Confidential File

More Letters From a Badly Warped Mind

The hard way, Jet Simrell got what he wanted this week:

Headlines.

By
threatening to kill six superior judges and three other court
officials, he got his name and picture plastered on the front page of
every paper in town.

But the stories weren't written the way Jet Simrell wanted them to be.

I know, they weren't, because I know Jet Simrell.

Fifteen months ago, he came to my office and told me his "plan."

He was going to dedicate the rest of his life, he said, to curing what he considered the biggest ill of our nation.

He
was going to put us — the men — back in the driver's seat. And he was
going to depose the "un-female" American woman from what he considered
her position of power and authority in American society.

 Exactly how he'd conduct his one-man crusade he wasn't too sure, then. But publicity definitely would play a key part in it.

It
never occurred to me at the time to classify Simrell as a dangerous
fanatic. Much of his criticism, many of his arguments made a lot of
sense.

He was a man who obviously was deeply hurt when his wife
divorced him. He couldn't comprehend that the fault for failure of his
marriage had to be in some part his own.

"The more freedoms and privileges I gave my wife," he said, "the more she took."

Simrell
blamed his personal troubles on his wife, existing social conditions,
neighbors — but most of all the divorce courts of our state.

Only
a few weeks after I'd met him, Simrell pulled off his infamous "I
killed three kids and their mother" stunt, which sent police racing to
his home to find three kid goats and their nanny spread across a bed,
their throats slit.

He was picked up and put in the psychiatric ward at General Hospital for observation.

While there, he wrote me an apologetic letter about his "unusual caper," as he described it.

"I
need to attract public attention," he wrote. "I wanted to shock the
public into thinking strongly about the seriousness of our national
problem of divorce and its tremendously numerous devastating effects.

"The scheme backfired partly when the police confiscated the papers on the table that explained my reason for doing what I did.

"I must also make it clear that I expected only the more intelligent people to fully understand my bizarre action.

"I
did expect the press to headline the fact that a man, known to be
unorthodox but intelligent, had the guts to pull such a stunt for the
sake of a cause in which he sincerely believed…"

'I Must Injure No One'

The
10-page letter went on: "One paper called me a woman-hater. This, of
course, isn't true. I love woman, as nature intended her to be, with
all my heart."

Simrell said that his greatest concern was the
embarrassment which his actions caused his three daughters. "But I
know," he wrote, "that during their lifetime they will come to know
that I was in the right."

But most prophetic, I hope, are the words he used in describing his plan to "shock" the public into listening to him:

"I must injure no one, physically, and must stay within the law, or reasonably so."