Mockingbird Hill

They called it Mockingbird Hill.

The property sat on elevated ground in rural Pope County, Arkansas - remote, isolated, no phone, no plumbing, surrounded by a tall makeshift fence that Ronald Gene Simmons had built with his own hands. He moved his family there in 1982. He made them dig a four-foot pit in the yard in the weeks before Christmas. He told them it was for an outhouse.

On December 22, 1987, he began killing them.

By December 26, fourteen members of the Simmons family were dead - his wife, his son who had come home from the war, three-year-old Barbara, four school-age children he killed one at a time behind the house after telling them he had Christmas presents, and the adult children and grandchildren who arrived for an after-Christmas dinner on the 26th. He arranged the bodies in the living room in neat rows. He covered them with coats. He covered one - his daughter Sheila, with whom he had maintained an incestuous relationship and fathered a child - with his wife's best tablecloth.

Then he went for a beer. He came home. He watched television with the dead for two nights.

On December 28, he drove to Russellville and killed two more people before surrendering.

Sixteen dead. The worst family mass murder in the history of the United States. The worst mass murder in Arkansas history.

He was executed in 1990. He never said why.

Mockingbird Hill is Book 3 in the Ozark Crime series.