Walkup Family Murders: Flagstaff’s 1937 Killings and Silence

The Walkup family murders took place on the night of July 22, 1937, in Flagstaff, Arizona, when Marie Walkup smothered her four young children at the family’s North Leroux Street home, pierced each of their hearts with an ice pick, and then drove to Schultz Pass Road and shot herself. The children were Daniel, 10; Rose, 9; John, 4; and Elizabeth, 18 months. A note was nailed to the front door, and a letter to her husband read: “Because of my lack of discipline, the children are happier to go this way. Only grief would come to them.”¹

The Night of July 22, 1937

Marie’s husband, JD Walkup, was away in Phoenix that night. She was alone with the four children in the house on North Leroux Street. She killed each child by smothering, then pierced their hearts with an ice pick.¹

After leaving the note on the door and the letter to JD, she drove out to Schultz Pass Road, near the old Flagstaff Country Club golf course. Her body was found in the backseat of her car. She had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.¹

Who the Walkups Were

JD Walkup was one of early Flagstaff’s prominent figures. By the summer of 1937 he chaired the Coconino County Board of Supervisors and was counted among the town’s most affluent residents. His wife, born Thelma Marie Green, went by Marie.² Very little of her life before the marriage survives in the record; historian Susan Johnson has written that the details were “lost to history.”

JD appeared regularly in the social columns of The Coconino Sun. Marie and the children were largely absent from them. Johnson described Marie as a woman who “never found her place” beside her husband in a world of social engagements, and characterized JD as an “overpowering personality” who may not have realized his wife needed help.¹ The family had money and standing. Marie, by Johnson’s account, grew more isolated as her husband’s public life grew.

What Pushed Marie to It

The letter to JD is the clearest surviving window into Marie’s thinking. Her insistence that the children were “happier to go this way” and that “only grief would come to them” has shaped every later reading of the case.

On the day of the murders, Marie had complained to her doctor of a stomach ailment and had told him she worried the children were “running wild.” Johnson has speculated that Marie may have believed she was pregnant with a fifth child, something that could have been overwhelming for a mother already struggling. No autopsy was performed on Marie, so the possibility of a pregnancy was never resolved.¹

Johnson called Marie “fragile” and said she felt like a “disappointment to her husband” as he climbed socially and politically in Flagstaff. Commentator Mary Sojourner framed the case in psychiatric terms, saying it requires grappling with “the incredible depths that severe psychotic depression can take someone to.”¹ In the clinical literature, a parent who kills their children and then themselves is classified under filicide-suicide, and research has found that mothers who commit filicide often show depression, psychosis, or suicidality. Some such killings are described as “altruistic” filicide, in which the parent genuinely believes death is in the child’s best interest.³ Marie’s note fits that pattern closely.

Why There Was No Investigation

Authorities treated the case as settled. JD had been confirmed in Phoenix. Marie had left written notes. No formal investigation was opened, no crime scene photographs were taken at the house or the car, and no autopsy was performed on Marie. One account summed up the official view: “This was not a whodunit. Everyone knew Marie Walkup was the culprit.” Officials, in Johnson’s phrase, “were likely keen to put the case to bed.”¹

Because there was no inquest, almost no official documentation of the killings exists. The contemporaneous record is essentially the newspapers. The story ran on the front page of The Coconino Sun on July 23, 1937, and was picked up by The Arizona Republic and papers nationally. Coverage was intense and brief. Within weeks it faded from print entirely.¹

Burial and the Town’s Silence

The four children were buried together in a double plot at Citizens Cemetery in Flagstaff. Marie was buried in the same plot but at the opposite end from the children, her head facing east, following a custom of the era.¹ Whether the separation was deliberate judgment or practical arrangement is unknown.

Flagstaff moved on. The Walkups had been a notable family, and Johnson’s research suggests the community treated the murders as “dirty laundry” best left unexamined. No relatives kept the children’s memory in public view, and for decades the grave went largely unvisited and the story largely untold. What became of JD after 1937 is itself one of the least documented parts of the case.²

How the Story Resurfaced

The case returned to public attention through Susan Johnson, a retired nurse who moved to Flagstaff in the late 1980s and became a local historian focused on the town’s cemeteries and historic buildings. She first encountered the Walkups while walking Citizens Cemetery and noticing the family’s double plot. That led her into years of work in microfiche, newspaper clippings, and the social pages of The Coconino Sun.¹

Her findings were published as Flagstaff’s Walkup Family Murders: A Shocking 1937 Tragedy, released on September 27, 2021, by Arcadia Publishing under its History Press imprint.⁴ The book draws on original research, court documents, and interviews with descendants, and the Arizona Daily Sun called it “a gripping, meticulously researched account of a tragedy that shaped early Flagstaff.”⁵ Johnson also cofounded Freaky Foot Tours, a Flagstaff walking tour that has run since 2015 and features the Walkup case in its adults-only “Mountain Town of Madness” route.⁶

Readers looking for primary material should be aware of how little exists. There are no known police reports, crime scene photographs, or autopsy records. The surviving sources are the 1937 newspaper accounts held in the Arizona Daily Sun archives and the gravestones at Citizens Cemetery. Marie’s two notes were recovered at the time, but their current archival location is not publicly documented.¹

1
Arizona Daily Sun. Walkup Family Murders Recounts Forgotten Story of Flagstaff Mother Who Murdered Her 4 Children
2
Google Books. Flagstaff’s Walkup Family Murders: A Shocking 1937 Tragedy
3
National Library of Medicine. Filicide: Mental Illness in Those Who Kill Their Children
4
Arcadia Publishing. Flagstaff’s Walkup Family Murders
5
Susan Johnson. Walkup Family Murders
6
Jack Central. Freaky Foot Tours Haunted Flagstaff