Ronald Gene Simmons "CHRISTMAS FAMILY INCEST MASSACRE" murders

Ronald Gene Simmons "CHRISTMAS FAMILY INCEST MASSACRE" murders

On December 22, 1987, Ronald Gene Simmons began a killing spree that would be the worst mass murder in Arkansas history and the worst crime involving one family in the history of the country. His rampage ended on December 28, 1987, leaving dead fourteen members of his immediate family and two former coworkers.

Ronald Gene Simmons was born on July 15, 1940, in Chicago, Illinois, to Loretta and William Simmons. On January 31, 1943, William Simmons died of a stroke. Within a year, Simmons’s mother married again, this time to William D. Griffen, a civil engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The corps moved Griffen to Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1946, the first of several transfers that would take the family across central Arkansas over the next decade. On September 15, 1957, Simmons dropped out of school and joined the U.S. Navy. His first station was Bremerton Naval Base in Washington, where he met Bersabe Rebecca “Becky” Ulibarri, whom he married in New Mexico on July 9, 1960.

Over the next eighteen years, the couple had seven children. In 1963, Simmons left the navy and approximately two years later, he joined the air force. During his twenty-two-year military career, Simmons was awarded a Bronze Star, the Republic of Vietnam Cross for his service as an airman, and the Air Force Ribbon for excellent marksmanship. Simmons retired on November 30, 1979, at the rank of master sergeant.

On April 3, 1981, Simmons was being investigated by the Cloudcroft, New Mexico, Department of Human Services for allegations that he had fathered a child with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Sheila. Fearing arrest, Simmons fled first to Ward (Lonoke County) in late 1981 and then to Dover (Pope County) in the summer of 1983. The family took up residence on a thirteen-acre tract of land that would become known as “Mockingbird Hill.” The residence was constructed of two older-model mobile homes joined to form one large home and was surrounded by a makeshift privacy fence, as high as ten feet tall in some places. The home did not have a telephone or indoor plumbing.

Simmons worked a string of low-paying jobs in the nearby town of Russellville (Pope County). He quit a position as an accounts receivable clerk at Woodline Motor Freight after numerous reports of inappropriate sexual advances. He went to work at a Sinclair Mini Mart for approximately a year and a half before quitting on December 18, 1987.

Evidence indicates that Simmons bludgeoned and shot his wife on December 22, 1987. Simmons also bludgeoned and shot his visiting son, twenty-nine-year-old Ronald Gene Simmons Jr. He then strangled his three-year-old granddaughter. All three bodies were later found in a shallow pit Simmons had instructed the children to dig months before for a third family outhouse.

Later the same day, the Dover school bus dropped off the younger Simmons children for their Christmas break from school. Based on crime scene investigation, it is believed the Simmons children (ages seventeen, fourteen, eleven, and eight) were separated and killed individually, by strangulation and/or drowning in a rain barrel. Their bodies, too, were found in the hole for the outhouse.

The older Simmons children had been invited to the Simmons home on December 26, 1987, for an after-Christmas dinner. Twenty-three-year-old William H. Simmons II, his twenty-one-year-old wife, Renata May Simmons, and their twenty-month-old son, all of Fordyce (Dallas County), were likely the first to arrive. William and Renata were shot, and their bodies were left by the dining room table, and covered with their own coats and some bedding. The child was killed and placed into the trunk of a car behind the Simmons home.

Next to arrive were Simmons’s twenty-four-year-old daughter, Sheila, and her husband, thirty-three-year-old Dennis Raymond McN