Duane Earl Pope

Who is Duane Earl Pope?

Duane Earl Pope is a convicted murderer serving a life sentence for one of the bloodiest bank robberies in modern times, the 1965 robbery of the Farmers State Bank in Big Springs, Nebraska.

Pope grew up on a small, 160-acre farm outside Roxbury, Kansas, an unincorporated town in the northeast portion of McPherson County. He was one of eight children. Shy, quiet, and athletic as a child, Pope grew up with a fascination for guns and tractors, neither of which is particularly unusual for a farm boy. He graduated in 1965 from McPherson College in McPherson, Kansas with a degree in industrial education, although he lacked the teaching component of that degree that would led him obtain a job teaching high school industrial arts. He excelled in football but was a mediocre student.

Pope had the idea to rob the Big Springs bank while working in wheat fields there one summer while he was in college. While in college, he bought several caterpillar tractor/bulldozers and was contemplating starting an excavation businesses but needed money for a trailer. In preparation for the Big Springs robbery, he built handmade silencers for his pistols in the machine shops at his college and experimented with them in his family's barn. He also fashioned a breastplate out of a piece of a bulldozer blade. Two days after graduating from college, Pope borrowed fifty dollars from his father and said he was heading for Oklahoma to look for work. Instead, he went to Salina, Kansas, rented a new car, and drove to Nebraska. Late in the morning of June 4, 1965, after circling the bank and watching for the morning customers to leave, Pope conversed with a banker pretending to be a landowner seeking a loan. He then pulled out a Ruger .38 semiautomatic pistol and ordered the bank employees to fill his briefcase with cash. After getting what he could, Pope ordered the four bank workers to lie face down on the floor, where he shot them execution-style in the back and in the neck. Three of the victims, bank president Andreas Kjeldgaard, 77, cashier Glenn Hendrickson, 59, and bookkeeper Lois Ann Hothan, 35, died instantly. The fourth, Franklin Kjeldgaard, 25, survived but was paralyzed for life.