Once the shock and outrage, the horror and the grief

began to abate, family, friends, and the press all asked

the same question: why ? What concatenation of forces

and events had, in the six days surrounding Christ-

mas 1987, driven Ronald Gene Simmons to the grisly

murders of fourteen of his own family and a homici-

dal spree in a nearby town that left four people

wofinded and two others dead?

Even when fragmentary details of Simmons s life

began to emerge, lay speculations still tended toward

simple answers, those that could be accommodated in

some inches of print or a sound bite on the evening

news, and the psychologists and criminologists who

probed Simmons s motives were reluctant or unable

to arrive at any sort of revelatory conclusion. The law

found Simmons fit for trial. He was eventually con-

victed in two separate proceedings, twice sentenced

to death, and executed on June 25, 1990. But the

sordid tale of incest, isolation, and violence that those

trials and the investigations of reporters brought to

light still begged more questions than they settled,