Reporters, documentarian people,
newspapers, book writers, tourists
come from all over the world to see Skidmore, Missouri
and where Kenneth Rex McElroy
was shot down on the streets.
It happened 40 years ago.
People are still coming.
People are still asking questions.
Everybody wants to know why or how
a town can keep quiet for 40 years,
and not naming the people they-- that shot him.
Does anybody know what happened?
Does anybody really know what happened?
We had to be violent to settle this country.
This was a very wild country.
We still have places in this country that are totally wild.
Sometimes violence is necessary.
In Skidmore, we just had a bad guy.
The story of Skidmore was more like the Old West.
They call him a bully, a big guy. A bully.
So these others here in town got together and killed the man.
His death created a story that went on and on and on.
You can't hold a secret like that
and not have it affect the psyche of the town.
It's still such a secret.
I know that there are people who know
who shot Ken McElroy.
But, in all those years,
no one has ever talked.
They've shaken the tree and shaken the tree,
and nothing has fallen out.
People don't understand
what drove a whole town to the point
where they felt like they had no other choice.
Skidmore's secret. Skidmore, Missouri.
It is said that there are no secrets in a small town, but in Skidmore,
those who know who killed Ken Rex McElroy, won't say.
Ken McElroy terrorized the town of Skidmore, Missouri for more than ten years.
The locals called him "Bad Dog."
He raped a 13-year-old girl and then married her,
so she couldn't testify against him.
He set fire to her parents' barn.
He murdered a man in cold blood.
Then, in broad daylight,
with more than 45 people watching,
Ken McElroy was gunned down and killed.
But nobody looked up,
until the shooting stopped.
Nobody saw a thing,
and nobody did anything.
He's held a gun to my family, to my mom,
to my brother and me.
He tried staring you down. He tried making you crawl.
A lot of reporters have come to Skidmore in the past five months,
and people here are getting sick of them.
Tired of having their town portrayed as some
vigilante village, hiding a dark secret.
Who pulled the trigger?
I don't know.
I couldn't tell you.
Would you turn in the person who did it?
No.
Would you, preacher?
I wouldn't.
If they catch somebody,
and he's tried, and he's found guilty,
would you feel that justice has been done?
No.
No, because it was the whole town.
That was the one mistake that they made
was that they didn't kill his wife.
I would have killed his wife.
I probably would have ambushed him in his driveway.
I-- I'd have waited for him in the cornfield
and let him have it in his driveway.
And then I'd have set his house on fire.
I'd have burned everything.
When we moved here,
it was a movin' town.
It was a hoppin' town.
There were three gas stations,
there was a convenience store up on the corner.
The bank was catty-corner to that gas station.
You know, after the McElroy shooting,
everything pretty well folded up.
And it was a shame. You know, it's a shame.
It killed the town.
It did, it poisoned everybody's life.
Skidmore is home.
I'm fifth-generation, here,
of farmers.
Working the land,
following in my father's footsteps.
- What're you doing, young man? - Hanging out.
- Hanging out? - How are you, Ken?
- All right. How's Kurt? - Doing good.
When you're put into a situation
that you're not used to being in,
you don't know what you're going to do.
Countless times,
the law enforcement had been called
for some help.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
So it comes to a point
where the people feel,
well, it's you or me.
Well, 41 years ago,
we moved here-- I think it's been about 41.
I didn't want to come to Skidmore,
but my husband got a job.
And from there on, that's... that's when things
really, you know,
was happening.
My husband was a smoker,
and he was sitting out in the garage,
fairly early that morning
He was out there smoking, and I said,
"Leland, did you hear?"
And I said, "Sounds like a big firecracker or something."
He said, "That wasn't no firecracker, that was a gunshot."
So my husband went up to town,
and when he come back, he was pretty well shook up.
He said, "Call the kids
and don't let them be out on the street or nothing
because there's a whole mess up there.
And McElroy is sitting in the truck
with his head shot off
and blood running down the highway."
We were working away at the store.
And Mom had gone to the bank.
And then I heard a shot, and I told my dad--
He was back there at the meat case.
I go, "Dad, he's shooting somebody."
And then I looked again 'cause I saw his head go forward.
I go, "No, they shot him."
I was working at the farm.
My dad came out to the field,
stopped me in the tractor.
Looked up, and he said,
"Well, they blew him away."
I said, "What?"
He said, "They shot Ken Rex."
I thought, "Wow."
McElroy came into town,
parked in front of the bar, walked into the bar.
The guys who were inside said, "You know,
you need to get the hell out of town right now."
And he went out and got in his truck,
and then they opened up on him from behind.
His wife, she was sitting in the truck with him.
She sat right there and seen his head blowed off.
And they were shooting right around her.
We left the D&G and went to our pickup.
And as soon as we walked out the door,
everybody else walked out the door behind us.
And they gathered around on my side over here,
on my passenger side of the truck.
I seen a man go across the street, go to his pickup,
take the gun out, and I seen him shoot it.
When he got shot, his foot froze on the gas pedal,
so the engine was going maxed out, and it started smoking.
Finally, the engine blew, and then it was just silence.
The ambulance had pulled across the street,
and I saw the ambulance drivers go from McElroy's pickup,
back to the ambulance, and back again, with some equipment.
And I told whatever lady was standing there beside me,
if he's still alive, they're just gonna have to shoot him again
because he'll kill all those people.
I was in the pickup,
and this man told me to stay in there,
or they was gonna shoot me too.
A couple of guys helped, uh, Trena out of here,
she'd wet her pants, and walked her up to the top of the hill
to get her out of harm's way.
I still thought they was going to kill me
when they took me up to the bank
because he told me there was women up here to take care of me.
Of course, there was a little blood and a few teeth
and stuff laying around.
My brother went around and picked up his teeth.
Then the people started coming out of the pool hall, and...
everybody left town.
Everybody cleared the town.
Everybody was in their houses and stuff.
Nobody was up there on that street.
That truck was just sitting there.
I went across the street to make sure there was a sheet up over his head.
And, of course, then everybody went back about their business.
And then, somebody stopped, opened the door of the store and said,
"It's over. You can sleep tonight. Now just stand behind us."
I was glad he was dead.
Killing him was the only way it was going to stop.
People were afraid of Ken Rex.
They knew he would shoot you.
He was definitely a bully.
If somebody crossed him, he'd burn their house down.
They had a whole problem with that.
He was a monster.
Unlike the fish that you caught,
it passes hands and gradually gets bigger as the story's told.
Ken Rex was already there.
He must have been about 6'2 " or 6'3".
Jet-black hair, long sideburns.
Steely blue eyes. He just stared right through you.
Really, really cold eyes.
He could make my legs turn to Jell-O.
He was picking on people who were smaller than he was.
He was picking on women.
He probably picked on kids.
He was a career criminal.
We just knew he was a bad man.
You never heard of Ken Rex getting in a fist fight.
It always had to do with a gun.
Romaine Henry remembers when McElroy shot him
and says X-rays show his stomach
still has the buckshot in it from the incident, more than a decade ago.
One of the local farmers, riding in the pickup truck,
shoots him in the stomach with a shotgun.
Excuse me?
One of the boys come out and said
that he heard somebody shooting down the road.
When I got pretty close, well, I recognized it was Ken McElroy.
And then next thing I knew, I was looking right down the barrel of that shotgun.
He said that I was a dirty SOB
and had been over to his place in a white Pontiac.
I don't even have a car like that.
And he said, "Well, you're a lying SOB,"
and pulled the trigger.
And when they brought him into the hospital,
just like, they went,
Romaine Henry's been shot in the stomach. We think McElroy got him.
And that was all over the hospital.
Of course, it laid my flesh all open and blew my flesh into this door here.
And I just figured I was as good as dead.
Yet, when he went to court,
he had two witnesses said he was somewhere else.
McElroy had two dozen felony charges over the years.
Cattle rustling, hog rustling, molesting a child,
assault with intent to kill, burglary, theft and on and on.
The lawyer who got him out of those scrapes with the law
was Richard McFadin of Kansas City.
I looked at this fella, who was huge.
I had a pair of old jeans on and an old shirt. And I said, "Well,
I don't think that you probably could afford to hire me. I'm kind of expensive.
And he said, "Well, let me be the judge of that, counselor."
He got his load of bills and put the money on the table,
and I have to tell you, it was kind of humorous,
I said, "Mr. Ken... McElroy, sir, you hired yourself a lawyer."
McFadin, he was what we called a nickel-slick lawyer,
fast talker, worked for cash...
The consensus seems to be that whoever killed him did Skidmore a favor.
And you know, that disturbs me. I'm appalled by that.
There have been all kinds of articles that call him
"The Brute of Nodaway County,"
"The Bully of Nodaway County."
The point is, as bad as allegedly he was, and I'm not saying he was,
what they did was worse than anything they could say about him.
They went outside that system of justice,
and they took the law in their own hands, in my opinion,
and they decided they were going to get rid of him.
We just pulled onto Missouri 113,
and I'm going to stop in front of the D&G Tavern,
where Ken Rex was shot dead.
I was the first police officer dispatched over here.
Pretty much, I'm parked where Ken Rex's truck was at, on the day I saw it.
I knew this was significant.
Danny asked us-- He was the sheriff, he was a friend of mine.
Good guy, very courageous man, Vietnam combat vet.
He was-- He was visibly upset.
Very, very upset that this had happened.
Sheriff, what kind of calls did you get on McElroy?
Did you get a sense that he was intimidating those people?
I think that calls for an opinion, and I don't want to give one.
I'd had people discuss it with me, dealing with McElroy.
'Cause they wanted me to just take the badge and go shoot him.
You know. We're going to make you our policeman,
you're gonna be the town marshal, have at it.
And I just-- It didn't fit my plan.
I was out in Vegas and saw it in the newspaper,
and I saw his picture on the newspaper.
And, when they asked the sheriff,
what about this Vietnam veteran out here?
Uh, the sheriff said, "No, I know it wasn't Brett."
If it was Brett, there'd have been a hole right between McElroy's eyes."
People know that, if they push us the wrong direction,
it's gonna come back in lead.
There's a lot of people that seen it, 50 or 60.
People's afraid to say what they seen 'cause they're afraid
what's gonna happen to them and their family.
And that's kind of what small towns do.
They just kind of band together and do what's best for the town.
In the aftermath of that, you have to use all the resources at your disposal.
Well, in Skidmore, they're non-existent.
Nobody in the town would even give a name.
After the murder, a task force was put together
of area and regional law enforcement,
And they engaged the case.
They investigated, they talked to witnesses.
And they were coming up empty.
All of a sudden, in newsrooms across the country,
people were looking at maps,
trying to determine where Skidmore, Missouri was.
We had a reporter from theLondon Times
stop by our newsroom and politely ask
to see our dossier on the Ken Rex shooting.
Tonight, Gary Wilson reports on a northwest Missouri town
on the threshold of the national spotlight.
And I think that's kind of when it dawned on people here
that this was something big.
This was something so unusual,
that it captured the attention of media outlets all over the world.
Reporting live from Skidmore, Missouri, Tracy Toft, Action 4 News at five.
As more and more media outlets reported on this,
the bigger and bigger the story got.
I was teaching at the University of Texas that summer.
And I'm sitting there having my coffee,
and all of sudden, Skidmore, Missouri comes on the news.
And they tell me about the murder of Ken Rex McElroy.
Right away, I knew who the man was.
My thought was, well, Dad won't lose any more pigs.
Was Skidmore more violent than other communities?
I hate to say they're more violent,
but it seems like, yes.
There was a culture of violence in the area.
McElroy, who was known as the town bully,
was killed, while dozens of people watched.
Investigation into the vigilante-style slaying of Ken Rex McElroy...
Because it was so unusual,
because it was so violent...
Camera roll 27, take 55...
...CBS sent a crew in to do a story.
Some hot-shot reporter that, I'm sure, thinks he's going to break the case...
There's more to Ken Rex McElroy versus the town of Skidmore
than just the story of a local bully and frightened townspeople.
It's not gonna happen. Skidmore will never give up who they think did it.
There was a lot of angry people, townspeople,
that didn't want reporters here.
But I didn't mind talking to them.
I mean, it happened, you got to deal with it.
If your rights are violated to the point
that you fear your life or your friend or family's life,
then you're gonna take somebody else's. That's basic law of nature.
Having so much of a spotlight, on this tiny, tiny, little town,
it had to be traumatic.
He was just a bully,
had everyone scared to death, all over the county.
He was pretty vicious. He shot this man
at the store over a two-cent piece of gum.
Richard Bennett thinks everyone knows who did it.
Far as I'm concerned, everybody in this town is guilty.
I am scared that they will do the same to us
that they did to McElroy.
If you open your mouth too much.
And it's not right. One murder is not right.
They was proud they did it.
That's how they felt, a lot of them.
They was proud they had killed him.
Nobody deserves to be murdered.
However,
something had to be done,
for the safety of this community.
If everything else failed,
then the murder was the answer.
Some of them, probably, shook their heads and said,
"OK, we killed a bully. Big deal."
There's an old saying,
you know, "He needed killing."
People were scared,
and it just kept escalating, and escalating.
And I don't know about you,
but, you know, everyone has a limit.
You get pushed so far,
law or not, something's gonna happen.
Well, this is the back of the grocery store
and the alley where Bowenkamp was shot by McElroy.
A bad day in Skidmore's history,
but you can't change it.
It was on a Friday, two little girls come in.
Now, one of them wasn't so little, she was about 14 or 15 years old,
and then the smaller one, which was about four years old.
The little girl had picked up two or three little pieces of candy.
We didn't have any idea who either one of the children were.
Ken McElroy got mad
when they accused his children
of stealing bubble gum.
The lady that worked in the grocery store,
accused my little girl
of taking some candy,
and raiding the store.
She had my girl really upset.
She was bawling when she came home.
She was only four.
Trena McElroy walked in,
and Trena wanted to know
who accused their kids...
And I'm cleaning up the language, quite a bit.
...of raiding the store, and of course, no one had.
The door opened again,
and she said, "Well, you're about to meet Kenneth McElroy."
I went out and tried to straighten it out,
and she didn't want-- She wanted to have no part of it.
That's pretty much what started the ball rolling.
McElroy started driving past Mom and Dad's house and cruised slowly by,
and then during the day,
they would sit in the pickups outside the store
and just watch the store all day.
One day, McElroy turned up
at the loading bay behind the store,
where Mr. Bowenkamp was sitting,
watching the world go by.
He just rolled up his sleeves, like this,
he says, "Do you want to fight?"
I said, "I have no reason to fight."
I turned around. Well, I was looking down a double-barrel shotgun.
When I walked up the stairs,
Bo was laying on the wooden floor,
all stretched out.
There was blood just pumping out of his neck.
And there was a pool of blood that streamed across the floor
probably six or eight feet.
He was gurgling, and he was trying to tell me--
I know he said "McElroy."
Shortly after the shooting, McElroy was arrested.
He was caught by one of the troopers, down here.
Then they put him in jail, down here
at Savannah, overnight.
They did take him in,
and again, they let him go.
He bonded out.
The next day, McElroy was back out on the street again.
Not only that, he was back here in the pool hall, bragging about it.
He was still out free.
And after, he drove into town,
and shot a man that owned a little grocery store.
He actually shot the man.
And he never was put in jail for it.
That was one of the hardest things for Skidmore to accept.
We had grown up good people,
believing, that if you did the right thing,
the law would be there for you.
But we pretty much were on our own over here.
Miraculously, Bo survived his wounds
and continued at the grocery store.
But he and his family hadn't heard the last of Ken McElroy.
After Dad got out of the hospital, it still continued.
McElroy would be sitting in front of the store, when they left the store,
and then he'd pull up in front of the house later and just sit there.
Fired their shotgun into the air.
Must have been a nightmare for you and your folks.
Constant fear. You wake up scared, you're scared all day,
you go to bed scared, and then you start all over again the next day.
And every time
the Nodaway County Sheriff's Department was called,
if they came at all, it would be three days later.
Dave Dunbar, he was the marshal when McElroy was around,
till he quit because they started threatening him and his family.
He goes, "Are you gonna testify in the Bowenkamp trial?"
And I said, "Yeah, I'll be-- I'm the marshal, I was there that night.
Sure, I'll be over there, you know, that's my job."
And he goes, "Well, I believe in killing any son of a bitch
that tries to put me in the pen the rest of my life." That's his exact words.
For almost a year,
it was just our family that had to deal with it.
It was hell.
Scared, every single minute of your entire life.
A year after shooting grocer Bowenkamp,
McElroy finally comes to trial.
He is charged with first-degree assault with a deadly weapon.
He faces a minimum of ten years in prison
and possibly up to life in prison.
His adversary was prosecutor, David Baird.
Only three years out of law school,
just months as prosecutor.
Once they did that, we went to trial.
I was probably too young and naive
to be intimidated.
The defense team for Mr. McElroy,
they tried to make the argument that, somehow,
Mr. McElroy was acting in self-defense,
relative to Mr. Bowenkamp.
At that time, you had David Baird
who is a very young and inexperienced prosecutor.
But Ken was actually found guilty of that crime.
Ken Rex McElroy, I think I read somewhere,
he was charged with 37 felony crimes
and convicted of none, until the very last one,
when he was convicted of shooting Bo Bowenkamp.
But his attorney, filed an appeal
and then requested of the judge
that Ken be released on bond.
The judge agreed,
and there was a caravan of people from Skidmore
that drove over to be in the courtroom.
They drove back to Skidmore,
and when they got back, Ken Rex was already there.
It had to have been pretty traumatic.
Not even probably a week after that, he was in the bar
with an old Army rifle with a bayonet.
You know, a fixed bayonet is-- That's war.
You know, you don't even discuss it.
Walking into the bar with an M1 and a fixed bayonet
and sitting in the corner...
You know, if I had been the marshal, at that point,
and they called me on the phone,
he'd have been dead.
Because I'd walked into the bar,
I'd walk right up to him and put a hole in him.
I don't look at "vigilante" as a bad term,
but I think some people do.
It was necessary, at the time, for the situation.
A man comes up
and shoots your father.
He doesn't kill him, but he shoots him.
And his mentality was
that he could get away with anything.
All you can do is run.
Cow down and get beat some more
or stand up and fight.
These guys around here carry
Winchesters or Henrys, you know, saddle guns.
They're cowboys.
That's the way it is around here.
Everybody's got a gun.
You know, everybody does.
You put things in your own hands. I know that's vigilantism.
But you've got to take care of yourself.
You've got to protect yourself, at times.
That's our American gun mentality.
And that's what the Skidmore people did.
Was there fear that, if McElroy remained a free man,
he would do further damage in the town?
Yes, there was a feeling like that.
Fear is an emotion that takes energy.
Most tired people don't feel fear,
except when faced with evil.
And by all accounts,
Ken Rex McElroy was evil.
Anyone who doesn't understand and hasn't lived through this fear,
just can't understand the pressure
that has been on, the emotional strain.
We have never, ever, as Ken said, never locked our doors.
But now, we never go to sleep without the doors locked.
You had people who were on-edge.
Townspeople had lost their faith in the court system
because Ken was found guilty but released on bond.
These people are crying out for justice,
they finally get justice,
and it does no good, it has no affect.
That was a tipping point, in that town.
And that's why they called the town meeting.
So, what they did was decide to get everybody into the Legion Hall
and have a meeting, trying to figure out
how they were going to protect themselves.
It was a hotly-contested meeting.
There were rumors of money changing hands
for the death of Ken Rex McElroy.
Oh, we heard a lot of rumors, what they was gonna do to him.
Were you at the meeting?
No, I was in Boulder, Colorado.
- Were you at the meeting? - I was not there, no.
- Were you at the meeting? - Yes, I was at the meeting.
They don't know my husband. All they know is what they hear.
I had my five-year-old daughter with me.
And everybody was gathering around, you know.
It was pretty wild and crazy and hectic
and all kinds of emotions.
And I thought,
I don't need my five-year-old daughter,
you know, around this.
There were a hundred people.
That's almost every adult citizen in the city of Skidmore.
They lured him into town so they could kill him.
The town had no choice
because they had gotten together at the Legion building
and had a meeting, and the sheriff was there.
And the sheriff drove out of town,
and just as he drove out of town, McElroy drove into town.
That meeting, the morning of July 10th, in Skidmore,
you were at that meeting, what was the mood of the place?
They were concerned about the welfare
of the people who had signed statements,
uh, concerning the bond-revocation hearing.
- And they were concerned about their safety. -Right.
About 60 townspeople were gathered in the American Legion Hall.
The red brick building. They were talking about what to do with the town bully.
At about that time, Ken Rex McElroy showed up at the bar.
They followed him inside the bar.
And what was the atmosphere in the bar that morning?
It was strange.
I mean, 'cause everybody was getting free beers.
And no way that many people would come in like that.
It was all different.
So were you made to feel uncomfortable in there,
that morning?
Yeah, we've-- We figured that they had a meeting.
Just tell me what happened.
We left the D&G and went to our pickup.
As soon as we walked out the door,
everybody else walked out the door behind us.
My husband, he hadn't started the pickup yet.
We were just sitting there. I looked at them,
to see what they was looking at. See if they wanted anything,
and they was just staring and laughing.
It was the whole town.
-Sixty-three.
There may have been as many as a dozen people outside the D&G
and around McElroy's pickup at the time of the shooting.
Or there may have been as many as 50 or 60.
How many bullet holes?
That's part of the investigation that I can't tell you.
I've heard reports there were two guns used, two weapons used.
That is also part of the investigation, and I can't tell you.
Do you have any suspects?
Not at this time.
I mean, they had nothing to work with, ballistics-wise.
All they had was fragments from his body,
but you couldn't pair it with a weapon because they had no weapons.
There were three different calibers.
So at least three people.
Two people, I believe, shot him.
There was probably at least three to four shooters.
Four, in my estimation.
Six shooters.
Well, I think there were three.
I know who two of them are.
There was eyewitnesses.
It doesn't mean they all saw it.
It doesn't take long to go, boom, boom, boom.
To put your gun away, just a few seconds.
One other person
that I was told was a shooter left town.
Then I don't know who the third person is.
There are some people that aren't even convinced
it was totally from Skidmore because so many rumors abound,
like, it was a Mafia hit and all that.
The shooters were probably across the street, up here.
Because the little Quonset building,
it had some bullet holes in it.
But nobody knows which caliber of weapon was the fatal blow.
They never found any weapons.
They couldn't prove anything.
They can't even prove who's got what kind of a rifle
because we don't... we don't register the rifles.
And right now, we're not even registering the handguns.
Can't find the guns.
Not even a shell, they picked them all up.
I can't really go into that
because that's where the conspiracy problem is.
But, you know, the weapons were disposed of
in an interesting way.
The guns was put in a van.
If I remember the van, it might have been blue.
They had planned where the van would be sitting.
And they took the guns out to Cheyenne, Wyoming.
Except one.
And that gun was the main one,
my brother told me, before he died.
The main one was throwed in the river.
I don't know if this is true or not,
but I was told they have still got McElroy's head
in a freezer thing,
and that case was never closed.
If they ever could find the shell or the gunner thing,
then they could prove which one's gun it belonged to.
If you try to think about it from a motive perspective,
well, hell, everybody had a motive.
If you start thinking about who benefits from Ken Rex McElroy's death,
jeez, maybe everybody benefits, I don't know.
People in small towns don't call the cops, anyway.
They handle things themselves.
That's a legacy that goes back
to when this part of the country was settled.
This town was so full of sin.
My kids are afraid for me
because some of them that helped
murder McElroy, some of them are still alive.
You better keep quiet.
No.
I thought it was kind of a brutal way
of doing away with the man.
If he needed put to death, I think the law should have done it.
The killing of Ken Rex McElroy opened up something
that needs to be closed.
I think I counted nine mysterious,
horrible, strange deaths since Ken Rex died.
One of them was a young woman named Wendy.
Her boyfriend attacked her and killed her,
literally stomped her to death.
Another young woman had a baby cut out
and was strangled to death.
A young man who just disappears.
One person committed suicide with a shotgun.
One, supposedly, committed suicide by hanging.
It's a town of 280 people.
It's hard to reconcile that.
The question is,
if Ken Rex was such a bully,
if he was a monster,
then why didn't the violence end with his death?
Because it hasn't ended.
Horror and mayhem
have visited that town
over and over and over again.
Maybe they're cursed to live
with the existence of these bad things always happening to them.
There's no limit on murder or conspiracy.