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Small-town banking relies on a fundamental social contract: trust between neighbors. On Saturday, November 12, 1955, that civic trust was targeted by a calculated corporate impersonation at the Northern State Bank in Thief River Falls, Minnesota.
When cashier Kenneth Lindberg opened the doors after hours to help a stranger, he expected a routine weekend deposit. Instead, he met an ex-con with less than a dollar in his pocket, no gun, and a desperate plan to rob the vault.
What began as an unarmed robbery quickly spiraled into an abduction, a brutal roadside homicide, and a multi-state federal manhunt. It put a small-town bank employee at the center of one of the most unusual federal death penalty cases in Minnesota history.
At 11:00 that Saturday morning, forty-four-year-old cashier Kenneth E. Lindberg’s desk phone rang.
A man identifying himself as Herbert F. Johnson from Racine, Wisconsin claimed he was representing the Johnson Wax Company. He told Lindberg he was flying in after hours to scout a local factory site. He asked to store $25,000 in cash inside the bank vault over the weekend.
According to True Detective magazine accounts, Johnson called back an hour later. He asked Lindberg to reserve two local hotel rooms for himself and his secretary, Miss Hadley. He also invited Lindberg to dinner. Lindberg declined dinner due to a local school event, but he agreed to open the bank after hours.
When Johnson hammered on the locked bank door at 3:30 PM, bank vice-president George Werstlein and a janitor were still inside. Lindberg let Johnson in and introduced him to Werstlein.
At 6:30 that evening, Werstlein left for home. As he left, he could hear Lindberg and Johnson laughing and talking in Lindberg’s office.
The visitor was not corporate executive Herbert Johnson. He was James Peter Taylor, a thirty-year-old career criminal released fourteen days earlier from federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. Taylor acted on a prison tip from inmate Ben Bakken. According to Taylor’s later memoir, Bakken was a former banker with a grudge against Lindberg. Taylor expected a $100,000 robbery score, despite having less than a dollar in his pocket.
Once the other employees left, Taylor announced the robbery. That was when his plan hit a wall. The main vault operated on a time lock, an automatic mechanical lock mechanism set to prevent opening until Monday morning.
Taylor panicked. He falsely claimed a criminal syndicate was watching Lindberg’s wife and their four children.
Blocked by the vault, Taylor forced Lindberg to open a secondary safe. He took $14,000 in Bank of America travelers checks, pre-printed, fixed-amount paper drafts requiring dual signatures. He also grabbed $1,750 in silver coins.
According to True Detective magazine accounts, a building porter mopping the floor saw two men leave the rear exit at 9:00, one carrying a black satchel. Whether they were Lindberg and Taylor was never established.
Lacking a gun or a getaway car, Taylor forced Lindberg into his own two-tone green 1951 Buick. He forced the banker to drive south into the dark as his guide.
At 11:20, the men stopped at the Greystone Hotel in Detroit Lakes, ninety miles south. Lindberg walked into a phone booth and called his wife, Violet. He told her he was away on extended bank business and said not to wait up. Taylor watched nervously from the hotel lobby.
Driving south toward Minneapolis, Taylor ran into practical problems. According to his later confession, the heavy coin bags were too bulky to carry onto a getaway plane. He had also forgotten his sleeping pills at his Minneapolis hotel, leaving him unable to drug Lindberg as planned.
Taylor pulled the Buick off Highway 10 into western Sherburne County, near Clear Lake. In the freezing darkness and falling snow, he decided to bury the coins on a rural farm slope.
Taylor pulled a World War II folding trench shovel out of Lindberg's trunk. The two men walked down the slope carrying the coins. Taylor later said he slipped in the dark and grabbed Lindberg’s coat to catch his fall. In his account, Lindberg took the sudden grab as an attack and swung a heavy bag of silver coins into Taylor’s face.
Taylor retaliated with the trench shovel. 44 year-old Kenneth Lindberg suffered eight to twelve severe blows to the head and died on the snow-covered hill.
Taylor fled the scene in Lindberg’s Buick and drove directly to Minneapolis. He returned to the Nicollet Hotel, where he had registered before the robbery under the alias Herbert F. Johnson. He paid his hotel bill using one of the stolen travelers checks. He then abandoned the green 1951 Buick on Eighteenth Avenue North, leaving $1,630 in silver coins in the trunk.
On November 18, Minneapolis police located the abandoned car and FBI agents recovered latent fingerprints from the interior. One week later, on November 25, three farm youths, Merle, Kenney, and Gary Fiereck, went rabbit hunting near Clear Lake. They discovered Lindberg's body frozen in a snow-covered field. Investigators found defensive wounds, $200 in loose silver, and a Christmas list in his pocket.
The FBI tracked Taylor's escape route using serial numbers from the stolen travelers checks. Taylor passed the checks under the names Charles D. Kenwell and Herbert F. Johnson across Chicago, Detroit, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, and Cleveland.
According to magazine reports, Taylor had established a false identity in Joplin, Missouri, a week before the robbery. He passed himself off as a novelist named Charles Kenwell to a local travel agency. He convinced a prominent family in Joplin to host him in their home.
On December 8, 1955, FBI agents surrounded the family’s home and arrested Taylor without incident. Agents found a thirty-caliber rifle, a twenty-two revolver, over $1,000 in cash, and bank passbooks showing thousands deposited in Detroit.
Dressed in an imported British tweed topcoat, federal marshals transported Taylor under heavy guard to the Hennepin County Jail in Minneapolis.
On February 2, 1956, a federal grand jury indicted Taylor on four counts, including murder during a bank robbery. United States District Judge Gunnar H. Nordbye appointed attorneys Irving Nemerov and Walter E. Riordan to represent the indigent defendant.
Because the crime involved a federally insured bank, federal statute carried a potential sentence of death. This created an intense legal conflict in Minnesota, which had abolished capital punishment in 1911. Under federal law, the death penalty could only be imposed if directed by a jury.
On April 6, 1956, Taylor pleaded guilty to murder without a plea bargain, avoiding a trial on guilt. A jury could still be called to consider the death penalty, but prosecutors later withdrew that request. On July 5, Judge Nordbye sentenced him to life imprisonment. Before sentencing, Taylor delivered a statement praising Lindberg's heroism and apologizing to his family. He also criticized federal prisons for denying him prior psychiatric treatment.
In 1959, Taylor filed a Section 2255 motion, a federal legal procedure allowing a prisoner to challenge sentence validity, alleging mental incompetency during the proceedings leading to his guilty plea and sentence. An appeals court ordered a hearing in 1960. Chief Judge, Edward J. Devitt held the three-day hearing in July 1961, considering witness testimony and subpoenaed medical records. Devitt ruled Taylor had been legally competent.
According to newspaper accounts, Taylor was released from prison at age seventy in 1995. He co-authored a 2007 memoir dedicated to Lindberg's family before dying at age eighty-six.
Kenneth Lindberg’s murder exposed the danger of placing personal goodwill against calculated deception. The bank’s time lock kept its main cash beyond Taylor’s reach, but that mechanical safeguard could not protect the bank employee once Taylor threatened his family.
Legally, Taylor v. United States reinforced a prisoner’s right to a hearing when substantial questions about competency remained unresolved. The appeals court also rejected Taylor’s accusations against his appointed lawyers, praising the extraordinary care they had taken in defending a man facing a possible death sentence.
Ultimately, the tragedy stands as a sobering landmark in state history. It marks a devastating moment where a small-town banker's willingness to help was weaponized against him by a robbery scheme hatched behind prison walls.