Ivend Olgar Holen murder 1976

Forty plus years later, investigators are trying to nail down the case of Ivend Holen!

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.

Ivend Holen arrived to work early on 13 May 1976. Ivend was the assistant postmaster at the Kimball post office. He and others usually started work early to start sorting mail, he was the only one in this morning due to a postal strike.

While sorting mail, Ivend threw a bag with pamphlets in it, on a pile of mail and the explosion happened! The bag was for a school north of Kimball. The bomb was set in a tackle box.

Authorities said the tackle box was by “Old Pal” green with a fish on top. Here is one I found online 

Authorities believe Ivend was not the intended victim!  Robert Kunkel now retired Stearns County Deputy and Kimball police officer at the time, believes he was the intended victim. “It was probably for me,” Kunkel said in an interview.

Kunkel helped secure the Post Office on the day of the blast, and a short time later he remembered threats he received during an arrest he made just three weeks prior.   “(The suspect) said, ‘I can blow you out of your house. You won’t even know what happened,'” Kunkel said.

From the Stearns History Museum facebook:

Kimball Post Office Bombing
It was a quiet spring morning when an explosion disrupted the small town of Kimball, Minnesota on May 13th, 1976. The explosion came from the Kimball Post Office where assistant postmaster Ivend Holen was sorting the morning’s mail. Though the ambulance was fast to the scene, the 60-year-old father of 10 died on the way to the hospital.

Ray Covert from Eden Valley had dropped off 3 large sacks of mail in a bulk shipment from Minneapolis at the Kimball Post Office at 1 am. “I didn’t look inside (the three sacks) but they were goddamned heavy.” (St. Cloud Daily Times, 13 May 1976). Ivend Holen had begun sorting the mail for that day’s delivery when one of the packages exploded at 6:42 am. Glass was blown as far as 35 feet into the street.

The explosion caused a fire in the post office that took the Kimball Fire Department 30 minutes to extinguish. Damage to the building was extensive. A bomb squad, postal inspectors, and FBI agents soon joined local law enforcement in investigating the cause of the explosion. They quickly determined that the explosion was caused by a bomb which came through the mail and was intended to kill someone upon delivery. They believed that the targeted victim was someone who lived along Rt. 1 (300 people lived along that route). Rumors circulated that the package was sent from Massachusetts, but later was determined to have come from another Kimball resident.

When the investigation started, a $3,000 reward was offered for any information that would lead to a conviction. About a week later the Postmaster General authorized the amount be raised to $10,000 in the hopes that it would generate new leads. That amount of reward was said to be used only for extreme cases.

One year after the explosion the reward was raised again, this time to $50,000. The reason for this increase came from the fear that whoever sent the bomb did not get the results he or she wanted and might try to kill someone else. The investigation concluded that the bomb was made by someone in or near Kimball who had a definite target. They narrowed the number of possible victims to only a few people and the number of most likely suspects to less than 5. Investigators were hoping that this large reward would entice someone with information to come forward.

But, it hasn’t worked yet. The reward is now up to $100,000. Will Ivend Holen’s murderer ever be found?

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