There were five bodies lying inside the house and several more buried or otherwise hidden outside the house. Ronald Gene Simmons slept, ate, drank, and passed the time for two days while those bodies lay and his macabre urges were still festering. He woke up the morning of December 28th, 1987, the first Monday after Christmas, and grabbed a pen and paper. He jotted down these words: “Dear Ma, sometimes you reap many more times what you sow. You have given so much to this family; this is just a little token of our appreciation. Keep it in remembrance of us. Love, Gene and family.” Simmons mailed that letter and $250 in cash to May Novak, his mother-in-law in Colorado. May had seven children and many more grandchildren and great-grandchildren. She did not know it yet, but even before that letter was mailed, she’d lost a daughter, seven of her grandchildren, and four of her great-grandchildren.
Simmons used winter coats and whatever else he could find to cover the corpses in the house, but the one he treated with the most care was Sheila, his oldest daughter. He’d moved her body near the Christmas tree, folded her arms across her chest, and draped a blanket over her. All of the carnage the previous week occurred on Mockingbird Hill, the name Simmons gave to his desolate 13-acre property north of Dover. No one other than Simmons knew the gruesomeness of what lay inside and outside that mobile home. Later that morning, Simmons was preparing to take a drive to Russellville, about 9 miles south of Dover. Gene grabbed his two handguns, a Ruger and a snub-nosed revolver, and headed out the door. He hopped in his son’s Toyota and pulled onto Broomfield Road toward Arkansas Highway 7. In his mind, there were still some scores that needed settling.
Presented by the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, you’re listening to “The Devil of Pope County: America’s Worst Family Massacre.” The city of Russellville had a population of nearly 20,000 people in 1987 and sits about an hour northwest of Little Rock. The home of Arkansas Tech University, it’s the largest city in Pope County. It’s located in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains near the Arkansas River, a desirable place for those who like to be close to nature but also a city that’s populous enough for those who don’t want to feel cloistered. David Eddie has lived and practiced law in Russellville for close to 40 years. “It was a really, and still is, a really good town,” he said. “It was small-town oriented; people knew each other, people got along, and really there were not any major problems that I remember back then. It was just a peaceful small town and a good place to live, and still is.”
On that December 28th morning, Gene Simmons drove to the home of Kathy Kendrick, a former coworker of his who was young and attractive. Simmons was infatuated with Kathy because she reminded him so much of his oldest daughter, but Kathy rejected him at every pass. That morning, Simmons wanted to make sure Kathy’s car was not parked outside her house. Seeing it was gone, he knew where he wanted to go next: to Kathy’s new workplace at Peele and Eddie, a law firm in downtown Russellville. Simmons had mapped out his escape route and went step by step in his mind about what he was going to do; that was his modus operandi—meticulous planning. Simmons parked the Toyota in the lot of the law firm on Glennwood Avenue, about a block south of East Main Street, and kept the motor running. He walked toward the front of the building and saw someone through the glass door—the very woman he came to see.
David Eddie was one of Kathy’s bosses; his office was across the hall from the lobby where Kathy’s desk was located. David was one of the partners at the law firm, which specialized in estate cases. He still remembers the details of that particular morning before any blood had spilled. “I remember what the weather was like,” he recalled. “It was a Monday morning after a Christmas weekend. It was a crisp, clear, sunny day, best of my memory, pretty cool. I remember going to the courthouse to do something and coming back somewhere around 10:00. Oh, I remember all this vividly. I came in; my office was next to the reception area where the front door was, where people came in. I was right there; my door was right there, adjoining the hall. I remember coming into my office, putting my stuff down, going into the library, which is at the end of the hall, and pouring a cup of coffee and turning around. Kathy came around the corner, and we just met. I almost spilled my coffee all over. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Kathy, that was close,’ and we talked a minute. She went, I went to my office, and she did her thing.”
A woman was in the lobby waiting to speak to one of the other attorneys in the office. Kathy was back at her workstation, which was in the lobby close to the door to the hallway. Around that time, Simmons entered the building through the front door. Kathy did not immediately look up when Simmons entered. Simmons stood directly in front of her, and when she did look up, she saw Simmons pull a gun out of his pocket. Then he pointed the gun at Kathy’s face. Kathy rose out of her seat; the first bullet entered her head, and she fell back onto her chair. Simmons fired three more times. “It’s hard to describe what hearing gunshots inside a building just a few feet away does to you,” David said. “It’s a numbing experience. I remember it; I knew it was gunshots, and they’re a lot louder inside. I’d hunt and shoot guns occasionally. I knew then something bad had happened, and it was just a few feet from me on the other side of the wall in the lobby. I remember my secretary and I could see in that room across the hall; she stuck her head out and looked at me, and I looked at her. I could hear the door open or shut, and I knew I’d never heard that door shut, so I knew whoever shot those shots was still outside my door, and I could not go out the door without being in plain view of them.”
“I sat there a second,” David continued. “I thought this person’s going to go through the office and kill anybody; I can’t just sit here.” That female client seated in the reception area was frozen in fear as she watched a murder unfold about 15 feet in front of her. Simmons made eye contact with her but never raised his gun at her. David got out of his seat and stood behind the open door of his office, preparing to jump out and confront an armed gunman. A second or so later, David heard the sound of the front door opening and closing. That’s when he crossed the hallway and rushed into the lobby. “I don’t know why I thought that the lady sitting outside my door was the one shot,” he said, “but then, to my great surprise, Kathy was lying there on the floor behind the desk, bleeding from her head. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh.'”
Before he tended to Kathy, David peered out of the glass door and spotted a Toyota peeling out of the parking lot. He did not get a good look at the driver, but he did get a good look at the car. Meanwhile, someone else inside the office picked up the phone and called police. It was about 10:17 a.m. That hysterical caller was transferred to the lone dispatcher on duty that morning, Donna Stowball. “The very first call I got was from Peele and Eddie’s attorney’s office,” Donna recalled, “and it was another secretary. He was describing to me that a man had come in and had shot Kathy, and she just kept saying the word ‘Kathy.’ I kept trying to ascertain from her, find out from her, was Kathy still alive, and she just kept saying, ‘I don’t know.'”
While that was happening, David was kneeling over Kathy, who was sprawled on the floor. “I held her hand, and she was breathing in a very strained manner,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t good. I looked to see if she—I didn’t know where she was shot—and I found the wounds in her head. I thought, ‘I don’t know what I can do,’ but there was nothing I could do.” Moments later, in what felt to David like a few minutes, the city’s chief of police, Herb Johnston, was banging on the front door. Johnston and the other police officers at the scene were soon joined by EMTs. Kathy was taken out on a stretcher and driven by ambulance to the nearest hospital, where she was pronounced dead. She was 24 years old.
David Eddie told me that he doesn’t remember much beyond that; most of the day remains a blur. He remembered being interviewed by a detective but doesn’t recall any specific questions he heard or answers he gave. The only detail he remembers is that while he was still speaking to the detective, he reached for the coffee mug on his desk, which was still filled with the coffee he had poured for himself earlier that morning and had nearly spilled on Kathy. It was still warm. It struck him at that moment that so much had happened in such a short amount of time.
That same realization came into sharp focus for Donna Stowball too. A shooting inside a business was not a typical call for Donna, who at the time went by the surname Jones. She had been a police dispatcher for about two years by then. This predated Pope County’s 911 system by a few years, so it was all up to Donna to direct police and EMTs to that scene. “I had four officers on duty that day,” she said, “and one of them was a shift supervisor, and he had informed me he was on his way to that location. So I had contacted the ambulance, I contacted the officers, and kind of went back to my daily duties.”
After leaving the Peele and Eddie Law Firm, Simmons turned west on Main Street and drove about a mile to Taylor Oil Company, located at the corner of South Cumberland Avenue. Julie Money had just been hired at Taylor Oil; December 28th was her first day on the job. The owner was Rusty Taylor. Rusty would later tell police that he barely knew the man who had shot him that morning. Simmons had been a part-time employee for one of his customers. Julie came in that morning, and one of her new coworkers gave her a warm and friendly greeting—a driver by the name of James Chaffin, who was known by his friends as JD. The 33-year-old JD was a firefighter who worked part-time as a driver at Taylor Oil. Julie had a great first impression of JD, who seemed to her like a kind and humble man and a proud father.
Around 10:20 that morning, not more than five minutes after the first shooting, Simmons walked in through the front door of Taylor Oil. Rusty’s office was close to the lobby and within sight of anyone who entered. Simmons spotted Rusty through the open office door and fired at him. Rusty was shot twice, once in each shoulder. Julie was coming out of the bathroom near the loading dock; just like in David Eddie’s case, Julie recognized the sounds as gunfire. It was jarring. What happened afterward was horrifying. “I heard a shot—you know, bang, bang,” Julie recalled. “I heard two shots, and I knew it was a gun because I know guns. So I looked at JD; he was standing right by the office door, which was probably 15, 20 feet away from what I remember, because I looked at him and I put my arms up, and he just kind of shrugged and opened the office door. Well, when he did, there was a glass pane in the office door, ‘cause the door opened from the left to the right, outwards, and there was a glass pane in that door. And all I saw were two arms coming up with a gun, and he shot him, and he hit him right in his eye. It was a hollow-point; killed him immediately.”
The second after watching a man she had just met get shot through the glass window of a swinging door, Julie made sure not to stand and wait for something else to happen. She was about 15 feet away from a man holding a gun. He was sporting an expression that she’ll never forget. “He had this terrible grin on his face,” she said, “and it was a mad-dog grin. It was like, you know, ‘I’m going to get you, I don’t care.’ It was awful.” She instinctively knew that the next move the gunman was going to make was to shoot her, and that’s exactly what he tried to do. “Then he turned and he saw me,” Julie continued, “and so I went diving for the floor, and he shot at me, and he shot through my hair, and I felt the bullet, so I went down.” Julie was lying face down behind a stack of boxes. She placed her hand on her head to check for blood. She did not feel any blood, but for a minute or two, she remained in a state of confusion about whether she had actually been struck by the bullet.
Meanwhile, Simmons exited through the loading dock and got back into his car. Julie caught a glimpse of him while he made his exit. In the midst of all that confusion, Julie had the presence of mind not to remain lying on that warehouse floor. She ran into the office and called police. Donna still remembers that second emergency call that morning; it came while she was still decompressing from the first. “By that time, I had received another call,” she said. “I want to say they were less than 10 to 15 minutes apart, and that’s when the lady at Taylor Oil had called me.” It was a tense call between Donna and Julie, who was still rattled from having a hollow-point bullet whiz by her head. “When I came in, part of the story was I was on the phone with 911,” Julie said. “I told them where I was, and I said, ‘I’ve got to get off here, I’ve got to go help Rusty,’ and she kept saying, ‘Stay on the phone, stay on the phone,’ screaming at me. And I said, ‘I can’t stay on the phone, I’ve got to go help.’ So I set the phone down, the whole time not even knowing whether I was hit or not, because when I went up to grab my head after I felt the shot and I put my hands down, I thought, ‘Well, there’s no blood, I must be dead.’ And then I was going to look at the rest of my body, and I looked down and I thought, ‘No, don’t look, because if you see your own blood, you’ll faint.’ So anyway, I was just kind of, you know, taking charge and doing what I had to do, and I could hear her screaming at me on the phone.”
Donna remembers Julie’s voice being elevated. “She said, ‘I think I felt the bullet go through my hair,'” Donna recalled. “I mean, she was like, ‘I think I felt that,’ and I’m like, ‘Okay, are you hurt? Are you bleeding? Is everything okay?’ ‘Yes, I’m okay, yes, I’m okay,’ but sure, I would have been very excited also.” Donna remained on the line while Julie ran over to Rusty. A customer who was there, Craig Bailey, also was standing over Rusty. He was seriously wounded, but his injuries were not critical. Julie realized that Taylor Oil’s warehouse was away from view from the main road, so she urged Craig to stand outside and flag down the ambulance. “Well, I went in and got Craig,” she said, “and I said, ‘Go stand out on the loading dock and just wave your arms so they can see you, because we’re off the beaten path, and I’m trying to explain to them where we are.’ So I get back on the phone, and so Craig goes out there, and he’s just standing there waving his arms, and he was in shock too. And I went back in to Rusty, and I said, ‘Rusty, can you get out?’ because he was underneath this big old oak desk, and he said, ‘I don’t think so.’ So I said, ‘Hang on, I’ve got 911 coming, a pair of medics are coming,’ and I grabbed that desk, and I picked it up—just the one end of it—and I flung it against the wall. And the next day, when I went back in there, I couldn’t even lift the edge of that desk.”
After lifting and moving that heavy desk above Rusty, Julie got back on the phone with Donna. Julie was asked to describe everything she witnessed. “She is very excited,” Donna said. “I’m trying to get as much as I can from her. She was explaining to me that Mr. Taylor had been shot; she was explaining to me that the fireman, Jim Chaffin, had been shot. And at the same time, I was trying to find out from her, ‘Who was this?’ I was trying to figure out at that point, did we have the same person, or did we have separate incidents going on?” As Julie was describing the shooter, Donna asked her whether he was wearing a white cowboy hat—something that the first caller had mentioned. Julie confirmed that the gunman was wearing a white hat. She also saw the car that the gunman drove away in and recognized it immediately as a copper-colored Toyota Corolla, so she passed on that information to Donna.
Rusty survived his injuries, but one of the bullets that struck him remains lodged in his left shoulder. Rusty still lives in Arkansas. He told me over the phone recently that he’s put that experience behind him and declined to take part in this podcast. After police arrived and after Rusty was taken by ambulance to the local hospital, Julie was interviewed by police. Much of the interview took place in the police car while en route to the police station. It was during that car ride that Julie realized the extent of her fear of again seeing that same man with the mad-dog grin on his face. “As I’m talking,” she said, “I kept sliding further and further down in the seat, because he was driving to the police station, and I didn’t know where this guy had gone. So I was scared that he would maybe shoot at the cop car. So here I am sliding down, and the cop said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m so scared, I just don’t want to be in a window where he sees me again.'”
So Julie had no idea what Simmons was doing, but she knew he was still out there. The police knew it too. When the car that Julie was riding in arrived at the station, it was under a lockdown. Meanwhile, Donna was still juggling numerous calls at once, and she was just as perplexed as anyone else about what the shooter was doing and where he could possibly be going. “By this time, I’ve got several officers on the way,” she said. “State Police has contacted me; they’re wanting to know if they should do something on the interstate because we didn’t know which way he was headed. We were getting telephone calls from individual citizens. It felt like he was zigzagging across town when, in actuality, he was not. Lots of people were getting him confused with others, but at Taylor Oil, she knew that Jim Chaffin was down, but she thought Rusty was still alive. So I had dispatched an ambulance, and Rusty was a fireman, so by this time, the fire department had contacted me, and they were trying to get there also. The Sheriff’s Office had called by that time, so there was a lot of activity. It was happening and going down really fast.”
All Donna knew with any level of certainty was that the suspect who entered Peele and Eddie and Taylor Oil was the same man. Donna was struggling to stay afloat with all of the calls she was making and receiving. She also had to be conscious about what she said over the airwaves; back then, a lot of people owned CB radios. She was careful about calling out names on the air in case a family member or acquaintance of one of the victims was listening in. The day was getting to her, but she hung in there. Her resolve would be further tested in a matter of minutes.
Simmons made it to his next stop, the Sinclair Minimart, where he had previously worked. It was located on Main Street, about three miles east of Taylor Oil. Simmons pulled into the parking lot, got out, and walked through the door of the store and saw a coworker, Roberta Woolery, turn and look out the window. The roar of sirens had piqued her curiosity. Simmons walked past her; he was holding a pistol in his hand. He headed straight toward the back, where his former boss, David Salyer, was seated at a table with his friend Tony Cooter. The two were sipping coffee. Simmons fired at David, who ducked; the bullet missed him. At that moment, David did not know whether he was really being fired upon or if it was some kind of prank. He even asked Tony whether it was a joke. Tony told him it was no joke. By then, the gunman was aiming for David’s head.
Roberta, who had been looking out the window when Simmons stormed in, screamed and reached for a telephone. Simmons was still standing a short distance from her, and after he heard her scream, he turned and opened fire on her. Two bullets struck Roberta—one on the chin and the other in her shoulder. David grabbed a chair and charged at Simmons, yelling, “Get out, you son of a bitch!” Simmons fired another round at David and struck him in the head. As he fell to the ground, David flung the chair at the man trying to kill him. David’s friend Tony, a burly but older man, grabbed what he could within arm’s reach—a six-pack of soda—and started hurling the cans one after the other toward Simmons while dodging the projectiles coming at him. The gunman fired a couple more wild shots in Tony’s direction and then left. Those shots missed their target.
Roberta, with a bullet wound just below her mouth, was on the phone with police. It was 10:39 a.m.—a total of 22 minutes had elapsed from the first emergency call to the third. Roberta’s frantic call was forwarded to Donna Stowball. “The first thing I remember her saying was that she had been shot and that she was bleeding,” Donna said. “She needed an ambulance. I’m trying to get a little bit of information from her, and she just keeps repeating, ‘I’m bleeding, I’m bleeding.'” Donna had only two ambulances available to dispatch, and both of them were tied up, but she knew the woman she was talking to on the phone was injured, and someone else inside the store had been shot. So Donna had to get one of those ambulances to the Minimart as fast as possible. Roberta told Donna at one point, “Please hurry, our blood is dripping everywhere,” while still on the phone.
Roberta, who by this point was drifting into a state of hysteria, called out to Tony and asked whether it was Gene Simmons who had come in and shot up the store. Tony confirmed that it was. He was tending to an injured David Salyer, telling him to remain still and calm. Donna was on the radio, trying to get an ambulance and a police officer to the scene of the Minimart. Then she got back on the line with Roberta. “I get back on the phone with Roberta,” Donna said. “She says, ‘I’ve thrown everything I can at him. I’ve thrown cans, I’ve thrown stuff.’ I said, ‘Roberta, please forgive me, I do have somebody on the way to you.’ I said, ‘Do you, by any chance, can you describe him?’ She said, ‘I know who he is,’ and I said, ‘Okay, who is he?’ And she’s the one who first gave me the name of Gene Simmons.”
Donna repeated the name; now she had something to work with other than “a man wearing a white cowboy hat driving a Corolla.” “But she described him,” Donna continued. “She told me that he lived at Dover. I’m trying to give all the officers all the information I have that she’s given me. By this point, I’m thinking I need to tell them who he is. Of course, everybody on their devices out there got it also, and so it got a little crazy after that.” Roberta and David were brought to the hospital, and both survived their gunshot wounds.
Simmons had one more place to visit, and it was not on the main drag. He headed south to Woodline Motor Freight on Airport Road. Woodline is where Simmons had worked and where he developed that crush on his coworker Kathy Kendrick. His bizarre antics had caused Kathy to report his behavior to their boss, Joyce Butts, who had reprimanded him. Simmons never got over the embarrassment that caused him. His last target that day was Joyce. He entered the building with both pistols; the Ruger was in a paper bag, and the revolver was in his pocket. He entered the office, stood by the Christmas tree, scanned the workplace, and spotted Joyce. He started walking toward her. He grabbed the snub-nosed revolver from his coat pocket and fired bullets into Joyce’s head and chest.
In an adjacent room, 31-year-old Vicky Jackson heard the shots. She immediately ran to another office where her coworker was seated. She told him someone had just been shot, and both of them ducked behind the door. The coworker headed for the rear door to the loading dock and screamed at Vicky to follow him. Just as she was about to run after him and through the open door, she saw Simmons enter. She froze. Simmons walked toward Vicky and stood over her. He gestured to her to stand up; he assured her that he was not going to harm her. Simmons and Vicky were former coworkers. Simmons spoke to her as though she was an old friend. He asked Vicky, almost sheepishly, why she never came to the Sinclair Minimart to see him. Vicky tried to keep Simmons calm while struggling to stay calm herself. She told him that she did come to the Minimart a few times, but it must have been on the days he wasn’t working.
Simmons told Vicky to call for an ambulance for Joyce and to ask for police to come. Simmons looked around and noticed that everyone he could see was cowering underneath desks. He told Vicky he was ready to turn himself in. Confused, Vicky asked Simmons what was going on. According to police transcripts, Simmons told her, “Nothing now that it’s all over with. I just wanted to kill Joyce. I don’t want to hurt nobody else. Just call the police.” Donna Stowball, who by that time was fully rattled by the morning’s developments, took one more emergency call. “Vicky had contacted me and told me that there was a Ronald Gene Simmons standing in front of her,” Donna said, “that he had shot one of her coworkers, that he had two guns, and I said, ‘Are you okay?’ And she said, ‘Yes, he’s not going to shoot me,’ and I’m like, ‘Okay, oh, how do you know this?’ ‘He’s not after me, he said he’s done.’ So he must have relayed some information to her about he had accomplished whatever task it was he was trying to finish, and then she proceeds to repeat what he’s saying, that he will surrender to an officer.”
Vicky told Donna that Simmons had two guns; he was holding one of the guns in his hand, but he wasn’t aiming it at her. She also told Donna that Simmons was ready to turn himself in, but he did not want police barging in; he wanted to surrender peacefully. Vicky was located in the interior of the building, so getting to her was a little bit like walking through a maze, and Donna had to handle that task while telling other police officers to stay off the radio. “That took a little bit of time,” Donna said. “Again, it felt like warp speed, but here’s the problem: when you’re trying to tell an officer something and another officer had a question, it was called ‘walking on each other.’ It’s when you would press down your radio to deliver something, and somebody else would press theirs at the same time, and nobody really got information; it was just a squelching noise. And so I kept reminding them that they were walking on each other and that I needed radio to be clear so that I could deliver all this. It was intense.”
“I didn’t really know what to say to her,” Donna continued, “and I kept asking her, ‘Do you feel like he’s going to hurt you?’ And she kept saying, ‘No, no, I think he’s done.’ So I don’t know what kind of conversation they had had, but he had assured her that she wasn’t in danger and that he was ready to give up.” Donna did not necessarily disbelieve Vicky when she told her that Simmons was not going to shoot her, but she was still inside an office with an armed man who had just shot six people, so it was still a dangerous situation. It was made all the more difficult by the fact that police needed help to find where the gunman was—all of that fell on Donna. She also asked Vicky during the call whether she was calm. Vicky told her no, in fact, she was not calm. Donna told Vicky, “Calm down as much as you possibly can. We’re going to get you through this. Believe it or not, we’re going to get you through this.”
Vicky did manage to remain poised during the ordeal. She gave Donna directions all while maintaining a soft tone and consoling demeanor with Simmons. The gunman had insisted on turning himself in to a uniformed officer, but Chief Johnston and his assistant chief were wearing civilian clothes. Donna explained to Vicky that the department’s two highest-ranking officers would be there to take Simmons into custody. “If some of the officers were still at other locations,” she said, “so really getting a uniformed officer there in time was not an option. We had some civilian detectives in their civilian clothes, and I feel like the chief and assistant chief didn’t want to put them in harm’s way. I feel like they thought, ‘This is ours; this is our job.'”
Vicky saw Johnston coming toward the office and assured Simmons that it was okay to turn over his guns to him. She told him that he was the police chief. Before the call was disconnected, Donna could hear a lot of screaming and other noise over the phone. The chief was standing face-to-face with Simmons. Vicky stood there, stunned, with a phone still in her hand and heard Johnston tell Simmons, “Give me the damned gun.” Simmons did what he was told and handed it over. The second gun was still inside the paper bag and had been placed on one of the desks inside the office. Simmons had no other weapons on him. He was apprehended, handcuffed, and brought to the Pope County Jail. The rampage was over.
Julie Money was still at the station. She still had no idea that Simmons had been to three other places and shot more people. She was brought inside a room with a semi-transparent window—known on network TV cop shows as a one-way mirror. Ronald Gene Simmons was in the other room. Julie looked at him through the window while flanked by a couple of police officers. “They said, ‘Is this him?'” Julie recalled. “And I thought in my mind, ‘Well, if I’m wrong, you know, I’m going to send some guy to his death.’ And I said, ‘I’m not sure. Did you get his cowboy hat? Can you put that on him?’ And the cop just looked at me and he said, ‘Just say yes, that’s him, ‘cause that’s him.’ I said, ‘Okay, that’s him.’ And then he said, ‘If it’s—if you’re wrong, we’ll straighten it out later.’ I said, ‘Okay.'”
Simmons’s original plan was to kill himself, but there were too many instances in which a single bullet wound was not enough to kill his victims. Four of the victims he shot that morning survived, including two who had suffered two bullet wounds. He did not trust the guns he had to do the job with a single shot to the head, so he ultimately decided during all of that chaos to let the state kill him. He was already resigned to that fate. Police did not know it yet, but he had actually aimed those guns at other people days earlier, and those victims were lying on a 13-acre property near Dover. It would be up to the Pope County Sheriff’s Office to find them.
Sheriff Jim Bolin was at the jail, and he confronted Simmons. The sheriff asked him about the whereabouts of his family. Bolin would tell the media that Simmons said nothing, only that his lip quivered after he was asked the question. Bolin and his deputies did not know what they were going to see next, but they assumed it was very bad. It wound up being one of the worst murder scenes ever documented on American soil.
Coming up on “The Devil of Pope County: America’s Worst Family Massacre”: “All the children were like little robots; none of them went near Gene. It was a trick he learned in Vietnam, designed to keep the animals away. The ceiling in this room also is blood-splattered.”
