Pope grew up on a small, 160-acre (65 ha) farm outside Roxbury, Kansas, an unincorporated town in the northeast portion of McPherson County.

[3] In preparation for the Big Springs robbery, he built handmade silencers for his pistols in the machine shops at his college and experimented with them in his family's barn.

Three of the victims, bank president Andreas "Andy" Kjeldgaard, 77, cashier Glenn Hendrickson, 59, and bookkeeper Lois Ann Hothan, 35, died instantly.

Franklin Kjeldgaard, who returned to work at the bank and served as president until 2004, when his family sold it, died July 6, 2012, aged 72.

[8] Upon reading an appeal for him to surrender issued by the president of his college, Pope flew to Kansas City, Missouri, where he turned himself in.

[1] Pope was ruled competent to stand trial and was tried in 1965 in front of a federal jury in the U.S. District Court in Lincoln, Nebraska.

His sentence was commuted to life in prison by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 as part of the Furman v. Georgia package of cases that determined that the death penalty, as then practiced, was unconstitutional.