Last Podcast On The Left - Episode 645: Ronald Gene Simmons Part I - A Difficult Man
Episode Date: December 5, 2025This week the boys dive right on into the twisted mind of Ronald Gene Simmons, America’s deadliest familicide killer. In the span of over one week in 1987, he murdered 14 family members before going... on a small-town shooting spree. From a difficult child to a difficult man, with an obsessive need for control... Get ready to explore the tale of The Arkansas Christmas Massacre. For Live Shows, Merch, and More Visit: www.LastPodcastOnTheLeft.comKevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ to listen to new episodes of Last Podcast on the Left ad-free, plus get Friday episodes a whole week early. Start a free trial now on Apple Podcasts or by visiting siriusxm.com/podcastsplus. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
There's no place to escape to.
This is the last podcast.
On the left.
That's when the cannibalism started.
Who was that?
Oh, yeah!
That's why they kind of believe that partially the Mothman myth.
That's right.
It's perpetuated by gangsters from Jersey that were in the West Virginia area growing.
marijuana to keep them
out of it. Hell yeah. They're smart.
Jersey ain't going to West Virginia.
But guess what? Then they built a whole Mothman festival around it.
So it turns out fucking, and then what
we do is smoke weed at it. Yeah. Yeah.
So they go, everything got fucked. They all thing got fucked.
Full circle, man. The more weed you smoke, the
more real the Mothman gets.
Fuck, yeah, dude. That's what I like to hear. You know who also?
You know who could have used weed? Who?
Ronald, Gene Sim.
This
No, he hated weed.
That's the problem.
Goofies for Queers!
Ronald Gene Simmons,
I'm going to say is up there
with one of the bigger pricks we've ever covered.
I would say that is easily the truth.
I mean, we talk about difficult men
because we've been on the stream a lot.
We've been showing a lot of videos of difficult men.
I've been obsessed with difficult men.
I love difficult men from afar.
Obviously, same thing.
From a sovereign citizen, you know, you'd say a fan.
Yeah.
You're interested in difficult men.
I love difficult men.
Yes.
Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen.
My name is Marcus Parks.
I'm here with the difficult man, Henry Zabrowski.
My goal is to be the easiest of difficult men in order to create a sort of bridge to the rest of the world to difficult men in order to then apply dynamite to that bridge and kill us all involved.
It is the bridge over the river Kauai.
Yeah, yeah, it is.
And we're also joined, of course, with probably the easiest man around.
The easiest man in podcasting, Ed Larson.
That's right.
I'm filthy, easy.
You're very, yeah.
I'm sitting on a dick right now.
Which also is something...
Ronald could have used.
This guy, man.
No redeemable qualities.
Not a single one.
Even Himmler wanted to be a farmer.
Yes, we are here to talk about Ronald Gene Simmons.
And this is in honor of the Christmas season.
Yeah, it is.
Yeah, we're going to be kicking off the month of December
with the story of a family annihilator.
This man is not just number one
when it comes to the holiday mass murder body count.
And there's a lot of competition in that arena.
That's a big deal.
But this guy also has the highest body.
body count of any familiar side
in American history.
Wow. This
utter piece of shit's name
was Ronald Gene Simmons. No relation
to the Kiss frontman. Also a piece
of shit. Yeah. I don't want
to him to get off too easy.
No, of course. Now, Gene Simmons is a massive piece
of shit. Yeah, he was like, he was like the
Henry Ford of rock and roll. Yeah.
He was like, he tried to be so
fun, but it just made him just unfun.
Well, that was the thing. Then he tried to sell the fun.
Yeah. And then his hair
got solid.
Look at that waterfall.
That wonderful solid Jewish
waterfall. Oh, God.
His hair is just like a gigantic
broilop pad.
And a tongue like a
goddamn serpent. If D. Snyder could have had his
talent or the other way around,
it would be so much better.
So over a period of just one
week during the Christmas... I do want to come back to his D. Snyder
thing. We'll come back to it later. We can come back to the D. Snyder
thing later. Yeah.
So over a period of just one
during the Christmas of 1987, a 20-year military veteran turned mini-mark cashier named Ronald
Gene Simmons murdered 14 members of his own family in two separate mass events at his home
outside the small Arkansas town of Ward. Among the victims were his wife, his own adult
children, and his young grandchildren, including a child-grandchild that had been born of an
incestuous relationship with his own daughter. That's just called having a daughter square.
this had all come after his family had started to pull away from him
because life wasn't good in the Simmons household even before Ronald killed them all
I was actually killing them was kind of the easiest part of their lives
the massive body count however still wasn't enough to quell the rage within Ronald Gene Simmons
that Christmas after murdering almost every member of his immediate family
either just before or just after Christmas Day it was the 22nd and the 26th I believe
He took a break.
Yeah.
Ronnie Jean, as I like to call him,
because I know he would fucking hate being called Ronnie Gene.
He embarked upon a further shooting spree on December 28th
at multiple locations throughout his small Arkansas town.
Don't call me Ronnie Jean.
That's what you call a horrid hooters.
Oh, Ronnie Jean Dio.
It's like another one.
Wow,
except Ronnie James Dio, that's a solid one.
Anybody says one single negative word about Dio?
I'll flip out.
Oh, yeah.
Get me difficult?
And I got Ronnie Jean from our head researcher, Joel.
He turned me on to Ronnie Jean, and I love Ronnie Jean.
Well, this spree, the one that was after his family massacre, that killed two, and it injured four.
And it focused on Ronnie Jean's personal enemies, women who had rejected his advances,
co-workers who had wronged him, or local businessmen who had made deals that had negatively impacted Ronnie Jean's private world.
Now that's all to say that the most important thing in Ronald Gene Simmons' life
was that he have total and complete control over his own petty and pathetic private world.
But when his life fell apart and he began losing his grip, the guns took control for him.
Like a true American hero.
Obviously, you guys have heard me over the years talk about having a singular stroke of revenge against anybody who's ever wronged me.
And y'all know that
It does sound
Really fun, right?
I mean, in theory
I mean, it's a nice fantasy
The fantasy of it is so sweet
Let's call it an exercise
Yes, an immersion exercise
Like I have to do in therapy
You have to go sit in a closet
And breathe through a straw this week
Nice
Really?
Yeah, to control me
To control you
Yeah, to settle me down
They're putting your therapist
Put you in the closet?
I have to go in a closet
And breathe through a straw
This is completely
true in order to approximate anxiety breathing in order to get used to it right kind of like how guys get used to zero g oh okay so is this for anger or anxiety all of it
apparently it's all one big red feeling because i've been getting really angry i'll show you later thanks i'll fucking show it come with me in the closet and then you pull out your straw
we just go back and forth like sucking and blowing our own air back and forth but uh this guy had he i i understand almost like it's it's a very
American feeling almost in a way of like, I'm going to destroy my own world because I can.
Yeah, because it is, well, because it's out of his control.
It's, you know, once that world that they build, because it's very, it's very much an
entitlement thing.
Like he, Ronnie Jean Simmons is nothing if not entitled because he felt like he was owed
everything, you know, and what he was not given, he tried to take and tried to control.
And when people started pushing back on that, you know, it was a slow bird, of course,
but once he felt like
it was completely out of his hands
he decided if no if I can't
have it nobody can
he makes John List charming
he does and but he is also
he's somewhat close
to John List because you know he
he did not
commit suicide afterwards like that's
a lot of family annihilators at the end of it
they take themselves out he just screamed yes
over and over he was like
kill him
another one no
yeah
explode, so easy. Yeah.
Excellent work, Ronnie Jean.
It's not like Ronald Jean Simmons
was a super popular guy outside
of his family. As one author
put it, he was sneered at by his
siblings, despised by his family,
shunned by his coworkers,
and ignored by the outside world.
The rest of the world disliked
Ronnie Jean because he was annoyingly
oriented to detail, in addition
to being mean-spirited and sarcastic.
But Simmons was not cleverly
sarcastic. He was just an asshole who liked putting other people down to make himself feel
better. Put into a modern context, Ronald Gene Simmons shares personality traits with a certain
type of man who used to just be a problem for other people every once in a while out in the
real world, but now has to be dealt with all the fucking time thanks to the internet. If we're
talking social media archetypes, Simmons is like the aggressively pedantic, no-it-all middle-aged
white man who spends all his time telling other people how to live their lives. He's the type who
He uses a selfie sitting in the front seat of his truck wearing Oakley's as his profile pick
and his constant barrage of negative abuse of bullshit only gets silenced after he inevitably gets exposed as a sex criminal.
It's just because the age of consent is getting lowered behind her backs.
But we know this type of guy.
Like you've seen the like just imagine the guy who's an asshole to you on the internet who has that unsmiling selfie as his profile pick that's telling you.
you, how you should be living your life, how you're doing everything wrong and how he knows better.
It's very annoying.
They're very lonely every time.
Yes, it's the guys that troll, like, young, pictures of young actresses and talk about them on the internet, like, like, they know them in a way, like both hypersexual and then hyper-friendly and then hyper-aggressive.
Yeah, but it doesn't, it's not just limited to that.
Like, he's the type of guy who's going to tell you that, you know, you're not taking care of your car, right?
And he's going to give you six reasons why you're not taking care of.
your car right but he's the guy that we love
that's why we're covering him
because he's our favorite he would never know
how to properly use that cell phone
a lot of that footage is going
I'm going sell you another of the
goddamn thing about the government
like it's going to be a lot of filler so
at least there's that yeah do you think if the internet
kept him busy he wouldn't have killed his family
I actually did ask myself that question
unfortunately it has not
stopped anybody since I mean
we don't know that it could have stopped
lots of people I actually feel like it's
the opposite. I do think that the internet
widely accelerates family annihilation.
Because it's really about
loss of status. Yeah, it exactly like
the internet creates the world of status.
Yeah, the rise,
it is not a coincidence
that mass shootings in America
rapidly rose
with the creation of the internet.
If you look at it, you know,
it is a correlation.
And honestly, I think it is a causation.
I think it's going to be the lead poisoning
of our generation. Easily. Yeah, yeah.
And most pre-shooters are American.
Obviously, we have, like, Anders Breivik and the other fucker, too.
Who is the guy that?
Martin Bryant.
Martin Bryant, you know, obviously, but they're very right wing, too.
So are most family annihilators American?
Yes.
We're good at it.
Yeah.
I mean, I would not, I don't know about most, but I would say it happens here more than it happens anywhere.
Yeah.
Any sort of mass murder happens here more than it happens anywhere else.
We're getting really good at it.
Yeah.
Now, for our sources today.
We used two classic trashy true crime books from the 90s, written at a time when facts were loose and authors took liberties because no one was paying attention to true crime books sold in the supermarket.
The first is Rampage by Jim Moore, which is pretty good, but the real Jim here is Zero at the Bone by Bryce Marshall and Paul Williams.
This is the good shit.
Yeah, yeah. I miss true crime.
Oh, yeah.
No, and it's one of those classic true crime things where like it sounds super cool, like zero at the bone.
But it's a reference to an Emily Dickinson poem about a snake.
Oh, yeah.
Well, now I hate it.
Yeah.
Now I'm hated.
Oh, it also says here there's a familial side in the United States of America every five days.
Cool.
Yeah.
And, of course, zero at the bone is full of the kind of overly dramatic true crime turns of phrase that you come to expect from a mass market paperback.
Right from Northland.
And so, without further ado, let's get into the story of Ronald Jean Simmons and the Arkansas Christmas Massacre.
of 1987.
Now, Ronald Gene Simmons was born in Chicago
as a sickly baby on
June 15, 1940.
Simmons, however, was not born into a broken
home. His mother was a loving
and educated, if somewhat high, strong
woman named Eva, while his father
was described as a coarse, lantern
-jawed industrial inspector
named William. Tragically,
though, William Simmons dropped dead
from coronary thrombosis when
Ronnie Jean was just three years old.
That's how dad should go. Yeah.
That's how dad's died in the 40s.
You could drop dead at work.
Yeah.
Ronald's mother soon moved to Moline, Illinois, with Ronnie and her other two young children.
But since being a widowed mother, three, was tough in 1943.
Ronnie Jean's mother remarried the same year her first husband died and remarried a man with the same name.
She had a type.
Yeah, fix it.
Yeah.
Ronnie Jean's stepfather was named William Griffin.
And Ronald, a contrarian, even as a child, dismissal.
referred to his stepfather as dad griffin instead of just dad you eat my dad my dad had the guts to die you're still alive like a pussy that was his voice at four
yeah mommy baby needs lunch looking a little old mummy now you might be expecting ronald's stepfather to be some sort of monster
but he seemed to be just a regular fucking guy.
In fact, Ronnie Jean's stepfather created a life for his stepson's that was almost too good.
He created a spectacular childhood that Ronald would chase for the rest of his life.
What Ronnie Jean does is very similar to even what we just saw, I mean, you know, not to go too deep into it,
but this idea of a conservative mindset that builds a fantasy about a past that never existed.
Yes.
So he believes this truly this man has this idea of this idyllic.
childhood when he
was a little fucker. Yeah.
Throughout entirely.
Horrible. Yeah, but he still believes that, yeah, this
childhood, this small period of time
is idyllic. Everything was perfect, and if only
he can return to that, then everything's going to be okay.
Do you mean Ronnie Jean, you're, like,
changing his diaper, and he's just being like,
you're trying to molest me, pervert?
Yeah.
You're trying to fuck with me, pervert.
You won't... You're some kind of
Democrat.
You're trying to. Oh, he's trying to see my little pecker.
I bet you are dead, Griffin.
Well, you see, the thing is that after his mother gave birth to Ronald's half-brother in 1945, a son named Peter Griffin, funnily enough, Ronald's stepfather got a job with the Army Corps of Engineers in Little Rock, Arkansas.
So the family moved to a nearby small town in the Ozarks called Hector.
The five years the family spent in the Ozarks were so idyllic in Ronald Gene Simmons' memory that he would eventually become obsessed with trying to re-buy the home where he lived from the ages of five and ten.
where his desire informed almost every move Ronnie Jean made for the rest of his life.
Every time I see another dandelion from another part of the country, it just reminds me how shit the dandelions are outside of Hector, Arkansas.
You know, they say that people putting the wrong milkweed down is why we have less modern butterflies.
You dumb shit, I'm from Arkansas where things are perfect.
Oh, yes, perfect in Pirate, Kansas.
Harcansy.
I hate your pirate jokes and your boat-based humor.
If I'm my good, I turned into a man right now.
But I'm just a furious little baby.
You bring that little pecker over here to me.
All right, I'll bring you my little pecker.
Whatever you say.
Now, we have no idea exactly why Ronnie Jean had such fond memories of living in Arkansas for these five years.
Because by familial accounts, Ronald had been.
a miserable little fuck from the day he was born, almost as if it was genetic.
Ronnie Jean was the middle child, and when his younger siblings got any kind of attention
from his mother, Ronnie would become extremely jealous and troublesome until his mother put the
attention back on him. His behavior only got worse when the family moved to a suburb of Little
Rock in 1950, where Ronald took to physically and emotionally torturing his younger half-brother,
Peter Griffin. In between the threats, pokes, pinches, and slap,
Ronald would pull typical older brother pranks,
like telling his brother to pee off the porch,
then yelling to his mother in midstream,
Peter's peeing out the porch.
Look what he's doing, the little fountain.
Look what he's doing.
He's pissing all over your prize-winning hydrangeous, mother.
I mean, it is a pretty good joke.
Look at how weak his stream is.
Not big and strong like mine.
I'm a real baby.
Now Peter Griffin would later remember
that even when Ronald was a child
He couldn't stand to be questioned
He always had to be right
And he always had to be the boss
If you crossed Ronald or if things didn't go his way
Ronnie Jean would throw fits
Bellowing and stomping
Until everyone else just gave up
And agreed with him
Physical punishments common at the time
Like spanking had no effect on Ronald Gene Simmons
Give me another one more
More
Give me another one
You never were kids that backed into it
What?
There were always kids that backed into it
Backed into the spanking?
Yeah.
What do you mean?
There were always kids who backed into it.
I never knew a kid who backed into it.
I never backed into it.
Well, actually, there were some kids who did
Once, yeah, they did actually try to take the power back.
They did laugh or they'd yell, give me more, give me more.
There were some, they definitely pushed back.
Definitely.
Yeah.
Whenever my mom hit me, I'd always laugh.
It was my best.
Yeah, that is true. That is true. But neither did Ronnie Jean Simmons behavior improve when his stepfather whipped him with a garden hose. In fact, it only seemed to make Simmons worse. Usually does. Because when Ronnie Jean hit a growth spurt after puberty, he began bullying his stepfather as well. And unfortunately, his stepfather suffered from debilitating asthma and allergies. Now, as far as his mother's health went, we've all heard our mothers say in a moment of dramatic license that were killing them. Of course, you've
You've heard, I, Garrett, we've all hard...
I technically did.
Yeah, I definitely was so big I gave her diabetes.
She died of that, yes.
Yeah, my mom was more of a threats of suicide woman.
Oh, okay.
All right, I heard that too.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But everyone knows you're killing your mother.
You're killing your mother.
Yeah.
But Ronald Jean Simmons was such a little dickhead that he was literally killing his mother.
She already had arthritis, cervical cancer, colitis, angina pectoris, and hardening arteries.
She had hells and heels
Which is a horror
It's horrific
Your heels fall off
And then she had
Upside down tits
Worst thing in the world
For a mother
Yeah but it's good if you
Whenever want to suck out your own milk
Of course
But Ronnie Jean was so awful
Backing into it
That's called when you back into that
But Ronnie Jean was so awful
That his mother said that she got
Heart palpitations
Just from being around him
And his stepfather said that Ronnie Jean
Actually exacerbated his
asthma. In other words, Ronnie Jean was a difficult boy. And as we all know, difficult boys
often become difficult men. And Ronald Jean Simmons would grow up to be the epitome of the
difficult man. You know, I take it back. Now that we're thinking about it, I think with the
internet, he would have become like a child killer. I think he would have gone away work.
Truly. Well, he was a child killer. He did murder many children. Well, no, I mean like as a child.
As a child. Yeah, we need to talk about Kevin type thing.
Oh, you know.
Actually, yeah, yeah, I could see that.
I could see him being very easily radicalized.
Yeah, oh, very much so.
Now, since Ronnie Jean's personality was such a health hazard,
his parents sent him to a boarding school in Arkansas
while the rest of the family fucked off to Albuquerque.
That's awesome.
Yeah, because they were trying to see if they could alleviate
the debilitating allergies and asthma suffered by Ronald's stepfather.
Have a few good years.
Yeah.
The next year, Ronnie Jean was released from the boarding school at the age of 16.
He rejoined his family in New Mexico,
although it soon became clear that boarding school had done nothing.
Once home, Ronald was often heard to say things like, quote,
You can't make me, get away from me, don't touch me, none of you cares anything about me,
I hate all of you.
That was from his stepbrother who remembered Ronnie Jean said all this stuff so often.
I hate all of you!
Yeah, Peter Griffin had a full.
list of, you know, phrases that just came up all the time.
In other words, Ronnie Jean was a deeply unhappy person, desperate to be praised despite
having accomplished nothing.
In Albuquerque, Ronald also began enforcing his way of the world upon everyone around
him.
He decided that he hated cigarettes, which is a fucking rough sell in 1950s, New Mexico.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, my God.
That's their major food group.
I mean, I spent a lot of time in the 90s in New Mexico.
And it was just cigarettes all the time everywhere in every single environment.
That's like while they stayed.
That's like the look.
Yeah, cigarettes.
But Ronnie became a lifelong militant non-smoker who would performatively gag and cough when anyone smoked.
Talk about just like, that's the most enraging behavior.
He's not the first person that we've talked about.
I can't remember who else did this.
I remember what's a pyromaniac.
There was the pyromantic guy.
Well, that was the guy who would go.
No, I'm talking about somebody else who did the same thing with cigarettes.
I think maybe it was Her Baummeister.
It's one of those.
But there is something about this that, you know, it's a psychopathic thing.
Yeah, and I don't think cigarettes made anyone cough until 1994.
Not really.
You know what?
Truly, I think it's because of this.
It's the, he's being highly antagonistic.
Yeah.
Well, his attitude towards cigarettes was so ridiculous that,
it was described by his future brother-in-law
as, quote, comically prudish.
This is annoying.
Is someone who's never smoked, I hate that shit.
Yeah.
Yeah, like, I get it, right?
I know that it smells or whatever,
but you should just go someplace else,
or, you know, or, you know,
if you really mean something,
hit him, spray him with the house.
But really do something.
Yeah.
Was he, like, real religious, too?
No.
Actually, he had, that was one of the things
that he had, as far as I could tell,
no religion at all,
except for America.
He was very patriotic, but religion, as far as I could tell, never played a role in his life.
Because, honestly, I think he was so self-obsessed that his morality was more important than gods.
Yeah, it's just his way or the highway, it didn't matter.
Yeah, it's like, yeah, because I think to him he would see religion as somebody telling him what to do, and he could not abide by that.
But the law he was good with.
The law he was good with, as well, you know, we'll...
Except for murderous family.
Yeah, but again, that's his family.
Yeah, we'll get into that.
But I think he definitely chose America as his religion over Christianity.
Okay.
Now, Ronnie Jean moved around constantly because of his father's job.
And because he refused to do schoolwork, he never graduated high school.
Even at the age of 17, Ronald's only goal was to move back to Arkansas to start a large family of his own,
where he would force his children to work a self-sustaining farm.
Ronnie Jean got so obsessed.
with Arkansas, that he began disparaging
any place that wasn't Arkansas.
Only person ever.
Yeah. I've never heard of it.
And if anyone had anything nice to say about
anywhere else in the world, Ronnie Jean was quick
to tell him, well, it might be okay, but it's no Arkansas.
Just bizarre.
That's it. Yeah, very strange.
I mean, I get that the Ozarks are beautiful, but Jesus.
It's this one house. It's the only time
you kind of remembered anything being happy for him.
Yeah. Now, Ronnie Jean's bad attitude
naturally had consequences after the family moved to
Berkeley, California.
where he got a job as a bus boy at a golf club.
One day he came home from work covered in garbage,
probably because the other kids got tired of dealing with him.
But Ronnie Gene refused to tell anyone what had actually happened.
Soon enough, Ronnie got his GED at the age of 17 and joined the Navy,
beginning a 20-year military career where he continued being a pain in the ass to everyone around him.
But that's where you can monetize being a pain in the ass.
Very much so.
You really can.
And I think, to your point, I think because he joined the military,
it did become, that did become his religion.
Yeah.
Well, it gave him everything that he ever wanted, which was authority at a hierarchy's notice, right?
Like the idea that like all paperwork means that people have to pay attention to what he says eventually.
Like he created it for himself at a really important role within his little organization.
He made himself like he tried to make himself necessary.
He was very, he was obsessed with it.
And then the idea of like that gave him his entire personality and every single bit of value he had.
At least he had the good nature to, like, want to go to Arkansas and, like, get in the Navy and go to the middle of the ocean where no one else would be.
Yeah, you know, like, get me out of you.
Now, after boot camp, Ronnie Jean was assigned to clerk duties in 1958 at a ship repair facility in Guam,
where he surprisingly followed orders and showed himself to be eager to please anyone in authority.
Ronnie also found that, like other difficult men we've recently covered,
he had a natural aptitude for administrative work, which finally got him the recognition in regard,
that he had unreasonably demanded from his family.
When Ronnie Jean returned to America
after 18 months in Guam,
he was a physically matured, broad-chested sailor,
confident and capable.
This, however, did not fix any of his social awkwardness,
nor did it make him popular.
He didn't date or make friends,
and while he did develop a taste for beer,
he only drank alone.
That's an amazing prick fact
that he only drinks alone.
Like some people like that idea, too,
of like, I'm just a social drinker.
It's just being like,
No, I only drink
When the only thing I can hear is ice in my
Rage
And that was how much of a dick he was
Is that he, a beer was fine
But liquor
No, you can't drink liquor
Beer's okay though
Well yeah, because liquor makes you too under out of control
Sure
They always say this
It's like an old man thing
That's like an old idea that like
Oh he just drinks beer is fine
Yeah
It's such a enabling mother concept
Yeah you can't be an alcoholic
if you just drink beer.
He's just drinking beer.
Oh, beer's not alcohol.
You're going to be like, oh, he could drive with that.
That's like water.
Yeah, he's only had 10 to 15 of them.
It's not like he's had like two vodka drinks.
No, yeah.
That would be crazy.
He's had 10, but he's only had 10 beers.
Let him go.
Well, finally, Ronnie.
Imagine George, yeah, he's going to, I'll just put up George Thurgood.
This is a guy who looks up to George Therogood.
I mean, George Thoregood is awesome.
He used to me.
He's now, he looks up to 2023.
George the Rogan.
Finally, Ronnie Jean began attending U.S.O. dances at the local YMCA in Brimmerton, Washington, where he was stationed.
There, a young woman named Becky Ullabari caught his eye, and Ronald watched her for weeks before he finally talked to her after the other sailors dared him to.
Well, apparently, Becky was typing up the schedule for upcoming U.S.O dances at the current dance.
And when one sailor commented on Becky's typing skills,
Gene scoffed and said,
actually, I can type a lot better than that.
You can't type like a goddamn man.
It's true because he was named the fastest typist, right?
That was his, that was his claim to fake.
Yeah.
So, manly.
Dude, but this was one of those moments that I honestly think
he was this close to punching that woman in the face,
where he's been like,
you think you can type faster than me,
this skinny little one, can't type faster.
than me?
Well, they eventually held a contest which Ronald unfortunately won,
and thus the wooing of Ronnie Jean's future wife began.
Yeah.
Now, Becky was very much a normal person who just got mixed up with a psychopath.
Their courtship was reportedly uneventful for the three years they dated.
But after they got married in 1960, Ronald Gene Simmons began verbally abusing his new wife.
They met when she was really young.
She was, yeah, she was pretty young.
He was fairly, they were both pretty young.
Yeah, but she was like, was she not, she wasn't even 18 yet, right?
I think, I'm not sure, but I at 16, 17.
Yeah, she was definitely not, yeah, she was definitely not an adult.
Yeah, she was working for the USO, so she had to be old enough to work.
Yeah, I guess, right?
But I think they can volunteer up to a certain point.
I'm not quite certain, but are you?
It's also 1958, 1957.
So, you know, the rules are definitely different when it comes to courting 16, 17-year-old girls.
Yeah, that's not even the thing.
It's more just he saw somebody.
I think that he realized he could totally control.
Yes.
That he could kind of change from the inside out.
Well, not just that, but, you know, women didn't really talk to him.
Like, he didn't really have the skills.
And for some reason, she saw something in him that, like, she gave him an N.
And they, I mean, they actually dated for three years.
Yeah, and it was just fine.
But after they got married, he would publicly reprimand Becky with sneering sarcasm,
mock her for not knowing information that he knew, and he would berate her for her so-called country grammar,
implying that she was an idiot for the way she talked.
But even though the marriage was obviously bad, Becky still gave birth to the first of their eventual seven children, Ronald Jean Simmons Jr.,
who was coincidentally born on his father's birthday in 1961.
The next year, Ronnie Jean was released from Navy service, but after he discovered that life
outside of the military was difficult because he had zero social.
skills. He re-enlisted in the Air Force in 1963, right as the Vietnam War was first making
headlines. Well, he's one of those guys. Well, he, I think, uh, at that point, like in
1963, like Vietnam really was just like, and there's something going on over there. Like,
we're, we're not committed yet, you know, uh, JFK still alive. Uh, we don't have a big military
presence there. So if you join the military in 1963, you're not necessarily, like, you don't
necessarily know you're going to Vietnam.
Like, you're just joining the military.
But still, it's the Air Force, too. It's not
the Army or the Marines. Yeah. But he's
definitely volunteering because he's
getting a little tingling feeling he
might get sent over because I do
think that he wants to go. He's
desperate for action.
Well, yes and no.
He thinks he is. Yeah.
Now, Ronnie Jean was sent to Langley Air Force
Base in Norfolk, Virginia, where
he worked the barracks as basically a
combination of a hotel night manager
and a security guard.
Very much a job for a difficult man.
He likes telling other people what they can and can't do.
Henry, your dad was a security guard, right?
Yes.
Yes.
Exactly.
But the thing about Norfolk is that Becky's older sister
and her husband were also stationed there.
They therefore got to know Ronnie Jean fairly well,
and it's through them that we get a peek into the world
of Ronald Jean Simmons in these early years.
Now, as Becky's brother-in-law put it,
Ronnie Jean was odd but not wholly objectionable,
which is not a ringing endorsement.
And that's a direct quote.
Odd but not wholly objectionable.
I don't hate him, hate him.
I hate him.
Is that old?
I'm going to say that.
Odd but not wholly objectionable.
There's moments of levity.
Yeah.
Well, Ronnie Jean's brother-in-law, however,
seemed to have pretty low standards
for what he considered to be not wholly objectionable.
See, Ronnie Jean refused to have a tough.
telephone in his home, but only because he wanted to control anything and everything Becky said
to other people. Ronnie Jean would even read his wife's letters before she mailed them, and he
used a post office box to control the flow of mail in and out of the house. Ronald also refused to
let Becky learn how to drive. In other words, he had created a world where she was totally dependent on
him, which was just the beginning of Ronnie Jean's all-encompassing need to control every aspect of his
family's lives. Now to make himself an even bigger dickhead, Ronnie Jean was also obsessed with
learning new information so he could regurgitate it to everyone around him and show them not
just how smart he was, but more importantly, how much smarter he was than them. His brother-in-law
said that this made it very hard to know Ronnie Jean, because anytime they talked, Ronald would
just ramble on about all the new facts he learned without attempting to have an actual
conversation with the other person.
Do you know a deflophisor?
Probably the size of a beagle.
Oh, yeah.
What is a dolophosaur?
Shut up.
Okay.
It's a dinosaur, you idiot.
Of course.
Of course.
Of course.
Yes, you fat pig.
You stupid dumper.
So you used to call me a fat pig, not just a pig?
Delophisor sometimes could go up to the size of a larger beagle.
it really was as small as that like it's like this did you know type shit and because he made he thought it made him sound very intelligent very smart he's like it's a guy who like pretends he's smart because he's good at trivia yes exactly yes he's good at very he was very good
uh ronald jean simmons i will say this actually you did hit upon something very good there he had an incredible memory yeah and he could he had an incredible memory for rules and regulations and facts but he didn't know how to put it all together
All he had was memory, but he had no critical thinking skills, no common sense.
He couldn't make anything actually happen.
You know, and to that point, when Ronnie's brother-in-law brought up something that Ronald didn't know,
Ronnie Jean would get flustered and irritated and do his best to sarcastically respond to his brother-in-law,
claiming that, sounds like you don't know all the facts.
As I said, this guy would have fucking killed on social media.
This is the Lord of Do Your Own Research.
He would have had Ivermectin.
in his eyeballs.
Like, you know, it's like one of those.
Oh, yeah.
Like, for example, the brother-in-law once made a comment that he was taking his car in for a tune-up and an oil change.
Very, just like, it's what I'm doing today.
But Ronnie Jean took his innocent comment as an opportunity to grab his young son and sarcastically boast.
Well, we do our own tune-ups.
Don't we, son?
I love him this guy killed his sister.
And this is still what he's hung up on.
Well, we do our own two days.
Don't we, don't.
He was one time, said this real prick thing to me.
No, he didn't kill his sister.
He did not.
Oh, okay.
No, no, this was, yeah.
Oh, he killed his sister-in-law.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's the thing, that's kind of a given that he's an asshole, or a given that, like, oh, I don't like that he killed my sister-in-law.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
but it was it but you know that this is how we know who ronald jean simmons is because after
he was arrested he didn't talk to anybody and in fact uh he held he held the record for the man
who was executed in arkansas quickest uh because he got it done real fast and he just he didn't
talk because he did not talk and i don't think he even appealed yeah no he didn't actually
he he uh he told them get kill me faster uh but what we know about ronald jean simmons
comes from the people who know him
Like, people like the brother-in-law who talk to this true crime author.
But, yeah, I think the murdering his sister-in-law, that's baseline.
Now, Ronnie Jean got promoted again and again in the Air Force.
But his evaluations usually came with a remark that he did not get along well with others.
So Ronnie Jean was again and again given jobs that were tailor-made for people who didn't care if others liked him.
And they loved the Army likes having those guys.
Well, I mean, this is the Air Force.
But you don't mean they have the military.
He likes these guys.
They're great for this.
No, the military always needs guys that nobody likes.
The promotions, however, came with raises.
But instead of sharing the wealth with his ever-growing family,
he now had two children.
Ronnie Jean insisted that Becky and the kids make do with as little as possible.
It's like he wanted to torture him even more.
It's like now that we have the money, it's like it's almost he can't even enjoy that.
Well, the thing is he doesn't want anyone else to enjoy it because he can spend money on whatever.
he wants. Oh, yeah. But he has to have
strict, and he always had an opinion
on what was frivolous
and he would yell at his wife for
frivolous spending and basically for him
frivolous meant anything that he didn't personally
want. Yeah, because his sixth
gun was very much in need.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, you had to have that.
Even though he was making more money
than ever, Ronald moved his family to a
trailer park off base so he could save
$50 a year on rent. And I don't care if it's
$1960. $50 a year is not.
a lot. It's not a reason to move your family to a fucking trailer. He also began
pilfering towels, dishes, and toilet paper from the base. Anything he could.
Well, that I get. I love stealing. I'll steal the soap out of every hotel we go to.
That's different. That's called being trash like us. Yeah. We're allowed to be trash.
But all of this was done with a purpose. See, Ronnie Jean had never let go of his dream
of purchasing his childhood home in Arkansas. So every penny was saved for this purpose.
And I mean that literally. Ronnie Jean made spreadsheets for budget.
that would save literal pennies, and he was so exacting that his wife and kids would
hide their spare change. Now, in addition to everything else, Ronald Jean Simmons was also
an obsessive patriot. When the Vietnam War began moving closer to total bloodbath territory,
Ronnie Jean wrote to his commanding officer in 1966, offering to volunteer for service
in Vietnam. And while I'm sure lots of men with good intentions did this, it really does feel like
the guys who asked to go to Vietnam were mostly dickheads.
Ronald, however, did not want combat.
Instead, he wanted to be stationed in Saigon,
working for the Air Force Office of Special Investigations,
which fell under the purview of the Office of Secret Intelligence,
the OSI, a group of difficult men, if ever there was one.
Because isn't that basically mean their internal affairs?
Yes, this is internal affairs, yes.
So it's basically an MP.
Yeah, he is a, I would say he is a, like, a,
detective, like a little bit above an MP, but more of, more of an investigator.
But yeah, definitely in that area.
Yeah, because it was a, yeah, he was a professional pain in the ass.
Yeah, I mean, his new job meant that he was going to be an arbiter of morality in an
active war zone.
He was going to be a narque, meaning his main job was breaking up black market contraband
rings that sold alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs.
Just this idea that I know a lot of people got hooked on heroin in Vietnam, but the idea
of taking their weed away.
Or their cigarettes?
We're going to take their cigarettes away.
Just let them fucking,
they're all going to be sprayed with Agent Orange
in like six weeks, buddy.
Let them fucking smoke a cigarette, buddy.
If they would have just let him join the infantry,
he would have been killed by his own men
and none of us would have been a problem.
Well, you know what it is, too.
I will say the OSI is technically also
looking for people that are selling information
to the other side.
Like, that's the far extreme end.
is spy hunting.
Yeah, I mean, he did have, that was part of his job.
I mean, it wasn't just petty bullshit.
It was mostly petty bullshit.
It was mostly petty bullshit, but he was also, you know, in charge of investigating, you know,
South Vietnamese officers who might have been selling secrets to the NVA or Americans who
sometimes they sold, you know, offensive or defensive capabilities to the Viet Cong.
Like, he was in charge of that, which, you know, that is an important task, but Ronnie Jean
had found the perfect job for a difficult man.
His job was to make the lives of others harder,
people who were in an already impossible situation.
It's like if you're in Vietnam, he is the guy.
Like, you know, Qa kind of think of him as,
Good Morning Vietnam, the boss.
I was thinking about that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The guy who's like he...
Bruno Kirby.
He's pedantically, you know, like,
you have to follow these rules.
You know, like, I don't care if you're making other people happy.
You're breaking the rules.
Yeah, this is Vietnam.
No, I'm not...
Disneyland?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Follow the whole human trail.
So on and so forth.
Fly from your grave.
Now, while Ronnie Jean was off in Saigon, he had stuffed his wife and kids into a 20-foot camper at her parents' house in Colorado, parked next to his van, as if the family were just more possessions to store.
He then removed the wheels from both vehicles so Becky couldn't leave.
Wow.
And he gave them just four.
$40 a month on which to survive.
Now I've made the car just a shitty little room.
Yeah.
And $40 a month, you know, it's about $380 a month in today's cash, which it's fucking nothing.
It's literally nothing.
Did she have a job?
No.
Well, she couldn't.
She just sat there with her two kids in a trailer for 13 months.
Damn.
I think they said that she went to a rodeo once, and that was it.
And that's not even that fun.
Yeah.
And then finally, after Ronnie Jean's tour and side.
Saigon ended after 13 months, he returned to America for an OSI job in San Francisco.
He also parked his family's trailer in Vacaville and commuted 50 miles each way so he could keep his wife isolated.
Now, Ronnie Jean arrived in San Francisco in the summer of 1968, and he still had the same NARC job he had in Saigon.
And as you said, I get that you had to keep heroin under control in Vietnam, but Ronnie Jean gleefully narked on any servicemen
in San Francisco who even so much
as smelled like weed. Ronnie Jean
had shown up in San Francisco the
summer after the summer of love.
Yeah, it's just like everyone's all
weed. Yeah, yeah. And he
hated hippies.
Hated them. And there were hippies
everywhere. But this meant that
Ronnie Jean was very busy ruining the good
time of any servicemen who had the
misfortune to even be seen with
a hippie. I'm surprised they didn't
like all get together and beat the shit out
of him. You know, it's really
funny how he was
seen like I'll get into it a little bit later
but the way they described him
is that he was neither liked
but he was also not feared
he wasn't really he was just sort of
something he was like an annoyance
that you had to deal with yeah he was just there
and you had to avoid him yeah yeah yeah
because he wasn't that he wasn't smart
he wasn't clever he wasn't powerful
no I mean he was just a part of he was
a cog in the machine
but to the military
he was very useful I think that
Of course, because they don't want their service been stoned.
Well, I don't even know if it was about that.
I just think he did his job really thickly.
He, quote, unquote, anticipated needs.
He loved his position, which is actually difficult to ask them to do because it's one of the most, like, dumb.
Like, you basically go to Vietnam to sit at a desk.
You need someone that has no friends to do this, Josh.
Oh, very much so.
Yeah, yeah, you can.
The person who is, you know, trying to, you know, sniff out the black market cigarette ring.
you've got to have somebody who doesn't care if they're liked.
And in fact, you've got to have somebody who kind of likes being disliked.
Now, even though Ronnie Jean hadn't seen a second of combat in Vietnam,
he nevertheless became a gun nut once he returned.
Admittedly, he had lived through parts of the Tet Offensive,
in which the Viet Cong had launched surprise attacks
against military and civilian command centers throughout South Vietnam.
Nobody was safe during the Tet Offensive,
and a lot of people who thought that they were safe from combat
were killed during that attack.
But because Ronnie Jean had at least,
been shot at, or at the very least he was on a base that was attacked, he began fantasizing
about wielding an M-16 rifle in pretend-fire fights against the Viet Cong.
A little old for that.
Yep.
You know, go, no, I got you.
No, he teaches you to look at me like I'm.
Dept at Ben!
He's the worst.
He's a fucking prick.
Yeah.
He went to gun ranges and put in dozens of hours practicing with M-16.
jeans, rogers, revolvers, and rifles, and much of the misfortune of his family, Ronnie
Gene became an incredible shot.
Now, Ronald took great pleasure in bragging about his job with the OSI to others, but when
anyone asked any follow-up questions, he would smugly tell them, quote, that's classified.
Such a fucking dickhead thing to do.
That's classified.
For him, it was code for the story's too boring to tell.
It's extremely boring.
He does paperwork for a living.
But even though Ronald certainly had power, he was neither, as I said, he was neither feared nor loved by his peers and was mostly known for having an annoyingly good memory for orders and regulations.
Because of his exacting nature, Ronnie Jean believed that he deserved an OSI posting in Washington, D.C.
But when the OSI denied that request, Ronald began taking out his frustrations on the government agency that employed him, which never works out well for anyone.
He wrote several long pedantic letters to Air Force bureaucrats complaining that he deserved any post he wanted.
Then he cited rules and regulations to back up his argument.
Like this idea that it matters.
Yeah.
The Air Force did not respond kindly because they did at some point in the military, difficult men outlive their usefulness.
And once they go over that line, it's like, okay, it's time to stuff this guy somewhere where he's not going to do any harm.
the last place they want him is in Washington, D.C.
Yeah, because you're fine being at a desk in Vietnam during a war.
Yeah.
Yeah, you can stay there.
Yeah, we like you in Guam.
Yeah.
Well, that's the thing, is that they actually assigned Ronnie Jean to a posting in England,
working as a desk clerk counting inventory.
It was a pointed demotion.
Now, just after Ronnie Jean and his family arrived in England in 1973,
Becky gave birth to their fifth child,
which put the Simmons clan at three boys and two.
girls. But while his desire
for a large family was going nicely,
the demotion in England fucked
with Ronnie's sense of how the world should be
and he therefore began beating his wife.
He's traveling the world.
He should like have any type, he's seen
everything. Yeah, I know. He should just enjoy
life at this point. San Francisco, England.
But it's not the thing. But it's not
what he believes he deserves.
Yeah. Which is Arkansas. And he's right.
Actually.
From what it seems like, the beatings began when Becky finally demanded that Ronald teach her how to drive.
Ronald begrudgingly agreed, but every time Becky made a mistake, Ronnie Jean would physically strike her.
And after that precedent was set, Ronald would hit her for any mistake, like not making a meal the way he liked or not doing laundry correctly.
Ronnie Jean's five children, meanwhile, were treated as nuisances.
Whenever the family did something that Becky and the kids wanted to do, Ronnie Jean would complain about how boring it was the whole time.
and then would finally find a reason to never do it again.
For example, when the kids wanted to get into roller skating,
Ronald tried it first,
but when he crashed and hurt his elbow like the fucking nerd that he was,
he declared that roller skating was too dangerous to be a family activity
because he wasn't good at it.
Nobody could control the wheels.
You got eight wheels underneath you.
That's insane.
That's four more than a car.
That's illegal amount of wheels.
So much you have is four.
Eight is illegal.
It's dangerous.
It's a medicine.
and we should burn the goddamn derby
to the goddamn ground.
Why is the floor so slippery?
I hate the sounds of laughter.
I hate spinning.
And I hate the Bay City Rollers.
Oh, I hate that with their armpit air hanging out of their garbage overalls
and their Scottish delight.
We're going to go hang out at the warehouse
and count the boxes so we can actually have fun.
One box.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! You see that point?
Two boxes! Yeah, caught in the boxes there!
While Ronald Gene Simmons was remote and withdrawn from his family, aside from when he was angry with them...
Yeah.
He began paying extra special attention to his 12-year-old daughter, Sheila, when they moved to England.
Attention that was of a decidedly incestuous quality.
Yeah, it's getting romantic in here.
Yeah. I guess what happens when... She's my little Guinevere.
Yeah.
And I'm Lancelot.
God fucking damn it
Ronald would make Sheila sit on his lap
while he rubbed his hands on her upper thighs
and he would act like he was adjusting her clothes
just so he could put his hands inside her pants
Ronnie Jean also had a predilection
towards taking naked photos of his children
while they were in the bathtub which a lot of people do
for some reason
I don't know why they do
I got a couple of nudie shots
yeah I know everyone has a couple of nudie shots
still not sure why
but then he said he'd laugh uproarously
when they'd cover their penises?
Yeah, he really,
he thought it was really funny
when they got bashful.
But the worst thing
is that the nude photos
he'd taken of his daughter,
Sheila, those were kept
in a special envelope
in his dresser.
Oh, yeah, no,
you got to put them
in front of everybody
with everything else.
It's got to be Disney World,
naked picture right next to it.
Otherwise, it's weird.
Well, I think he,
I think what he was doing
is that he was signaling.
Like, he was,
he was signaling to his whole family
that Sheila gets treated differently.
and I have a sexual attraction towards Sheila
and you're all going to have to deal with it.
Yeah, because he believed it was his right
that she was his property.
Ronald became so obsessed with his daughter
that when the family would take drives,
Sheila would sit up front alone with him
while his wife, Becky, and the other four children
were forced to cram themselves in the back seat.
There was some of this.
There was just kind of a common, weird thing, though,
sometimes where I know my grandfather would treat my mom
like that a little bit in a way where
because my grandmother was so
debilitatingly
mentally ill and so bad to be around
my grandfather used to do all the kind of like public
facing things because he was the PR guy for Pepsi
so he'd bring my mom out she'd like put her
in dresses and she'd be sort
of like his date
to things
was he molesting her? No. Okay then it's
not the same but no but I'm saying
but she got to me John Wayne
that's nice
that's really nice
yeah I mean this was this was
control again
Again, it's showing everyone this is the way things are.
Yeah.
And he's demoting his wife.
That's what he's showing her.
Is it like I...
Well, he got demoted.
Yeah.
Now, in 1975, Ronald Jean Simmons received orders to move once again.
This time, he was ordered to the mountains of New Mexico to work at a satellite base
near Alamagordo.
Incredibly, Ronnie Jean had rose to the ranks of Master Sergeant, which meant he was second
in command of the facility.
This, of course, inflated Ronald's sense of self-worth and his patriotism.
even more, even though the facility was on its way to closing by the time he got there.
From the way I see it, by the mid-70s, people were just trying to get rid of Ronald Gene Simmons
any way they could. And sending him to a satellite base in New Mexico that was about to close
was another way of doing this. Now, once Ronnie Jean arrived at the rental house in Alamagordo
that he got for his family, he found that the rental did not come close to meeting his
exacting standards. So he wrote an excruciating four-page list.
detailing the houses every
shortcoming.
He just came from a trailer.
Yeah, but this is all these
lives. But now this is where he lives.
Oh, okay. And this is where
he is trying to find his
new life. And so, since it's
for him, it has to be exactly
correct. And typical for a
control freak, making lists have become
quite a habit for Ronnie Jean.
He was obsessed with keeping lists,
notes, and records, which meant that he
lugged around triplicates of military
orders, requisition forms,
contracts, titles.
He would even have cards
that detailed the family's finances
and would keep them for years afterwards.
He was so obsessed with cataloging everything
that he kept old grocery lists
and receipts from years earlier
so he could document the rising cost
of everyday goods like mayonnaise
and adjust accordingly.
He had to know.
Oh, yeah.
Because the idea is total,
it's total control, obviously.
It's just out of control.
This is the father from sleeping with the enemy.
Yeah.
I haven't seen that in years.
Do you remember that movie with the his, hers, towels,
and the ones off, you know, when he freaks out?
Man, I can't just trust anyone who would have been so excited when Excel was invented.
Like, oh, what a good new way to categorize things.
That's cryptic and ununderstandable.
You don't even need an eraser for this spreadsheet.
By 1979, Ronald Dean Simmons had finally called.
qualified to retire from the Air Force.
He'd saved up the modern equivalent of $67,000, which included an insurance payout
that he had stolen from his siblings a few years earlier after his long-suffering mother
had finally passed.
It was such a dick move.
She left her three kids $3,000.
And when Ronnie Jean found out about it, he called the insurance company and somehow convinced
them that he was the only beneficiary and then told his siblings to fuck off.
I got all the money.
Using his savings, Ronnie Jean bought a house on a plot of land 11 miles east of Alamagordo in New Mexico's Lincoln National Forest, and it's here that Ronald's control-freak behavior reached a new level.
See, by this point, Gene and Becky had five children between the ages of 15 and three, three boys and two girls, and their sixth child was on the way.
That meant that Ronnie Jean was making good on his fantasy of having a large family.
Ronald claimed that he had bought this remote property in New Mexico for his children
so they could have a wholesome upbringing that avoided exposure to the dangers and perversions of city life.
Arnie Jean was, of course, terrified of drugs,
and he decried the so-called race-mixing that was happening as a result of integration,
because Ronald was also obviously deeply racist, deeply.
But drugs and miscegenation were just the start of Ronald's list of so-called moral pollutants.
And he likewise became obsessed with environmental pollution as well.
He convinced himself that tap water was impure poison.
And he became obsessed with, you know, purity of essence.
It's very much just the world of this is like proto chemtrail obsession.
Yeah.
Yeah.
This is like proto, like that style.
There's fluoride in the tap water.
Same thing with the mistrusting vaccine or like general science.
Because the idea that you know better.
It's another layer of a thing that you know better.
you've lived enough life.
You can tell the difference
between what's good and what's bad
because you don't.
Yeah, we're killing the world,
but I'll never recycle.
Yeah.
Now, Ronnie Jean didn't actually see
his six children as people.
Instead, they were more of a security blanket
and an ego boost.
How many fathers and mothers
do we see like this?
Oh, yeah.
Well, the more kids he had,
the better he felt
because children were capital
that affirmed his manhood
and his virility.
Yeah, this is like Andrew Tate shit.
Yeah.
But more importantly,
the children were going to be
Ronnie Jean's labor force, the ones who would transform the New Mexico property from wilderness
to a functioning self-sustaining farm. But as I said, Ronnie Jean was all talk. And even though
he'd studied various survival manuals and he had a lot of confidence in his own abilities,
he could never actually follow through with anything. And his plans for living off the grid
failed time and again. And it wasn't just because he couldn't put together his own ideas.
It wasn't just because he didn't have any critical thinking skills. It also failed because his
workforce was all children.
Oregon trails lied to me.
This thing sucks. This whole thing sucks.
I like to think his neighbor was a toy box
killer and they were just having different levels of
depravity. He was just like waving to each other
every once in a while. There's something about that David
Ray guy. Parker Ray guy. I like him.
He's a nice guy. Well, I'll say that
they're in different parts of New Mexico, even though they
are there at Iran the same time,
David Parker Ray's down an elephant
Butte it's more of like a little bit more of the desert
He's where Ronnie Jean Simmons is
He's near a town called Cloudcroft
Which is near a town called Ria Dosa
Which is actually he lived where
My family used to go vacation when I was a kid
The mountains of New Mexico
Middle class Texans and Northwest Texas
You go to Ria Dosa and Cloudcroft to vacation
So it is and it's fucking gorgeous up there
It's beautiful
It's incredible
And that's how much Texas sucks.
Yeah, you've got to go to New Mexico.
Yeah, I mean, like, let's say comparatively, beautiful.
Well, that's the thing, is that Ronnie Jeans, he's got all of these kids clearing and stacking rocks.
They're mixing mortar.
They're carrying concrete blocks so they could build a retaining wall.
Like, he's not hiring contractors.
It's a fucking 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl, and there's 6-year-old little brother.
As one author put it, Ronnie Jean had his kids perform concentration camp style labor, although that's a bit of an overstatement.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, because they had like machines.
Yeah, but, you know, they had big machines.
They actually had some contractors.
Yeah, but even so, the kids began work every morning before school and continued afterward until well after dark.
As such, the kids struggled in school and had no interaction with the outside world.
Ronnie Jean again refused to have a phone in the house, although his new excuse was that a telephone
and quote, tempted the children
to frivolity.
You know why?
Freddy Freaker.
That's the problem, dude.
You didn't want them touching Freddy Freaker.
Yeah, that's actually, that is a good point.
Yeah, because Freddie Freaker, well...
You could all busted that whole family wide open.
He really could, yeah, because...
You can't see it.
You can't see it.
You can't even hear it.
I'm doing the Freddie Freaker dance.
Yeah, they can't scam from New York to L.A.
If they can't use a phone.
That's true.
Well, in 1978, the first member of the Simmons family pushed back.
This first rejection of Ronnie Jean's will, however, would be the pebble that would lead to the wholesale massacre of the Simmons family nine years later.
See, by the time Ronnie Jean's eldest son, Gene Jr. became a senior in high school.
He had decided that all the forced labor, it was a bunch of bullshit.
He didn't want to do it anymore.
Ronnie Jean, therefore, beat his son within an inch of his life.
So Gene Jr. ran away to his grandparents' place in Colorado.
Ronnie Jean quickly brought him back, and he made Gene Jr.'s life a living hell
until the kid moved out the first chance he got.
Gene Jr.'s treatment, however, was nowhere near as bad as what Ronnie Jean was starting to do to his daughter, Sheila.
By 1978, Sheila was 15, and Ronnie Jean had begun taking photos of her breasts and her hips.
By October of that year, Ronald had begun raping her, all while he openly defended his sexual attraction to his daughter as, quote,
the natural instincts
of a father. The natural instincts
of a father normally
involve you making yourself your own
grandfather. And that's what's
nice here. I'm just adding batter to the batter.
It's like if the grabber
attacked his own family.
Yeah. You're right.
God, I love that guy.
I wish he was my friend.
Now, even though Ronnie Jean was fully
focused sexually on his own daughter
by the end of the 70s, he was still doing
everything he could to impregnate
his wife again and again, no matter what effect it had on Becky.
See, after she gave birth to her sixth child in her late 30s, doctors told Becky that there
was a good chance that she would die if she had another child.
So she got an IUD, but when Ronald found out about that, he made her remove it, which
resulted in the birth of their seventh child, Becky Jr., in 1979.
And you know you got too many kids when you start doing the mom junior name.
You're out of ideas
Now after child number seven
Becky's doctors told her
that she would definitely die
if she had another kid
So if she wanted to live
She needed to get her tubes tied
Ronnie Jean of course
Thinking only of his own fantasies
Refused and he got angry
And what seems like one of her first acts of defiance
Becky broke down in tears
And straight up told Ronald
That she was going to die
If she didn't have the procedure
Ronnie Jean therefore had no choice but to agree
but he was not in any way happy about the decision
and while childbirth did not ultimately kill Becky Simmons
her husband's desire for control
would still ultimately get her in the end
she along with all of her children and grandchildren
would be dead from gunshot wounds or drowning
in just seven years time
the family had finally begun to pull away from the tyrant in their lives
and it's there that will pick back
up next week for part two
of Ronald Gene Simmons
and the Arkansas
Christmas Massacre
Dun Dananan
Dananan
Danan
I love
Christmas
because this next one
everybody dies
Yeah
But this truly
What a horrible bastard
Yeah
Yeah an absolute
piece of shit
Yeah
He is the archetype
The difficult man
There is no redeemable
qualities
None
Actually you know
I do believe the true archetyped
might be from back in the day. It was, um, I think
it's from the Sparta, like Methuselah.
Hmm? The Ogyo...
Methuselah from the Bible? The original
difficult man. How is
Bethuselah a difficult man? I'm trying to think of it. That's
a woman, right? Yes. Nebuchadnezzar, old
fuck? No, Methuselah's a man.
Who's the original difficult man? Would you
not say that the pharaoh?
Oh. The pharaoh's the most...
Which pharaoh?
The one. There were thousands.
The one Jesus got yelled at.
How about it?
Oh, y'all are great Jesus Christ.
A little more modern. A little more modern.
Anyone, anyone else?
Andrew Jackson.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Oh, yeah, Andrew Jackson is a difficult man.
Very difficult man.
Really great work.
Oh, well, thank you very much.
He was not talking to him.
He was talking to Ronald Jean Simmons.
He said, good for doing your favorite.
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That's right.
This Sunday, Henry and I are going to be in Las Vegas at Wise Guys Comedy, the Town Center.
We get fucked up.
Yes.
We're going to get fucked up.
Well, after the show.
Yeah.
We will be going to put that about it.
Come on.
Come on, guys.
Let's get fucking nuts.
I'll be pretty sober.
The, um, for...
Come on.
We're all men in our early 40s.
We're getting fucking crazy this fucking weekend, man.
You're going to have three beers and go to bed.
Yes.
I'll have a Red Bull, so I might have four beers.
Nice.
Next weekend, we're going to be in Portland, Oregon for Friday and Saturday at Revolution Hall.
That's going to be all of us.
And last podcast is then hitting the road in 2026.
January 31st, Philadelphia, February 28th, Austin, Texas, March 13th, Indianapolis, Indiana, April 25th, Cincinnati, Ohio, May 29th, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 27th, Grand Rapids, Michigan, July 17th, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and July 18th, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
Well, our entire half years already, uh, 2020, 2006 is like already planned, huh?
Yes. It's almost like it's already in the bucket. It's like we already did it. It's like it's like it's
not, you know, December at all.
Jesus fucking Christ, man.
Well, hell Satan, everybody, and we are going to
see out there on the ice. Yeah, and my goose
ulations, y'all. Yeah. Hale
Ronnie James Dio. Yes.
Yeah. Every day.
Holy day. Every inch
of Ronnie James Dio.
Yeah, dude. Hale every inch.
A four foot, 11 inches of that man was
the peak of music.
Well, that's...
This is a huge debate.
Best musician of all time.
He's not a musician even.
Rodney James Dio, best guy that's ever lived.
Not even though.
Best man who's ever lived.
Not even close.
Best voice for a tiny man?
Hey.
No, not even.
John Fogarty.
He's better than John Fogarty.
Johnny James Dio is definitely better than John Fogart.
Unfortunately, that's a end.
That's a long conversation, but it's true.
You have to face that, dude.
No, you have to face that.
His Black Sabbath was the only one that could even touch Ozzie's black Sabbath.
Yeah, buddy.
Heaven and Hell is an amazing album.
It's fine.
Yeah, we're going to go with Credence on this one.
No, it's not a good album.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
You're all fucking fakers and liars.
Creedance, going credence.
Bye.
Henry's sucking his own dick.
Fuck you all.
I can't anymore.
Hurt my back.
