- [Narrator] This original WSRE presentation is made possible by viewers like you.

Thank you.

- From fighting crime to writing books, we talk with Mike Simmons on this edition of Conversations.

(slow-paced upbeat music) Mike Simmons saw the inside of a police station early in his life, not because he did anything wrong, but because he was hanging out with his father, Police Officer, Jim Simmons.

Mike quickly found his way into law enforcement, beginning with the Escambia County Sheriff's Department as a Corrections Officer.

He would go on to become a Pensacola Police Officer and retire as a Sergeant after nearly three decades on the force.

These days, he's teaching his craft to the young up-and-comers working with the Criminal Justice Training Center at George Stone Technical Center, but there's more, Simmons is also writing books.

He recently pinned 'Pensacola's Finest, the Story Of The Pensacola Police Department and 'I'm a Dead Man,' the link between the John F. Kennedy assassination, and the unsolved murder in Pensacola, we welcome Mike Simmons to Conversation.

Interesting, interesting, I'm anxious to get to the 'I'm a Dead Man' about the unsolved murder, but let me begin with 'Pensacola's Finest,' how did the book come about?

- Well, like you say, I grew up at the police department, I grew up knowing the old cops and I always wanted to be a police officer, when I was about five, I had a bicycle with training wheels, and it had a blue light on it, (laughing) I wanted to be a cop always, so when I finally joined the force, I was always interested in the way it was, and I was also interested in how things in Pensacola... What happened here?

What took place on this corner way back when?

And so in 1993, Chief Norman Chapman, asked me to do some research on the history and I kind of took it on myself to become the unofficial historian of the police department and just collected things ever since then, and then I said, well, like everybody says, I'm gonna write a book.

- Right.

- So I did.

- Yeah.

- And I enjoy it.

- As you were delving in and doing your research, what was the one thing that jumped out at you that you go, wow, that's a surprise, or I didn't expect that?

- Well, it probably it's this, if you think about it, you don't know the beginning, you say, wait, when did you start?

When did you start enforcing the law?

Well people always have, so really the further back I look, there was always somebody that was keeping the peace or enforcing the rules.

So the beginning of the police department, I can't pinpoint it to one particular day and that surprised me and probably more than anything else, that in the fact that we've moved around so much, had so many different police stations.

- Really?

How many different police stations- - We've had 13, - 13?

- Around, yeah.

- In the city of Pensacola?

- In the city of Pensacola, some were temporary, some were...

In the beginning it was more of jail- - Okay.

- And it's like, okay, well, that's kind of where they kept the bad guys, so a cop will be in charge of them and then eventually you got to where they did more, more things at the station, but they were a bunch of different locations, just all of them downtown.

- Where was the first one?

- The first one was actually in Plaza Ferdinand, it was the first one I could find any way, was when Andrew Jackson accepted West Florida for the United States, shortly after, there was an arrest made, the former Governor here, Caliber was arrested over some land papers and he was put in...

They didn't know where to put him, so they put him in...

It was the old officer quarters, and they just said, okay, we'll lock him in there, and so, that was the temporary headquarters for a time they kept him there.

- As you look back over the history of the police department, what have been the biggest changes?

And I'll ask that kind of as a multifaceted question, both from the types of crimes, to the equipment and law enforcement strategies, et cetera.

- Right.

Probably as far as the crime goes, it's very interesting, because looking at the numbers of crimes, of course, there weren't as many, but whenever something happened, it was just a matter of it bringing up a rough, tough time, for instance, somebody got killed, why, they just got healed, and it was...

It's looked at a lot different today.

Equipment wise, probably one of the biggest jumps we made was when we moved from horses to vehicles, to cars.

And this is also interesting, police motorcycles came about before police cars did.

- [Jeff] You're kidding.

- In 1912, we got our first police motorcycle and in 1913, we got our first police car and then in the 20s, they...

I remember the statement was made, well, we're gonna have to do away with police horses, because now we've got the cars.

Now, something happened then that probably changed as much as the vehicle itself, was the fact that as police cars became more and more popular, officers lost touch with the community.

In essence, you think of Andy Griffith, he walks around and talks to people, well, they had too then, police officers were on foot a lot.

- Right.

- And then when they got the cars, it was easier to travel more distance and go from call to call, but you lost the personal touch- - [Jeff] Right.

- And then air conditioning, (laughs) because you rolled the window up (laughing) and you never see people.

- You don't have to worry about it.

- Right.

- What about like the evolution of...

I think about, the stun guns and police cameras, and all that sort of stuff or body cameras accessories- - Yeah, yeah very interesting because, back in the day, police officers had a gun in a club, that's what they had and they could either shoot them or hit them, and nobody thought twice about that.

Even my early days the weapons, the impact weapons, even they got into the Ass batons and the PR-24s, and they slowly were replaced with tasers, with pepper spray and now that's the weapon of choice because they're non-lethal, so they're much better choice of weapons.

And also the expectation of the public now, is not to use those weapons, because you do have the others to use.

- [Jeff] Right.

- I remember as a young officer getting in trouble about hitting a guy with my fist, and I thought, what?

Because in my dad's day that's what they did, they got in a fist fight, but this is the way it was explained to me, look, if we have to send you to the hospital and pay for your fist and we give you a club to hit somebody with, use the club.

(both laughing) - Interesting way to look at- - Right, right, right- - What was the most rewarding part about your job over the years?

- The rewarding part was always helping people, that was the most rewarding thing that if I could...

Even if it meant getting somebody off the street and then making a resident feel safe, that was great.

Sometimes even you have to arrest somebody, even the guy that I arrested, I've had him thanked me for it before, because he knew, yeah he needed to be stopped.

The most rewarding thing that ever happened was, I got a call one morning that there was a lady that didn't speak English, and she was frantic when I got there and she was in the front yard and it was the first cold snap of the year in 1987, and she motioned to me to go into the house, so I followed her in their house and I looked on the floor were children, and I thought they're all dead, they weren't covered up, snuggled up, they were laying out.

The first thing I thought was, I've got to tell this woman who speaks no English that her children are dead by some manner, so I thought, well, let me check and I touch the child, and the child moved it on, so I wrapped him in a blanket and hand him to a neighbor, and then I got another one and another one, and then I said, "Is that all?"

And she said, "Si!"

And I thought, oh, lemme check and there was another one, and I said, "Is that all?"

"Si", so I checked and there was another one, and then her husband.

And once we got five children and the husband out of the house, we found out that it was carbon monoxide- - [Jeff] Oh no.

- And that they would have been dead had I not done that, and I thought, well you guys can skip paying me for today because this is good, I'm fine, that's a great feeling.

- Yeah, I can imagine.

What advice would you have for a young police officer today that was going into the force going into the business?

- This is interesting because when I started, some old timer said, "I don't what you're getting in this for, "this isn't the same as it was in old days."

And I thought, I'm having a ball, this is wonderful, what do you mean?

And I realized they had been told the same thing, and now I hear old timers tell kids the same thing, It's not like the old days, but then I look at young officers and they're having a ball, because to them this is the old days.

So that's why I tell them, enjoy yourself, have fun, help people, do it for the right reason, do it because you want to help.

There's a lot of bad press these days, but most officers just wanna do what's right, just wanna do the right thing and it's a fun job.

- Right and of course, you're working now with folks who're training young police officers or soon to be police officers- - Correct.

- What do you see in those young folks right now?

What's their mentality?

What's their line Of thinking?

- It has changed over the years, because in my day there was a lot of, oh, it's so exciting, this is great, you get the bad guys and now the majority of the students who come through say, "I wanna do better, I wanna help people do better."

It's a good thing, they're also smarter than we were.

(both chuckling) - Yeah.

- They think more and they're usually better educated and the standards are better, for instance, reports, reports now you're expected to be more articulated and you're expected to use better grammar and spelling, and in my days it wasn't as much and in my father's day, not as much as that.

- Right, interesting.

The book, 'Pensacola's Finest' and it's the story of the Pensacola Police Department, and what I wanna do is, I wanna put some pictures up and we're gonna have Mike kind of tell the story surrounding some of these pictures, so when James puts those up, I'm gonna just kind of let you roll with it and tell us the story that goes along with it, some of them will begin right here.

So what is this Mike?

- [Mike] Well, that's a 1911 photograph of the officers of the Pensacola Police Department in front of what is now the Pensacola Museum of Art and the same building and if anybody's ever been there, they can recognize that it's the same cut out the archway and at the time it was a brand new...

It was the first police station that was built for that purpose, the others were repurposed.

- Okay.

- And this was built in 1911, they spent the money they were really excited to have a brand new station, they have new uniforms, as you can see, they have the old...

They call them custodian helmets, which is they look like an English Bobbie.

And in those days, something else that's interesting, you don't see a gun on their side.

- [Jeff] Yeah.

- [Mike] All of them had guns but they weren't really authorized, they usually kept them underneath their coats.

- Okay.

We'll roll to the next photograph that we have here and give us kind of a brief synopsis of this.

- [Mike] This was in the early 30s, in 1933, this was in front of the Wentworth Museum, the Florida State Museum, which was City Hall at the time.

And it's interesting because Chief Albert Anderson was appointed chief and exactly 14 months later, he was removed.

Now, I can't find the reason behind that, but it was obviously a political reason and so he had a couple of photographs taken, this one was their new uniforms.

- [Jeff] Okay.

- [Mike] And they had three special officers there that were not in uniform.

- [Jeff] And we'll roll on to the next one, this is a great story, tell us.

- Yeah, this is a picture of the breathalyzer and before there was a breathalyzer, there was what they called a drunk-o-meter and the drunk-o-meter could be manipulated very easily, so an Indiana State Police Officer, he invented what we knew as a breathalyzer which today they use it in Intoxilyzer, but the breathalyzer was the forerunner of that.

And our chief, his name was Drexel Caldwell, he was a Sergeant at the time and he met the guy, and he said, well, you know what?

Our department will purchase one of these, we're interested in buying one of these.

So he had the state police officer come into Pensacola to demonstrate the breathalyzer and we were gonna buy it from him.

So whenever he got here, he pulled Sergeant Caldwell off the side, they were at the San Carlos, and he said, "Listen, this works, I know it works "but I have never done an actual test on it for the public."

He said, "We've got to make sure this thing works right "before tomorrow and we're gonna do it "in front of everybody."

So they got a police officer there, they got him drunk and they ran the first breathalyzer test in the United States at the San Carlos Hotel.

- Wow, that was interesting.

- It was interesting, yeah.

That's a lot of first- - In Pensacola.

(laughs) - Yeah there is, that was in 1953.

- Wow, let's roll on to the next one.

Okay, this is a story a lot of people probably remember.

- Sure, yeah, this is Judias Buenoano, they called her Judy, the English name is Goodyear, she was a housewife for years and then she moved to Gulf Breeze, and she had a nail salon there, this was back in '84.

She had a boyfriend named John Gentry, and so one night they decided to meet at the Driftwood Restaurant Downtown, and they had dinner there, interesting though she parked her Corvette about a block and a half away from his car, after they were finished eating, he went to the car, cranked his car up and it blew up, it exploded, so Ted Chamberlain and Rick Steele were detectives at the time and they came out and they started working on it.

And they noticed a couple of things right off, one was the fact that why did she park her car so far away, it wasn't crowded Downtown, and so they talked to her about it and she was vague about her answers, she was really...

I'd say was pretty private, but some things like her wealth didn't add up to what she said it was and she said she had a son that had also died in a canoe accident.

A long story short, what they found out was that, she had poisoned the son, he was in the Marine Corps and she talked him into going in the Marine Corps she poisoned him slowly with arsenic through his food and as he got worse and worse, the Marines just said, okay, well, they need to discharge him, he got to where he couldn't walk, he was in a wheelchair, so she and her other son took him for canoe trip and they turned him over and he went to the bottom and drown and they got the insurance money for it.

Well, they started looking, she was supposed to get the insurance money for John Gentry, they also found a husband or two and a boyfriend or two in the past, that she'd gotten insurance money from in Alabama, and so they pursued it and pursued it and pursued it to where she was convicted and she received the death penalty in the 90s.

An interesting little sad story about that, at the time I was working in Corrections and I was transporting her back and forth to court, but she was being housed at the Santa Rosa County Jail, and I was carrying her back from there, and I'll never forget... Now she poisoned people through the food, she knocked on the, on the plexiglass cage and said, "Officer, I've got a candy bar and coke if you want some."

(chuckles) - I thought, you no!

(both laughing) Just interesting.

- Oh, wow.

Yeah, they called her the Black Widow- - The Black Widow, right.

- Let's roll one more up here and take a look and get you to kind of talk a little bit about...

This was a national case, Paul Hill.

- Correct.

Early one morning at the clinic that provided abortions on 9th Avenue in Creighton, there was a driver and his wife that would pick the doctor up weekly at the airport, and he pulled up and was met by Paul Hill who had been doing some anti-abortion demonstrations there and he had a shotgun and he just killed all three of them.

And I remember I was a detective at the time and we got the call and we were getting ready for our morning meeting, got the call until we all went up there and he never denied what he did, never denied it all.

From a police point of view, you would call it an easy prosecution because you never had to work around to get the truth from him, he openly admitted it almost to our surprise.

- [Jeff] Wow.

- And he ended up receiving the death penalty for that.

- There's one more I want to get in Ted Bundy, I think we have the picture of Ted Bundy, but there he is.

- Right.

in the early seventies, of course, Ted Bundy was known throughout the United States, especially in the Northwest part of the country.

And to this day they really don't know how many women he killed, but he was arrested at one time, and he jumped from the second floor of the courthouse and escaped another time he was arrested, and he went through the ceiling of the jail and escaped.

Then they didn't know where he went, he disappeared, well, the next they rolled up on him was in Pensacola.

There had been two murders, one murder scene was in Tallahassee with the Florida State coeds, and then one was in Lake City, a 12 year old named Kimberly Leach.

And what Ted had done is he had fled from those, they know it was him, but he fled from there and he planning to start a new, and he was gonna head West toward Texas.

The reason he had come to Florida was to start a new but then he committed the murders and he fled, then in Pensacola is where he came, nobody knew that nobody knew who he was.

Well on midnights one night, there was an officer by the name of David Lee, and I always say he's an example of a good beat officer, because he was riding around checking his buildings like he was supposed to, in the middle of the night, there's burglars out, but not much else, so he drove past Oscar's Restaurant and he saw Volkswagen Bug parked there, and there again he was a good officer, he knew the people that worked at Oscar's, and he thought nobody has one of those, so he turned around, well, he didn't know, but the driver was watching him and so the driver fled.

Now, Oscar's is located on the corner of W Cervantes, so he just floored it and headed north on Cervantes, and David was in pursuit of him, ran the tag and he came back to a guy named Kenneth Meisner and it was reported stolen.

So he finally stopped him near where Catholic High School is on W Street and got out with him and he gave him the information that he was Kenneth Meisner.

So, the officer was a little confused because he was in Kenneth Meisner's car and it was stolen but he was claiming that he was Kenneth Meisner, no photo ID at the time, then he got him out of the car, well, he and Ted started fighting and Ted ran across W Street, he caught him in the corner of V, and I think it was Hatton Street, and they fought some more and eventually cuffed him up, still didn't know who he was, brought him back to the station, and Norman Chapman was the detective at the time, and he talked to him and talked to him and talked to him and eventually they found out through fingerprints who he was, and Chapman interviewed him a bunch.

And he got a lot of information out of him, and then Chapman had to go to trial and testified at trial, and they eventually convicted Ted Bundy, and he got death penalty too.

- I've got about three minutes left here Simmons, but I do wanna know a little bit about, 'I'm a Dead Man, The John F. Kennedy Assassination 'And The Unsolved Murder In Pensacola', also a book you've written.

- Right.

- What's it about?

- Well, there was a guy that lived here in town named Hank Killam and he was arrested here, put on probation, and he fled, he violated probation, went to Dallas, started working for a guy named John Carter, who's roommate was Lee Harvey Oswald, he also met and married a woman who worked for Jack Ruby, the one that killed Lee Harvey Oswald.

So to my knowledge he's the only one that knew both of them.

After the assassination of Kennedy in Dallas, he wasn't in mourning but he was scared to death, and there were some guys that were following him, he called them Agents and Plotters.

So he eventually came back to Pensacola and he told his brother, he said, "Look I'm a dead man, but I'm tired of running."

And they found him the next day on Palafox Street, and he had had his throat cut, he'd been thrown or jumped through a plate glass window, but they've never found out who did it.

- Wow, do you think he was involved in any way in the assassination or?

- Indicators are that he knew about it and that he had had some dealings with messages that he probably didn't have direct knowledge about, but he was involved somehow, he knew who some of the players were.

- Any idea who may have killed him?

- No, no ideas.

There've been the talk that may be it was the CIA, the FBI, Cuba, Russia, the mob, no idea.

- The kind of the same thing that we always hear of- - The same thing.

- Surrounding that.

- They're conspiracy theories and nobody knows, they do know that the... As he called them Agents and Plotters were after him, he never defined who that was.

- Yeah, interesting.

How did you find out about that?

- I have always heard that story, my whole career, I've always heard, there was a story and so I started digging into it and come to find out some friends of mine are family members of his.

Elton Killam was a public defender here for years, and I know Elton and I called him and he'd done some research on it and then his sister and I, Sherry went to high school together, and so I talked to her and of course involved the family, before I even put anything out and made sure I had their permission.

- Lots of fascinating stories have occurred in this part of the world.

- Right, right.

What would you say is the most fascinating certainly during your time in law enforcement?

- Well, there was a bunch of them, there were some really, I'll say gruesome murders which aren't good, but they are fascinating.

- Right, right.

- And there were several of those, there's been a couple of axe murders here, and some with machetes and things that were some... Just some some fascinating but sad stories.

The Ted Bundy one was actually, it had a lot of attention and there are some more I'm writing another book on a bunch of those stories.

- Oh, good!

- That are fascinating here and it'll be called, 'Stories of Pensacola's Finest.'

- You'll have to come back and see us again when that's finished.

- I'll love to.

- So, where are the books available?

In the typical places in the Amazon?

- Amazon, they're all available on Amazon, I'm working right now to have them available on the bookshelves at Barnes & Noble's too.

- Okay.

- That shouldn't be long.

- Good deal, good deal.

Well, Mike, wonderful visiting with you, thanks for the information.

- Enjoyed it.

- Absolutely fascinating.

Mike Simmons, he is retired from The Pensacola Police Force, but he is helping youngsters who are pursuing a career in law enforcement these days and he's also writing books.

The names of the books are, 'Pensacola's Finest: 'The Story Of The Pensacola Police Department', and also, 'I'm a Dead Man: The John F. Kennedy Assassination 'And The Unsolved Murder In The Pensacola.'

Lots of fascinating stuff going on in our neck of the woods.

Greatly appreciate him joining us for this edition of Conversations.

By the way, you can see this program and many more of our conversations online at WSRE.org/conversations, as well as on YouTube and sometimes they're flying around Facebook as well.

I'm Jeff Weeks, thank you so very much for watching, take wonderful care of yourself and we'll see you soon.

(bright upbeat music)