Arkansas Father Executed, Murders and buried 16 family members in pit he forced them to dig…

Arkansas Father Executed, Murders and buried 16 family members in pit he forced them to dig…

Nine more bodies found this morning in Dover. The victims may be the wife, children, and grandchildren of the gunman. The toll now stands at 16 dead in an Arkansas murder case. What happened in Pope County has stunned Arkansas and has rocked the nation. A mass murder of almost unbelievable proportions.

16 dead, including 14 who may be members of the same family. It all started yesterday with a shooting spree in Russellville that left two people dead and four people wounded. Then last night, police discovered five bodies inside a home in Dover. And today, the grisly recovery of nine more bodies. We begin our coverage tonight with Stacy Allison in Dover.

Police lines went up just after daybreak this morning as deputies prepared to search for more bodies. They found nothing in the pond, but just a few feet away, someone spotted what looked like a grave.

And two feet below the ground, a body. Hold it. Hold it. Hold it. There it is. There it is.

Not one body, but seven stacked one on top of the other.

Police brought them out in body bags. They believe they are Simmons’s wife, Becky, his son, Jean Simmons Jr. of El Paso, a grandchild, and four of Simmons’s younger children still living at home: 17-year-old Loretta, 15-year-old Eddie, 10-year-old Maryanne, and 8-year-old Becky. The sheriff was visibly shaken.

Emotionally, fellas, you never get used to it. You never get used to it. And I have a job to do and I try to hold up and do that job.

On June 25th, 1990, Ronald Jean Simmons was led into the execution chamber at the Cummins Unit in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He was 49 years old, having spent just over 2 years on death row since his conviction in May 1988, one of the fastest executions in the modern era of capital punishment.

At 9:02 p.m. Central Time, prison officials began administering the lethal injection protocol through an intravenous catheter in his right arm. The drugs flowed into his system as witnesses watched from the viewing room. At 9:15 p.m., the prison medical administrator checked the catheter. At 9:17 p.m., she held a stethoscope to his chest, checked his wrist for a pulse, and touched his neck. At 9:18 p.m., the Lincoln County Coroner entered the chamber and examined him. 1 minute later, at 9:19 p.m., Ronald Jean Simmons was pronounced dead, ending a case that had shocked the nation and claimed 16 lives.

His final statement was brief and garbled: “Justice delayed finally begun is justifiable homicide.” He was the 131st person executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. He was the first person executed by lethal injection in Arkansas. No surviving relatives were willing to claim his body. He was buried in a pauper’s grave at Lincoln Memorial Lawn Cemetery in Varner, attended only by his sister Nancy and a few members of her family.

Simmons faced execution for the murders of 16 people—crimes that began 2 and a half years earlier on December 28th, 1987. A Monday morning in Russellville, Arkansas, the town of 20,000 sat quietly in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains, still wrapped in the afterglow of Christmas. Holiday decorations hung in storefront windows. Families were returning to work after the long weekend, easing back into routine after days of feasting and gift-giving.

At 10:17 a.m., a 47-year-old man walked into a law office on South Glenwood Avenue. He wore ordinary clothes. He carried no appointment. He asked to see a young woman who worked at the front desk. When she returned to her station and asked if she could help him, he drew a .25-caliber revolver and shot her four times in the head. Over the next 45 minutes, this man drove across Russellville, stopping at four different locations. He shot six people in total. Two died. Four survived with wounds that would scar them forever.

Then he took a hostage, ordered her to call the police, and waited calmly to be arrested. “I’ve gotten everybody who wanted to hurt me,” he told the hostage before surrendering. “But the shootings in Russellville were not the beginning of this story. They were the end.”

When police grew concerned about the gunman’s family and drove out to his rural property that afternoon, they discovered something far worse than anyone could have imagined. They found bodies in the living room covered with coats and bedding. They found a woman’s body laid out on the dining room table draped with a tablecloth. They found a mass grave behind the house: seven corpses stacked together under fresh dirt. They found others in plastic garbage bags stuffed into the trunks of abandoned cars.

14 members of the same family—a wife, seven children, three grandchildren, two sons-in-law, one daughter-in-law—all killed by the same man over 6 days. All killed by the patriarch of the family, the husband and father who was supposed to protect them. Combined with the two people murdered in Russellville, the body count reached 16. It was the largest family killing in American history. It remains so to this day.

Ronald Jean Simmons was a retired Air Force Master Sergeant, a decorated Vietnam veteran, a father of seven. On paper, he appeared to be a respectable man who had served his country and raised a large family. The reality was something else entirely. Behind the walls of his isolated compound in Pope County, Simmons had ruled his family with absolute control. He had forbidden his wife from having a driver’s license, from using a telephone, from wearing makeup. He had censored her mail, denied her contact with her own relatives, kept her prisoner in her own home for nearly three decades.

He had assaulted his eldest daughter, impregnating her with a child that was both his daughter and his granddaughter. When authorities in New Mexico tried to prosecute him for incest, he fled the state with his family, escaping justice and isolating them even further. By December 1987, his world was crumbling. His wife was planning to divorce him. His children were escaping his control one by one. His finances were in ruins. His grip on the family he had dominated for so long was slipping away. Rather than lose control, Ronald Jean Simmons chose to destroy everything.

This is the story of how one man murdered 16 people over the span of a single week. This is the story of the wife who dreamed of freedom and the son who tried to save her. This is the story of the victims who had no way out. If you’re drawn to stories of justice, betrayal, and the people who reach a point of no return, make sure to subscribe to No Way Out. This is where true crime meets truth.

Ronald Jean Simmons was born on July 15th, 1940, in Chicago, Illinois. His mother, Loretta, and father, William, brought him into the world during a summer that saw America still recovering from the Great Depression and bracing for a war that seemed increasingly inevitable. The country was watching Europe fall to Nazi Germany while debating whether to intervene. It was a time of uncertainty, and the Simmons household was no exception.

But William Simmons would not see his son grow up. On January 31st, 1943, when Ronald was just 2 and a half years old, William suffered a fatal stroke. He died suddenly, leaving Loretta a widow with a toddler to raise alone. The loss of his father would become the first in a series of events that shaped the man Ronald would become.

Loretta did not remain a widow for long. Within a year of William’s death, she married William D. Griffin, a civil engineer employed by the US Army Corps of Engineers. Griffin provided financial stability, but his career demanded constant relocation. The family moved frequently, never settling long enough to establish roots or lasting friendships.

In 1946, when Ronald was 6 years old, the family relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas. Over the following years, they would move repeatedly across central Arkansas as Griffin’s engineering projects demanded. Each move meant new schools, new neighborhoods, new attempts to fit in. For a child already dealing with the loss of his biological father and the arrival of a stepfather, the constant upheaval created additional instability.

By the time Ronald reached age 10, a troubling pattern had emerged. He had developed a reputation as a bully. His targets were not strangers or schoolyard rivals, but his own family members. He regularly tormented his younger sister Nancy and his half-brother Pete, the children born from his mother’s second marriage. The behavior was not occasional roughhousing between siblings. It was persistent, cruel, and severe enough to alarm his parents.

Loretta and William Griffin tried to address the problem. They sent Ronald to a Catholic boarding school designed for troubled boys, hoping that discipline and structure would correct his behavior. The experiment failed almost immediately. Ronald returned home within a single month. Whatever the school attempted, it could not reach him.

A second attempt at reform came during the 1955 to 1956 school year. Ronald, now 15, was enrolled at Morris Academy in Searcy, Arkansas. Morris Academy was another structured environment, another attempt to channel his aggression into something productive. But like the Catholic boarding school before it, Morris Academy could not contain whatever darkness was growing inside Ronald Simmons.

By September 15th, 1957, Ronald had abandoned formal education entirely. At 17 years old, he dropped out of school and walked into a Navy recruiting office. He signed the papers and enlisted. The military would provide him with something he had never found in civilian life: structure, authority, clear rules, and a defined hierarchy. It would also eventually provide him with a family of his own to control.

His first assignment took him across the country to Naval Station Bremerton in Washington State. The base sat on the shores of Puget Sound, surrounded by evergreen forests and cold Pacific waters. It was about as far from Arkansas as Ronald could get while remaining in the continental United States. And it was there, in that distant corner of the country, that he met a young woman named Bersai Rebecca Ulibarri.

Bersai Rebecca Ulibarri grew up in New Mexico, one of several children in a close-knit Hispanic family. Her relatives called her Becky. She was raised in a household where family bonds mattered. Becky was young when she met the sailor stationed at Bremerton. She was hopeful about the future, eager to start her own family, and had no way of knowing that the man courting her would one day take her life. She could not have imagined that the charming serviceman would become her jailer, her tormentor, and ultimately her killer.

Ronald Jean Simmons courted Becky with the charm that many would later describe as a defining feature of his personality. He could be engaging when he wanted something. He could be articulate, even warm, when it served his purposes. He knew how to present himself favorably, how to say the right things, how to make a young woman believe he would be a good husband and provider.

On July 9th, 1960, Ronald and Becky married in Raton, New Mexico. The ceremony took place surrounded by her family, the Ulibarris, who had traveled to witness the union. Becky was entering marriage with optimism. Ronald was acquiring something he would come to view as his property. The Ulibarri family had reservations about Ronald from the start. Something about him did not sit right with them. But Becky was in love. She believed in her new husband. She dismissed whatever concerns her family raised and committed herself to the marriage.

Ronald left the Navy on July 13th, 1962, after 5 years of service. The transition to civilian life lasted only 6 months. On January 30th, 1963, he enlisted in the United States Air Force. The military had become his home, the only environment where he felt he truly belonged. Civilian life offered too much ambiguity, too little structure. The Air Force would give him another two decades of clearly defined authority.

He was assigned to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, known by its acronym OSI. The Office of Special Investigations handled criminal investigations, counterintelligence, and protective services for the Air Force. It was a position that required intelligence, discretion, and the ability to gather information. Ronald Simmons apparently excelled at these tasks. By January 1966, he had been promoted to staff sergeant. His performance evaluations were exemplary. His service record remained spotless. Superiors saw a dedicated airman who followed orders and completed his assignments.

Children came quickly after the marriage. Ronald Jean Simmons Jr. was born around 1961, before Ronald even left the Navy. The family called him Jean Jr. to distinguish him from his father. Sheila Marie followed in 1963, the first daughter. William arrived in 1964, the third child in four years. The family grew as Ronald’s career advanced. He rose through the ranks while Becky raised the children, often alone during his deployments and assignments.

On paper, Ronald Simmons appeared to be building the American dream: military career, growing family, steady advancement. The reality inside their homes told a different story. The children learned early that their father demanded absolute obedience. His word was law. Questioning him brought consequences. Becky learned that her husband expected total submission. She was not his partner, but his subordinate. The control that Ronald craved in every aspect of his life extended most intensely to his own household.

In August 1967, Ronald received orders that would take him to Vietnam. America’s involvement in the war was escalating rapidly. On August 2nd, 1967, Staff Sergeant Ronald Jean Simmons arrived at Tan Son Nhut Air Base in South Vietnam. The sprawling military complex sat just outside Saigon, serving as the primary hub for American air operations throughout the region. Tens of thousands of American servicemen passed through Tan Son Nhut during the war. Ronald Simmons was one of them.

The base was a city unto itself. Aircraft took off and landed constantly. Supplies flowed in from across the Pacific. Intelligence was gathered, analyzed, and distributed. For an OSI investigator like Simmons, there was no shortage of work. The chaos of war created opportunities for crime, corruption, and security breaches that required investigation.

Simmons would spend nearly a year in Vietnam, serving through some of the war’s most intense and consequential fighting. He was there during the Tet Offensive, the massive coordinated assault launched by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in January and February 1968. The offensive struck during the Vietnamese New Year holiday, catching American and South Vietnamese forces off guard.

Tan Son Nhut Air Base itself came under attack during Tet. Enemy forces breached the perimeter, and fighting raged on the base grounds. For the Americans stationed there, the offensive shattered any illusion that the war was being won. For Ronald Simmons, it meant experiencing combat conditions firsthand, seeing death and destruction up close.

His service earned him recognition. He received the Bronze Star Medal awarded for meritorious service in a combat zone. He was presented with the Republic of Vietnam Gallantry Cross, a decoration from the South Vietnamese government acknowledging his contributions. He earned the Air Force small arms expert marksmanship ribbon, demonstrating proficiency with firearms.

By July 1968, Simmons returned to the United States. He came home a decorated veteran, a man who had served his country during wartime, who had been present for one of the war’s pivotal moments. His military record remained unblemished. His promotions continued on schedule. To the Air Force, Staff Sergeant Simmons was a success story, but the man who returned from Vietnam was, according to those who knew him, different from the man who had left.

He was more rigid than before. The need for control that had always defined him had intensified. The expectations he placed on his family had grown even more demanding. Whatever he had experienced or witnessed in Vietnam had not softened him. If anything, it had hardened something inside him.

Over the next decade, the family continued to grow. Loretta was born in 1970, named after Ronald’s mother. Eddie arrived in 1973. Maryanne was born in 1976. The youngest child, Rebecca Lynn, came in 1979. Seven children in total spread across 18 years of marriage. The oldest, Jean Jr., was nearly an adult by the time the youngest was born. The family moved repeatedly as Ronald’s Air Force career took them from base to base.

Each move isolated Becky further from her own family in New Mexico. Each relocation made it harder for her to maintain outside relationships. The Simmons household became increasingly self-contained, with Ronald at its center.

On November 30th, 1979, Master Sergeant Ronald Jean Simmons retired from the United States Air Force. He had served 22 years in uniform, combining his Navy and Air Force careers. He had survived combat in Vietnam. He had risen to a respectable rank. He had built what appeared from the outside to be a large, stable family. But retirement changed everything. The military had provided Ronald with structure, with a hierarchy he understood, with clear rules and expectations. Civilian life offered none of that. Retirement also meant he would be home full-time. There would be no deployments, no assignments that took him away for weeks or months. Becky and the children would experience the full weight of his presence every single day.

In July 1980, 8 months after his military retirement, Ronald Jean Simmons took his eldest daughter Sheila on a trip. The stated purpose was to attend a coin show in Phoenix, Arizona. Simmons collected coins as a hobby, and the show provided a legitimate reason for the journey. Sheila was 17 years old, just months away from adulthood. What happened in that Phoenix hotel room would set in motion a chain of deadly events.

The assault was not a single incident driven by some momentary loss of control. It was deliberate, and when they returned home to New Mexico, the abuse continued. By September 1980, Sheila was pregnant. The father was her own father. The family was living in Cloudcroft, New Mexico, at the time. Cloudcroft was a small mountain community in Otero County, tucked into the Sacramento Mountains at an elevation of nearly 9,000 feet. The town attracted tourists seeking cool summer temperatures and winter skiing. For the Simmons family, it was simply the latest in a long series of homes.

For months, the secret remained hidden within the household. Sheila’s pregnancy advanced. The other children may have noticed changes, but did not understand what they meant. Becky either did not know or could not bring herself to confront what was happening under her own roof. Ronald Simmons continued as though nothing had changed, but secrets of this magnitude rarely stay buried forever. Someone in the family knew the truth and could not stay silent.

On April 17th, 1981, an anonymous caller contacted social services in Otero County, New Mexico. The caller reported that incest was occurring in the Simmons household. The caller was Ronald Jean Simmons Jr., the oldest son, now in his early 20s. Jean Jr. had discovered what his father was doing to his sister. Jean Jr. could not stop it himself. He was no longer living at home, and even if he had been, confronting his father directly would have been dangerous and likely futile. So, Jean Jr. turned to the only authority he believed could intervene. He called social services. When they did not immediately act, he called again. He made three separate calls over 3 days, pressing the authorities to investigate, refusing to let the matter drop. It was an act of courage—a desperate attempt to protect his sister from their father.

On April 20th, 1981, a caseworker from social services arrived at the Simmons home in Cloudcroft. The caseworker needed to speak with Sheila privately, away from her father’s presence and influence. In that private meeting, the 17-year-old confirmed what her brother had reported. She was pregnant. Her father was responsible.

The next day, April 21st, 1981, the assistant prosecutor for Otero County was notified of the situation. This was no longer simply a family services matter. This was a criminal case. Ronald Jean Simmons had committed incest, a felony under New Mexico law. Simmons was confronted with the allegations. Faced with the threat of prosecution, he agreed to psychological counseling for the entire family. It was a deal that allowed him to avoid immediate arrest while ostensibly addressing the underlying problem. The authorities believed or hoped that professional intervention could help this family. They were wrong.

In June 1981, Sheila gave birth to a daughter. The baby was named Sylvia Gail. She entered the world as both Simmons’s daughter and his granddaughter, a child whose very existence testified to the crime that had produced her. Every natural law, every boundary that separates parent from child had been violated in her conception.

The counseling that had been mandated as part of the agreement with prosecutors accomplished nothing. Ronald Simmons attended the sessions as required, but the process did not change him. If anything, the exposure of his crimes made him more determined to maintain control over his family. The intervention he had been forced to accept only increased his resolve to ensure nothing like it ever happened again.

He blamed his son, Jean Jr., for the investigation. Jean Jr. had made those calls to social services. Jean Jr. had brought outsiders into family business. In Ronald Simmons’s mind, his son had betrayed him. That betrayal would not be forgotten. He blamed Sheila for not keeping silent. She had confirmed the abuse to the caseworker. She had not protected her father when questioned. Never mind that she was the victim—that she had been assaulted by the man who was supposed to protect her. In Simmons’s twisted thinking, her failure to lie for him was another betrayal.

On August 11th, 1981, prosecutors in New Mexico’s 12th Judicial District formally charged Ronald Jean Simmons with three counts of incest. If convicted on all counts, Simmons faced up to 9 years in state prison. For a man who had spent 22 years in the military with a spotless record, who had earned medals for his service in Vietnam, who had built an image of himself as a respectable family man, the prospect of prison was unthinkable. The public shame alone would destroy everything he believed about himself.

But Ronald Simmons had no intention of facing trial. Over the following months, he began planning an escape. He would not stay in New Mexico and risk conviction. He would not submit to a system that had dared to hold him accountable. Instead, he would gather his family and disappear. He prepared carefully. He arranged the family’s affairs. He determined where they would go, and he waited for the right moment to vanish.

On August 10th, 1982, one day before the first anniversary of the charges against him, the Simmons family disappeared from New Mexico. They left Cloudcroft behind, abandoning whatever life they had built there. Ronald took Becky, the children still living at home, Sheila, and infant Sylvia Gail. He was not going to leave his daughter behind where she might testify against him. The prosecutors in Otero County could not proceed without a defendant. When Simmons could not be located, the charges were dismissed. He had successfully escaped justice. The system that was supposed to hold him accountable had failed.

The family surfaced in Ward, Arkansas, a small community in Lonoke County. Ward was rural, quiet, and far from New Mexico. It seemed like a place where the family could start over, where the past could be left behind. But the move did not end the abuse. While living in Ward, Ronald Simmons impregnated Sheila a second time. His daughter, already the mother of one child by her father, was pregnant again. In early 1983, she was taken to Dr. Chu Ean in Dermott, Arkansas, a small town in the southeastern corner of the state. The pregnancy was terminated.

Arkansas would be the Simmons family’s final destination. Ronald began looking for property, searching for a place where he could isolate his family completely from the outside world. In June 1983, he found exactly what he was looking for: a remote piece of land in Pope County, far from prying neighbors and curious authorities.

On June 12th, 1983, Ronald Jean Simmons purchased 14 acres of rural land in Pope County, Arkansas. The property sat 6 and a half miles north of the town of Dover in an unincorporated area called Pleasant Grove. It was precisely a quarter-mile east of Arkansas Highway 7, positioned on a low ridge that ran parallel to Broomfield Road, one of the few paved county roads in that part of Pope County during the 1980s.

The location was deliberately remote. Pleasant Grove had little nearby except for a small church, a cemetery, a corner store, and a campground. The nearest town of any size was Dover, a community of only a few hundred people. Russellville, the county seat with a population around 20,000, was about 7 miles to the south. For Ronald Simmons, the isolation was not a drawback. It was the entire point.

The property was accessible only by a long, rutted red clay driveway. When it rained, the clay turned to thick mud that made the road nearly impassable. Vehicles would get stuck. Visitors were discouraged by the difficulty of simply reaching the house. This natural barrier suited Simmons perfectly.

The property featured two older model mobile homes that Simmons joined together to create one larger structure. He connected them under an extended roof, creating a dwelling with five bedrooms. He added a spacious family room with a fireplace, a gathering space for the large family. On paper, it sounded like a reasonable home for a family of nine, but the home’s apparent amenities were deceptive.

The heating and air conditioning systems did not work, and Simmons made no effort to repair them. The only heat for the entire structure came from a single wood-burning stove in the family room. During Arkansas winters, temperatures could drop below freezing. The family huddled around that one stove for warmth, while the bedrooms remained cold. Only one room in the entire house had a functioning window air conditioner. That room belonged to Ronald Simmons. During the brutal Arkansas summers, when temperatures climbed into the 90s and humidity made the air feel like a wet blanket, Simmons kept cool in his private space while his wife and children sweltered.

The toilet was broken. Rather than fix it, Simmons required the family to use two outhouses on the property. In 1983, when most American families took indoor plumbing for granted, the Simmons children were using outdoor privies like settlers from a century earlier. The only indoor plumbing that functioned ran to a single shower. Water for washing dishes and cooking had to be collected from rain. The family kept jugs and jars positioned to catch rainfall, storing the water for household use. Simmons refused to address the plumbing issues that would have given his family running water for basic needs.

He also refused to install a telephone. In an era before cell phones, this meant the family had no way to communicate with the outside world from home. If there was an emergency, if someone was hurt or sick, there was no way to call for help. The lack of a telephone was not an oversight or a financial necessity. It was a deliberate choice to cut the family off from anyone who might intervene in their lives.

2 days after moving in, Simmons posted no-trespassing signs around the property. The signs went up before the family had even finished unpacking. He then began constructing a makeshift privacy fence that would eventually reach 10 feet tall in some places. The fence was topped with barbed wire, turning the property into something resembling a compound rather than a family home.

The yard was filled with junk automobiles that Simmons collected, but never repaired. Concrete blocks were scattered around, ostensibly for construction projects that never materialized. The property took on the appearance of a rural junkyard, further discouraging any neighbors from approaching. Simmons named the property Mockingbird Hill. He named the driveway leading up to the house Little Princess Lane, a reference to his pet name for Sheila. Even as he created a prison for his family, he memorialized his obsession with the daughter he had violated.

Neighbors noticed the new family, but learned quickly that the Simmonses kept to themselves. Bill Ren lived about 200 yards away, close enough to observe comings and goings. He noted that the children seemed like sweet kids on the rare occasions he saw them. But Simmons himself struck Ren as strange and antisocial. The man did not engage in the casual neighborly conversations that were common in rural Arkansas.

William Brown, known locally as Dub, operated a nearby grocery store. The Simmons family occasionally came in for supplies. Brown observed that Simmons did not have much to say. He was not hostile exactly, but he was closed off, uncommunicative, unwilling to engage in even basic pleasantries. One neighbor, a man named Banister, who had some interaction with the family through the local school, remembered seeing Simmons and Sheila riding down the road together. What struck him was how Sheila was sitting so close to her father, like boyfriend and girlfriend instead of father and daughter. Others made similar observations. The relationship between Ronald and Sheila seemed off to anyone who witnessed them together, though most could not articulate exactly why it disturbed them.

Becky Simmons lived as a prisoner in her own home. After 23 years of marriage, by the time they moved to Mockingbird Hill, she had long since learned that resistance was futile. Her husband’s rules were absolute, and the consequences for breaking them were severe. She was forbidden from obtaining a driver’s license in rural Arkansas, where the nearest town was miles away and public transportation did not exist. This meant Becky could not go anywhere without her husband’s permission and participation. She was dependent on him for every trip, every errand, every contact with the outside world.

She was not allowed to use a telephone, though there was none in the house anyway. When the family occasionally had access to phones elsewhere, Simmons monitored every word. She could not leave the property except to do laundry at a laundromat—one of the few excursions Simmons permitted because there was no washing machine at Mockingbird Hill.

Her appearance was controlled down to the smallest details. She was required to keep her hair tied back at all times. She was required to wear long dresses, modest and plain. Makeup was forbidden. Simmons dictated how his wife presented herself to the world, stripping away any expression of individuality or femininity that she might have claimed for herself. Becky’s brother, Manuel Ulibarri, later described the situation bluntly: Simmons had his sister so isolated that she couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. The only time she could go out was to wash clothes.

Ronald Simmons controlled all mail coming into and going out of the house. Every letter was subject to his inspection. He read everything before deciding what Becky could see. Correspondents from her family in New Mexico, letters from friends, any communication from the outside world passed through his hands first. He censored what he disapproved of, keeping Becky ignorant of outside news.