Lowell Lee Andrews murders his family

Lowell Lee Andrews murders his parents and sister during Thanksgiving week in 1958, then stages a burglary and constructs an alibi. The killings turn the image of a quiet, gifted student into something profoundly unstable: a young man who had appeared gentle to those around him carries out a deliberate family murder and responds with striking composure, as if the crime were another problem to manage.

The Student and the Concealed Plan

Two years before the killings, Lowell Lee Andrews had been an eighteen-year-old sophomore at the University of Kansas, an honors student majoring in biology. Nearly three hundred pounds, bespectacled and withdrawn, he was regarded by acquaintances in Wolcott, Kansas, and at the university as gentle and sweet-natured. The contrast between that reputation and the violence he later planned is central to the account: his family, including his parents and his slightly older sister, Jennie Marie, had no reason to recognize the second self he kept concealed.

During the summer and autumn of 1958, Andrews secretly imagined himself as a master criminal, not as the shy, bookish student others thought they knew. He wanted gangster-style silk shirts, scarlet sports cars, and a life that would make him seem unlike an overweight, bespectacled schoolboy. The narrative presents inheritance as the ostensible motive: his father was a prosperous farmer who owned land valued at about two hundred thousand dollars, although he did not have much money in the bank. Andrews did not consciously dislike his family, but killing them seemed to him the quickest way to enact the fantasies he had built around wealth and a criminal identity.

His first plan was to poison his family with arsenic, put the victims in their beds, and burn the house, hoping investigators would attribute the deaths to an accident. He worried that an autopsy might reveal arsenic and that the purchase could be traced to him. Near the end of summer he devised a different scheme, then spent three months refining it. By the time he came home for Thanksgiving, the plan was ready.

The Killings

On November 28, during Thanksgiving week, Andrews and Jennie Marie were home with their parents. Around seven in the evening, his sister and parents were sitting in the parlor watching television while Andrews remained in his bedroom reading the final chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. After finishing, he shaved, changed into his best suit, and loaded a semi-automatic .22-caliber rifle and a Ruger .22-caliber revolver. He carried the rifle down the hall, entered the darkened parlor, switched on a light, and shot his sister and parents. His mother survived the initial shots, and he shot her again; his father was still alive as well, and Andrews used the revolver before reloading it. All three members of his family were killed.

The measured sequence matters to the account. Andrews had spent months considering how to commit the murders and avoid detection; on the night itself, he moved from reading and dressing to loading two firearms and shooting his family. His conduct is not presented as an impulsive quarrel or a spontaneous response to family conflict. The evidence instead sets the act against his carefully developed criminal fantasy and the plan he had revised to address the risks he anticipated.

The Staged Robbery and Alibi

After the killings, Andrews raised a window, removed its screen, and searched dresser drawers, scattering their contents to make the house appear to have been ransacked by thieves. He then drove his father's car toward Lawrence, where the University of Kansas was located. On the way, he stopped on a bridge over the Kansas River and disposed of the rifle and revolver by dismantling them and dropping their parts into the water.

The journey also served as an alibi. At the campus house where he roomed, Andrews told the landlady that he had come to collect his typewriter and that bad weather had made the trip from Wolcott take two hours. He then went to a movie theater. There, unusually for someone described as withdrawn, he chatted with an usher and a candy vendor. When the movie ended at eleven, he drove back to Wolcott.

At home, the family dog was waiting on the porch, hungry. Andrews entered the house, stepped across his father's body, prepared the dog warm milk and mush, and called the sheriff's office to report what he represented as a robbery. Four officers responded. They found the lights on and Andrews sitting on the porch, petting the dog; when asked what had happened, he casually indicated the house. Asked about funeral arrangements, he expressed indifference to what was done with his family. These gestures and responses sharpen the contrast between the ordinary care shown to the dog and the detachment with which he treated the deaths inside the house.

Suspicion and Narrative Significance

Senior detectives questioned Andrews soon afterward. They were convinced he was lying, but he maintained that he had driven to Lawrence for his typewriter, gone to a movie, and returned after midnight to discover the house ransacked and his family dead. At this point in the account, the false story remains intact: the detectives' suspicion is clear, but Andrews has not yet changed his version of events.

The episode draws force from the discrepancy between reputation and action. The gentle honors student, the family member who outwardly seemed to belong to a familiar domestic world, becomes the planner, killer, and architect of a fabricated burglary. His attempts to control the evidence extend from the staged disorder in the house to the discarded weapons, the campus visit, and the report to the sheriff. Yet the account also records details that make the performance difficult to reconcile with innocence: the casual manner of his report, his care for the dog while crossing the house, and his indifference to what became of his family. The murders are therefore presented not only as a sudden rupture in a household but as the revelation of a hidden identity whose imagined criminal life had preceded the act.