On September 29, 1983, Rudolph H. Blythe Jr., 42, president of the Buffalo Ridge State Bank in Ruthton, Minnesota, was killed in an ambush near Tyler, Minnesota. Blythe and Deems Toby Thulin, a 37-year-old loan officer from the same bank, drove to an abandoned dairy farm once owned by the Jenkins family to meet a man they believed was a prospective buyer. Upon arrival they were shot; Thulin was killed in the car and Blythe was wounded and then shot multiple times while trying to flee.

The Jenkins family had lost the farm to the bank after a loan default in 1980. The primary suspect was Steven Todd Anderson, formerly known as Steven Todd Jenkins, then 18 years old. He and his father, James Jenkins, were at the farm the day of the killings. James Jenkins later killed himself in Paducah, Texas, on October 2, 1983, and Steven surrendered to police admitting involvement. Steven maintained his father fired the shots and that he intended only to scare Blythe, but he was convicted of first-degree murder in Blythe’s death and second-degree murder in Thulin’s, and received life plus an additional 116 months.

Are there witnesses or local memories of the Jenkins farm meeting that could shed more light on what happened that day?