by Ryan Green
It took 17 minutes for the doctor to declare that Ronald Gene Simmons was finally dead. The state held onto the body for the mandatory time, waiting for a family member to step forward and claim it, but there was nobody left. He was buried in a pauper's grave in Star City, Arkansas, far from the families of his victims and anyone who might have remembered his name.
In Pope County, Simmons was not so easily forgotten. His name is still spoken in hushed tones. He is the boogeyman of the small backwater towns of Arkansas, an evil so dark that adults can't even speak the names of his crimes. Earl Humphrey, the principal of the Dover Elementary School that Little Becky had attended said, ‘We're trying to decide what we tell children, but I don't see any answers. I see a lot of adults with no answers. There's no way to explain this.'
In the days after Simmons' massacre, local psychologists were called out en masse to deal with the devastating impact that a crime like this can have on a town's psyche. They were sent out to the schools to console the children. Some of the victims, children of the killer, had attended the local school, and not one teacher had noticed that anything about their nightmarish home life was abnormal. The businesses that he had attacked were pillars of the Russellville community. The murderer himself had walked among them for years without ever raising an eyebrow, completely invisible and as indistinguishable from their fellow citizens as a wolf in sheep's clothing. As loathsome as it was, the whole of Arkansas had felt Ronald Gene Simmons' touch and wouldn't soon forget the experience. To this day, he still has the spurious honour of being Arkansas' most prolific mass murderer.
Part 6: Conclusion
We live in a chaotic world. For some, the constant state of flux is a source of joy and excitement, but for others it is the root of all fear. How we respond to the chaos is often what defines us. It is what separates the heroes from the bystanders, the downtrodden from the opportunists.
For many, exerting some control over the world is the only way that they can feel peace. They create a tiny universe of their own that they can predict and manage. All of us do this to a degree, seeking out familiar patterns and familiar faces, eating comfort food and building routines. For Simmons, control meant much more than taco Tuesdays or watching the same television show every week. It was his means of coping with a life that had been fraught with instability. If he had remained a solitary man, his life, despite his exemplary military record, would have disappeared into history. Simmons' need for perfect control and order in every part of his life made him into a tyrant to his family and to everyone else who had the misfortune to cross his path. He made his need for control into everyone else's problem, dictating every moment of their lives and lashing out fiercely when his orders were not obeyed.
Gradually, his need for control grew. With each new uncertainty that life brought, he tightened his grip on the things that were within his reach. At some point, this evolved beyond a defensive measure into a genuine passion. He took pleasure in dominating others. Exerting his power over his wife and children became a purpose unto itself.
If he were a man of limited intelligence, then his actions could be passed off as an inability to cope, and some of his more eccentric behaviour could have been written off as crime born of ignorance. But Simmons was not a stupid man. He excelled in his military career and held white-collar jobs competently until his personality problems drove him out of them. And he showed an ability to manipulate people, plan complex scenarios, and predict potential outcomes in a manner that only a true, highly intelligent, psychopath can.
Eventually, the inevitable happened. One of the people that Simmons thought that he controlled completely slipped their leash, and his perfectly ordered world began to come unravelled. People that he had dominated, mind and body, began thinking for themselves, making their own decisions and leaving him behind. He could not tolerate it.
Throughout his life, Simmons sought to close off any avenue of escape for his victims. He found ways to convince them that their only choice was to obey him, that his way was the only way. When manipulation, threats, and psychological warfare failed him, he did the only thing that he could to remove all other choices and possibilities from his victims' futures.
Ronald Gene Simmons has been labelled by the clinical psychologists who have examined his case as a textbook version of the ‘control oriented psychopath'. According to them, everything that he did stemmed from this disorder, this inability to empathise with others or see them as more than just pieces in the games that he was playing. All that mattered to Simmons was maintaining control of every situation, no matter what the outcome of his control might be.
This diagnosis may gloss over many of Simmons' more interesting traits as a killer. For one thing, psychopaths are generally incapable of fear and appear confident in all social situations, while Simmons seemed to suffer from considerable anxiety over loss and failed to maintain relationships even when the power balance was tipped massively in his favour. Psychopaths who kill are characterised by their poor impulse control, while Simmons not only carefully planned and executed his massacre but also held down long-term jobs with only a few minor issues caused by his aggressive sexual advances. There is no denying that many of Simmons' actions could be explained away by a diagnosis of psychopathy, and for many that is a much more comforting thought than the idea that a perfectly sane man could commit crimes of this magnitude and brutality.
Whether he was too paralyzed by fear to allow anyone else their freedom or he was a cold-blooded psychopath who derived pleasure from forcing his will on others, the result was the same. He made the lives of his family into a living hell and then he took even that living hell from them in an orgy of violence, just because his daughter refused to reciprocate his deviant sexual advances anymore.
In the end, Simmons' murderous rampage claimed sixteen of the twenty people he attacked. Of those sixteen, only two were not members of his family, although in a community as tightly knit as that in Russellville and Dover, almost everyone is as close as family to everyone else.
Simmons' crimes were planned out meticulously and committed over the course of a few days starting just before Christmas, 1987 but the life that led him to that moment, the turns of fate that shaped the man into not just a killer but a family annihilator, started decades before when a boy lost his father and was plunged into chaos.
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More books by Ryan Green
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The Kuřim Case: A Terrifying True Story of Child Abuse, Cults & Cannibalism
Fred & Rose West: Britain's Most Infamous Killer Couples
Colombian Killers: The True Stories of the Three Most Prolific Serial Killers on Earth
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About Ryan Green
Ryan Green is an author and freelance writer in his late thirties. He lives in Herefordshire, England with his wife, three children and two dogs. Outside of writing and spending time with his family, Ryan enjoys walking, reading and wind surfing.
Ryan is fascinated with History, Psychology, True Crime, Serial Killers and Organised Crime. In 2015, he finally started researching and w
riting his own work and at the end of the year he released his first book on Britain’s most notorious serial killer – Harold Shipman.
His books are packed with facts, alternative considerations, and open mindedness. Ryan puts the reader in the perspective of those who lived and worked in proximity of his subjects.
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