A 74-year-old Tyrone, Mo., woman died last week from cancer, a Missouri coroner said Monday.
Texas County coroner Tom Whittaker said Alice L. Aldridge had been dead for at least 24 hours before her son's shooting rampage that took eight other lives, but the events may be tied.
"It's purely speculation," Whittaker said. "We'll probably never know what happened."
Joseph Jesse Aldridge, 36, took a .45-caliber handgun Thursday night and went from house to house, killing seven people -- including two of his cousins and their wives -- in the small community of Tyrone, about 60 miles north of the Arkansas line.
Joseph Aldridge was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound before dawn Friday in adjoining Shannon County.
According to the Missouri Highway Patrol, the victims were Garold Dee Aldridge, 52; his wife, Julie Ann Aldridge, 47; Harold Wayne Aldridge, 50; his wife, Janell Arlisa Aldridge, 48; Carey Dean Shriver, 46; his wife, Valirea Love Shriver, 44; and Darrell Dean Shriver, 68, Carey Shriver's father.
A 67-year-old woman survived the shooting and is recovering, according to a news release from James Sigman, sheriff of Texas County, Mo.
All of the victims' residences are within a 3-mile radius in Tyrone, an unincorporated community of about 50 residents.
Whittaker performed an autopsy Saturday on Alice Aldridge. He said there was cancer throughout her body, including her abdomen and her brain. Whittaker said she'd had a mastectomy at some point to treat breast cancer.
"The best we could determined is it had initiated in the lung and spread throughout," Whittaker said.
Whittaker said Alice Aldridge's cancer apparently caused a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in the lungs, which was the specific cause of her death last week.
"There was no indication of any trauma or suffocation," Whittaker said of the autopsy. "It showed she was full of cancer."
Whittaker, who has been coroner since 1997, said he never expected to see a mass murder in Texas County.
"The gentleman that I took over from had been coroner for 44 years," Whittaker said. "He said this isn't going to be any big deal. We hardly have anything going on at all."
Whittaker said the number of cases he has handled has gone from 54 in 1997 to 211 last year.
Metro on 03/03/2015