The Black Hole Murders - Kibler, Arkansas

Summary

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Small Town Murder: “The Black Hole Murders – Kibler, Arkansas”

Hosts: James Pietragallo & Jimmie Whisman
Release Date: June 25, 2026
Episode Description:
The hosts investigate a wild quadruple homicide that stunned a small Arkansas town in 1981, blending thorough research, dark tragedy, and their signature comedic riffing. This episode features a twisty case involving a missing husband, a botched car sale, a vanishing detective, and a hardened, slippery suspect—all under the unlikely shadow of Kibler, Arkansas.

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Overview

James and Jimmie take listeners on a trip to Kibler, Arkansas, unearthing a notorious murder case that rattled this minuscule town in the early ’80s. What begins as a missing persons report unraveling a local couple's strange disappearance soon spirals into a four-victim kidnapping and murder case—one so audacious it implicates a police detective as a victim and leaves investigators flailing in a rural black hole. The episode weaves town backstory, deep character dives, and sharp (and sometimes irreverent) comic asides.

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Key Discussion Points & Episode Flow

1. Kibler, Arkansas: Setting the Scene

• Town Profile:
  • “Kibler. K-I-B-L-E-R. It says, I looked it up, trust me, because I was gonna pronounce it Kibler and then I looked it up and it says ‘rhymes with rib,’ like ribbler.” (James, 06:29)
  • Population: ~1,324—“Oh yeah, it’s gonna be a metropolis in no time.” (09:47)
  • Real estate and demographics discussed, including quirky reviews and ‘castle’ listings around $950K (“I would never pay a million to live in Arkansas. Not a chance.” – Jimmie, 15:18)
  • Local color: A festival with all-cowboy-hat-wearing country acts, and bleak property stats.

2. Introduction to The Crime

• The Disappearance:

  • January 6, 1981. Joanna (“Juana”) Price can’t find her husband, Larry. He never shows for lunch; then work reports someone else called in sick for him.
  • By evening, after reporting him missing, both Joanna and their neighbor/landlord Holly Gentry accompany a detective, Ray Tate, to investigate the Prices’ apartment… then they also vanish.

• Detective’s Disappearance:

  • Detective Ray Tate arrives at 6:04pm, never radios back (“...does not answer his radio after that and never radios back again. Gone. Disappeared.” – James, 06:51).

3. Rabbit Hole of Clues and Missing People (22:57–54:07)

• Sequence of events as relayed by Joanna, neighbors, and detectives.

• Odd details: Phone ripped from the wall at the apartment; detective’s flashlight left behind; both the car for sale (a ’79 Ford LTD) and Tate’s police car go missing.

• The small town is thrown into panic.

• Quote (on discovering the mess):

  • “No people, phone ripped out of the wall, his partner’s flashlight there. Now they freak out.” (James, 31:42)

4. The Community and Victims

• Profiles:
  • Larry Price: 21, machinist, “outgoing, tall… very thick brown hair. We’d make pretty babies.” (James, 34:47)
  • Joanna Price: His wife, 21, nursing student, “real shy… short.”
  • Holly Kim Gentry: Landlord, called “the nicest guy,” active in church and community groups—striking for a small town.
  • Detective William “Ray” Tate: 33, family man, master sergeant (Air National Guard).
• Life details and Arkansas flavor are richly evoked throughout:
  • “Cowboys have a lot of girl names. It’s an interesting trend.” (42:00)
  • Frequent asides on regional cuisine, local history, and names.

5. Crime Developments: The Case Deepens (54:07–77:42)

• Odd Timeline:
  • Multiple vehicles found abandoned—each with unexplained miles, dust, and missing items.
  • Bank manager spots someone trying to reclaim a suspicious check written (and forged) by missing Larry (Thomas Simmons).
• Bodies Discovered:
  • Three bodies (Gentry, Joanna, Tate) found under a tractor tire, hidden with oil cans. Execution style, collars over heads, Tate handcuffed with his own cuffs.
    • “...shot execution style at the base of the skull... all three have their collars of their shirts pulled like halfway over their head...” (James, 76:00)
  • Fourth body (Larry) found separately after a tip from an anonymous caller—never identified—whom James notes: “That’s the major mystery in this entire case.” (79:19)
  • Medical examiner: Larry likely died after others, despite being kidnapped first.

6. The Suspect: Thomas Winford Simmons (80:59–103:00)

• Background:
  • One of 11 children, lifetime criminal, recently paroled from federal prison after slashing and nearly killing a gas-station clerk.
  • Series of escalating offenses—auto theft, assault, failed military service, family abandonment.
  • Details about being “the best shovel boy” at a sand and gravel company, and comedically roasted (“If your job title has the word ‘boy’ in it and you’re a grown man, you have fucked your life up royally.” – James, 89:57)
• Crime Motive and Evidence:
  • Simmons posed as a car buyer, intended to rob Larry and steal the LTD for resale.
  • He unexpectedly encounters Larry’s wife, resulting in an improvised, escalating series of kidnappings and murders.
  • Glaring evidence: Forged check, witness identifications, blood type and hair matching, and semen evidence from Joanna’s rape (type O, matching Simmons, not Larry).

Notable Quote:

“All he had to do was not steal that check, and it would have been very hard to identify this guy… Instead, he went to a goddamn bank and said, ‘My name is Thomas Simmons, here’s my bank account number, from a dead guy.’”
— James (182:58)

7. Prosecution, Trial, and Incarceration (120:08–177:36)

• Trial Details:
  • Witness James Davis saw Simmons lead three bound people from the apartment to a car—but delayed reporting due to his own warrant (“He could have called the cops right then and saved everybody’s life. But this fucking guy was like, ‘I got a warrant.’” – James, 116:14)
  • Various legal wranglings, including conflict of interest as both defendant and witness have same lawyer (!!), and a defense attorney accused of being a drunk.
  • Conviction on all counts: four murders, four kidnappings. Sentenced to death by electrocution. (137:19+)
• Appeals and Reaction:
  • Lengthy appeals on technicalities, alleged ineffective counsel, and challenge of blood evidence.
  • Supreme Court repeatedly rejects appeals; public outcry fiercely against leniency.
  • Simmons maintains innocence to the end.

Memorable Moment:

“The law was written and said you have to kill him. All right.” – Jimmie, 151:03 (on jury’s death penalty logic)

8. Finale: The End of Simmons (177:36–180:15)

• Simmons’ Suicide:
  • Days before his scheduled execution in January 1991, Simmons kills himself with a modified razor in his cell.
  • “Seemed to do really well in any environment except freedom. That’s where he really had a problem.” (James, 178:00)
  • His suicide note maintains innocence; last appeals denied.
• Aftermath:
  • Victims’ families feel justice incomplete; the case and its brutality ripple through local memory and court reform arguments.

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Notable Quotes & Lighter Moments

| Timestamp | Quote | Speaker/Context | |---|---|---| | 06:29 | “Kibler... rhymes with rib, like ribbler.” | James’s mispronunciation theme | | 15:18 | “I would never pay a million to live in Arkansas. Not a chance.” | Jimmie, on real estate in small towns | | 26:56 | “Now they freak out. Now, alien abduction kind of shit.” | James, when detective’s flashlight is found | | 75:59 | “All three have their collars of their shirts pulled like halfway over their head, like they were being Cornholio.” | James, on execution style of the murders | | 109:20 | “For 85 bucks he’ll carve a boy up, so he does not care.” | James, on Simmons’s greed and brutality | | 151:03 | “The law was written and said you have to kill him. All right.” | Jimmie satirically mocking jury logic | | 182:58 | “He went to a goddamn bank and said, ‘My name is Thomas Simmons... from a dead guy.’” | James, exasperated about killer’s stupidity |

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Section Timestamps

• [05:47] – Start of town history / Kibler introduction
• [21:03] – Crime rate, segue to murder case
• [22:57] – Disappearance & investigation
• [31:42] – Police get involved, detective vanishes
• [54:07] – Car(s) discovered, bodies missing
• [74:40] – Bodies found under tractor tire
• [79:07] – Larry’s body discovered after anonymous call
• [80:59] – Thomas Simmons’s criminal past
• [120:08] – Evidence & trial
• [137:19] – Jury verdict and sentencing
• [177:36] – Simmons’s suicide and aftermath

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Host Tone and Podcast Vibe

The hosts’ default mode bounces between genuine empathy for the victims and withering, often darkly absurd, comedic tangents riffing on small towns, criminal stupidity, and legal absurdities. They make regular meta-comments on crime podcasting, cold case quirks, and the irony of small-town mythmaking.

• Example: Jimmie’s running bit on “shovel boys” and James’s playful exasperation at bad stage names or criminal incompetence.
• They are careful not to make fun of victims or their families, reserving their jabs for institutions, the murderer, and the sometimes hapless machinery of justice.

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Conclusion

This episode is a microcosm of the show’s strength: wildly detailed, research-rich storytelling, honest horror, and cathartic humor. The Kibler case itself is a knotted, tragic mess—one untangled step by step even as side-plots and egos complicate the road to justice. The hosts’ irreverence never shadows genuine respect for the victims, making this a rich, memorable chapter in the series.

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“If you don’t like true crime and comedy together, maybe it’s not for you. But it might be—let’s put it that way.”
— James (05:30)

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Transcript

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[A]

Yay.

[B]

Yay indeed, Jimmy. Yay indeed. My name is James Petragalo. I'm here with my co host.

[A]

I'm Jimmy Whisman.

[B]

Thank you folks so much for joining us today on another Absolutely bonkers. If you heard the opening, there's a lot going on in this episode, as you might imagine. Episode of Small Town Murder. It's going to be a wild one. Buckle up. Before we get to that, though. Absolutely. Head over to shutupandgivemerder.com now. You go. Well, it's there. Merchandise. Sure, there's merchandise. We got all that stuff. Tickets to live shows are the things you really want to get here. Next up, Milwaukee, September 18th at the Pabst. There are not a lot of tickets left for that one if you'd like to go to that show. So I suggest doing right now. Get them in there. And then after that, the next day, September 19th in Minneapolis at the State Theater. Get your tickets for that. Do it right now. There's more tickets than there should be available for that one. So it's very odd. Bill. Milwaukee. Milwaukee's gonna beat you guys. Don't do that. What do you want?

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Minnesota always sells out, so it's gonna be.

[B]

They do. Let's hope they come through here. Then we have Dallas, San Jose, Sacramento, Tarrytown and Boston in October and November. So do that and get your tickets right now. Shut up and givememurder.com is where you do that. Definitely. Listen to our other Crime in Sports where we have a very cool series about the Yahweh Ben Yahweh cult going on right now because one of the main enforcers happened to play football for like a month and a half in the NFL. So you know it counts. So we do that. And then your stupid opinions is just insane.

[A]

So fun.

[B]

It's so fun. So check those shows out. Get yourself Patreon. That's the important part. Patreon.com CrimeInSports is where you get all the bonus material. Anybody $5 a month or above. You get everything we put out, including as soon as you subscribe you about almost 400 back bonus episodes. You've got huge feed to binge on. And then you get new ones every other week too. One crime in sports, one small town murder, and you get it all, everybody. And this week it's a banner week actually because it is Prisoner Dating Game time. Again, everybody much requested. And we do it about twice a year. The Prisoner Dating Game is back where what we do here, it's the all violent felon. As always. I line up four ladies and four young gentlemen for Jimmy to choose from here. And he's going to pick one based on just what they say about themselves. And then afterwards we get to find out what they did and how horrible of a choice Jimmy has made. And the whole game is basically try to avoid the pedophile. It's like whack a mole. That's what he's trying to do. It's very fun. Patreon.com CrimeInSports is where you get all that and you get all the shows we put out. Crime and sports, you stupid opinion. Small town murder. All ad free.

[A]

Ad free.

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All ad free. Just take it. We want you to have it. And on top of that, you also get a shout out at the end of the show too. It's literally all we could give without opening a vein.

[A]

That's all we've got.

[B]

That's all we got. Disclaimer time. It's a comedy show, everybody. We're comedians, so we're going to make jokes. And the show's called Small Town Murder. So people are going to die. That's the way it works here. Now you go. Well, how the hell do those things go together real easily? Actually, it's amazing if you do certain things. The main thing we do is we never make fun of the victim or the victim's families.

[A]

Why?

[B]

Because we're assholes.

[A]

But.

[B]

But we're not scumbags. See how that works? It's real simple. And if you stick with that, it's pretty easy. Plus there's plenty to make fun of. There's some murderer to make fun of. Who's more easy to make fun of or make fun of? Some small town police force that didn't do their jobs and let a murderer go free. Make fun of small towns, because why not? We're all from somewhere that deserves to be made fun of. So there you go. That said, you think that true crime and comedy should never ever go together. Though maybe it's not for you, I don't know. But it might be, let's put it that way. I'd give it a shot. But either way, don't really want to hear you complain later. So enjoy. Buckle up, Strap in and sit back also and clear the lungs here and put your arms to the sky and let's all shout, shout up. Forgive me, murder. Let's do this, everybody.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Let's go on a trip, shall we?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Gotta do it. We're going to Arkansas. That always raises any crowd you say that to, obviously a huge cheer will come up. Yay.

[A]

Finally, very underwhelming destination.

[B]

Yeah. If you have kids, gather them up, sit them down and go, we're going on a family vacation. They'll go, yay. Where are we, Disney? Where are we going here? And then go, we're going to Arkansas. And then watch their faces change. And they'll go. Number one. Half of them won't know it's a state, so they won't even know what you're talking about.

[A]

They've forgotten.

[B]

They've forgotten. And the other ones who do know, they'll be even more frightened. So this is Kibler, Arkansas. K I B L E R. Kibler.

[A]

That's Kibler. That's Kibler.

[B]

It's Kibler. It says, I looked it up, trust me, because I was gonna pronounce it Kibler and then I looked it up and it says rhymes with rib, like ribbler. And I was like, perfect. It's Gibler. Far western Arkansas. This is 2 hours and 15min to Little Rock, if you want to go that way, 2 hours and 50 minutes to Oklahoma City, the other way. So it's kind of almost right in between them. And about 2 hours and 15 minutes to Austin, Arkansas, which was our last Arkansas episode. Episode 664, the Deadly Grandma and the Doppelganger. That was a wild one, by the way. This is in Crawford county, area code 479 now. Little bit of history on Kibler. Kibler's a small town. Yeah, it's like the bigger towns nearby are places like van Buren and Fort Smith is the big city nearby, which has like 80,000 people, but that's the big city. So it's a real small area out in Kebler. It's about halfway between the I40 and the Arkansas River. So right between the freeway and the Arkansas River. It's interesting.

[A]

That thing's muddy.

[B]

It's a mud, gross river. It's mud brown. Absolutely. Originally known as Prairie Grove in the beginning, apparently it's very hilly in this region and didn't attract a lot of settlers until the 1800s. A guy named John Kibler is said to have arrived from Germany in the 1840s. And there's also Mary Kibler and all this type of thing.

[A]

Hilly, not mountainy.

[B]

Yeah, hilly. Yeah. Just hills. Yeah, there's no mountains over there. It's just this is the hills.

[A]

Prairie Plains.

[B]

Arkansas's got some hills and then they go away completely before you get to Oklahoma. I think that's where they drew the border. Yeah. If there's anything over about 7 inches of elevation, that's still Arkansas. We can't have that. So their wells for natural gas were dug in 1914 on the binks Kibler farm. So they're farming gas at that point. And then more wells the next year on a different farm. And then a sawmill was built to harvest trees in order to clear land for gas wells and for cotton farms. Yeah, more wells and farms. So this was probably a pretty nice scenic area at one point and then they, you know, destroyed it all. Reviews of this town could only find one and I was honestly surprised there was any. It was one of those small towns. It's a four star review and it says, I would definitely choose to live here again because it is a safe environment. The atmosphere is always great. I see this town expanding in the future.

[A]

This guy writing this on his deathbed.

[B]

Live here again? I don't know, but what is he talking. It's going to expand. I think the big next boom. I mean, we had booms. I mean, Austin Was pretty booming for a while. Austin, Texas, and people were going places. Nashville, very booming. Vegas. I think the next one's Kibler, Arkansas. Is that it? Well, I was going to go to Nashville, but, man, those birds are getting expensive. Kibler's my next choice, though. What the fuck? People in this town, 1324. Oh, yeah, it's going to be a metropolis in no time. It's going to be huge.

[A]

What has that person seen? I mean, I understand what they haven't seen, but what have they seen that made them think that this is a booming place?

[B]

Seems like they're sitting in whatever place they've moved to because this place was terrible and they couldn't get a job, so they moved somewhere else. And they're just having some reminiscent flashbacks of like, boy, that place was great. I bet a lot of other people will go there. Since I want to go back, that must mean everyone agrees with me. More women than men in this town. Barely 50.2% women. So a few more. Median age here is a couple years below the national average, about 35.2. Now, the family, normally, 50. 50 is average for married. Here it is 69% married. Good God, these people are married. I don't know if the courthouse isn't close enough to get a divorce or what the deal is, but they are sticking around.

[A]

30% single. I mean, 30% of this country is unmarriable. You know what I mean?

[B]

Oh, absolutely. 30.

[A]

So all the Marri people are married.

[B]

30.

[A]

At least. You know what I mean?

[B]

Yeah, we're talking. I mean, even some of the people that are married, I would say 80 to 85% of the country is unmarriable.

[A]

Yeah, right.

[B]

For one reason or another.

[A]

Whether they're hideous or just in a lifestyle that you just.

[B]

Fucking pill addict. I mean, you could name a bunch of different things. That's about 85% of this country. If you put all those things under

[A]

an umbrella, it's a miracle that it's as high and married population as it is.

[B]

Yeah, well, maybe they're just too lazy to get divorced, though. You don't know. That's probably it, too.

[A]

People settling.

[B]

That's it. Race in this town, 91.3% white. 0.0% black in Arkansas, Not a black person in town. That seems. That's weird. 1.4% Asian, 1.2% Native American, which is above the national average, actually, and 1.1% Hispanic. So white. Fascinating religion here. 50. 50 is normal. This is 51.3% of the people here are Religious, which is kind of lower than you would think for this kind of area. But as you would think though, the most, the number one religion here is Baptist. Of course, as we know, Baptists are the Catholics of the south everywhere. 0.0% Jewish or Muslim or anything like that. Unemployment is low here. Actually under the national average. Median household income, also below the national average, it's 69,000. In the rest of the country here, 56,563. So a little bit low. But the cost of living is also lower in the rest of the country. Let's say it's 100 as average. Here it is 76 for cost of living. And the housing is the low thing.

[A]

That's how they all have fishing boats.

[B]

That's the only way. Median home cost here, $151,600.

[A]

Dang.

[B]

So I mean that's.

[A]

You can do it.

[B]

That is very, very cheap. So I don't know, maybe we've convinced you to make Kibler the next boom town. I'm not sure. I'm surprised that's not the motto. If we have convinced you, we have for you the Kibler Arkansas real estate report. Average two bedroom rental here goes for 8, 30 bucks. Well below the national average. Yeah, well below. So I found some shit here. Here is a five acres of land.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Totally undeveloped, just woods.

[A]

Just. Just barren.

[B]

Just woods. $75,000 which seems.

[A]

How many acres?

[B]

Five. That seems steep.

[A]

That is expensive, right?

[B]

For not developed at all like. No.

[A]

Not even a little cabin or anything?

[B]

Oh, no, nothing. This is just a patch of woods. Basically. That's it. Here is a two bedroom, one bath, 960 square foot, really old shitty metal trailer. It's terrible looking. But if you buy this, you'll get the entire Trailer Park. 10 acres of trailer park.

[A]

You're the boss.

[B]

You are the trailer master here. The park was built in 1965. The listing says unlimited possibilities. You can have crackheads and child molesters and there's a few limits. I would say there's plenty of limits here. The property was formerly an active mobile home park and presents an exceptional development potential. With ample space for up to six homes. You can create a small subdivision or just live in it in your trailer. $166,500 for that.

[A]

Wow, 10 acres.

[B]

Yep. And that's a $12,000 price cut. So it seems like five acres is about 75 grand in that ballpark. Here. And then one, here's one. A three bedroom, two bath, 1171 square foot house. It's A little brick house. Pretty nice. Decent on the inside. Small lot. $169,900.

[A]

That's the castle.

[B]

Now this is the castle here. Five bedroom, four bath, 7,318 square feet, which the house doesn't look at. The house looks like a rural information center. That'd be the best way to put it. Like there should be pamphlets in one of those things outside. That's what it looks like. Basement or what it has to, but it's. It's 20.67 acres and there's like a huge pond and like with a dock and like all kinds of shit. Like that's a lot of land. $949,000. Don't think so. Just had a price cut of 20,000. I don't know what they were thinking there.

[A]

I would never pay a million dollars to live in Arkansas. No, not a chance.

[B]

Fuck no. No. That's why that house is sitting there. Someone built that and then went, I have enough money to not live in Arkansas. And then they left.

[A]

Well, they used to. They spent it all on that house.

[B]

Things to do here. Old Fort Days. This is at Fort Smith, which is nearby. It's like five miles away. Now I'll give you a schedule. It runs for a few days, but I'll give you a basic everyday schedule is pretty much the same. There's a rodeo parade and then there's a mutton busting event of some kind. There's qualifying and then they go through the rounds.

[A]

A whole thing for the kids.

[B]

Oh yeah. There is live music at the Old Fort Days stage, which we'll talk about what that music is in just a moment. And of course all sorts of fireworks and shit like that. Sure. Street dances or some horseshit like we always read about in these places. Musical acts that we'll be playing. Leah Butler, who's just a chick who's leaning against a huge keyboard that's standing up. She's like leaning on it. So she plays a giant Casio. The Lane Louder Band, which it's L O W. So it's like Loder. I guess it might be Loader. He looks like a 15 year old boy dressed up like a Casio.

[A]

Oh, that's a dude.

[B]

It's hilarious. Lane Loder. Yeah. You look at this guy and you go, dude, stop making that face. He's like making a face like I'm a tough cowboy singer. It's like, dude, you are 12. You're 12. You're late for math class. Seriously, get back to that.

[A]

What's your last Name that's very confusing.

[B]

It's also confusing Kennedy Holland, who's just some chick wearing a tiara for some reason. I don't know where she got that from. Bourbon Rain. I'm gonna give you a guess what those people look like. Bourbon Rain.

[A]

That is a bunch of fellows in very, very weird hats.

[B]

That is four old men is what I wish it would rain. Bourbon, One of them said one night, and they were like, me too, man. If there was rain.

[A]

The rain is poison and it kind of tastes like bourbon.

[B]

I'd like it. I wish it got you drunk, too,

[A]

instead of just sick, instead of just burning your mouth.

[B]

Oh, man. Todd Mitge. There has never been a worse stage name than Mitge. And my name is Petragallo. So. M I T M I T T G E Mitke.

[A]

That's a horrible name.

[B]

It's a terrible name. He looks like a complete dork. He looks like whatever company you work at. Picture the IT guy. Now put a cowboy hat on him. That's this fucking guy. Dork. Then there's Uncle Fudge. Uncle Fudge, which sounds disgusting. That sounds like he molests your kids.

[A]

Yeah. That's the worst uncle.

[B]

That's Uncle Fudge. Watch out. Then, though, the problem is, when you look at them, it's exactly what you'd think it was. It's four guys and they look like four different families kicked out the worst uncle and they all fled the band. That's what it looks like. It looks like the uncle that no one wants at their house, all four of them together.

[A]

Uncle Fudge has four guys.

[B]

Four guys who look like the worst uncle ever. That's what's great about it. Oh, gross. Wow. Sarah Murrah. M U R R A H Murrah. I guess that sounds like a Southern person saying, Murray, isn't that the name

[A]

of the building that they exploded in Oklahoma City?

[B]

Is it the M U R R A H?

[A]

I think it was.

[B]

I'm not sure how it was spelled. The Libby Starks Band. You know what they are? Libby Starks.

[A]

Very Small Blonde Girls is a blonde

[B]

chick in a cowboy hat. And then a bunch of dudes behind her says under them, real country, real music, real fun. Okay.

[A]

There's not a lot of diversity in the music so far.

[B]

Not really. No. No.

[A]

You're getting.

[B]

You know what you're getting here. Then there is Cowboy Hour with Heath Wright and Chris Hempfling.

[A]

We got two of them.

[B]

We should be at Hempfling and Mitke together to form the Worst Name Band of Mitke. And Hempfling, I think, is how many albums have they sold?

[A]

Dad, you got to take a. You got to take a beat before you pronounce that band. Yeah, you do get all the syllables and consonants in there.

[B]

It's too much. It's too hard. Hits hard everywhere.

[A]

So a lot of consonants.

[B]

Chase Prince and the Redemption. And then Stormy Sullivan, some chick. And then the Dustin Boyd Band.

[A]

Yeah, Dustin Boyd. He's gonna put his name on it.

[B]

All these people have cowboy hats. It's just too much.

[A]

They all sing the same shit, same song. What's the point? Just have one of them.

[B]

Oh, he's gonna sing his song about beer in a parking lot now. Okay, that's good. Oh, his. Oh, he added a pickup truck to it. This is. He's really.

[A]

They all gotta have a meeting beforehand so that they don't all cover the same Toby Keith song.

[B]

It's like comics beforehand if you're on a lineup with people. And like, there was another comic whose son was aut. So we would literally get together and go, which jokes are you doing? And are you gonna do your raw dal do? Well, okay, you do that section. That's nothing like my shit over there. So we can, you know, we can both do that.

[A]

Tell you what, you talk about your kid's school. I'll do everything else.

[B]

Yeah. I'll do the home stuff and, you know, I'll do that. So. Crime rate in this town, what we are interested in property crime just under the national average, which a town of a thousand people, it seems like it should be farther below it than that. Then violent crime, murder, rape, robbery, and of course, assault. The Mount Rushmore of crime is also. Is about 20% under the average. So.

[A]

Okay, well, that's what happened. You cover my Toby Keats on.

[B]

So that said, let's talk about some murder. What do you say here? Let's do it. Okay, let's start out hot. January 6th, 1981 in Arkansas. Yikes.

[A]

Summer of 81.

[B]

January 6th.

[A]

Oh, January. Not June. Yeah.

[B]

No, no. January 6th. Winter of 81.

[A]

I gotta see a doctor.

[B]

You gotta see a doctor. We'll go back to that again. No wonder why he couldn't follow Widow's Bay.

[A]

You just said the moment.

[B]

Summer. What goddamn day did he say that was that they're doing here? Who'd they find in the basement? What's going on?

[A]

I heard a J and an N. Yeah, that's June.

[B]

Yeah, that works. 1:30pm Juana Price, young lady, 21 years old, she calls up a company called Baldor Electric Company where her husband Larry works as a machinist. He's 22, young couple, just got married. Now they say that Larry said. Larry said that. They said that Larry had called in and said that he wasn't going to be at work that day. She's like, what are you talking about? He's going to be at work that day? That's crazy. Now the reason why she's calling at 1:30 is because they were supposed to meet at lunch at noon and he never showed up. So she's like, what the fuck is going on here? So it's 1:30. So she calls his work like, hey, dickhead, I waited for you. Because this is pre cell phones and everything like that. Two hours go by, she doesn't hear from him. And back then you could call a couple of people and that was pretty much it. You pretty much just had to wait after that. So 3:30pm she calls Baldor again and is told that the man who called in to tell them that Larry would not be there wasn't Larry. Some other guy called.

[A]

Oh, somebody called in for Larry.

[B]

Someone called in for Larry. She gets to the bottom of it. You talk to Larry and they're like, no, no, no, some guy called for him. They're like, who? What are you talking about? Who calls in for you?

[A]

81 was a different time. Can you imagine somebody calling in for you?

[B]

Unless you're like, you know, in the emergency room and your spouse calls in for you or whatever. Exactly. Your spouse or like your mother or somebod, but not your.

[A]

Not just a random dude.

[B]

Hey, Chuck, call me in to work, will you? You do that for me, please? Like, imagine asking your buddy, hi, my

[A]

name is Chuck, I'm calling in for Larry.

[B]

Larry ain't gonna be there today. Yeah, well, I guess there's only limited questions they could ask. Well, why isn't he coming in? I don't know, he didn't tell me. He just said to tell y' all he wasn't coming. Oh, okay. So there's one way. So then 5pm comes up, and now Juana's starting to get upset here.

[A]

Still no Larry.

[B]

Still no Larry. So her and a neighbor who is a friend of theirs also actually go down to the Fort Smith police station to file a missing persons report about him. Because as far as she knew he was going to work that day. She saw him in the morning, they had lunch plans, and now he's just disappeared into thin air.

[A]

He didn't show up to work, he didn't show up to lunch now. He's not home for dinner now.

[B]

Well, it's five, so, yeah, she's just. She was going down after 3:30 when she heard that. I think she sat around, you know, machinated on it for a minute and then was like, we should probably report him missing. Right. So they go on down to the police station and they meet with Detectives James Davis and Ray Tate. Tate says, I'll bite. Let's see what's going on. And he says, lead me over to the apartment that you guys live at. I'm gonna look around and then I'll start from there, basically. So 6:04pm, Detective Tate, well, he radios the police station at 6:04pm he gets in his car and follows Gentry, and Gentry is her friend Joanna Price and Gentry to the apartment complex. Gentry's the last name? Gentry's, yes, the last name. We'll talk about the first name and middle name because they're interesting. So Gentry and Juana lead him there. Tate radios the police dispatcher at 6:04pm and says he has arrived at the apartment. Now, from there, there is contact coming into him. People are trying to get ahold of him on the radio to find out status and things like that. He does not answer his radio after that and never radios back again. Oh, gone, Disappeared. Just not answering the radio. So they're like, okay, well, maybe it died. Doubt it, but maybe it died. But. So the detective they're looking for is William Ray Tate, goes by Ray here. And Tate here, he's born June 14, 1947. So was he 34 at this point? Oh, yeah.

[A]

Young man. That's wild.

[B]

33, young man. He's from Siloam Springs in Benton County. And police can't reach Tate on his radio by 6:30, so they start to be a little bit worried. And whether or not it died or not, they still want to know. So at 7:10pm Detective Davis, the other guy, he goes to the apartment as well, goes to the address that he knew Tate was going to. He shows up to find the door ajar. He's like, okay. He opens the door and doesn't see anybody. There's no Tate. There's no Joanna Price, Joanna's friend.

[A]

Is there no car or anything like that?

[B]

No, that's the thing. Nothing is there. But he does find the telephone receiver cord ripped from its socket. And he finds his partner's flashlight. It's like a horror movie lens down on the table, you know, standing up, as they said on one of the mag lights. And he said that's one of our flashlights. He's like, why the fuck would he never leave his flashlight behind?

[A]

Never.

[B]

That's crazy. Hey everybody. Just gonna take a quick break from the show to tell you how to find really cool stuff with Poshmark.

[A]

Poshmark.com or the app.

[B]

Or the app user. This Poshmark is very cool though because like I'm always looking for like different stuff, cool stuff we have to go on stage and stuff. So you want to, you know, something a little different. Something a little whatever.

[A]

Unique.

[B]

Something a little unique and your own life. You don't want to just dress like everybody else or look exactly like everybody else. Maybe you want a little vintage thing or maybe you want a little, you know, kind of a one of a kind type of deal. You're gonna find that at Poshmark exactly like I did. I found a very cool like old school leather jacket that was just exactly what I was looking for for years. And it's vintage, it's very cool. You can find stuff like this or anything. Top fashion brands. It's amazing. Poshmark is the leading fashion resale marketplace shaped by real people and real style. Millions of new and pre loved items from taily wardrobe staples to vintage luxury fashion archive worthy pieces you thought you missed forever. Current essentials One of a kind vintage finds. It's all there telling you, looking for like Louis Vuitton, Prada, stuff like that. The real high end good stuff they have, they got it. I mean it's there. Fendi, all that good stuff, they have it and you can find, like I said, vintage things or unique ones or maybe one that wasn't. You couldn't find it in your area but somewhere else. It's really cool. They have all this stuff and you should get in there and do it here. And when you're ready for a closet refresh, you can earn real money by selling the pieces you're ready to part with. Reaching more than 80 million users on the platform. And you'll just have fun looking through it too. And you're gonna find all sorts of great stuff. Find what feels like you shop and share your style on Poshmark today. New deals and styles are listed every day. So don't wait. Download the Poshmark app and use the code Smalltown murder when you sign up to get $10 off your first purchase. Or shop now at poshmark.com smalltownmurder and get $10 off your first purchase. That's P-O S H-mark.com smalltownmurder now back to the show. Hey, everybody. Just gonna take a quick break from the show and tell you the best food to feed your cat. Smalls.

[A]

Smalls.com Absolutely.

[B]

I love Smalls, and that's because I care about my kitty. Yeah, I care about Brandi. I want her to tell you. Every morning I wake up, she, like, knows I'm awake. She climbs on the bed, climbs on my chest, sits on me for a minute. Even if I have to go the bathroom or whatever, I gotta give her her pets and feel the kitty purrs in the morning. Because we love our cats. We love them. And here's something that's crazy. I don't even mind scooping the cat's litter box anymore. Honestly, I really don't. Ever since we started feeding the cat, we started giving little Brandy Smalls her poop's been healthier, smaller, and a lot less stinky as well.

[A]

Easier.

[B]

Easier. That's because Smalls is fresh human grade cat food that's made from high quality meat, not cheap fillers. Meat is easy for cats to digest. They're little carnivores. That's what they are. That's what they do. Which means their bodies absorb more nutrients and healthier poops come out of the other side of them there. So in contrast, the stuff a lot of people feed their cat and what we used to feed the cat is made with grains and artificial ingredients that aren't easy on the cat's body. That's why you get nasty poops that you don't want to scoop. And Smalls isn't just good for digestion. 88% of cat parents say that after feeding Smalls, their cat is softer, shinier, has more energy to play, and overall just seems healthier because it's really good for cats. And it really is. Brandy is bounding all over. She's having such a good time. You can tell she likes it because I look at the food and I go, that doesn't look bad for me. I eat that. It's pretty good. So if you want to invest in your cat's health, Smalls is giving you 60% off your cat cat's first order, plus free shipping and free treats. When you go to smalls.com stm if your cat doesn't like it, Smalls will refund 100% of your order. But trust me, your cat's gonna love the taste of Smalls. And you'll love that your house no longer smells like a litter box all the time. That's 60% off, plus free shipping. And free treats when you go to smalls.com stm so stop serving your little carnivore a bowl of processed shortcuts for a limited time because you're a small town murder listener. You get get 60% off your first order plus free shipping and free treats for life when you head to smalls.com stm that's 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life when you head to smalls.com stm

[A]

now back to the show.

[B]

So at this point, no people phone ripped out of the wall, his partner's flashlight there. Now they freak out.

[A]

Now, alien abduction kind of shit.

[B]

Yeah. By 8pm it is a full on search for Tate's police car. Which is an unmarked car, by the way, which also doesn't help anything.

[A]

Oh, that's not helpful.

[B]

That's not helpful. At least a marked car easier to find. It's just a blue sedan. So it's hard to find in 81

[A]

when they didn't have trackers on those.

[B]

No trackers, no gps. You just had to look. So who knows? Now let's find out who the hell they were looking for to begin with when they went in. Larry. Larry A. Price is his name. Larry is the missing person. He is born April 1, 1959. He was, you know, 21 at this point in time. For Christ's sake. Didn't even turn 22 yet. He's got a dad named Burl, which is a great dad name. B U R L. Burl. Like Burl Ives. The guy who sings the Christmas songs. Fucking. That's a real old dad name.

[A]

I like any name like that.

[B]

This is my dad, Burl. Burl sounds cool.

[A]

Milty. Uncle Milt. That's a good name too.

[B]

Milton Berle. Yeah. Cause he's Milton Berle. Yeah.

[A]

Because he's a kind old man. It's just such a.

[B]

He is not a kind old man. Milton Burl.

[A]

He wasn't kind.

[B]

Fuck no. He was the biggest dick in show business. Everyone hated him.

[A]

I've never heard that. I heard he had biggest dick in show business.

[B]

He had a. He loved showing it to everybody. But he was a complete asshole, that guy. Everybody hated him. Yeah, no one liked Milton Burrow. He's a real dick.

[A]

No kidding.

[B]

Yeah, real dick.

[A]

Well, never mind.

[B]

Look up his contract that he signed in the early 50s. It's incredible. It's incredible to what? To TV? A TV deal. Because before. Because back when TV first started, it was only like in the New York City area. And he was. He got like an 80 share, like the whole. Everyone that had a TV watched him. So they were like, oh, man, we got to get this guy signed. So they signed him to like a 25 year deal for like, like crazy money every week. And then by the time it started going national in like two years, nobody watched him anymore because they were like that beast. Too New Yorky and too whatever. So they really lost their asses on the deal. It's really interesting.

[A]

Whoops. They met hard.

[B]

He made money for decades, though. Milton Berle. So he's got a mom named Geraldine. Burl and Geraldine. Those are parents there?

[A]

Hell yeah.

[B]

And his wife is Joanna Claudette Parker Price now, but she was born Joanna Claudette Parker. She's born August 13, 1959, so they're only a few months apart. Her dad is named Claude, which is why she's Claudette. And her mom's name is Patsy Parker. Patsy Parker. Great names, great names for parents. She came from a very small community here, I guess. Larry was from Flat Rock and she was from Lamar, which is a very small town. But they met in high school and they started dating in the 12th grade when they were seniors, which was like a year and a half ago.

[A]

Yeah, it was a minute ago. Yeah, but it's all in Arkansas, huh?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it's all in the little area here. They had fun together. They have a lot of things in common. She's real shy. Larry's real outgoing. She's short, he's tall. They get. It all works here. They said. They literally said, we both have very thick brown hair. We'd make pretty babies. And so they got married as you do when it's. You're in Arkansas and it's 19 fucking 78.

[A]

You're cute enough.

[B]

Yep. They get married in August of 1978, which means that. Shit, he was, good God, almost 20, right? Well, he was born in 59, so, yeah, 19, barely. She wasn't even 19. Interesting. Okay, so they get married now. So high school sweethearts get married. Larry gets a job at Baldor Electric Company as a machinist. So that's what he's been doing. And Joanna has a job too, but she's training to be a registered nurse. She's going to school for that. And so they get an apartment together, and they get an apartment managed and partially owned by a guy named Holly. By a guy named Holly Kim Gentry.

[A]

Is that right?

[B]

Holly Kim is his name.

[A]

Awesome.

[B]

I'll give you the explanation for that, by the way. He's born August 12, 1953, real nice guy, this Holly. Holly Gentry, from what everybody says. Just like a real. Like a easygoing, everybody likes him, goes with the flow type of guy. Befriended them pretty cool. Quickly after renting them their apartment here. He's a part owner of the complex also. And so he manages it. He's a nice guy. He's from Alma, Arkansas. His dad is named Robert. He has a brother and a sister and also a sister that died in infancy in 1948.

[A]

Damn it.

[B]

47 to 48 here. He graduated from Alma High School, which I believe we've talked about Alma before here on the show.

[A]

That sounds familiar.

[B]

And then he went to the University of Arkansas and graduated from there, too.

[A]

Attaboy.

[B]

He was a manager of Phoenix Village Mall and also part owner of this apartment complex.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

He goes very much into church, where he's a member of the choir and. Yeah. Former member of the deacons of the church and a commander of the Royal Rangers. A member. Which is. I don't know what that is. I guess it's part of the Crawford County Mounted Patrol. So I guess it's like a voluntary royal unit that rolls out the horses when there's a problem. I don't know why you would need that. Like riot control in a town of a thousand people, but on horseback.

[A]

That's fucking. That's frightening, too. That's aggressive.

[B]

Well, they use that in, like, Manhattan where there's huge crowds of people to control. This is because even Fort Smith, where he hangs out, is still 80,000 people.

[A]

What could be the crowd?

[B]

That's what I'm saying. I don't know where they're getting a crowd from. You'd really have to gather everybody to get a crowd. So he's also a member of the Christian Men's Business Committee and the International Council of Shopping Centers, which. I had no idea there was an International Council of Strip Malls, but there is. And we're talking about.

[A]

He's talking all for himself.

[B]

He's also named. And this. You could take it either way because we've mentioned this one other time on the show. And the guy who we talked about was a horrible murderer. That was a part of it. He is named in one of the books of the Outstanding Young Men of America. Again. It's back again. The Outstanding Young man of America. My God, I can't believe it exists. It's the funniest thing in the world. I really want every copy of all those. Just to look up those people and find out how many of them are, like, murderers and rapists.

[A]

I want to look at all of your child molesters.

[B]

I love it. So he's got a wife and a son. A wife and a son. Holly. Kim. He has plans for building a strip mall. And he is right on target for the. The timing on that. 1980 Strip malls are blowing up. He and his brother Mark, who was a minister and taught at the Central Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, they said they felt called to build the stores. God said we need a yarn barn. God said the dollar general must go here.

[A]

We feel we need a TV repair shop, a coin operated laundromat.

[B]

Gotta have a Laundromat. Then you gotta have a dry cleaner too, just in case. You never know. So that's what's going on. Maybe an ice cream shop, something like that. So. And they needed. Well, they said the calling was to build the stores so that they'd make more money to finance Mark's mission work. So that's the calling.

[A]

Oh, the whole goal is to get to those underdeveloped countries and lock them

[B]

into Christianity and then fucking guess. And then tell them a new lie. And the ones they've been told their whole life. Yeah. More money. Perpetual. Money perpetual. They were both devoted to church here. Super into it. The faith assembly of God in Fort Smith. And Holly Gentry does youth work with his church too. And he said he felt the need to carry the gospel to the young children in other parts of the world.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

So the Royal Rangers, by the way, are a group of. Of children that he leads kids on horseback. Not on horseback at all. He just also is part of the mounted people. But the Royal Rangers are like the Christian Boy Scouts in this area. I think they like to. Which is basically the Boy Scouts. He takes them camping and hiking and all that kind of shit, which is what they do. The year before he took them all the way to the Rockies to camp out.

[A]

It's a long ride.

[B]

Now, his name, he explained it that my sweet mama, Odessa Howard loved cowboys. That's what she said. And he said that she saw a movie with Jimmy Stewart and he played a hero whose name was Holly. That is how he got the name Holly. And then they went, might as well go all the way and name him Kim as his middle name.

[A]

They didn't get Kimberly. He just got Kim.

[B]

Kim K, I M. That's it. So yeah, they're like, maybe people think he's Asian. And they laughed.

[A]

It is interesting how cowboys got a lot of girl names. They do. They do a shitload of them.

[B]

It's an interesting. I wonder why I don't know.

[A]

I don't know. I don't know what that is. I'd love to read a book.

[B]

You gonna follow it?

[A]

Probably not. I just want to know why they did that. But it's, it's a very.

[B]

That's interesting.

[A]

There's a lot of Tracy's, a lot of Stacy's, There's. There's a lot of ladies names in cowboy culture.

[B]

Was it Johnny Cash that did it?

[A]

No, it was before.

[B]

Or was it before that? Or was he just commenting on the, on the trend?

[A]

There's been boys named Lauren since, since the 1800s.

[B]

Yeah, that was. Yeah, yeah. Spelled L, O, R, E, N. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's different. I think. I think that came before the women's name of Lauren. Honestly.

[A]

It might have.

[B]

I never, I've never read about anybody from the 17th century named Lauren.

[A]

There was a lot of Laura.

[B]

Laura, yeah. Lauren I think came later. That sounds like a 70s name. Lauren.

[A]

I'll bet it's. I mean, I'll bet it. I'll bet it's better. That's pioneer shit.

[B]

Probably. Who knows? December 16, 1980 comes around. Now the prices. Larry and Joanna agree to help Holly Gentry sell a car for him. Holly's got a lot of shit going on. He's a very busy guy and he doesn't have time to take calls and sell this car. So he said, hey, if you guys get calls, if you have time, just, will you show this car for me and just kind of whatever, try to sell it for me.

[A]

Me.

[B]

And they're friends, so they agree. So they put an ad in the paper on December 16th. It's a classified ad in the Southwest Times Record. And it reads, must sell. 1979 Ford Ltd, two door silver with maroon top and interior, very clean, $4,295.

[A]

Interesting color scheme of that car.

[B]

Strange. And that's like a year old car. It's a 79. We're in December of 80 and 42.95 is the price. See at 7:10 North 48th, apartment one. Or call 785-4185. Okay, so by January 5th, they still have the car, still haven't sold the car. Which around the week of Christmas is not a great time to sell a car.

[A]

You're going to move $4,000 worth of car in that 81. That's. Yeah.

[B]

People A, need money for Christmas.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And B, it's just not, you know, it's not a matter of necessity. Yeah, it's not a necessity. And you're also busy Right. You got family and all, you know, kids and all. You have time to go look at 4,000.

[A]

That's around what that car costs. New anyway.

[B]

I don't know. An 80, who knows? I don't know what kind of features it was.

[A]

Brand new, five, something like that.

[B]

The 80. They were more than that by 80, were they? Yeah, because it's a big car. It's a pretty chunky car. Probably get a Toyota for that price back then. I don't think you can get anything more than that. January 5, 1981, 8:30am okay, this is. Someone wanted to see the car. All right, so Larry answered his apartment door and lets a man in who's interested in the car. Okay? They go out and take a test drive of the car, go out and take a spin real quick. So they go out. He says, sure, I'll go with you here. So Juana is still in the house and it's January, it's cold and she is going back. This is her first day back, I guess. No, it's not quite started yet. Nursing school. So she's doing nursing school. She has one more week off for Christmas break and then she goes back to nursing school. So she's doing a part time job, secretarial work at the Phoenix Village Mall, which her neighbors got her and her friends got her that job. And then she's got to go back to class and do all that shit. So I guess. What is it? West Ark. West Ark. Fort Smith is where she. It's a community college in Fort Smith. West Ark. Like western Arkansas wasn't far. So that's where she's been going. She's always wanted to be a nurse and she's eager to get back to school too, I guess she's into. She does pediatrics. Psychology and ICU are her areas, which are all interesting areas. Now Larry's out for a test drive. She's getting dressed for her day at work in the bedroom. And yeah, so somebody had come that morning and she said, yeah, whatever, great deal. So Juana puts her shoes on. She's got khaki slack, she's got some brown shoes. She puts those on a white top and she's getting ready. She could hear the man and her husband returned in the living room.

[A]

Oh yeah, you can hear that car coming.

[B]

She heard the door close, okay, in the living room. Now she wanted to get rid of this car already number one, because it was only going to be in the paper for another couple days. And then they'd had to rerun the ad so that's annoying. And she felt bad about it. She wished that she and Larry could afford to buy it because it was a nice car. But they were, you know, young couple like this, they can't afford a car like that, so too new for them. Now, one of the neighbors had told them that a man had come by on Saturday afternoon to look at the car. And he told Larry, to tell you the truth, he didn't look like he could afford that car. And Larry said, oh, don't judge a book by its cover. You never know. That's a fact. You never know where someone's coming for, especially on a Saturday. He could have been doing anything. Could have been working in his yard, then decided to look at a car. And he looks like a bum, but he's. He's very wealthy. He owns that big house that we did in the real estate report. Yeah, it's like I got 900,000 sunk into Arkansas.

[A]

He owns all four of those places.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. But the car needs to get sold. Like we said, the 6th of January is the last day it's going to run, which is the next day. So there we go. Now she walks out of the bedroom, says hi to Larry, asks how the test drive was. Yeah, you know, Larry said, you know, this guy, I think he wants to buy the car. So they're like, great. Larry made. She notices Larry made coffee because there was two cups out on the coffee table. So, you know, immediately brought this guy in, gave him a cup of coffee.

[A]

Awesome.

[B]

Larry's a nice guy. So they were doing that. So he looked a little disheveled, this guy. He had a blue jacket frayed around the collar and sleeves, and underneath that, he had a blue shirt with what looked like an insulated shirt under it. Okay. And he had a mustache and long, curly sideburns and a big comb over. Over his bald spot. This guy.

[A]

That's a hell of an outfit.

[B]

That is quite looking. Nah, that's how you want to look right there. All the ladies, once he gets in that ltd, I mean, honestly, it's going to be dangerous. The. The amount of fucking women that are gonna bum rush him is gonna be dangerous.

[A]

The human personification of a 79 Ford LTT, he is.

[B]

But he'd be like a 72 with some rust on the doors in 80. 79's still pretty new. This guy's been around. He's been through the ringer a little bit here, so that's what he's doing. He's got glasses that are kind of out of style. Thick lenses, black frames. Like the 60s or he's in prison, one of those. Or the army or something. He's thin.

[A]

What's his goddamn name? Shit, now it doesn't matter.

[B]

Ed Kemper.

[A]

No.

[B]

Is that who you're going for?

[A]

San Francisco serial killer. Never caught him. The Zodiac. Bingo.

[B]

Zodiac. There you go. So, yeah, kind of like that. He's thin, kind of sunken in looking, but he looks wiry. Looks like he's not a pushover. He doesn't look frail. He just looks like sinewy, kind of. And also, he kind of smelled a little bit stinky. Yeah, like I said, he's gonna have to fight him off with a stick once he gets in that ltd. They're gonna be diving on the hood across the windshield. He's gonna be running the windshield wipers just to knock off the women they're diving on, throwing their panties, stuffing them

[A]

in the windows, turning the windshield wipers around and spraying water at the ladies. Get back.

[B]

Get back. Go, go. So that's how he is now. She wasn't sure that he looked like he could afford it, but that's not really her problem. And she's like, well, why would he look at a car he can't afford? So she took off. They made plans to see each other around noon. They made plans to try a Mexican place, which sounds terrifying. In 1981 in Arkansas. Can you imagine how shitty that Mexican food was?

[A]

Is it new and hip or is it just.

[B]

No, I mean, Mexican food is. At that point. Mexican food really didn't hit America till, like, the 70s. Outside of the Southwest, obviously. Really didn't hit till later. And there was people. I can't remember what I saw it on, but people were talking about in the 70s, they discovered nachos, and everyone was like, oh, my God, you can just get these chips and you put cheese on it and you just put it in the oven for a minute and it melts on there. It's incredible. That blew their fucking minds.

[A]

They didn't discover nachos. They discovered cheese on chips.

[B]

Cheese on chips. To them. Nachos. Yeah. This was in New York in the 70s, so, I mean, it was not very popular. So they talk about. Neither of them, I guess, like to wear coats for some reason, which is interesting. So they talk about seeing each other at noon, and she leaves and leaves Larry and this gentleman in the house here. So apparently he wanted to. Basically he asked if he could use the phone. He wants to call his wife to go over the car with her, basically. Okay, so Larry Says, sure. Phone's in the bedroom. I'll be right back. And he walks Joanna out to the car, and she takes her keys out of her purse, hands them to him for some reason, because he's gonna lock the door of the house. I don't know if they only have one set of keys. So anyway, he gives her. Oh, he unlocked the door and held it for her while she. I got it. He opens the door. He takes the keys, opens the door for her. She gets in. They've been married very short amount of time, and that's that. And then gives the keys back to her, and she leaves with those two in the house alone. Now, while this is going on, the man inside is in their dresser snooping through their drawers. Oh, and he finds a checkbook and tears out a check and puts the checkbook back. Okay, okay. So this guy's basically trying to get Larry to take him with the car to go see his wife so his wife can see the car. That's what's going on at this point. So apparently, from what we understand, they left in the car together to go show his wife is what they think here. And they're talking small talk and all that kind of shit. Now, noon comes around, and Larry Price does not show up at lunch. No tacos for Larry. So that's when Joanna calls a neighborhood and asked the neighbor, will you go check on him? Basically, her friend Carol, who lived in the same apartment complex, and she said, I'm sorry to ask you, but do you mind walking down and seeing if Larry's home? He's supposed to pick me up for lunch, and I'm kind of worried. Basically, he hasn't come. She said, also, see if that car that's for sale is still parked out front. So see if that guy bought that car or not, basically. So Juana gives her the office number to where she's at, and they go. So Carol calls back and said, I called and got no answer. Then I went down and knocked on the door a bunch of times. Your cat peeked through the curtains, but I didn't see any people. Okay, that's that. They said, what about the car? Was the car there? Larry always parks in a certain spot, and that's where she'd left him earlier. And so she's like, you know. And they said, yes, Larry's car is there, but the car he's selling was gone. So his car's there. He won't answer the door, or he's not home, and the for sale car is gone. So now she's really worried Joanna now, she's like, none of that is right. None of that's right.

[A]

Yeah, as long as there's. If there's no Larry, then, yeah, we got a problem.

[B]

We got a problem. He's not answering the door, but his car's there, but the other car's gone and he's not. It's strange. And he's not at work, so it makes no sense. Like I said, she called Baldor Electric at 1 o' clock and called again at 3:30 and then at 5 o' clock went down with Holly Gentry. Right, the cop, the neighbor. No, no, Holly Gentry.

[A]

Oh, the boss.

[B]

Yeah, the neighbor, the guy with the complex who's selling the car. She goes with him to the police station to say, what the fuck? Basically, right, so Ray Tate, he takes the case. Detective Tate, 604. He calls in. I'm here, I'm at the location, what up? And then 6:30 comes around and he's not heard from again.

[A]

Answering again after that.

[B]

Now, a little bit about William Ray Tate here, the detective. He's got a wife, he's got two kids, he's got a boy and a girl. He's got a wife named Anita. He joined the Fort Smith Police Department in June of 76, and for the last two years or so he's been a detective. He's also a master sergeant in the Air National Guard, the Arkansas Air National Guard reserves, and was a recruiter for them as well. So he does a lot, but he can't be reached on his radio. So at 7pm that is when his partner, Detective Davis, who by the way, goes by Pancho here. So Detective Davis here gets a call and it's Burl Price, Larry's dad.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And he's like, that's interesting. He sounded very worried and he said, I helped fill out the missing person report on your son. How can I help you and dad? Burrell said, we were supposed to meet Joanna at her apartment, but she's not there. She called us this afternoon and begged us to come to Fort Smith. And they said, well, what time was this? When did you get to the apartment? And Burl says, we got here about 6:30, but the place was empty and the lights were on. We went over to Tom Gilbert's apartment and he called the police station for me. But the lady, whoever she was, told us that Detective Tate and Juana and Holly had left earlier. So that's at least if you're, you know, that's some sort of relief. Where is my daughter? In Law. Well, she went to the police station and then left with a detective.

[A]

Left with a cop. That's good.

[B]

Yeah. At least she's safe, they think here. The detective says, where are you now? And Burl says, we're at Tom Gilbert's apartment and we waited, but then we went over to the state police headquarters to see if they could help us. But we're back here at Tom's now and we're scared to death. Juana's parents are here with me and my wife. So, I mean, by 6:30, everyone's families are there looking for them, all gathered together.

[A]

They at least care about each other. They talk a lot and communicate enough to where they know something's off.

[B]

Yeah, and they're young, they're still young. So it's not like I think they think of these people as kids still, you know, and you want to find out where they are. So this detective said, I will be there. Detective Davis said, it'll take me about 10 minutes. I'll be there, don't worry. I'm on the way. So 7:10pm, the front door to apartment 1 slightly ajar. So he walks inside hesitatingly, like we said at the top of the show. The front door leads directly to the living room. He sees two coffee cups that Joanna had mentioned earlier sitting on the table in front of the couch. And next to the cups was a large face down flashlight, the cop's flashlight. So he said, oh, this is strange. So he goes into the apartment a little further and looks around and notices that it's really clean and tidy. No dirty dishes, no dirty clothes tossed on chairs, just tidy. Very, very tidy. He said he sees a lot of the inside of homes and this was pretty fucking immaculate compared to most other places. He goes, yeah, he said, obviously they take care of their home and they seem like decent people here in the bedroom, the bed is made, the room is in perfect order. The phone is still plugged into the wall, but the wires to the phone itself had been jerked out.

[A]

Jerked out of the back of the

[B]

phone, the receiver wires pulled out. It's probably one of those where it's connected. Not the plug in ones. Back then it was still. You got your phone from the phone company and it was that big fucking.

[A]

Yeah, it's like soldered into the receiver and soldered into the box.

[B]

Big line that goes in the back. Yeah, and that's. What's that? Now, Juana had told the detectives earlier that she knew where the papers were to the Gentry car that was for sale. So this cop looks around to see if he can see any envelopes or manila folders lying around that look like they might contain official paperwork. And he didn't find anything. So he walks across the apartment yard to a home across the street and asks to use their phone. He calls the police station and asks for an alert to be put out for missing people. Juana Price, Holly Gentry, Larry Price, who's already reported missing. And now add Detective Ray Tate to the mix too, because he ain't here and his car isn't here. His flashlight's here, but he's not answering his radio. There's a problem. So that's crazy. He didn't want to use his radio because he didn't want. That's why he called on the phone, because he didn't know if somebody had a scanner. Whoever did this and would know what was going on and now they know to run. He also asked that a team be sent out to the apartment to take fingerprints and perform an investigation. To lock it down, basically. Then he walks back to the apartment complex and he finds Burl Price again. And he says, it looks like Detectives Tate's police car is missing. His flashlight's on the coffee table. The phone is torn up and ripped out. I just called the station and we've put out an alert. My guess is they've all been kidnapped, but we're gonna find him, which is not what you want to hear from the cops when you call. My guess is everybody's been kidnapped, but it'll be fine.

[A]

My guess is we have four separate kidnappings and this person's so badass they

[B]

can get detectives, even an armed detective and everything, which seems far fetched, you know what I mean? That that would happen.

[A]

Seems like a tough. That's probably the hardest kidnapping.

[B]

An on duty police officer, probably. Yeah, he's got a lot on guard.

[A]

He's a tough one.

[B]

Yeah, he's on guard. He's got a gun. He's got several weapons.

[A]

Not on a swivel. Straighten situational awareness. This guy's not fucking around.

[B]

No. So 8:00pm, the Arkansas and Oklahoma police all start to search because now there's a missing. It's one thing if you got a missing couple or three missing people, but when there's a missing cop, then they all seem to really have a lot of energy about it at that point.

[A]

It's interesting, isn't it?

[B]

Yeah, it's interesting. So they start the search at 10:45pm Two hours and 45 minutes later, a Holly Gentry's Limited is found the silver

[A]

with the red top. That one.

[B]

Not bad. They find it. It is at the Central Mall in Fort Smith. Oh, there are people you are told to trust. Lawyers, teachers, especially doctors. But what happens when you put your life in someone's hands and they betray you? The hit podcast Dr. Death is back. And this season is unlike any other. Dr. Death the Cowboy is the story of a charming neurosurgeon who rode into western town selling a Persona of confidence and care. He wore cowboy boots in the operating room and became sought after by patients. He promised to heal them. Instead, he left a trail of broken bodies. This season is about a doctor who was never truly held accountable for the patients whose lives he ruined. A story of greed, betrayal, and a fight for justice that will leave you questioning who to trust. Listen to Dr. Death the Cowboy wherever you get podcasts or binge. The entire series right now only with audible. Hey, everybody. Just gonna take a quick break from the show to tell you about the best security you could possibly have. SimpliSafe.

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[A]

Way too late.

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[A]

Now back to the show.

[B]

I'm Serena Williams and I'm healthier on row. I've lost 34 pounds in a year. With GLP1's diet and exercise on RO, you can access GLP1 options including the first FDA approved GLP1 pill for weight loss. Go to Roe Co Journey to see if you qualify. 14 to 20% average weight loss in one year in non diabetics with obesity or overweight with a weight related medical condition versus 2.2% to 3.1% 1% in placebo arm Rx only. To stay informed about serious side effects, go to RO Co Safety. Okay, so that's where they find it. Within minutes, a bunch of people arrive at the scene, including Detective Davis. The car's locked, so they have to get a locksmith to open the doors. They also got someone to open the trunk because they wanted to see if perhaps Larry was in the trunk of his car. Anything's in the trunk.

[A]

Or anybody.

[B]

Yeah, anybody. And if he was, was he dead? He could have been alive. They open the trunk completely empty except for a spare tire, like you were just selling it and you cleared all your shit out of There no map books or anything like that. Now the car is taken to the police garage to be fingerprinted and processed for all physical evidence. They're happy to have found the ltd, but they're saying the car is very near the Interstate 540, which connects to the Interstate 40, which we don't like that. If the kidnapper ditched the LTD and took off with or without these people, he could be in Tennessee by now. Or he could be in Texas by now. Or he could be.

[A]

Three hour head start.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah, he could be anywhere halfway through Oklahoma by now. So they didn't know. They didn't know if the kidnapper ditched the LTD and sped away, did he have Larry Price with him? And if that's. And also, where the fuck are Holly Gentry, Juana Price and Detective Tate? Where'd they go? Someone else kidnapped them. What's happening right now? Like, this is all very confusing.

[A]

If he stole Larry and took off with him, like people were looking for them hours later.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. Before the detective was even on the scene. So it makes no sense then. 11:25pm so this is almost the next day. Less than 45 minutes later, still that evening, 11:25pm, they find Detective Tate's car.

[A]

Found his car now, not bad.

[B]

Within three hours of starting the search, they found both cars they were looking for. It's pretty impressive, honestly, without GPS, it is recovered at a Union 76 truck stop. So big truck stop, gas station. There are 57 unexplained miles on the odometer, by the way.

[A]

57.

[B]

57 unexplained miles that are not like, from the apartment to here. 57. The extra miles, they don't know where the hell they came from because every time they get in the car, they have to do mileage so they know exactly what it is. That's 1125. There is. Yeah. So they're trying to figure it out. And there's dust on the car. Like a lot of dust. Yeah, like dirt road dust. So they're like this looks like. Because it was clean when Detective Tate got in it. So it looks like it may have been driven on dirt roads for possibly 57 miles.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Which is a bad sign when someone's been kidnapped and you've been taken on a dirt road. Now the cops, they're trying to figure out what's going on here. They say this is a quote from the police captain. He says Detective Tate and Mr. Gentry were with Mrs. Price, who was a witness. That's the only thing we can attach to this because they're like, what does this have to do with Larry Price disappearing? And they're like, we don't know.

[A]

Right.

[B]

A cop came to investigate to find that out, and then he disappeared with the reporting people too. So who the hell knows what's going on here?

[A]

However, he's. Whatever it has in common, it has something real in common.

[B]

Yeah. And he said, we don't know, though. We just don't know. We can attach it that they happen on the same day, but other than that, we don't know. So they suspend looking. They find the cars and suspend looking for people because they have no idea where they're even looking until 6am the next morning. So let's go home, get a couple hours sleep, and then come back and figure this shit out, essentially. So police begin a day of searching on January 6, 1981, 6:00am 100 cops organized for a search effort. It's a lot.

[A]

How do you even. There's got to be more than one person and more than one car because this car's. There's cars everywhere.

[B]

There's that car. Yeah. All the cars that they. They found both the cars they're looking for. So now there's a third car somewhere, obviously. Or a four car.

[A]

These two cars aren't anywhere near each other. Yeah.

[B]

And what are the odds of someone getting kidnapped? You report it, get a cop over there, and then you're all kidnapped too.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

The odds of that are crazy.

[A]

Outrageous.

[B]

Yeah, they're outrageous. So this is bonkers. At 9am there is a man waiting at the bank for the doors to open. Okay. Just waiting there to get a. They opened the bank for him. Now this guy said, my name's Thomas Simmons. I deposited a check Yesterday, on the 5th, the day of the disappearances. But I just found out from the guy who wrote it that it's no good. He said, oh, shit, I wrote you a check. It's going to bounce. He said, so I'd like to get that check back. I don't want to have to pay no fee on no return check. He said, which do you. If a check bounces that you deposit from someone else, you have to pay that fee or do they pay a fee? You both pay a fee.

[A]

I don't know who pays the fee there. I just know you don't get the funds.

[B]

I know you don't get the funds. So the teller, Elizabeth Arnold, asks for his address and bank account number and phone number and writes it all down. And then she asks for the name of the person who wrote the check? And he said, larry Price. It was on a Clarksville bank. So the teller recognized from the news the night before the 10 o' clock news, saying, larry Price is missing. She recognized the name, small town. And she said, I hope it's not that same man who was kidnapped yesterday.

[A]

She said that out loud?

[B]

She said that out loud? Yeah. Oh, my God. That's that name. I heard that yesterday. I hope it's not the guy who got kidnapped. And he said, I hope not, too. And she said, just a minute, sir. I have to talk with our bookkeeper. Her office is in the back, and she can tell me whether we can get the check back right now or not. So they go into the back room, talks to the bookkeeper, who happens to be married to a Van Buren, Arkansas policeman, by the way, of course, the assistant police chief, as a matter of fact. And the woman in the back, the bookkeeper, she recognized the name as well, Larry Price. And she tells the teller, go back and tell him that the check's already been sent off and we can't get it back. It goes first to Little Rock, then on to Clarksville. So it's going to be a few days, it'll be at least Friday before he can actually pick up the physical check. Okay, it's Tuesday. Now. She then said. She said that she told the man waiting at the counter, she goes out, I don't have the check. This guy leaves the bank. He goes, okay, and he leaves. Now. Now, while he's backing out of the parking space, the bookkeeper, whose husband's a cop, writes down his license plate number.

[A]

Smart move.

[B]

And calls her husband as soon as she gets back in the bank and said there was a guy in here trying to get a check back from a kidnapped guy. Don't know if it means anything, but you'd probably know more about this than me, possibly kidnapped guy. So they do all of that. They get his license plate number. Now, the day before he had come in and deposited the check. It was a $350 check.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And they said he deposited 300 and got 50 in cash. And they said then he tried to get the check back and whatever. So now he's being. They call it in. So now the license plate number's called into the police, and they figure out who this person is, and he wasn't lying at the bank about his name. His name is Thomas Winford Simmons, and he's 37 years old. And they find out when looking him up that he is a parolee from Federal Prison.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

At the moment, they find out he works at a sand and gravel company because his parole officer knows where he works.

[A]

And that's what they do.

[B]

That's helpful. You know exactly where those guys are. And they find out that he had not been at work the day before. He apparently had said he got in a car accident and called in.

[A]

Oh, car seems to be running.

[B]

Yeah. So that's what happened then. 3:14pm on the 6th. So this is all going on the bank and all that. They're looking for everybody at 3:14pm and we know the exact time because you'd remember this shit, put it that way. A farmer in the area, Clyde McClure, is doing some shit here. He notices blood on the ground near his diesel tank. And he says, my goddamn dog's killed a rabbit or something again. Farm dogs kill all sorts of shit. So then he returns and he walks off and comes back. When he comes back, he spots what he describes as bare flesh there. So he reports this to the police. And the police come in here and

[A]

just a chunk of it.

[B]

Just some bare flesh. Well, you can see, apparently they find some farm equipment. There is a large tractor tire near a mounted diesel fuel tank. And he said, I was coming back and I saw bare flesh. And I had a pretty good idea what it was. And they find out that it is bodies, is what it is.

[A]

Plural.

[B]

Three bodies. Three. How many? Looking for? Yeah. How many are we looking for?

[A]

There's still more out there.

[B]

We got four.

[A]

We're not done.

[B]

Three. So they discover these three bodies. It is a large tractor tire and. And there is five gallon oil containers all on top of it. Like that's what someone did to hide it. Just put some oil containers on there. They find out this is the bodies of Holly Gentry, Joanna Price and Detective Tate.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

They're all in this tractor. We still don't know where Larry is. They're all in a psychopath. Maybe Larry's a psychopath and he did all this shit, you know? They don't know. Now, Tate's hands were cuffed behind him with his own handcuffs.

[A]

Oh, really?

[B]

Yes. Juana Price was on the bottom of the pile. Gentry was bound with a small white cord that was around his hands. And then one was wrapped around one of his ankles. And he had, like, one shoe and one sock missing. Holly Gentry. Juana is on the bottom of the pile. They also find a.38 caliber revolver with traces of blood also found. And they find that all three have been shot execution style at the base of the skull.

[A]

Weird.

[B]

And all three have their collars of their shirts pulled like halfway over their head like they were being Cornholio.

[A]

What is that?

[B]

Notch. And I guess maybe for blowback or

[A]

draggin it, I don't know.

[B]

Well, there's also the gunshot is in the collar, so it was pulled over before the shooting happened. So I don't know if that is a way to stop. Stop the blowback is what I'm imagining. That's all I can think. So all three of them have been shot. The gun is a.38 Special Colt Cobra 6 shot with a 2 inch barrel. And these serial numbers are filed off of it.

[A]

Oh, a stolen one. Nice.

[B]

But they were able to. By the way, they don't find Detective Tate's service weapon. That's not in the. That's not his service weapon. So the serial numbers are filed off, but not very well, as we'll find out here. So. Yeah.

[A]

Each of those things stamped in so deep.

[B]

Yeah. On purpose because. So people can't easily file them off.

[A]

Yeah, it's very hard to file that off.

[B]

You gotta get some equipment. Yeah, you really do. Each of them were shot once at the base of the skull and killed execution style, like we said. So missing. Missing from the scene are all three of the wallets. And the two men's wallets and Joanna's purse are all missing. They weren't at the apartment either. Joanna's body they find has slight bruising in the genital area. And her pantyhose were on wrong side out. Wrong side out, inside out. And her belt was not looped through all the loops.

[A]

That's weird.

[B]

So that's not a good thing. We'll find out about that. Now the pistol is identified tentatively as the murder weapon, which is just pretty obvious. They have 38 holes in their head. There's a.38 there.

[A]

Probably the numbers filed off, didn't take it with them. It's probably the one.

[B]

They were able to figure out the numbers though, of the gun, the serial numbers. Now the search is. They're still searching now even more frantically for Larry Price because now they know what happened to the other three. So like where the fuck is he?

[A]

Yeah, he's willing to kill cops.

[B]

Yeah. Anything. So they said one of the police people announced, quote, we have very little hope of finding him alive.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Either he's the murderer or he's probably dead too. Right.

[A]

If he's not, he is.

[B]

Exactly. January 7th, 1981. The next day, Wednesday, 9:20pm man, there is a creek bed in Crawford County. At a recreation area. Pretty rural. Pretty. Gotta know where it is. In that creek bed they find the body of Larry Price. An anonymous. This is the wild part too. They found it because it's so rural. They weren't looking there. They found it because an anonymous caller called the sheriff's department and just said to search the recreation area and then left calls. And the phone call. We have no idea.

[A]

Hung up, you know what I mean?

[B]

And then walked away. That's it. Who's that guy? Right? Who the fuck is doing that? And that's the major mystery in this entire case. We never found out who made that fucking phone call.

[A]

That's crazy.

[B]

Which is crazy. We don't know who made the phone call. Someone made the phone call and said that. And his body is found. He has also shot exactly the same. Close range, base of the skull, shirt pulled over his head.

[A]

Clearly it's like somebody that minds their own business but also doesn't want that person to just rot out here.

[B]

Possibly. But yeah, somebody must have been told or something. So state medical examiner said that they probably. We'll find out. They figure out that he probably died after the other three, even though he was kidnapped well before they think from just what from the medical examiner thinks he was killed after. So figure out the math there. Now there is a cab driver because this gets hu. This is huge news locally. I mean this is. Not only are three people kidnapped and murdered, but a fourth and he's a fucking detective who was actively investigating a case. That's crazy. That doesn't happen. You know, the detectives are. Very few detectives get murdered on the job. Yeah, that's the good part about making detective. Now no one's going to shoot you while you fucking come up to their car. You know what I mean?

[A]

Generally you're putting bad guys in prison and they stay there for a long time. So you just have to present the evidence in court.

[B]

Yeah, you're not. When there's a liquor store robbery and they call the cops, you're not running there to stop the guy. Once everything's done and the crime scene's already set up, that's when you come in and start asking questions. But anybody dangerous is long gone. Usually with a detective, you know.

[A]

And isn't it interesting, they're usually. Usually the criminal is usually mad at the da, not the cops.

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

He's shooting bullets at the judge or firebombing the DA's house.

[B]

Well, it's one thing to make arrests and stuff like that, but it's another thing to go to court and tell everyone about it. That's the other thing that's really. You're gonna come and just blow up my spot in front of a room full of people? It seems more invasive, I think, to be sat down in front of a room full of people with a guy literally. Literally judging you with a fucking gavel. Judging. And then be like that.

[A]

Yeah, Very interesting.

[B]

So there's a taxi driver who says he picked up a man at the Central Mall at 5:20pm and took him to the apartment complex. That would line up. Right. And especially if you took their car, you wouldn't have a car to get back. So they. He said that that's what happened. He said that the cab driver would try to identify his passenger in a photo lineup or whatever. He said, though, there was also several apartments in this complex and that this may have been coincidental, but doesn't sound like it because the mall is where the car was found. And so this doesn't sound coincident.

[A]

How many people left that mall to go back to that apartment complex?

[B]

That's what I mean. How many times do you do that? Usually you got about 30 of those a day. Or is that once every couple weeks you have to do that. What are we talking about?

[A]

How many people in this apartment complex are relying on taxi cabs to get from the mall?

[B]

To go to the mall? Yeah. That's weird. So the medical examiner findings. This is crazy here. They figure out that Larry most probably died after Juana and Holly Gentry and Detective Tate. They also said through thorough investigations of Joanna's body, there was evidence of both. Both vaginal and anal rape. Yeah, she was raped both places there. The state later will say they think it was basically just minutes before she was shot. She was raped twice.

[A]

What is that about?

[B]

That's horrific. And she's the only one not tied up in that tire, too. They concluded that Price may have died after the other victims, but also said nobody can determine the exact times of death except those who witnessed the dying death. They determined that Larry could have died anywhere between 8am and 7:30pm on January 5th. And they estimate the time of death for the other victims sometime in the afternoon of January 5th. Which we know they were alive at 6 o' clock because they were pulling up to a police. To the apartment with a cop. So we know they were alive at six. So we know that that's not correct.

[A]

Jesus. But Larry may have witnessed what happened to his wife.

[B]

That's possible too. Or they may have been separate.

[A]

Oh, right.

[B]

Yeah. They said Mr. Price, most probably died after these people. Which makes no sense because it makes all the sense in the world when we figure out the timeline of everything. It makes all the sense in the world that you would take Larry, go kill him, then come back for more. Where the hell did he stash Larry when he came back to kidnap the other.

[A]

Right.

[B]

Did he have Larry with him, like just tied up in a. You know what I mean?

[A]

Like trunk of the car or something. Who knows?

[B]

Yeah, he didn't have a car. He had to take a taxi because he dropped the LTD off at the mall.

[A]

Right. He came back at five. Something.

[B]

Yeah, you can't. And he was a single guy. He didn't have Larry with him.

[A]

Yeah, Larry's got to be dead by now.

[B]

He's got to be dead by now or stashed somewhere. This isn't like, you know, they're not the Gambino family. They don't have a fucking basement where they got a guy tied to a chair for the next. It doesn't make sense.

[A]

Unless he stole the car. He'd have Larry with him if he stole the car. Unless he. Larry in the trunk.

[B]

Yeah. And they. Look, Larry wasn't in the trunk.

[A]

Right. But I mean, came back with the LT with the cop car and then pulled him out of the trunk. Maybe. And then did whatever.

[B]

Maybe.

[A]

But either way, Larry would have been banging and screaming in that parking lot

[B]

to get out of a mall parking lot. Yeah. No way. In a mall parking lot. Yeah, so. So that doesn't make any sense.

[A]

Where the fuck would he have stashed him?

[B]

That's what's so weird now. This contradicted assumptions that he was killed first, dumped in the recreation area and then the other victims were abducted then. That's what the cops figured because it's logical. But the medical evidence says that's not how it happened. Which is super weird. But it was determined. All the victims died of contact gunshots to the rear of the head. With the direction being back to front, right to left and slightly upwards in all four of them. Them.

[A]

So he's got.

[B]

So it's a right handed guy. Yep. In each case, their outer garments were pulled up over their heads so the bullets passed through the material. The bullets retrieved from the heads of the victim were so mutilated that it was impossible to say for sure that they came from that gun. But they're pretty sure it came from that gun. It matches up and it would make a lot of sense. So it's like 99% sure now. Like I said, Juana was raped both vaginally and anally, as well as parts of her face had been eaten by an animal as well.

[A]

Oh, from inside the tire?

[B]

Yes. The eroded area included the eyelids, the nose with the cartilage there, the lips and muscles on the face. Like something ate her face.

[A]

Hat or something.

[B]

They think it was probably the farmer's dogs that ate her face. The hands of all the victims show bruising on the palms and around the wrists. Detective Tate had a large amount of bruising on his hands, indicative that there was some sort of struggle to get out of the bindings that he was in. He was in cuffs. The knuckles of his left hand were colored with yellow and orange bruises, as well as the fingers and palms of his right hand. And deep, blackish purple bruises showed on his wrists where the handcuffs had been placed. He's been struggling hard. Holly Gentry's right palm was covered in bluish purple bruises and his right thumb was heavily bruised. Grains of sand were seen embedded between his right thumb and right forefinger. So it's very interesting here. They never find Detective Tate's badge and gun. Oh, they don't find that. Joanna's got a Timex wristwatch on that is stopped at 1:50, 1:50, which is very strange because we know she was alive at 1:50. She was making phone calls at 1:30, 3 o', clock, and then she's literally at a police station at 5 o'.

[A]

Clock. What time did they find her, though? Maybe it died in the morning.

[B]

Oh, that. That's true. They found her. Yeah, you're right. 3:14pm so that could have happened 1:50am, but she would have been long dead by then. Does it need to be wound every day?

[A]

Is it one of those at time X? I'll bet it has to be wound.

[B]

That's interesting. Now, Holly Gentry's watch was still going, it was still ticking. But they estimate that those three bodies were killed after 5 in the afternoon on the 5th of January. Now, the guy in the bank, remember him, right? Thomas Winford Simmons, who had the check, they go to his job on January 6 after the check thing, because he had gone right to work after that and said, would you please come down to the police station to answer some questions about a check you tried to cash? It was drawn on the account of a murder victim. So we'd like to talk to you here. And he said, sure, no problem. And he really has no choice because he's a parolee. So they can talk to him, tell you to go, they can talk to him anytime they want. They can search him anytime they want. He has no rights, essentially. So they go out to the sand and gravel company sand to interview Simmons. According to them, Cooperative readily agrees. They go back. He wasn't at work on Monday, the murder day, which is something they note pretty heavily here. Apparently his foreman here got a call. This was the first day the plant had reopened. They shut down for Christmas. Jesus, what place like this shuts down like an elementary school for Christmas? That's awesome. Damn, I hope they got paid, too. So he said that his secretary came in and told him, hey, that guy Thomas Simmons isn't going to come to work today. And he said, why? And she said, well, he said he was in a car wreck and he wouldn't be able to come in until Tuesday. So this guy said, was he hurt? And they said, I don't think so. He said, he'll be in tomorrow. So I don't know. Now, the foreman didn't want to have to replace Simmons because he was actually a good employee. Yeah, he said he was one of the hardest workers he ever had on the job of shovel boy ever. Ever. He's the most.

[A]

The best shovel boy you ever saw.

[B]

The most impressive shovel boy in the history of shovel boys. If you're a grown man and your job has the title, your job title has the word boy in it. You. You have fucked your life up royally.

[A]

It's pretty bad for you.

[B]

Royally? Yes.

[A]

You need to work harder.

[B]

Yes. That means that job is supposed to go to a 16 year old. That's what that means. That's meant for a shovel boy. That's meant for a boy. So Simmons had only been employed since Thanksgiving, but he had a reputation for being a tough guy and a tough worker. Once he was cleaning out from under the primary crusher and a large rock fell and hit him on the back, causing him to fall. And they were like, oh, Christ, he's going to be. He just said, I'm fine, and went back to work. They were like, okay. So they had asked this guy, how's the new guy working out anyway? And he said, quote, tough as nails. He said the guy Boulder fell on him. He got right back up. He said any other guy would still be in shock. The other men couldn't believe it. They said he hopped up like nothing had happened. A lesser man wouldn't have been able to stand up for days.

[A]

Lesser man.

[B]

Lesser man or a man that doesn't

[A]

need this job as bad.

[B]

Yeah, a man who doesn't need this job to stay out of federal prison. Might. Yeah. So this guy said, yeah, they come and go pretty fast, usually these parolee workers, especially shovel boys.

[A]

Yeah, shovel boy turnover is pretty high.

[B]

Yeah. He said, well, the employment office routed me to a federal probation officer who was looking for a job for his guy who just got out of prison. So, you know, we were both desperate, pretty much, is what he said. And he said. The probation officer told me about Simmons. He'd been paroled and was staying with his sister in Kibler. And he said he needed to find him a job. He said, so I guess you needed a guy, you know, that needed somebody. And there you go. And the foreman said, yeah, it's a shitty little job. No two ways about it. The federal guy knew it, too. And he said, I'm glad that the Simmons guy's working out for you. I guess everybody deserves a second chance. So, hey, if he does good work, great. The foreman said, I've been taking him down to the Jenny Lind store and having him try out one of those tuna fish sandwiches everybody loves so much. What? Everybody's. There's this new thing called tuna fish. It comes in a can. It's amazing.

[A]

They mix plenty of pickles and mustard and a little bit of mayo. They put it between bread. Blows people's minds.

[B]

Did it take a while to get to Arkansas from the coast or something? What the hell are they talking about? He said, he worked so damn hard that I have to tell him he needs to take a break. Go smoke a cigarette every once in a while. Relax. You're going to kill yourself out here. He said, we've had some heart to heart talks and I like the guy. He deserves a chance to change his life. His sister thought so, too, and that's it. So he also says that this guy's a nice guy. He fried some fish up for his sister and her boyfriend at a fish fry up at Lake Fort Smith. So good guy frying fish for my family now. They talked to Simmons. They said, well, you got a check from Larry Price. You got some explaining to do here because Larry is missing. And he said, well, I encountered Larry Price on Sunday night, which would be the fourth. And the check he gave me. He gave me the check. And they said, why? Why'd he give you this check for $350? And he said, well, I don't really want to say because I'm on parole. And they said, look, we're not caring about anything but dead people, right? Murder police don't give a shit about that.

[A]

That your Parole officer might give a about that, but not us.

[B]

Right now there ain't gonna. Nothing's gonna happen. We just need to know what's going on.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So he said, well, it was for. The check was for payment for some weed and Quaaludes, which. There's Quaaludes still existed back then?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So they were like, okay. And he said the check, you know, when he encountered Price at a later meeting later on that night on Sunday, Price had told him the check was back. So the officers tell him that. Well, now Larry Price is missing. Simmons clammed right up, said, I'm not talking anymore. I want an attorney. Which for a guy who's been in the system, as we'll talk about, he knows once they start talking to you as a suspect, you ask for a fucking attorney and you shut the fuck up. So the officers then place him under arrest for violation of his parole and cease their questioning and call a public defender to represent him. Him. And we'll talk about this public defender because that's an interesting thing for the drug charge because he said that and he said he sold weed and Quaaludes. So they arrest him on a violation there. Now the detective says that they did not consider him a suspect in the murders or kidnapping when he was being escorted by officers from the Arcola, by the way, a R K H O L A Arcola sand and Gravel Company. They said when they were pulling him in, they had no thought of him as a suspect in the kidnappings and murders, which is a crock of shit. They just say that because that way they don't have to read him his rights for a while and they can get some preliminary shit out of the way before they read him his rights. But they absolutely thought of him as a suspect. He's got to. Yeah. He was taken into custody before noon. By 2:15pm a neighbor of the Prices tells police. Holy shit. He had seen a man in a similar description to Larry looking at the Ford LTD that they were selling. So this neighbor is nosy and looks out the window. Then at 2:30pm, Donald Seaton, who works in the Village, Phoenix Village mall parking lot. I don't know what the fuck. He's working in a parking lot of a mall doing but cars, I guess. Who the fuck is valet at the mall besides Scottsdale? Nowhere in Arkansas has mall valet over there.

[A]

No, not in.

[B]

Not in rural Arkansas.

[A]

A place where something called Arkhole is.

[B]

Arkhole. Can I park your pickup, sir? Thank you very much. All right.

[A]

Ain't nobody touching my Truck boy.

[B]

Don't worry, I won't knock any of the mud off the flaps. I'll keep it real nice for you. Nobody touching my truck boy, while I go into Kohl's and get me something.

[A]

So I gotta go to Oshman's for new galoshes.

[B]

Oh, boy, I need them bad. He tells the officers that he observed a white male sitting in a yellow Toyota, which, by the way, Simmons has. A yellow Toyota. Yeah, in a yellow Toyota, apparently watching Juana Price's car. Oh, he went to the fucking mall to stalk her. This guy took down the license plate, same as the bank teller. And it turns out, coming back to Thomas Simmons. Okay, okay. Then at 2:45, Burl Price called the cops. Remember? Burl Price had called the cops. Told police the check which Simmons tried to retrieve was written on his son's closed account. Because they showed him the check after that from the bank and he said the signature was forged as well.

[A]

That's not my boy's signature.

[B]

Not my boy's signature. Now, a little bit of history, because there's more. We're going to talk about a guy who saw some crazy shit. One of the neighbors saw someone. Well, we'll describe it when you get there. Nevermind. Okay, now a little history of Thomas Simmons. First of all, he's one of 11 children in rural Arkansas. Yeah, so that's never going to be good.

[A]

Couple died?

[B]

Yeah, I would think so. Just from Ricketts and scurvy or some shit, some weird preventable diseases.

[A]

Grass disease, yeah.

[B]

He spent most of his adult life in prison. He's from Hot Springs. He'd been living in Kibler for about two and a half months before the murders. He had moved in with his sister after being paroled in October of 1979 after serving part of a 20 year term for assaulting a federal agent. Oh, now that's 20 years. That's what he was on. On parole for then. But there was more shit, too, before that, when he was 16. He was arrested in 1960 for stealing cars in Hot Springs. Started early. So picture him, greaser. The fucking. You know that look, this was 1960. So, like, Greece is set in 1959. So I picture him doing like that, you know, looking like that, stealing cars, as they call it. Boosting, probably back then. Yeah, boosting.

[A]

He's boosting to hop it up. Paint it all black and hop it up.

[B]

Put some new. What the hell, Aiko? Put some new rings in it. That's what Travolta's always talking about in that movie, by the way. No, no. He's just that stuck in my head of him talking about rings. I don't know why. So August of 62, he was sentenced to six months in prison on a Texas conviction of theft by a bailee. So he was on bail and he stole something. He also serves a one year sentence in 1963 in McAllister, Oklahoma for assault with intent to commit a felony. Which sounds like gonna rape a chick or that. Yeah, that's what that sounds like. That was after he had joined the air Force in 19. After his auto theft arrest, he went and joined the Air Force, but was discharged for bad conduct in 1961. So they said the military will fit. You know what'll straighten this punk out? Just like they used to say back. Some punk kid will put him in the army. They said, nope. He's too much of an asshole for us too.

[A]

He's already so far gone, we can't fix it.

[B]

He's broken. He'd been arrested.

[A]

We'll make push ups, get it out of him.

[B]

He won't even do push ups. We can't make them. How do you do it? He's been arrested twice in Amarillo, they said, and served six months for each crime of theft and arrested a couple times in Oklahoma City for attempted robbery with a firearm and assault somewhere.

[A]

Jesus Christ. He's done enough to get a 30 year sentence already.

[B]

Already. And he's still young. And along the way he's a real catch. Somebody just had to sink their hooks into him. And he gets married somewhere in there and has some kids too. Because also we need his genetics persisting. A fucking skinny bald guy with a skinny bald ugly guy who's a fucking career arch criminal. We need him to reproduce. We really need.

[A]

He was a shovel boy in his late 30s.

[B]

A shovel boy. Wow. He was unable to find jobs other than cooking or dishwashing or things like that. I'm telling you, the kitchen is where anybody can get a job. It's great.

[A]

Kitchen or sand and gravel?

[B]

One of the two, yeah. Shoveling or a kitchen. You can either wash dishes or shovel the sand. He never stayed at a job for more than a couple of months. In 1965, he was sentenced to two years in Cummins prison near Pine Bluff, Arkansas for forgery and uttering.

[A]

What is that?

[B]

He said some shit that wasn't right, apparently.

[A]

Yeah. Speed. Uttering a cow's titties.

[B]

Yeah, that's it. He was getting down there. Really? Really. I just pictured him laying under a cow just being like, is that uttering,

[A]

like when you put your mouth under the slurpee machine?

[B]

I pictured him hitting it like a speed bag while he laid there. Or he could be double uttering. He could be double milking into his mouth.

[A]

Just getting like a double porn star afterwards.

[B]

Just bukaked all over his fucking head afterwards. Really.

[A]

Is that ottering?

[B]

But loving it. Just being on the ground, being like, yeah, that's how he got caught. It was the screams of passion that caught him. People were like, gargle, the hell's going out there? I hear a boy yelling with joy and gargling. I don't know what's going on.

[A]

I think that screams of joy through unpasteurized milk.

[B]

That sounds like unpasteurized ecstasy to me. I'm not positive, but I mean, I'm no doctor or nothing, but seems like it. So. Uttering Pure joy.

[A]

98% fat, man.

[B]

So he's paroled in January of 1967. Then he was returned to that prison in July of 67 on a new three year sentence of forgery and more utterance. He's been uttering again, keeps uttering. He was paroled in July of 69 and was returned to the prison again in November of 70 for violation of parole.

[A]

Goddamn.

[B]

The violation of his parole was also a crime that he'll be sentenced to as well. In September of 1970, he and his wife and three children drove to Little Rock. Three. He needs three kids, this fucking guy.

[A]

Three.

[B]

There is three people with this dipshit's genetics rolling fucking just screaming through their veins, man. Oh my God.

[A]

Who for the last 10 years has been out of prison long enough to fuck three times and that's it.

[B]

Barely enough to not pull out three times. Barely. I mean, close. So they end up checking into a motel for the night, left the wife and kids in the motel while he tried to go out and rob a few places. Wow, he's really learned his lesson. No luck with the robbery. So the next day he took his family to the Salvation army to stay while he slept in his car. I did not know the Salvation army had like quarters.

[A]

Barracks. Yeah.

[B]

Could you just donate. I know you can give them like old coats. Can you give them like your wife and kids and say, put these out in the showroom for a while.

[A]

These up all.

[B]

So yeah, just put. I'll come back and get them, don't worry. It's like a consignment thing or what?

[A]

I mean I, I have heard that, that, that was a thing that people did. Stay at The Salvation Army.

[B]

But every time I've ever.

[A]

What is it?

[B]

It was like the ymca.

[A]

Yeah, it's kind of like that. But every one that I've ever seen was just like a store. Secondhand store. There was no.

[B]

It's just Goodwill.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

Essentially that Goodwill with an army slant, that's all it is.

[A]

And I guess that makes sense than normal. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Why there's a fake Santa out front of places paying for shit. Because what the fuck else do you need all that money for? You got a storefront for Christ's sake.

[B]

Yeah, here, take care of my wife and three kids for a minute. So he slept in the car and on the 6th of September, he robbed a gas station on West 3rd and kidnapped a 17 year old boy in the process.

[A]

What?

[B]

Gary Walaya, who was working there. So rather than be identified by him, he said, I'll just take him with me. He put a knife to his ribs and ordered him to sit on the floorboard with his head between his knees. His own knees. Sit down there on the floorboard. He was intending to let the boy off somewhere, apparently, but everywhere he looked there was cops all over the place. So instead he drives for miles into Saline county where he spotted a wooded area. He forced the boy out of the car and tied him up with a piece of cloth he'd torn from one of his own kid's clothing. He tore up a fucking onesie so he could tie up a goddamn 17 year old gas station clerk, which is insane. He then stabbed him several times with a hunting knife.

[A]

Oh, fuck.

[B]

Moving it back and forth until he felt that the boy had bled enough to die. He'll probably. He's bleeding pretty good. He'll probably die out here. So then he grabbed his hair, pulled his head back and slit his throat too. This young man, the 17, who. For the egregious. The egregious fucking action of working at a gas station. This is what he deserves. This is crazy. So he left the boy for dead, covered him up with leaves. All of this for $80.

[A]

Oh Lord, 80.

[B]

Somehow the boy survived being stabbed many times with a hunting knife and having his throat slit. He survived.

[A]

And jiggled back and forth.

[B]

Yeah, he survived. Dug himself out of the leaves and somehow stumbled till he found somebody and got help.

[A]

Oh man.

[B]

Which is the wor that's almost worse than killing him. Because now he definitely knows who you are and he can tell the court all the horrible things he's done to

[A]

you and the scars that you're gonna have from that. You're never gonna forget this piece of shit.

[B]

Some poor 17 year old kid up on the stand talking about just trying to work my shift and, oh, I'm saving up for a car.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Saving up to marry my girl, you know what I mean? Or whatever the fuck they would save up for in 19. So, yeah, he got 45 years for that. Which based on his history. Yeah, yeah, based on his history, that sounds like a right sentence. You have escalated to the point of now you're hurting people. You're not just stealing things anymore, now you're trying to kill people.

[A]

As far as you know, you've murdered.

[B]

Yeah, that's the thing. He must have shit when he figured out that kid was alive. Oh, my God, how?

[A]

Nine years later, he's out of prison.

[B]

Absolutely. And the prosecuting attorney was a guy named Jim Guy Tucker, who later became the governor of Arkansas before Bill Clinton. And he wrote the parole board that Simmons was vicious and shouldn't be set free. He's a particularly vicious asshole. Keep him as long as possible. So he was convicted of that in 1971. It was kidnapping. Wow. So that's when he gets you, sir, may fuck off. 45 years. Okay. He was held until May 3, 1979, eight years, which is 20% of his sentence, at which time he was released. Now he was released to the US Marshals Service so he could serve a 20 year sentence at Leavenworth for assaulting a federal officer.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Somehow he was paroled 17 months later.

[A]

Holy shit.

[B]

Which is how he ends up in October of 1980, living in Kibler with his sister. So he got 65 years total, state and federal, and he did about 10 and change at a 65. That is wild. Wow. That's crazy. And he was only out three months before this quadruple murder that they're suspecting him of here. That's crazy. Crazy that they paroled him and then transferred him to the federal prison. And they were like, that ought to be okay, by the way.

[A]

And the kingly sum of$350.50 up front, waiting on the other 300 to clear.

[B]

I mean, for 85, he'll fucking carve a boy up, so he does not care. By the way, the FBI agent he assaulted, he also stole his car.

[A]

Nice.

[B]

He assaulted an FBI agent and stole his car, which is fucking crazy. So he's paroled for good behavior.

[A]

How good do you gotta be?

[B]

You gotta be. He blew all the guards. Like, you have to be the best. He went out and painted the fucking prison yeah, he scrubs the fucking floors with his toothbrush. He's incredible.

[A]

They call him steel jaw around here. He never gets a cramp.

[B]

We know he's a hard worker, though. That's the thing. So if he goes into prison and if he's in a situation where he has to do well, he does well. He's a hard worker. They might have said, oh, look at this kid. He's really trying. But no.

[A]

That's a bummer about prison, though. You're not allowed to have shovels.

[B]

No, they don't give you any shovels. Yeah. So his sister let him live with her and her kids because he's going to be a great influence and an excellent father figure. I would say no word on whether he ever saw his kids again. If that woman was smart, she fucking ran away and never looked back at this asshole.

[A]

He was only out for three months.

[B]

Yeah, it's crazy. So by the end of October, he'd gotten a job, bought a car. But the job at the plant at the sand place was closed for Christmas and he was running short on money and he had some checks out that were going to bounce. He had taken classes while he was in Leavenworth and he'd already enrolled for the spring semester at West Ark. Remember we talked about West Ark, that was supposed to start in January 81, but he couldn't pay the tuition, so he didn't do it. Okay, now, what he says about the check here, all right, he tells them this is a check he received for weed and Quaaludes, like we said. So they said, all right, let's run through your thing. Where have you been? He said, well, on the 5th, the day of the murder, at 10:30am he was at the bank, which we know of by the bank, depositing a $350 check, asking for $50 cash back on Larry Price's account. Then the taxi driver picks up a man matching his description in front of the Osco Drug at the Central Mall. And then a short while later, one of the neighbors at the apartment complex sees a man fitting his description get out of a cab in front of Price's apartment. That's pretty good. At 8:30pm he made a call. Okay, that night, that was half hour after the search had started for everybody. He was in. At 8:30, he stopped at a convenience store in Van Buren and called his sister for a ride from there. And she said, why don't you be driving your car? And he said, that's a long story. And so that was that. Now, January 6, 1981, at 9:00am, he goes into the bank. Obviously they tell him he wants to check back. They said it's going to be till Friday. They write his fucking. His number down. And there we go now, 1-8-81. Now they're starting to get evidence in. And we'll talk about this. What they think here is that he didn't expect the wife to be home. He expected basically Larry would be home. He'd inquire about the car. As we find out, he already had a buyer for the car, a stolen car buyer. He already had somebody that was waiting on this car for him. He said, I'm gonna go steal this ltd, basically.

[A]

So when he showed up in the morning to look at the car and get coffee with Larry, she came out of the bedroom and he was like, fuck.

[B]

Fuck. Cause when he showed up, he knocked on the door and said, let's go for a test drive.

[A]

No problem.

[B]

They went for a test drive, came back, and now all of a sudden, there's a woman in the house.

[A]

Oh, no.

[B]

So he's like, fuck. He thought he was just gonna rob this guy, take the car, maybe kill him, who knows? But whatever. But there's a guy who had already promised. A guy had already promised him 1,500 cash if he delivered it to him on Monday afternoon, this car. So he thought that everything would go well. And turns out now there's extra people and he can't figure it out. Yeah. Then a witness comes forward that is the craziest witness of all time. And you go, well, why the fuck didn't he do this? The day this is happening, one of the apartment complex neighbors, and it's because he didn't want to come forward sooner because he had a warrant. So the warrant kept him from calling the cops and telling them what he saw, which was the thing that explains everything, pretty much. He first went to his lawyer, by the way, this guy Davis is his name, not to be confused with Detective Davis, who went looking for Ray Tate. This Davis guy, James Davis, his lawyer, who he called to say, should I come forward with this information, will I get arrested? Happens to be the same lawyer that has been assigned to Thomas Simmons. Oh, no, small town. So now they have the same lawyer. So Davis, the neighbor came to the lawyer, whose name is settle. That's his name, his last name, and related the story, saying that, you know, this is what happened, what I saw. And he said, you gotta tell the cops. You have to.

[A]

And then in a couple of weeks, I'm gonna be really fucked. On cross exam.

[B]

That's the thing. He thought about it and he said he didn't know whether he could continue to represent Simmons in view of the fact that his other client is now gonna be, you know, on the record and all this type of shit. And I have to fucking. I'm gonna have to cross examine him. And he's my client, so that's not right. So they said James Davis, the neighbor across the street, saw a man who appeared to be Officer Tate, Detective Tate arrive at the Price's apartment complex in a blue unmarked car.

[A]

He saw it.

[B]

The man. Yeah. The man looked briefly at the truck. Collie Gentry's. His large truck was parked in front there, sideways, taking up two spaces. Because it's his complex, he can do it again.

[A]

The cops didn't like that at first.

[B]

So he was looking at the car. Well, he had heard that this guy had one of these cars, so he was just looking. Okay, that's that car. So that's what's going on. Cop, presumably Detective Tate, looking at a car, then going into the apartment complex. Shortly after that, a different man, not Detective Tate, made three trips from the apartment to the blue car, Tate's car,

[A]

to the cop car.

[B]

Different guy. Yeah. The first time, it's what he brings out to the car. That's the crazy part. The first time he brought out a man whose hands were tied behind his back and made him get into the car. Someone is watching this and not calling anybody, by the way, for days.

[A]

What?

[B]

He could have called the cops right then and saved everybody's life.

[A]

Life.

[B]

But this fucking guy was like, I got a warrant. You know? Okay.

[A]

He saw a detective with his badge on his waist and a gun and all that. He didn't know it was a detective.

[B]

He didn't know it was a cop going in the door. Later on, he assumes that's who it was, based on the facts, but he just saw a guy go in with a blue car and go into the thing.

[A]

But even still, he saw a man come out, handcuffed or sport coat and

[B]

tie, you know, and then he sees a different man go to the car with a man tied up, a man with his hands tied behind his back. So he brings out him getting in the car. Next, he brought out another man, also tied or hands behind the back, and put them in the car. Then he brings out a crying woman and forces her into the car.

[A]

Oh, my God.

[B]

And drives away. And this guy went, well, Price is Right is on. And fucking went back to what he was doing. Well, that Ramen Only takes three minutes. I better really get in there.

[A]

There.

[B]

That's what this guy saw and didn't come Forward until the 8th.

[A]

That's what warrants will do, huh? Wow.

[B]

Holy shit. I wouldn't even think about that for a minute. I'd be like, holy shit. Do it anonymously.

[A]

I would think maybe this will get this warrant washed away.

[B]

I'm gonna be a fucking hero. Yeah. You can't send me back. Send me to jail. Now I'm a hero.

[A]

Amazing.

[B]

Now, by the way, scientific evidence, a hair from Simmons body was discovered in Officer Tate's shirt. So they gotta be pretty close to each other for it to get inside of his shirt. And another hair from Simmons body was found on Larry Price's sock. So that connects him. I mean, this is not DNA, by the way. Back then, this was microscopically similar, consistent with. So we have no idea if it's his hair or not, but it's a hair that matches the. The deal there. And they found out that semen that they got from Joanna's vagina, which sounds like the worst porn movie of all time, this matched Simmons blood type, but not Larry's blood type. So not like the defense can't say, well, she had sex with her husband that morning. No, she didn't. Now, they can't match this definitively to Simmons because it's only by blood type, but it's not hers, obviously, and it ain't fucking Larry's.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So. And they have this. It's typo, which is the same as Simmons. So there you go. Now, there's blood as well. Here. There's blood. Blood found on Simmons work pants that he was wearing at work. He just wore his work outfit. Could be matched to the blood types of both Larry and Joanna because they're both the same type, which is type A, which is about 40% of human beings are type A. But they said that the only conclusion could be formed from the test was that the stain did not come from Simmons, who is type O. So he didn't bleed on his own pants. This is someone else's blood on his pants that matches the same blood type as victims that he has. And speaking of type O, like I said, semen sample is type okay, which is her, which is him. Now, handwriting as well. An FBI handwriting specialist concluded that the handwriting on the check drawn on Larry's account was that of Thomas Simmons as well. He wrote it out. Now, the gun here that they found under the bodies, that they believe is the murder weapon, they go, well, where the Hell that come from? They figured out the serial number and figured out it was purchased by a guy named John Neal Bryant in 1976 in Van Buren, which is the town next to us. We've done Van Buren as a town. He said it was either. He couldn't remember if it was lost in the woods or stolen from his pickup truck, but he thought it was sometime around 1978 that happened.

[A]

So loose with weapons.

[B]

And he's a neighbor of Simmons, by the way. So he could have lost it in the woods and Simmons could have picked it up. We don't know.

[A]

Or stolen out of his truck. Either way.

[B]

Either way. While he was in prison during 78. So it makes sense that he lost it in the woods and then he picked it up, because he couldn't have been in there in 78 because he was in prison. Now, another testimony later on, an investigator at the state crime lab said bullets recovered from the victims were officially too mutilated to make an accurate link to the.38. But they said that they could neither verify or rule out the possibility that they came from the recovered gun. But logically, a jury's gonna look at that and go, so I'm gonna. The bodies and the gun, I'll throw them all in one place. It doesn't make sense otherwise. So he is arraigned on four counts of kidnapping, four counts of murder. Now, they send him for a competency examination, first of all, right away. Okay. He gets sent for a few days and gets returned back to his cell. When he gets returned back to his cell, there was a deputy sheriff who made the transfer. And they asked him, did it go okay? Was he crazy? Was he drooling and fucking insane? And he said he didn't say anything, and I didn't have anything to say to him. That's that. So will he be competent? Well, they expect to receive a written report in a couple of days. However, one local official said that basically he's probably going to be found fit to stand trial. Trial. He said, quote, I've never known of them to send one back that had been determined mentally unable to stand trial. So they sent him back to jail, which means he's probably fine.

[A]

He's going.

[B]

He's going. Now, the competency results. Dr. A.F. rosendale, who's a psychiatrist, wrote that Simmons was found to be without psychosis, but does exhibit antisocial behavior. I would call raping and slitting throats and murdering cops. Yeah, slightly antisocial behavior. Copies of the findings are sent to the prosecutor. The evaluation said he's probably not suffering from mental disease or defect of such a degree as to make him unable to appreciate the criminality of his conduct or to conform his conduct to the requirement of the law. So they literally took that copy pasted from a law book of what they have to be and said, that's what he is. The findings also concluded that he has mental capacity to understand the proceedings against him and has capacity to assist effectively in his own defense. Therefore, he is considered fit to proceed at this time.

[A]

Great.

[B]

Very good. So they want to change a venue. Yeah. Because they're like, everybody's heard about this. This is a small town. And he killed a fucking cop and raped a chick. Got killed. It's bad. And the thing is, it came on the heels of an unconnected series of murders in the immediate area. There were four separate capital murder trials pending in Fort Smith or Van Buren. So this little tiny area had five death penalty eligible murders at the same exact time. Pretty much.

[A]

Fascinating.

[B]

Which is. It's got to be the water or something overwhelming.

[A]

You can't try it. That. Right.

[B]

That's wild. It has to be environmental or some shit. Like, I don't know what's going on right. There has to be like a. I don't know, maybe it's like Widow's Bay. Like, really, it's the island that's doing it.

[A]

I don't know what's just sucking. Sucking in evil.

[B]

The area just like, wants to be fed. I don't know what it is. So local citizens here, they say, were appalled by what appeared to be a reign of violence unprecedented in this century. Because this is a small area, they don't have this. This one editorial on a TV station on January 7th worried that, quote, this most recent in a series of violent killings has raised concern about the quality of life in western Arkansas. That's what it took to raise your concern about quality of life in western Arkansas. You didn't look around and go, jesus, this is shit. What the fuck are we doing here, guys? We're. We're in a lot of trouble here.

[A]

Tornado season just ended, too. That's a bad time of life, too.

[B]

And at least nobody was robbing us while a tornado was going on. So that was actually safer for a minute there. So they had a bunch of man on the street interviews. A gun dealer whose business had increased substantially in the last year. He said that enforcement of the death penalty is, quote, the only way to stop violent crime and make the streets safe again. Which we know mathematically is a huge load of Horseshit now.

[A]

Well, that and selling a shitload of guns.

[B]

Yeah. So you should buy more and then shoot people with them and then get the death penalty for all I care. I'm already paid. It's all right for all I give a shit. Look at states with death penalties and compare them to murder rates. And they're the highest ones, all of them. It makes no difference. It doesn't fucking matter. That's just the way it is. So that's not. When someone's killing someone, they're not thinking, ooh, I better not do this because I could get the death penalty. Life without that would have been fine. I'm totally cool with that. But I'm afraid of needles. No one says that. It's not the way it works.

[A]

They say I'm going to get away with it every time.

[B]

That's what it is. They don't mind getting caught every time. And if they didn't mind getting caught, they didn't give a fuck. Then they're. They don't care what happens to them. So a People poll aired on January 9 on KLMNTV and said, quote, this is some of the comments. We ought to have more capital punishment.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Not enough murders are being solved. What does that have to do with capital punishment? Nothing.

[A]

We gotta kill more people because they're killing a lot of people.

[B]

We won't be able to find him unless we can kill him. That doesn't make any sense. The solving and the convicting are two separate things completely. And the murders aren't being solved because you have no scientific shit to go on. Yeah, but you're not rewarding the DNA.

[A]

You're not rewarding the detectives, James, with the ability to just go in there and mow them down.

[B]

Yeah. Not even a punishment. Just do it. It. And then they said, something should be done about keeping these people in prison. And also judges are too lenient. So just, I mean, whatever horseshit they heard from some idiot who never didn't read the paper either while they talked, sat and talked over their grits.

[A]

I certainly agree that this man should not have been out of prison. No. I don't know how in the fuck they did this.

[B]

This is what I mean. This is a crazy case.

[A]

This feels like they blew it.

[B]

Yeah. A Fort Smith Police Department major who was involved in the investigation was quoted in a statewide newspaper saying, quote, we've lost two police officers in the last four years. If we don't get something done and kill some of the people for killing others, the whole society is doomed. It was a tragic, senseless, execution style killing by a very ruthless individual who had been serving time. Oof. So also they said that immediately upon his arrest, the news reported extensively of his prior criminal convictions, which pollutes the jury pool. The Arkansas Gazette articles of January 7th through 9th described his extensive criminal record, including his 1960 juvenile arrest. Which is where I got all that shit from. I found all that in those papers based on these court documents. I was like, let me look that up. There we go. Now I got some background. A bad conduct discharge from the Air Force and convictions for larceny, forgery, kidnapping, assault, uttering. As we know, the fact that he was a recent federal parolee was emphasized in virtually every article. There's a shitload of them. Several media sources remarked on the parallels between this case and the 1977 of Fort Smith Police Officer Randy Basnett, who was killed by a former federal inmate about a week after the inmate's release on parole. So to them, it all fits together. He said this was a particular sore spot with local citizens who felt the parole system was not effective. The views of the police officers, prosecutors and others were prominently aired. Is what he's saying to try to get this change of venue. One the Fort Smith chief of police said, the state's handing out paroles left and right.

[A]

And that's why we got dead cops, James, because we value cops lives more than anybody else's.

[B]

That's right. Otherwise, kill everybody else, though. Kill them all now. Wow. Trial comes around. Yeah, okay. He says, I'm innocent as a young. Just a young, brand new baby boy. And so I just came like I'm still covered in fucking placenta.

[A]

Just a tiny little shovel boy.

[B]

That's it. Just a tiny little shovel boy. Now, defense opening. During the opening statements, the public defender, John Settle, who decided to stay on the case, he decided that it wasn't a conflict of interest to have to cross examine one of his clients in this case, which is crazy. His strategy is he admits that his client was at the Price apartment and stole a check, but he said that's all he did.

[A]

There's the extent of his wrongdoing.

[B]

That's it. He's not involved in these murders at all. He said, we do not know what happened to these people January 5th, and we do not intend to try to solve this, but we do know Thomas Simmons is not guilty of kidnapping and murdering these people. Well, you better fucking solve it, because you're in an OJ Situation where it's like, we're all gonna think you do It. Unless it's solved a different way. There's no. It's just the way it is. And then they talk about him. Him not thinking he's a suspect as well. They said when the cops brought him in, it's bullshit, that they didn't think he was a suspect. That's ridiculous. Yeah. They said their client has always been a suspect and was by technical definition, under arrest from the time they placed him in the squad car. So quoting from a statute book, the public defender stated that a person under arrest at the time he is placed under restraint or submits to custody. Custody. But they're saying, no, no, no. We asked him to come to the station. He voluntarily came down. We were just chit chatting.

[A]

But did they put him in cuffs because he's saying he was in restraints?

[B]

No, no, no. They said is placed under restraint or submits to custody.

[A]

Got it.

[B]

But they're saying submitting to custody. The prosecution says submitting to custody doesn't mean being asked to go somewhere voluntarily and you going. That's not them saying you have to come. Let's go. That's custody. So he also added that the Fort Smith officers who detained him had no jurisdiction in any of the places they were in where the check was tendered. Van Buren or Jenny Lind, which is an area, a town. Jenny Lind. Okay. So the witnesses, they bring up old James Davis there. The guy whose lawyer has a conflict of interest. Yeah, he said he then picked out Thomas Simmons and said, that's the guy I saw lead three persons from the apartment to the car. Why'd you wait to report it? He said, well, I had criminal charges against me and a warrant. You know how it is. I'm dumb, so I'm dumb on cross examination, by the way. Cause he's a prosecution witness. Now his own lawyer's gotta come up and rip him a new asshole. So on cross examination, he tries to discredit Davis memory of the incident by pointing to several discrepancies between his courtroom testimony and earlier sworn statements. The cross examination, by the way, he was really aggressive on this cross examination. The cross examination sparked repeated objections from the prosecution and numerous sidebar conferences to figure out what line of questioning they can do. They have another ID witness, Ernie Kramers, who identified Simmons as the man he observed with Larry Price on January 5th looking at the car. The defense challenged the accuracy of Kramer's identification due to the brevity of his observation of the two men. But the car is pretty clear. You're gonna see that and see the Two guys and two and two. So the medical examiner does a mock recreation of the scene by basically throwing a coat over the prosecutor's shoulders and pulling it up over his head to show him how these people were taken and then shot and then traced the path of the bullet that way, too. Which the juries fucking love. Those demonstrations. They love those things. It makes everything so much clearer. Under cross examination, the medical examiner stated that based on the evidence, proof positive of a rape is not possible. But the fact that she has some other person's semen in her and. And had looped her belt just fine and probably put her pantyhose on correctly before she was kidnapped, we have to assume the kidnapper did this. So that's just logic. Then there's a crazy fucking delay in the trial.

[A]

Why?

[B]

The jury is waiting for his sister. Thomas's sister is gonna testify.

[A]

The one that let him stay with her.

[B]

The ones who stay. Exactly. The one who's staying with him. And apparently it's her day to testify. She never takes the stand because she collapsed at the foot of the stairs at her house. Or had to collapse at the foot of the stairs from the Crawford County Courthouse when she arrived. And then her doctor said she would not be able to return that afternoon. So the prosecutor said, well, she'll be there on Friday because she failed to appear. So they said that they sent the sheriff to go get her, and when he arrived at her house, she wasn't home. So after that information was relayed back to the courthouse, there was a conference call between everybody where it was revealed that she was at the home of a family friend. When the sheriff gets to the family friend's house to take her to court, she wouldn't go. She refuses to go. The sheriff said he was greeted by her brother Ron, who just refused to allow. Ron Simmons, by the way, like the old wrestler. First Black Heavyweight Champion in NWA history, Ron Simmons, who flatly refused to allow his sister to go to the courthouse due to her medical condition. He said, she's in the house and to get her, you better bring a stretcher.

[A]

What is. She has a heart condition or something?

[B]

We have no idea. She's just collapsed due to her medical condition. She has. I don't want to testify against my brotheritis, I think, is what it is.

[A]

She's allergic to this.

[B]

Yeah. According to Ball here, the detective, Ron Simmons then threatened to sue both him and the others in his car if any further action is taken. Who you got in there with? I'll sue them, too.

[A]

Okay. Anybody in the Car.

[B]

Wow. So the sister had been expected to take the stand and tell of a collector sister in law. This is. And tell of a collect phone call she received that night. So it is her sister, sorry, the night of the murders, to ask for a ride home from the convenience store. The call came from a location close to where Ray Tate's car was found. They came up with a solution, which is the state would simply read a series of facts that all the attorneys could agree on. She's gonna say this and this. Do you both stipulate to that? Fine, then just put it in the fucking record and we'll.

[A]

She doesn't have to testify. If we all agree to it.

[B]

If we all agree to the. Yeah, we'll take a little bit off the edges that someone might have objected to and take the core of it and just put it in. That's it. They said if they would have not stipulated to the facts, then she would have had to testify. Now, closing arguments. The defense attorney tells the jurors, quote, the only conclusion you can draw from this testimony was that it is a fabrication. Meaning the James Davis testimony where he saw him leading people to the car. The only conclusion you can draw from his testimony is that it was a fabrication from beginning to end. It was not a matter of being mistaken. James Davis just flat out lied.

[A]

Really?

[B]

That's his lawyer saying that.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Also, a newspaper account of both closings says, quote, both prosecutor Ron Fields and public defender John Settle admitted in their summations that many of the bizarre circumstances surrounding the murders, often termed in the most sensational north, often termed as the most sensational in northwest Arkansas history, are still unexplained. Said, basically there's a lot of shit we don't know, but we're pretty sure about A, B and C. So the verdict comes in and it is seven man, five woman jury. That's what we got going on here. Less than three hours of deliberation.

[A]

Is this three charges of murder or

[B]

this is four murders, kidnapping, you name it. Oh, this is bad. Bad, bad. Oh, this is. Death penalty is on the table.

[A]

Sure.

[B]

Absolutely. Killed a cop and raped a chick. Raped a woman in the course of killing her and then robbed people while they killed. While he killed them, too. This is every aggravator you can find while on parole. While on parole?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Wanton, horrible shit. It's fucking aggravators based on, you know,

[A]

while on parole for 65 years worth of charge. Yeah, this is bad.

[B]

That dude should not have been jaywalking. No, honestly, he should have been fucking keeping it between the lines, 10 and 2 the whole time. So the verdict comes in less than three hours of deliberation. And he's found guilty of every goddamn thing possible that you can imagine. Oh boy. Just guilty of everything. So now the sentencing comes around and like I said, death penalty is here.

[A]

Firmly. Squad.

[B]

Yeah. During this death penalty thing here, prosecution's clothing. Not clothing, clothing.

[A]

Their clothing was beautiful.

[B]

Their clothing. They were dressed immaculately. Jimmy, the ties on these men, fabulous.

[A]

D and T, so.

[B]

Oh yeah, the best. Well, one prefers Gucci. He's a little flashier. Yeah. Following the return of the guilty verdict here, that's when the jury was immediately pressed to return and debate about the sentence. So in the arguments, the prosecutor said Simmons sealed his own fate when he committed the crimes. He said, he's the one who executed himself out in that field in Kibler and in that creek, in Clear Creek, he executed himself. So does he have anything to say for himself?

[A]

Is he gonna talk?

[B]

He is gonna talk. He stood there and gave a poker face when the judge said, what do you want to say? And he said, quote, On January 8th, I stood in this courtroom and said I was not guilty. And I repeat now, I am not guilty, sir. That's what he said. When he's been found guilty of murdering a cop in cold blood, on duty, quadruple raping and killing a woman. And anally too. Throw that in for a little fucking, you know, just a little extra for

[A]

some extra fucked cheese.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. And two other men who just. He was robbing.

[A]

So this is 100% anti societal behavior.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. So after an hour and a half of deliberation, which is barely enough time to fill out the paperwork for this such type of thing here, the jury comes back and says, you, sir, may fuck off. Death by electrocution. Electric chair. Electric chair for you. And then. So he's got four of those four death sentences and then an additional this and an additional that and years tacked onto this, and you name it. I mean, it's a lot. He won't live that long, so. Well, we'll talk about it. So the reactions here from the victims families, one of them said, here, we're just so relieved while they were crying and all that kind of thing. And Mrs. Price, this is Larry's mother, said, they treat the defendant like a person. But what about the victim? We would have loved to have gotten up and told that jury about our kids. We had such dreams and aspirations for those kids. They would have been such an asset to Our society. And, yeah, she said that the victims seemed almost unimportant to the case, which isn't really true. It's just the reason we're here. Yeah, exactly. We're just concentrating on what are we going to do with this guy. So it's got to kind of be about him. A close friend to the Gentry family who admitted he wrestled with the decision to even attend the trial, said he'd never be the same after the loss of Holly Gentry. He said it affects you more than you realize it will. It changes your priorities. Yeah. And then he talks about the Lord a whole bunch. I'll skip that. Then Simmons leaves the court and he's led to the car to be taken to prison. Right. Somehow. Now they take them out through a private thing and they put him at the sally port there. They do all that back then. They just take them out the front door of the court to the parking lot. And all the press would be around them and they would let him talk

[A]

down those super steep steps.

[B]

Stone, too. Yeah. Don't trip over all those cords or anything. All those camera cords they used to

[A]

have cuffed behind your back.

[B]

Exactly. They said Simmons appeared to be in good spirits as he was led from the Sebastian county jail, shackled in handcuffs and leg irons for his transfer to death row.

[A]

And leg irons.

[B]

Oh, and leg irons. Oh.

[A]

He was shallow prisoner.

[B]

Oh, very shallow. He vowed he would return to face a new trial as the officials ready. He said, I will. This will get overturned and I'm gonna have a new trial soon. So don't worry about it. He said this is during a little press conference out in the parking lot. He had that. He was confident that his conviction would be reversed and he would be granted a new trial.

[A]

Wow.

[B]

He said, we'll have to do it all over again. I'll be back.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Yep. He praised his defense attorneys, which. That'll come up later in appeals. They won't be so great then. But at the time he praised them. He said John Settle and Garner Taylor. He said, I am satisfied with the effort of my attorneys. I think they did a magnificent job, really. Which will then be piss poor ineffective assistance of counsel in a future appeal. Simmons said he did not regret his decision not to take the stand in his own defense when asked about it because speculation kept mounting. But he said the final decision was reached jointly by him and his attorney. They asked him, do you think you got a fair trial in Crawford County? And he says, absolutely not. No way.

[A]

No.

[B]

He said the prosecution was allowed to Introduce evidence in their case against him that would be struck. That should have been struck from the trial. And asked what he believed to be the most damaging evidence introduced about him. Because there's so much. I mean, what one piece was the crux. He said, quote, I hesitate to call it evidence, but the most damaging thing was the obviously perjured testimony of the state's key witness, the eye witness, which

[A]

is James Davis, the guy that saw me.

[B]

Meanwhile, there's like five other people. The cab driver, the other one who saw him going in and out. This is just the guy who happened to watch him walk people out. I mean, we didn't need him to put this together of what happened, you know, so. Because the crazy thing is, is I guess the detective walked into the apartment. I assume he probably hid and then popped out with a gun. And that's how he subdued the detective is all I could imagine. There's no other way.

[A]

You have to.

[B]

Yeah, there's no other way.

[A]

Otherwise, the cop had, like, his flashlight out and he was looking around.

[B]

Yeah, probably. He probably popped out from behind a door, put a gun to his head and said, fucking stand still, motherfucker. Took his gun from him and whatever. And we don't know what he did with his badge, his gun, any of that. None of it. We have no idea. Never recovered. He later said he was referring to James Davis. And here's an interview with what I like to call a pompous douche of a juror. This guy, he says he wouldn't take the money. That jury duty pays. It's his civic duty. I won't even take that. It was like a $53 check for like two weeks.

[A]

I don't even cash it.

[B]

Won't even take it, he said, I returned it to the him because I'm that good of a citizen. Fucking shut up and take your 50 bucks and take your goddamn wife out to dinner, you asshole. What a fucking asshole. This guy, Robert Roberts, he never had a chance. His parents are so stupid they forgot their last name was already that name.

[A]

Well, they're gonna call him Bob.

[B]

Fucking named him that. He said he was so proud to do his civic duty and sit on one of the juries here. He said he was so fat proud. He's a career military man. He refused to accept the $52.50 he received for his six days of service on the panel. Wow. He said his gesture of returning the check was not meant to be significant. It's merely the thing to do. He said it was my civic duty. No, no, no, we have a thing. You show up, we give you way less money than you deserve and you take it. And that's your civic. The fact that you show up for 52 fucking dollars for six days, that's your civic duty.

[A]

You got a dollar an hour, you fucking moron.

[B]

Yeah, you're already putting out like there's no need for this shit. So he said. The recently retired Crawford county man said he sat on the jury panel and viewed the evidence in the murder case and was overcome by the greatness of the American judicial system. Oh, it never fucks up.

[A]

Yeah, I was overcome by how great.

[B]

I was just overcome that an eagle flew through the room and like, that was pretty distracting, you know.

[A]

I cried. One eye stripes of tears, the other one stars of tears.

[B]

I just took the flag from the corner of the courtroom and wrapped it around myself. That's all I did.

[A]

That was an abomination.

[B]

He said, I think our system is the greatest in the world. We're number one. Oh, God, that's ballsy. Especially in 1981, to say that we were a disaster as a country by then, a fucking mess.

[A]

Is that Reagan's fault?

[B]

That was everybody's fault from fucking 68 on from.

[A]

He was the guy that was taking the rap then though, right?

[B]

No, they were. No, he. The way he. I want to get into it because it's politics and people complain. But he made it like, now it's all different. And everyone went, oh, now it's all different. It was the same shit.

[A]

Still kind of important thing. And there's no gas.

[B]

Economy was shit till 85, and then it was good for a year and a half. And then the market. Market fucking crashed and we had a goddamn. So that's a trickle down in a year and a half you'll be good and then it'll be worse than it was before. Great job. Did such a bad job that they elected a fucking governor of Arkansas to be the president. That's how bad of a job. For 12 years they did with the economy as they were like, this is so fucked up. That guy.

[A]

Perhaps Arkansas can fix it.

[B]

A dude from Arkansas bangs his wife's hairdresser. That guy will fix it. They didn't care. But he's so good at the sax. Excellent. So this Guy said after 21 years of service in the army, from which he was a retired first sergeant, he said his patriotic stirrings are there. He said, I don't know. Back when I was a child, it was a more automatic thing, you know, the old flag and Star Spangled Banner. Bit. Bit, but he's bit. I don't know what that. You know, the old. The old soft shoe, flag and fucking banner shit.

[A]

That old chestnut that made the greatest country on the planet, evidently, to you.

[B]

He said that the Simmons case was the first he had ever heard as a juror, and he could not help but be in awe of the proceedings. He's in awe a lot. Overcome by greatness. In awe of a courtroom. You're in awe of a bunch of civil servants doing their job. This is what you're in awe of.

[A]

I was in awe when I went into court that we have a courtroom that looks like that. My taxes are being pissed away on shitloads of wood.

[B]

Tons of wood and tons of fucking fancy chairs. Judges and shit. And they feed those jurors really well, too. I'd love to know what a state pays for in jury lunches. It's obscene what they're fucking paying in jury lunches, but you got to feed them. He said, we all learned it was an education. He said that his duty was not an easy one, deciding the fate of another person, but it needed to be done. He said it was a difficult decision, but when the evidence points to the defendant, there's nothing else to do. He said during his own mental deliberations, there was nothing specific which tipped the balance to a guilty verdict. He said, I can't think of any one thing. There was just so many that pointed to his guilt. He said he sat and listened to the parade of evidence about the murders, and the other jurors were conscious of being under the watchful eye of the defendant. This is from the article. With fingertips pressed together, Simmons frequently peered Emotionless into the jury panel as the testimony was presented, possibly checking reactions. Yeah, he's seeing how they're reacting, but the jury finds it extremely unsettling when the defendant just stares at them, especially if they're up for quadruple murder.

[A]

Staring at him is one thing. Emotionless is an entire different face when

[B]

you're being accused of being a terrifying emotionless killer. And then you're standing there, this just emotionless.

[A]

What does Emotionless look like, apart from just blank faced and horrifying?

[B]

That's. It has to be fucking dead eyed. So, yeah, they said the emotional issue of sentencing another person to die did not cause any inner conflict that he might have imagined it would have. He explained that the panel was locked away for deliberation. Some discussion did arise over the often painful decision. He said, we discussed it, but it's really Not a decision the jury makes, it's the law. And we're just following the steps.

[A]

Oh, that's how he does it. Guilt free.

[B]

One way to do it. Guilt free. Okay. I didn't really kill a guy, you know, the law said I had to. When you pull a trigger, then physics takes over. It's not really you. You didn't kill them. The bullet killed them. You just, it was just a, you know.

[A]

Yeah, the law was written and said you have to kill him. All right.

[B]

Now this is also in reaction, like I said, to other local death penalty cases in 81 that I'll go over real quick. They said there's five men facing capital murder charges in 81, but some of them from older crimes. Eugene Wallace Perry and 23 year old Richard Philip Anderson were in custody on 01-01-81 awaiting trial on two counts of capital murder and the deaths of Kenneth Staton and 24 year old Suzanne Staton warehouse who were discovered in a workroom at Staten's jewelry store in van Buren. On September 10, 1980, a jury convicted Perry of capital murder and sentenced him to death. Anderson was convicted of a lesser charge and sentenced to life. December 10, 1980, Wilburn Anthony Henderson was arrested for capital murder in the 11-26-80 fatal shooting of a 50 year old named Willa Dean O' Neill at a youth used furniture store in Fort Smith that she operates with her husband. What are you getting from a used furniture store?

[A]

I guess a little bit of cash, right?

[B]

I mean, I bet a lot of people pay in checks in 1980 with that because it's. You know what I mean, what are you getting? And I'll take this fucking old loveseat too. Throw it on my. What the fuck do you want?

[A]

After a certain time there's not really a lot of cash, right?

[B]

No, there isn't. I mean in 80 people had a lot of cash, but for bigger items they wrote checks. Like furniture. You didn't pay for furniture and cash. You wrote checks. Back then people used to do weekly grocery shopping, pay with a check.

[A]

Oh, for sure.

[B]

Yeah, that was with it. My mother always did that also. She didn't have any money. That also helped. I have these.

[A]

I have a check because in three days we're gonna have money in that account that I'll cover.

[B]

That's right. Either way, I have these and no food. So there you go. Henderson's first trial ended in a mistrial. Then a jury convicted him and sentenced him to death. And a U.S. district Judge Court overturned his conviction and sentenced citing Ineffective counsel. Okay. Henderson was retried and convicted, sentenced to death a second time. And he was executed actually on July 8th of 98. Marion Albert Mad Dog Pruitt. Well, Mad Dog, that's not one you want to go into court with.

[A]

Nope.

[B]

The defendant, Mad Dog. That'll get you every time. That's like, I always feel bad. Not that I don't feel bad, but it's always odd when like, you know, young Thug's on trial. Gee, I wonder what the jurors are going to think of Young Thug. That's not going to go over well. Mad Dog, Young. Any. It just never works out well when they bring your professional name in this case in there. It's all right.

[A]

Tupac's real name, but he was very well known for some words that he'd said.

[B]

For some. Sure, I don't think Snoop Doggy Dog helped himself much there either. But at least it didn't have the words thug or killer or. What do you think? When Sea Murder went up for his charges, what was the jury thinking about?

[A]

He's not around. So there's an answer.

[B]

There's your answer. So Mad Dog was charged with capital murder in 81 for the abduction and murder of 30 year old Bobby Jean Romer Robinson, who he kidnapped from a convenience store. And he remained at large, they said somehow. Pruitt, by the way, prior to this killing, had killed his wife, then kidnapped and killed a bank teller in Mississippi. And after he killed Robertson and fled Fort Smith, he killed two more men in Colorado.

[A]

God dang.

[B]

Never been a more apt nickname than Mad Dog. He was returned to Arkansas in 82 after he was sentenced to death in Mississippi and two consecutive life sentences in Colorado. And then in 82 he was convicted and sentenced to death in Robertson's murder in Arkansas. And he was also sentenced to life in New Mexico for the murder of his wife.

[A]

Who gets to kill him with all of that?

[B]

That's what I mean. It's like they got a. You know what I mean?

[A]

They're doing sorry for this shit.

[B]

Yeah, if you don't know, I'm rock, paper, scissoring to Jimmy. What do you think?

[A]

Here they're doing a coin flip tournament, for Christ's sake.

[B]

A bracket 50 yard line. They're going to need a bracket for all the states. May 82 is an attempt to reduce his sentence. Public Defender John Settle's bid to reduce the penalty and charges facing Thomas Winford was rejected Monday during court hearings. Circuit Court Judge John Holland of Fort Smith denied motions asking the capital Murder charges against Simmons be reduced to first degree murder and the death penalty be lowered to life imprisonment. So he's. Settle maintained the capital murder charge carrying with it the maximum penalty of death by electrocution should be reduced because, quote, there is no provision for automatic appeal within Arkansas state statutes. I think federal law fixed that later where you had to. The public defender added, without an automatic appeal, there's no provision to guarantee due process of law, which is true. The prosecuting attorney said, though the U.S. supreme Court has reviewed Arkansas state statutes several times and has found them not to be or has not found them to be unconstitutional. They said that. The same argument they echoed when settle asked the possible penalty be reduced. Settle claimed electrocution was cruel, barbaric and painful punishment. And they said, well, the Supreme Court says it's great, so no worries

[A]

doing a mess. They're paying a real high electric bill.

[B]

Oh, fuck. Yeah. This they're gonna put in where you could choose to get. Like if you get. They're gonna put it. Make lethal injection. The, the main thing. But then if you got sentenced to electrocution, then you get to choose.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Which is fun. I like that. How do you want to die? I don't know.

[A]

Real selfish choice.

[B]

It's a tough one. I gotta. Let me think about it for about, I don't know, 30 years or so. So what do you say?

[A]

I'll consider this over three squares over the next several.

[B]

Over several decades, hopefully. So he said that the settle alleges that the kidnappings in Sebastian county are closely linked to the alleged murders in Crawford county, and therefore to try his client on both would constitute double jeopardy. It is our con. Our contention that the kidnapping is included in the Arkansas capitol murder statute. Statute. Now, the prosecutor countered that the defense argument of double jeopardy trying a guy twice for the same thing is unfounded. He said, I don't think you can argue double jeopardy until you've been in jeopardy once. He said Fields explained that he would need to have been found guilty of one of the offenses before the motion could be valid. Okay. The defense is also asking for $130 in costs and that was denied.

[A]

We'd also like 130 bucks.

[B]

Well, the costs are. One of the TV stations refused to turn over material without paying for copying costs.

[A]

Oh. So we had to pay to get the.

[B]

So they're like, can I have that? And they said, no, you can pay

[A]

one of our editors to make you a copy, but you can't have this one.

[B]

It's just for paper. Because he Wanted all the shit for all the interviews they did with all the people to say that the venue, change of venue should have been done. So that's, that's he. They tell him to keep off 83 he appeals to the Supreme Court. The big one, the Arkansas Supreme Court anyway, you know, which is, you know three guys named Bubba.

[A]

Yeah. And their hands around a tire fire.

[B]

Well, warming their. I was going to go all sitting on toilets that aren't hooked up to anything. That's just the chairs they use.

[A]

Yeah. Since they're thrones, they're like. These are called thrones.

[B]

Yeah, that's what they call them.

[A]

They've been calling it that since I was a boy. Since I was a little shovel boy.

[B]

Since they started getting around these parts honestly on the tire fire. So the lawyer here, public defender John settle, filed a 715 page petition. Wow, that is a long fucking thing. Thing. With the Arkansas Supreme Court appealing the death sentence, Settle said in an interview that he filed the petition in Little Rock. And he said it took two weeks to write and raised 22 legal points. There's 22 points here. So five points relate to the admissibility of evidence. The prosecution did not unfairly withhold evidence merely because the deputy sheriff who received the telephone call about the discovery of Larry Price's body at the first protective at first protected the caller's request for anonymity, but disclosed the caller's identity at the trial after the caller had been given permission. Okay. So they ended up finding out then there's no indication that the officer acted in bad faith that he had disclosed the name to the prosecutor or that the defense was handicapped by not knowing earlier the identity of the caller. Yeah. They also point 10 the court correctly refused to admit proof that some of Simmons relatives had blood type A, which was the Prices type and the type found on his trousers. So they're trying to say there's no proof that relatives blood could have gotten on his trousers. If he said, hey, my sister Marsha got hit in the nose with a football and shot over and bled all over me, that would be one thing. But he never said that. He just goes, well, I mean I have family members with type A. They could have bled on me. Might have been them with fresh blood on my legs.

[A]

My cousin uses supers.

[B]

You never know. You never know. It's possible. Any possible gaps in the chain of custody of blood samples were inconsequential. And there was no substantial indication of tampering during the penalty stage of the two step trial. The court Correctly refused to allow the defense to introduce pictures of a gas chamber, a gallows and an electric chair. None of which can be regarded as a mitigating circumstance. They're trying to appeal. We should have let them show the jury how bad that.

[A]

Oh, show them what it does. They don't care.

[B]

Yeah, they know they like it. They'd be like, good. That's why they're doing this.

[A]

Stars and stripes, babe. They were really bout it.

[B]

Yeah. Whether to send the jury. There's also a point of whether to send the jury to the scene of the Price's apartment to determine how well the witness Davis could have seen the three victims being taken to the car at some imprecise time after sunset. Was a matter addressed to the trial judge's discretion. So there's no abuse there. The court was right in submitting to the jury the various charges of capital murder that we have already seen, that there was substantial evidence to support each verdict and points 21 and 22. The court refused to instruct the jury that it had to presume if Simmons were sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, he would spend the rest of his life in prison and refuse to rule that if the defense counsel made such an argument to the jury, the prosecutor should be prohibited from mentioning it in reply. The possibility of executive clemency. Okay. That's what they. Okay, so the high court denies the stay. Okay. Now problem is the execution is stayed by a federal court come in and supersede Arkansas. So they get, you know, know, put on that. So the stay was scheduled. The execution was scheduled, like soon, like it was coming. And so they said. This is from the Times record. The stay of Friday scheduled execution of Thomas Winford Simmons is one example of why the public has become disillusioned with the judicial system. That's what the prosecutor of the case said. The federal judge granted a stay of execution for Simmons. The prosecutor said it is this type of action, routinely granted without giving the state a chance to be heard, that has caused the disillusionment of the public with the judicial system. I think it is time for the federal judiciary to start executing some responsibility and not just its authority. State jury's opinions and state supreme court opinions should not be lightly dismissed as it seems to be the rule for the past several years. That's because you're in fucking Arkansas. And we proved over time that you fucking people in certain states weren't fair to a lot of people. That's why we have to do that. And if you didn't do that, you're the ones did it to yourself is what I'm saying. Just like you said about him, the murder, you made it. So it has to be that way. It has to be. You can't trust 50 individual states to all be fair at the same time. You can't trust that. Gotta have a standard. So Simmons request for a stay was denied by the Arkansas Supreme Court, but then and granted here. So there's a guy named Ron Heller who's his new lawyer. He said he'd just become Simmons lawyer like a week ago and hadn't been Simmons lawyer long enough to prepare anything. He argued that the penalty was too severe and that it demonstrated passion and prejudice. And the state Supreme Court said it knew of no other case involving multiple murders so cold blooded, brutal or lacking any trace of humanity. That's these Supreme Court, the state Supreme Court. There is a letter to the editor now and there people, this pretty much reflects the public sentiment. No justice for victims is the title of it. The Arkansas State Supreme Court was quoted as saying that it knew of no other case involving multiple murders so cold blooded, so brutal, so lacking in any trace of humanity as those committed by Thomas Wimps. The State Supreme Court issued Simmons a stay so that his conviction could be appealed by the Arkansas Supreme Court and the US Supreme Court. The appeal has been found to be without merit and the Supreme Court refused to issue a second stay, finding no just cause to do so. Your sympathy and compassion for this barbaric criminal is overwhelming. This is to the newspaper because they might have written an article that they didn't like. Are you fully aware of the facts of these murders? Murders? Would pictures of these four innocent victims, bodies lying in a hole with their limbs hanging over a tire covering the hole, be proof to you of just how heinous these crimes were? Convince you that Simmons does not deserve the consideration you've given him? He did not give his victims a stay of execution. Nor did the victims have the opportunity to argue that their penalty was too severe and that it demonstrated passion and prejudice such as Simmons is now declaring. No. These four God fearing people had absolutely no choice. Holly Gentry happened to be a very dear friend of mine. Holly nor any of the other three victims deserve this ill treatment. See, this is personal.

[A]

You can't write if you knew him.

[B]

It's personal. Yeah. Much less suffer the brutal barbaric treatment at the hands and whims of Thomas Winford Simmons. He is no better than a mad dog. But that nickname's unfortunately already taken.

[A]

So taken.

[B]

Very unfortunate because he would have been Perfect.

[A]

Several states. Mad Dog. It's not. You can't get it.

[B]

He's national band. It's just like when you're first starting out and you're an opener comic and you hear some fucking famous comedian do a joke that you do and you know you did it first. It's theirs now because people he's been

[A]

telling it from the Mississippi to the Colorado. You're in trouble.

[B]

Even if I did it first fucked Nothing he said. It appears that you and the other bleeding hearts must feel our trial judges in Arkansas Supreme Court are incompetent. I mean probably, but that's a separate issue. So you issued. So you issued the stay for this quote animal. The consideration you have given Simmons and overruling the state Supreme Court appears that you are condoning multiple murder Holly as well as Detective. Oh, they misspelled Tate. A detective who's. Whose name is so important to me that I don't even fucking take the time to make sure it's correct.

[A]

How do you spell it?

[B]

P A T E. Pate. Pate.

[A]

Nice. Pate.

[B]

Detective Pate.

[A]

At least they didn't call him tit.

[B]

Yeah. His name is Tate. Let's give him the respect he deserves and call him his fucking name and not Pate. Serve the Lord Jesus Christ. That doesn't matter in court. Bitch.

[A]

Sorry.

[B]

That doesn't matter. That matters to you and your house. Outside those doors. That's what it matters. Nothing.

[A]

Stop making these four murders about you. You weren't even.

[B]

That's what it is. He's a fucking animal. Who is a dangerous person who killed these people for no fucking reason. That's enough. Don't bring up the lore and everything up. That's plenty.

[A]

He doesn't even need to be your friend. I don't know these people and I hate him.

[B]

That's what I'm saying. He's a fucking scumbag. I'm sure they are in heaven this day. However, this does not lessen the pain and suffering their families are going through.

[A]

Through.

[B]

Will justice ever be served? With your compassion for murderers and rulings such as Judge G. Thomas Eisel's on death. Qualified juries. We have only a system serving the criminal. Horseshit. Criminal justice. There's certainly no justice for the victims. And it's signed Marilyn Moore. Justice for Crime Victims. Fort Smith. God, I hope you're dead by now. You sound like a fucking insufferable asshole. Okay. I mean. Yeah, whatever, but you know what I mean to use this exaggerated terminology and you don't care about this. You only care about that. All they talk about in court is the fucking victims. As they should. They never talk. But the poor defendant that only comes up in sentencing mitigation. He has one little slice where he gets to go, oh, poor me. And then they never listen to him. So what's the difference?

[A]

And she was probably named after that godless Marilyn Monroe.

[B]

Oh, godless, godless. Oh boy. So 1986 appeal about not changing venues. He has one of those here. So they moved for the change of venue. They go over all the different people's statements and quotes and all that and they say, no, thank you. You back there again. So he's denied that. 1988, the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a federal judge to determine whether Thomas Winford Simmons was ineffectively represented by his former attorneys. Okay, now let's get into this shit. They said the same public defenders who represented Simmons therefore cross examined principal witness James Davis. Davis had been representing Davis on a criminal charge of his own when Davis offered them his testimony. So that's what we're talking about now, the stuff about James Davis. They said Davis was not unknown to Settle at the time of Simmons trial. This is right from the court document. 8-5-1981. That's when the trial is on. 12-30-80. Settle had been appointed to represent Davis on a felony charge of theft by deception. At the time he was appointed in municipal court, Settle talked to Davis for about two months minutes in a second conversation between occurring between December 30th and January 8th. Sometime in there, Settle learned about Davis record as a Vietnam veteran and that he was taking lithium. He may have learned that Davis had a service connected discharge but he did not recall obtaining this information from him. Cross examination of Davis at the trial, Settle questioned Davis about his court martial in Vietnam, but did not recall where how he obtained that information. So they said he also cross examined Davis about a conviction in Memphis. Settle said he's almost sure he obtained this information through discovery, not from knowing it because he's his client. He also had an FBI rap sheet on Davis. This could well have been the source of information concerning the Vietnam court martial. Settle does not recall whether he knew about Davis treatment in the VA hospital in Fayette. Okay, so they said the criticism, the main criticism that is leveled at Settle is his failure to bring out the fact that Davis was taking lithium and that he was being treated for depression by the VA on an outpatient basis. Lithium is a widely used drug to counter manic depressive. Back in the Day. So the problem is, I think here is, I don't think unless that was in discovery, it is not something he can know. He can't just know it because he knows the guy and bring it up. Okay, that wouldn't be fair. It has to be something that came in from discovery.

[A]

He's saying, though it definitely came from discovery, not from knowing him.

[B]

He's saying some of the stuff, the Vietnam stuff, the other stuff. But they're saying, Simmons is saying, look, you knew this shit about this guy. It was up to you to bring it all up to try to get me out of jail. And he's like, well, it wasn't really fair. So it's not really fair. That he was cross examining this guy is what's not fair. So they said after all that this is an examination of Davis where they said, I see no signs of schizophrenia. He smiles, he has full range of affect. He senses his behavior as sociopathic and is a self reflective. No hallucinations or delusions. He may have been given the diagnosis in a spell of temporary fury. Sometime the overwhelming impression is of an emotionally discontrolled person of dull normal IQ who avoids responsibility for his decisions and compounds his own circumstances by running or going into temper explosions. Will use lithium to start. Now, the other thing here. So they said settle. Should have never been a part of this case in one way or the other. Then his second lawyer didn't, didn't bring that up in the last filing when they were appealing. Didn't bring up this overlap of client issue about the first lawyer. And you know why he didn't do that? Because he's a fucking drunk, that's why.

[A]

Oh, is he?

[B]

That's what they say. He's a drunk.

[A]

He's an alcoholic.

[B]

This is Heller, Mr. Heller. And they said that he was a drunk. A judge though said, I find that Mr. Heller was not suffering from alcoholism and his faculties were not impaired when he made the decision regarding the overlap issue and filed his brief on June of 1986 and argued the case in November 86. He surrendered his license to practice law in November 87, a year after he was this guy's attorney. He filed an affidavit and testified that during the previous year he had problems with alcoholism. The problem would have thus arisen 11 months after he filed his appeal and five months after he filed his brief in the court of appeal. That would be if you take him at his word of when he started drinking and didn't drink before, which I wouldn't say that probably the Case was argued in November 86. Mr. Heller testified he never did enter a courtroom when his faculties were impaired, didn't get drunk and come into court. So he's got one on. F. Lee Bailey drank his lunch. So they said that. Isn't it true or couldn't it be correct that the 12 month period prior to November 87 is just when you began to recognize the problem and that you'd actually had problems sometime prior to that? And the lawyer says, I can't say exactly. I don't think in November 86 I realized I was having that much of a problem. In retrospect, In November of 87, when I surrendered my license, I certainly could see that over the last 12 months there had been a pattern. Not meeting my overhead obligations and things like that that were certainly outward objective symbols of the problems. So that's what he said now. They said, denied, by the way. Go fuck yourself. Now, June of 1990, Arkansas hasn't been executing people, but now they're ready to start executing people again.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So they're saying, when is he gonna fucking die? Basically, they executed Ronald Gene Simmons. No relation. And also not the Ron Simmons from the apartment that his sister. At his sister's house over there. And not Gene Simmons. We covered Ronald Gene Simmons. I'm pretty sure. I think we did. Yeah. He killed a bunch of people. He killed 16 people, including 14 family members who did that guy, I think. Yeah. So there are several people up for this. There's A list of 32 men on death row in Arkansas. And they're basically gonna execute them in order of how long they've been on death row, the crimes they were sentenced to death, and the status of their appeal. September 1990 is the final appeal.

[A]

Here we go.

[B]

U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals denies him in September 90, moving him to the front of the line of the execution table. He is.

[A]

He's got a fast pass.

[B]

Hold on, baby. This is. No, no, no. Really, I got. No, no. I've been had my place held in line. It's good. This is my spot. Yeah, I fast passed around all you bitches. The Arkansas Assistant Attorney General said if the U.S. supreme Court refused to intervene, Simmons could be executed by mid January 91. So he is scheduled for execution mid January 1991. Yeah, they say that, by the way, there's going to be a. It can be lethal injection, it can be electrocution. They have a backup executioner, by the way.

[A]

No, she just. In case this guy gets a stomach flu.

[B]

Yeah, Heart attack, trips and falls. The backup Is a precautionary step taken in case the appointed executioner cannot able to carry out the execution. At the execution, the executioner and his backup both will be in a small control room located to the right of the inmate. A small window will allow the executioner to view the inmate. The identity of the two people will be kept secret. Okay, so that's how they do this here. They have media present. They have people coming. They said they don't believe. They said they don't anticipate any family members of either the inmate or the victims being present for the execution.

[A]

Is that right?

[B]

That people used to never go for that. Now it's like, I want to see them. And people have gotten wacky, man. People are fucking sick. You can't wait to see it. It's sick. You're kind of.

[A]

I feel bad for both sides that want to see it. The only people that should be there are journalists. Yeah. To document.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. That's your job. You do that shit. But either family. It's probably bad just for normal people. To watch people be killed is a bad thing. It's not good for your psyche, whether it's justified or however you want to put it, but it's just not good for your mental state of the truth.

[A]

I don't want to watch a dog put down. I don't want to see anything killed.

[B]

I don't want to see anything get killed. No. December 31, 1990. Less than two weeks away from his execution day, Simmons body was discovered in his cell at the Tucker Maximum Security Unit as the guards were delivering lunch.

[A]

Tr a pussy.

[B]

Yep. He was in his bunk covered with a blanket. Didn't answer the guard. So they summoned a supervisor. And they said there was lots of blood. So the medical personnel were called. There were towels in the bed soaked with blood. And they said Simmons died from a self inflicted laceration to his neck, apparently made with the blade of his disposable razor that had been melted into the handle.

[A]

Dang. He jammed it in there.

[B]

Yeah. Melted it. It's fair, they said. This is somebody from the prison said it's fair to say. This as much surprised the staff as everyone else. They said Simmons was not prone to cause problems for the staff, other inmates, or himself for that matter. He seemed to do really well in any environment except freedom. That's where he really had a problem. When he could just do whatever he wanted. He left to sue.

[A]

Yeah. Except for in the military.

[B]

Yeah. I couldn't do that. He left a suicide note maintaining his innocence in the Suicide note. They said, quote, with the exception of John Edward Swindler, who was executed in June of 1990 for killing a Fort Smith patrolman, Thomas Simmons was the most dangerous person I've come in contact with. That's one of the. That's what the prosecutor said. They said the type of disposable razor that a death row inmate apparently used to kill himself is available to all 6,500 state prison inmates. The spokesman said. They said he appeared to have a self inflicted laceration to the neck area that was inflicted, we believe, from a disposable razor. The blade had been removed and it had been set in the handle. He said, we don't have any reason to believe it was anything else but a suicide. All inmates are allowed to have one unadulterated disposable razor. And they said, we're talking about a disposable razor, not a straight razor. It's still a razor. I mean, a razor's a razor. Does that create a danger only when an inmate chooses to use it improperly? Yeah, they're inmates. They shouldn't have anything that has a choice to be used improperly. That's the problem.

[A]

The fact that it has the option to be means they will fucking do it.

[B]

Absolutely. And he said pencils and pens are common weapons. So, you know, if they can have that. But look, at an elementary school, you'll hand the kids pencils and pens, but will you hand them fucking razor blades? Probably not. You know, it's the same thing. They said bed sheets could be used as a rope. We issue bed sheets. What's the difference? I mean, I don't know what else you do. The guys have to be able to shave. You can't. And you can't be able to shave,

[A]

start a line and shave people every fucking morning.

[B]

Fuck no. Fuck no. I mean, you could do electric razors.

[A]

That works.

[B]

Then you'd have to provide those and they're a lot more expensive. Maybe over time they'd be cheaper though.

[A]

Yeah, but in an electric razor, there's a fucking razor inside there and you could pull that out.

[B]

Yeah, true, true. It's just not a.

[A]

It's a very small chip, but it's the same as. It's the same as that one that they fucking cut people with in wrestling. It's bigger than that razor.

[B]

Yeah, they just do a razor blade that's a tiny thing like that. Just tape it up. Well, sometimes it's half a razor with tape on it, but depends on who's doing it. So they Said that Simmons has no record of mental health problems. And they said it's fair to say this as much surprised the staff as everyone else. So one said, this is the prison staff police sergeant from the state. It was nothing whatsoever but self inflicted. He made elaborate preparations to kill himself. Now why did he kill himself? I don't know. Because they were gonna execute him in two weeks probably. WA Gipsy Henderson knows why he killed himself. Gypsy Henderson knew him in jail before they were both on death row. And he said that he didn't want his family in the spotlight so he killed himself to save his family. He said, if I don't get. He said, I talked to him years ago and he said, if I don't get a new trial and they don't reverse this thing, I'm not gonna put my family through that. Gypsy said, you know why he took his life? So his family didn't have to go through the media, newspaper, radio and television and all the hype that would have come about it probably sometime this year. It was well planned by Tom. Gypsy said, I do not believe the prison guards could have stopped this unless they happened to be in the right in front of his cell at that particular moment. Everybody's burials here. The prices share a headstone. It's very nice. It's like a heart where they each have one side of the heart there. At the Brock Cemetery in Johnson County, Arkansas. Holly Kim Gentry is buried in Rudy, Arkansas at the Morrison Cemetery in Crawford county. And William Ray Tate is buried at the Oak Hill Cemetery in Benton County, Arkansas there as well. So there you go, everybody that is Arkansas and holy. That place is.

[A]

Yeah, he wasn't going to. He was going to go out on his own terms no matter what. I think that was from the start, from the get. You know what I mean?

[B]

I think that's. Yeah, I honestly, if. I think. I think if he knew the damn cops were coming to the sand place, I think he would have blew his brains out in the sand. I think he's that kind of guy.

[A]

I think he thought he was going to get away with it.

[B]

Oh, he definitely thought he was going to get away with it. Then when he deposited the check and he said, oh fuck, why'd I do that? I'll get the check back. Then he was fucked. All he had to do was not steal that check and it would have been very hard to identify this guy. Although he went to a goddamn bank and said, my name is Thomas Simmons.

[A]

Here's my bank account number from a dead guy.

[B]

Number first. Wow. So there you go, everybody. If you like the show or anything about the show, get on whatever app you're on, Give us five stars. It helps so much. So thank you for doing that. If you're on Netflix, give the old thumbs up. That helps a lot too. Thank you for doing that. You can Definitely go to shutupandgivememurder.com that's where I suggest you go. What's there, you may ask? Well, merchandise. Sure. You. Yeah, but tickets to live shows are what we really want to talk about because our live shows are fucking awesome. They are. We're not going to be humble about it. They're goddamn good.

[A]

They're great.

[B]

And we know that because people tell us that that go to the shows. And we know it because even other comedians that see it go, jesus Christ, that was fucking incredible.

[A]

And you know what else? We see thousands of people stand and applaud after the goddamn show.

[B]

Yeah. And it's cause it's funny. We do a really, really funny fucking show that also has. Has a real complicated murder that we do jokes and visual jokes. It's great. So get your tickets right now. Milwaukee, September 18th at the Pabst State Theater in Minneapolis, September 19th as well. Get those tickets right now. The Pabst ones are running low, so if you want them, get them right now. Minnesota, get them now. Also then October 3rd in Dallas. October 16th and 17th in San Jose and Sacramento. And then November 13th, 14th, Tarrytown and Boston. So get your tickets right now. Shut up and give me murder.com. go ahead and follow us on social media. Malltownmurder on Instagram, smalltown Pod on Facebook. So you can do that for sure. Get yourself Patreon. My God, what are you doing out there? Everybody, patreon is amazing. Patreon.com crimeinsports which, just like the name of our other show, you should be listening to because we have a big Yahweh, Ben Yahweh cult murder thing going on with that. But check that out. Patreon.com crimeinsports anybody, $5 a month or above. And that's never gone up and never will go up. Never up, never. We're like. That's like the Arizona iced tea of podcasting. It will be five fucking dollars. We can't charge more cans right there. You know how many of these cans we had made? Trillions. We got cans to like 20, 55. We got to use them. So we're stuck with them. That's it. It'll cost more to redo the can.

[A]

So.

[B]

Yeah. Get in there and do that. Patreon.com CrimeAndSports $5 a month or above. Get you everything we put out. As soon as you subscribe, you get hundreds of backbone bonus episodes, like 400 of them that you've never heard before. Then after that, you get one crime in sports and one small town murder every other week for the foreseeable future. So this week, what you're going to get, it's just going to tell you this. It's Prisoner Dating Game time. It's back again, back by popular demand. And this is one almost like when the Sopranos were on hbo. Like we see a lot of people subscribe for this particular episode of they need to hear these again because they're so goddamn funny. Prisoner Dating Game. I'm gonna line up four bachelors and four bachelorettes for Jimmy here. And they only have one thing in common. They've all been convicted of violent felonies. And Jimmy's gonna pick one of each based solely on how they describe themselves. And then he's gonna try to read between the lines and then we're gonna find out afterwards what they have done and how horrible of a person Jimmy has picked to spend time with. It's going to be great. Can't wait. Patreon.com crimeinsports and you also get everything we put out ad goddamn free, baby. Ad free. And on top of that, you also get a shout out, which is right goddamn now. Jimmy, hit me with the names of the people who would never do any of the shit that happened in this episode because it was just disgusting. Hit me with them right fucking now.

[A]

This week's executive producer are Gary Howard and Allentown Paul. Good for you. Hey.

[B]

He's living here in Allen singing Billy Joel songs. Good for you, Gary.

[A]

Claude Cavallo. Happy hours in Galveston, Texas. Oh, don't get washed away. Aaron Webb, Kelly Becker, Shea Houseman. Christy Malcolm, Chris Bowers, Vanessa Braley. Thank you all so much for doing what you're doing. Also, real quickly, thank you.

[B]

Love you guys.

[A]

These shout outs, you guys we trust to do them. We started this to try to give you guys credit for what you're doing because we really feel like you are the backbone of this and you deserve the credit. So we just want to mention your name once.

[B]

I just want to shout you out.

[A]

There may be a little confusion. I can only do this on the initial signup. If you hear anybody repeat it, it's because they donate every week. And I don't fucking know why they do it, but boy, am I Grateful for those people.

[B]

Thank you for doing it. Yeah.

[A]

So I can only do it on the first one because otherwise this would. This would take longer than the show. It's thousands of people. It's crazy.

[B]

We'd have to put out a separate show. A separate two and a half hour show every week.

[A]

Names of just us names stumbling through the fucking different ethnicities of this country.

[B]

That'd be easy for me, though. That would be good. We should do that one. If we could replace a regular show with that. Is that what you guys want?

[A]

Is that what you want?

[B]

I hope not.

[A]

Other producers this week. So the point is giving you credit you deserve. We appreciate it. Thank you so much.

[B]

We love you for it. Thank you.

[A]

But I'm not going more than once. Fucking God damn it. It's so much possible.

[B]

We would if we could, but we can't.

[A]

Other producers this week. Peyton Meadows, Liz Vasquez, Janice Hill. Bill McClellan. Casey Thompson. Megan and Mabel. Fred. Scarlett Horbeast III. Thank you all so much. Dustin Kelly. Elise. Elise. Elise. No last name. Elise. I think. Sam Hodges. Tracy Fontaine. Sarah Sanders. Kendra with no last name. Katrina Bell. Danny Ehrett. Todd Wallenbeck. Heather Morche. Craig Garland. Courtney Griggs. April k. Joe Whitaker. McKenna. Matthew. Megan Block. Kimberly Watto. Jill White. Ryan Delgado. Brandon Wilson. Lauren Murphy. Dina Hoffman. Joe with no last name. Benjamin Gears. Brooke Page. Amy. Linebarger. Linebarger Line. All right. Chance with no last name. Natalie. Fia. Flora. Florian. Chich.

[B]

It's the best you're getting.

[A]

Bridget Revere's. Revere's. All right. Allison with no last name. Pam with no last name. Sp. No last name. Justin Yetzers. Megan Davis. Adam Hess. Jenny. Janine. Jennine. My God. Mallory. Megan Follette. Denny with no last name. Deny. Lewis with no last name. Misty with no last name. Gavin Beery. Joseph Florkley. Life is better with dogs. I couldn't agree more. Denise Bebiano. Ronnie with no last name. Tanika Beaver. Hell yeah. Megan Termezia. Termeze. Hey, what's. How do you say her name? Termeze. Cause it's like Torme. Yes. Mel. Or Marissa. Jessica. But it's Termet. All right, you get Jessica. Perky Perk.

[B]

You got that.

[A]

Derek Stewart. Leslie with no last name. Katie Bourne. Jan Sims. Like Phil. Abigail Batar. Julia Davis. Trina Childe. Child Shaw. Amber Spencer. And then Laura Spencer. Or is that Cora Spencer? I don't know what I did. I may have mistyped. Laura Brent with no last name. K. Bui. Lindsey. Trent. Shay Hausmond. I said that. Johnny Rhodes. Loragon Chestelle. Nope. That's Crystal. Crystal Gilbeau.

[B]

Chestelle.

[A]

Is it Chistel?

[B]

You should go by Chistel, man. Is there an R in there?

[A]

I don't know.

[B]

I love it. Fucking awesome.

[A]

Dave Dorn. James Bugger. Chris Schooney. Tuning Shannon leary. Brittany Green. Mama 5150. Todd Fishel. She's crazy.

[B]

James.

[A]

Crazy. Mom's name. Robert Smith. Holly Decred. Chisenzo Cray Chenzo Lee's Hammer Lishamar. God damn it. Cora Lee with no last name. Beth with no last name. Robert Burke. Cecily with no last name. Killer State of Mind Tina Tiago. Jeff Gomez Tuck 1195. Jessica Migelic. Miguelich. Something Borat would say.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

It's a Mizulich. Rhiannon. Rhiannon. Rhiannon Henry Abby Danko. Smooth. C. Not. Wait. No. Try just hard. I don't. What does that mean?

[B]

I have no idea.

[A]

What are you trying to get out of me?

[B]

Something Yoda.

[A]

Yoda. Not trying.

[B]

Just porn stars.

[A]

Jamie Miller.

[B]

Penis. Just hard. Sorry.

[A]

Say it with some nondescript accent. Brendan with no last name. Chuck Lankford. Ike Bryant. Liscoe with no last name. Tara Cuzzo. Jennifer Lee. Melissa with no last name. Mandy. Or maybe Leah. Mandy Latier. Vegan me. Rebecca with no last name. Melissa. Meow. Janek. Jeremiah Gray. Neb. Neb. Knob. Nab. Nab. Soccer.

[B]

It's not Knob.

[A]

Right. Nobody's name is Knob. Connie Ryan. Christopher with no last name. Jeff Millet. Katie Keller. Mike Dougherty. Sarah Suman. Ryan Dee Dee. Andy Kiki. Susan with no last name. Miranda. Cool Ho. Luminateer. Luminator. Charles Williamson. What is it?

[B]

I said there you go. That's Illuminator.

[A]

CW Laura Bishop. Cody with no last name. Ryan Hanning. Piera. Pierrette. Pierrette. That's the girl. Pierre. Pierrette. Is there a Pierrette? Pierrette.

[B]

It's a little. Yes. That's Pierre's daughter. Pierrette.

[A]

Is there a gal named Pierre? Yolanda Foltz. Kimberly Howey. Carla with no last name. Money or Mooney. Christian Muir. Leslie Cullen. She has two, and she did that on purpose. Two. Paid. Thank you. Leslie. Vanessa Bundell. Chris Odell. Crystal Osborne Lazio. Nope. That's Laszlo. Marks. Sloan Skillman. Deborah Logan. Ben Mills. Dana Kilcoyne. That's probably not right. Kelsey Terrell. Meg would know last name. Gary would know last name. Leland Helms. Leland is such a cool old man name. I had a crossing guard named Leland. He was the best. He got hit by a car. And died. Oh, holding the little sign out there.

[B]

That's a heartwarming story.

[A]

Yeah. Sweet old man just got blasted by a Honda Accord.

[B]

Perfect. That's how I want to go.

[A]

Christy DiCilo. Brian Hansell. Deborah Glaser. Justin with no last name. Lynn. Lynn. Steve and Dina Morin. Jennifer Strozner. Heidi Anderson. Sam with no last name. Ashley Smith. Christina with no last name. Amber Robinette. Alexandra Mitrofan. Micah Reynolds. Katie Gabagold. Gabagold.

[B]

Gabagold.

[A]

Michelle Miller. Oh, that's probably. We probably know her. Michelle. That show's terrific. Martha Araceli. Martha. Martha. Joan Rowland. Ryan Young. Tracy Craig. Carls Barkley. All right. Patriot babe. Better be the Patriots. New England variety. Brandon Brooks. Fern Dragon. Christine Bridges. Rick Silvera, Mackenzie Green. Angela Jones. Sarah with no last name. Beth Ward. Pete with no last name. Heather Zirpel. Zirpl Perhaps Bradley. Brett Whitaker. Amber Hodorski, Michael Ducey, Heather Montalvo. Garlic thought. All right. Drew Miller, Amy Gaiton and all of our patrons. You're the best.

[B]

Thank you so much, everybody. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Thank you for all that you do for us. We really goddamn appreciate every last little bit of everything that you do for us. So thank you for hanging out, telling your friends, posting on social media, and just for listening alone in a room, staring at the wall wall. Thank you for that. Thank you for everything. But definitely, if you want to find us on social media, shut up and givememurder.com has menus that'll take you everywhere you need to go. So come out and see us. Come to a live show. Keep coming back each and every week. No matter what, though. And also until next week, everybody. It's been our pleasure.

[A]

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[B]

Hey, everybody. Listening to Small Town Murder out there. Hi. Good to see you out there. I'm here with Jimmy, too. And this is an ad. But not an ad for a product. This is an ad. This is the best tour dates.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Come see a live show. The 2026 Tour. All the tickets are for sale right now. Starting out with February 21st in Nashville, March 6th in Durham, March 7th in Atlanta. Phoenix is sold out. We do have tickets though to your stupid opinions. On 21 March, Salt Lake City sold out. Denver has tickets. Tickets be there on May 2. May 29 Buffalo sold out. Royal Oak, Michigan. May 30 we have September 18 Milwaukee, September 19 Minneapolis. October 3 in Dallas. October 16 in San Jose. October 17 in Sacramento. November 13 in Tarrytown. November 14 in Boston. Come see us. The live shows are spectacular. Come join all of the other STM people. You're going to meet so many people. You're going to have fun. Make some friends like crazy and make some new friends. Come out and see us. Shut up and give me murder.com is where you go for those tickets. Get them right now while they're hot.

[A]

See you on the road.