Were Foreclosure Pressures to Blame? : Farm Family Deaths Shock Hamlet

ELK POINT, S.D. — Away from the office, Bruce Litchfield coached a Little League team, took his family to church every Sunday, never missed a Lions Club meeting and was a volunteer fireman.

But at work, day in and day out, he listened to farmers tell tales of financial troubles as county director of the Farmers Home Administration, the federally chartered lender of last resort for family farms.

He was facing some especially unpleasant tasks later this month because the government had lifted a two-year moratorium on FmHA foreclosures. About 20 farmers in his county are behind in their payments.

Perhaps, as some here believe, he broke because he couldn’t bend. No one here knows for sure.

But at dawn Wednesday, Litchfield shot and killed his wife, his two children and the family dog before driving four blocks to his office and turning the gun on himself.

‘Pressure on My Mind’

He left this handwritten note on lined paper: “The job has got pressure on my mind, pain on my left side.”

Most folks along Main Street in this tiny South Dakota hamlet were still baffled Thursday. Some blamed the pressures of the farm crisis that have led to the deaths of bankers in Iowa and Minnesota in the last month.

One friend of Litchfield said he had been upset by his work, torn between his strict allegiance to the FmHA rules and his feeling for farmers.

“His job was putting him between new regulations and the farmers. It kept eroding him inside,” said state Rep. Roland Chicoine, who talked with Litchfield the night before the shooting at a high school volleyball game.

“I saw it in him since fall. He was very concerned that he would have to start foreclosing.”

‘No Rhyme or Reason’

But others, among them Sheriff Eugene Rasmussen, say the farm crisis had nothing whatever to do with it. Rasmussen had no explanation, however. “There’s just no rhyme or reason,” he said.

Farmers who dealt with Litchfield, a bearded, 6-foot, 6-inch man, sometimes found him tough and unyielding. To Litchfield, rules were rules. Everyone said he was conscientious and did things by the book--that he was a perfectionist.

“He prided himself on knowing the regulations,” said state FmHA Director Dexter Gunderson. “He was a brilliant fellow” whose office had an extremely low percentage of delinquent loans.

“He’s the last guy I ever figured would do anything like this,” Gunderson said.

Litchfield, 38, his wife, Laura, 42, and their children, Allan, 9, and Christine, 13, moved here a little more than a year ago. They had moved frequently for Litchfield’s FmHA jobs before ending up in Elk Point, a town of 1,500 on exceptionally fertile farmland in the southeastern corner of South Dakota.

Involved in Civic Affairs

Early on, they became involved in community activities.

“I remember at his first Lions Club meeting he said he was not going to isolate himself in his work. He was going to get involved in the community,” said the Rev. Marvin Ketterling, a member of the club.

Mrs. Litchfield got involved in 4-H, Cub Scouts and the PTA. Christine was a straight-A student who had been recently writing poetry, her teachers said, and son, Allan, loved football.

While most people thought that the Litchfields were a model family, they were not without problems.

Shortly before Christmas, Mrs. Litchfield was fired from her secretarial job after a conflict with her supervisor. It was the second job she had lost in the last several years.

Bruce Litchfield, who grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., was outgoing and friendly, but was sometimes seen as domineering. He also apparently had recently been in pain. He told friends that he was taking medication for phlebitis.

His last day began just as the skyline began to glow Wednesday morning. In the two-story brown house on Pleasant Street, with the toy trucks on the porch, Litchfield fired a shot into his wife’s head as she lay sleeping.

Drove to His Office

Then he went to the children’s bedrooms, shooting them as they slept also. Dressed in his normal work clothes, he went out to his car and drove to his office.

It was before 8 a.m. and he was alone when he wrote the one-line note, on paper with doodles of a kite and a fish, and shot himself.

When a secretary discovered Litchfield, she called the sheriff and the Rev. Ketterling, a Lutheran minister. The Litchfields’ pastor was out of town.

Ketterling joined the authorities who went to the Litchfield home. “I had hoped to see her, to share with her the bad news about her husband,” he said.

But there was no answer at the door. Once inside, Ketterling said they found Mrs. Litchfield and her children in their beds. “It seemed like they were sleeping peacefully,” he said.

When he looked closer, however, he saw the blood.

The worst farm crisis since the Great Depression, which has put thousands of farmers in danger of losing land held in their families for generations, was a natural target for blame. Dale Burr, a 63-year-old Iowa farmer deeply in debt, shot and killed his wife, his banker, another farmer and himself last month.

‘A Gut-Eating Job’

A banker in Eagle Bend, Minn., recently committed suicide. Roger Larson, vice president at the bank, explained it this way: “Sitting across from a farmer and wife and telling them it’s the end of the ropes, that everything they’ve worked for is down the drain . . . it’s a gut-eating job.”

The FmHA traces its origin to the 1930s. About 90,000 of the 270,000 farmers with FmHA loans will be notified in coming weeks that they must either bring their payments up-to-date or agree to new loan conditions, the FmHA says. But in Union County, where Litchfield worked, conditions for farmers are better than they are nationally. In fact, the crops produced last year set state records and only a half-dozen or so farms are in danger of failing.

“You hear (about farm troubles) everywhere else, but it’s shocking to hear it in your hometown,” said farmer Richard Fennel, who farms 1,000 acres of beans and corn near Elk Point. “Especially since this is the best crop year we’ve had in years.”

‘Ag Economy Is Dragging’

“The ag economy is dragging,” said Keith Winge, vice president of the Valley Bank of Union County.

“I’m sure Bruce had a few weak loans. We all do. But it’s nothing to get overly excited about.”

What triggered the rampage is a mystery that will probably never be solved. As Elk Point Police Chief Richard Volk noted: “There’s no one alive to talk to us about it.”

On Thursday, one of Christine Litchfield’s teachers was rereading one of the young girl’s last essays. The last paragraph read:

“It is better to treat adverse situations when they’re small rather than later or when they are bigger and more difficult to solve.”

The Rev. Don Greenough, the pastor of the Litchfields’ church, says he intends to use that as the theme of this Sunday’s sermon.