Kill Them All

Ronald Gene Simmons was born in Chicago on 15 July 1940, the son of Loretta and William Simmons. His father died of a stroke before Gene was a year old, and his mother remarried quickly, a civil engineer, and the family moved to Hector, Arkansas. Gene was a bully from childhood: he beat his sister and half-brother and tortured the family cat, and in 1950 his stepfather beat him with a belt and a rubber hose for it. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it

In 1960, while stationed at Bremerton, Washington, he met Rebecca Ulibarri, known as Becky, then nineteen, at a USO dance. He proposed by mail and they married the same year. She was from Colorado and had little experience of the world. Immediately after the wedding he told her to stop wearing make-up and to wear her hair pulled back, and the marriage became violent. They had seven children: Ronald Gene junior in 1961, Sheila in 1963, William in 1964, Loretta in 1970, Eddie in 1973, Marianne in 1976 and Rebecca, known as Becky junior, in 1979. He left the Navy in 1962 and joined the Air Force in 1963, serving as a clerk and rising to master sergeant, with postings in Virginia, California and the United Kingdom and a year in Vietnam, where he was awarded a Bronze Star and marksmanship ribbons. The family lived in San Francisco, then England, then the small New Mexico town of Cloudcroft. He retired in 1979 and took a civilian job at Holloman Air Force Base.

At home he was a tyrant. The children were not allowed to socialise or join after-school activities, he read and censored all the family mail, he beat Becky and beat any child who intervened, and the house was run like a boot camp. In 1981 Sheila, then sixteen, became pregnant by her father. Her classmates told their parents, who told teachers, who told the school, and eventually the sheriff was called; Gene junior also telephoned the New Mexico Department of Human Services. Sheila told a friend that she had no boyfriends and that her father was molesting her. this part of the story is covered for now Three counts of incest were filed. details of the account remain covered until revealed Sheila gave birth to a daughter, Sylvia Gale.

the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now The family had moved to Ward, Arkansas, near Little Rock. Simmons worked at a Veterans Administration hospital from October 1981 to January 1982, then for nine months as a clerk-typist at the Army Recruiting Command Office in Little Rock, then at a pickle factory in Atkins, then full time at a Mini Mart in Russellville, and from January 1985 part time there while also working as an accounts receivable clerk at Woodline Motor Freight.

details of the account remain covered until revealed The home was two old trailers welded together; he built a ten-foot cinder block wall with barbed wire around the trailer, posted no trespassing signs, collected rainwater, let the plumbing fail so the family used outhouses, refused a telephone and kept the family isolated. Sheila met Dennis McNulty at college; Simmons moved the family to get her away from him, but she married McNulty anyway, he adopted Sylvia and they had a son, Michael, in 1985. Gene junior, Sheila and William all married and left. At Woodline he became infatuated with Kathy Kendrick, a 25-year-old former teenage beauty queen and secretary, and pursued her repeatedly until she filed sexual harassment complaints; at the end of 1986 he quit, telling his supervisor Joyce Butts to take the job and shove it. He then worked at a Sinclair Mini Mart.

In the summer of 1987 Becky began to resist: she had her ears pierced, had her hair cut and wrote to her children that she had been a prisoner long enough and wanted to leave. On 18 December 1987 Simmons quit the Mini Mart. the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it On 23 December he told the children he had gifts for them and would give them one at a time in their rooms. He strangled Loretta first and held her head in the rain barrel, then did the same to Eddie, Marianne and Rebecca. He shot Becky twice in the head, then shot Gene junior four times in the head and once in the stomach. He put the bodies in the pit the children had dug, soaked them in kerosene, and put three-year-old Barbara, Gene junior's daughter, in a plastic bag in the boot of an abandoned car.

On Christmas Eve he bought three dollars of petrol and a pack of cigarettes and was seen at Sears in Russellville, and again the day after Christmas. On 28 December William, Renata and their 20-month-old son Trey arrived; he shot William twice in the head and Renata five times in the head and once in the neck and throat, strangled Trey and put him in a green bag in another abandoned car. Sheila, Dennis, Sylvia and 21-month-old Michael arrived next; he shot Sheila six times in the head, shot Dennis once in the head at the door, then found six-year-old Sylvia in a bedroom and strangled her, and strangled Michael. He covered the bodies with coats and laid Sylvia on a bed under his wife's best tablecloth. Then he went to a bar for a beer.

He left on 28 December in his son's brown Toyota Corolla, after switching off the electricity, bought a second .22 at Walmart, called the law office of Richard Peel from the Delta service station on Interstate 40 and hung up, then walked in at 10.15 a.m. wearing a cowboy hat and carrying two .22 revolvers loaded with hollow points. The receptionist was Kathy Kendrick. He shot her repeatedly in the head at her desk and left. At 10.25 he shot dead J.D. Chaffin, a 33-year-old off-duty fireman and father of four, at Taylor Oil Company on West Main Street and wounded Rusty Taylor; at 10.40 he shot Roberta Woolery and David Saylor at the Sinclair Mini Mart, where a friend drove him off with cans of Coke; at 10.50 he shot Joyce Butts at Woodline Motor Freight, then told a clerk he had done what he came to do and waited for the police, handing his gun to Chief Herb Johnston.

That afternoon Sheriff James Bolin crawled through a window of the house and found the bodies. In all 16 people had been killed and 19 were victims including the wounded. At the time it was the second worst mass murder in America, after Charles Whitman. this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it this part of the story is covered for now details of the account remain covered until revealed the rest of this account is covered until you choose to reveal it He was buried in a pauper's plot at Lincoln Memorial Lawn in Varner. A black granite monument in a Colorado cemetery marks the grave holding the ashes of five of the 16.