"If only I could see him running in from school," Kathryn Schoch wrote, "just to hear his voice again, would be heavenly." Her son James, called Jimmy, had died on November 7, 1934, at seven. He was her only child. Six weeks later she killed six members of her family and herself.
She was a trained nurse, a daughter of Dennis Dempsey and Elizabeth Davis, born in May 1894, and she had married Donald Emmons Schoch twice and divorced him twice. She lived in Dunkirk, in western New York, with her sister, Ruth Dempsey Hughes, thirty-seven, who was separated from her husband, R. W. Hughes of Dormont, near Pittsburgh. Ruth had grieved for the boy too. "To see Ruth grieving so for our boy and my own heart breaking makes living impossible," Kathryn wrote. "I cannot live without Jimmy, nor can I leave Ruth with all this grief."
On the night of December 22 she shot Ruth in the back as she slept. Ruth was not found until the following evening. By then Schoch had taken a taxi the two hundred miles to Perrysville, north of Pittsburgh, where her brother Walter F. Dempsey lived in one half of a duplex at 103 Good Way. He was a welfare worker and a veteran of the First World War; the papers gave his age as forty-two and forty-three. He and his wife, Clara, had four sons: Robert, Walter junior, Thomas and David, the baby. Accounts disagree on the older boys' ages; the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette gave Robert as eleven and Thomas as six, a wire report as twelve and eight, with Walter junior ten and David fifteen months. The house was decorated with paper bells and tinsel garlands.
She arrived on the Saturday with her baggage full of toys, and in the baggage with them were a pistol and poison. She gave out the presents. Then, in the night, she went from bed to bed with the pistol. Walter and all four boys were shot dead. Clara was shot in the head and left for dead. Schoch went back to her brother's room and drank the poison.
Clara was found alive and taken to a hospital in Pittsburgh, where doctors gave her a chance of recovery. She survived. In 1938 she remarried, and she had a son with her second husband and raised three stepchildren. The Allegheny County chief of detectives, George W. Murren, was photographed examining the toys.
Schoch left four notes, which one wire report called vaguely phrased. In one she wrote that the struggle of the past four years had made death preferable to grief and the struggle for existence. In another she recalled wanting to take Jimmy to Florida months before, hoping the southern climate would mean fewer colds and stomach pains, and being afraid to go because she might not find work and could not pay what she owed in Dunkirk. Investigators took the notes as the explanation, and the wire copy of December 24 put it down to insanity caused by the death of her child. The papers called her grief-crazed. They gave her age as thirty-seven or thirty-eight, though her birth date made her forty.
A lawsuit followed that turned on a matter of seconds. Schoch had mailed a will from Perrysville a few hours before the killings, and a judge in Dunkirk refused it probate and declared it void. That made her next of kin her heirs. Her sister was already dead, which left her brother. If Walter Dempsey had outlived his sister even by moments, her estate passed to him and through his estate to Clara, the only survivor.
The house on Good Way was lived in by other families for decades afterward. It stood empty for a few years and was torn down in July 2011.