John Hughes was 43 and the president of the Hills Bank & Trust when he was shot and killed at the bank on December 9, 1985. The attack occurred shortly after noon when a man identified as 63-year-old farmer Dale Burr entered the bank carrying a shotgun and went into Hughes’s office before shooting him.

The rampage that day began at Burr’s farmhouse in Lone Tree, where he first shot and killed his wife, Emily, and then killed a neighboring farmer, Richard Goody, before driving to Hills. After the shooting at the bank Burr fled and later died by suicide in his pickup truck about a mile from his farm. No arrests were made because the alleged perpetrator was already deceased.

What details about John Hughes’s life or work in Hills might help explain how the community remembers him, or would anyone with memories of that day share what they recall?