Episode 645: Ronald Gene Simmons Part I - A Difficult Man

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That's when the cannibalism started.

What was that?

That's why they're trying to believe that partially the Mothman myth

was perpetuated by gangsters from Jersey that were in the West Virginia area growing marijuana to keep them out of it. Hell yeah, and they're smart.
Jersey ain't going to West Virginia.

But guess what? Then they built the 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 don't think you got fucked. Full circle, man.
The more weed you smoke, the more real the Mothman gets. Fuck yeah, dude.
That's what I'd like to hear.

You know who also, you know, could have used weed? Who? Ronald Gene Simmons.

No, this guy hated me.

I don't like feeling 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, when we talk about difficult men, because we've been on the stream a lot, we've been shown a lot of videos of difficult men.

I've been obsessed with difficult men. I love difficult men from afar.
Obviously, same thing. Are 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 Kawhi.

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 easy.
Yeah, you're very easy.

Sitting on a dick right now.

Which also reduced me to

Ronald's good abuse.

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 count of any familiocide in American history. Wow.

This utter piece of shit's name was Ronald Gene Simmons. No relation to the Kiss Front man.
Also a piece of shit. Yeah.
Yeah.

I don't want him to get off too easy. No, of course.
No, Gene Simmons is a massive piece of shit. Yeah, he was like, he looked 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. Yeah.

Look at that waterfall. That wonderful, solid Jewish waterfall.
Oh, God. His hair is just like a gigantic Brillo pad.
God.

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. Mm-hmm.

So over a period of just one week during the Christmas Snapshot. 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.

So over a period of just one week 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 squared.

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.

That 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 Gene, as I like to 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 Gene.
That's what you call a whore of hooters.

Oh, Ronnie Gene Dio. Looks like another one.

Except Ronnie James Dio. That's a solid one.
Yeah, if anybody says one single negative word about Dio,

I don't know if I'll flip out. Oh, yeah.
Doesn't get me difficult? And I got Ronnie Gene from our head researcher, Joel. He turned me on to Ronnie Gene, and I love Ronnie Gene.

This spree, the one that was after his family massacre, that killed two and it injured four.

And it focused on Ronnie Gene'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 Gene'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 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.
I 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. Does it work?

I'm getting really angry. I'll show you later.

I'll fucking show it. Come with me in the closet.
And pull out your straw.

We just go back and forth, like sucking and blowing our own air back and forth. But

this guy,

he, I, I understand almost like it's a, it's a very American feeling almost. Sure.
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, uh, it's very much an entitlement thing.

Like, he, Ronnie, Ronnie Gene 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 burn, 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.

But he is also, he's somewhat close to John List because

he did not commit suicide afterwards.

A lot of family annihilators, at the end of it, they take themselves out. He just screamed yes over and over.
He's like,

kill him.

Another one to die.

Yeah, grandkids explode. So easy.
Yeah.

Excellent work, Ronnie Gene.

It's not like Ronald Gene 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 Gene 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 we have to deal with this type of guy all the time thanks to the internet.

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 know-it-all middle-aged white man who spends all his time telling other people how to live their lives.

He's the type who uses a selfie sitting in the front seat of his truck wearing Oakleys as his profile pic, and his constant barrage of negative abusive bullshit only gets silenced after he inevitably gets exposed as a sex criminal.

It's just because the age of consent's getting lowered behind our backs.

He's a this type of. But we know this type of guy.

Like you've seen the like just just imagine the guy who's an asshole to you on the internet who has that unsmiling selfie as his profile pic that's telling 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, again, 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 to be him going, I'm selling another

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. Yeah.
It's really about loss of status. Yeah, it excels.

And the internet creates the world of status. Yeah, the rise of 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 spree shooters are American.
Obviously, we have like Anders Bravik 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 the mostly, are most family annihilators American?

Yes. We're good at it.
Yeah. I mean, I would not say, 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.

Really good at it. Yeah.

Now, for our sources today, we use 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 gym here is Zero at the Bone by Bryce Marshall and Paul Williams.
This is the good shit. Yeah, yeah.
I miss True Crime Really.

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 hate it. 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. Live from your blade.

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And so, without further ado, let's get into the story of Ronald Gene Simmons and the Arkansas Christmas Massacre of 1987.

Now, Ronald Gene Simmons was born in Chicago as a sickly baby on June 15th, 1940. Simmons, however, was not born into a broken home.

His mother was a loving and educated, if somewhat high-strung 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 dads should go.
Yeah, that's how dads 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 of 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. He shed type.
Yeah.

Yeah, fix it. Yeah.
Ronnie Gene's stepfather was named William Griffin. And Ronald, a contrarian even as a child, dismissively referred to his stepfather as Dad Griffin instead of just dad.

You ain't my dad. My dad had the guts to die.

You're still alive like a pussy.

Dad Griffin.

That was his voice at four. Yeah, yeah,

money.

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 Gene's stepfather created a life for his stepsons that was almost too good.

He created a spectacular childhood that Ronald would chase for the rest of his life. What Ronnie Gene 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 it 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.

You mean Ronnie Gene,

you're like changing his diaper, and he's just being like, you're trying to molest me, pervert!

You're trying to fuck with me, pervert! You mean

you're some kind of Democrat.

Oh, you're trying to see my little pecker, and 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 rebuy the home where he lived from the ages of five and ten to the point where his desire informed almost every move Ronnie Gene 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

I'm watching. You dumb shit farmer.

I'm from Arkansas. We are thicks are perfect.

Yes. Perfect in Pirate, Kansas.

Kansas. I hate your pirate jokes and your boat-based humor.
Get 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 my little pecker.

Whatever you say.

Now, we have no idea exactly why Ronnie Gene 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 Gene 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 slaps, 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 off the porch.

Look what he's doing, the little fountain. Look what he's doing.
He's pissing all over your

prize-winning hydrangeas, mother.

I mean, it is a pretty good show.

It's a pretty good show. Look how weak his dream 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 he crossed Ronald or if things didn't go his way, Ronnie Gene 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!

There 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 they'd yell, give me more, give me more.

There were some, they definitely pushed back, definitely. Yeah.
Yeah, whenever my mom hit me, I'd always laugh. It was my best offense.
Yeah.

Yeah,

that is true. That is true.
But neither did Ronnie Gene 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 Gene 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 mother say in a moment of dramatic license that we're killing them. Of course, you've heard, I get it, we've all heard of that.

I technically did. Yeah, you just did.
I technically was so big, I gave her diabetes and she died of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

My mom was nor the 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 Gene 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 of heels, which is

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 ever want to suck out your own milk.
Of course.

But Ronnie Gene was so awful. Backing into it.

That's called when you back into that.

But Ronnie Gene was so awful that his mother said that she got heart palpitations just from being around him. And his stepfather said that Ronnie Gene actually exacerbated his asthma.

In other words, Ronnie Gene was a difficult boy. And as we all know, difficult boys often become difficult men.
And Ronald Gene 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 way worse. Truly.

But he was a child killer. He did murder many children.
Well, no, I mean like as a child. As a child, we need to talk about Kevin type thing.

Actually, yeah, yeah, I could see that. I could see him being very easily radicalized.
Yeah. Oh, very much so.

Now, since Ronnie Gene'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 Gene 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 Gene saying, Ronnie Gene said all this stuff so often. I hate all of you.

Yeah, that Peter Griffin had a full list of phrases that just came up all the time.

In other words, Ronnie Gene 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 how 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.

And he's not the first person that we've talked about.

I can't remember who else was. I remember it's a pyromaniac.
There was the pyromaniac guy. Well, that was the guy who would go.

No, I'm talking about somebody else. No, somebody else who did the same thing with cigarettes.
I think maybe it was Herb Baumeister.

But there is something about this that, you know, it's a psychopathic thing. Yeah, and I don't think cigarettes made anyone cough till 1994.
Not really. And there's different stuff in it.

You know what it 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.

As someone who's never smoked, I hate that shit. Yeah.
And I'm like, I get it, right? I know that it smells or whatever, but you should just go someplace else, you know, or

if you're really mean something, hit him, spray him with a hose. But really do something.
Yeah. Was he like real religious too? No.
Actually,

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 God's.

Yeah, it's just his way or the way 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 he was good with. The law he was good with.

Except for his family. Except

we'll get into that,

but I think he definitely chose America as his religion over Christianity. Okay.
Now, Ronnie Gene 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 Gene got so obsessed with Arkansas that he began disparaging any place that wasn't Arkansas. Only person ever.
Yeah. I never heard that.

And if anyone had anything nice to say about anywhere else in the world, Ronnie Gene was quick to tell him, well, it might be okay, but it's no Arkansas. Just bizarre.
That's it. Yeah, very straight.

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 Gene's bad attitude naturally had consequences after the family moved to Berkeley, California, where he got a job as a busboy 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's his whole, 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 and 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.

Yep. At 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, yeah, get me out of here.

Now, after boot camp, Ronnie Gene 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 and regard that that he had unreasonably demanded from his family.

When Ronnie Gene 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 been like, no, I only drink when the only thing I can hear is ice in my range.

Well, and that was how much of a dick he was, is that he, 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 out of control. Sure.

They always say this. It's like an old, old man thing.
It's like an old idea that like, oh, he just drinks beer. It's fine.
Yeah. That's such a enabling mother concept.

Yeah, you can't be an alcoholic if you just drink beer. Just drinking beer.
Oh, beer's not alcohol. You're going to be like, oh, we 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 baker drinks.
No, yeah. Yeah, that would be crazy.
He's had 10, but he's only had 10 beers. Let him go.

Finally, Ronnie Gee. Imagine George.
Yeah, he's got the just put up George Thorgood. This is a guy who looks up to George Thoreaugood.
I mean, George Thorogood is awesome. He used to be.

He's now, he looks up to 2023 George Thoreaugh.

Finally, Ronnie Gene began attending USO dances at the local YMCA in Brimerton, Washington, where he was stationed.

There, a young woman named Becky Ulabari caught his eye, and Ronald watched her for weeks before he finally talked to her after the other sailors dared him to.

Apparently, Becky was typing up the schedule for upcoming USO 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 fame. Yeah.
So I was 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 Gene's future wife began.

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.

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...
was 16 17.

yeah she was definitely not um yeah she was definitely not an adult but she was working for the uso so she had to be old enough to work yeah i guess right i 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. Too.
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, he didn't have the skills.

And for some reason, she saw something in him

that

she gave him an N.

And they, I mean, they actually dated for three years. Yeah, and it was fine.

And it was just fine.

But after they got married, he would publicly reprimand Becky with sneering sarcasm, openly 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 Gene Simmons Jr., who was coincidentally born on his father's birthday in 1961.

The next year, Ronnie Gene 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.

He was one of those guys. Well,

I think at that point, like in 1963, like Vietnam really was just like, there's something going on over there. Like, we're not committed yet.
You know, JFK is still alive.

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 also,

there's the Air Force, too. It's not 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 is desperate for action.

Well, yes and no. He thinks he is.
Yeah.

Now, Ronnie Gene 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 Gene fairly well.

And it's through them that we get a peek into the world of Ronald Gene Simmons in these early years.

Now, as Becky's brother-in-law put it, Ronnie Gene 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, because I hate him.

I'm gonna say that. Odd, but not wholly objectionable.

There's moments of levity.

Ronnie Gene's brother-in-law, however, seemed to have pretty low standards for what he considered to be not wholly objectionable.

See, Ronnie Gene refused to have a telephone in his home, but only because he wanted to control anything and everything Becky said to other people.

Ronnie Gene 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 Gene's all-encompassing need to control every aspect of his family's lives.

Now to make himself an even bigger dickhead, Ronnie Gene 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 Gene, because anytime they talked, Ronald would just ramble on about all the new facts he'd learned without attempting to have an actual conversation with the other person.

Do you know what Deflophasaur? It's probably the size of a beagle?

Oh, yeah,

What is it? Dilophosaur. Shut up.

Okay. It's a dinosaur, you idiot.

Because of the sore on the end of that,

fat pig.

Stupid dumper.

So you used to call me a fat pig, not just a pig? Dilophosaur 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 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 ronald gene simmons i will say this actually you did hit upon something very good there he had an incredible memory 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 and he but he had no uh 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 Gene 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.
Yeah.

But Ronnie Gene 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 when this guy

killed his sister, and this is still what he's hung up on.

Well, we do our own tune-ups, don't we?

He just one time said this real prick thing to me.

No, he didn't kill his sister. He did not.
Oh, okay. No, no, no.

This was, yeah. Oh, he killed his sister-in-law.
Oh, okay. 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.

But it was it. But, you know, this is how we know who Ronald Gene Simmons is, because after he was arrested, he didn't talk to anybody.
And in fact,

he held the record for the man who was executed in Arkansas quickest because he got it done real fast. And he just, he didn't talk.

He did not talk. And I don't think he even appealed.
Yeah, no, he didn't. Actually,

he told them, get kill me faster.

But what we know about Ronald Gene Simmons comes from the people who know him. Like people like the brother-in-law who talked to this true crime author.

But yeah, I think the murdering his sister-in-law, that's baseline.

Now, Ronnie Gene 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 Gene was again and again given jobs that were tailor-made for people who didn't care if others liked him. And they love the Army likes having those guys.

Well, I mean, this is the Air Force. But you don't mean the Army.
The military likes these guys. They're great for this.
No, the military always needs guys that nobody likes.

But the promotions, however, came with raises. But instead of sharing the wealth with his ever-growing family, he now had two children.

Ronnie Gene 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, no, you have 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 $19.60, $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 will steal it. I'll steal the soap out of every hotel we go to.

That's called being trash, like us. That's right.
We're allowed to be trash. But all of this was done with a purpose.

See, Ronnie Gene 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 Gene made spreadsheets for budgets 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 Gene 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 doesn't that basically mean their internal affairs? Yes.

This is internal affairs. Yes.
This is 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 an investigator.

But yeah, definitely in that area. Yeah, because it was Debris.
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 narc, 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, we're going to take their corners. Or their cigarettes? We're going to take their cigarettes away.
Or their lips? Yeah.

Just let them fucking... They're all going to be sprayed with Agent Orange in like six weeks, buddy.
Man, 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. You're also, I will say, the OSI is technically also looking for people that are selling information to the other side.

Like, there's that's the far extreme end, yeah, 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 um or americans who sometimes they sold uh you know offensive or defensive capabilities uh to the viet concern that which you know that is an important task but ronnie gene had found the perfect job for a difficult man his job was to make the lives of others harder people who are in an already impossible situation.

It's like if you're in Vietnam, he is the guy. Like, you know,

I kind of think of him as Good Morning Vietnam. Yeah.

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.
Not

Disneyland. Yeah.
Yeah. Follow the Host Human Trail.
So on and so forth.

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now while ronnie Gene 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, and he gave them just $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 four, it's about $380 a month in today's cash, which is 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 I thought he was that fun.
Yeah.

And then finally, after Ronnie Gene's tour in 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 Gene 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 Gene gleefully narced on any serviceman in San Francisco who even so much as smelled like weed.

Ronnie Gene had shown up in San Francisco the summer after the summer of love. Yeah, it's like everyone's all weed.
Yeah. Yeah, and he hated hippies.
Hated them. And there were hippies everywhere.

But this meant that Ronnie Gene was very busy ruining the good time of any serviceman 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 hate.

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.
You know what I mean? He was just a part of, he was a cog and the machine. But.

To the military, he was very useful. I think that he

don't want their servicemen 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 just. Yes.
Oh, very much so. Yeah, yeah.
You can't.

The person who is, you know, trying to, you know, sniff out the black market cigarette ring, you got to have somebody who doesn't care if they're liked.

And in fact, you 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, or at the very least, he was on a base that was attacked, he began fantasizing about wielding an M16 rifle in pretend firefights against the Viet Cong.

A little old for that.

It teaches you to look at me like I'm something bad.

He's the worst. He's a fucking poor prick.
Yeah. He went to gun ranges and put in dozens of hours practicing with M16s, Rugers, revolvers, and rifles.

And much to 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. I'm sorry.
For him, it was quote 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 Gene believed that he deserved 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. Yeah.

And they go, 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. Well, because 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. Like, yeah, you, yeah, you can stay there.
Yeah, we like you in Guam. Yeah.

Well, that's the thing is that they actually assigned Ronnie Gene to a posting in England, working as a desk clerk counting inventory. It was a pointed demotion.

Just after Ronnie Gene 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.

He should just enjoy life at this point san francisco england but it's but it's not the thing but it's not what he believes he deserves yeah you know 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 Gene'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 all the wheels. You got eight wheels underneath you.
That's insane. That's four more than a car.
That's the legal amount of wheels. So what you have is four.

Eight is illegal. It's dangerous.
It's a menace. And we should burn the goddamn derby to the goddamn ground.
Why is the floor so slippery?

The sounds of laughter.

I hate spinning.

And I hate the base city rollers.

With their armpit hair hanging out and 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.

You see that boy? Two boxes. Yeah, count the boxes in.

While Ronald Gene Simmons was remote and withdrawn from his family, aside from when he was angry with them, 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.

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 Gene 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 nudie shots. Yeah, I know.
Everyone has a couple of nudie shots. Still not sure why.
And he said he'd laugh uproarously when they'd covered their penises? Yeah,

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 what he was doing is that he was signaling. Like, 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.
Mm-hmm.

Ron 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.

This is 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 she, because my grandmother was so

debilitatingly mentally ill and so bad to be around, my grandfather used to do all these 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 be John Wayne.

That's nice. That's really that's really nice.
Yeah. No, I mean, this was this was control.
Again, it's showing everyone this is the way things are. Yeah.
Yeah. And it's, he's demoting his wife.

That's what he's showing her. Like, I.
Look, he got demoted. Yeah.

Now, in 1975, Ronald Gene 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 Alamogordo.

Incredibly, Ronnie Gene 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 Gene arrived at the rental house in Alamogordo 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. It just came from a trailer.
Yeah, but this is what he 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 Gene.

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, Oh, yeah.
So he knows, because the idea is total,

it's total control, obviously. It's just

out of control. This is the,

this is like the father from sleeping with the enemy. Yeah.

I haven't seen that in years. 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.

Now, by 1979, Ronald Dean Simmons had finally 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 Gene found out about it, he called the insurance company and made, 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 Gene bought a house on a plot of land 11 miles east of Alamogordo 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 3, three boys and two girls.

And their sixth child was on the way. That meant that Ronnie Gene 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.

Ronnie Gene 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

obviously deeply racist, deeply. But drugs and miscegenation were just the start of Ronald's list 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 into the world of this is like proto-chemtrail obsession. Yeah.
Yeah. This is like proto-like that style of stuff.
So the fluoride and the tap water.

Well, same thing with the mistrusting vaccine or like the general science, because the idea that you know better, it's another layer of a thing that you know better you've you've lived enough life you can tell the difference between what's good and what's bad because you know yeah we're killing the world but i'll never recycle yeah

now ronnie gene 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 Gene'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 Gene 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 like waving to each other every once in a while. I'd be like, there's something about that David Ray guy.

Parker Ray guy. I like him.

He's a nice guy.

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 is down in Elephant Butte.

It's, you know, more like a little bit more of the desert.

He's where Ronnie Gene Simmons is. He's near a town called Cloudcroft, which is near a town called Riodosa, which is actually he lived where my family used to go vacation when I was a kid.

The mountains in New Mexico, middle-class Texans in northwest Texas, you go to Riodosa and Cloudcroft to vacation.

So it is, and it's fucking gorgeous up there. It's beautiful.
It's incredible. That's how much Texas sucks.
You've got to go to New Mexico.

Yeah. I mean, 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 like a fucking 15-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl and their six-year-old little brother.

As one author put it, Ronnie Gene had his kids perform concentration camp-style labor. Although that's a bit of an overstatement,

he had like machines. Yeah.
But you know, like, you know, they have 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 Gene again refused to have a phone in the house, although his new excuse was that a telephone quote tempted the children to frivolity. You know why? Freddy Freaker.

Freddy Freaker. That's the problem, dude.
You didn't want them touching Freddy Freaker. Yeah,

that is a good point. Yeah, because Freddy Freaker, well.
You could have 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. So I'm doing the Freddy 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 first rejection of Ronnie Gene'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 Gene'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 Gene, therefore, beat his son within an inch of his life, so Gene Jr. ran away to his grandparents' place in Colorado.

Ronnie Gene quickly brought him back, and he made Gene Jr.'s life a living hell until the kid moved moved out the first chance he got.

Gene Jr.'s treatment, however, was nowhere near as bad as what Ronnie Gene was starting to do to his daughter, Sheila.

By 1978, Sheila was 15, and Ronnie Gene 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 Gene 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.

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.

In 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 we'll pick back up next week for part two of Ronald Jean Simmons and the Arkansas Christmas Massacre.

I love Christmas now.

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 of the difficult man. There is no redeemable qualities.
None. Actually, you know, I do believe the true archetype might be from back in the day.

It was, I think it's from the Sparter, like Methuselah. Hmm? Have the OGOD.
Methuselah from the Bible? The original difficult man. How is Ahuzala a difficult man? I'm trying to think.

That's a woman, right? Yeah. Nebuchadnezzar, old fuck.
No, Methuselah's a man. Wheth's a man?

Yeah. 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

a little more modern? A little more modern.

Anyone else? Andrew Jackson. Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, yeah. Andrew Jackson Jackson is

a difficult man. He's a very difficult man.

Really great work. Oh, well, thank you very much.

No, he's not talking to you. He's talking to Ronald Jean Simmons.
Oh, good, good, good. You're going to have to use the episode.

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It is LPN-RPG presents Bloodbath. We here at LPN are doing Vampire the Masquerade with our storyteller, Jared Logan, featuring professional, professional

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So we are really, we've been crushing it. We're having a lot of fun over there.

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And see us on tour last podcast on the left.com for tickets. That's right.
This Sunday, Henry and I are going to be in Las Vegas at Wise Guys Comedy, the Town Center.

That's December 7th. Yes.
We're going to get fucked up. Well, after the show.
Yeah. We will get fucked up happens.
Come on, guys. Let's get fucking nuts.
I'll be pretty sober. The all forgets.

Come on. We're all men in our early 40s.

this fucking weekend, man. You're going to have three beers and go to bed.

But 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. Wow, our entire half year is already

2026. It's 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 we already did it. It's like it's not, you know, December at all.

Jesus fucking Christ, man. Well, hail Satan, everybody, and we are going to see you out there on the ice.
Yeah, and the gooseillations, y'all.

Hail, Ronnie James Dio. Yes.

every day

yeah

every

whole entire

every inch of ronnie james dio

hail it hail every inch 11 inches of that man was the peak of music

well that's

best guy huge to be best musician of all time i die

james dio best guy that's ever lived i don't even know exactly

not even close your best voice for a tiny man hey no not even john fogerty yeah he's better than john fogerty All right, this is it. Roddy James Deo is definitely better than John Fogarty.

Unfortunately, this is Abbott. That's a long conversation, but it's true.
No, no. You have to face that, dude.
No, you have to face that.

Brock Sabbath was the only one that could even touch Ozzy'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. No, it's a fucking good album.

It's a fucking

bad album. You're all fucking fakers and liars.
Credence, going Credence. Bye.
Henry's sucking his own death. Fuck you all.
I can't anymore. Hurt my back.

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