In 2009, recreational divers found a sunken jon boat at the bottom of Inks Lake. Instead of hidden treasure, the divers discovered something much more disturbing deep in the murky waters inside the boat: human bones.
Llano county authorities initially attempted to match the remains with current missing persons in Llano county at the time. The results were inconclusive. Dental records from teeth discovered in the boat revealed the drowned person to be Holly Marie Simmons of Buchanan Dam, a small town of about 1,500 located between Burnet and Llano on Highway 29.
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Two missing persons reports had been filed, way back in 2006. Llano County Sheriff Bill Blackburn reports that, “Most likely, she knew who did this.” Although Blackburn said they know how Simmons died, the Llano County Sheriff’s department was unwilling to share at the time of Blackburn’s initial interview, fearing public knowledge of the details could compromise the investigation. The only comment Blackburn would give regarding Simmons’s death was that it was “a personal type of death.”
Simmons’s body was found cemented to the bottom of the boat beneath Inks Lake bridge. Investigative reports also show that the boat was weighted down with an additional 600 pounds of concrete to ensure that it would sink.
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Blackburn believes the killer is a local Llano County resident. Evidence found in Simmons’s Buchanan Dam home suggests that Simmons did not leave the house alive, and her body was dumped in Inks Lake with the boat as a means of disposal by the killer or killers. Blackburn suggests that while this may be the work of a single killer, the method of disposing Simmons’s body took more than one person.
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Sheriff Blackburn remains hopeful that the case will be solved eventually.
“The ties that bind those people together are sometimes broken,” Blackburn said. “It may take years; it may take months…somebody’s conscience breaks down and they can’t live with it anymore.”
Simmons worked as a nurse’s assistant and was a mother to four children.
As of last October, when the case was re-examined no one had been arrested for the crime. The killer remains at large.