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Pionerd is a daily Minnesota history podcast. Every day, one story drawn from the people, places, and moments that shaped the state we call home. From the Iron Range to the Mississippi headwaters, from the Twin Cities to the small towns most maps forget, Minnesota's history is richer and stranger than most people realize. Join us every day and find out what happened here.
INTRO: Ambush at Ruthton
On September 29, 1983, a phony land inquiry lured two small-town bankers onto an abandoned ten-acre farmstead in Lincoln County. Within minutes of their arrival, a high-powered rifle ambush left bank president Rudy Blythe and loan officer Toby Thulin dead.
As the 1980s Farm Crisis devastated Midwestern agriculture, plunging land values and triggering mass foreclosures, this calculated double murder sent shockwaves across the nation. What local activists framed as a desperate farmer "biting back" against bank foreclosures was actually something far more sinister.
It was a cold-blooded execution driven by a vengeful father and carried out by his eighteen-year-old son. This is the story of the Ruthton bank murders, the six-state dragnet that followed, and the tragic price of violent retribution.
ACT I: Lured to the Abandoned Homestead
By the autumn of 1983, the Midwest Farm Crisis was tearing through rural Minnesota. Land values plummeted sixty percent, interest rates hovered near twenty percent, and local agricultural lenders faced a wave of mounting defaults. In Pipestone County, forty-two-year-old Rudolph "Rudy" Blythe Jr. ran the Buffalo Ridge State Bank in Ruthton. A towering six-foot-four Philadelphia native, Blythe moved to Minnesota to build a career in community banking. Working alongside him was thirty-seven-year-old Deems "Toby" Thulin, a decorated Vietnam veteran and father of three who served as the bank's chief loan officer and had previously served as police chief in Shelly.
On Wednesday, September 28, Blythe received a phone call from a man calling himself "Ron Anderson". The caller claimed he wanted to inspect a vacant ten-acre dairy farm three miles north of town to buy it. The bank had foreclosed on that exact property three years earlier after its former owner, forty-six-year-old James Lee Jenkins, defaulted on a thirty-thousand-dollar debt and declared bankruptcy. Blythe eagerly scheduled a meeting at the farmstead for ten o'clock the following morning.
Court records confirm the caller was actually James Jenkins. At eight-thirty in the morning, Jenkins and his eighteen-year-old son, Steven, pulled into the farm's gravel driveway in a white 1978 Chevrolet pickup truck. They carried an arsenal out of the cab, including a .30-caliber M-1 semi-automatic rifle, two shotguns, a pistol, and three defused hand grenades.
At eight-fifty A.M., Blythe and Thulin arrived an hour early in a green Ambassador station wagon. Seconds later, Blythe's wife, Susan, pulled into the yard in a separate car to exchange vehicles. Spotting the strange truck, Blythe told his wife to drive to nearby Tyler and fetch Sheriff Abe Thompson to clear off the trespassers. As Susan turned her car around, she noted a metallic creaking sound, the noise of someone stepping on old rain gutters piled behind the chicken coop. Seconds later, she drove away onto County Road 7, leaving the two bankers walking toward the outbuildings alone.
ACT II: The Execution in the Ditch
Susan Blythe was barely out of sight when the shooting began. Forensics reconstructed an ambush that lasted just three minutes and twenty seconds. Hiding behind the chicken coop, the gunman raised the .30-caliber M-1 semi-automatic rifle. The weapon had a known jamming defect, requiring the marksman to manually clear jammed shell casings between rapid shots.
The first bullet shattered the station wagon's passenger vent window. It struck Toby Thulin directly in the throat, severing his spinal cord and killing him instantly. A second round slammed into the car door. A third bullet pierced the windshield and hit Rudy Blythe in the lower back as he crouched for cover.
Though wounded, Blythe sprinted ninety yards west across the lawn toward County Road 7 to flag down help. His bright yellow jacket made him an open target against the gray prairie. The shooter pursued him across the yard. From ninety feet away, the marksman fired four more shots as Blythe reached the road ditch. Every bullet hit him. Two fatal rounds struck his side just one inch apart.
At nine o'clock, passer-by Paul Bartz spotted Blythe's yellow jacket in the ditch. As Bartz turned his vehicle around, he saw the white Chevy pickup screaming down the driveway onto the highway. Both bankers were dead, and the killers were on the run.
ACT III: The Six-State Dragnet and Texas Confession
The white pickup sped south into Rock County, desperate to outrun the law. At two-fifteen that afternoon, Deputy Ronnal McClure spotted the vehicle near Edgerton and gave chase. Steven Jenkins stepped out of the cab with his M-1 rifle and fired three shots at the officer's squad car. McClure ducked below the dash as the fugitives accelerated into the distance.
Their escape required fresh supplies. In Luverne, father and son stopped at Harvey's Trading Post to buy one hundred rounds of hollow-point ammunition. Minutes later at Schutz's O.K. Hardware, they calmly purchased a flashlight and shotgun shells using a second check signed by Jenkins. To bypass state law enforcement bulletins, they pulled into a South Dakota salvage yard and stole license plates off a junked truck.
For three days, the pair drove under cover of darkness across six states. At the grandparents' farm in Florence, searching officers discovered spent M-1 casings beside a denim-clad dummy shot repeatedly through the chest, chilling proof of systematic target practice. The flight ended on Sunday, October 2, in Cottle County, Texas. Out of money and running out of fuel, they hid in an abandoned farmyard near Paducah.
Local police records document the moment eighteen-year-old Steven walked into the town hall. Clad in camouflage fatigues, he calmly told dispatcher Joyce Hall that he was wanted for murders in Minnesota. He warned officers that his father remained at the farm, threatening suicide.
Deputies rushed to the scene, but they were too late. James Jenkins lay dead from a self-inflicted blast from his twelve-gauge shotgun. Minnesota authorities quickly dispatched Deputy Attorney General Thomas Fabel to Texas. Steven Jenkins waived extradition and was escorted back to the Lincoln County jail to face justice.
ACT IV: Judicial Theater in Ivanhoe
In the spring of 1984, national media descended on the Lincoln County Courthouse in Ivanhoe. It was the county's first first-degree murder trial of the twentieth century. The proceedings exposed deep, painful fractures across rural Minnesota. Regional farm activists framed the tragedy as a desperate human animal biting back under financial torture. Local townspeople expressed outrage over a cold-blooded execution.
Defense attorney Allan "Swen" Anderson took the case for free. He claimed Steven acted under duress, driven entirely by his vengeful father. In a bizarre legal maneuver, Anderson harbored the teenager in his home during the trial and legally adopted him, changing his name to Anderson.
Lead prosecutor Thomas Fabel dismantled the duress defense with forensic precision. State records show investigators exhumed James Jenkins' body from a Texas grave to re-examine his eyes. An ocular autopsy confirmed the father's retinitis pigmentosa left him legally blind in his aiming eye, proving he could not have sighted or chased the victims. Only Steven had the eyesight, agility, and marksmanship skill required to chase and kill both men.
On May 22, 1984, the judge delivered the verdict. The jury found eighteen-year-old Steven guilty of first-degree premeditated murder for Blythe and second-degree murder for Thulin. He received a life sentence, carrying a mandatory minimum of seventeen and a half years before parole eligibility.
CONCLUSION: Echoes on the Buffalo Ridge
In the year 2000, Steven Anderson broke a seventeen-year silence during a televised documentary, finally confessing that he single-handedly shot both bankers. The admission marked a crucial turning point toward genuine personal accountability. Former prosecutor Thomas Fabel eventually recognized Steven's complete rehabilitation, becoming his primary advocate and helping secure his release on lifelong Hennepin County parole in May 2015.
The Ruthton tragedy permanently altered Minnesota's agricultural landscape. State lawmakers passed the Mandatory Farm-Lender Mediation Act of 1986 to prevent future lender-borrower violence. Across small-town Minnesota, small agricultural banks permanently overhauled security protocols, destroying generational "handshake trust" between lenders and farm families. Today, near Ruthton, a permanent roadside memorial honors Rudy Blythe and Toby Thulin. Their legacy reminds us that even after the deepest societal crises, communities can choose dialogue over destruction and work to build a more just, compassionate future.