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For the Dreesmans, as for most farm families whose children scatter, the Christmas holidays meant a time of reunion. So it was that on Dec. 30, 1987, Agnes Dreesman, a superb cook and flower arranger who frequently contributed culinary and horticultural creations to church and garden-club benefits, readied their house for a celebration. Marilyn, widowed in 1984, had flown in from Honolulu with the three grandchildren. Robert too would be home for dinner.
When the family sat down to begin the midday meal, however, Robert was missing. Agnes left his plate warming in the kitchen. Two hours later, police found the family's bullet-riddled bodies still seated around the food-laden table. There was so much blood it had seeped into the basement.
Police and the Iowa division of criminal investigation quickly reconstructed what had happened. A few serving dishes had been passed, and the six family members were just beginning to eat when Robert appeared in the dining-room doorway, pointing a high-powered, semiautomatic rifle. Firing short bursts, he swung the rifle barrel right around the table. Nobody had time to move. They all died within 30 seconds. Then he stepped back into the hallway, picked up a shotgun he had left there, pushed the barrel up under his chin, and blew his brains out.
"This kind of tragedy crashes into our world without warning, a cruel uninvited guest," sermonized Father Hartz at the memorial service for Marilyn and her children. (A Lutheran service was held for John, Agnes and Robert.) "We can neither anticipate it before the fact, nor understand it after the fact."
At first the community was too stunned to react, clamming up protectively as the TV vans rolled into town. "It was as if we could hide this horror from the outside world as well as from ourselves," says Molly MacDonald, then editor of Algona's weekly newspaper, and Marilyn's lifelong friend.
Shock turned to grief, followed by the hollow ache of the town's terrible loss. For weeks, Algona's ministers counseled their congregations. Funeral director Mike Schaaf, who buried the Dreesmans, organized a grief-recovery seminar, bringing from Des Moines a psychologist specializing in traumatic losses. "If the killing had occurred in a crack-ridden city like New York or Detroit," says Schaaf, "we would have understood. Not in Algona."
The best therapy, though, was the kind Algonans gave one another over coffee at the Chrome, a 24-hour truck stop and favorite local hangout, where the 1979 tornado struck. "In public places like that, you could actually feel the town coming closer together," says MacDonald, who switched from editor to columnist so she could spend more time with her children. "We all suddenly realized how fragile life is, that we better get on with the things we have to do."
Still gnawing at the community's conscience are the many missed signals of the danger that was lurking in Robert. "The Dreesmans were very private people who didn't inflict their problems on friends," says Midge Andreasen, wife of a state-supreme-court justice and a close friend of Marilyn's. "Some of us knew about the black hole of hatred in Robert. We should have involved ourselves more with the family."