The phone rang with a chilling urgency, the voice on the other end delivering a question no parent ever wishes to hear: “Where’s your daughter?” Those words sent a deep sense of dread through Dick Harpootlian, a fear that would grip any parent’s heart.

Earlier that day, Harpootlian’s four-year-old daughter had been dropped off at her preschool, located just a short drive from their South Carolina home. Unbeknownst to them, a sinister plot was unfolding. Local law enforcement had received intel about a plan to kidnap the little girl from her school. The men behind this heinous scheme intended to use her as leverage, demanding the release of a notorious serial killer as a ransom. This was no ordinary criminal; it was Pee Wee Gaskins, a man whom Harpootlian had once prosecuted, securing his sentence to the electric chair.

The kidnappers’ demands were clear: put Gaskins on a bus and provide them with $2,000 in cash, or face the unthinkable. Gaskins himself had threatened that if the exchange failed, they would “get rid” of the child.

Harpootlian was all too familiar with the monster that Gaskins was, even from behind bars. Gaskins had a horrifying past, including the brutal rape and murder of a toddler, whom he bludgeoned to death with a hammer before discarding her body in a grave with her murdered mother. The prosecutor knew the depths of Gaskins’s depravity, a chilling reminder of the stakes at hand.

Having successfully prosecuted Gaskins’s final murder, Harpootlian knew more than anyone what he was capable of – even from within the confines of death row.

This was a man who had raped a toddler then bludgeoned her to death with a hammer, caving in her skull before tossing her body into a grave near her murdered mother.

A man who had murdered at least 14 victims including his own teenage niece – and was suspected of many more.

A man who, while already serving life in prison, had committed yet another horrific slaying – blowing up a fellow inmate with a homemade bomb planted inside a radio.

And now he was trying to bring his warped violence inside the home of the prosecutor who had sent him to death row.

‘He was a horrific, violent psychopath. There were no constraints. He didn’t see a child as a child. It was an object he could take his fury and vengeance out on, or he could use in a way to help him,’ Harpootlian told the Daily Mail.

Thankfully, the kidnap plot was foiled in time and Harpootlian’s family hunkered down at home protected by armed South Carolina Law Enforcement Division agents.

Two weeks later, on September 6, 1991, the nightmare would come to an end when 2,000 volts of electricity was sent coursing through Gaskins’s body.

‘Until my wife and daughter were safe that day, until I was with them, I didn’t breathe any sigh of relief,’ Harpootlian said.

‘Even after that, for the next two weeks, I was always anxious. And even after it was over, the thought that somebody would try to use my four-year-old daughter for leverage on a case is one of the reasons I later ran for something else when my prosecution term ended.

‘My family being in the crosshairs with some wacko psychopath had a chilling effect, no question about it… the anxiety never goes away.’

Long before Gaskins’s penchant for murder had landed at Harpootlian’s own door, the case had tested his position within the justice system, completely transforming his views on the death penalty.

Today, Harpootlian is best-known as one half of the defense duo representing legal scion Alex Murdaugh in his high-profile murder trial and a Democratic state senator who has worked on the Biden, Obama, Gore and Clinton presidential campaigns.

But back in his college days, Harpootlian was a self-described ‘longhaired hippie who thought all cops were pigs’ and who went to law school with the goal of fighting the system as a public defender.

For years, he was a fierce opponent of the death penalty – a stance shaped by both his liberal politics and Christian upbringing.

So in 1982, when the 34-year-old found himself leading the state’s third trial against Gaskins as an ambitious chief deputy prosecutor in Columbia with aspirations for the top job, whether or not to seek the ultimate punishment proved a troubling dilemma.

As Harpootlian writes in his new book Dig Me a Grave: The Inside Story of the Serial Killer who Seduced the South, Gaskins wasn’t just ‘no-good.’ He was ‘also a master of intimidation and illusion.’

His life of crime and depravity started young.

At 13, he attacked a teenage girl with an ax while burglarizing her home.

After a stint in a youth facility, he was constantly in and out of prison for rapes and killings.

But it was in 1970 when Gaskins embarked on one of the most prolific serial killing sprees in American history and the first of many victims began disappearing from the Florence area.

Some victims were shot, some strangled, some drowned, some poisoned.

Some of the murders were driven by his sick sexual fantasies for teenage girls and children including the rape and murder of his 15-year-old niece and her friend.

Some were driven by his deep-seated racism – murdering a woman because she was pregnant by a black man, then raping and murdering her biracial toddler daughter.

Others were out of a warped sense of convenience, including poisoning a woman with battery acid in a can of Coke after she fell pregnant with his child.

He enlisted accomplices to join his dysfunctional crime family before disposing of many of them too – such as with a bullet to the back of the head.

All the while, the unassuming five-foot-five, 130 pound man brazenly drove around Florence in a hearse, a sign in the back window reading: ‘We Haul Anything, Living or Dead.’

He even joked he needed the bizarre vehicle because he had killed so many people he needed to transport them to his private cemetery.

It turned out it was no joke.

The twisted killer had in fact transformed a remote sunflower field into a graveyard for more than a dozen victims.

By the time of his arrest in 1976, Gaskins had left a trail of bodies of teenage girls, toddlers, women, and men in his wake – many of them vulnerable runaways he had befriended while working at the carnival.

He was convicted of eight murders and sentenced to death during the so-called Prospect Killer trial that year.

But just months later the Supreme Court ruled the death penalty unconstitutional and his sentence was commuted to life in prison.

One year later, he was convicted of a ninth murder at a second trial and handed another life sentence.

While awaiting a third trial, he agreed to plead guilty to 13 murders and confess to his crimes for more life sentences.

Gaskins would later boast about killing around 90 victims.

It was while serving life in prison that Gaskins would commit his final murder.

On September 12, 1982, an explosion rattled Columbia’s Central Correctional Institution.

Rudolph Tyner, a Black man, was on death row for killing Bill and Myrtie Moon, a white couple who ran a mom-and-pop grocery store in Myrtle Beach.

He had been sitting on a toilet holding a radio to his ear when it blew up.

Initially, it appeared to be a botched escape plot. Then a tape was found inside Gaskins’s cell.

Gaskins had a habit of recording his jailhouse calls, including calls to the Moons’ son discussing their plot to kill Tyner.

The serial killer was soon facing his third trial.

By then, the death penalty had been reinstated in South Carolina – and Harpootlian wrestled with the dilemma of whether or not to seek it.

He reached his decision after speaking with his father about his experience serving as a bomber pilot in World War Two. His dad told him he viewed those deaths as self-defense.

‘My dad did not enjoy killing. He was doing his job in an attempt to protect his family, his country and the free world so he did it, but he didn’t relish killing anybody,’ Harpootlian said.

It was a reasoning that resonated with Harpootlian in Gaskins’s case. Being in prison for life had not deterred Gaskins from killing again so the death penalty would be an act of self-defense to prevent him from killing again.

‘Gaskins liked killing. So if not him, then the question is who?’ Harpootlian said.

‘He was given life sentences for 13 murders and then he went out of his way to kill somebody on death row. He’s the poster child for the death penalty.’

Harpootlian believes the death penalty should be avoided in most cases but that ‘some evil needs to be dealt with affirmatively.’

‘If you look at Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer or Pee Wee Gaskins, they’re going to kill again if they’re not constrained permanently,’ he said, adding: ‘That’s the criteria to me: will they kill again?’

Despite his change in belief, Harpootlian admits the serial killer got inside his head.

One day in court, Gaskins had called out to him: ‘Dick, you know what? You’re a lot like me. You like killing, just like me. You’re gonna enjoy killing me, Dick.’

‘He was trying to get in my head,’ Harpootlian said.

The games continued after Gaskins was convicted and sentenced to death for Tyner’s murder.

From death row, Gaskins sent Harpootlian Christmas cards each year and called his office. One night soon after his daughter was born, Gaskins called Harpootlian on his home phone. Things then reached a head with the plot to kidnap Kate.

Yet, even after the threat to his daughter and firm in his belief that the death penalty was warranted, Harpootlian still had mixed feelings about Gaskins’s execution.

It was September 5, 1991, when Gaskins requested his last meal of ‘pizza with everything.’

A few hours later, he was strapped into the electric chair and the switch flicked. As 2,000 volts coursed through Gaskins’s body, his eyes exploded, his bowels emptied and his blood boiled.

Harpootlian got the call just after 1.30am: Gaskins was dead.

He slept soundly that night.

‘I felt relieved,’ he said. ‘But, at the same time, anxious about being part of a process that ended with killing somebody.

‘I think if you don’t regret the death of another human being, if you relish their death, you’re as bad as they are.’

Even 35 years later, Harpootlian still thinks about Gaskins’s comments that they are the same.

But he believes the difference between them is exactly why Harpootlian chose not to attend his execution.

‘I never gave it a second thought to watch that. I think anyone who wants to watch someone die is as bad as Pee Wee,’ he said.

‘Why would I want to watch somebody die? That’s exactly what he likes.’