Michal Hirshberg

A father strangled his 17-year-old daughter while her three little siblings waited in the car listening to Christmas carols. Then he called the next one in. By Christmas, 14 people in his family were dead. One of them was a 7-year-old girl, and the man who killed her was both her father and her grandfather. His name was Ronald Gene Simmons, a retired Air Force master sergeant in Dover, Arkansas. On December 22, 1987, he bought a .22 at Walmart, shot his oldest son and his wife, and strangled his 3-year-old granddaughter. Then he sat down to watch TV and waited for the younger kids to come home from school. He met them outside with a smile and told them he had a surprise for each of them. On December 26 the rest of the family came home for the Christmas dinner he had promised them, and he met them at the door with the pistol. The little girl was Sylvia Gail, and her mother was Sheila, the daughter he had abused for years. He laid Sheila on the dining room table under his wife's tablecloth, covered the others with their own coats and put two babies in garbage bags in the trunks of old cars. Two days later he drove into Russellville and shot Kathy Kendrick, a young woman who had turned down his advances, at the law office where she worked. He killed one more man, wounded four other people and gave himself up. "I'm done," he said. In the video below is the real news footage from that week: deputies carrying bodies out of a pit next to the house, where seven of them were stacked on top of each other, and Simmons himself being walked in by state troopers. The sheriff can barely talk. A woman he shot at describes "this just horrid grin on his face, like a mad dog." In his cell, he lay on the bunk facing the wall and never said a word. The only time anything moved was when police mentioned his family, and his bottom lip quivered. At trial he finally spoke, but only to ask to die: "To those who oppose the death penalty in my particular case, anything short of death would be cruel and unusual punishment." He refused every appeal, and Arkansas executed him in June 1990. He never explained why. Was Ronald Gene Simmons a monster nobody saw coming, or a man everyone around him should have stopped years earlier?