This fall I became reacquainted with the most famous murder case in local history, the 1983 murders of two Ruthton bankers.

I reread the book Final Harvest by Andrew Malcolm. I wanted to read it again after 40 years because of how I remember hearing about events as they transpired.

Final Harvest goes into considerable detail about farmer Jim Jenkins and his son, Steve. Malcolm also discusses the lives of the victims, describes what happened at the former Jenkins farm site, and offers a step by step account of the 1984 murder trial at the Lincoln County Courthouse in Ivanhoe.

At the time of the murders in the fall of 1983 I was a sophomore at Marshall High School. It was the talk of the school and the town for a long time. It surprised everyone.

We were in the midst of a farm crisis that led to issues between many farmers and bankers. Still we didn’t think it would lead to murder. It wasn’t supposed to happen on a county road between Ruthton and Tyler.

The big question was whether it was the father or the son who did the shooting. The prosecution and defense presented different versions at the trial. The jury in returning a guilty verdict felt evidence pointed to Steven as the one who fired the shots.

He had friends in the RTR area who defended him in conversations. They said he wouldn’t have simply gunned down two men, that there must have been an argument. If he would have been a classmate of mine, I’m sure I would have said the same thing.

Much of the jury’s decision came down to the fact that Steven was 18, legally an adult. When someone reaches that age, they’re supposed to have enough good sense not to commit a serious crime, even if a father encouraged it.

It also came down to the legal standard that premeditation in a murder doesn’t have to exist for a substantial amount of time. The sequence of events at the farm site were considered enough to prove premeditation.

The only way Steven could have been found not guilty of first degree murder, other than claiming that Jim who later committed suicide killed the bankers, would have been to claim that Steven was mentally unstable and controlled by Jim. I’m not a lawyer, but it seems like it would have been hard to prove.

Final Harvest presents the Jenkins case under a backdrop of the early 1980s farm crisis. Malcolm, while describing Jim as a small marginal farmer, points to the idea that hard work wasn’t enough.

He was widely praised for Final Harvest, which made the national best seller list. At least several critics, including Southwest Minnesota State University history professor Joe Amato, questioned whether one incident truly reflected the farm crisis. There were no murders of bankers elsewhere.

I’ll have to reread Amato’s book When Father and Son Conspire sometime soon. This fall after finishing Final Harvest I opted for Treasure Island, the 19th century Robert Louis Stevenson adventure novel that I’d also read a teenager. I’d had enough true crime for the time being.

We’re fortunate, however, that we had journalists like Malcolm and scholars like Amato who wrote about the Jenkins case and gave everyone detailed interpretations that are still widely remembered.

That’s not the case with every historic crime. Often when a trial was over and someone went to prison or was found not guilty everyone stopped talking about it.

Over the years people forgot about the crimes. Eventually only relatives knew about it. In recent years some writers, including at least two from the region, have brought historic crimes back to life.

Marty Seifert of Marshall wrote the book Sundown at Sunrise about an ax murder in Redwood County. Patricia Lubeck of Montevideo has written more than a half dozen books about historic crimes in southwest Minnesota.

It’s important that violence, even that which took place many years ago, is not swept under the rug. People should know that it’s been a problem in society, one that in some ways has recently gotten worse.

It seems like we have more mass shootings. We have more individuals that simply want to kill even if the victims are people they have no grudge against. It’s been a result of interaction with like minded people on social media, and also a result of the proliferation of assault weapons.

We need to encourage kids to treat others with kindness. We should encourage them to cooperate, and to resolve conflicts using positive methods. That’s the only way we’ll be able to prevent future violence.

We hear a great deal about violent incidents. We don’t know when a parent or a teacher or another interested party helped to turn someone into a peaceful person. It’s happened. We should encourage it to happen frequently.

— Jim Muchlinski is a longtime reporter and contributor to the Marshall Independent