I have no sympathy for Ken Rex.
He scared this poor community half to death.
During that time, to protect myself and my family,
I carried a gun.
So he brought out the worst in me.
No one talked, everyone stuck together.
That's what small towns do. They just band together.
They planned that murder.
They had a town meeting, they all sat down together,
they decided that they were gonna do it, and they done it.
It was my estimation that we did not have
sufficient evidence to go to trial.
After he decided not to press charges,
pretty much everybody
in Skidmore thought it's finally over.
This is a town full of vigilantes.
Everybody else suffers, but they all carry on.
Aren't you now concerned that
now that he's gone,
this town has a dirty little secret,
and that, in it's own way,
will have as bad an effect on the town as McElroy did?
The people who were involved in this
and the people who covered it up
think they may have been doing a good thing for the community.
They didn't realize that their children
are going to be negatively effected by this.
I think I counted nine mysterious deaths
since Ken Rex died.
It perpetuates itself.
When's the next type of situation gonna occur
when the community turns on an individual?
- Rolling. - All right, here we go.
I'll wait for the car to go by.
- Hair looks OK? - Ah, yeah.
OK, here we go. Three, two and one...
It's one of America's most puzzling murders
and it happened 20 years ago today.
Hi, I'm NBC 8's Jim Reich. I'm in Skidmore, Missouri.
It's where they killed the town bully
right in front of this bar.
All right, so we're rolling.
- Ah, first of all, thanks for taking your time. -Sure.
And, uh, this is weird, isn't it?
I mean, the way I see it, and especially goin' over there,
I mean, you can see all the books
and all the movies, but this is pretty weird.
It's an unusual case
and it's gotten lots of attention in 20 years.
I thought, for all intents and purposes,
it was over.
They shot Ken Rex, he's dead.
It's pretty clear nobody's gonna be apprehended for that crime.
People get away with crimes all the time.
I mean, we would like to say that's not true,
some of them get more attention and some of them get less,
but we have murders and other crimes
that occur all the time, for which there is no prosecution.
Unfortunately, in the United States,
we have cases like that all the time,
we have cases in this office like that all the time.
Skidmore was trying to move past it...
but it seems like every anniversary,
there'll be journalists who'll come into town
dredging all this stuff up again.
This town is so small.
You know, there's that phrase, "small town gossip".
During the past 20 years, uh, any validity to that?
Well, I'm sure there's been a few discussions,
but for the most part, people never talk about it.
The newspaper people and TV people, you can say,
"I don't want to talk to you, go away and leave me alone."
Him, you couldn't do that to.
So yeah, we had put up with all those,
but we didn't have to put up with him.
I think they'd been victimized by McElroy
for such a long time, then you had a lot of outsiders
trying to find out what happened.
You know, it was a bonding thing.
It's us against them now.
It used to be us against him.
And now it's us against everybody else.
McElroy's wife, Trena, has remarried,
and is living somewhere in the Ozarks,
still fearful of setting foot in Skidmore.
See, the only thing I ever get out of this,
is a do get some free publicity.
I've gotten a lot of business through McElroy.
I've had a lot of people that have hired me to represent 'em.
I thought it would die down--
about a year, year and a half,
I wouldn't hear anymore about it.
Every year, it gets bigger and bigger.
I know, all the people here, they want to forgotten,
put it behind them, because it wasn't a good time
for Skidmore and their citizens.
The shooting-- the McElroy shooting--
definitely shriveled the town up.
It just sucked it right up.
People stayed in their houses.
People who socialized prior to that,
stopped socializing.
And that really was the bad thing
in the long run.
It just was so terrible,
it ruined the town.
And it was a shame. You know, it's a shame.
There are people who couldn't wait to get out,
people left town.
The next thing you know, the bank closes,
the grocery store goes out of business,
and the town just starts to dry up
and evaporate from the face of the earth.
This is where the old schoolhouse used to sit.
But it's gone now. Everything's gone.
I don't think Skidmore would've come down like that
if it hadn't been for that killing.
Since Ken's death, we've had a lot of tragedies
in the town that is unusual for a rural American town.
We're talking murders, suicides, deaths.
Here's a crime that hasn't been solved for decades.
No resolution, no closure.
So how do you cope with that?
It's there, it's constant,
it's part of your fabric of life.
Does that compel more violent acts to occur?
Maybe it does.
On my first visit to Skidmore,
I was confronted with the trauma
of the murder of Ken Rex McElroy immediately.
I went in there to buy lunch
and I was greeted by a waitress who told me
that I wasn't welcome there and I would not get any service there.
From there, I went up to a convenience store,
and as I got to the door,
there was a man with his arms folded and said,
"No, you can't come in here."
Skidmore tends to view any outsiders
as someone coming in
to make an attack on their town.
But I did talk to one woman who said to me,
"Go ahead and write about McElroy and his murder,
but while you do that,
look at the whole picture."
The thing that really got to me
was the current crimes.
There was something wrong here.
That's the inexplicable thing about it.
If Ken Rex was such a problem,
then why didn't the town live happily ever after?
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.
Skidmore wasn't on the map for anything
until Ken Rex McElroy.
And now, any little bitty thing that happens,
okay, it's Ken Rex McElroy and then this happens;
it's Ken Rex McElroy then this and this and this has happened.
But I think the outside community that looks in on Skidmore,
they would want you to think that, "Oh, Skidmore's this really bad place."
Well, it's not.
There's a few people that's made it look bad.
My name is Ben Espey.
I was the Nodaway County Sheriff for 16 years.
Back in the time Ken Rex McElroy was operating,
I had a different occupation.
I grew up on a farm.
Then when farming got really tough
in the early '80's around here,
I went to the Nodaway County Sheriff's Department.
People will tell you this and it's true.
If you get law enforcement in your blood,
you can't get it out.
In the time that I was the sheriff,
methamphetamine was beginning to become pretty popular.
Back then,
prosecuting attorney was David Baird.
He was prosecuting attorney for years and years
in Nodaway County.
Took a lot of cases in front of him.
In the early 2000's, methamphetamine was
by far the big issue.
The recipe's not that hard.
We arrested a guy who was walking around Walmart
with his shopping list he'd downloaded off the Internet
of what he needed to make meth.
On October 16th, the year 2000,
we got a call at the sheriff's department
that there was a female layin' in the backyard
that was non-responsive.
I, myself, went and when we got there,
there was a young female layin' in the grass
on the backside of the house.
It looked like she was just beaten to death.
There was no...
life left in this girl.
Wendy Gillenwater left this house on 406 Elm
for the last time Monday.
The house remains quiet now, as the sheriff continues
its investigation.
Because no one knows exactly what happened inside this house,
friends and family are just going to have to wait
to see what the autopsy will bring them.
Wendy Gillenwater was a small town girl in Skidmore
who grew up in the shadow
of the murder of Ken McElroy.
She was the next generation,
and so was her husband, Greg Dragoo.
I really didn't know much about the girl,
just knew that she was involved with wild parties,
and involved with drugs, heavy.
And that's about all I knew about her.
She was living about six blocks from me.
And, of course, everybody lives six blocks from me
in this town.
She was killed four houses down.
Domestic.
We had police and ambulance come in,
and I heard that this young lady Wendy
had been killed.
And I'm going, "What is going on here?"
And it turns out it was the man
that was living with her.
He'd been abusing her for a long time.
You live with an abusive man long enough,
he will kill ya.
Greg brutalized her for years.
From early in their marriage,
she was beaten up by him regularly.
On the final day of her life,
he started beating her
and he just wouldn't stop.
A story I heard was it was methamphetamine rage.
He was high to the point,
he didn't just beat her up,
he pulverized her.
He broke eight ribs in one side
and six ribs in the other.
There were lacerations all over her face,
all over her arms.
He was merciless.
There was some mad blood there, over something--
And I don't remember what it was, but...
He beat her to death with a flashlight.
He dragged her body
out of the house, down the stairs,
threw her in the yard,
and he saw a neighbor next door, looking on.
That didn't stop him.
Nobody would stop
and help Wendy Gillenwater
when she was laying, bleeding in her front yard.
That shows that there's a lot of people in that town
that don't care.
When she was gasping for her last breath of air,
he took a bottle of Dawn dishwater soap
and poured it down her mouth.
It was a horrific scene.
A preliminary coroner's report said
Gillenwater died of severe trauma
to her chest and stomach.
Been the coroner for four years,
and we haven't dealt with one of these before.
As a policeman,
we've had some experience in this.
No.
Wendy's mother was only able to identify her daughter
by the rings on her hand.
Dragoo's grandmother says
that seeing Gillenwater in the hospital
gave her nightmares.
The Skidmore residents don't want to talk about it,
and neither does the sheriff,
who points all inquires to the prosecutor.
We've got to figure out what the cause of death is,
and then you must be able to link that cause of death
to the actions of a particular individual.
All I know is,
he got life in prison over that.
For years, Greg was beating her.
People had to know about it that lived nearby.
In a small town like this,
everybody knows everybody's business.
Why didn't someone raise a red flag
and say, "This isn't right,
something's wrong here," but nobody did.
The silence was literally deadly.
There's no reason to move to Skidmore.
If my family didn't have a farm in Skidmore,
I would never go there again.
My name is Martin Edward Small.
I am the oldest kid
in the Festival family.
I'm an Eagle Scout, and I'm in my 19th year
in the United States Army.
My son Marty,
he's a captain and a paratrooper,
served in Iraq with Special Forces, twice.
My son was raised on three points.
Know your enemy,
never leave an enemy alive,
the guy with the most bullets wins.
My son happens to be a specialist
with a knife though,
because I am.
So he was taught how to kill with a knife
long before he was taught how to shoot.
You can't-- No you can't wander around, Dad.
- That's in the shot. - Oh, I see.
And if you're in the bedroom, you can't have the TV up.
OK. Phew.
There's only certain things
that can be solved only within the legal system.
And if that works, that's great.
But sometimes violence is the only option.
Ken Rex McElroy was a problem in the '80's.
And I was a kid growin' up there.
The next major violent time
was when the Wendy situation happened.
Wendy Gillenwater was two years ahead of me in high school,
and she was another one of those great examples of,
you know, you get out of school,
you find a guy local,
and you never leave.
That happens a lot--
in which, in turn, resulted in her death.
And that's really sad.
And then soon after that,
Branson disappeared.
Folks here in Skidmore have lived
with a big question on their minds.
What happened to one of their own?
Branson Perry said he was going to put away jumper cables,
he hasn't been seen since.
Perry, who was 20,
vanished from outside his home.
Signs across the area are getting the message out
about this missing man, but still, there have been
no signs of Branson himself.
Branson is my stepson.
My name is James Klino.
I was married to Becky Perry, which is Branson's mother.
I believe it happened on a Thursday.
Branson's father was in the hospital,
and he was getting the house clean
for his dad to come home.
He was also working on getting his father's car running
so he could pick him up.
Gina was the girl that happened to be in the house
trying to help him out
to get ready for his dad to come home.
While they're cleaning up the house,
Branson went into one of the kitchen cabinets
and starts rooting around and he came out with something,
and went outside and then came right back in again.
And Gina said, "What were you doing?"
He said, "Oh, nothing. Don't worry about it."
He went to go to the shed to return some jumper cables...
and at that point, was not seen from thereafter.
Everything just seemed like
it was a normal day in Skidmore, Missouri.
It took awhile for everyone to realize
that something was going on here.
Jo Ann Stinnett went to check on her grandson
at this house, where he lived with his dad.
Stinnett says the stereo was blaring
and the furnace blasting.
The 20-year-old Branson Perry was gone.
They found no blood, no weapons,
nothing missing.
He didn't take a thing with him.
By Saturday,
they still hadn't heard from Branson.
One of Becky's biggest frustrations
was the fact that the police
did not jump onto the investigation
as soon as they should have.
They should've jumped on it when it was first reported.
Early on,
I don't think anybody
suspected foul play.
The police said, "He's probably just out
sowing his oats. He'll be back."
And that upset her pretty much.
She goes, "He's not that kind of a boy
that would just do that."
The first question everyone wants to know is,
did he run away?
Well, when Sheriff Espey explored that possibility,
he found Branson's van, his wallet,
all his personal possessions
seemed to be there at the home.
The thing that kind of strikes me about this case is
that he just disappeared in thin air,
just taking some jumper cables out to a shed
behind his house and was never seen again.
The jumper cables were never returned
to the shed until
weeks after the fact.
All of a sudden, the jumper cables showed up.
Two weeks later,
those jumper cables that Branson was taking out to the shed
suddenly showed up in the shed right by the front door.
It's like somebody's trying to cover something up,
cover their own tracks.
It was beginning to look like someone
in Skidmore was responsible for whatever happened
to Branson Perry.
That is really strange.
Bob, his dad, and his mother
were good friends of ours.
In this particular case,
I think we had some strange people in town that day
and nobody really knows much about it.
But those signs have been up a long damn time.
They tried everything they could
to find what happened to the Perry boy.
I don't know if this is true or not,
but I was told
some man did it and he fed him to the hogs.
He was out in his yard and he just up and disappeared.
They even dug up places
and done all kind of stuff all around there,
but I don't know.
Was this drug related? Sex related?
We don't know.
Nobody saw anything,
nobody overheard anything,
but make no mistake about this,
just like the murder of Ken Rex McElroy...
somebody knows.
It wasn't long before Nodaway County authorities
began to suspect foul play in Perry's disappearance.
Officials say there's a lot of rumors circulating
about Branson's disappearance.
But still, no answers.
He's considered and listed
as an endangered missing person.
We've always believed in, and I think the investigation
has yielded that some kind of foul play has taken place.
You know, growing up I learned that
there are predators out there everywhere.
And not all of them are in prison.
There's really two kinds of people in the world,
there's sheeps and wolves, okay.
The sheep is just happy to sit and eat all day.
And life is great, okay,
but then there's wolves.
The wolf is a predator.
It takes from others.
Branson was a pretty cool kid.
I used to go over to his house.
Branson was a friend of my children.
He had a really cool play set
that his father built.
His dad decided they wanted to be the fun place.
If all the kids come to his house and play,
his kids were going to be safe, right?
He was a young energetic high school boy
when I knew him.
He just got out of high school.
I knew his folks pretty well.
They were a very good family.
They were respected
by all the other people and the neighbors.
I knew who he was.
I think he was younger than my kids.
I knew his dad. I knew his grandma.
So I knew who he was.
The question, I think, that you have to ask
with Branson Perry, certainly the one, you know,
that I ask as a journalist is, "Why him?"
Branson had a lot of potential in life,
but wolves look for weakness, right?
And you don't always have to be physically weak.
Sometimes you can be emotionally weak.
And sometimes, that's even better,
because all they have to do is attack those emotion pieces
and latch on and give you some hope.
He became an easy target.
Branson was a sheep.
The world can't function with only sheep.
And the world can't function with only wolves.
You gotta have both.
Branson Perry was the son of my neighbor.
He was always a sweet child.
It's just one of those things,
we sit there and go,
"Why is this happening?"
There were no tell-tale signs
of something being wrong.
There was no, "Mom, Dad, I'm going, and,
well, I think I'll see you."
There was none of that.
It was one day he was here
and the next day he was gone.
They put out rewards,
they hired investigators.
They even brought a medium in,
to a séance or do whatever
to feel the vibes of the property.
That was our last resort.
And when you run completely out,
what's it gonna hurt?
No matter how trivial
you may think the information may be,
it could be a very vital clue that will help.
This is the case that's went a year,
and we don't have anything really concrete.
We don't have anybody arrested for it,
um, we don't know he just completely disappeared
off the face of the earth.
Sheriff Estes reminds
all information is strictly confidential.
I just ask that the community get involved,
you know, for our closing, for the family.
They wouldn't want one of their own children missing
for a year.
So the community is gonna have to assist our department
in trying to solve this.
Story's kind of got out, you know,
that maybe some of the other kids in town
knew what happened and, of course, didn't say anything.
There were a lot of different theories
about who was in the town and who wasn't.
There are other details,
very gruesome details,
that were told to my son.
Two years after Branson Perry went missing,
they got a break in the case.
A young man's disappearance unexplained,
and now there's a push for new leads in a cold case.
Two years after Branson vanished,
the FBI arrested Jack Wayne Rogers of Fulton.
They found disturbing messages on his computer
claiming he had driven to Skidmore and abducted
a blonde-haired boy.
Jack Wayne Rogers
was a lay minister in Fulton, Missouri.
He went into chat rooms
and he talked about...
how he had abducted and murdered
a blonde-haired young man
from Skidmore, Missouri.
That is what brought Jack Wayne Rogers
to the attention of the authorities.
It was pretty gruesome.
He was investigated,
and as part of the investigation,
they searched his home.
We ended up in Fulton, Missouri
for three days doing a search warrant on a guy's house
and diggin' up his backyard.
And among the things
that they found
was a leather necklace
that had a turtle's claw on it
that Branson Perry's father
positively said, "That's his necklace."
When they looked at that guy's computer,
they found child pornography, for one...
...but they also found images
of botched gender reassignment surgeries
he performed in motel rooms for another.
Jack was a mutilator.
He allegedly performed procedures
on people who didn't like what gender they were,
and he would perform gender nullifications.
Sick-o people, right?
It's unfortunate-- there's people like that
out there in this world.
I got hold of the transcripts
of his chat room
and I couldn't believe
the horrible things he talked about.
Rogers claimed that he knew the perfect way
to impale an individual,
make them suffer.
I heard Branson was tied to a tree naked...
was impaled by a stake
through his nether regions,
had his genitals cut off
and eaten in front of him while he was still alive.
Like, they got a picture of 'em on a paper plate,
and then ate 'em right there in front of him
while he was dying.
Everyone thought Jack Wayne Rogers
had something to do with Branson Perry's disappearance.
But he always insisted that he was totally innocent
of any crime against Branson Perry.
He claimed that
what he wrote in a chat room
was not fact,
but fiction that was based
on a story he read about Branson Perry
in the local media.
When you're in law enforcement,
you can't determine if a lead is good or bad
until you follow through with it and check it out.
it was just tough because you gotta follow every lead.
Every lead, you have to follow.
And the Branson Perry's case
led us in a lot of different directions.
There was rumor
that Branson was mutilated
and a lot of really bad things happened to him.
And of course, I imagine,
over the years, that got out to the public
that oh, that's what happened to Branson.
No, we figured that out.
And we went in with search warrants,
and that was not the case, we was led astray.
That didn't happen.
The necklace, they believed was Branson's,
in his possession, later found out it was not Branson's,
but Branson had one like it.
But Becky was at every one of his trials,
because, at that point in time,
she believed Jack Rogers had something to do with it.
Authorities charged Jack Rogers
with the pornography, they charged him
with the body mutilation
and the gender reassignment surgeries.
He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
Branson Perry's mother was there.
She begged him to tell her
where her son was,
even if dead, where his remains were.
And Rogers insisted
he had nothing to do with Branson's death.
He would not give an inch on that.
When the police did more investigation
against Rogers and they said that they are
99% sure that he is not involved in this case,
Becky was devastated.
But she believed the police.
Needless to say,
Bob and Becky had a hard time
Bob was never the same after that.
There were times I'd just see him walking down the street,
just walking.
I have to keep believing he's alive.
I can't go the other side yet.
I can't go that way. I can't give up hope.
I know the family holds out hope
that Branson Perry is alive somewhere.
That's what we all want to believe,
but he's probably not.
It'd be easier to know
that he went off with that man
and was murdered.
And, to me, that's what happened.
But it's a terrible thing for the family
to not know for sure.
We don't know what happened.
Really, just nobody knows.
I don't know. I don't know.
The last I knew about that boy was,
he was seen in the afternoon
by some friends, out here in a white van,
north of Skidmore,
on the side of the road.
That was the last that this one person'd seen him.
There's stories out there, around town.
I have no idea, but...
something talk about, nothing else goes on here.
I grew up in a small town.
I knew who the bad kids were.
So did my mom and dad.
I heard talk
about things that went on in my small home town.
You can't tell me that somebody in that town
doesn't know who Branson Perry was associating with.
Skidmore is a mysterious town.
Things go on there, but nobody has answers,
and nobody wants to come forward with the answers.
Mr. Rogers had nothing to do with it.
I think people are using Mr. Rogers
as a scapegoat for the truth.
They're trying to push it off
to somebody else
to relieve the pressure
from the investigation on them.
And that explains
the deathly silence
surrounding the disappearance
of that young man.
And that brings us back
to someone in Skidmore.
Skidmore has the unlucky history about it
of having some very violent crimes
that's taken place there.
Why it happens in Skidmore
and why it's so infamous
and why the murders are so spectacular...
I have no idea why that happens.
We are now working the disappearance
of Branson Perry--
that case, I have open now,
since I come into office January 1.
We believe it is a homicide.
We believe we know who is responsible
for the murder.
Branson was no innocent young kid
that somebody just walked up and shot
that he didn't even know.
He got involved in the wrong crowd,
and they got to where there was drugs being made.
Fixing and making methamphetamine.
And Branson Perry got shot
because they thought he might talk.
Stories kind of got out, you know, that maybe it was
a drug deal that went bad.
They killed him and got rid of his body
and end of the story.
We knew it was drug-related.
Back then, they would have labs
all over the entire county,
and we made a lot of arrests for methamphetamine.
And we hit 'em pretty hard, as hard as we could.
I'll be a son of a gun if they didn't have a drug house
two doors down from me.
Had one three doors down
the other way from me.
There was about 11 drug houses here in town.
We had one just down the road here,
this old gray house on the corner
where they was makin' meth.
Legalize the stuff!
Let 'em have to go buy it.
Instead of goin' out to the street
and doin' all this and that.
When you're from a small town,
there's nothing to do except for go out and drink,
smoke, and nowadays, even more, do drugs.
Branson wanted to do things a certain way in his life,
and it came back to haunt him.
When you look at Branson
and the silence there,
it just makes you think
Skidmore is so haunted
by the vigilante killing of Ken McElroy
that it permeates their culture
and makes violence more likely.
I'm sure a lot of the people that were
the sons and daughters of the witnesses
and perpetrators had to have had an effect,
whether they knew what it was or not,
because the father or the mother
would not be the same person again.
You cannot experience
something like this and not have part of you die as well.
So I'm sure it had an effect
on the next generation.
If a parent gets by with something,
then your next generation down, or two,
and they can think they're gonna get by with it.
And in the case of Skidmore,
there's a possibility that it did drop
from one generation to another to another.
Because we know exactly what's happened
to Branson Perry.
We know who was involved.
And I can tell you right now that they were from Skidmore.