1980s agricultural crisis: Desperate farmer, his son murders lenders | Local
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Editor’s note: This is the second part of a series devoted to the agricultural crisis of the 1980s.
MARSHALL, Minnesota | Lincoln County, Minnesota was home to some of the weirdest early outcrops of the farm credit crunch as it unfolded in the Upper Midwest in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Joseph Amato, professor of history emeritus and former dean of rural and area studies at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, has written about it in two books – one on a famous Jerusalem artichoke Ponzi scheme and the other on the murder of two agricultural moneylenders in Ruthton. , Minn.
A failed farmer and his son lured two farm bankers on September 29, 1983, a few miles north of Ruthton, Minnesota, claiming to be potential buyers. The son shot them down.
The case received extensive coverage by “locals” – the Worthington Globe and the Marshall County Independent newspapers – as well as “outside” publications including the New York Times, Amato said.
It was a shocking story: Former failed farmer James Jenkins, 46, and his son Steven, 18, lured Rudolph “Rudy” Blythe, president and owner of the Buffalo Ridge State Bank of Ruthton, and his agent for credit, Deems “Toby” Thulin, on a farm Jenkins had once lived in.
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The Jenkins duo fled to Paducah, Texas, near Lubbock, where James Jenkins later died from a shot from his own shotgun.
Steven surrendered.
On October 28, 1983, a grand jury charged Steven with murdering the bankers. He never spoke up but was convicted of hitting bankers, shooting one from a distance and chasing them down.
Amato said the “biggest outdoor press” that rarely shows up in rural America is often wrong in history. There were three non-fiction books, including one by a New York Times writer. People magazine published a story.
Jim Langman, a farmer from Starbuck, Minnesota and local president of AAM, said, “A farmer is a human and a human is an animal; if you hit it, push it and take everything away from it, it will roll over and bite.
Amato wrote a detailed and more nuanced account in his book “When Father and Son Conspire: A Minnesota Farm Murder”, published in 1988.
Amato wrote that James was the only child of poor farmers. He had left school after grade 10, married his wife Darlene and had a daughter and a son.
After several unsuccessful ventures, Darlene left James in August 1980. She filed for divorce, alleging verbal abuse. She remarried later.
James complained to others that maybe his wife was dating an employer and even bank chairman Rudy Blythe.
James Jenkins left the farm and illegally sold cattle that were collateral for a Buffalo Ridge Bank loan.
He filed for bankruptcy, owing $ 25,000. He started another dairy farm, but the barn burned down. He started trucking in Ohio, then hitchhiked to Texas for labor and maintenance work in a school district. Steven left school in grade 11 and joined his father in Texas.
The loner and his son returned to Minnesota, slept on air mattresses and were denied loans and credits by cattle sellers, citing bad credit references from the Buffalo Ridge Bank.
James had purchased an M-1 rifle for his son, Steven, who “dressed like he was Army or Marine AWOL,” as Amato puts it. One of James’s colleagues, a Vietnam veteran, taught the boy how to use it.
Steven’s trial was a rarely seen judicial theater in the region.
Defense attorney Allan “Swen” Anderson, a controversial, loud and secular litigator from Granite Falls, took Steven’s case for free. Swen Anderson tried to make money for a psychological exam of Steven by selling the story to a New York screenwriter.
In a bizarre twist, Anderson kept Steven in his own home during the trial, and in 1984 effectively adopted the young man, which allowed the accused to change his last name to Anderson. Steven’s mother (and her new husband) funded Steven’s $ 150,000 bond.
Steven confessed to two charges and claimed he went with his father to “steal and scare” Blythe.
The jury found Steven guilty of the premeditated first degree murder of Blythe and the intentional second degree murder of Thulin. The judge sentenced him to life in prison for the murder of Blythe and 100 months for the murder of Thulin.
In late 1985, Anderson appealed the case to the Minnesota Supreme Court, but was dismissed. On February 2, 1986, Anderson died of a heart attack. In May 1986, the United States Supreme Court overturned Steven’s conviction.
In 2000, Steven Anderson confessed to the murders in a TV documentary, saying he was convinced Blythe was the source of the family’s problems.
Steven (Jenkins) Anderson, now 34, was paroled in May 2015. It will remain under the surveillance of Hennepin County authorities for life.
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