Tonya Lynn Hawks had moved into a rented single-storey white frame house at Phillipsburg, a village on a two-lane highway in Montgomery County, Ohio, in the late summer of 2005, with her boyfriend and her three sons. A neighbour said the couple both worked at a car plant in Dayton, about fifteen miles away. Her boyfriend had recently moved out.
On January 30, 2006 she bought a High Point .380 calibre semi-automatic pistol. Eight days later, on February 7, she shot her three sons with it and then shot herself. Chase Love was five, Chole Love was four, and Hunter Hawks was two.
All four died of chest wounds. Two of the boys had been shot twice and the other once. The two younger children were found in pyjamas in the bed in the master bedroom, and the sheriff said it looked as if they had been put to bed. The five-year-old was in an easy chair in the living room, also in pyjamas. Her own body was on the bathroom floor and the gun was on the sofa. The coroner said it was possible that the single gunshot wound had not been immediately fatal.
They lay there for four days. Neighbours called the Clay Township police on Saturday February 11 because there had been no activity at the house for four days, a dog was barking inside, the lights were off and the family car was still parked outside. While the police were on their way a woman looked through a window and saw one of the boys. A man who lived across the street, Michael Hines, broke the front door open with his shoulder. He found the first child in the chair in the living room, saw another body on the floor through the gap under a door, spotted the gun on the couch and left the house. The father of two of the children went in after him, went to his child in the chair, and came straight back out.
The house was secure and there was no sign of a struggle or of an intruder, and for the first day investigators did not know whether one of the four had killed the others or whether all four had been killed by someone else. The boyfriend was interviewed and nothing suspicious was found. The autopsies were carried out on the Sunday.
The day after the bodies were found, investigators found a page-long note in a child's backpack. It was not addressed to anyone in particular, but it gave instructions directing a family member to handle her personal business. The coroner's office said the note helped confirm that the deaths were a murder-suicide.
No motive was ever released.
Two details differ between the sources. Her age is given as thirty by the coroner's office and as thirty-one by the Associated Press. The middle child's name appears as Chole Love in the coroner's account and as Cole Love in the sheriff's identification of the children.
This is a single act, not a serial case, and it is in the archive under that classification.