Mockingbird Hill

Ronald Gene Simmons was a retired Air Force sergeant who bought a wooded tract north of Dover, Arkansas, in 1983 and called it Mockingbird Hill. There was no telephone and no running water, and a block wall along the road kept the place out of sight. In November 1987 he had his younger children dig a pit about four feet deep, telling them it was for another outhouse.

Between December 22 and December 26, 1987, Simmons killed fourteen of his own relatives there: his wife Becky, the four school-age children still at home, his grown children and their spouses, and his grandchildren. He shot every adult and strangled every child, and seven bodies went into the pit. On December 28 he drove into Russellville and went to four businesses across the town, shooting six people. Kathy Kendrick, twenty-four, who had rejected his attentions at a freight company and reported them, and James Chaffin, thirty-three, a firefighter who was simply in the way, both died.

Simmons surrendered at the last stop and did not fight the case. A Franklin County jury convicted him of the Russellville murders in May 1988, and a Johnson County jury convicted him of the fourteen family killings in February 1989. He waived his appeals. He was executed by lethal injection on June 25, 1990, the first Arkansas prisoner put to death by that method.