December 20, 1989, around 11 pm, at 1 Rector Place, a husband and wife turned their tv off in their tv room and went to bed. They turned the TV on in their bedroom to watch the news. About 20 minutes later, they turned it off, not knowing they were being watched, not knowing a couple of blocks away, a couple had just been killed and robbed. As they lay in their bed, they hear a loud noise outside. The husband checked to make sure it wasn’t a log rolling out of the fireplace. When he came back into the bedroom, his wife noticed that he had a knife from the kitchen and told her it wasn’t a log. He got back in the bed, and about five minutes went by, and noises started again. They both got up and walked around the house. They turned the outside lights on but didn’t see anything. Making sure the lights in the house were off, they walked around and started hearing more noises that became obvious that someone was throwing rocks on the roof, and they were rolling off. The wife goes to the kitchen phone to call 911 and notices the phone is dead. She unplugs it and goes to the bedroom to plug it in and try again. As she tries to get it plugged in, her husband walks in and asks if it worked. Then, a shot came through the window and hit him in the chest. He yells at his wife to get down. She crawls to the hallway. He goes to the front door, opens it, and starts screaming. He thought it was an accident, someone playing around with a gun. When he came back into the house, he told his wife she needed to get him to the hospital. She grabbed the keys from the kitchen counter as he headed out to the car. They make it to the car, get in and start backing out. As they start backing out, they hear bullets hitting their car. When they got to the hospital, the hospital staff called the Sheriff’s Office. Deputies were dispatched to the resident and hospital to figure out what had happened. Detectives and FDLE were called to investigate the scene. As the detectives and crime scene investigators work through the night and the next day collecting evidence, a mailman comes on the scene and asks them to check a house a couple of blocks away. He delivered the mail and pulled away; he noticed the drapes blowing out the front bedroom window. He went to the front door and rang the doorbell with no answer, so he walked around to the side of the house and noticed the window was broken and there were bullet holes in the top of the window. He ran back to his car, went down the street where the detectives were, and asked them to check the house down the road because something wasn’t right.
On the night of December 20, 1989, Louis Gaskin decided he would find someone to rob and kill. He drove from Bunnell to the R section in Palm Coast, a 9-minute drive from his home in Bunnell and saw the light on at 10 Ripley Place. He walked around the house, looking in the windows and watching the resident’s watching TV for several minutes. Gaskin’s first shot was a misfire. He stood outs smoking a Black and Mild cigar watching the residents. The residents had no clue they were being watched and what terror was coming. A shot rang out as the husband sat in his recliner and his wife on the couch. The husband was struck in the chest, then another shot hitting him in the shoulder, then another hitting him in the neck. His wife jumped from the couch; realizing what happened, she began running from the den when she was shot in the cheek and fell to the floor. Then, she was hit again in the head, but the bullet did not break the skull. She began crawling towards the hallway where she believed she could hide, and as she crawled, she was shot again. As she sat in the hallway holding her bloody head, Gaskin walked around the outside of the home, looking into every window and door until she could see her. He shot through the French doors striking her in the chest. Gaskin entered the house, walked up to her husband, who was already deceased, shot him point-blank in the head, and walked into the hallway and shot her point-blank in the head.
He took numerous items through the house, including each woman’s purses. He left and headed back to Bunnell. On his way, he swings down a side road and throws a purse in a canal off South Bay Street. Then he went to a friend’s house and asked him to hold some items for him, and one item was a gun wrapped up. As they were unloading his car and putting stuff in the friend’s spare bedroom, Gaskin commented that he had just “jacked” someone and left them stiff. As he was going, he said, watch the news if you don’t believe me.
The following day, this friend watched the news and saw they had found people in their home dead and the other victims that survived. He called the police and gave them the information he had and the items he had dropped off.
