The case, from the record

Flagstaff comes out of the Depression years with momentum. James D. Walkup chairs the Coconino County Board of Supervisors; he and Marie are raising four children in a comfortable home on North Leroux Street.

JD Walkup is away in Phoenix. At home, on a cool summer night, Marie Walkup takes the lives of the four children. She then drives north toward the old Flagstaff Country Club and dies by suicide.

Acting on a request Marie had made, the family doctor comes to the house and discovers the children. Hikers find Marie near the golf course. Notes are found, including instructions for the milkman; their contents belong to the record, not to this page.

The Arizona Republic carries the story on its front page, and papers across the country pick it up. The coroner’s jury finds that the children died at their mother’s hand and that Marie died by suicide.

Contemporary reporting attributed her state of mind to despondency over a chronic illness and fear for her children. That is what 1937 wrote down. No fuller answer has ever been established, and this site does not invent one.

Marie and the four children were buried in Citizens Cemetery in Flagstaff. The town largely stopped speaking of the case, and for decades the fullest account was a folded newspaper in an archive drawer.