Operating largely in rural South Carolina over several decades, Gaskins managed to kill repeatedly across a range of methods and circumstances before authorities fully grasped the scale of his crimes. His ability to continue killing even after incarceration — engineering the death of a death-row inmate through explosives — distinguished him from most other convicted killers of his era. The breadth of his methods and the length of his criminal record made him one of the more extensively documented serial killers to emerge from the American South.

Over six weeks in early 1984, Wilder moved across more than 6,000 miles of the United States, leaving a trail of abductions, assaults, and killings that spanned sixteen states before his death brought the spree to an end. What distinguished his case was the combination of scale, speed, and method — he had spent decades refining his approach to gaining the trust of young women before his crimes escalated to murder. The cross-country nature of the spree complicated law enforcement's ability to respond, and investigators have since connected him to additional crimes reaching back to the 1960s.

Brashers evaded identification entirely during his lifetime, dying in 1999 without ever being named as a suspect in any of his killings — a fact that shaped the long delay in understanding the full scope of what he had done. His crimes spanned multiple states over nearly a decade and targeted women and girls with particular violence. It was only through advances in investigative genetic genealogy, years after his death, that investigators were able to connect him to a series of cold cases, including the 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders, which had remained unsolved for over thirty years.