Pilcher asked the jury to find Hartman guilty of first-degree murder—murder committed with premeditation as well as intent. It may be that the prosecution itself had poked too many holes in Hartman’s story to make premeditation plausible. If Hartman had planned the whole thing, the jurors may have surmised, wouldn’t he have done a better job of tying up loose ends than that? They apparently believed, though, that Lawrence Hartman had killed his wife—killed her in a drunken rage, maybe, or killed her because he had started hitting her and couldn’t stop. After eight and a half hours of deliberation, Hartman was found guilty of second-degree murder. The judge sentenced him to twenty-five years in prison.
—
Because the case was appealed to the Iowa Supreme Court, Lawrence Hartman was able to remain free on a hundred-thousand-dollar bond. A couple of months after the trial was over, he and Katherine Sunderman were married. They continue to live in the apartment that Hartman visited the night his wife died. They are not seen around northern Grundy County. For the most part, what Hartman’s former neighbors know about him and his new wife is what they read in the papers. A recent item, reprinted in the Grundy County weekly from the Waterloo paper, reported that Katherine Sunderman Hartman had been picked up by the Iowa State Patrol for driving while intoxicated, and that Lawrence Hartman, who was in the car with her, was booked at the same time for public intoxication.
There are, of course, still a lot of different theories in Grundy County to account for how Lawrence Hartman was transformed from a pillar of the German farming community into a man who carried on with another woman and lost the respect of his sons and was eventually convicted of murdering his own wife. Some people think that Hartman simply fell into bad company—high-steppers who exposed an unworldly farmer to temptations he couldn’t resist. Some people think he just happened to be smitten—bewitched, maybe—by Katherine Sunderman. (“The defendant becomes obsessed with this other woman,” Pilcher said in his closing statement. “He becomes totally dominated by this woman, and she gains control of his every action. She caused substantial changes in the defendant, in his personality and in his character. His association with her ruins his relationship with his wife and his two sons, Rodney and Rollyn.”) In the Shamrock Café in Aplington not long ago, one man offered the possibility that Lawrence Hartman’s change had been almost biological. “I heard that some men have a change of life, just like women,” he said. “Their whole personality changes.” The man across the booth shook his head, held up his hand, and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Money,” he said. “There are very few people who can stand being rich.”
Rodney Hartman seems to share that interpretation, more or less. When asked what happened to his father, he says, “Inflation.” He means inflation in land values. “All of a sudden, people were coming up to him and saying, ‘Lawrence, you’re rich,’ ” Rodney said recently. Even now, there are people in Grundy County who don’t believe that Lawrence Hartman killed his wife, but his sons are not among them. They resent the fact that he is free—living with the woman they shouted at as a home-wrecker—even after a jury found him guilty of killing their mother. Rodney and Rollyn planted the Hartman acres in corn and beans this spring without the help of their father. Under an out-of-court settlement of the civil suit, the sons farm the Hartman land with the agreement that they pay their father a lump sum of more than two hundred thousand dollars, plus thirty thousand dollars a year for the next twenty years. Given the added burden, the younger Hartmans don’t sound completely confident of being able to make a go of it, but they are obviously committed to trying. For some time after his mother’s death, Rollyn couldn’t bring himself to enter the farmhouse, but now he has plans to move there with his wife and child. It is, after all, the Hartman home place.
I’ve Got Problems
* * *
Cairo, Nebraska
MARCH 1985
The first phone call made to Arthur Kirk once a Nebraska State Patrol SWAT team was in place around the Kirk farmhouse was from Jim Titsworth, a reporter for The Grand Island Independent. Titsworth had interviewed Kirk that afternoon in the driveway of Kirk’s farm, near Cairo—a fading little farm town in flat corn-and-wheat country fifteen miles northwest of Grand Island. At the time, Kirk seemed calm—he had just driven into the farmstead with a truckload of newly cut beans—but he was still angry about his confrontation earlier in the afternoon with some Hall County deputy sheriffs who had come out to serve legal papers for a Grand Island bank. The deputies had no right to come on his land, Kirk told Titsworth—he had what he called “a federal post” on it, excluding government officials as well as ordinary trespassers—and they had no business carrying out “the bankers’ dirty duties.” He didn’t deny that he had pointed a pistol at the head of one deputy; in fact, he pulled a long-barreled .41 Magnum out of his coveralls to show it to Titsworth. About an hour after the interview, Art Kirk called the offices of the Independent, but Titsworth was out. Kirk left his name and a short message: “I’ve got problems.”
He had serious problems. Jim Titsworth was returning the call that evening from a command post at the headquarters of Troop C, the Nebraska State Patrol’s Grand Island detachment. The Hall County Sheriff’s Department had obtained a warrant for Art Kirk’s arrest and had asked Troop C’s SWAT team for help in bringing him in. Titsworth was using the call from Troop C headquarters partly to nail down some facts for his story—he wanted to know how many acres Kirk had been farming before his operation began to shrink; he wanted to make certain that he had the correct first name of Kirk’s wife—but he had also been asked by the state police to do whatever he could to feel out Art Kirk’s state of mind. Kirk answered Titsworth’s questions—he had once farmed about two thousand acres; his wife’s correct first name was Deloris—but he seemed more interested in talking about the problems brought on by his confrontation with the deputies. He said that the deputies had brandished guns themselves. He said that a sheriff’s department car had followed him when he went out afterward to cut beans on some rental land several miles away. He said that an unmarked Cessna had been making passes over his house. He had seen roadblocks being put in place on country roads near his farmhouse. His wife had apparently been detained on her way to the farm from Grand Island. Kirk said that his phone had an odd sound in it; he was convinced that it had been tapped for some time. In answer to Titsworth’s questions about financial problems—the setbacks that had eventually brought the court papers from the bank—Kirk talked mainly in general terms. “You always thought, you know, that things would improve,” he said. “But they have gotten worse.” He was quite specific, though, on who was leading the forces against him.
“Mossad,” he said to Titsworth. “You ever heard of that?”
“What’s that?” Titsworth asked.
“Mossad.”
“No, sir, I’m not familiar—”
“M-o-s-s-a-d. Look that up. That’s what I’m fighting. That’s who I’m dealing with. There isn’t much hope. They are the most ruthless people. You think the NKVD and the Gestapo were ruthless—you look up the Mossad and see what they’ve been involved in.”
“I’ve never heard of that name,” Titsworth said.
“I know who I’m fighting.”
Titsworth tried a couple of times to suggest that Kirk’s problems with the sheriff could be settled without violence. “You know, what you ought to do is you ought to try and call somebody and get this thing over before—just to be sure no one gets hurt,” he said shortly after the phone conversation began.
Art Kirk laughed. “They’ll be somebody get hurt,” he said. “About all I got hopes of doing is taking as many of them with me as I can.”
—
“Another one sneaking down to the north, just like the last one,” Kirk said. He was on the phone with Jan Steeple, a deputy sheriff he happened to be acquainted with, and as he spoke he peered out the window toward movements in the farmyard. It was their second conversation of the
day. After the confrontation with the deputies, Steeple had phoned from the sheriff’s office and discussed the possibility of coming out to talk to Kirk about his problems. But Kirk, a man who was known to have a lot of guns, had insisted that Steeple leave his gun in the mailbox at the side of the road, and the visit had been ruled out as too dangerous. Talking to Steeple again, Kirk berated him for not showing up. He complained that his wife was being prevented from returning home. He complained that his telephone had been tapped. He complained about having had a motorcycle stolen from his barn some weeks before. Steeple tried again to persuade Kirk to come out of the house unarmed.
“I’m coming to no goddam place,” Kirk said. “If you want to talk to me, you know where I’m at, and I’ll be here.”
A state patrol sergeant who had some training in negotiating armed standoffs took over from Steeple. He spoke calmly, in a tone of generalized sympathy. (“I understand what you’re saying, Art, and you have some reasons to be upset.”) He avoided comment on the specifics of Kirk’s complaints. But Kirk seemed to grow angrier as the conversation went on. His voice became high-pitched. Some of his grievances were expressed in a sustained, obscene shout. Eventually, he talked about how the attack on his house might begin—tear gas, or a flamethrower that could burn him to a crisp, or a volley of gunfire.
“Art, nobody wants to shoot you,” the sergeant said.
“Well, then, damn it, come up here and talk to me,” Kirk said. “I don’t want to shoot you, either, but, damn you, you respect my rights.”
Kirk said that the deputies he had driven from his property were cowards. He railed against “filthy, lying members of the bar—outlaw bastards.” Speaking of a lawsuit he had filed without assistance from members of the bar, Kirk said, “I filed a suit against the goddam bank that’s been misusing me for years and years and years, unbeknowned to me, until I started reading the laws myself….I found out them dirty rotten son of a bitches have done everything despicable that they can think of to me. Everything you can think. It’s unimaginable. It’s covered by the U.S. Constitution and U.S. titles passed by Congress, the highest lawmaking body in the land, and they tell me that my suit is meritless. I’m going to tell you something: if the Constitution and the laws Congress passes are meritless, them son of a bitches are completely discredited.”
Sometimes Kirk seemed to ramble. He said that he was a son of Abraham whose birthright had been claimed by Lucifer and that the bankers had been Luciferized. He made an extended play on words comparing the service of court papers to a bull’s servicing a cow. Most of the time, though, he focused on the shoot-out that he seemed certain was about to take place. He said he was unafraid—a man who had never let anyone walk over him and wasn’t going to start now. “You ain’t going to walk over me until I’m cold,” he said. “And if you want to make me cold I’m not afraid of it. I’ve led a damn good life, and I’m not ashamed of nothing I ever done.” He said he had fired guns all his life (“Nobody’s going to take my guns. Is that kinda clear?”) and could even have brought down the Cessna. “I don’t intend to kill anybody,” he said. “But if you force me, if you shoot at me, damn you, there will be hell to pay. I intend to make the toll as great as I can. That’s the only thing you leave me now, and that’s what I’ll do.”
At other times, Art Kirk seemed to be asking why he could not simply be left alone. “Why all this goddam monkey business?” he asked. “Why don’t you let me try and make a living?”
“Art,” the sergeant said, “I didn’t have anything to do with what’s—”
“Goddam fuckin’ Jews!” Kirk shouted. “They destroyed everything I ever worked for! I’ve worked my ass off for forty-nine goddam years, and I’ve got nothing to show for it! By God, I ain’t putting up with their bullshit now. I’m tired, and I’ve had it, and I’m not the only goddam one—I’ll tell you that.”
“Yeah, but, Art—”
“Farmers fought the Revolutionary War and we’ll fight this son of a bitch. We were hoping to do it in court, but if you’re going to make it impossible, then, damn you, we’ll take you on your own terms.”
Deloris Kirk came on the phone for a while, from the command post. She kept reminding her husband that they had discussed what to do in such a situation, but she seemed to have trouble holding his attention. Steeple got back on the line, and again he pleaded for Kirk to come out unarmed.
“Well, hey, Jan,” Kirk said to Steeple. “If you’re just trying to divert me, I’m going out and clean the bushes out.”
“Art, you don’t want to do anything silly,” Steeple said.
By that time, Deloris Kirk was off the phone. From a snatch of conversation she had overheard on a police radio, she believed that the SWAT team was moving in. She insisted on talking to Chuck Fairbanks, the sheriff of Hall County, who was at an operational headquarters that the police had set up in a state road-repair depot in Cairo, and a phone connection was put through.
“Call all of those people away from my farmhouse,” Mrs. Kirk said.
“We can’t do that right now,” the sheriff replied.
“Why not?”
“Because he threatened deputy sheriffs, that’s why,” Fairbanks said. “The judge issued a warrant for his arrest.”
Sheriff Fairbanks and Mrs. Kirk seemed to be at a standoff.
Mrs. Kirk wouldn’t respond to the sheriff’s request that she telephone her husband and ask him to come out peacefully. The sheriff continued to say that he could not agree to allow her to go into the farmhouse. They were still talking when Art Kirk burst out of the back door of his house. He was wearing the green coveralls he normally wore around the farm. Strapped to his arms or jammed in his pockets, he had a gas mask and a hundred and sixty rounds of ammunition and a long-barreled .357 Magnum pistol. He was wearing a motorcycle helmet. He was carrying an automatic rifle.
“The trooper who was stationed on the southeast perimeter of the house in a shelter belt area advises that he saw the subject come out of the east door, carrying what appeared to be an AR-15 or M-16 by the sight on its barrel,” a report prepared by the county attorney a week later said. “This trooper yelled as loudly as he could in the direction of Kirk, ‘Freeze—police.’ He then saw a movement in his direction, saw muzzle flashes and heard automatic rifle fire. He returned the fire toward the muzzle flashes and lost sight of the subject.” Another SWAT team member had also fired at the flashes. For some minutes, there was silence. Then the SWAT team asked some deputies to shine headlights on the area where the shots had come from. Arthur Kirk lay on the ground near a wire dog kennel, not far from his back door. He had been hit by two bullets. “The cause of death,” an autopsy report said several weeks later, “is attributed to exsanguinating hemorrhage secondary to a gunshot wound of the anterior right shoulder and of the upper left thigh.” In other words, Art Kirk had bled to death.
—
Arthur Kirk was born and raised where he died—on the two hundred and forty acres near Cairo that was his family’s home place. His mother had been raised on the same farm. Her forebears were among the Germans who had arrived in the late nineteenth century in such numbers that they dominated Grand Island and the rich Platte Valley farmland nearby. Art Kirk’s parents were not prosperous. In the years after the Second World War, they were still farming with mules. For a while, Art and his younger brother slept in a brooder house so that there would be enough room for their parents and sisters in the tiny two-room farmhouse. Eventually, the Kirks managed to build an adequate farmhouse, with indoor plumbing. Partly with the money the Kirk children made detasseling corn, a small tractor was bought to replace the mules. By that time, Art was old enough to help adapt the mule-drawn equipment to the tractor. He liked working with machinery. He liked working with farm animals. He was interested in trying various combinations of chemicals and fertilizers to increase crop yields. Art Kirk might have simply remained on the home place to farm except that he and his father did not see eye to eye when it came to farmi
ng. The elder Kirk was apparently not interested in trying his son’s ideas on crop rotation or irrigation or equipment maintenance. In 1953, Art Kirk got a job with the gas company and moved into Grand Island.
In a small farm-state city the size of Grand Island, a large part of the population consists of people who grew up on the farm and moved into town—people whose connection to farming is made up of childhood memories reinforced every so often by a visit to the home place for a family meal or for a harvest that requires some extra hands. Art Kirk appeared to be one of those people. He and his wife, who had also grown up on a south-central Nebraska farm, began to raise a family in Grand Island. Kirk worked in the gas company’s meter-repair shop for about ten years and then switched to the service truck, calling on people who needed a pilot light adjusted or a gas dryer repaired. Altogether, he worked for the gas company for nearly twenty years, but nobody who knew him had any doubt that he still had his heart set on being a farmer.
In 1971, Kirk persuaded Dan Stauffer, who sells farm real estate in Grand Island, to rent him a hundred and sixty acres of farmland that Stauffer owns on the road between Grand Island and Cairo. A common way to rent farmland is for the owner to take a share of the crops as rent, and Stauffer was impressed by what Kirk managed to produce. “He had the crudest damn equipment you ever saw in your life,” Stauffer said later. “But the crops he raised were clean, and he had a good yield. He worked like mad all the time, and so did his wife.” A few years later, Kirk began acquiring his father’s farm on a land contract—an arrangement more or less like a home mortgage. When the elder Kirk died, in 1979, Art and Dee Kirk and their children moved from a house on Stauffer’s land to the Kirk home place. By then, Kirk was also renting twelve hundred acres from the federal government—land at the Cornhusker Army Ammunition Plant. A frugal, meticulous farmer with set ideas about how things had to be done, Kirk attacked farming mainly with a nearly limitless capacity for hard work. For relaxation, he hunted and fished. When he wasn’t in the fields, he was likely to be in the woods with a shotgun, and neighbors thought of him as someone who didn’t spend much time socializing. Aside from using guns for hunting, he collected guns—not an unusual pastime in rural Nebraska. He liked to own guns whose design he admired. He liked to reload his own shells. He liked to rebore guns. According to someone who shared his interest in firearms, Kirk’s greatest joy in life was “to take a gun and get it perfectly sighted so that the variance was less than half an inch in a five-shot group at two hundred yards.” As he settled down on his home place, where he had once plowed behind a mule, Art Kirk seemed to be fulfilling his dream, whatever the cost in toil. He was a farmer with a full operation—corn and soybeans and milo and some feeder cattle and hogs and horses—and he had nearly two thousand acres under cultivation.
Killings Page 19