In the early 1970s, a young woman named Martha Ann Dicks, known to some by the nickname 'Clyde,' vanished from her home in the South Sumter area of South Carolina. At the time she went missing, she was a teenager, somewhere between 17 and 20 years old. Her sister later recounted that Martha had gone out to a club one evening and simply never came back.
For years, her disappearance remained a painful mystery for her family, a wound that refused to close.
The chilling truth of Martha's fate would not begin to surface until 1977, when one of South Carolina's most infamous serial killers, Donald Henry 'Pee Wee' Gaskins, confessed to her murder during his trial for other crimes. Gaskins admitted to killing the young woman, and his confession led law enforcement to her skeletal remains in a drainage ditch in Sumter County. He claimed to have poisoned her by lacing a Coca-Cola with cyanide. Despite the confession and the discovery of her body, a strange and unfortunate series of events would deny Martha a proper burial for nearly five decades.
Following the initial investigation, Martha's remains were sent to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston for examination. Through a series of missteps and circumstances that have been described as things 'falling through the cracks,' her remains were then transferred to the College of Charleston and subsequently stored in a closet, forgotten for 47 years. It was not until June 2025, during renovations at the college, that her skeletal remains were rediscovered.
The Sumter County Coroner, Robbie Baker, took possession of the long-lost remains and renewed the effort to locate Martha's surviving relatives. Through media outreach, her nieces and nephews were found, finally bringing a measure of closure to a family that had been left with questions for over half a century. In August 2025, more than 50 years after she was murdered, Martha Ann Dicks was finally laid to rest in Walker Cemetery in Sumter. Her loved ones gathered to give her the funeral she had been denied for so long, remembering her as a fun-loving person who enjoyed laughing and teasing. The man responsible for her death, Pee Wee Gaskins, was executed in 1991 for a different murder, having claimed to have killed around 100 people.
