Homeschooled to Death: The Mary and Elwyn Crocker Jr. Torture Case
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Mary Crocker murder case in Guyton, Georgia, where a 14-year-old girl was found buried in her backyard on December 20, 2018, alongside her brother Elwyn Crocker Jr. The homicide investigation revealed systematic torture, starvation, and child abuse by their father Elwyn Crocker Sr., stepmother Candice Crocker, and three other adults in Effingham County. This death penalty case exposed catastrophic failures in Georgia's Division of Family and Children Services, where reports of child cruelty were ignored while two children vanished from school records under the guise of homeschooling.
What happens when the man playing Santa Claus at your local Walmart has two dead children buried in his backyard? This case out of Effingham County, Georgia will absolutely wreck you. We're talking about a house where five adults created their own version of hell for two kids who had nowhere to run. Mary Crocker died right around her fourteenth birthday. Her brother had already been in the ground for two years. The family tree connects back to serial killer Donald "Pee Wee" Gaskins, and there's this horrifying pattern of violence that nobody stopped. We've got dog cages in the kitchen, forced starvation while the adults ate normally, and a child welfare system that literally dismissed abuse reports as "too old" to investigate. The surviving brother has cerebral palsy and was allegedly kept alive only because he brought in disability checks. This one stays with you.
#TrueCrime #MaryCrocker #ElwynCrocker #EffinghamCounty #ChildAbuse #Georgia #UnsolvedMurders
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | December 20th, 2018, Effingham County Sheriff's deputies show up at a house in Guyton, Georgia, |
| 0:08.8 | asking about two kids that no one has seen in years. The father tells them that the kids are with |
| 0:14.4 | their mom in South Carolina. Then he breaks, takes them to the backyard, and what they find under |
| 0:20.5 | the bags of cement and two years of pine straw will haunt that community forever. |
| 0:26.4 | One of those kids died right around her 14th birthday, and the man who buried her had spent the last few weeks listening to children's Christmas wishes at the Rincon Walmart wearing a Santa suit. Guiden, Georgia, sits about 30 miles northwest of Savannah in Effingham County. |
| 1:08.3 | Pine trees everywhere, lots of space between houses, the type of place |
| 1:12.5 | where people move specifically because they want privacy. And in 2018, the family living at |
| 1:18.8 | 450 Rosebud Place weaponized that privacy in the worst possible way. December 20, 2018. |
| 1:27.2 | That's when investigators finally made it through the door. |
| 1:30.4 | What they found was a crime scene that had been operating for years, and two children buried in the |
| 1:36.1 | backyard. One of them, Mary Crocker, had died in late October right around the time she would |
| 1:41.9 | have been celebrating her 14th birthday. The other was |
| 1:45.4 | her older brother, Elwyn Jr., who'd been in that ground since November 2016. Two years, |
| 1:53.0 | the family had been living their lives walking over that grave for two entire years. When people |
| 1:59.6 | asked where the kids were, the adults had their stories ready. |
| 2:02.6 | Military Academy. |
| 2:04.6 | Living with Mom in South Carolina. |
| 2:06.6 | Home schooling. |
| 2:07.6 | Whatever lie worked for whoever was asking. |
| 2:10.6 | Here's the detail that makes your brain short circuit. |
| 2:14.6 | Mary's father, Elwyn Crocker Sr., had a job that December. He was working as |
| 2:19.9 | Santa Claus at the Walmart in Rincon. While his daughter's body was decomposing in his backyard, |
... |
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