Massacre on Prospect Hill: The True Crime of Francis Lloyd Russell

Although it wasn't yet summer, the temperature climbed into triple digits on June 3, 1925, and Lloyd Russell could not sleep that night. He lived with his mother and his brother's family in a modest three room bungalow on Progress Avenue in a neighborhood call Prospect Hill. Despite the bountiful implications of the place names, Lloyd worried about a mortgage coming due. Despite two jobs, he couldn't keep up, and he couldn't get that off his mind. Before daylight, the temperature still in the 80s, he got up from his sweat-soaked bed, loaded two pistols and shot and killed his mother, his brother, his sister-in-law and five of his brother's six children. Only 10-year-old Dorothy escaped, and if the shots didn't wake the neighborhood, her screaming in the terrible hot night did. One of those neighbors was local war hero and deputy sheriff Wesley Wulzen, who kept the man calm while more help arrived.