High Noon in Skidmore

Indian Summer--and in the café across the street from the courthouse, the flies that have been roused by the sudden heat bounce against the window, hoping for one more spin in the sunshine before winter deals its trump. The place is Savannah, Missouri, a one-elevator corn-and-bean town 75 miles upriver from Kansas City. The time is October 1981. The subject is murder; specifically, the public killing of an illiterate, unemployed drifter named Ken Rex McElroy in an even smaller town called Skidmore, about 20 miles away.

Murder, of course, is a rather common crime, even in the Bible-thumping Missouri hinterlands; yet what distinguishes McElroy's death from the 20,000 or so homicides reported in America each year is that a majority of Skidmore's citizens claim that it wasn't murder at all: that McElroy--unarmed and shot in the back by at least two gunmen while a crowd of local farmers watched approvingly--represented a threat to their community so dire and uncontrollable that killing him was a case of justifiable homicide.

Alden Lance, a former county prosecutor whom I have come to the café to meet, agrees with them.

"What else could they do to protect themselves?" asks Lance, who served as prosecutor here in Savannah from 1956 until 1976, a tour of duty that has made him an expert on crime in northwest Missouri. "McElroy was a vicious criminal. During the past ten years, he shot at least two men and openly supported himself by stealing livestock and farm equipment from his neighbors. In 1971, I had him arrested eight separate times for felony theft, but I had to drop the case when my witnesses decided not to testify against him. That was the pattern with McElroy: You'd work hard to build a good case and then you'd have to drop it because the witnesses were scared to testify. McElroy wasn't the kind of criminal you could get rid of with conventional methods. Look at his record: dozens of arrests for everything from arson, theft and rape to assault with intent to kill. And not a single conviction. The man never spent a night in prison in his life.

"People have a right to protect their lives and their property. McElroy stole from those people for years and terrorized them and they were sick of it. (continued on page 144)Skidmore(continued from page 111) When people lose confidence in the courts and the police, they'll protect themselves any way they can. The law was no help to the people in Skidmore. They had to get rid of McElroy themselves and they knew it."

Lance pauses and our eyes lock.

"If you want to know the truth, I expected this to happen sooner than it did. There's an old saying I believe in: 'The will of the people is the law of the land.' Although technically a crime was committed in Skidmore, the will of the people was served."

Lance tilts his chin for the last drop of coffee and rises to leave. "You know," he says suddenly, turning back to the table and lingering as though he's had a revelation, "what happened in Skidmore is just like this John Lennon thing. The Beatles' music ruined a whole generation of our young people, but you couldn't stop them, because the Constitution guarantees everyone--good and bad--the right to free expression. Obviously, killing John Lennon was against the law, even though the guy who did it did us all a big favor. It was the same thing up in Skidmore. The means were bad, but the net result was good." He glances at his wrist watch. "Hey, I really got to run. Nice talking to you." We shake hands and he disappears.

A few minutes later, a doughy teenager with frizzy hair slinks into the café and buys a pack of cigarettes. Above his Levis he wears a white T-shirt with blue lettering that neatly expresses the prevailing local sentiment about Ken Rex McElroy's murder.

Who Shot K.R.? the shirt says on the front. Who Gives A Damn? says the back.

•

The town appears abruptly as you crest a hill: Skidmore Population 447, the sign announces, and beyond it, a narrow ribbon of closely spaced white houses cuts an arrow-straight swath through fields of corn and soybeans that press right up against the edges of mowed lawns. This is serious farm country: From St. Joe, the road to Skidmore winds over a roller coaster of hills that from April to November are blanketed by a patchwork quilt of cultivated grain. The farmhouses, most of which are set far apart, are plain clapboard affairs with rusting machinery scattered in the yards and, near many of them, a fenced rectangle of bare earth containing hogs. Every few miles, you pass through a little town identifiable chiefly by its grain elevator: Savannah, Maitland, Graham and, finally, Skidmore. If you acknowledge the fact that the 40th parallel roughly divides America laterally and that the 95th meridian halves the country longitudinally, then Skidmore, which happens to be where they intersect, is the geographic center of America.

At first glance, Skidmore seems surprisingly small--much smaller even than you'd expect of a town with fewer than 500 inhabitants. After following the row of houses for maybe a quarter mile, you arrive suddenly at the business section, which would fit comfortably within the boundaries of a football field. At one end of town looms the requisite grain elevator and feed store; at the other, where Missouri 113 makes an abrupt turn east, are a pair of old-fashioned gas stations, a bank, a grocery a beauty salon (open by appointment only) and a hardware store. Between those goal lines are a small brick building that houses Inez Boyer's café and the squat, steel-sided honky-tonk called the D & G Tavern. Across the street is the Skidmore post office, the only sign of life in a block of abandoned concrete buildings that record a prosperity now faded. On the whole, Skidmore has the look--exhausted, anachronistic--of a town that's being wasted by a cancer. In this case, the cancer is the Nodaway County seat of Maryville, 12 miles northeast, whose three factories, shopping malls and neon-lit saloons are so attractive to the rural population that Skidmore can no longer compete.

It was the tail end of summer, just before harvest, when I arrived in Skidmore to study the failure of the American legal system as represented by McElroy's killing. Everything seemed so clear back then: McElroy, I'd been told, was a sadistic bully who had terrorized the town for decades; the citizens of Skidmore were law-abiding folk who had begged the sheriff and the prosecutor to protect them and who resorted to murder only when there appeared to be no alternative.

But after a month in northwest Missouri, nothing appeared quite so clear as it had from the distance. First, the fabled monolith of opinion about the righteousness of the murder shattered with the slightest probing. Next, I was unable to find any substantial evidence that McElroy had been the extraordinary criminal people said he was. I checked the court records in six counties; I questioned state and local policemen; and I discovered that while McElroy had frequently been accused of crimes and had stood trial, his record was clean enough for him to have run for public office.

Likewise, McElroy's contravention of justice through terrorism proved difficult to locate. I couldn't find a prosecutor or a policeman in northwest Missouri who could remember a single witness who'd formally requested protection from McElroy. Even Lance's claims that McElroy had intimidated witnesses were suspect. When questioned, those witnesses said they were arrested without charges and held without bail until they agreed to testify. Soon after they were released, they refuted their testimony and Lance, who could have charged them with wrongful oath, dropped the case.

Even so, it didn't take long to hear plenty of horror stories about McElroy--tales of rape, torture, child molesting and murder so gruesome they made my skin crawl. But I heard some chilling stories about the respectable, God-fearing families who killed him, too: stories about how Hangman's Bridge (which crosses the Nodaway River west of Skidmore) was so named because of the rustlers who were introduced to justice while swinging from its stout oak frame; about an itinerant hired man named Razco, who was lynched north of Skidmore after a farmer's wife accused him of raping her; about Raymond Gunn, a young black man who was burned to death by a mob in Maryville; and about Chester Leggans, a so-called thief and troublemaker, who was murdered six years ago in the presence of witnesses who all swore they hadn't seen a thing.

Like Alden Lance, a lot of people could make a brutal public execution sound reasonable and justified right up to the point where they compared it with the murder of John Lennon.

•

The first person I met in town was Harry Sumy, a rail-thin elderly gentle-man with stubbled cheeks, who owns the service station about 30 yards from the spot where McElroy was killed. White Sumy filled my tank, we chatted about the weather, which was hot and dry, perfect for the harvest. When I asked about the killing, the crow's-feet around about the killing, the crow's feet around his eyes wrinkled and all traces of sontaneity vanished. After that, he spoke in a careful, practiced tone, as though he were reciting a speech from memory. It was an act I was to encounter often in Skidmore; justified or not, a murder had been committed and nearly everyone seemed aware that loose talk about it could send someone to death row.

"You can look all you want, but you won't find any vigilantes around here," Sumy told me earnestly. He wore oil stained work boots and clean overalls that were faded nearly white. He certainly didn't look to me like a man who would take part in an organized killing, though I later heard that he'd been standing nearby when McElroy was killed and, like the rest of his friends who had witnessed the murder, had told the police that he hadn't seen the shooting.

(continued on page 154)Skidmore(continued from page 144)

"If you want my honest opinion," Sumy said, "I think that whoever killed McElroy wasn't even from around these parts. Probably it was a professional killer from Kansas City. You know, a man like McElroy had a lot of enemies and not all of 'em lived around here. I hear he was involved with the Mafia down there and they sent someone up here to get him."

It didn't seem worth the effort to ask why a professional killer would snuff a man with a crowd of people watching when it would have been considerably less troublesome to fulfill his contract when McElroy was alone. Perhaps Sumy thought that professional killers, as a rule, were sportsmen. I thanked him for the information and parked across the street, in front of the Sam R. Albright American Legion Hall, where, only minutes before the murder, a town meeting had been held, the subject of which was McElroy and what to do about him.

Several people who were present say that about 60 men had attended that meeting. Most of them were farmers, who in Missouri are characteristically strong, stout and independent. There's no doubt that most of those present believed McElroy was a master thief and a vicious bully whose continued freedom was a threat to their lives and their property. Judging from subsequent events, at least two of them believed that the law was incapable of protecting them and that in order to ensure their own safety, they would have to get rid of McElroy themselves.

Fundamentally, Skidmore's case against McElroy--and the legal system--was based on three recent incidents, as well as a deep-seated prejudice that McElroy aggravated by his refusal to conform to prevailing standards of morality and behavior.

In 1976, a prominent Skidmore farmer named Romaine Henry accused McElroy of shooting him in the stomach. According to Henry, McElroy had been standing in the road near Henry's house with a shotgun, and when Henry stopped to ask what he was doing, McElroy gave him both barrels. Arrested for assault with intent to kill, McElroy was brought to trial. Henry testified that McElroy had shot him; McElroy, supported by two witnesses, claimed he had been at home at the time Henry said the shooting occurred. The jury believed McElroy. "We all sympathized with the man who'd been shot," juror William Groomer says of that case, "but there just wasn't no evidence that McElroy had shot him. The prosecutor didn't have no case at all. I don't think it should have ever come to trial."

In Skidmore, where Henry is generally liked and McElroy was not, people were angered by what they considered the impotence of the courts.

Four years later, McElroy was again charged with assault with intent to kill. This time, his alleged victim was a 70-year-old Skidmore grocer named Ernest Bowenkamp, who, like Henry, claimed that McElroy had shot him without provocation. At the trial, held 60 miles away in Harrison Country on June 26, 1981, McElroy admitted to shooting Bowenkamp but said he'd done so in self-defense when the grocer attacked him with a butcher's knife. The verdict was a compromise: McElroy was found guilty--but only of second-degree assault; the jury recommended a sentence of two years instead of the 15 the prosecution had requested. As required by Missouri law, the judge gave McElroy 25 days to file a motion for a new trial and released him on bond. Again, the citizens of Skidmore were outraged, both by what they considered a meager sentence and by McElroy's continued freedom, which they viewed as a dangerous opportunity for him to strike back at those who'd testified against him.

Five days later, a wave of hysteria swept through town. In statements submitted to the Nodaway County prosecutor, four Skidmore men claimed McElroy had swaggered into the D & G with a loaded M-1 carbine and threatened to kill Bowenkamp and anyone else who tried to send him to prison. The conditions of his bond prohibited him from carrying firearms; when the prosecutor filed a motion to have the bond revoked, work spread quickly that McElroy had repeated his threats. The four men who'd signed the statements appealed to the rest of the town for help, and on the morning of July tenth, the meeting was convened at the American Legion hall. When someone brought the news that McElroy had stopped at the Skidmore honky-tonk--even as they were debating how to get rid of him--60 determined men headed for the bar for a showdown.

McElroy, who stood 5'8" and weighed more than 250 pounds, betrayed no emotion when confronted by the hostile crowd. He was wearing brown-suede cowboy boots, brown sports pants and a brown shirt that revealed the numerous tattoos on his ham-sized arms. He struck up a conversation with one reluctant farmer, finished his beer with a steady hand, ordered a six-pack of Bud and a tube of Rolaids and left. About half the crowd followed him outside. They glared from the weed-cracked sidewalk as he calmly started his pickup. Meanwhile, at least two gunmen assumed positions across the street, directly under the stars and stripes of Old Glory that hangs in front of the Skidmore P.O. According to Trena McElroy, who was in the truck with her husband, one of the gunmen raised a lever-action .30-30 and pointed it at Ken, who was unarmed. Outside the air-conditioned pickup, it was nearly 100 degrees. Everyone was sweating but McElroy, who nonchalantly put a Camel between his lips and prepared to light it.

The first shot--the one from the .30-30--shattered the rear window of the truck and struck McElroy an inch below his right ear lobe. Traveling at approximately three times the speed of sound, the steel-jacketed bullet incised a shaggy groove through both sides of his lower jaw and tongue and fractured his left axilla and upper palate, all of which clogged his throat with so much blood and fleshy debris that he would have suffocated if a second shot hadn't blown the back of his head off. As he died, McElroy's foot jerked reflexively against the throttle pedal, jamming it to the floor board so that the engine raced until it eventually seized and burned. The shot that killed him--the second one--was fired from a .22 Magnum. His unlighted cigarette, flecked with what appeared to be bits of rust, was later found on the dashboard.

After those first shots, a lull ensued; then more shots were fired from those and perhaps other guns. The shots were staggered, deliberate, evenly spaced, several of them directed in apparent jealous rage upon the vehicle itself, which was a nearly new four-wheel-drive. Chevy, an object held in high esteem by Missouri farmers. As the shooting ceased, Trena was pulled from the truck and led into the bank nearby, and the crowd that had witnessed the execution gradually dispersed. At the D & G Tavern, beer was served on the house for the first time in memory.

Despite a phone on the wall just inside the door, no one bothered to call an ambulance or the police. Consequently, more than half an hour passed before the first law-enforcement officers arrived to investigate. What they found was like a scene out of The Twilight Zone: respectable, churchgoing men, women and children conducting their business as usual, carefully ignoring the smoldering pickup and the bloody man within, who was slumped forward peacefully, as though asleep.

A few hours later, events took another strange turn when Trena McElroy gave a statement to the highway patrol in nearby St. Joe. Trena swore that the man behind the .30-30 was Del Clement, 27, the scion of Skidmore's wealthiest farming family. Normally, the Nodaway County Sheriff's Department would have responded to such eyewitness testimony by arresting and charging the suspect. But because of the unusual social implications of the killing and the certain unpopularity of arresting anyone named Clement, the case was shunted from the sheriff to the county prosecutor and the Northwest Missouri Major Investigation Squad (NOMIS), an ad hoc committee of lawmen responsible for investigating crimes deemed too complicated for local authorities to handle alone.

Two months later, when I arrived in Skidmore, no arrests had been made, no charges filed and McElroy's killers were still at large--a singularly sobering fact of life for anyone walking around town asking questions about the shooting.

•

Lois and Ernest Bowenkamp, who own the B & B Grocery, are proof that opposites attract: Lois is short, heavy, quick-tempered and outspoken; Ernest is tall, thin and phlegmatic. The Bowen-kamps' trouble with McElroy had started in April 1980, when, after an argument, Mrs. Bowenkamp had told McElroy to leave her store and never come back. Three moths later, McElroy shot Mr. Bowenkamp in the neck. As they awaited the trial for the next 11 months, the Bowenkamps lived in fear that McElroy, who was free on bond, would return to finish the job.

"This was not a vigilante action," Lois says categorically about McElroy's murder. "This was an eruption of fear and frustration, and it never would have happened if the law had worked. The police would arrest him and the courts would let him go. That's what made everybody so mad. After he was found guilty of shooting Bo, he was right back here in town, free as can be, telling everybody how he'd never go to prison and bragging about it. The Bible says there should be an eye for an eye. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. Well, Ken McElroy lived by the gun and that's the way he died. Justice has been served."

The Bowenkamps aren't the only Skidmoreans who had reasons to want McElroy dead.

"My only regret about what happened to Ken McElroy," says Tim Warren, pastor of the Skidmore Christian Church, "is that somebody didn't kill him sooner."

Obviously, those are harsh words for a man of God. Yet Warren, who is 28, believes that his sentiments are justified by the horror that was inflicted upon him.

About a year before McElroy was killed, Warren claims to have received the first of numerous anonymous phone calls from a man who threatened to torture and kill him, his wife and their two children. According to the preacher, the caller was McElroy--who went to such lengths to harass and terrorize him for the absurd offense of having visited Bowenkamp in the hospital after he was shot.

"McElroy must have had the hospital staked out," Warren says, "because when I got home from visiting Bo, the phone calls started. 'Mind your business or else,' the first one said. When I didn't back down, they got worse."

Instead of minding his own business or calling the police, Warren loaded his guns--a .22, a 12-gauge shotgun and a snub-nosed .38 special that he carried on his person. The threats intensified: The caller threatened to castrate Warren, to kidnap and main his children, to rape and mutilate his wife and send him her breasts in a manila envelope. Twice, claims Warren, he had armed confrontations with McElroy, who backed down both times. And although the phone calls stopped about six months before McElroy's death, Warren says that it was impossible for him to feel safe as long as McElroy was alive.

"You can't believe what it was like here," Warren says. "As far as I'm concerned, McElroy got exactly what he deserved."

Like Warren, David Dunbar, 25, is a relative newcomer to Skidmore who says he was happy when McElroy was killed. Oddly, Dunbar, who served for five months as Skidmore's marshal (a part time job with little actual authority), says that he and McElroy were friends--until McElroy threatened, without provocation, to kill him.

"It happened up at the D & G Tavern," Dunbar says. "I got a call that there was a fight going on, so I went to break it up. Well, there wasn't no fight, but McElroy was there, so I drank a couple of beers with him. When I left, he was leaning against his pickup outside. I started over toward him and he reached in the pickup and pulled out a rifle, but I grabbed the barrel before he could point it at me and held on real tight. We stood like that for a while, then, finally, he backed down. After that, even though I tried to stay away from him, I figured it was just a matter of time before he got me. I decided then that if he tried to harass me like he harassed the Bowenkamps, I'd kill him. That's the way most people felt. To be honest with you, my only regret about the way Ken died is that I didn't pull the trigger myself."

Then there is Romaine Henry, the barrel-chested farmer who accused McElroy of shooting him in 1976. Henry whose 1000-acre farm is only a mile from McElroy's house, says that after he was shot, McElroy would park outside his house at night and shine a spotlight on the windows, and that once, while he was plowing a field, McElroy shot at him with a high-powered rifle.

"I've got no idea why he was after me," says Henry, an extremely courteous, soft-spoken man of 47. "I really never had any involvement with Ken and there was no reason for him to be after me, but he was, and you'll just have to believe that, despite what the jury said."

Although Henry, Dunbar, Warren and the Bowenkamps were the only Skidmoreans who told me they'd actually been threatened by McElroy, nearly everyone with whom I talked knew at least one hair-curling story about him. At Inez Boyer's café, where farmers gather every morning to gossip over weak cups of coffee, one man told me that McElroy had worked for the Mafia as an arsonist and had made $10,000 for each building he burned.

Another man, a farmer, said he had been the biggest rustler in the state. "McElroy stole everything that wasn't tied down," he said. "Last year, this county had six times as many hogs and cattle stolen as any other county in the state. Everybody knew McElroy was doing it, but the law we got around here, they never could catch him at it. Last winter, it got so bad with livestock disappearing, I'm surprised somebody didn't take McElroy out and lynch him then."

Up at the D & G, a dim barroom with two pool tables and pictures of rodeo cowboys on the wall, I heard that McElroy had had $40,000 in cash on him when he was killed; that there had been a grocery sack full of dope in his truck; that one of his close relatives was a homosexual who starred in porno films in St. Joe; and that yet another had (continued on page 194)Skidmore(continued from page 156) thrown gasoline on his wife's first husband and burned him to death. Everybody explained McElroy's irrational behavior--shooting Henry and Bowenkamp for no reason--by recalling that he'd been run over by a tractor when he was a boy and that the doctors had put a steel plate in his head. Since that accident, they said, he'd been like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One day, he'd be as nice as the next guy; the next day, he'd come right out of the blue and shoot you.

Outside the Skidmore bank, an attractive matron with a blonde bouffant told me that McElroy had cut Trena's breast off with a knife, a story I was to hear many times. "Dr. Humphrey from Mound City said it was the worst thing he ever saw," she said. "Of course, I'm sure you know that before they were married, McElroy was arrested for raping Trena and then for burning her parents' house when she tried to leave him. He just walked over with a can of gasoline and set the house on fire with the whole family watching. He would've gone to prison for that, except he married Trena so she couldn't testify against him. What else could she do? He would've killed her if she hadn't married him. Everybody knows he drowned his wife, Sharon Mae, when she wouldn't give him a divorce. They found her floating in the river down by St. Joe, but he was never even charged for it. Let me tell you, there were plenty of people around here who figured Trena would be overjoyed if someone killed Ken. With him dead, she'd be free from him, just like she always wanted."

•

The voice is shaky, sliding uncertainly over the short sentences. Trena McElroy sucks air rapidly, fighting for control. Her eyes are red and watery, the pupils slightly dilated.

"When I knew what happened, I opened my door. They was still shootin' and I was beggin' them to stop. I tried to get out, but this guy told me to stay where I was. He said they was gonna shoot me, too. Then Jack Clement [Del's father] pulled me out real hard and put me in the bank with all these women. All the men that was on the street came up and stood around in a circle, lookin' in the windows. I thought they had me set up. I wanted to get out, but they wouldn't let me leave. I went over to the women who was standin' there talkin'. 'You didn't have to do him like that,' I told them. Then this lady said to me, 'Honey, we just didn't have no choice....'"

The voice breaks and she sniffs hard, pawing at her nose with a wadded Kleenex.

"I sat down, still thinkin' they was gonna kill me, too, when Del and Royce Clement came into the bank. They didn't say nothin' to me but went to the back to talk to the manager. After a while, Timmy [McElroy's brother] came and got me. He wanted to check on Ken, but I told him it weren't no use, that Ken was...."

The voice gets away from her again and she ducks her head, waiting for it to return.

"I was still afraid of what they might do to me. So I told Timmy just to drive on by the truck. We didn't even stop. As soon as we got home, I got in touch with Gene [McElroy's lawyer] and he tried to get ahold of somebody to get the law out there. When he finally got ahold of someone, they didn't know nothin' about it, because nobody even bothered to call in...."

Her voice escapes into a high keening whine, and this time she just lets it go and weeps. This is where all the smug avowals of vigilante justice begin to sound thin and a little weak. This is where you come face to face with the reality that what got shot in Skidmore on July tenth was a man with a wife and children who loved him and not merely some psychotic redneck, the fabricated villain of a tabloid story.

McElroy was born in 1934, one of 13 children of a dirt-poor itinerant farm hand who drifted to Skidmore during the Depression. Ken quit school before he could read or write and hitchhiked to Colorado, where he worked for several years at construction. He returned to Skidmore around 1953, the same year his brother Bobbie Dick was sent to prison for stealing a truckload of corn from a neighbor's bin. For the next 20 years, McElroy drifted from one rural town to another, supporting the children from his three marriages by trading livestock and secondhand furniture that he bought and sold at country auctions. By the time he settled down with Trena on his mother's hard-scrabble 60 acres near Skidmore, he had devoted himself to the single abiding passion of his life: raising and training coon hounds.

Now, eight years later, at the age of 24, Trena has a thick mane of blonde curls and baby-pink cheeks. At 14, when her romance with McElroy started, she must have been a stunner: soft, ample and shy. In Skidmore, people point to the rape, child-molesting and arson charges Trena brought against McElroy in 1973 as proof of his depravity. Trena emphatically disagrees. She says she told the prosecutor that McElroy had raped her and burned her parents' house because she wanted to force him to marry her.

Their affair had begun in the autumn of 1972, when McElroy was 38. Because he was a friend of her stepfather's, Ronnie McNeely's, Trena had known Ken since she was a baby. When she was 12, she developed a crush on him; two years later, after considerable flirting, Ken invited her to spend the day with him in St. Joe. She accepted. Ken took her shopping and bought her some clothes. They danced at a honky-tonk and finished the date at a motel named for Jesse James, who was shot in the back in St. Joe. She returned to the Jesse James with McElroy at least seven more times that fall, and by Christmas she was pregnant.

Trena desperately wanted to marry McElroy--not only to give her baby a father but because she loved him--but he was already married. When the baby was born, prematurely, in May, she was resentful and deeply depressed. Poor, unwed, without any hope of supporting herself and her child, Trena went to the county welfare department for help. As in all such cases, the welfare officer required that she identify the baby's father. Since sexual intercourse with a female under 16 was at that time punishable in Missouri by life in prison (whether or not the sexual act was consensual), soon after she had named McElroy as her baby's father, the county prosecutor paid Trena a visit. It didn't take long to convince her that the best way to force McElroy's hand in marriage was to agree to testify against him. On the day after McElroy was charged with rape and child molesting, McNeely's house burned down and a charge of arson was tacked onto the indictment. The next day, when Trena's uncle claimed that McElroy had threatened to shoot him, a charge of flourishing a weapon in a rude and angry manner was also added.

Almost immediately after the alleged weapons incident, Trena was hospitalized for nervous exhaustion. After three months in a state mental hospital, she was moved to a foster home in Maryville; then, because the prosecutor was afraid McElroy might try to harm her, she was secretly transferred to Whiteman Air Force Base. Soon after she arrived at Whiteman, she contacted McElroy, who by then was divorced and who asked Trena to marry him. Six months later, when he received a copy of the marriage certificate, the prosecutor dropped all but the weapons charge: and although Trena's uncle testified against him, McElroy was acquitted. As to the fire at her parents' house, Trena says it was caused by faulty wiring.

"The police harassed my husband constantly," she explains. "They hated him because they were always trying to pin something on him that Ken never did and Ken would make a fool of them every time. They were always challenging him, and my husband, he wouldn't back down for anybody.

"People were just always talking bad about Ken, and that's how the trouble started. They were just going on what they'd heard, not what they'd seen. There were plenty of lies told and plenty believed. Like that day in the tavern, just before he was killed, when they said he had a loaded gun. Ken never touched the gun. He told some guy he'd just bought this antique Army gun and the guy said he'd like to see it. So Ken told me to go out to the truck and get it, and I did. It wasn't loaded or anything, and Ken never touched it. After we left, they said he'd threatened them with it, but it wasn't like that at all."

Still scared and still under police protection two months after her husband was killed, Trena had yet to return to Skidmore. After she named Del Clement as one of the assassins, several of her relatives were advised by anonymous telephone callers that Trena ought to change her story and shut her mouth, or the people who murdered her husband would get rid of her, too.

•

Nearly everyone you talk with about McElroy eventually mentions his devotion to coon hounds. At the time of his death, he owned about 20 dogs, some worth as much as $3000. Trena says that McElroy trained his dogs daily and on weekends took them to the field trials held in the rural towns of Missouri, Iowa and Kansas.

Soon after I arrived in Skidmore, I went to one of those field trials in Fillmore, Missouri, with a couple of farmers named David and Lionel.

"Ken pretty much raised the best dogs in this part of the state," David said as we headed for the meet in his pickup. It was a brilliant day in late September and the fields of soybeans along the road had turned from green to yellow to a fine, rich chocolate brown. "Ken had this one walker named Rugged, had a voice on him prettier than Kenny Rogers'. I don't believe I ever saw Rugged lose a treeing contest."

The Fillmore Saddle Club, where the meet was held, was a three-acre clearing encircled by an immense field of soybeans and milo. Pickups were parked for about 100 yards on either side of the road. Hitched to some of them were elaborate dog trailers with the name of the owner stenciled on the side. (Po Boy's Treeing Walkers, one said.) Up by an enormous maple, the treeing competition was just starting. In a treeing contest, each hound barks at a caged raccoon for 30 seconds; the dog that barks the most is the winner. As we edged through the circle of men in overalls who were standing under the maple, I could see that a raccoon in a steel cage was being lowered by a rope from a branch. At the foot of the tree were about 20 men holding lunging hounds on leashes. This was the warm-up. As the cage was lowered and the raccoon walked nervously from one end to the other, the hounds barked and leaped and snapped. It was a hot day and a ring of foam formed around the raccoon's mouth. The animal was clearly distraught beyond any comprehensible notion of fear.

"Once, I was over in Bethany at a dog meet," Lionel said, "and as they was raisin' and lowerin' the coon, the rope broke. When it hit the ground, that old cage split open and the coon jumped out right under the nose of a fool redbone. That hound looked at that coon and that coon looked at that hound--and then, quick as a snake, that coon laid that hound's throat open from ear to ear. They got claws and teeth like razors, you know. They can cut anything. Then the coon took off and he like to make it across a soybean field to the timber before the other dogs caught him and tore him to pieces. That redbone bled to death before they could carry him to the truck."

Lionel's story haunted me long after the field trial was over. At the time, it seemed to be the perfect metaphor for the McElroy killing, with the citizens of Skidmore cast as the distraught raccoon tormented by the hound. But the longer I stayed in Missouri, the more evidence I found suggesting that it might have been the other way around.

•

Not long after the murder, Lester Doss, an unemployed farm hand who had been one of McElroy's closest friends, received the following letter: This is the only warning you will get. Our bellys are full of your kind. Ken did not pay attention to leave the county when told to. Get out of this territory while you can. You have been warned. We don't want any thieves or rustlers or troublemakers.

Another friend of McElroy's, a man with a reputation for cattle rustling, was abducted at gunpoint, driven into the country and hanged from an oak branch. This man, who wears a brown necklace of rope burn to support his tale, was told that if he didn't leave the area within a week, he would be hanged again--and the next time would be final. He didn't even bother to notify the police.

A week after McElroy was murdered, Alice Woods, his former common-law wife, who lives outside St. Joe, was threatened while returning from a visit to McElroy's mother, in Skidmore. On the blacktop road south of Graham, a car passed her and pulled sideways across the road so she had to stop. Four strangers approached her.

"Don't you know it's dangerous to be driving around this county in one of McElroy's trucks?" one of them said.

Woods, who'd already heard of the other threats, had a sawed-off 12-gauge ready. Although she was scared senseless and isn't handy with firearms, she poked the gun out the window and the four men scattered. A few weeks later, a black jeep stopped in front of her house while her three children played in the yard, and shots were fired over their heads. Then the phone began to ring in the middle of the night. "If you know what's good for you, you'll take this warning and stop stirring up trouble," an anonymous caller said. Despite the threats, Woods still lives in the same cramped six-room clapboard house. Random garbage--hubcaps, derelict tires, a half-chewed possum with its entrails strung out in the dust--decorates the weeds on her lawn.

"You know, everybody up around Skidmore hassled Ken all the time," she told me. "They were jealous of him and they had reason to be. They worked hard out in those fields every day and Ken never worked like that at all. Ken had a knack for making money by being smart, not by being strong. They didn't like the idea that a man could support himself without sweating all day like they did. So they claimed he stole their livestock, but there was never any proof that he did. They were always after him, them and the law. They just wouldn't let him alone."

We were sitting in the living room, where a picture of the Last Supper that she'd torn from a magazine is taped to the wall. "Let me ask you this," Woods said. "If Del Clement's wife said Ken McElroy shot her husband, how long do you think it would've been before they'd had Ken in jail?"

She let the question hang there for a moment before she continued. "The law says that murder, no matter who does it, is murder. Well, Ken McElroy got murdered and 30 people seen who did it. Lester Doss got a letter saying they'd kill him. too. I've been threatened and my children have been shot at, but nobody's been arrested or charged for any of it."

Yet McElroy's friends and family aren't the only people around Skidmore who have reason to be afraid. Many Skidmoreans--especially those who watched the killing and lied to the police to protect the killers--are afraid of one another. In Skidmore, everyone is aware of the extreme fragility of the web of lies that has thus far prevented an indictment; if only one witness cracked and went to the police with the truth, perhaps 30 others could be charged with conspiracy to commit murder. And every month, the fear that someone will crack gets worse.

Still, there are people in town who aren't afraid to say they don't think McElroy deserved to be killed. Ronnie Charles, a 19-year-old Marine whom I met when he was home on leave, was among them. Charles was one of the state's key witnesses against McElroy at the Bowenkamp trial. Charles's testimony--that he had seen McElroy park behind the grocery store only minutes before Bowenkamp was shot--prevented McElroy from claiming he wasn't there at all and forced his plea of self-defense. Many people in Skidmore say that McElroy consistently evaded prison by intimidating witnesses, yet Charles told me that McElroy never tried to influence him. In fact, he considered McElroy his friend.

"I never heard of Ken hurting anybody who wasn't messing with him," Charles said. "People who had never met him were always gossiping about him and running him down. Most of them deserved to have their asses kicked. You know, if those people hadn't talked about McElroy so much, they never would have had to shoot him."

Although Romaine Henry does not recall it, Charles says he was walking down Main Street in Maryville one night last July when Henry stopped him and said there would be a meeting about McElroy the next morning in Skidmore. They were going to get rid of him, Henry said--burn him out and run his women off. Henry asked Charles if he wanted to help, but Ronnie didn't want any part of it. The next day, McElroy was killed.

Like Charles. Inez Boyer, who was born and raised in Skidmore and who owns the café that is the social center of the community, doesn't think McElroy's execution was just. I had known Inez for nearly a month and had talked with her daily before she said anything about the killing. It happened without any prompting. One day, she simply stared at me and said, "You know, I never felt so sick in my life as the day they shot Ken McElroy. I was right here in the café when it happened and I knew there was a meeting about him, but I didn't know they were going to kill him until I heard the shots. There was a lot of them. It sounded like a war. When it got quiet, I went over to a window to look out. Well, they've shot McElroy, I said to myself. Right then, I knew that nothing around here would ever be the same."

By the time Inez unburdened herself to me, most of the tight and gruesome little tales I'd heard about McElroy had already come unraveled. According to James Rhoades of the highway patrol in St. Joe, who had known him for 25 years, McElroy had no connection to the Mafia and was never known to sell drugs.

"I hear these stories that McElroy was a big-time drug dealer and a rustler and I just laugh at them," says Rhoades, a member of the highway patrol since 1949 and the most experienced lawman in northwest Missouri. "McElroy was a punk, a petty thief. He was like a crow: He stole whatever people were careless enough to leave lying around. Sure, he stole some hogs, but compared with big rustlers, what McElroy stole wasn't even noticeable." Rhoades, who was a member of NOMIS and investigated McElroy's death, says there was no dope in McElroy's truck when he was killed, nor $40,000 in a paper sack. The coroner's report states that there was no steel plate in his head. And his first wife, Sharon Mae--the one I was told he had drowned--is alive and well in Helena, Missouri, and when I asked her about him, she said she'd loved him a lot.

Likewise, the most brutal story I'd heard about McElroy--that he'd cut off Trena's breast--proved false. Dr. James Humphrey, who delivered Trena's first baby, said he had never treated her for a breast wound, nor did she show scars of such.

But if, as Rhoades maintains, McElroy wasn't an extraordinary criminal; and if, as Charles and many Skidmoreans believe, McElroy had been more the coon than the hound, why had 60 farmers sacrificed a morning's work to discuss getting rid of him? And why had at least two of those men risked prison to blow him away?

•

There are three kinds of soil in Nodaway County: sand, loam and gumbo, the last of which is as black as oil and, for those who own it, considerably more valuable. The 1981 harvest set a record for farmers in Skidmore. While prices for crops were generally low and the costs of planting and harvesting higher than ever, the average profit per acre of farmland was about $100, while the value of the land itself (conservatively estimated at $1500 an acre) appreciated by 15 percent. Big farmers, such as the Clement-Patterson clan--who together farm about 15,000 acres--may have realized an income of $1,500,000 from an asset base worth $22,000,000.

All this surprises many visitors to rural Missouri, who expect anyone with that kind of income and assets to wear Brooks Brothers suits, own elaborate houses and drive flashy automobiles. In fact, it takes a trained eye to distinguish between the Haves and the Have-Nots of Nodaway County, because most of the Haves are frugal folk with the same simple tastes as the Have-Nots. In Skidmore, a man who owns a piece of ground worth $1,000,000 (and machinery worth half as much again) is likely to wear the same frayed overalls and torn flannel shirt as his hired man, who doesn't have a nickel.

Like everywhere else, however, Skidmore has its own symbolism of class and wealth, and within the community, those distinctions are closely monitored.

The most common indication of affluence is the pickup truck. Four-wheel drive is a must in any status machine; so is a special 50-gallon gas tank behind the cab, which implies that the farmer who owns the truck also owns other machinery--such as tractors and combines--that must be refueled in the field.

Other, more subtle, marks of affluence in Nodaway County are cowboy boots (men who work in the mud wear laceups), fine rifles and registered livestock. Because pigs smell bad, nobody fools with them unless he has to. Anyone who can still afford to raise cattle in quantity (the cattle market has been ruinously bad the past few years) or who owns more than a dozen saddle horses can be considered pretty well off. A house should be judged not by the quality or the beauty of the structure itself but by the quality and the size of the trees in the yard, which, besides offering shade, imply ancestry.

Yet the clearest distinction between the Haves and the Have-Nots is the nature of their employment. Even if they dress and live alike, the Haves all work for themselves on land they own, and the Have-Nots--unless they punch in on one of the shifts at the Union Carbide plant in Maryville or support themselves dishonestly--all work on farms for the Haves.

During the past 50 years, the nature of farming has changed radically. To-day, on land that once required the labor of 20 men, a single farmer can work alone, planting aboard a $50,000 tractor and harvesting with a $100,000 combine. But while the technology of farming has changed, certain time-honored values persist, and self-reliance is chief among them. In order to succeed today, a farmer must be an agronomist, a mechanic, a veterinarian, a chemist, a meteorologist, a businessman and a commodities speculator. Last, but certainly not least, he must be able to protect what he owns.

A modern farm is like a store with no doors and no guards. Virtually anyone with a mind to can drive up to a farmer's gas tank--in which he stores fuel for his tractors--and steal 30 gallons. Or thieves can back a pickup against his grain bin (which may hold $50,000 worth of corn), knock a hole in the side with an ax and drive away with a cargo that can be sold for cash at any elevator. They can hop aboard his combine, which he often leaves in the field at night (one key fits all), drive it to a waiting tractor-trailer and have it unloaded and sold in another state before he notices it's missing in the morning. Because hogs are so easily and frequently stolen, many farmers don't even bother to report their loss to the police.

How, then, does a farmer protect himself from thieves? The country is too big and too empty for the police to help him until after something has been stolen. Besides, a farmer distrusts policemen the way he distrusts anyone who charges to do a job he prides himself on being able to do alone. Yet, short of sitting up every night with a shotgun, what alternative does he have?

"There's only one way to keep people from messing with you out here," one farmer told me. "You've got to let them know that if they try to hurt you, you're not going to get mad, you're going to get even. And you've got to have the kind of personal credibility to back it up. People don't steal from a man who they know won't back down from anything."

Although it might not be recognized in the court in Maryville, this code is as fundamental to life in rural Missouri as seed corn. And because it has functioned effectively since the land was settled, it is something that every farmer who doesn't want to be bled dry by thieves lets it be known he subscribes to. The ways that a farmer can advertise his compliance vary: He may carry a rifle in his pickup, or he may spend some time bragging in taverns how he'll shoot the eyes out of any son of a bitch he sees sneaking around his farm. But by far the easiest way to demonstrate his belief in the code is to join up with a few of his friends and kill a suspected thief. And after the law in Maryville has tacitly approved that method--by failing to even slap him on the wrist--he's likely to believe that what he did was justified by the demonstrated inefficiency of the courts and the police.

Had McElroy been chosen and sacrificed as a scapegoat, in accordance with this code? Two farmers I met in Maryville at a bar called the Shady Lady persuaded me that he had been. I'd seen one of them, a man named Pete, at the D & G in Skidmore a few days before. The other, whose name was Kriss, had forearms like Popeye's and a chest the size of a 50-gallon drum. When I asked if they'd known McElroy, Kriss became visibly nervous, tugging at his hair and looking quickly around the bar to see if anyone were watching. Since McElroy's killing, paranoia had spread to every level of social intercourse around Skidmore. Strangers like myself were automatically considered reporters and most reporters were thought to be FBI agents or private investigators working for Trena McElroy's attorney, trying to pick up evidence for an indictment. Kriss asked for identification and I showed him some.

"This doesn't mean anything," he said to Pete. "Anybody could carry this stuff. Let's take him out to my office."

They each gripped one of my arms and escorted me to the rear of a Chevy van. Kriss unlocked it and we climbed inside.

"OK, buddy," he said. "Who are you really working for?"

I told him again, but he didn't appear to believe me.

"We might look like hayseeds," Kriss said, "but lemme tell you something: If you're lying to us, you're in bad trouble. We've got a saying around here. We say, 'The payback's a motherfucker.' You know what that means? It means that if you try to hurt me. I don't just get even for it, I hurt you at least twice as bad. Let's say I know you stole a tire from me. Well, for that, I'd steal your car and set it on fire. The payback's a motherfucker. That's the way it works around here. That's how you keep people from fucking with you."

I'd gotten in the van with considerable apprehension: after listening to Kriss, I wished I were somewhere else. Clearly. I was in a place where men were ready to fight--even kill--over any perceived insult or injury, where the veneer with which we hide our basest instincts was beginning to wear thin. This was life reduced to fundamentals: Don't back down. The payback's a mothererfucker.

Kriss and Pete were staring at me. I could see their faces only in silhouette. Again I told them who I was, adding as many details as I could to convince them that they had nothing to fear from me. When I finished, the van was quiet for a very long minute.

"You want to know about McElroy," Kriss said suddenly. "Well. let me tell you about him. He was a tough son of a bitch and everybody around here was scared of him. I don't know if you've noticed, but a lot of people around here think they're pretty tough and don't like to think they're scared of anything. Well, I used to think I was pretty tough, too. One night, I was at the bar in Skidmore with Ken and I was a little loaded, so I said, 'Ken, if you're such a great sportsman, how'd you miss old Bowen-kamp, since he was standing right next to you? And how'd you miss Romaine? You must be the worst goddaman shot since Don Knotts.' Ken laughed and said, 'Come on outside. I got something to show you.' We went out to his truck and he reached in and pulled this rifle out real slowly. Let me tell you, he backed me right down, buddy. I thought I was tough--I'm real good with my fits--but I found out that if you put a gun on me, I'll back down every time. Do you know how hard it is for me to say that? You ask anybody who lives around here: What's the best thing you can say about any man? They'll tell you 'He never backed down.' You got that? He never backed down! That's what it means to be a man around here. Well, Ken McElroy backed me right down, just like he did everyone else. Until they got so ashamed of themselves they had to kill him."

•

The office is at what used to be the epicenter of the meat-packing industry: North Kansas City, the corner of Armour and Swift. The business card of a 24-hour bail bondsman is taped to the frame of the door. The paneling is fake walnut. The rug is a piss-yellow shag. The man behind the desk is short, fat and neckless. He wears a three-piece suit made from material so shiny you expect to see your reflection in his vest. Diamond rings gleam from the third finger of each hand. His name is Richard Eugene McFadin and he used to be McElroy's lawyer. Now he represents Trena McElroy. who has instructed him to do everything in his power to see that McElroy's killers are caught and punished.

In Skidmore--where the hatred expressed at the mention of the name McFadin is only slightly less intense than the hatred that was felt for ken McElroy--most people consider him a sleazy opportunist who is using McElroy's widow to attract a fortune from Hollywood. McFadin denies this vociferoulsy; even so, he would hardly be the only person connected to the murder who is trying to turn a buck. In Skidmore, people offered to sell me everything from bits of bone, bloody hair and teeth scavenged from McElroy's pickup to snapshots of the murder scene. And there are rumors that the Bowenkamps, Warren and Henry have signed exclusive contracts for their stories.

"I'm doing this gratuitously" is the way McFadin puts it. "I don't stand to make a dime. But this vigilante stuff bothers me and I'm interested in seeing justice done. Despite what they say in Skidmore, this is a classic example of vigilante-type activity. Why do I say that? Look at the evidence. A whole community watches this murder. The prosecutor has the murderer identified by an eyewitness. But no charges are filed. Now, what does that say about the American legal system?"

On McFadin's desk are three copies of the issue of people that carried a story portraying McElroy asa redneck sociopath who terrorized a community for a decade. In one of his file cabinets, McFadin has a manila folder three inches thick stuffed with press clippings about the murder. "The Beast of Nodaway County" is what one reporter called McElroy. though McFadin's description of his former client is strikingly different. Instead of the brooding sadist and master thief depicted by most people in Skidmore. McFadin describes McElroy as a quiet man, a loner, who, though unable to read or write, had a remarkable talent for trading livestrock and for buying and selling old furniture?

"If McElroy had lived 100 years ago, none of this would have happened," McFadin told me. "He would have fit in back then, but he didn't fit in with those farmers in Skidmore at all. You know, you don't have to be a criminal for people to dislike you. Some people are hostile towarde anyone who's different. McElroy didn't live like the other people in Skidmore. Instead of working all day in a field, he was able to support himself with his wits, and they resented that. And sometimes he lived with two or three women at the same time, and people up there thought that was immoral. But McElroy was proud of who he was, and he was absolutely without fear. Right or wrong, he wouldn't back down from anyone or anything. If anybody told him he couldn't do something--like, 'Don't come into our town'--he'd take it as a challenge and they'd have to keep him out. He knew they were talking about getting rid of him, and he told me about it."

Because McFadin doubts that Del Clement will ever be indicted in Nodaway County, much less be convicted by a jury of his peers, he has written to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith, urging the Justice Department to prosecute Clement in Federal court for conspiracy to deprive Ken Rex McElroy of his civil rights.

"Listen, I'm no fool," McFadin said. "I know the law's not perfect. I know there's no such thing as real equality, that the law favors some people--rich people, mostly--and hurts others. But as imperfect as the law is, it's all we've got standing between us and chaos."

•

The Nodaway County courthouse in Maryville is an elaborate brick building recognizable for miles around by its spirelike clock tower, which rises a full 100 feet over the rest of the town. During the autumn of 1981, the front steps of the courthouse were blocked by a cordon of rope and a sign: Courthouse Under Repair. Please Use Rear Entrance. A little more than 50 years earlier, on January 9, 1931, a mob of 3000 enraged citizens had gathered before those same steps to abduct a 27-year-old black man named Raymond Gunn, who had been accused of raping and killing a popular young schoolteacher. Although the evidence against Gunn was at best circumstantial and the National Guard had been called to maintain order until his trial, the size and the mood of the mob convinced the sheriff to relinquish his prisoner. Gunn was then marched three miles to the schoolhouse where the crime had been committed, chained to a crossbeam, doused with gasoline and burned. According to the account of the killing in the Maryville Daily Forum, the mob chanted "To hell with the law" as Gunn was set on fire. No one was ever charged with the murder. When asked about it today, the few people I talked with who had witnessed that killing said it was best to forget it had ever happened.

David Baird, the Nodaway County prosecutor, is 28. The son of a local feed-store owner, Baird returned to Maryville after law school and, with less than three years' experience as a Legal Aid attorney, was appointed to his current job when the elected prosecutor unexpectedly resigned. Baird has soft brown hair and a chinless, cherubic face and wears tortoise-shell aviator glasses. He is intelligent, articulate and ambitious.

Despite his youth and his inexperience, Baird managed to distinguish himself with his first major trial as prosecutor: case number CR 880-2027, State of Missouri vs. Ken Rex McElroy. According to those who saw the trial, Baird handled himself competently, and although the verdict was a compromise and the sentence much lighter than the 15 years he had requested, Baird was widely commended for his performance. In fact, he was something of a local hero. For four days. Then the trouble started again.

On the night of June 30, the sheriff called Baird to report that McElroy, armed with a rifle, had threatened four men in the tavern at Skidmore. Although Baird filed a motion to have his bond revoked, McElroy remained at large. Ten days later, he was killed.

Still basking in the glory of his victory in court, Baird was suddenly confronted with the unenviable job of prosecuting a group of respectable tax-paying citizens for conspiracy to commit murder in the first degree. The task was made even more difficult when Trena named Clement as one of the killers. Consider Baird's dilemma: If he prosecuted Clement--an action that would be so unpopular in Nodaway County that he would certainly forfeit any hopes for a successful career there--it was unlikely that a local jury would convict him, no matter how much evidence was presented. But if he didn't indict Clement, Baird might expose himself to Federal conspiracy charges and, at least, censure by the Missouri attorney general. Baird instinctively passed the buck to NOMIS.

During a ten-day investigation, NOMIS officers interviewed more than 100 people, many of whom were eye-witnesses. At the end of the investigation, the officers in charge urged Baird to indict Clement, arguing that failure to do so would encourage more vigilante killings. Baird, however, already knew how to escape the dilemma with both his professional integrity and his career intact. The will of the people is the law of the land. He would let the people decide what to do about McElroy's death.

Thus, in late July, a coroner's jury was convened. After hearing testimony from six witnesses--including Trena McElroy, who told them she had watched Del Clement shoot her husband--the jury determined that McElroy's death was the work of "a person or persons unknown."

The ball was back in Baird's court, and he was ready for it. He had already requested a formal grand-jury investigation--the first such request in Maryville in more than 13 years. It was granted, and for six weeks, the grand jury listened to testimony from more than 40 witnesses without issuing an indictment. Finally, on September 25, in a courtroom crowded with reporters, the grand jury was dismissed. There were television cameras outside the court, and Baird, aware that he would be asked to meet the press, was dressed in an elegant three-piece suit. A wide smile--composed in equal parts of relief and satisfaction--creased his chubby face. Not only had he weathered the storm that threatened to sink his career but he had advanced himself in the eyes of his public as well.

"Did some weakness of the legal system force the people of Skidmore to kill McElroy by failing to protect them?" Baird was asked.

"I can't see any failure of the legal system that was responsible," Baird, the legal system's representative in Nodaway County, answered proudly. "We did everything that was possible to send McElroy to prison and we've done everything that's required to investigate his death. As far as I'm concerned, the legal system is working perfectly."

•

In late July, two weeks after McElroy was murdered, a full-page ad appeared in the Maryville Daily Forum that read, in part: The people of Skidmore are some of the best, friendliest and most hospitable people in the country. The courts should protect the innocent, not unleash the guilty on them to vent their anger. Let us give credit where credit is due ... to the good people of Skidmore. Let us also give the blame for the problem to where it is due: the court system and their liberal attitude.

The ad was signed "Norman Robbins Associates." Because Robbins is generally considered to be the wealthiest, most powerful politician in the county, I went to see him at his office in Maryville.

Robbins is a man of about 60, whose wizened face is peppered with stubble. A veritable rogues' gallery graces one wall of his office: Nixon, Wallace, Reagan, Goldwater and General Curtis LeMay. All of the photos are autographed and addressed fondly to Robbins; the inscription from Curt LeMay is almost a love letter. On the same wall hangs a sign that says, You Loot, We Shoot, and beneath it, a 50-channel police-radio scanner.

"You want to see what I call justice?" Robbins asked. He handed me a loaded Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum that, when directed at the human midriff, would have an effect similar to that of a ten-pound sledge encountering an overripe watermelon. "This is what I call justice--judge and jury all wrapped into one.

"Listen, McElroy was scum," Robbins said. "He was a guy who needed killing. For years and years, he stole from everybody around here, and he was good at it. He was an expert thief and there just wasn't any way the law could catch him. People were losing hogs and tools and tractors, and they were fed up. They were scared of him, too.

"So they had that meeting. A trial is what it amounted to," Robbins continued, now, perhaps, mixing the mythology of vigilantism with what is actually known about the killing in Skidmore. "Everybody who was there had a chance to disagree with the verdict, but nobody did, and the sentence was agreed on. Then the $50 and $100 bills went down on the table; and, presto, an hour later, he was dead.

"Hell, you ain't seen the end of this by a long shot. There's eight more like McElroy been marked for death. Do you know that some judges in this state let criminals go free because they say the prisons are too full to hold them? Well, I got a solution for that: If you took the top ten percent of all the criminals in the state and eliminated them--you know, by execution--why, the prisons wouldn't be crowded at all. No, sirree, this vigilante business ain't over. There's going to be a lot more killing until the courts start to give us some protection from criminals like McElroy."

I left Robbins' office and walked past the courthouse to the Shady Lady for a beer. It was a windy day in early October; the workmen repairing the courthouse steps wore gloves and mufflers; the weather had turned cold.

Inside the bar, I chose a stool beside a farmer I knew from Skidmore. He said that his wife had left him two days before and he had been drinking steadily since then. He appeared to be about as drunk as a man can be and still remain conscious. He asked if I'd found out anything about McElroy and the way he died. I told him I had learned quite a bit but nothing that offered much comfort. He nodded sympathetically.

"Ken was a pretty good old boy," he said, punctuating his speech with slugs of beer, "but he had no business tanglin' with all those people. Of course, nobody in Skidmore had any business rilin' him up like they did, either, and they certainly didn't have no business killin' him.

"Tryin' to understand what happened here is just like a cat tryin' to hold on to a big old steel ball. The harder that cat tries to get a grip, the quicker he slips off. This here thing just ain't got no heroes to it that I can see. This here is a case where everybody was wrong."

"It didn't take long to hear tales of rape, torture and murder so gruesome they made my skin crawl."

"The first shot shattered the rear window of the truck and struck McElroy an inch below his right ear lobe."

"One day, he'd be as nice as the next guy; the next day, he'd come right out of the blue and shoot you."