Today’s Calculated Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Duane Earl Pope was born in Roxbury, Kansas in 1943, and was a well-behaved, athletic and hard-working youth. He attended McPherson College in Kansas and graduated in 1965 with a degree in industrial education; however, he had not taken the teaching courses he would have needed to be able to obtain employment in that field. He thought he would like to start an excavation business and had purchased several tractors and bulldozers, but needed money for a trailer.
Sometime in May of 1965, Pope began making plans to rob the bank in Big Springs, Nebraska. He fashioned a protective breastplate out of a bulldozer blade and made silencers for his pistols. Just a few days after graduating from college, Pope drove to the bank, waited till there were no customers and then entered. He spoke first with Andreas Kjeldgaard, 77, the bank’s president, posing as a landowner wanting a land-development loan. Kjeldgaard told him his bank didn’t make those kinds of loans and went to find a phone book and the number of a bank that might. Pope then walked around the end of a counter into the employees’ area of the bank and drew his silencer-equipped Ruger, ordering Kjeldgaard to fill a briefcase with money.
Kjeldgaard, assisted by his nephew Franklin, 25, complied. Pope then ordered the bookkeeper, Lois Holthan, to bring more money from the vault. She too complied. Afterwards, Pope ordered the Kjeldgaards, Holthan and teller Glenn Hendrickson to lie facedown on the floor, which they did. He then shot all of them execution-style in the back and head. Franklin Kjeldgaard was left permanently paralyzed; his uncle, Hendrickson and Holthan were killed instantly.
Pope had netted about $1600, and he fled first to Tijuana and then to Las Vegas, where he saw an appeal in the newspaper from the president of McPherson College, asking that he turn himself in. One week after the robbery and quadruple homicide, Duane Pope traveled to Kansas City, Missouri and surrendered to police and the FBI. He had spent one day on the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
Pope was tried twice and sentenced to death both times. His federal death sentence was commuted to life in prison after capital punishment was abolished in 1972. In the unlikely event he is ever granted a federal parole, he will immediately begin serving three life sentences on state charges.
Culled From: Murderpedia
Submitted by: Aimee
So much for healthy Midwestern values. – Aimee