SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: The Strange Unsolved Murder of Ken McElroy

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The murder of Ken McElroy is an example of the kind of small-town justice so well served that it seems like it's gotta be a movie.

And it was a movie, not a very good one, starring Brian Denahy.

But the actual crime came first, and it was true, hence its inclusion on this playlist.

At any rate, the town of Skidmore, Missouri doesn't play around if they're pushed too far.

You can bet on that.

Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Hey and welcome to the podcast.

I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too pushing us around as usual for this episode of Stuff You Should Know.

Our second episode for us of the new year and

why didn't we save like a pretty happy one to get going with?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Probably because we knew we were going to be so bummed out after Jonestown, we needed something that was a pick-me-up.

And what's crazy is this story actually is a pick-me-up compared to Jonestown.

Oh, boy.

That's tough to parse out.

So thank you to Livia for

diving into this tough story.

And also, this episode, we want to issue a very big trigger warning

because in it, we are going to talk about a very bad man

and some of the bad things he did, which included sexual assault.

and

some of which were with minors.

So

trigger warning.

Know that going in.

There's no way around it.

There's very few stories that have like a clear-cut villain,

but this is one of them.

And the villain who's also the center of our story, the person at the center of our story, is a man named Ken Rex McElroy.

Yeah.

Which, I mean,

all you need to hear is that name, really, I think.

And it kind of just

puts a weird chill down your spine that you can't quite identify

Yeah, this is a story that you may have heard of before.

There is no shortage of content about Ken McElroy.

There was a book written in 1988 by Harry McLean, a crime writer, called In Broad Daylight.

You know it's coming.

Colon, A Murder in Skidmore, Missouri.

There was a...

documentary just a few years ago in 2019 called a documentary series actually called No One Saw a Thing of which I watched at the first episode.

How is it?

I didn't get a chance to yet.

Well, we'll talk about it.

It's okay.

It's got like a 7 plus on IMDb.

That's really saying something.

Yeah.

Chuck gives it a 6 minus.

Okay.

Still, it's not too bad.

It's okay.

I mean, not a ton of light was shed, so maybe it's because if I went into it blind, it might have been a little better.

Gotcha.

But there's also a 1991 TV movie starring Brian Dennehy and Marcia Gay Hardin, which I actually

watched a very very bad YouTube version of it, mostly.

I scrubbed through a little bit of it, but it's actually not terrible for a 1991 TV movie, largely because Brian Dennehy is perfectly cast and awesome.

Yeah, he really is.

I don't understand why they changed the names.

Did Harry McLean change the names for In Broad Daylight?

I didn't read the book, but I don't know.

Sometimes they do that with TV movies.

Huh.

Well, regardless.

It's the innocent, you know?

I scrubbed ahead ahead to the last

probably 30 minutes, saw the good stuff.

That's kind of all you need.

And you're right.

Brian Denahy was great in it.

And Marcia Gay Harden did a great job at the really important point.

Yeah, she's a tremendous actor, as was Dennehy, R.I.P.

Brian Dennehy.

So

Kenrex McElroy, he was from Skidmore, Missouri.

That's where this story takes place.

He was the 15th of 16 kids, from what I saw.

He was born in 1934.

And you can be the wealthiest person in your state and have 16 kids and you're still going to be hard Scrabble.

Sure.

His dad wasn't the wealthiest person in the state.

So the McElroys grew up kind of doing what they could to make their own way.

And Ken himself,

I saw either he made it up to age 15 in school, which is a surprising statistic to me after I know a little more about him.

I also saw that he was illiterate, which I would definitely believe more than the fact that he made it up to age 15 in school.

Either way, at a young age, he started taking up crime.

You get the impression not just out of necessity, but also probably out of a certain amount of pleasure.

Yeah, and this was,

to frame it, in the 1940s.

He was born in 34.

So by the time he was criming, It was the 1940s.

One thing we should mention is, and I'm glad Livia dug this up, and this is no way excusing any of his behaviors, but when he was 18 years old, he was working construction, and there was an accident where some very heavy cribbing fell about 30 feet and hit him in the head.

He had a construction helmet, but it cut his scalp, so it clearly provided minimal protection.

And he said that he had a steel plate implanted and had episodes of like blackout episodes and pain throughout the rest of his life.

And it should be noted that

one common denominator in many cases of

sick people who do awful things is head injury when they're younger.

So that

very well may have been the case.

Again, not excusing anything he did, but we're trying to paint a full picture here.

He was like a modern-day Phineas Gage.

Yeah, exactly.

And like you said, it seemed like he enjoyed criming from a young age.

He was a pretty,

I mean, this is before the accident, even.

He was was a pretty disturbed young man.

Yeah, oh, safe to say.

Yeah, I would say, I would definitely agree with that.

But he did do stuff.

He wasn't just like a layabout.

Like he was a kind of an industrious criminal.

He also trained hunting dogs.

He was a dealer of antiques.

a buyer and seller.

But more than anything, he was a cattle wrestler.

Apparently, the year before his death,

the county that Skidaway is in, or Skidmore is in, Nottaway County,

the cattle thefts were six times that of any other place in the state.

It led the state in cattle thefts.

And apparently, a lot of that was Ken McElroy.

He was flush with cash.

He would buy new cars.

He could support, he ended up having at least 10 kids, could support them all um he he had a lot of money and all of it essentially was from crime because he had a tiny little farm and he wasn't making much if any money off of that he was making it from from stealing yeah and when we say he had a lot of money it's not the kind of

it's not wealth he had the kind of money for a

criminal in the 1960s in Skidmore, Missouri.

He had Skidmore money.

Yeah, which is to say, oh, I hope there's no Skidmaurians.

There's a couple hundred of them.

Well, listening to us?

Yeah, I just assume the whole town listens to us anyway.

They're probably so sick of the story.

But he's the kind of money guy that, like, he always had a few grand in his pocket with a big fat money roll.

Yeah.

Like, that kind of dude.

He was a big guy.

He was like 6'2 or 6'3,

had this sort of, here again, kind of like Jim Jones, men of the time, had this jet black hair and these huge sideburns.

He was imposing, but he picked on people smaller than him, picked on women and children and young girls and took advantage of all these people.

And he was arrested and charged at least 21 times without being convicted.

And if you're thinking like, how in the world does that happen when like people know he's committing crimes,

he's getting arrested of these committing these crimes, It's because he had a very,

I guess, good, slippery attorney named Richard Gene McFadden, who was supposedly a mob attorney in Kansas City.

And upon their first meeting, he was like, you can't afford me.

And McElroy said, let me be the judge of that, pulled out that big, you know, fat roll from his pocket, threw it on the desk.

And McFadden was delighted to have him as a cash-paying client who listened to him.

Yeah.

So McFadden was

so good at getting him off.

Well, actually, they worked together.

McFadden was good at getting him off, but

he probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Ken McElroy hadn't have been also a very active participant in getting himself off.

Yeah.

So Gene McFadden would get delay after delay, all these procedural delays to just really put as much time between Ken McElroy's arrest and the actual trial date as possible.

And then Ken McElroy would get busy intimidating witnesses.

And if it got closer and closer to trial and a jury was impaneled, he would intimidate the jurors.

He would threaten their lives.

He would threaten the lives of their families.

He would threaten to burn their houses down.

He would threaten to kill them.

He would threaten

not just with words.

He would intimidate them by parking in their driveways, by brandishing guns at them, by shooting guns in the air sometimes in the night outside of their house.

Like,

just, it would take a couple of these

for the average person to be like, I can't, this is not what I've signed up for.

This guy is scaring me to death.

Some people lasted longer than others, but most of the time, almost in every single time, Eventually, he would intimidate enough of the witnesses that the cases would fall apart.

And that is how he became what Crime Library referred to as this Teflon-coated hick.

Yeah, absolutely.

Like, he shot a guy in the stomach in July of 1976, a guy named Romaine Henry.

And yes, you heard me right.

He was a farmer.

Spelled exactly like the lettuce.

Was he named after the lettuce?

Because was he a lettuce farmer?

I don't know.

Did they farm lettuce in Missouri?

They did in Yuma, Arizona.

I think just for the sake of this story, yes, he absolutely was a Romaine lettuce farmer.

His parents raised him to be one.

And named him after that lettuce.

So he was shot in the stomach with a shotgun, was not killed, and

got away with it.

He, you know, in the documentary, like Romaine Henry pulls up his shirt and he's like, here's where he shot me.

And court witnesses, he, you know, like you said earlier, he was one of his side hustles was raising and training and selling hunting dogs.

And he was well liked by some people, like the people that he dealt with with these hunting dogs.

Other crimy type people liked him.

So he had this stable of dudes that would go to court and testify on his behalf and provide him with alibis and say, like, he didn't shoot him in the stomach.

He was with us at the time of the shooting.

So he got away with shooting Romaine Henry in the stomach with a shotgun even.

Yeah, and just to make sure that you understand what kind of person Ken McElroy was, the reason that he shot Romaine Henry in the stomach was because Romaine Henry approached him and said, hey, will you please not shoot pheasants out of season on my land anymore?

And Ken McElroy responded by shooting him in the stomach because he told him basically to stop shooting birds illegally on that man's land.

Yeah.

It didn't matter who you were.

There was a cop even, a highway patrolman named Richard Stratton.

Hashtag hero.

Yeah, who had plenty of run-ins, obviously, with McElroy, because like you said, this is a town of

a few hundred people at the time, I think.

Yep.

Maybe like four or five hundred even.

So everyone knew this guy, including obviously Richard Stratton.

And he had a bunch of run-ins.

And so McElroy started threatening his home and his family.

One day his wife Margaret was on her way to church.

She got in the car to go to church and McElroy walks up to the car, puts a shotgun in her face, and he did that to cops' wives.

He did it to judges.

The county magistrate, Montgomery Wilson, was so fearful that he wouldn't take these cases.

He would have them moved to other nearby counties.

Like he was, people called him the town bully, but that is the kindest way to describe him because he was also a child molester and rapist.

Yeah, I say we take a break and then come back and talk about this.

All right.

We'll be right back.

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All right, so when we left off,

I leveled a pretty serious allegation, which is absolutely true, that Ken McElroy was a child molester and rapist, and this is 100% true.

The story gets very twisted and convoluted here, but

it's kind of hard to follow along because

he was married and then had a girlfriend and a wife at the same time, but then another one and then another wooden would come in and they're overlapping and he's having kids with most of them.

And it gets very confusing.

But like you said, he fathered 10 kids.

A lot of them were with underage girls.

He got married for the first time in 1952 when he was 18 and his wife, Alita, was 16.

And he, it's not like he calmed down or anything.

He would

pray and stalk and groom girls as young as 12 and 13 years old,

one of which was a 15-year-old named Sharon.

And

it was sort of a familiar pattern where

he would groom and stalk these young teenage girls.

He would abuse them.

He would rape them and threaten them with death and somehow end up with them.

And not somehow, through coercion and threat and intimidation.

Yeah.

And

he would get, so he would be married already.

And like you said, he'd be stalking and raping and abusing some some other younger girl at the same time.

And then

inevitably, when charges were about to be brought against him because of his

rape and abuse and in one case, shooting of one of the girls,

he would convince them to marry him.

He would go to his wife and be like, we have to get divorced because I got to marry this girl.

so that she won't testify against me.

And he would be successful.

And if

they refused at first, he would use the same tactics that he used to intimidate witnesses to intimidate these girls into marrying him and becoming his wife.

And then astoundingly, he would go find a younger girl and start the whole thing over again.

Like this guy got married more than once to keep the girl that he was raping from testifying against him.

Because back then, a wife couldn't testify against her husband.

Yeah, so I mean, we don't need to get into every single one of those details, but suffice it to say, this was happening over and over and over remarkably.

Sometimes, you know, obviously these, these girls' parents would put up a fight and get involved.

And he would intimidate and threaten them to the point where

at one point, he, and this is the wife he had sort of when the final incident went down.

Trina McLeod, who he got together with, this is just so sick, when she was 12 or 13 years old, was like picking her up from the school bus.

Yeah.

And school officials were like, something's going on with this creep.

No one ever did anything.

Got her pregnant at 14 and moved her into the house he shared with the previous young girl that he was with.

So he had a son with Trina in 1973 and a couple of others with this young girl,

Alice, and went to Trina's parents' house.

They obviously are saying like, you can't keep our daughter like this.

And he held them back at gunpoint, brought the girls back, continued to abuse them, and then eventually would burn down the house of Trina McLeod's parents and shoot and kill their family dog.

Yeah.

Is he a bad enough guy at this point,

dear listener?

Apparently, he

somehow Trina ended up being treated by a doctor somewhere or other, and the doctor got the story out of her.

And the doctor was like, wait

can you tell me all that one more time and i guess she did and the doctor called the authorities and this time um mclroy was in a lot of trouble and they took trina to child services and took her to a family foster a foster family and he started stalking the foster family and stalking their biological kids and threatening to rape and kill them and that foster family would not give in.

They were protecting Trina.

Up until the time, Trina's like, all right, I forgive forgive you.

I'm going back to you.

And I'm sure that foster family was like, oh my God, I can't believe

I can't believe this.

Like,

you can't make that decision.

And she did.

And he got away with it yet again because he got her to marry him to keep her from being able to even testify against her.

And Jean McFadden,

in

a show of just how sleazy lawyers can be,

served as the witness to their wedding.

I think she was 15 at the time.

And at the end of the ceremony, got her to sign a document saying all the things she told that doctor were lies.

And they lived as husband and wife.

That's right.

So this is,

this was his final wife, young Trina McLeod.

He apparently got her parents, because, you know, you needed to have permission to get married at that age.

And her parents acquiesced because he threatened to burn down the new house that they either bought or built.

And this is where I get to the documentary.

Like a lot of it should be taken with a grain of salt because some of the local townspeople they interview are clearly sort of

just maybe don't have all the facts straight.

Because someone in that documentary said that he burned their house down again and shot their other new dog.

And I didn't see anywhere else where that happened.

I think it was just a threat or whatever.

He killed a monkey, too.

Right.

That's what I heard.

That's a good deal with the documentary.

So this is going on.

He's terrorizing this town.

Everyone knows he's an awful guy.

He's just,

it can't be overstated what an awful

creep that he is.

And I mean, creep isn't even, that's way too soft to describe a guy like this.

Finally, in 1980,

he sort of pushes his luck, as Livy would call this section.

Things kind of come a little bit to a head.

There are these local shopkeepers.

They ran the B ⁇ B grocery there in town, Lois and Ernest Bo, Bowenkamp.

And they,

apparently, his, you know, his kids would go in there and shoplift all the time, his very young kids.

And one of his young daughters, her name was Tonya or Tanya, I'm not sure how that's pronounced.

I guess

Tanya, was like four years old and was stealing candy from the store.

They confronted this young girl.

And of course, McElroy wouldn't stand for that.

So he starts up with his usual routine, parking outside their store, staring them down, brandishing a shotgun and carrying it around with him.

And in July of that year, McElroy approached Bo Boenkamp, the grocery store owner.

They had a brief conversation and he shot this 70-year-old man through the neck, again, not killing him, but wounding him.

Yeah.

And so Bo and

Lois Boenkamp were like beloved in the town.

Oh, yeah.

This is a big deal.

He had assaulted a beloved elderly shopkeeper, grocer,

who fed the town.

And

even McElroy knew it was a big deal.

He fled.

He tried to get out of the state.

And you mentioned

Richard Stratton,

the Missouri Highway Patrolman, who had run-ins over and over and over again with Ken McElroy.

Well, he was out on patrol that night when that happened, or that day, I guess.

And he got the all-points bulletiner to be on the lookout for Ken McElroy and at the time the sheriff's office the rest of the highway patrol they were setting up roadblocks looking on every highway that they could for Ken McElroy but Richard Stratton said no I know this guy he's got a police scanner he knows exactly where they are he's gonna take every back road he can find to get to Kansas and get out of the state and lay low for a while and Richard Stratton said I know he's gonna have to go through Fillmore, Missouri to get to Kansas, and I'm gonna stake that place out.

And in short order, Ken McElroy came driving through in his Silverado with Trina in the seat, and he ended up getting busted by Richard Stratton.

He was caught.

And this, again, even he knew this one was a big deal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He finally was taken into custody.

This time he,

I don't know if he just had an instinct that there was probably no way out of this one, but he hired his trustee lawyer again, McFadden, who said, all right, let's move this thing to Harrison County, first of all.

And here's our plan is we're going to say that this was a dispute with Boeing camp,

this sort of argument you guys had over your daughter stealing, and that he pulled a knife on you and that it was self-defense.

And you were forced to do that.

He was still using his, you know, typical playbook intimidation tactics on the Boeing camps, but they refused to budge, which was great.

So

that was their defense.

We should also mention while this is going on, on, he continues his reign of terror on the town.

There was a Christian church whose minister was Tim Warren.

And if you don't know anything about sort of small town, actually probably even larger town ministers, part of their job, they don't just get up there and preach on Sundays, is they have to minister to the congregation and their community.

So they will do things.

Preachers and ministers will come and check in on people if they're sick.

They will visit people in the hospital if they're injured or, you know, or having some troubles.

And this is what Tim Warren was doing when he checked in on

or had planned to check in on Lois Bowen camp.

And he got a call saying, don't go see old man Bowen camp.

It's going to be bad news for you.

He did it undercover by borrowing a friend's truck and going in that, but got a call, was like, hey, I knew that that was you there in your friend's truck.

Nice try.

And if you do this again, I'm going to rape and murder your wife.

Yeah.

So

the Reverend, the local Reverend, Reverend Lovejoy is just told that his wife is going to be raped and murdered, right?

That's right.

I didn't get what the point of that was.

Did you?

I didn't see any interpretation of that.

I just saw it explained or described.

I never saw it explained.

Well, I think just anyone

sort of on the Boen camp side,

because who knows, like the Reverend could have been called to testify or something.

Who knows?

I got you.

That makes sense.

I think he was just trying to shut it all down,

kind of like with the town marshal, right?

Yeah, so the town marshal, nice setup.

David Dunbar was 24 at the time.

And if you were town marshal of Skidmore, you

not only had to call the sheriff when there was an actual real trouble because you weren't really allowed to do anything, you had to provide your own gun.

The city would pay for your ammunition, but you had to provide your own gun.

And David Dunbar was like, I don't even care about this job.

I took this job because I wanted to win a bet that I had with my buddy for a case of beer.

Right.

And so, in short order, he gets pulled into this whole thing

by Ken McElroy, who pulls a gun on him, holds him at gunpoint.

I saw for like 20 minutes at the Pumpkin Festival.

Yeah.

Not Pumpkin Chunkin.

No, the Pumpkin Festival or the Pumpkin Show.

That's what I saw it as.

Yeah.

They chunked no punks.

Yes, no.

But David Dunbar,

David Dunbar did say, like, that's that's it for me, man.

I really didn't care that much about this job anyway.

I'm not going to stand up to Ken McElroy.

You guys need to find yourself another marshal.

And they said, fine, we will.

And then they couldn't.

So the town was without a marshal, even for a little while.

They probably didn't need one.

I mean, it doesn't sound like it was very effective as positions go.

And also, the other thing I said, they need to call the sheriff.

I saw someone intimate that the sheriff may not have either taken Ken McElroy and the trouble he caused caused seriously, or he may have been

a friend or a sympathetic ally or something to Ken McElroy because apparently he was not super responsive to Ken McElroy trouble calls.

You know, he was interviewed in this documentary.

He certainly didn't seem sympathetic.

He might have been intimidated as well.

Yeah, I guess that's possible.

I wouldn't blame him, frankly.

So this takes more than a year, or I'm sorry, close to a year to come to trial because of all the delays that, you know, McFadden, that's his game.

Finally, it does, and there is another green, like almost everyone in this story seems like they were like very young at the time.

Yeah.

The prosecutor, his name was David Baird.

He was a super young attorney.

He was the county prosecutor, so named, just a few months earlier.

And all of a sudden, this kid is charged with prosecuting the case.

He convicted him of second-degree assault and sentenced him to two years in jail.

And this was the very first conviction after this years-long reign of terror on this town that he faced.

Of course, McFadden appealed.

The judge said, you're out on $40,000 bail.

And Baird said, oh, it sounds fine to me.

Yeah.

So, like, after shooting Bo Boeing,

getting caught by the highway patrol, he gets let out on $40,000 bond, which he probably paid his bail in cash from his pocket.

And the town was like, you got to be kidding me.

Like, you let this guy free.

Okay, we will hang in there.

We're just going to ride this out.

And almost immediately, Ken McElroy was like, How can I get my bond revoked?

I know.

I'll go show up at the local tavern in Skidmore, the DNG tavern, and I'll bring an M1 carbine rifle with bayonet on me, and I'll talk about how I'm going to use it to finish off Bo Boeing camp in front of everybody in the bar.

And that's exactly what he did.

And there just happened to be a couple of brave souls.

One of them was Pete Ward.

I think it was he and his sons who went and

confronted him about it and then went and filed a complaint and said, this guy needs his bond revoked.

And a bond hearing was set up 10 days from then.

And that set up all of the machinations that were now going to bring this story to its climax.

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So I said that

Ken McElroy has basically just brandished an arm.

He's walking around town talking about he's going to finish off the guy.

He's been now convicted of assaulting,

but he's out on bail.

And Pete Ward and his sons go file a complaint and a bond hearing to see if his bond should be revoked is set up for 10 days.

And those 10 days pass, and on the 10th day, the day of his bond hearing, a group of farmers around town who have just had it up to here with Ken McElroy come to the American Legion Hall to basically go to court with Pete Ward and Bo Boeingkamp and show solidarity, but also show that these guys are protected.

You better not mess with them.

Yeah, absolutely.

By most accounts, it was

most of the adults in the town were at this American Legion Hall meeting.

I think there were like a little over 100 adults maybe living there, and it seemed like 80 of them were at this American Legion Hall meeting.

Yeah, there was a lot of people there.

So they find out there that McFadden had gotten that hearing delayed, that bond hearing delayed for 10 more days.

So instead of July 10th, it's going to be July 20th.

They called the sheriff, Danny Estes in, that we talked about, and he basically said, you

there's nothing that we can do about it.

And this is where I think that maybe, I don't think he was friendly to McElroy.

I think he was just a law-abiding-abiding sheriff that was like, you know, what do you want to do?

Like, go kill this guy in the street?

Like, we can't do that.

All we can do is keep tabs on this guy and, you know, stick together.

It's probably a good idea.

So they said, that's a great idea.

We should form a large group and stalk him, follow him around.

They're strengthened in numbers.

If we get enough enough of us together, like, what's this guy going to do?

Kill all of us?

Right.

There are some people that were at this meeting that was like, you know, no one was talking about doing anything more than that.

Other people said, yeah, there were some people that were so, you know, pissed off about all this.

They were like, we need to take matters into our own hands, vigilante style.

And they found out at this meeting that he's back in town with his wife.

They went to the tavern, the DNG tavern.

It's still morning, mind you.

They're in there drinking, and they all go down there.

They walk in there as a group and fill this tavern, about 50 to 60 people.

And it's clear what's going on.

McElroy would not be intimidated.

He did leave, but he apparently just sort of thumbed his nose in their faces, bought a six-pack to go, and was like, you know, let's get out of here, Trina, and walked out.

Yeah, so this crowd was like, okay, I kind of like this following this guy around, watching his every step thing.

And they actually walked out of the bar with him.

And supposedly, there was between 30 and 60 people.

Some people had cleared out.

Romaine Henry, whom he'd shot in the stomach before, said that he sensed that this crowd was possibly out for blood and he didn't want to have anything to do with it.

So he left.

So not everybody who was in the VFW hall or the American Legion hall was in the parking lot of the DNG tavern, but a significant number of people were, and they had Ken McElroy and Trina surrounded in Ken McElroy's Silverado.

Ken McElroy apparently had the car turned on, still had it in park.

He pulled out a cigarette and I saw that he either had just lit it or was about to light it.

when somebody shot him in the head with a high-powered hunting rifle and then followed that up with a shot to the neck with Trina right next to him, who was suddenly covered in his blood.

Yeah, through the back windshield of the pickup truck.

I imagine, instantly killed him with that first shot.

His foot slams on the gas and this thing is revving at like full bore, this old truck, starts smoking and eventually blows the engine and it just goes silent.

Trina apparently urinated herself, was initially told to stay in the car or she would be killed too,

and then gets hustled out of this truck into a nearby bank, and a bunch of more shooting happens

until the shooting stops.

It's about 20 seconds worth of shooting.

People go up, peek in this truck.

McElroy is hunched over.

No one helps the guy at all.

And in the end, they figure out he was hit by

two different

bullet types.

So, two different guns had actually made contact with his body, two different bullets.

So,

you know, in the documentary, again, there were people that were like, you know, five or six people shot him, three or four people shot him.

Like, everyone sort of got their own story.

But as far as the autopsy goes, there were two different calibers of bullet.

Yeah, because here's the twist to this whole story.

We don't know, at the very least, the law can't say who killed Kim McElroy.

There were between

30 to 60 people who were standing right there when he was killed from several feet away, and no one saw a thing.

The town circled the wagons and clammed up to this day.

Yeah.

The town fully cleared out right after that.

And like he was just sitting there alone in the middle of town, dead in his truck.

Apparently, they like went into some local businesses.

and this one woman in the documentary said, We were just sort of hanging out in there.

And someone came in and said, It's over.

You can sleep tonight.

Now just stand behind us.

Yeah.

And they did, man.

I mean, they did.

The law, I saw, depending on who you ask, the law took this very seriously, like any other murder and investigated it and tried to prosecute it.

Others are like, yeah, the local law didn't try that hard because everybody knew that this was actually justice, even though it was a grotesque form of justice.

Either way, no one was ever prosecuted.

No one was even ever

arrested or charged with the murder of Ken McElroy because

not a single witness would crack.

There was apparently one witness who shortly after said that they saw a man named Del Clement and another man speed off very quickly right after the shooting.

And that person apparently said, Oh, I'm sorry, I was mistaken.

That's the closest the cops got to a witness

statement about who may have shot Ken McElroy.

No one would say anything.

Some people were interviewed five to six times, and no one cracked.

They would not crack.

And yet, whoever said that they saw Del Clement speed off was probably telling the truth because Trina,

Ken's wife, who by this time is 24 and looks a lot like somebody who would have been friends with Eileen Wernos,

says that she turned around right before the shooting started and saw very clearly Del Clement, owner, co-owner of the DNG Tavern, taking aim and shooting Ken McElroy in the head with his deer rifle.

Yeah, he was not only the owner of the tavern, but he had livestock that had been pilfered.

Apparently was a big hothead.

And I get the sense, took great pleasure in pulling that trigger is the sense I got.

There was a lady in the documentary, and again, this is the grain of salt, that said that the main gun was thrown in a river.

So I was like, oh, very interesting.

I hadn't heard that anywhere else.

But she also said right after that she heard that they had McElroy's head in a

head somewhere in a freezer thing.

So they couldn't do like more, I guess, bullet ballistics work or whatever.

Yeah, you couldn't find it because it was stolen stolen by a monkey.

Yeah, I don't think that happened.

There was another guy in there named Britt Small, and I get the feeling they just kind of gathered up whoever was still around and was like, you know, talk to me.

And Britt was a local guy, a Vietnam veteran, who was like, you know what?

The only mistake they made is that they let Trina live.

I would have killed him in his driveway.

I would have ambushed them both, killed her and him, and burned his house down.

That's what I would have done.

Well, she, if you read newspaper accounts like immediately after, Kansas City Star had a couple of articles like the week after.

Like she's scared to death or she sounded scared to death that she was going to be next or that her kids were going to be murdered.

And then, of course, the townspeople that they interviewed for the same article are like, no one wishes her any ill will.

Right.

You know, she's not in any danger, but she swore that she was told to stay out of Skidmore, don't ever come back, or else she was going to get it and her kids would be after that.

It's, I don't know.

It probably just depends on which town person you talk to.

I I mean, both things can be true.

They could have felt like she was a victim, but also please leave.

Yeah, exactly.

And apparently, when she was hustled off to the bank, whoever did that saved her life, because even if they hadn't been aiming for her, she probably would have gotten hit by a stray bullet after that second round.

But

when she was hustled to the bank, there was like a crowd, like you said, of people there that seemed to be just sitting there watching.

Like people knew what was about to happen or what was going down.

And she said they didn't need to do them like that.

And someone said they had no choice.

So even if you didn't agree with

that mob justice that had taken place and you were a Skidmore resident, at the very least, you weren't about to turn on your

fellow townspeople, certainly not for the likes of somebody like Ken McElroy or Trina.

Yeah.

And in the end, they couldn't.

With only Trina's word, there was nothing they could do.

That young prosecutor Baird and the FBI said, you know,

this is all we've got.

We can't move forward.

Everyone else is saying they don't know what happened.

The FBI closed their investigation on September 2nd, 1982.

And I believe the sheriff, oh no, I'm sorry, the police chief, Hal Riddle, was running the investigation.

And he said, you know, he was really trying to get this case to go to trial because he is a law enforcement officer and they weren't all like great in mob justice.

You know, they're like, we should have handled it to begin with, but you certainly can't handle it this way.

And he said it was the most frustrating case of his career.

And basically, like, this town got away with murder.

Yeah.

And if the local law enforcement didn't work hard enough, that was par for the course.

Because if there was any

theme to this, aside from this horrible bully, it was the local institutions failing the community time after time after time after time.

Yeah.

For any number of reasons, because they were intimidated, because they were corrupt, who knows?

But that was like the subtext of this whole thing: is that this community essentially had to take matters into their own hands, or else this guy was going to eventually kill somebody.

Yeah.

And they just decided that that was not going to happen.

They were going to stop it before it happened.

So it's tough to fault them for what they did, even though I don't agree with that.

I still understand why they did it.

Well, I think you can not agree with mob justice and also say the town of Skidmore and the world was probably better off without this child rapist walking around.

Yeah, no, you're right.

I like your theories.

I'm going to subscribe to your newsletter.

So, as for Clement, the supposed one of the supposed shooters,

he never said a thing about it.

He died in 2009.

Trina in 1985 filed a wrongful death civil case against the mayor, Clement, and the sheriff for $5 million,

settled for $17,600.

The defendants didn't have to admit to any wrongdoing.

They just wanted it to go away.

She got remarried a couple of years before that, in 1983.

So two years after the killing.

And she died in 2012.

And, you know, there was no mention of that life of hers in her obituary.

I think she really put it behind her.

And I hope at some point, you know, there are interviews with her.

That's the one interesting thing about the doc, like

not too long after their interviews with Trina McLeod.

I would hope that at some point she realized that she was a victim.

Yeah, I hope so too.

And came to on that, but who knows?

Because, I mean, you, you, there's a, there, there's a certain amount of like grudging admiration you have for her.

At the very least, it's like, man,

this girl is so twisted.

She was

like a really ardent defendant of her husband's reputation and honor and memory

and like really went would she was really like mad that they had killed him yeah um

one other detail I saw was that she um offered a $5,000 reward for the for information about who who killed him somebody to come forward but she didn't have $5,000 she was putting it up against the movie rights she presumed she would eventually be paid for Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

So I'm not sure.

I don't think anybody would have to five grand anyway, but certainly not a phantom five grand that didn't actually exist yet.

Yeah.

As for the attorney, he was always like, he was never like, oh, you know, I really regret representing that dirtbag.

He was pretty proud of his work.

He had a long career as a lobbyist working in the legislature there in Missouri and apparently would like.

buy copies of McClain's book and have McLean sign them and hand them out to all the delegates in the state senate.

He died in 2012.

Like I said, very proud of his work.

And Stratton, the highway patrolman that we mentioned,

was the guy who in an interview said, you know, they did what they did because we didn't do our job.

And I think he felt forever bad that the law enforcement had failed that town.

Yeah, he also said in that same interview, he knew for sure who did it, and he wasn't ever going to say.

I think it was Clement.

I just don't know who the second shooter was.

The guy that says he would have killed them both and burned their house down claims that he knew the second shooter, but he wasn't saying either.

Yeah.

You got anything else?

I got nothing else.

Quite a story.

Yeah.

Man.

Yeah, thanks.

And thanks, Olivia, for helping us with it.

And since Chuck said good pick, that means, of course, it's time for a brand new listener male.

That's right.

This is a follow-up on our, what I thought was a really good episode that I enjoyed on Kenton Grua and the Grand Canyon River Speed Record.

Great episode on that, guys.

I read the book a few years ago and to answer a question you had about the 11 p.m.

start time.

As I recall, you're correct in their desire to employ the cover of darkness.

There was also another probably more important issue that led to that decision.

Per my recollection of the book, it was the timing of when they would run into the rapids where they eventually

swamped the boat.

It was a stretch they had expected would be the crux of the trip.

As you pointed out, Kenton and his team were tenured, river rats who knew all the river like the back of their hand.

However, the unique dynamics of the unprecedented CFS meant that they were uncertain of exactly how fast they would be moving.

By starting when they did, they were able to more or less ensure that section of the river where they flipped would be squarely in the middle of the day.

A good worst case scenario and good pre-planning.

And that's from Noah.

That sounds like a very reasonable assertion.

Yeah, thanks a lot, Noah.

I'm not going to challenge him on it.

Heck no.

Yeah, okay.

Well, if you want to be like Noah and be like, hey, I got you guys.

You have a question?

I'm a Noah.

Then get in touch with us.

Do it like Noah did.

Do everything like Noah did.

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