At about 6:00 p.m. March 31, 1983 Bob Kropp was bludgeoned to death on Interstate I-90 alongside the St Regis river, just east of Look Out Pass, near the Idaho border.
Two witnesses happened upon the killers as they beat Bob Kropp. The killers stood near the body, which now lay beside the vehicle, off the highway, in a ravine, near the waters of the St Regis.
As they pulled up, the witnesses observed the men appeared to be beating on Kropp, but as they looked more closely, and the other two men noticed them, it became apparent that the men were helping resuscitate the man.
The murder of Bob Kropp occurred slightly more than three years after Michael Remz, a Montana Highway Patrolman, was gunned down after Remz began to monitor flights into obscure airstrips in the Libby-Eureka area. The death of Bob Kropp also came at a time when Frank Luciano's drug operation from Canada was starting to pick up steam.
Bob Kropp was a Montanan through and through. He was born near Choteau in 1922, graduated from Choteau High School and Montana State University with a major in agriculture. After leaving the army as a lieutenant at the end of WWII Kropp operated a lucrative farming and ranching operation in Teton County. Kropp also acquired a large interest in the Farmers State Bank located along the Hi-Line in nearby Conrad, in Pondera County.
Bob Kropp was on the board of directors of Farmers State Bank along with Carl Pohlad of Minnesota, and minority interest owner Earl Berthelson. The bank was thriving in the early years of the Reagan administration despite the full-scale battles fought in a whirlwind series of legal campaigns by a stubborn, hard-headed, obdurate local Dutch farmer named Ralph Bouma.
Ralph Bouma was a successful farmer too. So when banker Berthelson and others connived to steal one of Bouma's wheat farms valued at $1,100,000 the Farmer's State Bank had to contend for decades with Bouma and Montana's most famous civil legal battle. Bouma fought back with good lawyers; he spent thousands upon thousands of dollars, sued in the state and federal courts; Bouma founded a thriving trucking firm to compensate for needed extra capital to pay legal fees, and most importantly, he refused to quit. Bouma "refused to quit" is to put it lightly.
The court battles began in the mid-1960's and continued as late as October 31st, 1994. And now that new evidence of the murder of Bob Kropp is under consideration much of the previous litigation may be subject to most studied and concerned review, and yet more litigation. Ralph Bouma wants his farm back.
Someone had seriously underestimated Ralph Bouma. Rich powerful men in Montana had forgotten the lessons of history and the Dutch. The Dutch fought religious wars continually for more than one hundred years and showed no sign of relenting when peace came. 25,000 Dutch farmers in southern Africa held their own against the juggernaut of the British Empire, at it's apex, until they were finally rounded up and put into concentration camps. No, Ralph Bouma was of a kind that didn't give up good farmland easily.
Bob Kropp was an honest director of the Farmer's State Bank. He opposed what Director Berthelson was doing. Kropp had no problem with Bouma, and in fact, thought highly of the man. Director Pohlad, the major money man behind the bank, went along with Berthelson perhaps because Bertheleson was giving bad information to Pohlad. After Berthelson passed away in 1982 the greed factor sustained the successor directors of the bank - along with the need to keep deadly important matters covered up.
Kropp emphatically objected to Berthelson's attempt to solicit the Farmer's State Bank to sue Bouma. Finally in 1979 Kropp resigned from the bank board of directors. In his affidavit supplied to Bouma's attorney December 31,1980 Kropp stated, "In this same period a majority of the board agreed to destroy Ralph Bouma's credit in the financial community, which resolution has, for all appearance sake, been effective to this date." Kropp could see that a fix was in, and began to assist Bouma.
Bob Kropp's change of allegiance was devastating to the bank's position. But the Farmer's State Bank had excellent well-connected attorneys who kept the matter under wraps until the cases began to look as though Bouma would at last prevail. By March, 1983 Ralph Bouma was working with several lawyers including Lynn Lund a well-known civil rights attorney in Salt Lake City.
Bob Kropp felt that it was very important to meet with Lynn Lund in the days before he died. Kropp also accounted to people around him that a go-between for members of the Montana Supreme Court had made it clear that a $50,000 bribe would get the reversal of the state District Court decision that Ralph Bouma needed. Ralph Bouma and Bob Kropp were both raised in a generation that didn't play by those rules. Not only that, but the men believed it was time to approach the authorities.
Bob Kropp's integrity and candor proved fatal for him on his return to Montana.
Now in 1998 new forensic studies clearly show that Kropp did not drown in the St Regis river that evening. Vomit was on the interior of Kropp's vehicle, (a common fact to a person who has been beaten senseless about the head with a blunt instrument). The accident scene photos of the vehicle show that the vehicle was likely pushed off the cliff into the shallow St Regis by another vehicle. Photos of the Kropp vehicle indicate bumper contact with another vehicle. This information contradicts the statements of the two men at the scene.
There have been many federal investigators who have urged prosecutions around the Bouma case. Former U.S. attorney, Pete Dunbar, a Reagan appointee, managed to always avoid the prosecutions. Associated Press writer Garry Moes was pressured out of the AP Capital Bureau, in part, for his continued positive articles concerning the Bouma cases. Several of Bouma's Montana attorneys were threatened with ethics sanctions before the Montana Supreme Court Commission on Practice.
During the next few weeks or months the body of Bob Kropp will be exhumed and examined again. A new investigation with real teeth may begin regardless of whether Montana lawyers and journalists wince when the name Ralph Bouma is mentioned.
The investigation will potentially lead to a prosecution on murder-for-hire charges of two individuals. The killers, in order to save their skins, must tell what they know about members of the Montana Supreme Court and the system of bribery, blackmail, and egregious evil that came to dominate the Big Sky state.
A brutal murder of a Montana banker in the midst of exposing a bribe scheme involving Montana Supreme Court justices must not be ignored.
(Nota Bene: long time Conrad newspaper editor Ralph Bidwell has written an excellent book on the Bouma cases: You Be the Judge, Sawtooth Press, Box 1502, Great Falls, Montana 59403. $15.00.It is essential background for understanding the current situation and how the Hi-Line murders were allowed to occur)