Authors: Harry N. MacLean
Stunned to hear that his only witness, his victim in eleven felonies, had married the accused, Fraze said simply, "I can't believe it." McFadin assured him it was true and promised to send him a copy of the certificate.
Both McFadin and Fraze assumed that eleven of the felony cases-all but the flourishing-a-deadly-weapon charge-collapsed when McElroy married his victim. As a matter of law, that assumption was not necessarily correct. Like most states, Missouri recognizes the husband-wife privilege, which provides in general that a person may not testify in a court of law against his or her spouse. But Missouri, as most states, also recognizes several exceptions to this rule: One of them provides that a spouse is not prohibited from testifying about crimes committed by the other spouse against him or her.
Thus, theoretically, Fraze could have continued to prosecute the cases. But his real problem was practical, rather than legal. What would the jury think when the victim got up and testified that she had been raped by the defendant, but had married him a year later?
Fraze could have explored other avenues to save his cases. He could, for example, have filed a motion for a hearing, brought the circumstances to the attention of the court, and asked that a guardian ad litem be appointed for Trena; then he could have attacked the validity of the marriage, arguing that it was a continuation of the crime itself, that McElroy was attempting to conceal the crimes by marrying the victim. Under this argument, the judge could have invalidated the marriage as a blatant fraud on the court, entered into solely for the purpose of defeating the criminal action.
Such an attack would have been difficult, and what probably made it impossible was a statement executed and sworn to in McFadin's office by the victim-wife, in which she said:
I do not wish to engage in any criminal or legal actions against Kenneth McElroy; that any and all accusations that I made against any improper or criminal conduct between Mr. McElroy and myself were made because of my feelings of frustration and jealousy toward Kenneth McElroy; that all such accusations were untrue. That I fully understand the consequences of my acts, but said accusations were made when I was under considerable mental anguish and I do not feel I was fully responsible for said accusations. This statement is true. I do desire that the charges against Mr. McElroy in which I am the prosecuting witness be dropped. The above statement is true to my best knowledge and belief.
Trena L. McCloud
As Alice Wood and Marcia Surritte had done in the Savannah cases, Trena claimed, in recanting the felony charges, that her motivation in bringing the charges had been jealousy and frustration.
Fraze was baffled by Trena's turnabout, but did not in good conscience feel that he could proceed with the prosecutions. On October 24, 1974, he filed papers dismissing the eleven felony charges. The twelfth one -flourishing a weapon-went to trial some time later in Gentry County. A key prosecution witness could not be found for the trial, and McElroy was acquitted after trial by a jury. McElroy's rule-no witness, no case-had been elevated to the status of a criminal commandment. At this point a total of nineteen felony charges-occurring in Buchanan, Andrew, or Nodaway counties between 1970 and 1973-had been dismissed or resulted in an acquittal because the primary witness declined to prosecute, changed his or her story, or became unavailable for one reason or another.
Once the rape, arson, and child molestation charges had been dropped, the prosecutor and the juvenile officer washed their hands of the whole matter. In their view, they had tried to protect Trena as best they could, and if she chose to run off and marry McElroy, that was her business, and so was whatever happened to her afterward.
Ginger Clement felt bad when she heard about the marriage. Remembering Trena's descriptions of what Ken had done to her, she could only wonder what he had done to get her to marry him. Ginger would never believe that this was what Trena really wanted, and she often felt things might have turned out differently if she had only been able to keep her a little longer.
Shortly before the marriage, Ken explained the situation to Alice: He had to marry Trena to avoid going to jail, and Trena had made him promise that she would be the only woman living at the house. He knew Alice was going to be mad about it, but there was nothing he could do. But Alice wasn't mad; whatever love remained had vanished when he split her face open with a gun barrel. In fact, she was beginning to wonder why she had stayed around as long as she had. If anything, the drinking, the violence, and the obsessive streak in him had gotten worse. "You go your way and I'll go mine," she told him genially.
Alice left and moved to Maryville with the two kids, and took up hairdressing as a means of support. On September 20, 1975, eleven months after Ken and Trena were married, Alice gave birth to Ken, Jr. Some things were apparently easier said than done.
McElroy's triumphs shook the three small towns of Skidmore, Graham, and Maitland. For the first time, it had been their system going after him-their cops, their prosecutors, their judges-and for whatever reason, the system had failed.
Ken McElroy was a thief by profession. He stole everything he could get his hands on: pigs, cattle, dogs, grain, chemicals, antiques, tools, parts, and guns. His friends and family claimed he made a living raising hogs, growing corn, and buying and selling antiques. But most people never took that story seriously, and they probably weren't meant to. Any farmer in the area could tell you that the McElroy farm wasn't a true crop-producing farm: The land hadn't been cleared right or terraced where it should have been. He always had a few hogs on the place, but aside from their questionable origin, never enough to support a family. Ken McElroy wasn't a farmer, and he surely would have cringed at the image of himself as a farmer. Ken McElroy hated farmers.
McElroy may have been the best dog handler in the entire area. He knew dogs, he loved dogs, and in the trading, buying, and selling of them, he always came out ahead. A few dogs, the champions or potential champions, went for $2,000 or $3,000 apiece. And he could talk a guy into paying $500 for a dog he had just seen fall headfirst into a creek. But he would have had to make a lot of dog deals to live the way he did-to afford the women, the kids, the cars and trucks, the fancy guns, the good whiskey, and the enormous legal fees.
Ken was an honored figure at the dog meets. He had hunted and traded dogs with the other men for years, and his word was always good: If he told you that this pup came from that bitch, then it was a fact. And he was a gentleman. Coon hunters were a pretty rough crowd, arguing and cursing when they thought a judge had favored a friend or had miscounted the number of times a particular dog had barked when it hit a tree with a coon in the branches. But McElroy never joined in these disputes. If he received a bad call, he simply shrugged and walked away, without so much as raising his voice. If anything, McElroy was the conciliator, the one who tried to smooth things over. He drank quite a bit, and he made his women work hard training and exercising his dogs, but he was always polite and friendly. Everyone at the meets had heard the stories about Ken's thieving and violence, and some of them had been in on a few activities with him. But he never showed that side of himself at the gatherings.
Few people at the meets thought Ken McElroy was a farmer. He came dressed in slacks and a nice shirt, all cleaned up with his hair slicked back. His hands were soft and clean and his nails trimmed, like a woman's. He drove new, fancy pickups and he was always flashing a wad of money around. Once, he popped the hubcaps off the wheels and laughed as wads of money tumbled out on the ground.
Family members argued, with some justification, that Ken couldn't possibly have committed all the crimes he was accused of-unless he could be in twenty places at the same time. He could be, indirectly. By the time he moved back to the Skidmore farm, McElroy had graduated from popping a hog or two into the trunk of his car to stealing two or three trailer-loads of cattle in an evening and, more lucratively, fencing animals and other items for a network of other thieves. Some of the thieves were his buddies, who stole both with him and for him, and others were young boys from the area. McElroy seemed to know which boys would be amenable to his propositions-boys from poor families, misfits, malcontents, boys that would look up to him because he ignored the rules and lived life his own way. He bought them pop and beer and played pool with them, and let them drive his pickup, even though they were under age.
Sam S. began stealing for him at the age of fourteen and kept it up for ten years:
"There was a bunch of us that stole for him, kids that he trusted. He would buy whatever we would bring him: corn, tools, air compressors, chemicals, anything. We would go to a farmer's yard, scoop the grain into the back of our truck, drive to his place and scoop it out in his yard or one of the sheds. He would give us a dollar a bushel and the next day he would scoop it up and sell it at the elevator in Maitland for two or three dollars a bushel. Whatever you took him, you always got cash on the spot, usually one-third to one-half the price. There were never any confrontations or disputes-he was always fair with us."
A few of the boys formed more of a bond with McElroy. Tom L, who came from a poor rural family, was also fourteen when he began stealing for him.
"Ken always stopped to talk to us about things he had done, about his cars and women. Other times, he would buy us beer and give us money to play pool. He would talk a lot about how he didn't like farmers, that they were always fuckin' with him.
"Once, he pulled out a stack of money and asked a friend and me if we would like some of it. "Shit yes," we said, and he told us exactly what he wanted and where it was. He would drive around during the day and look at stuff and then tell us where it was and how much he would give us for it. He always paid cash.
"I never went out to the farm uninvited; he always came and found me. I never liked it out at his house. It was scary. His wife and kids never said a word. They would fade into the background the minute we arrived. He kept a bottle of speed in the house; I never saw him use it, but he would give it to me to keep me awake when we were out stealing at night.
"He knew when the farmers were going on vacation and how to get in all their places. He told me once that the key to this one house was in the fruit cellar, and there it was. How in the hell did he know that?
"Sometimes he would find me in town and he'd be in jeans and a jean jacket with a pistol under the jacket. "I need you to do some things that my women can't," he would say. We would take off in the middle of the night in his big Buick or Delta 88-they all had toggle switches on them to shut off the tail lights and brake lights when he was running-and he would slow down as we went by the place, and I would jump out the door. I'd go steal whatever it was and wait crouched in the ditch for him to come back around. He'd slow down and I'd run alongside the car with whatever I had and jump in.
"Some of his dogs were real bad. He had fifteen or twenty of them chained up outside, and he fed some of them speed to keep them mean. When he would give me a pill, he would always pop a couple down their throat-it really fucked them dogs up.
"I liked him, I really did. He was always really good to us kids. A helluva lot better than the farmers that hired us for nothing to slop around in their pens and do their nigger work. Once or twice I went back when I was stealing for Ken and nailed a couple of farmers I had worked for.
"I got a lot of respect hanging around him; people thought more of me after I was seen with him two or three times. The guy never did nothing wrong to kids. He was like a father to me."
McElroy loved to prowl the countryside at night, cruising the small towns and the back roads in his cars and pickups, stopping by bars and friends' houses, running his dogs and stealing cattle, until the early hours of the morning. He could be hunting or working, or both; more than one farmer came up on Ken McElroy on a dark night, parked alongside a gravel road, supposedly tracking down a dog he had lost in the timber.
Stories about Ken McElroy's exploits flourished. Many, though highly suspect, were repeated enough to become part of the legend. Some had a grain or more of truth to them, and others-often the wildest ones-were outright fact. One of those was the horse-trailer incident.
Fillmore, a town about twenty-five miles south of Skidmore, was a place unto itself, a grimy, wasted little rural slum where dilapidated buildings and rundown streets went unfixed for years, and rusted-out trucks and old farm equipment sat out on the street in front of ramshackle houses. Fillmore had a serious reputation for hard drinking and mean fighting, which the residents, men and women alike, did their best to live up to. It was a town of coon hunters, tenant farmers, and truck drivers. At midday people stood on the sidewalk on the main intersection of town drinking beer and spitting pools of tobacco juice on the dusty pavement, staring silently at strange cars that happened to wander in off the track. At one time, McElroy lived a few miles outside of town and used to hang out in the bar.
Nick P." a regular at the bar in Fillmore, had met Ken a few years back through a friend, trading dogs. Nick was a rough-looking dude; about forty-one, thick upper torso, bald with a little fuzz on the sides, beady eyes" mangy in the words of an acquaintance. His nature was decent enough until he got drunk, and then he was mean as hell. He had sold Ken a few hogs in the past and had always received a fair price for them. The night that Ken found him at the bar in Fillmore, Nick had just been released on parole after serving three months on an assault conviction. Ken had a goose necked horse trailer hooked on behind his pickup and was out to rustle some cattle. He needed someone to stand lookout and help him load the animals into the trailer. Nick readily agreed to assist, and in the course of a few hours the two of them rustled four cows from nearby farms. They were heading south through Fillmore on their way to St. Joe when Ken spotted a sheriff's car sitting in the driveway of the park. The deputy sheriff pulled out after them.