The Smith Family Massacre, Pensacola — 2015
“It happens once in a Blue Moon”…
The blue moon rises slow over the pines, hangs silver above the bays, and shines the same on fine houses and hard lives alike. And every so often—every two or three years—it shows itself twice in the same month. The old people call that a blue moon. They say…it don’t mean trouble… but it sure don’t mean peace, either.
On July 31, 2015, with another full moon waiting just over the horizon, death paid a quiet visit in a major way to a modest home on Deerfield Drive in the close-knit community of Klondike in Escambia County, Florida – outside of Pensacola.
The house contained three generations’ worth of memory—and three bodies.
The House That Went Silent
Voncile Smith, seventy-seven years old, was the matriarch. She had lived a long Panhandle life. Her priorities were church, family, routine… Her sons, Richard Thomas Smith, forty-nine, and John William Smith, forty-seven, lived there too—grown men, but still tethered to their mother’s home like so many families are in this part of Florida.
Richard worked for the Department of Homeland Security. He was steady. Reliable. The kind of man who showed up.
So when he didn’t show up for work that Friday morning, it set off alarms.
Coworkers called. Family called. And when someone finally went to the house, the front door didn’t fight back. It often doesn’t in these cases. It just opens. What it opened to was worse than most people will ever see…
The three were found in different rooms of the house. Each one had been beaten. Each one had suffered deep, deliberate cuts. Richard Smith had also been shot in the head. Some of the bodies were partially covered—blankets, clothing—like someone had tried, too late, to put things back the way they were…maybe a loved one.
There were no signs of forced entry.
Nothing was missing.
Which told every seasoned investigator the same thing it always does:
Whoever did this didn’t need to break in.
Whispers, Shadows, and the Moon
The timing stirred the pot.
Was it a ritual killing related to the blue moon? Had to consider that. Before long, the word witchcraft floated through the air.
Television trucks came. National talking heads speculated. Pagan and Wiccan groups stepped forward to say—plainly and correctly—that their beliefs had nothing to do with bloodshed.
And while the moon took the blame for a while, investigators kept their eyes on the ground, where the answers usually are.
Blood Tells the Truth
This was not quick work. It was intentional. Someone took their time.
The house was soaked in blood…and evidence. DNA everywhere. Multiple weapons. A mess that had to be carefully untangled strand by strand. Weeks turned to months. Months turned into a year.
And slowly, the focus tightened—not on the moon, not on ritual, not on strangers—
—but on family.
In October 2015, deputies arrested Donald Hartung Sr., fifty-eight years old.
He was Voncile Smith’s third son. Half-brother to Richard and John.
Blood had led them home.
A Family Matter
At first, Hartung denied everything. He cried. He protested. Investigators noted that his emotions didn’t quite match the moment—but they’d seen that before. Grief wears many masks, but so does guilt.
Then came the jailhouse testimony.
An inmate told prosecutors that Hartung talked. About planning. About money. About a will.
According to testimony, Hartung believed he had been cut out of his mother’s inheritance while his brothers stood to gain. The murders, prosecutors said, were not the work of madness or moonlight—but of calculation.
Old sins, old grudges, and a ledger kept in the heart.
Judgment
The trial came in early 2020.
The jury heard about the blood. The planning. The brutality. They heard about a mother and two sons who never saw it coming, because they trusted the man who walked through their door.
Prosecutors asked for death.
The jury gave three consecutive life sentences.
No parole. No release. No moonrise waiting at the end of the road.
Today, folks still call it the Blue Moon Murders, though there was only one night of killing—one house, one family, one long chain of decisions that ended in silence.
And maybe that’s fitting.
When the moon rises twice in one month, the old folks still pause and look up. Now they remember that house on Deerfield Drive—where family ties broke, blood spoke, and the truth came out… slow as a Panhandle dawn.
You see, it wasn’t about an uncommon blue moon, it was about something much more common – simple greed.
-Michael Earl Simmons
References
Victims of Triple Homicide Identified – Pensacola News Journal, August 4, 2015
Triple Murder May be Tied to Ritual – Pensacola News Journal, August 5, 2015
Man Charged in Ritualistic Murders – Pensacola News Journal, October 28, 2015
Brother Indicted in “Ritualistic Killings” – Pensacola News Journal, November 11, 2015
I was the responding supervisor , while hearing the story from the son (defendant) and walking in the house , as a former homicide investigator, things didn’t look or add up. If you ever what’s the show hoarding then you understand what we’re looking at. We were told that the family had a dog and saw evidence that one lived there, every now and then I got the whiff of the smell I have smelled for the last 19 years in my old assignment (inv) the young deputies believed it was the dog, seeing the families dinner still barely untouched from the night before, there cars still in the drive way, that feeling just wouldn’t go away. We entered a room of to the side of main house, piles of clothes , thru the lightest kid over that pile to look in a closet, he cleared it and the look he gave me, point to a wall, stated that’s strange, he shine his light, saw blood spatter, this part I can only explain as experience , right then I was able to see thru the clothes two bodies, one in a chair and one at our feet, inspecting proved both are males, knowing the female was missing we search finding her in a bedroom. I knew who commented the murders, and politely asked him to rest in a car, turned this case over,