Compiled and written by David R. Schleper, 2022

A lone, nervous, unmasked man walked into the First National Bank in Shakopee on January 25, 1937. He had a dark overcoat and a light hat. The tall, thin bandit, the muscles of his emaciated face twitching nervously, approached the cashier’s cage and asked Lucille Schwartz, the teller, for change, according to the January 28, 1937 Shakopee Argus-Tribune.

Then the burglar suddenly pulled out an automatic pistol and demanded money.

Lucille Schwartz, E.J. Huber, the assistant cashier, and Fred Weiland, the clerk, were told to lie on the floor while the man entered the cage and gathered up the currency on the counter and the money drawer. The man then jabbed his gun into the back of Lucille’s neck and ordered her to open the inner vault.

She couldn’t. It had an automatic time lock. Upset, the man asked E.J. Huber to do it. Again, he explained that he couldn’t. The man waved his gun and shouted, “I’ll shoot! I’ll shoot!”

C.T. Weiland, cashier, stepped into view. With a menacing swing the gunman aimed his pistol and again shouted, “I’ll shoot!”

While the victims stood motionless, the bandit slipped from the bank, ran to his waiting car, scarily 100 feet away on the corner of First and Lewis Street. He jumped into the car with $4671 and sped north over the Lewis Street Bridge.

The people in the bank called the police, while others grabbed a car and pursued the fleeing car. No luck.

That would have been it…except for an article half a year later, in the Shakopee Argus-Tribune on June 27, 1938.

As it turned out, John Henry Seadlund was the bandit. In fact, according to J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, John was “America’s most cold-blooded and atrocious criminal.” Yup. The nervous man who stole money from the First National Bank in Shakopee was, besides a bandit, a kidnapper and slayer, according to the FBI’s Cases and Criminals’ article, “Charles Ross Kidnapping.”

John Henry Seadlund was born on July 27, 1910, at Fenco, Wisconsin, and his family moved to Ironton, Minnesota, when he was an infant.

Seadlund was interested in outdoor life and obtained his first gun, a .22 rifle, when he was ten years of age, and often went into the woods with other boys to hunt. As he grew older, he became interested in buying a larger rifle. Seadlund would often go into the Minnesota woods near Ironton and remain for several days on hunting trips. After he turned 14 there was very seldom a season passed that he didn’t kill at least one deer. He was apparently fond of hunting ducks and on his hunting expeditions would kill as many as forty ducks, although the law limited the possession of ducks for one hunter to eight.

He graduated from the local grade school in Ironton and graduated from Crosby Ironton High School in 1928. Following graduation, he went to work in the iron mines, working particularly in the blacksmith shops and machine shops under the supervision of his father. He appeared to be content with this type of work and worked regularly until July 1929, when, because of the Depression, he was laid off. In July 1929, he left home and worked various jobs in Chicago, Illinois.

Seadlund remained at home from September 25, 1930 until May 30, 1934 and tried unsuccessfully to secure employment in the iron mines, which, during the Great Depression, were practically shut down.

Meanwhile, John’s father, Peter Seadlund, died on March 23, 1933, at age of 51. His body was found in the family car, having died from carbon monoxide poisoning. It was speculated that his father’s death, the Great Depression, and a chance meeting with an infamous gangster (Tommy Carroll, gangster of the Dillinger Gang) pushed Seadlund towards committing crimes.

“When his father died, John tried to get work in the iron mines, but they told him there was nothing for him,” his mother, Delia Seadlund, later said. “He sat around home for two years. He was desperate for money,” according to Wikipedia.

Seadlund and James Atwood Gray kidnapped Charles Sherman Ross and hid in a shack a dozen miles north of Emily, Minnesota, while Ross was imprisoned in a nearby dugout. Then a scuffle broke out. Seadlund claimed Gray pointed a gun, hoping to get all the ransom money according to Curt Brown in the Minneapolis Star Tribune article, “Son of Ironton miner morphed into ‘nation’s cruelest criminal’ in the 1930s.” They fell into the pit, fighting for the gun. In the process, Seadlund wounded his accomplice and then shot him another eight times to finish him off. Ross suffered three skull fractures, according to an autopsy. To ensure his captive was dead, Seadlund shot Ross once in the head.

He threw their bodies in the pit, according to Brown, and covered them with brush. Three months later, after his racetrack arrest, Seadlund led the FBI to their frozen bodies and the hidden money near Walker, Minnesota.

John Henry Seadlund, characterized as a cold-blooded and ruthless kidnapper and murderer, as well as a lone bank bandit in Shakopee, was executed in the electric chair for the abduction and murder of Charles Sherman Ross on July 14, 1938. The date of his electrocution was exactly thirteen days prior to the day upon which he would have celebrated his twenty-eighth birthday according to Find a Grave. He was laid to rest on July 17, 1938, in the Woodland Cemetery, two miles south of Ironton, Minnesota, beside the grave of his father.

Bibliography

BMC. “John Henry Seadlund.” Find a Grave, 21 April 2006. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/14017335/john-henry-seadlund.

Brown, Curt. “Son of Ironton miner morphed into ‘nation’s cruelest criminal’ in the 1930s.” Minneapolis Star Tribune, 12 Dec. 2017.

“Charles Ross Kidnapping.” Federal Bureau of Investigation. https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/charles-ross-kidnapping.

“John Henry Seadlund.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Seadlund.

Shakopee Argus-Tribune, 28 Jan. 1937.

Shakopee Argus-Tribune, 27 June 1938.