CRIME HUNTER: Was Ohio sex slave driven to murder her master?
· Toronto Sun
See more Toronto Sun on Google — save as a Preferred Source
Visit tr-sport.click for more information.
Vermilion sits about 56 kilometres west of Cleveland on the shores of Lake Erie. It’s a quaint, unpretentious town that could have been ripped from the 1950s.
There are around 10,000 souls living in this quiet corner of Ohio that features a slew of beaches and remains popular with Cleveland cottagers. It’s still about 93% white while the rest of America is going in another direction.
Importantly, the highlight of the town’s social calendar is the annual Woolybear Festival.
Master and slave sex scandals rare
Vermilion ain’t the kind of burg where one expects to find sex scandals of the master and slave variety. It’s the kind of town where people’s private affairs are theirs alone.
Julene and Jeremy Simko were high school sweethearts and both had challenging childhoods and teen years. He became the man of the family as a teenager when his father died. Pals described him as edgy. Julene’s childhood was more harrowing: she was sexually abused by her father.
But on Nov. 18, 2009, Vermilion hit America’s fine-tuned tabloid radar. Julene called emergency services around 6 a.m. that morning reporting that someone had blown her husband’s head off while he slept.
‘It was just role playing’
She told cops she was sleeping on a different floor and was awakened by the gunshots. There were some problems out of the gate: There were no signs of forced entry, the alarms did not go off and the couple’s dogs did not bark.
There was also a particularly eye-popping discovery: A 14-page contract outlining the Simko’s master-slave relationship.
“I don’t know what other relationships people carry on,” she told detectives in 2013, four years after her landscaper husband was murdered. “It was just role playing, but he was a dominant guy, and I was comfortable in that relationship. It’s not like we went out into the world with this.”
It would take years for cops and prosecutors to bring the case to trial but detectives believed the sex slave contract was Julene’s motivation for icing hubby. And, as a sweetener, revenge for what happened to her as a child. Cops said the night before the murder someone had looked up her father’s obituary on the home computer.
“Given the unfortunate acts that happened to Ms. Simko as a child, coupled with the father-daughter/master-slave agreement and then her father’s obituary being accessed by someone that night, coupled with the murder of her husband gave me pause for thought and concern,” Lorain County Prosecutor’s Office investigator Rick Thomas testified.
“Perhaps those things were related.”
Prosecutors had a treasure trove of courtroom-pleasing bon mots.
Julene told homicide detectives in 2013 that the couple had a regular sex life. Indeed, vibrators, dildos and other sex toys were in plain view throughout the couple’s home. She told shocked cops the toys were used often.
As for the master-slave contract, Julene said it was more a part of the couple’s role-playing sexual antics than a cornerstone of their “daily relationship.” However, police investigation found some interesting nuggets in the “contract” and in the home.
Submit to bestiality
— Jeremy was allowed to attend his wife’s obgyn appointments.
— Julene was ordered to stop shaving her legs, underarms and nether regions.
— Cops retrieved photos showing Julene “chained to something in the basement and she was nude with a golf ball as a ball gag in her mouth, a collar around her neck, and you could see she’s let the hair under her armpits grow.”
— In some photos Julene appeared to be in distress. She told cops she was a “willing participant” in the action and videos that one investigator described as “elaborate” affairs.
— The kinko contract also required that Julene submit to certain sex acts and that her body parts “would be stretched and measured.”
“In the agreement it refers to the fact that she would submit to acts of bestiality,” Thomas said. “There are photographs that show her in silhouette in a state of nudity with dogs, and I think it was a reasonable concern that had taken place.”
There were other problems for Julene. Detectives noticed a slew of inconsistencies, including the lack of blood on the 9mm handgun she used to shoot at the, uh, intruder. Blood was also absent from the .357 Smith and Wesson revolver whose bullets sent Jeremy to the morgue.
‘One is dead, and one is not’
Cops believed both weapons had been wiped clean — by Julene. Oddly, the backdoor handle did not have any of the dead man’s DNA. But didn’t Julene’s statements — and CCTV — show Jeremy taking the dogs to their houses before the pair retired for the evening?
Thomas told the femme fatale: “We’re left with two people in the house — one is dead, and one is not. Typically that lends itself to making you the prime suspect.”
Indeed. The defence gambit that it was a cold-blooded home invasion that turned violent with Julene starring as the plucky heroine did not move the needle. The jig was up and she pleaded guilty.
Payday was 28 years to life in an Ohio prison.
“Of the three potential killers here — a stranger/robber, assassin or Mrs. Simko, the one who would have the easiest to get close access to the defendant would have been Mrs. Simko and the individual who would have been the least concerned about getting extremely close to the defendant would be Mrs. Simko,” the judge said.
FOR MORE U.S. CRIME NEWS, FOLLOW ME AT CRIME SCENE USA AND SUBSCRIBE.