On the morning of Tuesday, January 18, 1983, three children did not turn up for class at the elementary school across the street from their home in Aplington, Iowa, a town of about nine hundred in Butler County, some thirty miles from Waterloo. At about the same time Dalene Tjabring, a close friend, came to the house to drive Ethel Mae Franken to Waterloo for an appointment with a psychiatrist. The two women had been at a Christian Women's Club dinner the evening before, and that was where Franken had asked for the ride. Nobody came to the door. Tjabring said afterward that she just did not feel right. The police chief, Tom Lines, went in at around noon.
All five members of the family were dead in the bedrooms, shot with a small-caliber gun. Ethel Mae Franken, thirty-three, lay in bed with the gun on the bed beside her. Her husband, Darrell John Franken, thirty-seven, was eight to ten feet from it. One of the children was in bed in one room and the other two were on the floor of the room next to it: Troy Vance, thirteen; Valerie May, eleven; and Dustin Jon, seven. Early reports from townspeople described a .22-caliber rifle; the medical examiner spoke of a small-caliber handgun.
She had been born Ethel Mae Hulsing on June 30, 1950. Darrell worked at the John Deere plant in Waterloo. Neighbors described the Frankens as hard-working people with nice children. For several weeks she had been under psychiatric care, including stays of several days at a time on the psychiatric ward at Allen Memorial Hospital in Waterloo, and she had only recently come home.
The medical examiner, Dr. Garry Teigland, thought the deaths could have happened on the Monday night, since all five were in their night clothes and Darrell had worked at the plant on Monday. The plant said he had taken Tuesday off. Gerald Shanahan, chief of the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, said agents were looking at the possibility that she had killed her husband and children and then shot herself, and Teigland said the scene was consistent with that: she was closest to the gun. There was no prosecution and no trial.
At the time it was the largest multiple killing in Iowa since six members of a family at Delmar died in a murder-suicide in December 1980, and it has since been listed among the worst mass killings in the state's history.