Ethel Mae Franken was thirty-three and lived in Aplington, a town of nine hundred people about thirty miles from Waterloo, in Butler County, Iowa. Her husband, Darrell J Franken, was thirty-seven and worked at the John Deere plant in Waterloo. Their children were Troy, thirteen, Valerie, eleven, and Dustin, seven. Neighbours described them as hard-working people with nice children.
She had been under psychiatric care for several weeks and had been an inpatient, for several days at a time, in the psychiatric ward at Allen Memorial Hospital in Waterloo.
All five were shot with a small-calibre handgun, in the bedrooms of the house. One of the children was in bed in one room and the other two were on the floor of an adjoining room. She was lying in bed with the gun on the bed beside her. Her husband was within eight to ten feet of it.
The four who died with her were her husband, Darrell John Franken, thirty-seven, and their children Troy Vance, thirteen, Valerie May, eleven, and Dustin Jon, seven.
The bodies were found at about noon on Tuesday January 18, 1983. Two things happened that morning. The three children did not appear for classes at the elementary school across the street from their home. And Dalene Tjabring, a close friend, came to the house to drive Mrs Franken to Waterloo for an appointment with a psychiatrist. They had been at a Christian Women's Club dinner together the evening before, and it was there that she had asked for the lift. Nobody answered the door. She said afterwards that she just did not feel right. The police chief, Tom Lines, went in and found them.
The medical examiner, Dr Garry Teigland, thought the deaths could have happened on the Monday night, because all five were in night clothes and Darrell Franken had gone to work at the plant on the Monday. The plant said he had taken the Tuesday off.
On the question of who had done it, Teigland said the scene was compatible with her having shot her husband and the children, and 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.
This is a single act rather than a series, and it is in the archive under that classification.