On The Road: Johnson County, Iowa;

When Dale Burr shot his wife, his banker, and himself, he became a national symbol of the farm crisis. Some of his neighbors see it differently.

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NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW THE complete truth about Dale Burr's rampage through this community of rolling hills and family farms in southeastern Iowa last December 9. But the shotgun blasts he fired that day would startle the nation. "Indebted farmer kills 3, then self," the headlines read. America's farm crisis, it seemed, was turning bloody.

The tragedy began around 11 a.m., when the 63-year-old Burr, dressed in overalls and work boots, went down to the basement of the family homestead for his aging Remington 12-gauge pump shotgun. Emily Burr, his wife of 40 years, was his first victim, killed with a blast to the chest while she was baking cookies in the cheerful kitchen of the family's white farmhouse. Then Burr got in his green Chevy pickup and drove down the highway from Lone Tree to the nearby town of Hills, home of Hills Bank & Trust Co., holder of Burr's mortgage. Forty-six-year-old John Hughes, the bank's president, was Burr's second victim, killed by a shotgun blast to the head while he sat at his desk just off the lobby. Burr then drove to the home of 37-year-old Richard Goody, a tenant-farmer with whom he'd been embroiled in a land dispute. Burr shot and killed Goody, then fired at Goody's fleeing wife and six-year-old son before returning to his pickup. Spotted by a sheriff's deputy on the gravel road leading back to his farm, Burr was stopped. But while the deputy waited for backup to help with the arrest, Burr took his own life with two shotgun blasts to the chest.

By early afternoon a swarm of local and national reporters had descended on tiny Hills, population 547. America's farm problems are hardly a breaking story: falling commodity prices and rising debt loads have made pictures of auction foreclosures in the Farmbelt a staple on the nightly news. But Dale Burr's rampage made the story fresh again. Rather than just losing a business or a factory like any other overextended small-business man, a foreclosed farmer loses his home and his way of life, too. Dale Burr seemed a perfect illustration of the human strain of the farm crisis: more than half a million dollars in debt to his bankers, expecting to be driven off the land his family had worked since 1879. It seemed easy to understand the pressures that had driven this hardworking and genial fourth-generation farmer, a pillar of Our Redeemer Lutheran Church, to such desperate acts.

A "tragedy waiting to happen," was how the press reported it. From the statehouse in Des Moines, Gov. Terry E. Branstad expressed his "anguish" that "the stressful economic times" had produced such violence. "Inevitable," local farm activists called it. They recited tales of other farmers stopped, loaded shotgun in hand, on the way to the bank, and predicted more terror on the farms unless Washington provided debt relief or price support for the embattled farmer. In Washington, Burr's name was invoked by lobbyists seeking to soften the Administration's farm bill, while one zealot even asserted that President Reagan himself was responsible for the carnage that cold and dreary December day in Iowa.

But the tale, in truth, is far more complicated than a simple story of hard times, harsh bankers, and one poor farmer who suddenly snapped. The farm crisis is real, tragic and pervasive; its scars have changed the face of the heartland. But Johnson County, Iowa, with its rich land and a thriving state university nearby, has been less ravaged than most of the state, thanks in part to banker John Hughes. And as for farmer Dale Burr, evidence now suggests he was something other than a pawn of forces beyond his control. His financial problems were far less severe than those of many of his neighbors, and most of them were created by his own shortcomings as a farm manager.

In the hamlets that dot Johnson County, most folks are still unwilling to talk about Dale Burr. His memory hangs like a pall over the farms around Hills. Burr was one of them, and his problems, in some measure, are the same as theirs. But his story is a nightmare the local families would rather forget. Who, after all, wants to go to sleep at night wondering if someone else is going to pick up a shotgun in the morning? The farmer down the road, perhaps? Or the man who lies sleeping fitfully in the next bed?

Dale Burr himself was never the talkative sort. Like most men who run their own businesses, he kept his finances between himself, his banker, and his God. But he did unburden himself once, just nine days before the shooting, talking with Ruth Forbes, his sister, and Ruth's husband, Keith.

Keith Forbes knew that something was wrong that Saturday noon as soon as he saw his brother-in-law through the kitchen window. It wasn't likely, Forbes figured, that Burr was coming over to ask for help getting the last of his crop in. Although almost half his corn and a quarter of his soybeans lay buried under what was left from the Thanksgiving blizzard, Burr was known for harvesting late, and planting late as well, and for always working alone. Nor was it likely that he had come to pay off the $10,000 he owed for fertilizer and pesticides -- he was always slow to pay a bill. And Burr was hardly the visiting type. Their farmhouses were hardly three miles apart, and Forbes would see Burr two or three times a week driving his pickup or his tractor, yet Burr never had the time to sit over a cup of coffee for a talk.

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