How Ronald Gene Simmons Massacred His Entire Family At Christmas
Wikimedia CommonsRonald Gene Simmons’ Christmas crimes lasted a full week — and resulted in the deaths of 16 people.
Ronald Gene Simmons planned a special surprise for his family during Christmastime in 1987. Then, he methodically killed his wife, his children, and his grandchildren at their home in Dover, Arkansas, before embarking on an additional killing spree that targeted strangers and his coworkers.
Simmons, whose violence may have been incited by his wife’s secret desire to divorce him, started killing on Dec. 22 when he shot his wife and oldest son and then strangled his three-year-old granddaughter. He lay in wait for four more of his children to come home, then killed them as well by strangling them to death and drowning them in a rain barrel.
Four days passed, and then more members of Simmons’s family walked straight into his web. On Dec. 26, he shot and killed his son and daughter-in-law and strangled their 20-month-old son. Then, when his daughter Sheila arrived — who Simmons may have molested — he killed her and her two children. But Simmons didn’t end his Christmas murders there.
YouTubeRebecca Simmons was the first of Ronald Gene Simmons’ victims.
On Dec. 28, Simmons drove to nearby Russellville and continued to kill. He murdered a secretary at a law firm who may have rebuffed his advances, then shot and killed more people at an oil company, a convenience store, and at Woodline Motor Freight, his former workplace.
All told, Simmons had killed 16 people. He surrendered to the police without a fight, but never explicitly stated why he’d decided to kill his family and so many others.
Over the course of two trials in 1988 and 1989, Ronald Gene Simmons was found guilty of all 16 murders. He was sentenced to death and died by lethal injection on June 25, 1990, at the age of 49.
