The Nation - News from Jan. 1, 1988

Robert Dreesman, a 40-year-old loner who apparently killed six relatives before turning the gun on himself, may have been enraged by the holiday attention showered on his sister and her three children, family friends said. “Here he was living with his parents, kind of being the center of attention all the time, and then Marilyn and the kids came home,” said state Sen. Berl Priebe, a close friend of the Dreesman family. John Dreesman, 79; his wife, Agnes, 74; Robert; the Dreesmans’ daughter, Marilyn Chuang, 48; and her three children--Jason, 12, Jennifer, 11, and Joshua, 8--were found shot to death at the Dreesman home at Algona, Iowa, on Wednesday. Authorities believe Robert Dreesman pulled the trigger. Authorities said they had some indication he had undergone counseling for mental problems, but they were not sure what the problems were. Friends of the family also said Robert Dreesman had recently quarreled with his father over who would control the family’s 1,000 acres of farm land in Kossuth County.