Marie Walkup

Nearly everything the internet holds about Marie Walkup is a fragment: a memorial page, a genealogy index, a transcription of a wire story that ran two days after her death. She was thirty-two years old in the summer of 1937, the wife of the Coconino County board chairman, and the mother of Daniel, Rose Marie, John, and Elizabeth. She had married James D. Walkup after he came to Flagstaff following the First World War.

The 1937 coverage explained the tragedy the only way its era knew how: a mother made desperate, the papers said, by a chronic illness and by fear for her children. That explanation is a document of its time, and the book treats it as one. It does not retro-diagnose her across ninety years, and neither does this site. What the record supports is grief, illness as 1937 understood and reported it, and an act that no explanation has ever made explicable.

She died by suicide on the night the children died, near the old country club north of town, and she is buried with the children at Citizens Cemetery. Whatever else is said of her, she is part of Flagstaff’s story, and a town’s story is not served by forgetting its hardest chapter or by repeating it carelessly.