True Crime Stories

  You have often heard me state how I love hearing stories from the early 1900's and prior. But, you have also heard me state they prove difficult to research because it is hard to distinguish between fact, rumor, and just a story that becomes a legend disguised as a fact. This is just such a case. There often are just not enough facts known to make a decent story out of things and so things become “fillers” so to speak. I am not saying that I do not do the same sometimes, however, I do not state things as facts if I cannot prove them to be so, if there is conflicting information, or as in this case there is really not enough information in my opinion to know exactly what happened and in what order. I will start with the facts that we do know. We know that on December 25, 1929 in Germantown North Carolina forty-three (some say forty-two) year old Charles “Charlie” Lawson murdered his wife and six of their seven living children on their farm. Several hours later he would co...

On December 4, 1888 two teenagers were out boating on the recent man-made lake called East Lake in Birmingham Alabama when they came across the body of a young girl floating face down in the water. The body was taken to the local medical examiner and was laid out to the general public as was often the practice of the time. This time it was to see if anyone could identify the young girl. It was thought that whomever she was she was approximately twelve to fourteen years old but no one knew. The body was very bloated from being in the water for so long so it took a day before a local butcher identified her as May Hawes. It has been said that May was seven or eight years old and the daughter of Richard and Emma Hawes, local residents. There seemed to be a little division between the residents as to whether Richard and Emma were even still married. Some said that they were but the marriage was “troubled” while others claimed that the couple were divorced an...

I had intended to spend the day mainly doing research on cases and then spend the day tomorrow putting them together to publish. That is how I have been trying to do things lately... spend one day on research and one day on composing. Yesterday I did two very long blogs and then a short one and I started researching more late last night. I had researched two and then I started looking into this one. This case is a bit unique. We have seen family annihilators, those who murder their entire family, or at least those who live with them. We have also seen many of those annihilators then kill themselves. Then there are the annihilators like John List who murdered his family and then disappeared before being capture several decades later. In this case, after finishing what he considered to be his goals Ronald Gene Simmons had someone call the police and he waited patiently until they arrived and without resistance turned himself in even if he did not tell them abo...