Denver Simmons’s sister, Tara, still remembers the moment the news reports started showing the places where the bodies had been found. It did not feel like her life. It felt like a book about someone else. But it was real.
Her brother, the chubby bald baby she remembered from a small Tennessee town, had killed a woman and her teenage son. Simmons was born in 1981 and grew up in Dayton, Tennessee. His father left when he was very young. His mother moved in with a partner named Gary, and for a few years, life felt normal.
Then his mother started using drugs, and she left too. For weeks and months at a time, no one knew where she was. Tara lived with their grandmother. Denver spent weekends there, where he could let his guard down, eat Granny’s spaghetti and fudge, and feel like a regular kid.
Then in 1991, when Denver was ten, his mother returned sober and took him back. She was a good mother to him then. Denver was smart and well behaved. Around age thirteen, Denver started running with the wrong crowd.
He began stealing, selling items out of his mother’s garage for the thrill of it. His mother took him to a psychiatrist, who diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. Denver hated the medication because it made him feel numb, so he stopped taking it routinely. His family fought a constant battle to keep him on it.
As a teenager, he could not hold a job. He preferred shoplifting. His drug use escalated from pot to meth. When he was high, he was violent.
In his early twenties, he had a son with a girlfriend. He loved the boy fiercely, but he was violent toward the girlfriend. She eventually left and took the child far away. Tara believed that Denver lost his purpose in life when his son was taken from him.
In 2007, at age twenty-seven, Simmons was kicked out of his mother’s home because of his drug addiction and behavior. He met a new girlfriend, and they moved to South Carolina. They moved in with Sheila Dodd, a relative of the girlfriend, and her thirteen-year-old son, William. They lived on Sheila’s farm in the small community of Round Oak near Walterboro.
At first, everyone got along. Sheila trusted Denver enough to let him drive William to and from school. Then she told him he needed to get a job and help pay bills. He agreed but never did.
Sheila asked them to leave. The girlfriend went home to her family. Simmons had nowhere to go. On May 1, 2007, Sheila Dodd took her now fourteen-year-old son to school and returned home.
Denver was inside the house waiting for her. They argued. He took her gun, which was already in the house, and shot her. He drove her body to the back of the yard, covered it with a white sheet, then took her keys and debit card.
He went out for lunch using her card. Then he drove to the school to pick up William. Simmons told the boy his mother was at a doctor’s appointment. William trusted him and got in the car.
When they arrived home, William noticed his mother’s purse and cell phone were still in the house. He started asking questions. Where is my mom? She would never leave these things.
William spotted the white sheet in the yard and walked toward it. Denver picked up the gun, walked out the front door, went around the house, and shot the boy in the back of the head. That night, Simmons built a pile in the yard as if he were cleaning up. He placed both bodies on it, poured gasoline over them, and set them on fire.
Around 3:00 a. m. , he realized the bodies had not burned completely. He disposed of the remains along rural roads and drove off in Sheila’s car.
He drove six hours to Fort Oglethorpe on the Georgia-Tennessee border. He abandoned the car in a medical center parking lot and called his mother to pick him up. While he was with her, he confessed that he had killed a woman and her child. Then he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital in Tennessee.
Tara’s mother called her and told her what Denver had said. Tara could not believe it. She went with her sisters to the police in Dayton, but the small-town officers looked at them like they were crazy. They said they would look into it.
The police in Georgia reached out to South Carolina. Lieutenant Gene Johnson of the Colleton County Sheriff’s Office received a call about a young man who had told his mother he killed a lady and took her car. When investigators went to the hospital to question Simmons, he denied saying anything at all. The next day, police found the abandoned car in the hospital parking lot.
A database search linked it to Sheila Dodd. Johnson spoke to her family. She had not been seen for days. Neither had William.
When Johnson searched the Dodd property, he found blood spots in the kitchen leading to the back door. In the backyard, he found a burn pile containing what looked like bone fragments and two cell phones. Johnson was convinced the confession was true. Seven days after the murders, police in Georgia arrested Simmons.
He waived extradition and was taken back to South Carolina. In a recorded interview, he admitted everything. Three days later, he led investigators to the locations of the remains. The first site was a remote hunting area with part of Sheila’s torso and a leg.
The second location had a cooler and buckets filled with charred remains so badly burned they could not even be identified as male or female. Simmons was charged with two counts of murder and held at the Colleton County Detention Center. The case made headlines. Tara found it hard to process.
She imagined the rage Sheila and William’s family must have felt toward her brother, and she admitted she did not blame them. Three years later, at age twenty-nine, Simmons faced a judge. There was a question about whether he was competent to stand trial given his history of mental illness and the fact that he had been found in a psychiatric facility. The judge decided he was.
Prosecutors initially sought the death penalty, but a plea deal was struck instead. Simmons pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison. Tara was thankful he pleaded guilty.
He did not try to escape responsibility by claiming insanity. Simmons was sent to Kirkland Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina. Because of his bipolar diagnosis, he was placed in the mental health wing. He was put into a crisis intervention program with more involved care and medication management.
At first, Simmons showed suicidal tendencies. He attempted to explore self-harm but later admitted that killing himself was too hard. He said it hurt. For seven years, Simmons received treatment.
By 2017, at age thirty-five, he was given a job as a ward keeper. He took inventory of cleaning supplies and distributed them to other inmates. The job gave him access to areas and tools that normal inmates did not have. Working alongside him was twenty-five-year-old Jacob Phillip.
Phillip had killed his girlfriend and her eight-year-old daughter. He was mentally ill, and because of that, he could not receive the death penalty. He was sentenced to life at Kirkland. Simmons and Phillip were chosen for the ward keeper jobs because they had minimal disciplinary actions against them.
They kept their cell doors unlocked for most of the day and roamed the mental health wing freely. On April 7, 2017, the wing with its 139 inmates began like any other day. But at 6:00 a. m.
, Simmons and Phillip decided they were bored. They hatched a plan to kill as many prisoners as they could. Their first target was John King. He had been imprisoned for theft, and he annoyed them.
They lured him to the cell with the promise of coffee. Phillip came up behind him and choked him with his arm until he passed out and died. They pushed his body under the bunk. Their next victim was William Scruggs, who knew them from work.
He was waiting in line for the bathroom when they lured him with the promise of a cookie. Simmons wrapped an extension cord around Scruggs’s neck and choked him to death. Then he hung a towel from the bunk to conceal the body. The two correctional officers overseeing the wing had no idea what was happening.
They were responsible for 139 inmates. Simmons had hung a trash bag over the narrow window in his cell with the words “Don’t bother” scrawled on it. The third prisoner they lured was Jimmy Ham. They told him they had drugs and invited him to share.
They told him to cut up the tablets to snort. Phillip tried to jump him, but he slipped. A struggle broke out. Simmons grabbed a broom handle and hit Ham over the head twice.
To silence him, he shoved the broom handle down his throat. Then they targeted Jason Kelly. Kelly was different. Denver considered him a friend.
Still, they lured him over with the promise of showing him something at the bunk. When Kelly peeked behind the sheets, he found the bodies. Denver pounced on him and pressed the broomstick against his throat until he passed out. Not knowing whether Kelly was dead, Simmons rammed the broomstick down his ear.
At that point, Simmons asked Phillip who he wanted to kill next. Phillip said he was bored and did not want to continue. They nonchalantly agreed it was over and stopped. Simmons walked up to a correctional officer and told him to look in his cell.
There they found Kelly lying on the ground uncovered, and the three other bodies hidden behind the bunk. Phillips and Simmons admitted to planning the murders. They showed no remorse. The high-functioning inmates had easily taken advantage of the vulnerable, low-functioning ones on the mental health unit.
When Tara found out her brother had killed four more people, she was in disbelief and shock. She could not wrap her mind around why. Simmons was transferred to Lieber Correctional Facility to await trial. His motive began to emerge.
He had been sentenced to life in prison. He would die forgotten, and he found that worse than death. He was bored and wanted attention. He believed that if he killed again, the state would sentence him to death.
He had tried to kill himself before but admitted it was hard to do to yourself. He figured this way, the state would do it for him. Two months after the murders, he gave an interview to reporters. He said they picked out who was easiest and who trusted them.
One victim was small and would not offer much resistance. Another he did not want on the list because he knew the man would fight, but he was annoying. He admitted one of the men was a good guy who did not deserve what happened. Experts noted that Simmons sounded like he was reading a recipe.
He knew what he said would be seen as bad, but it did not seem genuine. Simmons admitted that his goal was to die and that he murdered to receive the death penalty. But he doubted the outcome. “The death penalty is not the death penalty anymore.
All that’s going to happen is they’re going to give me four more life sentences. ”
He turned out to be right. Because of their mental health histories, a death sentence was unlikely. In November 2019, Simmons and Jacob Phillip were each sentenced to four life sentences for the murders of John King, William Scruggs, Jimmy Ham, and Jason Kelly.
Tara went to the courthouse in Columbia. The hearing was very short. There was no emotion from Denver at all. The exchange was simple: Did you do this?
Yes, I did it. That was the end of it. No feeling from him whatsoever. Tara said the hardest thing was that most of the victims were supposed to be released in a few years.
Their families had believed their loved ones were coming home, and now they never would. Denver Simmons is now held at Perry Correctional Institution, a maximum security prison in South Carolina. Experts describe him as callous, manipulative, and incapable of taking responsibility. He lacks remorse and lived a parasitic lifestyle.
These traits together make up what is commonly called a psychopath. Tara struggles with the word evil because her brother was mentally ill. But she knows his actions were evil, because taking any life is evil. She has never stopped loving him, but she pushed him away, and he pushed himself out of her life.
She is still angry at him, and she believes she always will be.
