Neuzil saw Dale Burr on a rainy day right before the killings, when he pumped gas for her at the self-serve just outside of Hills. "I knew he wanted to talk, but he just waved at me," she remembers. "He looked like the sorriest guy that ever walked."
I'm sorry," he said in the note left back at the house. "I can't take the problems anymore."
If Dale Burr had killed only himself, he would have been nothing more than a statistic, one more frarm suicide to add to the growing list. It was his murder of banker John Hughes that led the television cameras and city reporters to invade the quiet main street of Hills and made Burr a national symbol of the farm crisis. But Hughes was no more the average Iowa banker than Dale Burr was the average Iowa farmer.
It seemed everyone in Johnson County knew the president of Hills Bank & Trust Co. Hughes was a local boy who came back home after college, a farmer's son born and bred in Johnson County, a former 4-H member who went on to turn a small-town bank into the fifteenth largest lending institution in the state.
Hills Bank & Trust, too, had a history: founded in 1904, not long after the town's first tavern, it had prospered even through the Depression, conservative in its lending, but somewhat limited in its growth by an Iowa law that prevented expansion except to contiguous towns. Unsuccessful in changing the law once he became president of Hills Bank in 1975, Hughes found a way around it, arranging for the town to annex the railroad right-of-way that ran like a thread from Main Street in Hills up to Iowa City, the county seat. Thanks largely to that clever bit of urban expansion, deposits at Hills climbed from $35 million to $193 million in 10 years, allowing the bank to diversify its portfolio and reduce agricultural lending to less than one-quarter of its portfolio. Thus, while 11 Iowa banks had failed in 1985, the bank in Hills was booming.
The bank was a reflection of Hughes's personality. A former president of the Iowa Chamber of Commerce, active in charities, Hughes made friends easily, and turned customer service into a professional creed. He worked farmer's hours, 7 in the morning to 7:30 at night, and expected his colleagues to do the same. Most days you could find him away from his desk, out in the lobby of the new bank he had built in Hills, visiting with customers. He knew most of their names, knew the names of their children and grandchildren, knew how their hogs were doing, knew whether they followed his beloved Chicago Cubs. When a faculty appointment was announced at the university, he would call the professor personally to put the Hills Bank at his or her disposal. If someone celebrated a fiftieth wedding anniversary, customer or not, he would send a card with a note. At the customer-appreciation picnic last year, Hughes was on his feet most of the afternoon, helping serve barbecue to about 9,000 people.
There was no security guard on duty when Dale Burr walked into the bank, shotgun concealed inside his overalls. But even if there had been, it is unlikely he would have questioned the farmer's presence. Burr, after all, was a customer, encouraged to drop by whenever he came to town. Hughes was sitting at his desk just off the lobby when he was killed.
Fifteen hundred people turned up at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church in Iowa City to hear Hughes eulogized two days after the killings. "It's ironic," said Neil Milner, executive vice-president of the Iowa Bankers Association. "Of all the lenders in the state, he was the one who was trying to help people the most."
"He'd let everybody go the limit on loans -- you'd have to be down to where you didn't have a dime before he'd foreclose," a customer told the press. "That's why this is so hard to understand."
If people in Hills didn't see John Hughes as the stereotype ofr the uncaring banker, they hardly saw Dale Burr as the symbol of America's embattled farmer. Because he had been born to relative privilege, he'd never had to learn to live with hard times. "Hell," one neighbor said, "he had 600 acres given to him, and he couldn't hang on to them. I had to work for the land I'm about to lose."
You could see the problem just driving by the Burr family spread. It wasn't just the unharvested corn under the snow or the ramshackle barn; signs of sloppy operation were everywhere. The yard by the shed, for example, is carpeted in corn, spillage left on the ground after hauling. "I could make a living on what he lost," one neighbor marveled.
"The truth of it is he wasn't much of a manager," another explained. "He was always two months behind, and he always lost half his crop. His work was excellent, when he got to it. When he set out to put in a four-acre farm, he worked it until it was a garden; it had to be perfect. But if he'd been a little more roughshod, he could have saved weeks throughout the year.
"He was a great one for work, but he didn't have the time to get everything done, and he would not hire a man. He didn't want to spend the money. All he would have had to do was set down with a pencil and figure out the cost of the labor to see he could have saved in the long run. But he was never much with a pencil."
