JUST IN: Executed for Killing His Wife, Children & Grandchildren — The last Hours of Ronald Gene…, thaison8386

JUST IN: Executed for Killing His Wife, Children & Grandchildren — The last Hours of Ronald Gene…,

Nine more bodies found this morning in Dover. The victims may be the wife, children, and grandchildren of the gunman. The toll now stands at 16 dead in an Arkansas murder case. >> The Patriarch, June 25th, 1990. Lincoln County, Arkansas. At exactly 9:02 in the evening, the curtains over the death chamber windows are pulled open.

A man lies strapped to a gurney, covered chin to toe in a white sheet. His arms are fixed at his sides. A leather strap holds his head still. He blinks. He scans the room, the witnesses, the glass, the ceiling. He is not afraid. He has been waiting for this moment for 2 years. His name is Ronald Gene Simmons.

Master Sergeant, decorated veteran, Bronze Star recipient, and the state of Arkansas is about to execute him for killing every single member of his own family. 14 people. His wife, his children, his grandchildren. All dead. All killed by his hand on a remote property in Pope County in the 6 days surrounding Christmas of 1987.

And when the family was gone, he drove into town and killed a woman who had once refused his advances, then shot his way through four more businesses before walking into a police station and sitting down. 16 people dead, four more wounded. And the man responsible had one request for the court, make it fast.

 The jury gave him death. He waived every appeal. He told the judge that anything less than execution would be cruel and unusual punishment for him. And in his final statement, seven words delivered to a room full of witnesses who had come to watch him die, he said, “Justice delayed finally be done, is justifiable homicide.

At 9:19 p.m., Ronald Gene Simmons was pronounced dead. First person ever executed by lethal injection in the state of Arkansas. This is the story of how a man the world called a hero built a kingdom of terror inside his own home. And what happened when he decided no one was allowed to leave it. You have to go back to the beginning to understand it, not to excuse it.

 Nothing will ever explain away what happened on that frozen property in Pope County. But to trace the architecture of a man who built his entire life around one thing. Control. Ronald Gene Simmons was born on July 15th, 1940, in Chicago, Illinois. His father, William Simmons, died of a stroke when Ronald was just 2 years old, before he was old enough to understand death.

He had already lost the first man who was supposed to show him what a man looked like. Within a year, his mother remarried. Her new husband, William D. Greffen, was a civil engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which meant one thing for young Ronald, constant movement. The family relocated across central Arkansas again and again through the 1940s and ’50s, following government postings.

Never staying long enough to plant roots anywhere. For a child already unmoored by loss, the perpetual displacement hardened something inside him. He never fit in. He was always the new kid, always the outsider, always the one starting over. And rather than learning to adapt, Ronald Simmons learned to resent.

By age 10, relatives would later recall, he had become a bully, targeting his own siblings first, then anyone weaker around him. He tormented animals. He sensed vulnerability in others the way a predator senses it, and he went toward it, not away from it. Teachers couldn’t reach him. His parents tried everything, stricter rules, summers away, a Catholic boarding school called Morris.

None of it worked. What finally worked, in the most dangerous possible way, was military school. At 16, his parents enrolled him, and for the first time in his life, Ronald Simmons found a structure that made sense to him, not because it taught him discipline in any moral sense, but because it handed him a hierarchy he could climb.

Rules were not there to protect people. Rules were there to establish who had power and who didn’t. In the military world, rank meant control, and control was the only thing Ronald Simmons had ever wanted. At 17, he graduated and walked straight into the United States Navy in 1957. He was stationed in Bremerton, Washington, where he met a woman at a USO dance.

Her name was Bathsheba Rebecca Ullibari. Everyone called her Becky. Becky was gentle, accommodating. She came from a modest background, and she was, by every account, the kind of woman who gave people the benefit of the doubt, who tried to see the good, who forgave more than she probably should have. She fell for a man in uniform who seemed purposeful and decisive, who knew what he wanted and went after it with clarity.

What she didn’t understand yet was that what he wanted was her. Not in the way a person who loves another wants them. In the way a person who needs to possess things wants them. They married on July 9th, 1960, in New Mexico. Over the next 18 years, they had seven children. And from almost the first days of that marriage, Ronald Simmons began building his cage.

 He handled all the money. He paid all the bills. Becky was given an allowance, rarely enough to cover decent meals for a growing family. He would not allow her to get a driver’s license. He would not allow a telephone in the house. He controlled what she wore, requiring long dresses and no makeup. Her hair pulled back and plain.

 He monitored every letter she wrote, routing family mail through distant post office boxes so he could read it before she could. When he was away for military service, she wrote to her family. When he found out, he denied her stamps. She began handing letters to strangers in parking lots, begging them to mail them for her.

Her own sister, Viola Shields, would later tell investigators, “Becky was not stupid by any means, but she was insecure.” Ronald had made her believe that things were her fault, that she deserved what she got. This is what coercive control does. It doesn’t announce itself. It comes in slowly. In increments so small that by the time the person inside it realizes what has happened, they are already so far from the world outside that leaving feels impossible.

Becky once wrote about her husband in a private letter she never expected anyone to read. She called him my Gene. And in the next sentence, she wrote that she was sure he probably knew best. A woman so thoroughly dismantled that she couldn’t even hold onto her own anger. Meanwhile, Ronald Simmons advanced through the military ranks.

 He served in the US Navy, then joined the US Air Force in the early 1960s. He rose to master sergeant. He was awarded the bronze star, the Vietnam Gallantry Cross, an Air Force ribbon for marksmanship. On paper, he was exactly the kind of man you hang a flag for. Disciplined, decorated, dependable. But the men under his command in the Air Force saw a different version of him than the medals suggested.

The same quality that made him a rigidly effective administrator, his obsession with order, with hierarchy, with total obedience, made him the kind of superior officer people feared but did not respect. And at home, that same instinct expressed itself without any of the institutional guardrails that military life imposed.

At home, there was no authority above him. He was the only law. By the late 1970s, the family was living on a remote property near Cloudcroft, New Mexico. The isolation suited him. Fewer people to observe, fewer neighbors to ask questions. The children had grown up knowing only two things, that their father’s word was absolute and that disobeying it had consequences.

Then, in early 1981, the world he had built began to fracture. His eldest daughter, Sheila, then 17 years old, was pregnant. Ronald Gene Simmons was the father. He had been sexually abusing Sheila for years. When word of the pregnancy leaked out, he responded in the way he responded to every threat to his authority.

He called a family meeting, stood in front of his wife and children, and announced that Sheila would carry the pregnancy to term, that the child would be raised in their home, and that every member of the family was expected to accept it. No apology, no shame. He had done it, he later told a counselor, to protect and teach her.

He saw no wrongdoing. He simply decreed reality and expected the world to conform. But his son, Jean Jr., his eldest, could not stay silent. Jean went to Sheila’s school and told a counselor. The school reported it. The New Mexico Department of Human Services launched an investigation. Sheila, under enormous pressure, eventually broke and confirmed what had happened. Criminal charges were filed.

By the time authorities arrived to execute the arrest warrant, the Simmons family had vanished. They had packed up and run. First to Ward, Arkansas, where Ronald quietly took a temporary filing job at a Veterans Hospital. A man with a Bronze Star and a secret so dark he’d fled an entire state to keep it buried.

The charges in New Mexico were eventually conditionally dismissed. No active warrants. No flags in any database. To the outside world, he was just another retired military man starting over. But Sheila was still with the family. And in early 1983, still under his roof, she became pregnant by him a second time.

That pregnancy was terminated. And then, in June of 1983, Ronald Gene Simmons purchased 14 acres of rough land in Pope County, Arkansas, near the tiny community of Pleasant Grove, 6 miles north of a town called Dover. He named it Mockingbird Hill. He was building his final kingdom. The property sat on a low ridge near Arkansas Highway 7.

The nearest things of note were a church, a graveyard, a corner store, and a campground. And even those were far enough away to matter. Within 2 days of moving in, Simmons hammered a no trespassing sign into the dirt. Then he strung barbed wire around the entire perimeter. The home itself was a five-bedroom mobile unit with two additional rooms squeezed under an extended roof.

There was a living room with a fireplace, but the rest was cramped and dim. No working bathroom, just two outhouses. A single wood-burning stove for heat in winter. One window unit for summer, and no telephone. Simmons would not allow the line to be connected. He built a privacy fence around portions of the property, some sections 10 ft high.

He had quit his last civilian job at a law firm in Russellville after being fired for making unwanted sexual advances toward a female co-worker. He had then found work at the Woodline Motor Freight Company. His supervisor there was a woman named Joyce Butts. Taking orders from a woman was, to Ronald Simmons, a form of humiliation he could barely contain.

He grew openly hostile, insubordinate. He was fired again. In his mind, women were doing this to him deliberately. Arkansas women, specifically. He had begun to develop a deep, specific hatred, not just the generalized contempt he had always carried, but a targeted rage at particular people who had, in his view, wronged him.

 Meanwhile, inside Mockingbird Hill, life was contracting. The older children were leaving. Jean Jr. had moved to San Antonio. William had built a life in Fort Smith, married a woman named Renata, had a baby son they called Tree. Sheila had met a young man named Dennis McNelt at a business school. She was trying to build something of her own.

And Becky, quiet, exhausted, defeated Becky had, for the first time, stopped sharing a bedroom with her husband, her son Gene Jr., knew something had to be done. He set up a secret post office box for her, so she could write to her children without Ronald intercepting the letters. And so Becky began to write.

 Four pages to William and Ronald Arthur, telling them the truth in her own voice for perhaps the first time in decades. “Dad has had me like a prisoner,” she wrote. “Every time I think of freedom, I want out as soon as possible. I don’t want to live the rest of my life with Dad. But I’m still trying to figure out how to start.

 What if I couldn’t find a job for some time? You have to remember, I’ve never had a job since I’ve been married.” She wrote about the simple things she dreamed of, having a telephone, going to church, going shopping if she wanted, seeing her children anytime she chose. Things so ordinary they are almost painful to read in that context, the smallest freedoms, the most basic dignities of a human life, described by a woman in her 40s as though they were miracles she could barely imagine.

The three eldest children, Gene, William, and Sheila, had been quietly coordinating, working together to convince her to leave. 17-year-old Loretta, still at home, still going to school every day, had told a classmate the same thing. She was counting down to graduation. She was getting out. And somewhere in that locked bedroom at Mockingbird Hill, Ronald Gene Simmons was watching all of it.

Reading what he could read, sensing what he could sense. The family he had spent 30 years building into something he owned, something that could not leave, could not speak, could not exist outside his authority, was dissolving. He could feel it happening. He had spent his entire adult life building walls, the barbed wire, the no trespassing sign, the no phone, the long dresses, the secret PO boxes that weren’t secret enough.

The monitoring and the censoring and the isolating. All of it had been architecture, a structure designed to keep his world intact, and now the structure was failing. There is a letter. It was found in a safe deposit box after everything was over. Ronald Simmons had written it to Sheila after learning that she had told the truth about who had fathered her child.

He had written it to his own daughter, the woman he had abused for years, the woman he had driven from her home. The woman who had finally, at enormous personal cost, told someone what he had done to her. The letter ended, “I will see you in hell.” The Christmas cards went out in December of 1987. Becky had sent them herself, stuffed with handwritten notes.

Her sister Edith Nesby would later recall how excited Becky sounded, all her children, all her grandchildren, all together for the holiday. A real celebration, the first one in years. Becky didn’t know she was writing her own invitations to a slaughter. Weeks before Christmas, Simmons told the children to dig a large hole in the backyard.

 He told them it was for a new outhouse. They dug it without question. They had never in their lives questioned him. The hole was 6 ft long and over 3 ft wide, deep enough. On the morning of December 22nd, 1987, Ronald Gene Simmons began. Gene Jr. had come home for the holiday. He was 29 years old. He had a daughter, little Barbara, 3 years old, who was staying at Mockingbird Hill while her parents sorted out their situation.

Jean was the son who had spoken up years ago, the son who had gone to the school counselor, the son who had gotten his mother a secret PO box, the son who had been working to get the family out. Simmons struck him from behind with a blunt object, a crowbar, according to accounts, hitting him across the forehead.

Then repeatedly across the face until the nose shattered. Then he pulled out the .22 caliber Ruger revolver and fired. Jean Jr. was shot four times in the head, once in the abdomen. Becky heard the sounds from somewhere else in the house. She came to investigate. When she found her son, she was so overwhelmed she didn’t hear her husband come up behind her.

The crowbar came down across her shoulders, driving her to the floor. He hit her again and again, breaking ribs. When she stopped moving, he fired a single shot into the back of her head. Becky Simmons was 46 years old. 3-year-old Barbara woke to the noise and began to cry. Simmons went into her room. He picked her up, held her close.

Then he wrapped his hands around her small throat and squeezed until there was silence. He dragged the three bodies to the hole in the backyard and dropped them in. Then he sat down and drank a beer and waited. The school bus arrived at the end of the gravel road that afternoon. Loretta came off first, 17 years old, honor student, a diary full of plans and escape routes she would never take.

Then Eddie, 14, Mary Ann, 11, little Becky, 8 years old. They walked up the driveway. They came inside. Their father told them he had Christmas presents for each of them, but he wanted to give them out one at a time. He took them separately. Loretta was first. He told investigators nothing about those moments and there are no witnesses.

 What the evidence confirmed is this. She was strangled and drowned in the rain barrel outside. She had cuts on her face. She had fought. Then Eddie, then Maryann. Then Becky, each taken separately, each killed the same way. Eddie still had his school lunch ticket in his pocket. The girls still had barrettes in their hair. The bodies joined the others in the pit.

Christmas Eve passed. Christmas Day passed. Ronald Gene Simmons spent those days at Mockingbird Hill alone with the bodies of his wife and five of his children. He drove to a Sears in Russellville and collected Christmas gifts he had ordered for the family, wrapped them. He went to a private club and drank.

 He came home. He watched television. He did not call anyone. He did not flee. He waited. December 26th, the remaining family arrived for Christmas. William Billy was 22. He came with his wife Renata, 21, and their 20-month-old son Tree. They drove to Mockingbird Hill not knowing what they were walking into. Simmons shot Billy and Renata in the dining room.

 He covered their bodies with coats and blankets, arranging them across the table as though they were simply resting. Then he carried baby Tree outside, strangled him, drowned him, and placed his small body in the trunk of a car at the edge of the property. Sheila arrived with her husband Dennis McNelt and their two children, Sylvia, who was 7 years old, and Michael, 21 months.

Sheila, who had survived years of abuse under this man’s roof, who had carried two of his children, who had finally managed to build something like a life. When Sheila and Dennis stepped through the door, they saw the bodies arranged in the lounge neat rows, each covered with a coat except for Sheila’s mother, Becky, covered with the finest tablecloth in the house.

Simmons shot Sheila and Dennis before they could move. Then he turned to their children. He strangled Michael, 21 months old, and dropped his body outside in the mud away from the others. Because in his mind, Michael was Dennis’s son and did not belong with the family. Then he strangled Sylvia, the child he had fathered with his own daughter.

 He arranged the bodies in the lounge with the others, 14 people, his wife, his children, his grandchildren, every one of them dead. He had killed them over 4 days. He covered them with their coats. He put the Christmas presents under the tree unopened. He left the lights on. December 28th, the first working day after the Christmas weekend, Ronald Gene Simmons drove into Russellville in his son’s car.

He had stopped at Walmart earlier that morning and purchased a second revolver, the H&R Model 929 .22 caliber. He was wearing a cowboy hat. His first stop was the law firm of Peel, Eddy and Gibbons. Inside, a 24-year-old woman named Kathy Kendrick was working at her desk. She had worked there for years. She had once rejected Simmons’ advances clearly, calmly, the way a person has every right to.

 She had reported his behavior to management. It had cost him a job. He walked in. He shot her four times in the head. He kept going. Taylor Oil Company. He shot the owner, Russell Taylor, wounding him. He shot James David Chaffin, 33, a firefighter, a part-time truck driver, a man Simmons barely knew, a man who simply happened to be standing in the wrong room.

Chaffin died. He was the one true stranger in the carnage, a man who had never wronged anyone in this story, killed because he was present. Sinclair Mini Mart. He shot the owner, David Seay, and an employee, Roberta Woolery. Seay later recalled that Simmons was grinning as he fired. Woodline Motor Freight Company.

 Joyce Butts, his former supervisor. He shot her in the head and chest, leaving her severely wounded. Then he found a secretary named Vicky Jackson. Walked her at gunpoint into the computer room and ordered her to pick up the phone and call the police. “Tell them,” he said, “that I’ve come to do what I wanted to do. It’s all over now.

 I’ve gotten everybody who wanted to hurt me.” The entire rampage took 45 minutes. When Police Chief Herb Johnston arrived, he walked in alone, unarmed. Simmons was sitting quietly. He handed over the revolver without resistance, placed the Ruger in a paper bag on the desk. Johnston later said Simmons was utterly composed.

 Johnston looked at him and asked the question most people would ask. “Why didn’t you kill yourself?” Simmons thought about it. Then he said he had been afraid of becoming a vegetable. He had been using .22 caliber hollow points. He wasn’t sure they would penetrate. He did not want to survive his own suicide attempt in a damaged state.

 He had put more thought into his own death than into the deaths of 16 other people. The investigation moved quickly. Sheriff James Bolin had received a tip from witnesses. He authorized an emergency search of the Broomfield Road property. Deputies entered through an unlocked window. The sliding glass door had been barricaded from inside.

 They moved through the house with a video camera, room by room. In the lounge, they found the bodies, the Christmas tree still standing. Presents underneath unopened. The tablecloth over Becky Simmons, the coats over everyone else. A family arranged like they were sleeping. In the yard, the pit, seven bodies.

 The children still in their school clothes. Two cars at the edge of the property, more bodies. Two of the youngest, the smallest in the trunk. A total of 14 people. Six shot, eight strangled. On the walls and ceiling of some rooms, investigators found holes not from bullets. From fists, from a hammer or some other blunt object.

 The force of blows delivered not in a moment of blind passion, but in the sustained, methodical work of a man expressing something that had no other language. Autopsies confirmed the sequence and manner of each death. Becky had been shot twice in the head. Gene Jr. four times in the head and once in the abdomen. Sheila six times in the head.

William and Renata multiple times. The smaller victims all strangled. Fish stringers, the kind used for fishing. They were among the tools recovered. Ballistics linked the .22 revolver Simmons had surrendered to Johnston directly to five of the family killings and to the Russellville shootings. It was the same gun.

 The whole week, the same gun. Simmons underwent psychiatric evaluation at the Arkansas State Hospital. The diagnosis, mixed personality disorder with narcissistic and paranoid features. Competent to stand trial. Fully responsible for his actions. Sane. He knew exactly what he had done. His two trials were as unusual as the crimes.

At the first, for the Russellville murders, he pleaded innocent, requested a speedy trial, and refused the option to plead guilty. The jury convicted him in under 2 hours. He was sentenced to death. He waived all rights to appeal on the spot. Stood in open court and stated formally, “I, Ronald Gene Simmons Sr.

, wanted it to be known that it is my wish and desire that absolutely no action by anybody be taken to appeal or in any way change this sentence. It is further respectfully requested that this sentence be carried out expeditiously.” He was sentenced to death 16 times across the two trials. At the second trial, for the 14 family murders, he sat through the presentation of evidence and the testimony of forensic expert experts linking the gun, the autopsies, the bodies, the timeline.

And then, as the jury was preparing to deliberate, something cracked through his composure for the first and only time. Prosecutor John Bingham was presenting the letter, the one Simmons had written to Sheila, the one that ended, “I will see you in hell.” Simmons came out of his chair. He crossed the courtroom and punched Bingham in the face.

He would later explain this calmly in the flat, strategic voice he applied to everything. He had wanted to make a violent impression on the jury before they deliberated to ensure they would sentence him to death rather than life in prison. He called it, with a kind of clinical precision that turned the stomach, a mitigation neutralizing maneuver.

Even his courtroom violence was calculated. The jury sentenced him to death. He did not die quickly. He had asked for speed and did not receive it. Other forces intervened. A fellow death row inmate named Jonas Whitmore, who argued that Simmons’ refusal to appeal would undermine the appellate rights of other inmates.

The case went to the United States Supreme Court, Whitmore v. Arkansas. Seven to two, the court rejected the challenge. Simmons was pulled back from his execution table in March of 1989 while eating what he believed was his last meal. He was returned to his cell and waited another 15 months. On May 31st, 1990, Governor Bill Clinton signed the execution warrant.

June 25th, 1990, the Cummins Unit, Lincoln County, Arkansas, Simmons refused all visitors in the days before his death. No lawyers, no clergy, no family, though there was almost no family left to come. His sister Nancy and her children attended the graveside service. They were the only ones. He gave a final statement, seven words, “Justice delayed finally be done is justifiable homicide.

” His attorney, John Harris, interpreted it as an acknowledgement that Simmons felt his execution had been postponed too long, that he was ready, had been ready, and that the waiting had been its own cruelty. At 9:00 in the evening, the curtains over the chamber windows opened. Simmons lay strapped to the gurney, covered from chin to feet in a white sheet.

 His arms were fixed at his sides, catheters in both arms, a leather strap across his forehead. He blinked frequently. He scanned the room, the witnesses, the executioner’s window, the ceiling. At 9:02, the warden announced the commencement. At 9:06, Simmons coughed, murmured something too quiet to hear. Convulsions moved through his body, shifting the gurney.

His fingers and face slowly turned purple. By 9:10, he was still. At 9:19 p.m., Ronald Gene Simmons was pronounced dead. It was the first execution by lethal injection in the history of Arkansas. He was buried in a pauper’s plot at Lincoln Memorial Lawn Cemetery near the Cummins Unit. No surviving family claimed his body.

The graveside service was attended only by his sister Nancy and her children. The house at Mockingbird Hill was vandalized repeatedly after the trial. In March of 1989, it burned to the ground. The state fire marshal ruled it arson. Someone set it on fire. No one was ever charged. No one looked very hard.

 The why? People always want the why. Ronald Gene Simmons never offered one. He refused to cooperate with investigators. He never made a statement about the family killings. He sat through two trials, waived his appeals, and went to his death without explaining himself. His psychiatrists couldn’t find a why.

 There were no diaries, no manifesto, no organized statement of grievance. What was left were the fragments, Becky’s letters, Loretta’s diary. The escape plans that the children had been building quietly, not making noise about, trying to be careful. The adult children coordinating to get their mother out. The younger ones counting down to graduation.

 And underneath all of it, the thing that investigators believed was the trigger. He knew he was losing them. Not just Becky, all of them. The family he had spent 30 years constructing as a sealed system. No outside relationships, no money, no phone, no independence. No will of their own was dissolving. The older children had left.

 The younger ones were planning to. Becky had stopped sleeping in the same room as him and had started writing letters about divorce. Even the control he’d exercised through terror was failing. His children hid when they heard his car coming. The respect and fear were going. A man who defines himself entirely through his dominance over other people has nothing when the dominance goes.

He is not a husband without a wife he controls. He is not a father without children who obey him. He is not a man without people to rule. What Ronald Gene Simmons did at Mockingbird Hill was not a family annihilation in the way that term is usually used. A person at the end of their rope, overwhelmed, acting in desperation.

It was a property claim. He had built something he believed was his and rather than let it become the property of people who chose their own lives, he destroyed it. He had spent weeks preparing. He had ordered the hole dug months in advance. He had purchased the gun. He had waited. This was not madness. Madness, at least, might contain some diminishment of understanding, some mercy of confusion.

 Ronald Gene Simmons understood everything he was doing. He had been planning it the way he planned everything. With precision, with patience, with the cold administrative attention to detail that had once earned him a Bronze Star and the rank of Master Sergeant. He killed 16 people and walked into a police station and sat down.

And the hardest question, the one that doesn’t let go, the one that lives in every detail of this case, is not what drove him to it. It’s what enabled him for so long. He abused his daughter for years before anyone was told. When they were told, charges were filed and he moved. He passed background checks.

 He held government security clearances. He lived for years on an isolated property in rural Arkansas. And the outside world did not reach in. Becky wrote her letters in secret through strangers’ hands and mailed them without stamps she had to beg for. Her children were old enough to help her plan an escape. But not old enough to feel certain it would work.

 The institutional failure here is not a single missed moment. It is years of systems, social services, military oversight, legal processes that encountered Ronald Gene Simmons and found ways to let him go. He did not live in a vacuum. He lived in a world that at nearly every turn gave him another door to walk through. The last one closed on the evening of June 25th, 1990. 16 people.

 He had killed 16 people. The youngest was 20 months old. And still, somehow, the question the sheriff couldn’t answer at the end of it all, the question that no court, no psychiatrist, no legal proceeding ever resolved was the simplest one. Why? Maybe that’s the thing we’re left with. Not an explanation, not a clean ending where the motive is named and filed and understood.

Just the weight of 16 names against the silence of a man who went to his death having given the world nothing, no remorse, no accountability, no answer. He took the why with him. So, let me ask you this, and I want you to think about it seriously before you answer in the comments. At what point does the system bear responsibility for what happens when it keeps releasing a man like this? Is the failure of institutions in this case a tragedy, or is it something closer to complicity? Tell me what you think.