On the last Tuesday of August 1937 seven caskets stood in a row in the Perkins and Huebner funeral home in Denison, Iowa. Thirty pallbearers, friends and playmates of the family, carried them out, and five funeral coaches from Denison, Dunlap and Battle Creek took them half a mile south of town to the Lutheran cemetery, where they were lowered into a single grave seventeen and a half feet long and six feet wide. The Denison Review put the crowd standing in the heat at two thousand; another report said three thousand.
The dead were Elsie Nollen, thirty, and her children: Orvin, eleven; Wilbert, ten; Pauline, seven; Earl, six; Leona, four; and Viola, two. Elsie Joens had married Albert Nollen at Denison in March 1924, when she was seventeen, and the children came roughly two years apart, from Orvin in September 1925 to Viola in September 1935. By 1937 they were farming about ten miles west of Denison, near Kenwood.
On the Saturday night the couple quarreled. Albert told the county sheriff that she 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 went out for the night.
Before midnight she attached a washing-machine hose to the exhaust of the family car, backed up to the house, and slipped the other end through the bedroom window. She died with Viola in her arms. Orvin, the oldest, was found at her feet. The other four were caught as they came out of their upstairs bedrooms and through the parlor toward their mother's room.
She left a six-page letter in the mailbox. "I am doing this because I can see that this family is not going to be raised up right," she wrote, and she wrote that her husband drank to excess. The United Press story went out under the line that she had been frenzied by jealousy and grief over marital unhappiness; her own explanation was the one in the letter.
Accounts differ on the discovery. The United Press reported that Albert came home on the Sunday morning after an all-night spree and found them. The Denison Review said he and a neighbor, Jack Schile, found the bodies at about two in the morning. He was later seen sitting on the running board of the car, talking to the sheriff. Elsie's gravestone gives her death as August 29.
At the funeral the Rev. L. M. Grigsby asked the crowd to be slow to condemn this poor dead mother, and turned his anger on the liquor traffic, which he called more ferocious and destructive than bombing planes. Albert Nollen sat among the relatives, the only member of the household left alive. He died in 1977.
There was no prosecution, because the only person who could have been charged died with her children. This was a single act on a single night in one house, a family murder and suicide, not a series of killings.