On the morning of December 22, 1987, Ronald Simmons snapped. At the age of 47, he went through the house, killing each family member. With Christmas right around the corner, he waited and killed the rest of the family as they arrived.
Born on July 15, 1940 in Chicago, Illinois, Ronald Simmons was born to Loretta and William Simmons. When Ronald was only 3, his father died from a stroke, and within a year, his mother remarried, this time to William D. Griffin, a civil engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a job that would move the family numerous times across central Arkansas.
In 1957, Ronald dropped out of school and joined the U.S. Navy, where he was first stationed at Naval Station Bremerton in Washington. There, he met his wife, Bersabe Rebecca “Becky” Ulibarri, whom he married in New Mexico on July 9, 1960. In 1963, Ronald left the Navy, and two years later, joined the U.S. Air Force. During his twenty-year military career, he was awarded a Bronze Star Medal, the Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross for his service as an airman, and the Air Force Ribbon for Excellent Marksmanship. When he retired, in 1979, he had acquired the rank of Master Sergeant.
One year into the marriage, Ronald and Becky had their first child, Ronald Gene Simmons Jr. Two years later they had another child, Sheila Marie. Over the course of the next 16 years, they produced five more, William, Loretta, Eddie, Marianne and Rebecca Lynn.
Ronald was well known in the town of Cloudcroft, New Mexico. He was someone most people feared. “He had a beer in his hand all the time. He had one little room he would stay in all the time. It was dark and seemed spooky, and it stunk,” said a friend of his oldest daughters.
Ronald was a very private and controlling man. He ordered his children around with many chores, always keeping them busy. By the time Sheila was 13, she was all Ronald could think about. He kept his hands to himself for another 4 years, but by the age of 17, Sheila had been impregnated by her own father.
He confessed to his wife and demanded that they keep the baby and raise it as part of the family. Becky, while humiliated, agreed, and stayed with her husband. All the while, Ronald was seen giving Sheila more than friendly kisses each morning, and when she was questioned by the school counselor, she had to come clean and admit that she was pregnant with his baby.
Ronald wrote his daughter a letter following her confession:
“You have destroyed me, and you have destroyed my trust in you…
I will see you in Hell.”
An investigation ensued, and fearing arrest, Ronald packed up the family and fled to Dover, Arkansas. They purchased a 13-acre tract of land just 15 miles out of town. The area was remote and wooded. Two mobile homes were joined together at the end of a red-clay driveway, and the home was barricaded like a fortress with cinder blocks and barbed wire. Ronald called his home, “Mockingbird Hill.” The yard was littered with junk that Ronald claimed to be “building materials,” including multiple automobiles on blocks in various stages of demolition.
Ronald was obsessed with privacy. Liesl Smith, who had infrequently visited Loretta at her home, said, “They just tiptoed around him,” she said. “Whenever he wasn’t around, they would act like normal people. When he was around, her mom’s main concern was keeping the kids quiet . . . He was the keeper in his kingdom. The look he gave you in his house was, ‘When are you leaving?’ It was creepy.” Ronald would see them, but not say a word. Rather he would lie on the couch and drink his beer, watch the news on TV and look as though he were being intruded upon.
The kids were never allowed to attend school functions, and friends were never allowed to stay the night at their home. They were always clean and Ronald drove them to catch the school bus every morning. They excelled in their studies, and never drew any attention by falling behind or missing school.
Ronald had trouble keeping a job. He quit a position as an accounts receivable clerk at Woodline Motor Freight after a number of reports were made regarding inappropriate sexual advances.
Becky tried to leave Ronald on several occasions, but she was not allowed out of the house without him, except to do laundry. She often had bruises on her face and arms, but neither she, or witnesses, reported it to authorities. Their home had no telephone, and they never sent or received mail at their home. She knew how to drive, but was never allowed to do so. Despite everything, she was saving up money, and gathering her nerve to flee and file for divorce.
By 1987, Ronald’s mind was murderous. His three oldest children, Gene Jr, Sheila and William were all married and living in different cities, raising their own families. Ever since Sheila left, he seemed to fall into a deeper and deeper depression. Sheila’s husband, Dennis McNulty, even threatened to hurt Ronald if he ever touched Sheila again.
Ronald read all of Becky’s letters, so their son, Gene Jr. got her a secret PO Box, so she could communicate with them without Ronald knowing. They wrote many letters, often discussing a plan for her to escape.
In a letter to her son William, daughter-in-law, Renata and grandson, Trae, Becky reveals how she truly felt about her life on Mockingbird Hill.
“Dear Bill, Renata and Trae,
Loretta, may be staying in town Friday night, so I’ll have her mail this. I’ve been thinking of all you said Bill and I know you are right, I don’t want to live the rest of my live with Dad, but I’m still trying to figure out how to start, what if I couldn’t find a job for some time. You have to remember I’ve never had a job since I’ve been married, or before that either. I now I have to start some where. It would all be so much easier if it was just me, but I have three kids also by then. So if you want to do any checking by telephone go ahead and check and we can talk about it when you come. I’ve decided if I borrow from Mom, that I would have her send it to you. I’m still all very confused but like I said I do know I don’t want to stay with Dad, but don’t want him getting more than he deserves. Yet sometimes I feel God is telling me to be more patient. Right now I’ll just say do some checking and then it will help make my decision. I would like for Loretta to move with you after she turns 18. She wants to go to college, and she can get a job too. I don’t think San Antonio is the place for her.
L. Gene and Wilma are back together, but they want to try it out and try to come get Barbara. I’m sure enjoying Barbara, she is a sweet lovable, polite little girl. She is a good girl and we all love her and enjoy her so much. She always has us laughing.
I’m so proud of Trae. The last time you came, Dad wanted to know how come you didn’t stay long enough to see him too.
Now that L. Gene and Wilma are back together I wish they could move from San Antonio. Barbara needs both her parents. They both been through so much I hope it works out. I love them both. Wilma wrote me a letter telling me she loves L. Gene very much, and she must, she went back to him, and I’m sure she has been hurt deeply. I want to see all my children happy.
I’ve remembered a lot what you said Bill, I am a prisoner here and the kids too. I know when I get out, I might need help, Dad has had me like a prisoner, that the freedom might be hard for me to take, yet I know it would be great, having my children visit me anytime, having a telephone, going shopping if I want, going to church. Every time I think of freedom I want out as soon as possible. I don’t want to put any burden on my children, and I think its best while or before I get out too old. I want out, but its the beginning, once I get a job and place than I can handle it with the mental support of my children I can do it. It was hard to talk in front of L. Gene. He had been having it so hard, and his problems were deeply in my mind. I felt sorry for him. I was so afraid what he might go back and do. You are lucky Bill, you have a very good wife, she had led you the right way, and that is toward God. She is very pretty, too. I’ve always thanked God for sending you a good wife, I’m thankful for Dennis too.
Give my darling Trae a lot of hugs and kisses for me. I love you all very much. Barbara gets bored if I take too long to write, so I hope I made sense in this letter. Hope Loretta can mail this Fri. or Sat., on her way home.
Love you very much.
Mom.
P.S. You all look so nice when you came. Loretta had a great time Renata, she talked a lot about it.”
On the morning of December 22, 1987, everything took a turn for the worse. He bludgeoned and shot his son, Gene and Becky. Then he strangled his 3-year old granddaughter, Barbara. He sat down and drank a beer all before dumping their bodies into a cesspit he had made the children dig.
He sat back and waited, knowing the rest of the family would soon return. When they arrived, he told them he had presents for them, but wanted to give them to them one at a time. Loretta was first to receive her gift. Ronald strangled her and held her under the water in a rain barrel. Eddy, Marianne and Rebecca were all killed in a similar manner.
Midday on December 26, the rest of the family arrived for their Christmas visit. Ronald’s son, William and daughter-in-law, Renata were both shot dead. Then his grandson Trae, 1, was strangled and drowned. Sheila and her husband Dennis were shot, and his daughter/granddaughter, Sylvia Gail, 6, was strangled. Last, his 20-month old grandson Michael, too, was strangled.
All their corpses were covered with coats, with the exception of Sheila, who was laid and covered by Becky’s best tablecloth. The two grandsons, Trae and Michael, were wrapped in plastic sheeting and placed in abandoned cars at the end of the lane.
He left and went out, to the local bar for a beer before returning home and spending the next two nights and Sunday drinking beer and watching TV, with his dead family all around him. Monday morning, he drove to Russellville and visited a law office. Kathy Kendrick, 24, was his target, as she had spurned his advances when they worked together at a nearby trucking firm a year earlier. She was sitting at her desk when he walked in and, according to police and witnesses, fired repeatedly at her head, killing her. Police were called at 10:17 a.m. By the time they arrived at the scene, he was gone.
Brenda Hefner, a legal secretary, was working in the back with a colleague when “suddenly I heard a gun.” At first she thought it was just some kids playing with toys they had gotten for Christmas. “Then all of the sudden we heard two shots and Kathy screamed,” she recalled in an interview. The two women opened a file drawer and took cover behind it. “He just kept shooting and kept shooting,” said Hefner. “It was at least six times. I figure he unloaded the gun.”
A bullet is still lodged in the area over Kendrick’s desk. A client who was in the office at the time watched as the scene unfold; Ronald did not talk to her or harm her. Afterward, according to Hefner, the woman “ran to our door and started yelling, ‘He shot her.’ “There was blood coming out of her head. It was real dark, red blood, not like you’d expect to get from a cut. It’s not blood like that. It’s bright red. It was coming out of the back of her head. She was breathing. She had trouble breathing, but she was breathing.. . . I thought he was going to kill everybody in the room. We didn’t know why he was here.” Hefner said she is scared to be alone at home now, and at the same time is afraid to leave her house. “There might be some crazy out there,” she said.
At 10:27, the police got a second call, saying there had been a shooting at Taylor Oil Co. There, Ronald was allegedly gunning for Rusty Taylor, 38, the owner of the Sinclair Mini-Mart where he had been a part-time clerk, a job he had quit weeks earlier after complaining of low pay. Taylor survived a gunshot wound in the chest, but a fellow employee, J.D. Chaffin, 34, was killed. Juli Money was starting the second hour of her first day as a bookkeeper at the office. She was in the adjoining warehouse, returning from the bathroom, when she heard shots.
She reported believing it was some kind of joke until she opened the door, saw Chaffin lying in a pool of blood – and saw a .22 revolver aimed point-blank at her forehead. Ronald fired, and she felt the heat of the bullet as it whisked through her short blond hair, and she dove behind some crates. “I just screamed, ‘No!’ and went down,” she recounted. “I believe that he thought that he hit me and that’s why he left.” “He just had a look in his eye like a mad dog. And when he looked at Jim on the floor and Jim was bleeding profusely, he showed no emotion or anything. He just turned around and pointed the gun at me and shot.”
Ronald was wearing a straw cowboy hat, a black leather jacket and “a horrid grin on his face,” Juli Money said. The hat was pulled down to his eyebrows. Ronald almost always wore a hat to cover his balding head. Later during that same day, he would confront his victims while wearing a white baseball cap.
By the time the police arrived at Taylor Oil, Ronald was on his way up US 64 to the Sinclair Mini-Mart, about three miles away. The call from there came in at 10:39, after he allegedly shot and injured the proprietor, David Salyer, 38, and an employee named Roberta Woolery, 46. It has not been determined what grudge Simmons might have had against Woolery, who was his initial target at the convenience store.
As police officers sped to the Mini-Mart, they received their final radio call of the spree, at 10:48 a.m. Someone had been shot at the Woodline Motor Freight Co. The victim, wounded in the heart and head, was Elaine Butts, who was Ronald’s supervisor at the firm a year earlier had advised him to stop making romantic advances to Kathy Kendrick. Ronald had been an accounts receivable clerk, Kathy Kendrick a secretary. He had sent her notes, flowers, small gifts.
Friends said he recently had begun doing so again, and even showed up at her front door some mornings; he may have been following her. He reportedly persisted even after she told him she had married since they had last known each other. Ronald, wearing a baseball cap, walked in through a side door near where Butts’ desk had been the year before. He walked across the large room to where she now sat, and, according to a score of witnesses, fired at her twice. “He didn’t say anything until after he’d shot Miss Butts,” said Robert Wood, the company’s president.
After he did, he walked into an enclosed office nearby and locked the door. A woman he knew was kneeling on the floor there, hiding. Robert Wood said Ronald put a gun to her head, grabbed one of her arms and told her, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you.” The gun still trained, he helped her up and offered her a chair, then cigarettes.
Robert Wood recalled that Ronald then dropped the gun to his side and offered the woman his second weapon. “Why didn’t you visit me at the Mini-Mart?” he asked. She responded that he was never there when she shopped, and she refused the gun. He put it on a nearby table and told her to call the police. “I’ve done what I wanted to do and now it’s all over,” he said. “I’ve gotten everybody who hurt me.” Moments later, he surrendered.
The Russellville police took possession of his guns – an H and R .22 with a 3-inch barrel, commonly called a Saturday Night Special; and a Ruger .22 with a 9 1/2-inch barrel – and they marched the gray-bearded suspect to a jail cell. From that time until he was transported to the psychiatric hospital in Little Rock, he did not speak a word to authorities. The only emotion he showed, according to Sheriff James Bolin, was when Bolin mentioned the slain family. Then Ronald’s bottom lip quivered.
Ronald Simmons was charged with sixteen counts of murder, found guilty and sentenced to death. On May 31, 1988, Arkansas governor (later president) Bill Clinton signed his execution warrant, and on June 25, 1990 he died, as he had chosen to do, by lethal injection.
“To those who oppose the death penalty in my particular case, anything short of death would be cruel and unusual punishment.”
-Ronald Simmons statement before the court at his first trial
Victims
| Date | Name | Age | Relationship | Cause of death |
| December 22, 1987 | Ronald Gene Simmons Jr. | 29 | Son | Gunshot |
| December 22, 1987 | Rebecca Simmons | 46 | Wife | Gunshot |
| December 22, 1987 | Barbara Simmons | 3 | Granddaughter | Strangulation |
| December 22, 1987 | Loretta Simmons | 17 | Daughter | Strangulation |
| December 22, 1987 | Eddy Simmons | 14 | Son | Strangulation |
| December 22, 1987 | Marianne Simmons | 11 | Daughter | Strangulation |
| December 22, 1987 | Rebecca “Becky” Simmons | 8 | Daughter | Strangulation |
| December 26, 1987 | William “Billy” Simmons II | 23 | Son | Gunshot |
| December 26, 1987 | Renata Simmons | 22 | Daughter-in-Law | Gunshot |
| December 26, 1987 | William H. “Trae” Simmons III | 1 | Grandson | Drowning |
| December 26, 1987 | Sheila Simmons McNulty | 24 | Daughter | Gunshot |
| December 26, 1987 | Dennis McNulty | 23 | Son-in-Law | Gunshot |
| December 26, 1987 | Sylvia Gail Simmons | 6 | Daughter and Granddaughter | Strangulation |
| December 26, 1987 | Michael Simmons | 20 months | Grandson | Strangulation |
| December 28, 1987 | Kathy Kendrick | 24 | Acquaintance | Gunshot |
| December 28, 1987 | J.D. Chaffin | 33 | Stranger | Gunshot |
There must be something about Christmas. Even Charles Lawson snapped.
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