Life sentence in torture, murder of pregnant woman
As she awaited word about her pregnant granddaughter’s disappearance from West Allis two years ago, Janice Madosh-Smart kept hearing a Tanya Tucker song, “Would you lay down with me (in a field of stone)?” in her head.
Madosh-Smart told a judge Monday that she feared it was an answer from Tess M.M. White to her grandmother’s yearning for an answer — though not the one she hoped for.
White’s family would later learn that she had been kidnapped, tortured and killed in West Allis, then burned in a South Dakota farm field during a stop on her friends’ cross-country crime spree.
Assistant District Attorney Karl Hayes called it among the three most “shocking and appalling” cases he’s had to prosecute. “It’s nothing short of an abomination,” he told Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Carolina Stark.
She agreed, and said the crime was “aggravated in its senselessness” over some missing drugs or money among a group of users.
Stark also noted that Tiffany Lynn Simmons, 37, had been released from prison 10 weeks earlier and didn’t keep a single meeting with her probation officer, and that she and Shanta Pearson then took White’s body out of state and tried to destroy it, almost denying her family any closure at all.
She sentenced Simmons, who pleaded guilty in March to firstdegree intentional homicide, to life without any chance to even petition for extended supervision. She added 25 years for kidnapping, as a party to a crime.
Defense attorney Patrick Earle conceded the crime was horrific but argued that it was not pre-planned, but something that happened during a drug binge by all three people involved. He noted that Simmons has had mental illness and drug issues for 16 years, but agreed to plead guilty as charged, and did not try “shift any blame to anyone else.”
It was only a combination of fortunate circumstances that solved the crime.
White, 25, was last seen May 4, 2016. Her aunt with whom she lived in West Allis had seen her picked up by a white pickup truck.
Simmons suspected White of stealing drugs the three were using. White, in turn, accused Simmons of using her ATM card. That day in the truck, the two women began fighting, so Pearson stopped and he and Simmons tied White up.
After he got some cocaine, he returned to his apartment, leaving the two women in the truck. That’s when Simmons began punching White, burning her with cigarettes and then crammed plastic bags into her mouth.
White spit them out, and Simmons then put a bag and a purse over White’s head, then strangled her with a rope until she died. Simmons then joined Pearson doing drugs until dawn.
Hayes said Simmons knew White was 10 weeks pregnant. “She killed her anyway. It was truly heinous, truly vicious.”
The next day they stole a car belonging to Simmons’ mother and a plastic storage bin. They moved White’s body to the bin, then hid the truck in Whitnall Park while they robbed a bank using the other car.
After the robbery, they returned to the truck and headed west.
In Minnesota, they first tried to burn White’s body, but, Hayes said, miscalculated how much energy that takes. When they failed, they put the partially burned body back in the bin and drove on until they found the field in South Dakota and succeeded in a second burning attempt.
A farmer found the remains May 17, but it would take more than a week to identify them — aided by the chance that White’s DNA had been collected in North Dakota when she was at a drug treatment center there years earlier.
As White’s family grew more and more worried about her, Pearson and Simmons drove on. They robbed banks in Minnesota and Wyoming before they were stopped in Denver on May 25 for failing to dim their high beams at ongoing traffic. There was a warrant out for their arrests in the May 6 bank robbery in Wisconsin.
West Allis police showed a photo of the truck stopped in Denver to White’s aunt, who said it was the same make and model as the one White entered the last day she saw her.
Madosh-Smart, White’s grandmother, showed Stark a photo of the ceremonial dress and moccasins made for her Ojibwa burial ceremony since there was no body for the casket.
She said White loved to collect rocks at the beach as a girl, was a fierce traditional dancer and dreamed of becoming a veterinarian.
“She showed me what love was about,” said her great-aunt Charlene Madosh. “She was making efforts to fix her life and increase her spirituality.”