<p>The Saga of Ken McElroy</p><p>SKIDMORE, Mo. (AP) – No sooner had Ken McElroy walked out of the courtroom where they found him guilty of shotgunning the village grocer than, sure enough, there he was back at the D&G tavern. He showed no remorse. He was sullen. When Ken McElroy was sullen, prudent people gave him room. Even when he was not sullen, tough guys in saloons all across Nodaway County called him mister. It was recognized as unhealthy to cross Ken McElroy. “He never knelt down to nobody,” his young, blonde wife of five years, Trina, reflected the other day. “He didn’t care who they were or how many there were. He didn’t need nobody beside him.” Just so. He was a big, thickset man of 47 ill-spent years, 5 foot 10 inches and 265 pounds, massive arms, low forehead, bushy eyebrows and sideburns. He wasn’t a street brawler. He was specific. He struck fear in your soul by staring you down, flashing a gun, occasionally using it. If you were his prey for today, he stalked you. He glared at you in silence, and when he spoke, it was in a slow whisper. Chilling. He was born on a farm just outside of town. When he was a boy, he fell off a hay wagon, requiring a steel plate to be implanted in his head. Some wondered if that was what made him so mean. This is a small town: 440 people, filling station, bank, post office, tavern, blacktop street, grain elevator. Beyond are rolling meadows, ripening corn, redwing blackbirds, fat cattle, windmill and silos, a scent off a Sweet Lassy feed calendar. Ken McElroy jarred that pastoral serenity. So it is with outspoken relief that the citizens of Nodaway County now speak of him in the past tense. He is dead. The fear he brought them, though, still lingers in a new, unexpected form. At the D&G tavern the day of his conviction, last June 26, he was very much alive, and he was decidedly sullen. “I’ve been fighting prosecutors since I was 13 years old and I’m damn near 50,” he muttered in his beer. “This is the first time I’ve lost.” For the next two weeks the townspeople muttered, too. They wondered why Ken McElroy was in the D&G tavern in the first place, or anywhere else than where they had wanted him to be approximately since he was 13, which was in a well-barred jail. Here he was again, scot free on a $40,000 appeal bond, terrorizing the countryside. Bond or no bond, he had swaggered into the D&G tavern toting an M-1 rifle with a bayonet on it. “Same old story,” Lois Bowenkamp said. “Police arrest him, courts let him go.” Lois is the wife of Ernest Bowenkamp, known affectionately as Bo, the 71-year-old grocer who McElroy shot in the neck. Bo survived and is back to work. On the day of the hearing to revoke McElroy’s bond for carrying the rifle, July 10, about 60 men gathered downtown. They figured a big crowd at he hearing would impress the judge, and they figured to go to the courthouse together. When the men go to town, though, they learned the hearing had been postponed. Another maddening delay. In their frustration they gathered at the Legion hall, and invited the sheriff, to discuss how to protect themselves from the county menace. The meeting broke up when someone burst in with a message that more than once had cleared the streets of Skidmore. “McElroy’s in town.” This time they didn’t clear the streets. This time they strode over the D&G, and when McElroy finished his beer, they walked out with him. They stared wordlessly as he got into his pickup. Suddenly, someone put at least three bullets in McElroy’s head. Now a new terror grips the people of Skidmore. Having survived their fear of the lawless, they now fear the law. Not one person in that crowd has been willing to say who it was who shot and killed Ken Rex McElroy. Trina McElroy, who was with him, told a coroner’s jury she saw who it was and named his name. Nonetheless, the jury concluded McElroy was killed by a “person or persons unknown.” Now a Nodaway County grand jury will investigate. Trina was not McElroy’s first wife. She was his fourth. The mother of three of the 15 children he fathered over the years. They were married when their first child was a year old and Trina was 17—married under circumstances the prosecutor termed “suspicious.” The townspeople had other words for it. The prosecutor had charged McElroy with raping Trina. Trina says it was a lie, that they wanted to get married all along. Fair enough, except that Ken already had a wife and, besides, Trina would need her parents’ consent, which they refused to give. A few days before the rape trial, four things happened. One, Ken got a divorce. Two, a house burned down. Three, Trina’s parents gave their consent. Four, Ken and Trina found a magistrate in another county who married them. The house that burned down belonged to Trina’s parents. Thus ending the possibility of Trina’s testifying against Ken. The rape charges were dropped. Charges being dropped for lack of people willing to testify against Ken McElroy was the theme of his long criminal record. His lawyer said he had been run in and turned loose for lack of a case so many times he couldn’t remember them all. Rustling, livestock, threatening people, molesting a minor, arson, you name it, McElroy had been charged with it, but witnesses had a way of backing off. So it went, until he shot Bo Bowenkamp. Guilty. Finally. “Oh, he was intimidating,” Lois Bowenkamp said. “You can’t know how awful it was. My neighbor and I took turns sleeping at night. “Before the trial, he would drive up in his pickup at night and sit there. Occasionally, he would fire a gun. We knew him, knew his reputation. It was frightening.” You could never know what small thing that might set McElroy off. His falling out with Bo Bowenkamp resulted from Bo’s clerk asking McElroy’s daughter to put away a candy bar she hadn’t paid for, or from McElroy’s view, “accusing her of raiding the store.” When McElroy roared into town in his pickup with the big mud flaps and the gun rack, his wife in a second pickup (“backup,” she explained), everybody fled, not so much for their immediate safety but for fear they might see McElroy do something they would have to testify to later. In fairness to the late Ken McElroy, it is also true that, like another who once prowled these parts and met his Maker just south of here, Jesse James, he was suspected of every crime in the county. Especially rustling. Last year, Nodaway County led the state in stolen livestock—six times the thefts in any other county—and the ranchers who were aware of that were also aware that Ken McElroy always had a pocket full of money. He lived on a small town not likely to win any agricultural awards, so where did he get it all? He claimed also to trade in antiques, to which everybody said, but not to his face, whose antiques? We’re talking money. He paid for his pickups in cash. He paid his lawyer in cash. He tossed $8,000 on the bar at D&G and told the bartender, “If that ain’t enough, I’ve got a suitecase full at home.” He peeled a hundred-dollar bill off his wad and told Lois Bowenkamp it was hers if she would try to whip Trina on the Skidmore street. People here are looking to see what happens to the rustling problem now that Ken McElroy is laid in his grave. It will be more interesting to see what happens to Skidmore. The McElroy shooting has thoroughly shaken this rural community. The townsfolk don’t wan to talk about who might have shot him, they don’t want to talk about “the incident,” as they refer to it, at all, not even among themselves. “All we want to do,” Lois Bowenkamp said, “is to go back to doing what we do best, which is minding our own business.”</p>