MN MN - Ivend Holen, 60, Kimball, 13 May 1976

Early that morning 40 years ago, assistant postmaster Ivend Holen was alone in the Kimball Post Office, sorting mail early as he often did. Holen had just turned 60 two days earlier, was a father of 10, and lived on a farm south of town.

A package that had been mailed to a Kimball address on Route 1 (which included the area north of town) arrived by truck from Minneapolis at 1 a.m. that morning. Inside was a carefully made explosive device inside a tackle box, set to explode when opened. But the intended victim was not Holen or the Post Office, it was most likely someone on Route 1, Kimball.

It was Holen’s bad fortune that morning to be the one to accidentally set off that device. He bore the brunt of the explosion, and was fatally wounded by it; he would die in the ambulance on the way to St. Cloud.

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There are no new leads that can be released, according to Jeff Long, public information officer for the United States Postal Inspection Service. But there is a $100,000 reward for anyone who has information that brings the arrest and conviction of the person responsible...

The bomb was delivered to Kimball from a bulk mail station in Minneapolis at 1 a.m. the morning of the explosion...

In the first year of investigation, postal investigators conducted more than 3,000 interviews and spent almost 11,000 hours investigating the case...

In the years since the explosion, authorities have described the bomb as a low-grade explosive triggered by a carefully constructed device. No motive has been determined.

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Friday marks 40 years since a bomb rocked a small Minnesota town and took the life of the assistant postmaster. Someone sent that bomb in the mail in Kimball. Ivend Holen, 60, died in the blast as he sorted through packages that May morning.

No arrest has ever been made in the case.

But investigators aren’t ruling out a man once named a suspect in Jacob Wetterling’s disappearance.

(...)

But on this somber anniversary there is new hope after a local author passed on new clues and a name they’ve never heard before.
“It’s definitely interesting,” Harriel said.

A man once considered a suspect in another Stearns County case 13 years after the bombing: The kidnapping of Jacob Wetterling.

Police arrested Duane Hart three months after Jacob went missing (...)

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