by Ryan Green
Part 5: Guilty as Charged
When the police arrived, Ronald Simmons was taken into custody without a single word. After he handed over his gun, he was searched and then loaded into a van for immediate transportation to the station. Ronald was booked at the Pope County Police Department. Before he ever saw the inside of a jail cell, all the other reports began filtering through. Simmons had only been arrested for the attempted murder of his former supervisor Joyce Butts so far. As he sat in the police station, the reports of all the other crimes in his spree began to come in. He would not speak to the police, but he would give a terse nod each time they asked him if he was the one responsible for a crime. Eventually the phone stopped ringing, the office returned to its usual state of silence, and Simmons' paperwork was processed.
The small-town police department could have coped with an angry employee shooting their boss—murder wasn't a common occurrence but it was at least something that they were mentally prepared to deal with. What Simmons had done was so far outside of their realm of experience that they couldn't even understand it. They were about to book him into the local jail when the death threats began to pour in, some of them more elaborate, some of them chillingly simple. It was clear that if he remained in Russellville, the town's tiny jail would come under attack and the man would be strung up in the middle of the night. They skipped ahead to the next logical step in their plans: they sent him to a mental hospital for evaluation, beyond of the easy reach of the enraged residents of the town who had just lost friends and family to his rampage. They used words like maniac, lunatic, and crazy to describe Ronald Gene Simmons, because they could not conceive of a world in which a sane man would kill the way that Simmons had killed. Without pity, mercy, or any discernible motive. If they thought that they had reached the ground floor of his depravity, they were in for more shocks.
A police escort drove Simmons south to the Arkansas State Hospital in Little Rock. The deputy, James Bolin, who would soon become Sheriff of the county, seemed to be the only one of the Pope police who recognised the reclusive man at all. He remembered that Simmons had a large family back at home and, considering the state that the man was in, he became concerned. He leaned in close and asked Ronald, ‘You've got a family up there on Mockingbird Hill. Are they doing all right?'
Simmons maintained his stoic silence as he had been trained to do if he was ever captured by the enemy, but his lower lip quivered. Staring closely, Bolin thought that he could see a tear in the man's eye. It was enough of a sign for him to demand that the family be checked on immediately.
While Simmons was in the hospital, he was examined thoroughly over the course of three days by staff psychiatrist Dr Irving Kuo. Even as he spent his days with Simmons, Dr Kuo was still receiving regular reports from the police on Simmons' crimes as the evidence against the man mounted. First the bodies in town, then the bodies in the house, then the rest.
The police had prepared themselves for the worst, but their imaginations could not encompass all that they would find at Mockingbird Hill. After Deputy Bolin crept up to the house and took a peek in through the window, the local police immediately contacted their state counterparts for assistance. They had neither the experience nor the training to handle a massacre of this magnitude. It took both local and state troopers days of searching before they could recover all the bodies. The strange ways that Ronald had hidden some of them, laid others out, treated the corpses with kerosene, wrapped some in plastic and dispatched them with different methods confused the forensics teams to no end. The children wrapped in plastic were the last to be discovered, days after the rest of the family had already been sent off to the coroner's office to determine their causes of death for certain.
While there was plenty of physical evidence, there was no motive to be found anywhere. James Bolin led much of the local investigation and found that nobody really knew the Simmons family. Ronald's enforced solitude had precisely the desired effect. They had no family nearby who could be contacted. They had no friends, and even the people who they regularly interacted with, such as the owner of the gas station just down the road from Mockingbird Hill, said that Ronald would go about his business as though he was the only person in the world, never even bothering to speak during most visits to the store where he would purchase his cigarettes and beer almost daily.
Bolin was able to reconstruct a chronology of the events that took place, breaking down the murders into three clusters. He quickly came to the conclusion that to execute the murders with such precision, Ronald had to be a cunning and calculating man, but beyond that he could make no sense of the man's actions beyond his terrible temper. The vital details of Simmons family life would not surface for years after the case was closed.
In the end, despite Simmons complete refusal to cooperate with Dr Kuo, he was judged to be mentally competent to stand trial for his crimes on the basis that he knew the difference between life and death, and right and wrong. At the time, there was a strong belief among the police that he may have been mentally disabled in some way, and it was only years later, after criminologists had poured over the details of this case to create a timeline of events, that they realised just how accurate Bolin's initial assessment was and how fiercely intelligent Simmons needed to be to orchestrate the whole thing in such a way that none of his victims had a chance to escape.
Simmons was sent to prison, where details of his crimes were withheld from the general population of prisoners, for his safety, for as long as possible. It took less than a day for his story to finally hit the news cycle. Simmons had made local history by committing the single largest mass murder in all of Arkansas and national news for committing the worst crime involving a single family in US history. His claim to fame meant that the population of the prison held barely concealed loathing for him at best and murderous intent at worst. He was kept isolated for his own safety until his first trial.
His lawyers, Robert ‘Doc' Irwin and John Harris, were public defenders assigned to his case, and despite his desire to plead guilty to everything and his outright loathing for them, they planned to make sure that his trials went as well as possible, given who their client was and what he had done. They argued that it would be impossible to find a jury that was not prejudiced if he was brought up on the two murder charges in Russellville after he had already been convicted of being a family annihilator, so the two cases were separated. They also worked diligently to quash hearsay and evidence from unrelated cases, such as his outstanding warrant for arrest for incest in New Mexico, that might turn a jury against him. Despite their frankly herculean work to turn the tide of opinion in Ronald Gene Simmons' favour, he was unrepentant and determined to plead guilty on every count, giving no justifications or excuses for his behaviour to the court that might have given them reason to doubt that he would kill again in an instant if given provocation. He received the death sentence by lethal injection for the murders in Russellville, in addition to 147 years in prison, and was transferred to Death Row.
The status of the death penalty in Arkansas at the time was a complex situation. It had only recently been made legal again after years of being banned. The laws that would later develop ensuring that every death penalty automatically ran the gamut of appeals through every court in the state had not even begun to materialise yet, and the complex meeting of public opinion on a contentious issue and the actual legal structure of the day was leading to many problems, entirely exacerbated when Ronald Gene Simmons refused to appeal his sentence, claiming that death was exactly what he deserved.
On death row, there were multiple attempts on Simmons' life. Not because of the terrible crimes that he had committed—he was surrounded by killers who were just as cold-blooded as him—but because they believed that his refusal to appeal his sentence would be used against them in their own appeals. There is a strange structure to the American legal system where every legal decision that is made can then be cited as a justification for any future decisions. This system, known a
s ‘precedent', is why every judge is so careful before issuing a judgement and why so many styles of defence have been disallowed for fear of the way that they can be applied to other, unrelated cases. This system of living law allows for the constantly adjusting landscape of the modern world. Because there is no limitation on how far back a lawyer can reach for a case to cite, it can also lay undue weight on decisions that were made under what was essentially a completely different legal system.
In theory, this system pleases both the stoic conservatives who wish to stay close to the traditional understanding of the law and the more progressive lawyers who wish to lay down new interpretations. In practice, it means that a single bad decision made by a judge in the lower courts can have a lasting impact on the whole legal landscape, and that well-read lawyers can pull out legal precedent to justify practically any position or defence that they can come up with to suit whatever mood they believe that the jury is going to be in. In Arkansas, precedent was still being set for death penalty cases. The hope was that the state would adopt the policy of other states, where every appeal had to be exhausted before the death penalty could be enacted, but of course, someone like Ronald Gene Simmons threw a wrench in the works.
His second trial arrived shortly after the first. As he was pleading guilty and had no intention of raising a defence, the state did not feel the need to give his defenders much time to pull together a case. As in the first trial, the prosecutor was a district attorney by the name of John Bynum. Unlike the first trial, the case that he was trying to present to the jury did not come with a conveniently pre-packaged motive. Bynum was forced to scrape through all of the evidence that the police had collected from the Simmons estate, finally settling on one single piece of evidence, combined with some long-forgotten court documents from the family's time in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, in the family's safety deposit box in the bank in Russellville—communications between Ronald and his daughter Sheila that one or the other of them had held onto, either as blackmail material or out of sentimental value. Between that letter and the indictment for incest, Bynum was able to weave a narrative in which a sexually aggressive, incestuous rapist turned on his family when he was denied what he considered to be his ‘rights'. Simmons worked with his lawyers for the first time in the entire proceedings in an attempt to get that letter blocked from entry into the evidence.
Pynum stood up in court in front of the jury and read every word from the private letters that Ronald had shared with his lover and daughter. The girl who had ruined his life. The girl who he blamed for everything. He had destroyed her and all evidence that they had ever been together. He had wrung the last trace of proof that they had ever been together out with his bare hands. Pynum was letting the whole world know. He was sharing all of Ronald's secrets. Ronald sat behind the bench glowering at the man through every carefully enunciated word of his own clumsy writing. He listened to his own confessions of love. He listened to Sheila reciprocating. He heard it all happening again. All of the things that he had killed her to stop. Pynum strolled past Ronald with the smug grin of a job well done.
Ronald didn't know that he could still get so angry that the world turned black until he was up out of his seat. His fist connected with the smug prick's jaw and sent him flying. Ronald clambered over the felled lawyer, ready to beat the man to death in full view of the whole court, when an officer of the court rushed over to stop him. Instinct took over. He snatched at the deputy's gun. It caught on the holster strap for the half second that it took the other officers of the court to arrive.
They dogpiled on top of him. Despite his screaming and struggling, they clapped him in chains and then dragged him out of the courtroom as he roared murderous threats at the fallen Pynum. Then the judge sent them off to decide Simmons' guilt.
He was convicted, with little deliberation, and sentenced to death by lethal injection, again once for each of his victims. In his final court appearance, he thanked the judge for his sentence, declaring that death was the only suitable justice for what he had done. Pynum, keeping his distance, seemed inordinately pleased with the results, too.
Almost immediately after the second trial, Simmons lawyers began working on appeals for him even though he had officially denied any wish to move forward with one. One of his lawyers moved to have Simmons judged incompetent to deny his right to appeal, going as far as to put himself forward as a legal guardian for the killer. This attempt was thwarted when it made its way to the Arkansas Supreme Court, using the same evaluation of Simmons that made it possible for him to stand trial to begin with. Dr Kuo's assessment stated that Simmons clearly understood the difference between life and death, which was all that the court felt was required. The legal process of ending Simmons' life kept on rolling forward, making national news once more after his outright refusal to raise an appeal against the order for his execution. Even Sheriff Bolin, who had seen the full nightmarish extent of Simmons' actions, felt the need to speak out against the death penalty, stating that despite the cunning that Simmons had displayed in setting up these killings, someone, as warped as him, shouldn't be making life and death decisions for all of the people in Arkansas.
*
In his cell, Ronald Gene Simmons was watching television and eating his last meal. The date for his execution had finally come, and he was facing it with all of the serene calm that characterised him when everything was going according to plan. He would die under the watchful eye of a doctor. They would make sure that he was completely gone before they buried him. There was no possibility of his being trapped inside his body with no means for escape. It was as clean an ending as he could have possibly hoped for, and he had no complaints. His life had been limited, but he had lived it in the way that he wanted to. Dying on his own terms was the natural conclusion of that.
Prison and military service both suited Ronald equally well, each of them filling up his days with carefully scheduled activities and allowing him to abdicate all responsibility for his actions. That lawyer had tried to dig up business that was meant to be left buried. It had been a near thing in that courtroom, but now it was over and he could set that worry aside. He would never step into a courtroom again for the rest of his life, even if the rest of his life could now be measured in minutes. He finished his meal, set the tray aside, and stared blankly at the television screen, laughing along with the laugh track, nodding along with the talking heads and doing his very best impression of looking like a perfectly normal human being. He wouldn't have to maintain any sort of charade for much longer, so the least that he could do was be comfortable.
He waited and listened for the time on the news before flicking the channel again. He aligned his internal clock with that and kept on counting. It wouldn't be long now. He didn't think that he would be afraid. He had never really believed that he would be afraid when the time finally came. That was why the war never scared him. That was why things in life never really scared him that made other men tremble in their boots. So long as he knew what was going to happen, he didn't have to worry about the all possibilities exploding out in every direction. Even if there was only a bad end to the road that he was on, he didn't mind so long as he knew which way he was going.
The time kept on ticking by. Any minute now the guards would come walking along to clap him in chains. They would lead him to the chamber, lay him down on the table, and slip that needle in his arm to take all of the pain and worry away. Once he was lying down on that table, he would never have to raise his weary head again. He waited until a full minute past the allotted time, then he wandered over to the bars of his cell to look as far down as he could. Where the hell were they?
The political firestorm around the death penalty continued as one of the other death row inmates filed a suit in Simmons defence, on the basis that Simmons' refusal of his right to appeal hurt the legal standing of the other prisoners who were fighting against their own sentencing. The Supreme Court tossed this defence out just as readily as they had the argument that Sim
mons wasn't competent to stand trial or the argument that his public defender knew what was best for him, but the legal machinations of denying that appeal had brought the planned execution to a grinding halt. Without the correct paperwork in hand, the governor was forced to call the prison a few minutes before the execution was meant to go ahead and order a stay until the situation in the Supreme Court was settled. The situation was eventually explained to Simmons, after he had already eaten his last meal, and he took the news with all of the grace with which he met any changes to his schedule—he was absolutely furious that someone was trying to interfere with his fate. His execution was rescheduled for a later date, and he was left locked in his cell once more with nothing more to occupy him than the endless loop of his thoughts.
On May 31st 1990, future president Bill Clinton, who was then serving as the Governor of Arkansas, signed Simmons second death warrant, for June the 25th. This was the fastest pipeline from conviction to execution in United States history since the death penalty had been reinstated in 1976. Since the last trial, Simmons had habitually refused any visitors, and he did not break that pattern on the day of his execution, outright refusing a visit from either legal counsel or clergy. He was led into the room where he would be executed, where he loudly proclaimed, ‘Justice delayed, finally be done, is justifiable homicide.'
