Killing time in prison
Offing fellow inmates
One by one, Denver Simmons recalled, he and his partner lured inmates into his South Carolina cell. William Scruggs was promised cookies in exchange for doing some laundry; Jimmy Ham thought he was coming to snort some crushed pills.
Over the course of about a half-hour, four men accepted Simmons’ hospitality. None of them made it out alive.
Calmly, matterof-factly, the 35year-old inmate told The Associated Press how he and Jacob Philip, 26, strangled and beat their blockmates to death and hid their bodies to avoid spooking the next victims. They had nothing against the men; one of them was even a friend, Simmons admitted. Why did they do it? Convicted in the coldblooded shootings of a mother and her teenage son, Simmons knew he would never leave prison alive. Tired of life behind bars, a failure at suicide, he hoped killing these criminals would land him on death row.
Officials say Philip and Simmons — both serving life without the possibility of parole for double murder — have confessed to the April 7 slayings of Ham, 56; Jason Kelley, 35; John King, 52; and Scruggs, 44. But until Simmons talked to the AP, no motive had been made public.
The South Carolina De-
partment of Corrections doesn’t allow in-person interviews with inmates. So the AP wrote letters to the two men. Philip’s attorney responded with an e-mail: “Jacob is a severely mentally ill young man who has been so adjudicated by the court. Accordingly, I would ask that you make no further efforts to interview him or contact him.”
Simmons, though, called the AP three times, once using another inmate’s time slot. And he described a twisted compact between two men who had “a whole lot in common” from the moment they met — most important, both despair and a willingness to kill again.
“I’d always joke with him — from back in August and September and October of 2015 — that if we weren’t going to kill ourselves, that we could make a name for ourselves, so to speak, and get the death penalty,” Simmons told the AP. “The end of March of this year, he was willing to do it. So, we just planned to do it. And we did it.”
In retrospect, he said, the plan was not well thought out, “because Jacob’s not going to get the death penalty either way. He’s legitimately mentally ill.”
As for himself, South Carolina hasn’t carried out an execution in six years.
“I did it all, I did it for nothing,” Simmons said. “So that makes it especially bad for me, you know?”