In the confines of South Carolina's Central Correctional Institution, the life of Rudolph Tyner, a 24-year-old Black man, came to an abrupt and violent end on a Sunday afternoon in September 1982. Tyner was himself a condemned man, residing on death row for the 1978 robbery and shotgun killings of a husband and wife, Bill and Myrtle Moon, in their Murrells Inlet grocery store.
While the wheels of justice and the appeals process turned slowly for his own crimes, another form of justice, born of vengeance, was secretly and meticulously being plotted against him from both inside and outside the prison walls.
The architect of this plot was Tony Cimo, the son of Myrtle Moon. Impatient and frustrated with the legal system that kept his parents' killer alive, Cimo sought a more immediate and permanent resolution. His search for an executioner led him to one of South Carolina's most infamous and depraved criminals, Donald 'Pee Wee' Gaskins, a fellow inmate of Tyner's at the Columbia prison. Gaskins, a white man already serving multiple life sentences for a string of other brutal murders, agreed to carry out the killing for hire. The plan they devised was as cunning as it was barbaric, a reflection of Gaskins' own twisted ingenuity.
On September 12, 1982, Gaskins put the deadly plan into motion. He had constructed a small explosive device, packed with C-4, and disguised it as a makeshift radio or intercom system, telling Tyner it would allow them to communicate between their cells. Gaskins instructed Tyner to hold the device to his ear at a specific time. When the unsuspecting Tyner complied, Gaskins triggered the explosive from his own cell. The resulting blast killed Tyner instantly. For this murder-for-hire, Gaskins earned a new death sentence, a rare instance in that era of a white man being condemned for the murder of a Black man.
The investigation unraveled the conspiracy, leading to the arrest of Tony Cimo, who was charged with hiring Gaskins. Cimo was ultimately convicted for his role in the plot and received an eight-year prison sentence, though he was paroled after serving less than three years. Several other inmates were also implicated and pleaded guilty to conspiracy. For his part, Donald 'Pee Wee' Gaskins, the man who boasted of numerous killings, was finally sent to the electric chair on September 6, 1991. His execution was carried out not for the many lives he had taken before, but for the one he took behind prison walls, bringing a final, violent end to a dark and intricate story of murder and revenge.
