still. Peewee shined the light on
Johnny's face, and I could see what looked like a
bullet hole in the center of Johnny's forehead. It looked
like to me where a bullet had come out. I
was scared to say anything, and I did not ask
pee Wee any questions. That night would be too much
for Walter. Thirty five days later, he led police to

(15:51):
these two graves, only to then find himself arrested for
being an accomplice to the murder of six of the
eight bodies found in the field that cold November day.
In nineteen seventy, he would be tried for one murder,
Dennis Bellamy, and while his attorney would allege Walter was

(16:11):
an unwitting accomplice since pee Wee had threatened to kill
him if he said anything, the jury only took three
and half hours to decide Otherwise, as the prosecution claimed,
slow Walter neely could pull the trigger of a gun
just as well as a smart man. Walter was sentenced

(16:32):
to death by electric chair, but through the appeals process
ended up with consecutive life sentences plus twenty years. He
was serving his time at the liber Correction Institution, a
maximum security prison in Ridgeville, South Carolina, when he died
in He was fifty two years old. James Connoy Judy

(17:08):
was entangled in the dead bodies. Investigators founded Peewee's burial
field in December. About a year earlier, James was one
of several associates pee Wee got employed at a roofing company.
He worked there over a year with pee Wee, but
had something else in common with Gaskins, Jesse, Judy, and

(17:30):
Donna Carulo. James was married to Jesse, but his drug
abuse made life untenable and she left him and moved
in with Peewee and his wife's Sandy. Apparently she brought
a baby with her. Jesse Judy moving in with Peewee
and she had a little child, and pee Wee could

(17:51):
tell that the child was very arsick, and Jesse didn't
know that one feeding the baby correctly, one taking care
of the baby. So Peewee ordered Sandy to take the
baby to the doctor, and the doctor was very alarmed.
The baby was seriously ill, but they nursed the baby
back to health, and pe We paid all the doctor experiences,

(18:14):
all the new food, and the baby soon perfectly well,
perfectly happy. It was during this time that Jim says
Peewee really fell in love with Jesse Judy. He says
often that he loved him more than than anybody else,
and I think there were days that he actually thought
that if he was capable of really loving anybody. Peewee

(18:37):
was twenty years older than Jesse, and she apparently yearned
for another type of life. But after about a year,
she moved out of Peewee's house and in with Johnny Sellers,
and Johnny sell fell in love with Jesse Judy sincerely. So.

(18:58):
Sometime later, James d did Donna Carulo, but drug abuse
and financial problems got the best of him and she
too left him for Peewee, who was still married to Sandy.
When Jesse Judy's body was found in Peewee's burial field,
Florence County Solicitor Ken Somerford was convinced her death was

(19:18):
James getting rid of his ex wife with Peewee's help.
James Connoy Judy was arrested on December six, at the
age of twenty two and charged with murdering Johnny Sellers,
whose body was found with Jesse Judy. Here's his former

(19:38):
employer at the roofing company. He worked for somebody m
And from the stories we heard, James got Peewee and
got his wife and took him out in the country
and had pee wee chill him and then they buried.

(19:59):
And that's just roy we heard. I think James dud
did turn state's evidence and he didn't get much time
in jail. We don't know how factual that is or not,
but that's just a story we heard. Back then, James's
attorney convinced him to take an Alford plea, which allows
an accused to plead guilty while still maintaining innocence to

(20:23):
avoid a trial and possible conviction on a more serious charge.
With that plea, he was sentenced to ten years in prison,
but was released in three when the parole board recognized
he was not guilty of killing his ex wife or
her boyfriend. Johnny Sellers was a native of Johnsonville, South Carolina,

(20:47):
forty five miles south of Florence. He was in a
theft ring along with his younger brother Carl. Johnny and
Peewee had stolen a boat and given it to a
guy named Belton Dye. Edie was the fence for peewee
stolen goods. When Johnny Sellers got busted for breaking into
a drug store, Peewee bailed him out of jail. Johnny

(21:10):
was desperate and needed money to pay his lawyers and
a legal fine. He owed he planned to pay the fine, lawyers,
and Peewee back with the money from Belton Eady, but
Edie never paid, and Johnny became vocal about it, jawing,
which always ends badly when you're in Peewee's circle. He

(21:37):
threatened Mountain Eady on the telephone and said, look, if
I don't get paid soon, I'm gonna go straight to
the law, and I don't have anything to lose by
doing this, because I've got the goods on you guys.
Like so many people in this story, Johnny had limited
money and few legitimate resources. Crime was a way to

(22:01):
get by more than a passion or habits. He wanted
a life with Jesse, and paying off his debt would
help get that life going. But those who went around
jawing about Peewee's crimes paid the ultimate price. So Peewee
and Dye concocted a plan to get rid of Johnny

(22:22):
Belt and Dye had grown weary Johnny Seller's threats. Belt
and Edie would not pay Johnny and Carl for what
they had stolen and given to him, so Johnny was
upset and was threatening to go to the law with
the whole kitten to boodle the straw that broke the
canamal back with Johnny Sellers. He and Peewee sold a

(22:45):
station wagon with the boat on it from a friend
of Peewee's and sold it and got a lot of
money for it. And Johnny Sellers never paid for that
car theft he wanted immediately two thousand dollars, and it
never came. Johnny Seller simply violated the Code Loyalty and

(23:06):
threatened to talk about the set up with the stealing nlings.
We're going on with Peewee and Melton Edie. According to
recorded depositions with Ken Somerford, Gaskins confessed that it was
Belton Eadie who hit a loaded rifle in the trunk
of Peewee's car. When everyone met at Eadie's house in June,

(23:31):
Jesse stayed behind. Johnny and Peewee went to get stolen
guns so Johnny could sell them and get back on
his feet again. But Gaskins drove Johnny to the woods
and shot him in the back. He hit the gun
beside a tree and headed back to Eadie's house. Peewee

(23:51):
got Jesse, took her back to the same location and
stabbed her with his campbell soup knife. Belton Needy would
laid or plead guilty and get a sentence of ten
years for his participation in Johnny's murder. As for James Connoy,
Judy Gaskins would have something to say about that as well.

(24:13):
In this exchange, was Solicitor kN Somerford Somerfort All right,
I want to go back to Connoy, Judy. He didn't
ask you to kill Johnny Gaskins. No, he didn't know
nothing in the world about it. At the time, Connoy
was living with Donna, the girl I'm married to right now,

(24:35):
and he had no reason in the world wanting Jesse
killed whatsoever. Pee Wee never wavered on his story that
James Connoy was innocent of the crime, but he would
be willing to say whatever the prosecution wanted him to,
stating the boy is innocent, but if you want me
to lie and hang him, I'll give you a statement

(24:56):
if you want to hang the man now. Gaskins told
Somerford that he killed her twenty five ft from where
Johnny's body lay. Here's more from their interaction. Some affort,
y'all have any conversation before you killed her? Gaskins? I
just told her I was gonna kill her. Some Aford,

(25:18):
you did. What did she say, Gaskins? Not a word
in the world. She didn't cry. I said, Jesse, I'm
going to kill you, and she looked at me like
she didn't believe me. I just took it, stuck it
right through her about here, and she diswilted right down
to the ground, and I pulled it out. Some Affort.

(25:39):
Did y'all have sexual relations Gaskins at that time? No,
we did not, some Afford. Do you remember how she
was dressed, Gaskins, A pair of shorts and a little shirt.
Her shorts come off when I put her in the grave, Jesse,

(26:01):
Judy had a real heart, and she really fell in
love with Johnny. Sellers and was on her way, I think,
to a happy life with him when we killed him.
The book Jim was writing about pee Wee is called
pee Wee and Me. It has a Shakespearean literary flavor

(26:24):
and includes a chapter on the tragic love story between
Jesse and Johnny. Here's Jim and Anita. I think she,
in a sense emotionally had come into her own by
the time that the relationship jailed between her and Johnny Seller.

(26:46):
You don't want to say what she's said about Jesse
and Johnny setting up housekeeping and all that, dude, Yeah,
that's a good thing to say. There's a chapter entitled
Jesse and Johnny set up Housekeeping, and that chapter end
with a quote from a poem from John Dunne. He
says to her, you make a little room and everywhere,

(27:11):
and that's her described a little, tiny apartment that they
were able to rent and move into for the first time.
Jim cites English poet John Dunn's were called the Goodmorrow,
a celebration of the pleasures of true love. It begins
by asking what two true lovers could possibly have been

(27:34):
doing before they met. Any other Prior lovers were but
a dream of the the one true Love done compares
life before this love to a child suckling at its
mother's breast. True love makes quote one little room and
everywhere end quote. Jim's image of Jesse, Judy and Johnny

(27:58):
sellers find their first small apartment together, is painted with
seventeenth century poetics, and it's not surprising that Jim's occupation
as a literature professor inflects his worldview. More specifically, it's
not surprising that a metaphysical poet like John Dunn is

(28:19):
his reference, and this one line of poetry does more
for Jim and Anita then frame the second hand image
of ill fated lovers Jesse and Johnny as they set
up a little home together. The line reads and makes
one little room and everywhere, not let at all. But

(28:41):
you don't want to tell a risk, Please tell it.
I want no word to tell. No, I'm not going
to because you said it reminded you of us? Oh yes,
it was Anita in me? Yes? Over is it? In

(29:26):
his dozens of interviews with Peewee, Jim heard aspects of
Peewee's life that others hadn't, details they missed in their
quick identification of the mass murderer. But these sorts of
details of Jesse and Johnny being in real love, or
of Jesse being Peewee's true love, they came out of

(29:48):
Jim's literary background, informed by years of reading and teaching
these familiar names Chaucer, Milton, Done, Shakespeare, Blake and Keats, religion, metaphysics, romantics.
This is where Jim specialized, and he approached Peewee from

(30:10):
the first meeting to the last with this mindset. But
if Jim saw Peewee through a literary lens, how did
he see Jim and what made Peewee choose Jim to
write his story? Like Robert Louis Stevenson strange case of
Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde, pee Wee had an alter

(30:33):
ego which he seemed to control at will, and his
characters were perceived differently by those around him depending on
which persona Peewee put on display. For a writer, these characters,
stories and legends were literary gold, and Jim could not

(30:53):
stop filling pages with these comical and sordid tales. Here
is another perspective from Peewee's employer, as he talks about
the character he saw it work. Actually, everybody liked Peewee.
He was a very likable fellow. Despite what he did.

(31:14):
He was very likable. And he was a short feller
in statue. You know, lot heavy said he was quite
a character. He would tell a tale and like to
talk stories, and everybody knew that half what they talked
about was probably just made up. He speaks here of
Peewee as anyone would about a good employee. He was

(31:34):
a hard worker and nobody ever complained about him. He
was strong. You know, he might have been small in statue,
but he was a strong man. Um well, let me
put it this way. He had a beatless and fellows
at work Monday that he could take a tire and
laid it on the ground and take a sledge hammer

(31:56):
and crowbar and get the tire off the rim and
put it back on the rim and pumped up by
without regular bicycle pump. So we watched him one day
and he actually did that. Can you imagine how hard
that would be. He was the bed. I think they
bat like two dollars. He just did it because he

(32:17):
could do it. I call him a shade tree mechanic,
a shade tree mechanic. Pee Wee worked on a lot
of cars under oak trees on the property and prospect
cars he and others had stolen cars he was flipping
for someone else, and cars he was going to give

(32:40):
to people. This was greasy, hard work, and the boss
appreciated that. But looking back, he had no idea what
pee Wee was really up to. None of us had
any clue about what he was doing, for lack of
better term, he was doing on the weekend. On the weekends. Indeed,

(33:06):
if a boss viewed Peewee one way, how did the
reporters perceive him. Here's Cecil Chandler, who covered Pewee Gaskins
in nineteen seventy five for TV thirteen in Florence, South Carolina.
When I first started in television, this was the biggest
story that I'd ever come up on. I was working
with CBS News and I got a chance to interview

(33:28):
Peewee when he was on trial, and I asked him
several things about what he did coming up and what
turned him into the life of murdering people, and he said, well,
it was just my way of life, he said. I
traveled with the carnival for a while and I just
kind of picked all of this up and I didn't
understand what he was talking about. But I reckoned from

(33:50):
his way of life growing up, you know, with very
little or nothing, and then traveling all around with the
Carney guys. They just picked him up to you know,
if something was wrong, like somebody that he would beat
him up or kill him. You told me a lot
of weird stuff, But you know how much of it
can you believe? You know, I've always heard the old

(34:13):
saying you can't judge a book by its cover. Well,
if you looked at Peewee Gaskins, you would not think
he had killed more than a dozen people. Just look
like a normal guy. But you never know. And I'll
tell you so, be aware of people that you think
are ordinary, but they may not be. Margaret O'Shea had

(34:40):
hours of direct contact with Peewee and conducted her own
research about his crimes. Like Cecil Chandler, she has a
reporter's disposition that worked to understand his motives. He worked
on a tobacco farm at one time, and he and
and accomplished were in alved In helping to sell tobacco.

(35:04):
But they came upon a scheme that worked better than
selling tobacco. They would clear the barn of tobacco and
get it hauled off in the night to sell elsewhere,
and then they would set the barn on fire. The farmer,
who usually was not involved in the arson itself or

(35:25):
even the theft, would collect insurance, and so he got
paid for his crop. But Peewee and his accomplice also
got paid because they had stolen it and sold it.
So it's like everything he touched might have a legitimate element,
but there was always something running undercurrent that was an

(35:46):
illegal way to sweeten the pot and make it better.
Jim Batty spent his years reflecting on the Peewee saga
with a literary perspective. He had read the words, studied
the rhythm, heard the rhyme, and tapped the meter. To
John Dunn and other writers who created human dramas with

(36:09):
words like Duns, Jim's perspective is typically dramatic rather than descriptive,
and he was tasked to put the Peewee drama into
his own words. The responsibility that I felt was to
record actually the life of this mass murderer. And as

(36:33):
I got into the interviews and learning him and about him,
and trying to determine what made him tick, so to speak.
I realized it was impacting me tremendously, and my life
and outlook and perspective was changing because of this experience

(36:55):
that I was having with this mass murder. So I
moved from a novice writer into an investigator, a student
of this personality and and this man and I and
I say often one of the tragedies of Peewee's life
or his execution certainly, was that he was not studied.

(37:22):
He was not taken for months and months and months
and studied. I felt that as human beings, the responsibility
was to study this person, to study why he did
what he did, his background, what could have prevented him,
what we could have done so that would never ever

(37:44):
happen again. Those are the things that became my own
in trying to write this book. Jim's perspective is distinctive,
and whatever subject p we talked about, love, death, god,
human frailty, murder, Jim presents it in the context of

(38:08):
some metaphysical problem concerning the human condition. He also witnessed
contradictions in Peewee's behavior. There were events of kindness that
just absolutely shocked me. The fact that he would risk
going back to jail to steal a transmission at night

(38:32):
in a street in Florence, South Carolina, to put it
into the car of an elderly woman who hadn't driven
their car for six elder lady went to him and
told him that transmission was slipping in the car. When
not see it fix it? And he looked at it,
and he's saying, well, he couldn't fix the transmission. And

(38:54):
the story goes, he drove around town because he sounds
a car just like hers. Then he went back in
the middle of the night, pulled up underneath the car,
dropped that transmission out of that car on side of
the road, took it back and installed it in her car.
And then when she came to get it, he said, yeah,

(39:15):
he fixed it. And he accepted the fifteen dollars that
she said as all the money she had to fix
her transmission. You know, I know he didn't get paid
a whole lot working on cars, because most people's cars
worked on was you know, like poor people. They weren't
wealthy people. And he loved the fact that he says,

(39:36):
as far as I knew, and said him, it's still running.
It made me marvel at the inconsistency of this character,
the same hands, the same mind, the same man, these
two different behaviors. I wanted to study him. I wanted
to find out how this could be such a paradox.

(40:00):
It's a contradiction. What a dichotomy was this man? And
every time I visited him, I saw that. One of
my main interests in continuing to write the Life of
Peewee was I was always looking for something positive. And

(40:23):
when I found those acts of kindness in the midst
of the life of this mass murderer, it was outstanding.
And I was hoping that as we moved along, hope
against hope, that somehow there would be signs of I
don't want to be theological or religious, but some sign

(40:45):
of repentance. I'm sorry I did this, I must admit.
I was hoping to have a book that had just
a ray of hope, of the human spirit, human character.
So I was looking on this life's level of something

(41:07):
that would be a positive that I could write about,
and that was what I was hoping would be a
conclusion of my Life of Pelee. Gaston Jim has articulated

(41:28):
his literary process. He says, quote, I was looking on
this life's level for something that would be a positive
that I could write about. From the beginning, he was
looking for the good, the positive. He was looking for
that pre existing inner nature in a horrid man. For Jim,

(41:48):
goodness is the assumed mode of being in the world.
It's the force that first led him to Divinity School,
and it's theological questions. The writer's poet and playwrights he
taught at university filled volumes of stories on that same search.
With Peewee, Jim was asking questions about a man who

(42:10):
grew up in the same general area as he did.
That man killed more than a dozen people, and those
questions often had responses that tell us about Jim's character
in his own story. Many of those stories Jim taught
come fashioned with positive, moral uplifting good prevails sort of narratives.

(42:34):
Jim is genuinely moved by the poetics of the relationship
between art, literature, and life. Literature exposes life and lays
bare the human condition. The last stands of that done poem,
The Goodmorrow, reverberates even further in revealing Jim Batty, the

(42:54):
author and his character. The lovers of the poem are
in their own war world, their eyes constantly reflecting in
each other's. If our two loves be one, none can die.
Heroically love conquers death. Nothing is so romantic love, truth, death.

(43:24):
These are the subjects of authors through the ages. In words,
love never dies, death cannot contain us myth sized topics
and as hopeful as can be? But where was the love,
hope or truth? In Peewee? Story? Had occasion wants to

(43:50):
ask Peewee? And I said, pee Wee, would you ever
lie to me? Thinking you know, we're old buddies, we're
old friends. He's not gonna lot of me. And he
thought for a second and said, yes I would. I said, Peewee,
you would lie to me? When he said without hesitating

(44:15):
half the time. So I learned then that pee Wee
was a skilled liar, because if you allow half the time,
you don't know where you lie. Pee Wee Gaskins was

(44:41):
Not My Friend is a joint production from My Heart
Radio and Doghouse Pictures, produced and hosted by Jeff Keeping.
Executive producers are Courtney DeFries and Noel Brown. Written by
Jim Roberts, Courtney DeFries and Terry James, edit Nix and
sound designed by Jeremiah Kolani Prescott music composed by Diamond
Street Productions, Spence or Guard and Ian Newberry. Special thanks

(45:02):
to Jim and Anita Baby. Additional thanks to the University
of South Carolina Moving Image Research Collections and the University
of South Carolina