Beoria A Simmons was born on May 17, 1954. Between 1981 and 1983 he abducted four women and girls at gunpoint in Louisville, Kentucky. Three of them he raped and shot. Their bodies were left in or near Iroquois Park, on the south side of the city.
Robin Barnes, fifteen, was killed on May 18, 1981. Her cousin Kaye Barnes described what was done to her: raped, sodomised, shot in the chest and once under the chin, with her left wrist broken, which the family took as a sign she had been trying to get out of the car. It took three days to find her body.
Shannon House, twenty-nine, was killed on March 25, 1982, and Nancy Bettman, thirty-nine, on March 11, 1983. Both were left in Iroquois Park.
The series ended because the fourth woman fought him. On June 11, 1983 he abducted a sixteen-year-old girl near Churchill Downs and took her to Iroquois Park, where he told her she was going to be raped. She stabbed him, got away, and identified him to the police. He was arrested the same day. Two years of investigation had not found him; she did it in an afternoon.
He was sentenced to death on May 13, 1985 for murder, rape and four counts of kidnapping. The fourth count being the girl who survived.
He then appealed, more or less continuously, for the next twenty-five years, and it was an appeal that eventually got him off death row. In March 2010, with a further appeal pending, he accepted an agreement under which the death sentence became life imprisonment without parole in exchange for his dropping every appeal. It took effect on March 3, 2010.
The reason prosecutors gave for offering it was the age of the case. They told the victims' families that if the appeal succeeded and produced a new trial, a twenty-nine-year-old prosecution would be extremely difficult to run: the original detectives and witnesses were dead or otherwise unavailable, and the risk was that he would walk out altogether.
Robin Barnes's cousin did not accept it. She said it was not good enough, that she understood the reasoning and thought it unfair, and that she had waited for a lethal injection and not for him to die of old age in a prison cell.
Contemporary accounts note that Simmons is black and that the women he abducted were white.