Final Harvest : An American Tragedy

On the misty morning of September 29, 1983, the small town of Ruthton, Minnesota, was stunned by two murderers.  Rudy Blythe, the local stunned by two murders.  RUdy Blythe, the local bank president, and Toby Thulin, his chief loan officer, died in a sudden fusillade of precisely aimed bullets.  The murders, the first in a string of violent outbursts across the roubled Midwest, were symptoms of painful changes creeping across that vast countryside, forever altering the farms, towns, and cities of the Heartland and the action itself.

Anderw H. Malcolm, who has covered the developing farm crisis as Chicago Bureau Chief for The New York Times, was at the scene.  His stories made page one news.  A native Midwesterner and the grandson of two farmers, Malcolm retraces in Final Harvest the lives of the tragedy's two main characters-Blythe and James Jenkins-and the forces, events, and personalities that inexorably Drew these men to their fatal clash over a patch of overgrown prairie.  With mounting drama, Malcolm describes the slayings, the flight, the investigation and cross country manhunt, a suicide, and the stunning courtroom verdicts.

Rudy Blythe, born and raised on Philadelphia's affluent Main Line, moved his family to Ruthton in 1977 with a dream of raising his young son in an idyllic small town.  He had visions, toom of financially lifting that tiny community from the decline of so many similar towns.  The local citizens were both wary of and curious about the tall, outgoing banker from the East who talked loudly and held the financial futures of so many people in his hands and files.

Among the local farmers was Jim Jenkins.  Born and raised on a struggling eighty-acre farm, he saw his father labor in the same fields for nearly half a century while the financial and business realities of the nation quietly  changed around them.  Jim would have his own dream, his own farm, a small one but big enough for his family and some dairy  cattle, and a new mortgage with the new banker in town.