A gunman has killed seven people and wounded an eighth in an overnight house-to-house rampage in a small Missouri town before apparently taking his own life.
The victims were found in four homes in Tyrone, about 65km north of the Arkansas line.
The 36-year-old gunman was discovered in a neighbouring county, dead of what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Missouri Highway Patrol Sgt. Jeff Kinder said.
Kinder gave no information on a motive for the shootings or whether the gunman and the victims were connected. The names of the dead were being withheld until their relatives could be notified.
"This is a horrific tragedy, and our hearts go out to the victims of these senseless acts and their families," Governor Jay Nixon said.
He said crisis counselling will be made available to students and others.
All the victims were adults, Texas County Coroner Tom Whittaker told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Whittaker told the newspaper that before the gunman was discovered dead, authorities found his mother dead of apparent natural causes on a couch at her home.
She had been under a doctor's care and appeared to have been dead at least 24 hours, the coroner said.
Whittaker said investigators were still gathering evidence, but he speculated that the son "came home and found her deceased and then for whatever reason went on a rampage and started killing people".
The sheriff's office received a call about 10:15pm on Thursday from a young woman who said she had fled to a neighbour's home after hearing gunshots in her house, Kinder said. When officers arrived, they found two people dead.
Officers later found five more people dead and one wounded in three other homes. The wounded person was taken to a hospital.
Whittaker told the Post-Dispatch that the discovery of the bodies over a several-hour span was numbing, considering that the county averages perhaps one homicide a year.
"At first I thought, 'I have three victims,' then we keep finding more victims," he said. "It's kind of like, 'Oh, gosh, what have we got here?' It's spread over miles."
