Denver Simmons Case: Prison Killings, Guilty Pleas, and Immunity

Denver Simmons is a South Carolina inmate who, with fellow prisoner Jacob Philip, strangled four men inside Kirkland Correctional Institution on April 7, 2017. The Denver Simmons case ended in November 2019 with four more consecutive life sentences for each killer, no possibility of parole, and no death penalty, which was the outcome the two men had told investigators they were hoping to force.¹

Who Denver Simmons Is

Before Kirkland, Simmons was already serving life for the 2007 murders of a 45-year-old woman and her 13-year-old son in Colleton County, South Carolina.² His accomplice Jacob Philip was serving life for the 2013 strangulation killings of Ashley Kaney, 26, and her eight-year-old daughter Riley Burdick in Berkeley County.³ Both men had also been given “dormkeeper” or “wardkeeper” status at Kirkland, which let them move freely through the unit and gave them access to mops, brooms, and extension cords.⁴

How the Four Men Were Killed

On the morning of April 7, 2017, Simmons and Philip lured four fellow inmates into Simmons’s cell one at a time. The victims were John King, 52; William Scruggs, 44; Jimmy Ham, 56; and Jason Kelley, 35. All four were classified as minimum security risks and lived in the same dormitory as the killers.⁵

King, chosen because he was small and would not resist, was offered coffee and strangled from behind. Scruggs was offered cookies, then tackled and strangled with an extension cord. Ham was told the pair had crushed pills for him; when he fought back, Simmons hit him with a broken broom handle and forced it into his mouth to keep him from yelling. Kelley was asked to look behind a curtain, thrown to the floor, and strangled with a broomstick that was afterward thrust into his ear.⁶ Between killings, the two men hid each body in the cell so the next victim would not see anything wrong.⁷

The killings took roughly two and a half hours. When they were done, Simmons and Philip walked to an administration building and told staff to check the cell. Sgt. DeWaun McKan and Officer Damian Jones went in and found the four bodies.⁸

Why They Did It

In a jailhouse interview with the Associated Press soon after the killings, Simmons said he and Philip had decided 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.” Their reasoning, he said, was arithmetic: “The more people you kill, the more chance they’re gonna give it to you.” The victims were men they saw every day. “One of them was a friend of both of ours,” Simmons said.⁶

Simmons said he became “desensitized” after the first murder and that “the more you kill, the easier it gets.” He justified targeting inmates rather than guards by saying staff were “just there doing their job” and that the victims were “not fine, upstanding members of society.” He also acknowledged the plan had failed. South Carolina had not executed anyone in years, and a confessed killer of seven had recently received life without parole. “I did it all, I did it for nothing,” Simmons said. “So that makes it especially bad for me.”⁶

How Two Inmates Killed Four Men Undetected

At the time of the attack, two officers and seven non-security employees were assigned to a dorm holding 139 inmates.⁹ Sgt. McKan was responsible for security checks every 30 minutes on the wing where the murders happened. He admitted he had been trained to look inside cell windows during those rounds and did not do so that morning. He walked past Simmons’s cell more than once while bodies were inside and noticed nothing. Surveillance video captured portions of the attacks and confirmed the extended timeline.⁸

South Carolina Department of Corrections Director Bryan Stirling said an internal investigation would follow the criminal case, and the agency’s spokesperson declined to answer questions about whether policies had been violated.⁵

Guilty Pleas and Four More Life Sentences

Both men confessed almost immediately, and each was charged with four counts of murder. The case took more than two years to resolve and ended with guilty pleas on November 21, 2019, in a brief hearing at the Richland County courthouse before Circuit Judge De’Andrea Benjamin.¹⁰

Simmons, then 38, pleaded guilty to four counts of murder. Philip, 28, pleaded guilty but mentally ill to the same charges and appeared by video from Gilliam Psychiatric Hospital. Each received four consecutive life sentences on top of the life terms he was already serving. Neither will ever be eligible for parole.¹

Deputy Fifth Circuit Solicitor Dan Goldberg said the families of all four victims unanimously opposed the death penalty, in part because Simmons and Philip had killed specifically to get it. “The families would rather they be in prison than give them what they wanted,” Goldberg said. Family members attended the hearing but made no statements.¹⁰

The Civil Lawsuits and the Qualified Immunity Ruling

In January 2018, relatives of Jason Kelley and Jimmy Ham filed wrongful-death lawsuits in Richland County state court alleging “gross negligence” by prison officials. They claimed Simmons and Philip had “voiced on several occasions” their intent to kill other inmates, that the facility suffered from “horrible under-staffing” and “negligently substandard” mental health care, and that conditions amounted to a “powder keg.”⁴ The lawsuits also alleged that prison counselors announced inmates’ mental health diagnoses in front of other prisoners and used unapproved checklists instead of talking with inmates. William Scruggs had been convicted of murder but found insane and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.¹¹

The estate of John King filed a separate federal civil rights lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 against Sgt. McKan, Warden Timothy Riley, and other administrators, alleging deliberate indifference to inmate safety and to King’s medical needs. On August 4, 2023, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in King v. Riley, 76 F.4th 259, that all defendants were entitled to qualified immunity.⁸

The majority opinion, written by Judge Richardson and joined by Judge Thacker, held that the King family had not identified any “clearly established” constitutional right that the officers violated. On the failure-to-protect claim, the court found no controlling precedent requiring security checks to include looking inside cells. On the medical-needs claim, the court held that calling for medical personnel rather than performing CPR was a “good-faith effort.” Supervisory claims against the warden and associate wardens were dismissed because the family did not allege specific individual misconduct by each administrator.⁸

Judge James A. Wynn Jr. dissented, calling the murders an “atrocity” that occurred because the killers were “allowed to circulate through the unit unsupervised.” Columnist George Will followed with a syndicated Washington Post piece calling the ruling “sickening” and built on “hairsplitting misapplications of qualified immunity.” Will argued that the doctrine effectively rewarded uniquely gross failures, because no prior case would match closely enough to count as “clearly established” law.¹²

1
The Post and Courier. 2 SC Prisoners Get Life for Murdering 4 Fellow Kirkland Inmates
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WIS TV. SC Inmates in Jail Murder Plead Guilty to Killing Fellow Prisoners
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Live5 News. Man Accused of Killing Woman, Her Daughter Expected Back in SC
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Corrections1. Lawsuits: Execution-Style Massacre of 4 SC Inmates Was Gross Negligence
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NBC News. 4 Inmates Found Dead at South Carolina Prison
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NBC Philadelphia. South Carolina Inmate Details 4 Prison Killings
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Daily Jeffersonian. Inmate Details 4 Prison Killings
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U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. King v. Riley, No. 22-6410
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The Post and Courier. Deaths of Four South Carolina Inmates Show Need for Better Mental Health Care in Prisons
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The State. 2 SC Prisoners Get Life for Murdering 4 Fellow Kirkland Inmates
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Live5 News. Families of Inmates Killed at South Carolina Prison Sue State
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The Washington Post. Four Prison Murders Lead to a Sickening Ruling on Qualified Immunity