SEDALIA, Missouri - The frozen chicken that Joy Rank had been thawing for dinner was still soaking the next morning in a sink full of water -- a meal abandoned when Rank watched a scene of terror unfold outside her kitchen window.

A tornado tore through the mobile home park she co-owns Sunday night, flipping over one of six occupied homes and killing a 39-year-old woman inside.

"There's not a lot of damage to the homes people live in," Rank said Monday, crying while sipping coffee in the dim candlelight of her kitchen. But "it really bothered me that a girl had to lose her life."

Early reports show more than 100 twisters touched down in a weekend wave that stretched across five states, from Oklahoma to Illinois. Nine of the ten dead were in Missouri.

"It's just amazing how devastating it is," said Mayor Tim Davlin of the Illinois capital of Springfield. "It looks like the pictures we saw a couple months ago after Katrina."

The violent weather was driven by a powerful low-pressure system over the Midwest that pulled warm air out of the Gulf of Mexico. The same phenomenon caused powerful winds that drove deadly wildfires across Texas over the weekend.

On Monday, a second line of storms raked the region, with rain, hail and fierce wind tearing up trees and homes from Kansas through Indiana.

The weekend storms left four people dead in Renick, a rural community about 30 miles north of Columbia, Missouri. The death toll also included a married couple killed when a twister hurled their pickup truck beneath a propane tank about 80 miles south of St. Louis.

Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt declared a state of emergency throughout Missouri, Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich declared a disaster in seven counties, and three southern Indiana counties were under states of emergency.

Classes at the University of Kansas in Lawrence were canceled Monday because of the danger of falling debris. University Chancellor Robert Hemenway put the damage at $6 million. Classes were to be held as scheduled Tuesday, though one building was to remained closed and access restricted to three others.