Close to midnight on October 30, 1937, Ray and Gail McAninch came home to their house in Norwalk, Iowa, talking about the rabbit hunt they were planning. An oil lamp was burning on the living room table beside an open Bible and a note in their mother's handwriting. "Ray and Gail," it began. "You will find us dead this morning. Don't get excited." It told them which neighbor to go to, to get the doctor, to have Mr. Galloway, the undertaker, come for the bodies, and to bury them in the Webb cemetery. "I have stood all I can take and best to take the kids along," it said. "All that saves you boys is no more shells." It was signed "With love, Mama."
On the davenport, under a sheet, they found their brothers Max and Morris, shot in the head. In the small bedroom off the living room their mother, Alma, lay on the bed holding the shotgun to her own forehead, beside their two-year-old brother, Richard. Upstairs their sisters, Cora Belle and Geraldine, were dead in their bedroom. Ray and Gail ran to the next-door neighbor, Josephine Snyder, who called the town doctor, C. A. Willett. He called the police and the county coroner, C. H. Mitchell.
The newspapers of the day called her Mrs. G. R. McAnich, aged thirty-five, and did not print her first name. She was Alma May McAninch, the wife of Girness Roy McAninch. They had met when he was a farmer of twenty-four and she was nineteen, and their first son, Ray, was born soon after they married. Girness never kept a job long, and there were stretches when he did not work at all. The family was poor before the Depression and poorer after it. By the time they settled in Norwalk, a town of about 350 people south of Des Moines, in December 1936, they had seven children: Ray, Cora Belle, Geraldine, Gail, Morris, Max and Richard.
In January 1937, pregnant with an eighth child, Alma slipped on ice outside the house and lost the baby. Afterward she would sit and stare for hours without answering anyone, and when she did speak she often talked of killing herself, telling the children she would have done it already if not for them. That summer Girness was arrested for a petty crime and told the sheriff he was afraid she would hurt herself and possibly the children, and the sheriff came and took away the family shotgun. In October, eleven-year-old Gail borrowed a single-shot .410 from a friend so that he could go rabbit hunting. For the next few weeks Alma, who was a good shot, used it to shoot cans in the backyard.
On October 30 Girness was arrested again, in connection with the robbery of a coal mine in central Iowa. Alma seemed not to mind. She seemed happier than she had been in months. That morning Gail found she had used up all the shells, and he borrowed six more. Ray and Gail had been staying close to home to keep an eye on her, but she told them she was starting to feel better and that they should go out and enjoy the night before Halloween. They checked on her at about eight, and she was cheerful and putting the younger children to bed. Later Cora Belle went across the street in a Halloween mask to play a trick on a neighbor, and at eleven another neighbor, Mrs. Black, brought six-year-old Morris home. Everything seemed fine.
She had apparently waited until the children were asleep. Each was killed with a single shot to the head at close range, and because the gun was a single-shot .410 she had to break it open and reload it after every one. None of the children seemed to have woken, and none of the neighbors heard any of the six shots. Six shells had been borrowed, and six were fired. The wire reports that went out on November 1 gave ill health and worry as the explanation.
Girness was released to his brother's custody the next morning to arrange the funerals, and broke down when he saw his sons. Nearly five hundred people crowded into and around the Spring Hill Methodist Church at Spring Hill, where Alma had grown up, and thirty-two pallbearers carried the six coffins to a single grave seven feet by twenty. Afterward Girness went back to jail. He was indicted, pleaded guilty in November to breaking and entering in the coal mine theft, and was sentenced to six months. Ray and Gail went to live with an aunt. Ray later served in the Navy in World War II and worked as an electrician in Des Moines; Gail served in the Army, came home to the Des Moines area and raised a family of his own. He died in 2006.