The Girl in the Butcher’s Box: How One Teen’s Miraculous Escape Brought Down a Sadistic Killer and Saved a Family
There is a profound and terrifying truth about human nature that most of us prefer to ignore: monsters do not always lurk in the dark alleys of our imaginations. They do not always wear terrifying masks or hide in the shadows of abandoned buildings. Often, they walk among us in the bright light of day. They are the groundskeepers at our children’s daycares, the friendly neighbors who wave from across the street, and the men who calmly walk through crowded shopping malls without drawing a single second glance. They blend into the fabric of everyday life, wearing the meticulously crafted masks of ordinary citizens, while harboring secrets so devastating they defy comprehension.
On August 13, 1996, in the bustling city of Mobile, Alabama, a man named Gary Simmons walked into a local electronics store. To the onlooking customers and the retail staff going about their daily routines, he was just another face in the crowd. He stood in front of a display camera and began to record a video message. The lighting was bright, the atmosphere was mundane, and yet, the words that left his mouth were laced with a chilling finality.
“Hello, Lori. I guess it’s a real mess, isn’t it? It wasn’t supposed to go like that. I don’t know what to tell you,” he spoke into the lens, his voice steady, devoid of panic or immediate remorse. “I never think about the consequences of what I do until after it’s done, but that’s what happens when you cross the line. You pay for it. I guess it’s time. I love you.”
No one in that electronics store had any idea that the man casually speaking into the camera was a killer on the run. They had no idea that just thirty-five miles away, a massive police manhunt was underway, sparked by the horrifying discovery of an eighteen-year-old girl who had literally clawed her way back from the brink of death. They did not know that the serene, murky waters of a Mississippi bayou were currently holding the gruesome evidence of his crimes.
This is the harrowing, multi-layered story of Gary Simmons. It is a story of twisted fantasies brought to life, of a justice system that trapped an abused woman in a nightmare, of a young man whose life was brutally cut short, and ultimately, of an eighteen-year-old girl named Brook Weber. Brook would endure the unimaginable, surviving a torture chamber to become the single thread that unraveled a monster’s reign of terror. She would forever be known in the annals of criminal history as “The Girl in the Butcher’s Box.”
To truly understand the magnitude of the horror that unfolded in the sticky, sweltering heat of August 1996, one must first understand the innocence that preceded it. The year was 1996, and in Houston, Texas, a vibrant twenty-one-year-old named Jeffrey Wolfe was living a life full of promise and simple joys. Jeffrey was the kind of young man who naturally drew people toward him. He lived with his father, Paskiel, sharing a bond that was built on mutual respect and deep familial love.
Paskiel looked at his son with the kind of pride that only a father can truly understand. “He was just a good kid,” Paskiel would later recall, his voice thick with the heavy burden of hindsight. “He loved dogs, he loved football, he loved motorcycles. He was an All-American guy, you know, he really was.” Jeffrey was navigating the prime of his youth, a time characterized by a sense of invincibility and the thrilling pursuit of the future.
On August 11, the warmth of the Texas summer provided the backdrop for a momentous occasion in Jeffrey’s life. He came home to his father’s house with a surprise guest, a beautiful new girlfriend whom he was incredibly excited to introduce. Her name was Brook Weber. She was just eighteen years old, radiating the kind of youthful optimism that perfectly matched Jeffrey’s own energy.
“I was sitting at the house and they drove up and introduced her,” Paskiel remembered vividly. “‘Dad, this is my new girlfriend, Brook.’ She was a beautiful young girl.”
Jeffrey and Brook had only known each other for a few short weeks, but the intensity of their connection was palpable. They were in what Brook would later describe as the “honeymoon phase” of their relationship, a fleeting, golden period where everything feels flawless and every shared moment is imbued with magic. “He was real charming, real charming and sweet and cute,” Brook reminisced.
Driven by the spontaneous energy of their new romance, the couple had planned a getaway. It wasn’t just a vacation, however; it was a trip with a specific purpose. They were going to drive from Houston, Texas, all the way across state lines to the coastal community of Moss Point, Mississippi. According to Jeffrey, it was a simple business trip. He needed to collect a debt from some acquaintances, and he figured he and Brook could make a fun adventure out of the journey.
On the morning of August 12, the world seemed perfectly normal. Jeffrey woke up early, the anticipation of the road trip fueling his movements. He went to pick up Brook, stopping to say goodbye to his father. “He hugged and kissed me bye,” Paskiel recalled, the memory permanently etched into his mind. “And that’s the last time I heard from him.”
The drive from Houston to Moss Point takes roughly six hours, a journey characterized by long stretches of highway, changing landscapes, and the intimate confines of a car interior. For Jeffrey and Brook, it was hours spent talking, laughing, and building the foundation of what they believed would be a long relationship. They had no reason to suspect that they were driving directly into a carefully orchestrated trap.
By the time the couple arrived in Moss Point, the sun had already surrendered to the horizon, casting deep, long shadows over the landscape. Moss Point is a city defined by its proximity to the water, bordered by the Pascagoula River and a network of dense, twisting bayous. The air there is heavy with humidity, and the atmosphere can quickly shift from serene to deeply isolating as night falls.
As Jeffrey pulled the car up to the designated address, an immediate sense of unease washed over Brook. The property was shrouded in darkness. “I could tell something wasn’t right,” she later explained, the instincts of survival subtly whispering to her before she even understood why. “It was dark, and we pull up and there’s not a porch light on. So that kind of was like, ‘Why doesn’t he have the porch light on?’ You know, ‘He knows we’re coming.'”
Sitting on the steps of the shadowed house was a man waiting for them. It was Gary Simmons. To the eighteen-year-old Brook, there was something inherently unsettling about his presence. “He looked kinda creepy to me,” she recalled. But the powerful influence of trust in her new boyfriend overrode her intuition. “Jeff had told me that these were his friends, so I didn’t question it. I wish I would’ve asked questions that day.”
Gary, playing the role of the hospitable host, stood up and invited the young couple inside the house. The interior, much like the exterior, felt off, but the social contract dictated that they play along. Gary offered them drinks, setting a disarmingly casual tone for the interaction. As the men began to discuss the business that had brought Jeffrey all the way from Texas, Brook sought out a comfortable spot to wait. She took a seat at a nearby table in the kitchen area, physically distancing herself from the conversation.
She wasn’t paying close attention to the specifics of the discussion. To her, it was just business—a boring exchange of words that would soon conclude so they could begin the fun part of their trip. From what she could perceive, the interaction was completely non-confrontational. There were no raised voices, no aggressive posturing, and absolutely no indication of hostility. “I mean, I thought that they were just gonna have a discussion and then it would be done,” Brook stated, recalling her innocent assumption.
And then, the illusion of safety shattered in an instant.
The deafening, concussive roar of gunshots abruptly ripped through the quiet house. The sound was so sudden, so violently out of context, that for a split second, Brook’s brain struggled to process the reality of the noise. When she instinctively looked up toward the source of the sound, her eyes captured an image of pure, unadulterated horror—an image that would brand itself onto her psyche for the rest of her life.
Jeffrey, the charming, vibrant young man she had fallen for, was hit. He had been shot directly through the chest. The sheer force of the impact sent a spray of his blood painting violently across the window blinds. Brook watched in paralyzed shock as his body crumpled, collapsing heavily onto the floor.
Standing directly behind where Jeffrey had just been was a second man, a young man Brook had no idea was even inside the house. He was holding a smoking gun. The friendly business meeting had been a lethal ambush.
“I was like, ‘Oh, f*** I’m gonna die!'” Brook recalled, the primal terror of that moment rushing back to her. “I was so scared.”
Before she could even attempt to scream or scramble toward the door, Gary Simmons moved with terrifying speed and purpose. He lunged at Brook, wrapping his massive arms around her in a crushing bear hug. He physically lifted her off the ground, subduing her frantic struggles, and carried her forcefully into another room of the house.
What followed was a systematic dismantling of Brook’s humanity. Gary was not acting on a spontaneous impulse; his movements were methodical, practiced in the theater of his own dark mind. He threw her down and proceeded to hogtie her, binding her wrists and ankles together behind her back with excruciating tightness. He shoved a gag into her mouth, silencing her terrified screams.
And then, he dragged her toward a terrifying apparatus he had prepared: a large, human-sized wooden box. He shoved the bound, gagged teenager into the confined space and locked the lid shut.
“It was the scariest moment of my life,” Brook revealed, the psychological weight of the darkness pressing down on her memory. “I didn’t know what they were going to do to me.”
The true depravity of Gary Simmons was about to reveal itself. He did not simply leave her in the box to await her fate. He returned, opening the lid, and pulled the helpless girl out. In a moment of absolute psychological and physical domination, he laid out the sick, twisted rules of her continued existence.
“I was basically told how well I performed sexually determined if I lived or if I died,” Brook stated, recounting the ultimate nightmare. He then proceeded to brutally rape the eighteen-year-old girl, stripping away her dignity while the body of her murdered boyfriend lay bleeding in the next room.
When the horrific assault was over, Gary did not show a shred of mercy. He forced her back into the wooden box and slammed the lid shut once again, locking her inside.
“It was dark, and you’re just sitting there alone with your own thoughts and fears, just praying for a way out,” Brook described the suffocating isolation of the butcher’s box. “I didn’t think I was getting outta that box.”
To understand how Gary Simmons evolved into a monster capable of building a torture box and executing a young man in cold blood, one must rewind the clock six years and look through the eyes of another survivor: his wife, Lori Simmons.
On August 14, a mere twenty-four hours after Brook was thrown into the box, Lori received the disturbing VHS tape at her workplace. Hearing Gary’s voice and seeing his face on the screen sent a shockwave of dread through her system. To the outside observer, a message ending with “I love you” might seem like the communication of a troubled but affectionate husband. But Lori knew the terrifying truth. She knew the darkness that lived behind Gary’s calm exterior.
Lori’s harrowing journey with Gary began almost exactly six years prior, on August 11, 1990. It was the day they were married. Lori had met Gary approximately ten months after going through her first divorce. She was a mother with two young children, looking for stability and love. Gary, who worked as the groundskeeper at the daycare her children attended, seemed like the perfect fit. He was employed, attentive, and appeared to care for her family.
On the day of their wedding, they moved into the house in Moss Point—the very same house that would later become Jeffrey Wolfe’s slaughterhouse and Brook Weber’s prison. Even decades later, the mere thought of that structure sends shivers down Lori’s spine. “The house still creeps me out. And I have not set foot in there in like 27 years,” she confessed.
In the early, seemingly idyllic days of their relationship, Gary shared a personal hobby with Lori. He told her that he loved to write short stories. To Lori, this was an endearing quirk. She imagined him as a creative soul, perhaps harboring dreams of becoming a published author. Inside his dedicated office in their home, Gary kept a meticulously organized collection of over fifty thick binders, all filled to the brim with his writings.
One day, driven by the innocent curiosity of a new wife wanting to understand her husband’s creative mind, Lori decided to open one of the binders and read a story.
What she found waiting on those pages was not fiction; it was a blueprint for atrocity. As her eyes scanned the handwritten lines, a cold, sinking feeling gripped her stomach. Every single story, across every single binder she checked, revolved around the exact same deeply disturbing theme. They were not tales of romance or adventure. They were highly detailed, graphic accounts of women being taken captive, held against their will, and subjected to horrific abuse as sex slaves.
“I remember reading these stories, and I don’t know if he let me read that to gauge my reaction or my interest in what he had written,” Lori recounted, the memory of that horrifying realization still fresh. Confronting the disturbing nature of the texts, she went to her husband. “I told him, ‘That’s not pleasure, that’s torture.'”
Gary’s response was chilling in its casual detachment. He didn’t deny it, nor did he apologize. He looked at his new wife and said, “Well, these are my fantasies. I have secrets you know nothing about.”
Desperately wanting to hold her family together, Lori tried to compartmentalize the discovery. She tried to convince herself that they were just stories, the harmless, albeit strange, outlets of a vivid imagination. But the darkness contained in those fifty binders was not content to remain on the page. Gary was merely waiting for the right moment to bring his horrific fantasies into the real world, and he had chosen his wife to be his first victim.
The shift from disturbing writer to active predator occurred shortly after the birth of their first daughter together. Lori was physically exhausted and recovering from childbirth. When Gary approached her seeking intimacy, she set a clear boundary. “I told him, no he can’t, ‘It’s not time, it’s too soon, you have to wait.'”
Gary’s reaction shattered the illusion of their marriage forever. He looked at her with cold determination and replied, “That’s not gonna happen.”
That evening, the man who had vowed to love and protect her turned into her abuser. He violently forced himself upon her. “That was the very first time Gary raped me,” Lori revealed, the trauma of the betrayal evident in her words.
In the aftermath of the assault, Lori was plunged into a state of profound shock and confusion. She retreated to the shower, desperately scrubbing her skin, hoping the hot water could wash away the profound sense of violation. But the psychological damage was done. In the early 1990s, the societal understanding of marital rape was dangerously murky, and Lori found herself questioning her own reality. “I wasn’t quite sure on what happened, and I didn’t even know if that was considered rape because we were married.”
But Gary was just getting started. The assault was merely the opening act of a campaign of terror designed to completely break Lori’s spirit and subject her to the scenarios he had painstakingly plotted in his binders.
One of the recurring, obsessive elements in Gary’s written stories involved a large wooden box. It was designed specifically to hold a human being captive. Lori had read about it, and soon, she saw it manifest in her own home. “I was in the kitchen when I heard this noise and this banging. I see he’s got this huge box,” she recalled. The physical presence of the box in their living space was a terrifying omen.
Realizing the extreme danger she was in, Lori attempted to stand her ground. She confronted Gary, demanding an explanation and a cessation of his escalating madness. But standing up to Gary only triggered a more violent response. He didn’t engage in a shouting match. Instead, he moved with terrifying calmness, his hands wrapping tightly around her throat. He squeezed with such lethal intent that Lori’s vision went black, and she lost consciousness.
When she finally awoke, the nightmare had reached a new level of depravity. She found herself lying in her own bed, but she was entirely immobilized. Gary had bound her hands and feet securely to the bedposts. She was trapped, entirely at his mercy. Standing right beside the bed was Gary, watching her panic with a sick sense of satisfaction.
“I asked him, ‘Let me go, please untie me, I’m not a fan of this,'” Lori pleaded, hoping to appeal to whatever humanity he had left.
Gary’s response was a chilling dismissal of her autonomy. “He told me it was not about me, this was not about me.”
He then escalated the psychological torture by blindfolding her. Plunged into sudden darkness, Lori’s other senses became hyper-aware. She could hear the floorboards creaking as Gary slowly paced around the room, taunting her with his unseen presence. He wasn’t acting out of anger; he was operating with the cool, calculated precision of an executioner.
Then, she felt the terrifying, icy sting of metal pressing against her skin. It was a butcher knife, its blade so impossibly sharp that even the slightest flinch would slice her open. Gary began to trace the outline of her face with the tip of the blade, a slow, agonizing mock surgery.
“And I was petrified,” Lori described the absolute terror of the moment. “I thought I was dying that night. This was one of the fantasies that he had written about. If I made a noise, if I twitched or flinched a little bit, it aroused him. He enjoyed the pain and the agony that he was causing.”
Lori understood that her survival depended on her ability to suppress every natural instinct she had. She held her breath, forcing her trembling body to remain as still as a corpse. The lack of reaction frustrated Gary. He wanted the fear; he wanted the struggle. Recognizing that his sadistic game was losing its thrill, he ripped the blindfold from her face and scoffed, “Well, that’s not fun anymore.”
Lori knew that if she stayed, she was going to die. “He had already played out some of the stories in his books. I did not wanna become any of the other stories.”
Desperate for a lifeline, Lori went to the local police. She sat before the officers and detailed the rape, the strangulation, the bondage, and the torture with the butcher knife. But the response she received was a devastating indictment of the justice system’s failures regarding domestic violence at the time. The police told her that it was essentially her word against his. Without physical evidence or a third-party witness, they claimed they did not have enough to charge Gary with a crime. “There was no way for me to prove anything that happened,” Lori lamented.
Realizing that criminal charges were impossible, Lori sought civil escape. She contacted a legal aid service, hoping to file for an immediate divorce to separate herself and her children from Gary legally and physically. She explained the horrific sexual and physical abuse she was enduring.
The legal advice she received next was like a physical blow. The representative explained an archaic, trapping aspect of the law. “She told me that in the State of Mississippi, you can’t get divorced when you’re pregnant.”
Lori was bewildered. “I said, ‘Well, I’m not pregnant.'”
Regardless of her assertion, the rigid requirements of the state mandated that she take a clinical pregnancy test before the divorce proceedings could even be initiated. Lori complied, taking the test, only to receive news that felt like a death sentence: she was, in fact, pregnant.
The realization that the law was forcing her to remain legally bound to her torturer for the duration of a pregnancy was unbearable. “I wanted this to be over, and it wasn’t only me, you know, it was my kids and the danger that I not only put myself in, but I put my children in. You know, I put people in that I love,” she explained, the heavy burden of responsibility crushing her.
Refusing to be a victim of both her husband and the legal system, Lori reached out to domestic violence advocacy associations. She was a mother pregnant with her third child, possessing no job, no independent income, and absolutely nowhere to go. All she owned in the world were two diaper bags and two suitcases. But it was enough. The association helped secure her a secret apartment, a safe haven where Gary could not find her. She gathered her children and fled the house in Moss Point, escaping the fate Gary had written for her in his binders.
However, escaping Gary’s physical presence did not mean escaping his sphere of influence. Gary was a master manipulator, and while he had lost control of Lori, he maintained a dangerously close relationship with her younger brother, Timothy Milano.
By the summer of 1996, Lori was trying to rebuild her shattered life in her new apartment. Her brother Timothy had moved in with her to provide support. “He had moved in with me for that summer so he could attend to his nephew and nieces to help me out,” Lori noted. Timothy was a lifeline for the struggling single mother.
One sweltering night, at around 11:00 PM, Lori and Timothy were relaxing in the kitchen. The children had been put to bed, and a rare moment of quiet had settled over the apartment. Suddenly, a heavy knock echoed from the front door.
When Timothy opened the door, Gary Simmons was standing on the threshold.
The sight of her abuser at her safe house sent Lori into a panic. Gary, ignoring Lori, asked Timothy to step outside for a private conversation. “I did not know that they still spoke. I did not know that they even had a relationship,” Lori admitted, shocked by the betrayal.
When Timothy returned inside a few minutes later, his demeanor had shifted. He looked at his sister and announced, “Gary needs my help.”
Lori’s protective instincts flared. “I said, ‘You have no business with that man.'”
Timothy, perhaps naive to the true depths of Gary’s depravity, or perhaps manipulated by threats he dared not speak of, simply hugged his sister. He promised her that he would be back within the hour. He then walked out the door and got into the car with Gary Simmons, unknowingly driving straight toward an act of unspeakable evil.
The hours ticked by with agonizing slowness. One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock in the morning passed, and Timothy had not returned. By 3:30 AM, Lori’s concern had morphed into full-blown panic. The silence of the night felt oppressive. Desperate for answers, she picked up her telephone and dialed the number to the house in Moss Point—the house she had fought so hard to escape.
“I called Gary’s house. Gary had an answering machine and I left a message, and then I called Gary’s home again,” Lori recalled the sequence of her desperation. “And then the third time the answering machine didn’t pick up. The phone literally just rang and rang and rang. I literally just put the phone down and I just let it ring.”
What Lori could not possibly have known, as she listened to the endless ringing of the telephone in her quiet apartment, was that her calls were echoing through a house of horrors. She did not know that the floorboards were stained with Jeffrey Wolfe’s blood. And she did not know that her ringing phone was serving as a beacon of hope for an eighteen-year-old girl locked inside a wooden box.
Brook Weber had been trapped inside the dark, suffocating confines of the butcher’s box for hours. The sheer trauma of witnessing her boyfriend’s murder, combined with the brutal sexual assault and the physical pain of her bindings, had completely exhausted her nervous system. In the suffocating darkness, she had eventually passed out, her body shutting down to protect her mind.
But the shrill, piercing sound of the telephone ringing jolted her awake.
“I heard the answering machine come on,” Brook remembered, the memory of that sound forever tied to her survival. “And I knew nobody’s there.”
The persistent ringing was a revelation. It meant that Gary and the other man who had shot Jeffrey were gone. They had left the house. In that tiny, airless space, a profound, primal surge of adrenaline flooded Brook’s system. “I was thinking in my mind, I was like, ‘If you’re ever gonna get outta here, now’s the time.'”
She was hogtied, her wrists and ankles pulled taut behind her back, but the fear of Gary returning overpowered the pain in her joints. Brook began to writhe and thrash inside the box. She twisted her wrists, ignoring the friction burns as the rough rope dug into her skin. She pulled and tugged with an animalistic desperation until, miraculously, she felt a slight give. The knot began to loosen. Continuing her frantic struggle, she finally managed to pull her hands free, swiftly untying her legs in the dark.
She was untied, but she was still trapped inside a locked, heavy wooden box.
Outside the box, the telephone continued to ring relentlessly, a haunting soundtrack to her fight for life. Brook shifted her bruised body onto her hands and knees. She positioned her back against the heavy wooden lid of the box. She planted her hands firmly on the floorboards beneath her and pushed upward with the strength of a person fighting for their very existence.
She pushed against the metal lock, groaning under the strain. She summoned every single ounce of strength she possessed, refusing to give up, until finally, with a loud crack, the metal gave way. The lid burst open.
Brook scrambled out of the box and stumbled into the room. She looked around frantically, but the house was completely silent, save for the persistent ringing of the phone. In a chilling display of sociopathic organization, the house was completely clean. There was no sign of Jeffrey’s body, no blood on the floor. Gary had meticulously scrubbed the crime scene while she was locked away.
But Brook knew she didn’t have time to analyze the cleanliness of the room. She needed a weapon, and she needed an exit. She rushed into the kitchen, her eyes darting around until she spotted a massive butcher knife resting on the table. She grabbed it, her knuckles turning white as she gripped the handle.
“‘Cause if they were coming in when I was going out, I was gonna gut ’em, period,” Brook stated, her voice reflecting the fierce, uncompromising warrior she had been forced to become in those few hours. “Because they weren’t gonna kill me, I was not dying that day.”
Clutching the knife, Brook burst through the front door and sprinted into the humid Mississippi night. She didn’t look back. She ran with a frantic, desperate speed, her bare feet hitting the pavement as she searched for any sign of a safe haven. The first house she spotted was directly across the street. She headed straight for it.
But just as she reached the neighbor’s yard, the worst possible scenario unfolded.
“And I ran, I ran so fast. About that time, I looked up and Gary Simmons pulled back up at the house,” Brook recounted, the terror of that moment seizing her anew.
Brook dove behind a thick bush on the neighbor’s lawn, pressing her body flat against the damp earth. She clutched the butcher knife to her chest, her entire body shaking violently. She had no idea if the headlights of Gary’s car had caught her sprinting across the street. She was convinced that this was the end of the line. She believed Gary was going to hunt her down in the dark, and she was prepared to fight to the death on that lawn.
From her hiding spot, she watched as Gary stepped out of his car and walked into the house. The seconds that followed felt like hours. It only took Gary a few minutes to realize that his meticulously crafted nightmare had been breached. He discovered the broken lock, the empty box, and the missing girl.
Brook expected him to come tearing out of the house, searching the perimeter with a flashlight. She braced herself for the confrontation. But instead of hunting for her, Gary panicked. He ran out of the front door, sprinted to his car, threw it into gear, and sped off into the night.
Brook Weber was finally, undeniably free.
She crawled out from behind the bush and began frantically banging on the neighbor’s front door, screaming for help while still clutching the butcher knife. The terrified neighbors, seeing the distressed, armed teenager, immediately dialed 911.
In the early hours of the morning, the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department dispatched units to the scene. When the officers arrived, they found an eighteen-year-old girl in a state of profound shock. Brook was hyperventilating, her eyes wide with terror, unable to form coherent sentences. The officers tried to calm her down, gently asking her what had happened.
All she could manage to repeat, over and over, was a frantic chant: “They shot him, they shot him.”
When Brook managed to point a shaking finger toward the dark house across the street, the officers drew their weapons and carefully approached Gary Simmons’s property. They breached the front door, expecting a chaotic, bloody crime scene based on the girl’s hysterical claims.
Instead, they walked into a house that was immaculate. There were no overturned chairs, no signs of a physical struggle, no bullet holes in the walls, and absolutely no blood. The home appeared completely undisturbed. The only anomaly in the entire pristine house was the large, human-sized wooden box sitting in the room, its lid forced open.
While an ambulance transported Brook to the Sheriff’s Department for a medical evaluation and a formal interview, the officers continued to search the perimeter of the property. They knew something terrible had occurred; the broken box and the traumatized girl were undeniable proof. The house backed directly onto the murky, winding waters of a Mississippi bayou. As the officers made their way toward the wooden dock at the water’s edge, the facade of cleanliness finally broke.
Inside a small boat tied to the dock, an investigator spotted several distinct, dark drops of blood. The chilling reality began to set in: the killer hadn’t just murdered a man; he had disposed of the evidence in the dark waters of the river.
Not far from the dock, another officer made a discovery that elevated the crime from a murder to an act of sheer, sadistic butchery. Lying in the grass was a heavy axe. As the officer shone his flashlight onto the tool, the beam illuminated a blade thickly coated in fresh human blood.
A massive search and rescue dive team was immediately deployed into the bayou. What they pulled from the dark water over the next several hours would cement Gary Simmons’s legacy as one of the most heinous criminals in the history of the state. Floating across the surface and submerged in the muddy depths, the dive team recovered exactly eighty-eight separate, dismembered pieces of human remains. Gary Simmons and his accomplice had not just killed Jeffrey Wolfe; they had methodically butchered him, chopping his body into eighty-eight pieces to discard him like garbage.
Back in Houston, Texas, Paskiel Wolfe was entirely unaware of the nightmare unfolding in Mississippi. He was in his bedroom, packing a suitcase for a planned trip, when his younger son appeared in the doorway. The look on the boy’s face told Paskiel that his world was about to collapse.
“He put his arm around me and he said, ‘They ain’t gonna let you see Jeffrey,'” Paskiel remembered, his voice trembling with the grief of a father’s worst nightmare.
Refusing to accept the implication, Paskiel replied fiercely, “Ain’t nobody gonna stop me from seeing my son. Nobody.”
It was then that his younger son delivered the crushing, horrific truth. “He said, ‘Bubba, they cut Jeffrey up in 88-something pieces. They’re looking for his body parts now.'”
The words hit Paskiel like a physical blow. His legs gave out beneath him. “So I just fell over onto the bed and I cried and I cried and I cried,” the heartbroken father recalled. “Why they did that to my boy, I don’t know. I never thought I’d have to bury him.”
Meanwhile, back in Mississippi, the timeline of August 13 was moving rapidly. While Gary Simmons was on the run from a massive police manhunt, Timothy Milano finally returned to Lori’s apartment. He had been gone for hours. When he walked through the door, Lori immediately knew that her brother was irreparably changed.
“He’s not there, it’s almost like he’s checked out,” Lori observed, sensing a dark, heavy void surrounding him. The anxiety that had been building inside her all night reached a boiling point. “I stop and I think, ‘Oh God, what has happened now? What has Gary done to my family now?'”
Timothy looked at his sister, his eyes hollow, and offered a confession that tied him permanently to the monster. “I had to do it,” he told her, his voice devoid of emotion. “I had to help him because he threatened you and the girls.”
Lori was stunned. Gary had used the ultimate leverage—the lives of Lori and her children—to force Timothy into becoming an accomplice to a brutal murder. Shortly after confessing to his sister, Timothy Milano walked out of the apartment and turned himself in to the local authorities. “The last time I laid my eyes on him was outside my apartment when he was being taken away,” Lori said.
When Paskiel Wolfe learned that Timothy Milano was the man who had pulled the trigger, his grief was compounded by a furious sense of betrayal. Timothy was not a faceless stranger in a dark alley. Jeffrey had known him. In fact, Jeffrey had previously brought Timothy to their home in Texas, asking his father if the young man could stay with them for a few weeks because he was going through a tough time.
“I was sick in my stomach,” Paskiel revealed, the anger burning through his sorrow. “I thought I’d done the boy a favor by letting him live in my house for three or four weeks. I washed his clothes, I fed him and put a roof over his head, and I took him to the store a couple of times and he repaid me back by shooting my son seven times in the back and twice in his chest.”
With Timothy in custody, the police knew exactly what had happened, but the mastermind, Gary Simmons, remained at large. Lori, learning the horrific details of the butcher’s box and the dismembered body from the news, was terrified. She knew Gary’s capacity for violence better than anyone. She wondered if he was coming to her apartment next to finish what he had started years ago.
But Gary had a different plan. On August 14, while Lori was at work, she received the package containing the VHS tape. As she watched the recording of her husband calmly addressing her from the Mobile, Alabama electronics store, acknowledging that he had “crossed the line,” she realized that the hunt was nearing its end.
Later that exact same day, deciding that running was futile, Gary Simmons picked up a telephone and called the police, offering to turn himself in. When officers swarmed his location and clamped handcuffs onto his wrists, they realized a terrifying fact: Gary was hiding just a few blocks away from Lori’s workplace.
The media frenzy surrounding the case was intense. News anchors reported grimly on television screens across the nation: “It’s a murder officials call the most grisly in Jackson County history. Authorities say, Simmons shot Wolfe, cut up the body and scattered it in a nearby bayou… Simmons also was accused of raping Wolfe’s girlfriend and imprisoning her inside this box.”
On October 11, 1996, the judicial process officially began. Gary Simmons and Timothy Milano were formally indicted for the capital murder of Jeffrey Wolfe. However, the wheels of justice turn slowly, and it would take nearly a full year before the men would face a jury of their peers.
For prosecutors to secure a death penalty conviction against a monster like Gary Simmons, they absolutely needed the testimony of the only living witness to the crimes inside the house: Brook Weber.
But for Brook, surviving the box was only the first battle. The psychological warfare continued long after her physical escape. Even while securely locked behind the steel bars of a maximum-security prison, Gary Simmons continued to exert his terrifying influence. He recognized that Brook was the key to his demise, and he actively attempted to orchestrate a hit on her life from inside his cell.
“I was the only living witness. If something would’ve happened to me, they would’ve probably got away with that,” Brook explained, the persistent paranoia shaping her daily existence. “That’s why they tried to have me killed from prison. I never felt safe after that. Ever.”
Despite the overwhelming fear that a hired killer could be lurking around any corner, Brook refused to be silenced. On August 25, 1997, one year and two weeks after the murder, the highly anticipated trial began in a packed courtroom.
When Brook Weber was called to the stand to testify, she had to physically walk past the man who had raped her, bound her, and locked her in a box to die. The psychological toll of being in the same room as her tormentor was immense.
“I was so scared my whole body was shaking. My hands were like this, and I’m talking not a little bit, and I would try to sit on my hands and then my legs would go. I couldn’t make it stop. I was scared,” she recalled the visceral, uncontrollable physical reaction to her trauma.
But as she sat in the witness box, shaking and terrified, she looked out into the gallery. Sitting in the front row, their faces etched with unimaginable pain and quiet dignity, were Jeffrey’s parents. Paskiel Wolfe was there, watching the girl who had loved his son take the stand.
“But Jeff’s parents were there. They were right there and I knew if they could sit there and take it, I could sit there and I could make sure that Jeff didn’t die in vain,” Brook stated, her voice hardening with resolve. “He wasn’t gonna die, and these people were going to get away with it.”
Brook delivered her testimony with devastating clarity. She detailed the sudden gunshots, the bear hug, the rape, the box, and her miraculous escape. She painted a picture of absolute evil that the jury could not ignore.
On August 28, after a swift trial and only a few hours of deliberation, the jury returned to the courtroom with their verdict. It was a complete and total victory for the prosecution. Gary Simmons was found guilty on all counts: guilty of the capital murder of Jeffrey Wolfe, guilty of the violent kidnapping, and guilty of the horrific sexual assault against Brook.
Timothy Milano was also found guilty of murder, convicted of firing the nine shots that ended Jeffrey’s life, and for his role in the kidnapping. Timothy was sentenced to spend the remainder of his natural life in prison without the possibility of parole.
For Gary Simmons, the architect of the nightmare, the jury showed no mercy. He was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
While the gavel coming down provided a legal conclusion to the Moss Point murder, it did not provide an emotional end for Brook. The trauma of the butcher’s box had fundamentally altered her DNA. The knowledge that Gary had tried to have her assassinated from prison convinced her that she would never truly be safe.
In her mind, the threat extended beyond Gary himself. She developed an intense, irrational fear of Gary’s extended family, specifically Lori and her children. Brook convinced herself that because her testimony had sent Gary to death row, his children would grow up harboring a deep, vengeful hatred for her. She believed they would eventually hunt her down in retaliation.
“I was terrified of Gary’s family,” Brook admitted, shedding light on the complex, twisting nature of PTSD. “I thought that, you know, maybe Gary and Lori were high school sweethearts and I just ruined their perfect marriage.”
To survive, Brook effectively erased herself. She changed her name to sever ties with the girl in the news reports. She radically altered her physical appearance, chopping off her long blonde hair and dyeing it dark to avoid recognition in the mirror and on the street. She spent years moving, hiding, and looking over her shoulder, a prisoner of her own survival. “You know many years of my life I lost running from this, hiding from this? I lost myself.”
Decades passed. The world moved on, but the survivors remained tethered to the events of August 1996.
By the year 2023, twenty-seven long years had evaporated since the night Brook broke the lock on the wooden box. She was now forty-five years old, a woman who had built a family of her own despite the heavy shadows of her past. She was exhausted. The constant running, the pervasive fear, the hiding—it had drained her spirit. It was finally time to stop looking over her shoulder.
During the filming of a true-crime documentary exploring the infamous case, the production team approached Brook with a highly unexpected proposition. Lori Simmons, the woman Brook had feared for nearly three decades, desperately wanted to meet her face-to-face.
Brook was apprehensive, her old fears bubbling to the surface, but a deeper need for closure pushed her forward. She agreed to the meeting.
“I was 18 years old, I am 45 now. I’m tired of running, tired of being afraid,” Brook explained her reasoning. “I wanna heal, I want my power back, I wanna know, ‘Are you gonna hurt me? Are you gonna come after me?'”
For Lori, the meeting was not about confronting the woman who put her husband on death row; it was about honoring the woman who saved her family. Lori knew that if Brook had not escaped that box and brought the police to Gary’s door, Gary would have eventually come after Lori and her children. Brook had inadvertently stopped a serial killer in the making.
“I need to look her in the eyes so she knows Brook is my hero,” Lori stated, her voice thick with emotion as she prepared for the encounter.
When the two women finally stood in the same room, twenty-seven years of assumed hatred and unspoken fear instantly dissolved.
“Hi, I’m Lori,” the older woman introduced herself gently. “I’m Brook,” the survivor replied. “Can I hug you?” Lori asked. “Sure,” Brook answered, allowing herself to be embraced by the woman she had spent a lifetime running from.
As they sat down together, the healing began. Lori looked directly at the woman who had suffered unspeakable horrors in the house she once called home. “I owe you a debt of gratitude. You are my hero. You might not believe that, but you are. And we have thanked God for you every day since you’ve escaped. I have four children who are grown because of you. I’m here today because of you.”
For Brook, hearing those words was a paradigm shift. The guilt she had carried—the irrational fear that she had ruined a family—was washed away in an instant. She had not destroyed a family; she had preserved one. “I’ve never looked at it that way,” Brook whispered, tears welling in her eyes. “You kinda make it okay now.”
The connection forged between the two women was a powerful testament to the resilience of the human spirit. They were united by their shared trauma, both victims of the same sadistic monster, but they refused to let that monster define the rest of their lives.
“It’s nice to know she’s as strong as she is,” Lori reflected after their emotional conversation. “What she’s given me, you know, is closure and a debt that I could never pay.”
Brook Weber walked out of that meeting a changed woman. The ghost of the eighteen-year-old girl terrified in the dark had finally been laid to rest. She had looked her deepest fears in the eye and realized she had nothing left to run from.
“I just feel like I was put there on purpose so that they didn’t get away with it,” Brook concluded, her voice ringing with newfound strength and undeniable power. “I’m not ashamed of it anymore, it doesn’t define me. I am Brook Weber, period. I’m not a victim anymore, I’m a survivor of a violent crime and we’re gonna make it through it.”
