Killings

by Calvin Trillin

  Around that time, the notion that dreams had come true was common among American farmers. There had been a number of good crop years in a row. More important, farmland seemed destined to grow in value indefinitely. There was a lot of talk about how America would be feeding the world for the foreseeable future—talk meaning that farmers might be selling ever larger harvests at steadily increasing prices. The experts said that effective, ambitious farmers should expand, in order to spread out the cost of expensive farm equipment and to acquire land before its price got even higher. The farmland of America was a finite commodity that could never be replaced, it was said, and you couldn’t go wrong owning it. Credit was easy. Even if a loan on land did not, as bankers say, “pencil out”—that is, even if the interest on the purchase price and the other costs of production seemed to be greater than the price of the crops the land could be expected to produce—the bank often went along. The loan was secure, after all, because the farmer’s holdings had become worth so much money. Turning down the loan would just mean that the farmer would take his business to the bank down the street. The steady increase in land values, a Nebraska banker has said, “seemed to prove the pencil wrong.” But the pencil was right all along.

  Grain prices didn’t go up, but interest rates did—so at one point farmers were paying interest as high as twenty-two percent on their loans. The value of farmland began to decline even faster than it had increased. In four years, the value of Nebraska farmland dropped by a third. Farmers who had been millionaires on paper a few years before began having trouble keeping up with their interest payments. As some farm-oriented banks got into financial difficulty, bank examiners started insisting that loans show some real prospect of being repaid by cash flow rather than simply secured by net worth. A lot of farmers—particularly farmers who had expanded their holdings during the boom—had to declare bankruptcy.

  The experts said that some farmers—especially those sometimes called the Young Tigers, who bought up farmland almost as fast as the previous purchase could be appraised as collateral—had simply overextended themselves. The experts said that some farmers had been shown to be poor managers. That’s not the way farmers saw it. Farmers, of course, are accustomed to being buffeted by elements beyond their control—the weather, for instance, or some flip-flop in world grain prices. This time, though, there was something particularly maddening about the combination of a boom—a boom celebrated by farm experts and bankers and government agricultural specialists as proof that expansion was the wave of the future—and a bust that cost some supposedly successful farmers the land that their more modest forebears had managed to hang on to for generations. This time, also, it was more intense. By some estimates, the farm foreclosures of the mid-eighties in the Midwest will be recorded as the greatest dislocation of Americans since the Depression. Some farmers blamed the bankers. In Minnesota, a farmer and his son shot and killed two bankers they had lured to their farm. Some farmers blamed the government or the grain embargo imposed in 1980, and organized tractor caravans to protest to the authorities. A lot of farmers didn’t know whom to blame. They carried around a bitter, unfocused anger that sometimes erupted into blockades at farm sales or shoving matches at courthouses. It became common for someone serving papers on a farmer to do so with a weapon handy.

  In the tumult—the foreclosures, the public meetings, the demonstrations—Midwestern farmers have been exposed to the message of some organizations that seem quite certain about whom to blame for the plight of American agriculture, or for just about any other problem in American society. The organization that has received the most public attention is the Posse Comitatus, a loosely knit crowd of prairie vigilantes who spend a lot of time stockpiling food and undergoing paramilitary training for the day when they will have to protect themselves against urban hordes desperate for the food supply. According to Posse doctrine, the Federal Reserve System and the income tax are both illegal, and there is no legitimate law-enforcement authority beyond the sheriff and the local posse that may be formed among the citizenry, with or without the sheriff’s permission. Adherents sometimes shoot at law-enforcement officials they don’t consider legitimate; the Posse owes part of its notoriety to an incident in February of 1983 in which one of its members, a North Dakota farmer named Gordon Kahl, shot and killed two federal marshals who were trying to arrest him for a parole violation.

  The other right-wing fringe organizations preaching to American farmers vary from the Posse Comitatus and from one another in the details of precisely how the conspiracy works. Even people who adhere to the same theories vary in the intensity of their adherence—so some people may simply attack the Federal Reserve System as illegitimate, while others refuse to transact commerce except by silver or barter. Still, there is enough overlapping in theory and in membership to form a loose body of fringe-right beliefs. Lawyers are generally seen as the enemy, and court decisions are therefore dismissed as predictably unfair. There is a lot of talk about the Constitution. There is a strong element of anti-Semitism, some of it leaning on the information in hate tracts so old that the place of business of some international Jewish bankers is given as Berlin or Hamburg. There’s a tendency to sympathize with the teachings of “identity churches”—churches teaching that Anglo-Saxons are the true descendants of Abraham and that Jews are the people of the Devil. There is often a belief that the loans that banks have made to farmers are illegal and can be dissolved by one sort or another of do-it-yourself legal action—do-it-yourself legal action being the only sort of legal action available to people who believe that lawyers are among the conspirators lined up against them. There is a strong belief that a farmer has the right to keep anybody, and particularly representatives of the government, off his land—by force, if necessary. Some of the no-trespassing signs distributed by the fringe right begin “LEGAL NOTICE—To Federal Officers of the IRS, HEW, HUD, Environmental Health and other Unconstitutional agencies; and to all local members of planning & zoning boards. NO TRESPASSING.” That sort of warning is sometimes referred to among the fringe right as a “federal post.”

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  Art Kirk was not one of those farmers who overextended themselves through land purchases. The only land he actually owned was the home place; he had inherited a one-third interest in it and was buying the rest gradually, with payments to his brother and a sister. Still, he borrowed a lot of money from the bank. There was once a time when farmers borrowed operating money in the spring and paid off the loan after the fall harvest, but that time is long gone. Farmers now tend to have what amount to semipermanent bank loans. A farmer borrows money for planting expenses in the spring. He borrows money for a combine and other equipment. He may come in throughout the year to sign small notes—four thousand dollars for a used pickup, say, or twenty-five hundred dollars for sharpening blades and “general farm expenses”—as if he had a sort of drawing account. When he sells his crops, which are normally part of the collateral for his loan, he brings in the money, it’s applied to paying off the interest and reducing the principal, the loan is refinanced, and the process starts all over again. In the early eighties, Kirk’s loans began to show what bankers call deterioration; he wasn’t producing enough income to take care of all the interest, so each year his principal got larger and the interest on it even harder to pay off. By the spring of 1984, his debt at Norwest Bank of Grand Island was approaching three hundred thousand dollars.

  How did Art Kirk get that far behind? There had been some bad crop years, of course. He was paying high interest on operating loans. Although Kirk was the sort of farmer who would haggle over the price of a spare part and adapt scrounged secondhand machinery to his needs, there are some who say that he never really mastered the business aspects of modern farming—that he was trying to make up with labor in the field what he lacked in finesse with the calculator. According to someone who knew him well, “He didn’t understand bankers or lawyers. He thought they were all bad and greedy. He thought they were out to get his
money. A farmer needs a banker. He needs a lawyer. He needs a good accountant.” There are some who say that Kirk was distracted by family problems. The Kirks were having so much difficulty trying to control their teenage son that at one point Dee Kirk tried to persuade the Hall County Sheriff’s Department to put the boy in jail. Some years before, one of Art Kirk’s sisters had committed suicide by shooting herself in the head with a .357 Magnum; in 1982, one of the Kirks’ daughters—a married daughter who had been having emotional difficulties—came to her parents’ home, picked up Art Kirk’s .357 Magnum, held it to her head, and killed herself.

  As Kirk’s loan deteriorated, so did his patience. “He became more and more bitter with the establishment,” someone who saw him during that period has said. “I think he was beginning to realize that he was getting in deeper and deeper and there was no way to get out.” Testifying in an investigation of Kirk’s death, Richard Falldorf, who handled Kirk’s loan at Norwest Bank, put it this way: “It was just difficult to get Art to answer rational-type questions with rational-type answers.” In February of 1984, the lease came up on the twelve hundred acres of ordnance-plant land that Kirk had been farming—the federal government leases out the land for three or five years through sealed bids—and he had to decide whether to bid on a new lease. The bank would agree to back him only on a rental figure that penciled out. Kirk made the bid, but he didn’t get the land, so he was faced with the task of making a dent in his enormous loan with the income on the home place and the hundred and sixty acres he was renting from Stauffer. Kirk had always been known as a man with a quick temper, and his temper had grown worse. It was said that he usually kept a gun in his coveralls, even while he was plowing. It was said that when some local kids got too close to his land one day he fired shots over their heads.

  In May of 1984, Kirk drove in to Grand Island to attend a meeting of an organization called Nebraskans for Constitutional Government, which has been described by its Grand Island representative, a man named Robert Mettenbrink, Sr., as a group that meets to study the Constitution. At times, the lesson has been led by a speaker from the Posse Comitatus. That night in May, the visiting speaker was Rick Elliott, of Fort Lupton, Colorado, the founder of an organization called the National Agricultural Press Association, or NAPA. Although Elliott had talked from time to time about a plan for NAPA to provide farm reports, the only apparent connection NAPA had with the press was that anyone who joined got a NAPA press sticker for his pickup truck and that Elliott was putting out a newspaper called the Primrose & Cattlemen’s Gazette—an odd and erratically published mélange of conventional ranch news (HEREFORD BREED DEMONSTRATE STRENGTH AND QUALITY AT COLORADO STATE FAIR) and some of Elliott’s other interests (HOW THE JEWISH QUESTION TOUCHES THE FARM). Elliott had been traveling around the Midwest—particularly southern Minnesota and Iowa—telling farmers that there was a legal and nonviolent way to solve their financial problems. He said that all loans made since 1974 were illegal under federal truth-in-lending legislation. He said that by joining NAPA and following its guidance, farmers could, without hiring lawyers, file lawsuits that would result in their bank loans’ being declared null and void. He said that NAPA could find low-interest loans for farmers. He said all this in vigorous, dramatic speeches that were laced with patriotic references and historical anecdotes and citations of federal codes. The Kirks joined NAPA, and when Robert Mettenbrink opened a Nebraska chapter in Grand Island, Deloris Kirk worked for a while in its office. According to Mrs. Kirk, her husband had returned home from that first meeting and said, “Mama, I’m sure at last we found the answer to our troubles.”

  That view would not have been shared by Norwest Bank. In June, the bank found out that Kirk had sold seventy thousand dollars’ worth of stored corn and thirty thousand dollars’ worth of cattle—property that, by the terms of his note, belonged partly to Norwest—but hadn’t brought in the receipts. The bankers had a talk with Kirk, but he still didn’t produce any money. What he did instead was to file a case in the federal district court in Lincoln asking that the Norwest loan be declared null and that the bank be ordered to pay him several million dollars in damages for a number of reasons, among them that the bank’s conduct “has led to Plaintiff being accused of stealing his own property which Plaintiffs have proof of ownership by bills of sale and checks which is surely the most wanton form of conduct on the part of Defendants that would make a skunk belch from odor while leaving Plaintiff with horrendous damages.” Kirk didn’t use a lawyer; Robert Mettenbrink notarized the papers.

  The chief judge of the federal district court in Nebraska, Warren K. Urbom, was not impressed by Kirk’s legal reasoning. Except for one claim that didn’t include enough information to permit a judgment, the case was dismissed without a hearing in October. Of the citations of law that Kirk had made, Judge Urbom wrote, “Many of these provisions have absolutely nothing to do with the facts alleged.” In fact, the homemade cases inspired by NAPA had been dismissed wholesale by federal judges in the Midwest, and at least one judge had spoken of the possibility of assessing future plaintiffs court costs for taking up the court’s time with frivolous litigation. “These cases display a disturbing pattern of identical styles, identical statutory and case-law citations, and even identical typographical errors,” Judge Urbom had written in a decision in August of 1984. “Given the meritlessness of the claims, I have to suspect that these complaints are being filed for purposes other than good-faith assertion of legal claims. Whether the plaintiffs have the purpose of harassment or are deceived by some third party into believing there may be merit in their claims, I do not know.” The Kirks had a newspaper clipping quoting Judge Urbom’s August decision. They also had a smudged photocopy of a clipping from the Rochester (Minnesota) Post-Bulletin that went further than Judge Urbom had in criticizing what he referred to as the third party. “Rick Elliott, who is helping farmers prepare lawsuits against their lenders and says he can get low-interest loans for farmers, has a criminal record that stretches from 1949 to 1972,” the Post-Bulletin reporter, Bruce Maxwell, wrote. Maxwell listed convictions for perjury and bad checks and selling stocks without a license. He also reported that the NAPA programs Elliott operated were being investigated by attorney-general offices in several states.

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  Once Judge Urbom had dismissed Kirk’s suit, Norwest’s lawyers entered a claim to the property that was security for Kirk’s loan—his farm equipment and whatever crops had not been sold and the unaccounted-for hundred thousand dollars. Papers were drawn up notifying him of the date on which the state court would hear the bank’s claim and ordering him not to dispose of any more secured property before that date. As was required by Nebraska law, Norwest turned the papers over to the civil section of the sheriff’s department for service. The Norwest people also informed the sheriff’s department that during their last conversation on Kirk’s farm he had been wearing a .45. They may have mentioned that he was suspected of being a member of the Posse Comitatus. The sheriff’s department, which had served papers on Art Kirk before, already knew him to be a man with a lot of guns and a quick temper. It was decided to send three deputies, and to send them armed.

  When the events of that day are discussed in Grand Island, a lot of people are described as having done what they did because they couldn’t be put in the position of doing otherwise. The bank, it is said, couldn’t be put in the position of ignoring a debt of three hundred thousand dollars and a debtor who had sold a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of secured assets. The bank had a responsibility to its depositors and to its investors. It was required to answer to bank examiners. The sheriff and the county attorney, it is said, couldn’t be put in the position of permitting a citizen to avoid service of court papers by threatening deputies with a gun. Since the threatened deputy had responded by telling Kirk that he was under arrest, to which Kirk’s response had reportedly been to mention the possibility of shooting the deputy’s head off, it was decided that a warrant could be obtained
charging Kirk with resisting arrest with a dangerous or deadly weapon. To judge from Art Kirk’s conversation on the telephone that evening, he may have believed that he could not be put in the position of permitting armed deputies on land that had been federally posted. Once the warrant had been obtained, the county could not be put in the position of having its law-enforcement officials driven off the Kirk farm again—and that meant alerting the Troop C SWAT team.

  “I am just afraid we’re going to need some help, ’cause I’m afraid the guy’s going to do some shooting,” the chief deputy sheriff said that afternoon in a telephone call to the state police captain in charge of Troop C.

  “Well, you understand if the SWAT team goes out there and there’s any shots fired, they’ll take him down—they won’t worry about the consequences,” the captain said.

  “Well,” the deputy sheriff said, “I don’t know that the guy leaves us any choice, does he?”