Elsie Nollen was born on December 25, 1906 and was thirty, a farmer's wife at Denison in Crawford County, Iowa. She and her husband Albert had six children: Orvin, eleven; Wilbert, ten; Pauline, seven; Earl, six; Leona, four; and Viola, two.
On the Saturday night the couple quarrelled bitterly. Her husband later told the county sheriff that she had followed him out, got into the car and demanded to know where he was going, and that he told her it was none of her business. He then went out for the night.
She backed the family car up to a window of the farmhouse and ran a pipe from the exhaust into her bedroom.
She died with Viola, the youngest, in her arms. Orvin was at her feet. The other four were caught as they came out of their upstairs bedrooms and made their way through the parlour towards their mother's room.
Her husband came home on the Sunday morning after the quarrel and a night out, and found the bodies. He found her letter in the mailbox. He was later seen sitting on the running board of the car that had produced the gas, talking to the sheriff.
An earlier version of this entry said the contemporary press attributed the deaths to jealousy and marital unhappiness and that this was the whole of the explanation on the record. That is not so. She left a letter, and it is quoted in the reporting: she was doing it, she wrote, because she could see the family was not going to be raised up right. The jealousy was the wire service's gloss; the sentence above is hers.
Two matters of record. The date of the deaths is given as August 28 in the field table and reported on August 30 as having happened on the Sunday, which would be August 29. And the place is given as Dennison in the field table, Denison being the town in Crawford County, while one report carries a Kenwood dateline.
This is a single act, not a serial case, and it is in the archive under that classification.