Authors: Harry N. MacLean
At the cafe, conversations turned inevitably to McElroy's appearance at the tavern. People shook their heads and swore over the easy freedom of a would-be murderer. Inevitably, the more people talked about McElroy, the bigger and more fearsome he seemed, and the more intimidated and helpless they felt.
McElroy had a few sympathizers who sat in the cafe and the tavern and listened to the talk and told him later what people said about him. These reports fed the fires of his paranoid rage and kept things going full circle.
Word of the shooting spread far and wide, mainly because Ken McElroy's finger had been on the trigger. To his friends, McElroy explained that the shooting was pure and simple self-defense: The old man came at him with a knife, and he had to shoot him or he would have been stabbed to death. In recounting his capture, his face darkened, and he rubbed his forearms and told how Stratton had handcuffed him so tight his wrists hurt like hell for weeks.
To his family, his brothers and sisters, Ken gave a more elaborate story. He had driven up the alley and found a pickup blocking his way. When he stopped, Bo yelled at him to get out of the alley. Ken shut the motor off so he could hear what Bo was saying, and Bo yelled again, "Get out and stay out!" By then Ken's pickup had developed a vapor lock and wouldn't start. He got out of his truck to explain it to Bo, but Bo started coming at him with a knife. Ken reached in the truck, grabbed his shotgun and fired, intending only to scare him. Had he intended to kill the old man, McElroy would explain, he would have blown his head into a million pieces.
The Bowenkamp family feared McElroy would do exactly that. He might not have had any reason to shoot Bo before, but he certainly had one now. Without Bo, there was no case. From the hospital, Bo went into hiding at his daughter's house in Elmo for two weeks. Bo badly wanted to go home, and he cried at the end of the first week when his family told him he couldn't go home yet because he wouldn't be safe there.
When Bo eventually left Elmo, he stayed with Cheryl and her family for a few days. Cheryl was glad to have him, but she worried that McElroy would track him to her house. She asked the sheriff for protection and was told, as usual, that the cops couldn't do anything.
Finally, almost a month after the shooting, Bo went home. For his protection, the family established one iron-clad rule: Bo was never to be left alone. If he crossed the street, someone crossed the street with him. If he drove to work, someone drove with him. The Bowenkamps' primary defense, other than the loaded shotgun, was to make sure that Bo was never isolated again. After a while, Bo had had enough of the women looking after him and announced that he was going out by himself and wanted to be left alone. They let him go.
The Bowenkamps and the Sumys took other precautions, as well. They hooked up an intercom system between their two houses and kept track of each other. Cheryl's sister would call from Maryville and say she was driving to Skidmore; if she didn't show up in twenty minutes, Cheryl would start phoning around looking for her. When Lois left the store, she would call Cheryl or Evelyn to let them know, and would check in when she got home. The key was not to get singled out and picked off.
The nighttime, when McElroy did most of his prowling, was the worst. Someone would call and tell the Bowenkamps that McElroy's truck had pulled up in front of the tavern, or that he had been circling a block in town, and they would lock the doors, turn off the lights, and wait and watch. Evelyn and Lois had decided shortly after Bo was shot that someone needed to be awake at all times. So Evelyn would lie down and rest from six to nine in the evening while Lois stayed up, then Evelynwould sit up until midnight or one while Lois rested, then they would repeat the cycle two more times. The intercom buzzed through the night as they moved through the cycle. Lois cleaned house and did chores, running a vacuum cleaner and dusting table tops at 3 am, to stay awake.
Some people in town continued to believe that the Bowenkamps had brought their troubles on themselves. Cheryl's father-in-law told her that what was happening to them was their own fault. Others in town felt sorry for Bo and sympathized with the family's plight, but were afraid to get involved. Knowing that any neighbors who tried to help them would find McElroy on their own doorsteps before the day was out, Lois understood her family's isolation and partly accepted it. But she was also bitter. When you were in trouble, friends and neighbors were supposed to help. That's what small towns were all about.
One person who did offer assistance was Tim Warren, minister of the Christian Church. A short, rotund man, with a small head and a high voice, Warren had been the minister for only a short time when Bo was shot. Returning from vacation in Colorado a few days after the shooting, Warren paid a visit to Lois and told her to please call on him if he could do anything to help.
He also visited Bo in the hospital, where security was tight. After getting permission and showing identification, Warren entered Bo's room and sat by his bed. In his raspy, crackly voice, Bo described what had happened and showed him the holes in his neck. Once or twice, when Bo's voice broke altogether, he stopped talking and turned his head away, and tears welled up in his large blue eyes. He feared for his life and his wife's life, he told Warren. They talked for about an hour, then Warren left.
He hadn't been home more than forty-five minutes when the phone rang, and a male voice told him not to go see Bowenkamp again. "If you don't mind your own business, we'll have to hurt you."
"It's my job," Warren responded, "and I'm going to continue to do it no matter what you say."
"You're going to be sorry," the caller said, then hung up.
Two days later, a church member told Warren that Lois was very upset, so he stopped by to visit her. She was a frightened woman, and he did what he could to comfort her.
A few minutes after he returned home, the phone rang, and the familiar male voice said, "I told you to mind your own business, and now we're going to take your little boy and kill him and throw him out in pieces in your front yard."
"If you want to try it," Warren shot back, "go ahead!"
Warren knew the voice belonged to Ken McElroy. The threat bothered the minister, but the fact that somebody apparently was watching his movements bothered him even more.
Twenty minutes later, the phone rang again. The familiar voice said, "We're going to get you, you fat son of a bitch!"
Warren saw himself as a peace-loving man-"most of the time." He believed in God, Guts, and Guns and in his right to keep and love all three. He was not a violent man, he would say, but he had a right to protect himself and his family. He had been around guns since he was ten, and he understood and respected them. At the time of the incident, he had a .32 automatic, a .38 snub-nose, a .38 police pistol, a .22 rifle, and two or three shotguns. After the first call, he loaded the shotguns with deer slugs and 00 buck. After the second phone call, he began sleeping with the .38 snub-nose under his pillow and carrying the .22 rifle and the other .38 in the car with him. Some days, he would also carry a shotgun on the front seat.
Warren kept up his visits after Bo came home. The minister would stop at the Bowenkamps' house, and he and Bo would talk about what had happened and what it all might mean in God's plan for Bo. For the first month or two, the phone calls came every other day or so, even on days he hadn't seen Bo. The voice called the minister "fat boy," "stupid," "cocksucker," and other vulgar names. Sometimes the threats were short descriptions of what would happen; other times, the caller rambled on in lurid detail, as if he were enjoying it.
"If you keep on minding other people's business instead of your own, we're gonna rape your wife in front of you, and then we're gonna cut your little boy's sex organs off and make him eat them while you watch," the voice would say. "We're gonna tie you up and cut him into little pieces, and then all of us are gonna fuck your wife in front of you, and then we're gonna kill her."
"If you're so brave," Warren finally yelled, "come ahead and do it!"
The caller hung up.
Not long afterward, the trucks began coming by, as if by his challenge Warren had called them down on himself. Sometimes only McElroy came, sometimes Trena followed in another truck, and sometimes a third truck, with a woman driving, would make it a caravan. Sometimes they came in daylight, and sometimes at night. Some nights they circled only once, and other nights three or four times.
The distinctive sound of the Chevy pickup could be heard half a block away, approaching slow and steady. The deep-throated rumble of the big V-8 engine with its double exhausts would seep into the victim's consciousness, gradually growing loud enough to jolt him from his sleep. The sensation was like awakening in a darkened room to find someone sitting across the room staring at you. As the truck approached, it would go slower and slower until it was creeping, crawling almost to a standstill in front of the house. The rumble would dissolve into separate beats that floated singly through the air, rising and falling almost imperceptibly. For an instant, the truck would fill the window frame, a green apparition on huge tires with red running lights, white CB antenna, and shiny running boards. Then it would start to move, the beats would connect with each other, and the pitch would rise. The pickup might return a few minutes later, after an hour or two, or not at all. Into the night, the victim would listen, waiting for the faint rumbling to return.
McElroy kept the pressure up-pushing a little bit here, twisting that person over there-almost every day. He worked on anybody who might be a witness at the trial, and he paid particular attention to the four boys he had sent into the tavern before gunning Bo down.
Before the shooting, McElroy didn't seem to mind Red Smith much one way or another. When McElroy sat in the bar, drinking and cursing Bo, Red simply stayed out of his way. After the shooting, everything changed. McElroy would come in and sit and brood and drink and stare at Red, following his every move behind the bar. Red felt like McElroy's eyes were boring through him, and he tried to look away and ignore it, but he couldn't shake the sensation. A day or so after the shooting, McElroy started asking about the boys, who their parents were, where they lived, how old they were and where they went to school-always speaking in a low, soft voice. Red figured that McElroy knew the answers and was just asking to see if Red would lie to him.
Red also assumed that McElroy wanted the boys to know he was interested in them, because if he could get one witness to break, the others would probably scramble for cover as well. McElroy wanted Bo hanging out there all alone, seeing nothing but huge distances between himself and everybody else in town.
Late in July, a few weeks after the shooting, McElroy came in with Trena and sat at the bar. Red left for a few minutes and returned to find McElroy staring at him. McElroy nodded at Trena and she left the bar. She came back in carrying a paper sack, which she gave to McElroy. He motioned Red over.
"What do you need?" asked Red. "Another beer?"
McElroy reached into the sack and pulled out a .38 special.
"What the hell you doing with that thing in here?" Red blurted.
"I'm going to give you a memento of me," McElroy said softly.
"What the hell for?" Red protested, moving away from the counter, hands in the air, palms out. "I don't want no gun or anything."
McElroy twirled the chamber, ejected a shell, and pushed it across the counter to Red. "I just want to give you a shell out of it."
"What the hell do you mean?" Red asked. "I don't want nothing."
"One of us ain't going to be around," McElroy said.
"What the hell do you mean?" Red repeated.
"Just what I said, one of us ain't going to be around. I saw when you came back in," said McElroy. "You had a bulge in your front pocket. You carrying a rod?"
"Hell no," Red protested. "I don't even own a pistol!"
"By God, you are!" McElroy said, his voice rising. "I see the bulge in your pocket."
"Hell," Red said, feeling some relief, "that's my billfold, that's where I keep my billfold."
Red started to reach for the billfold, and the barrel of the .38 swung around, stopping in the middle of his chest.
McElroy turned to Trena and said, "You go out to the truck, and if you hear any shooting, shoot the first guy out the door, if it ain't me."
As Red would later say, he thought he'd "done had the green wienie right then and there." He hesitated, with the tip of the wallet sticking out, then pulled it out very slowly. This seemed to satisfy McElroy, who put the gun back in the sack and turned away to play a game of pool with one of his friends.
Red nonchalantly picked up the bullet and put it in his pocket. For the next few months, things seemed to be all right between them.
Before the candy incident in the grocery store, McElroy seldom came to Skidmore more than once or twice a week, usually to get gas or play pool and drink beer in the tavern. Now, after the shooting, he became a constant presence. He drove into town at least once a day, sometimes by himself, sometimes followed by other trucks. Some days, he would just drink in the tavern, his truck parked out front, guns hanging in the rear window. Other days, he would park in front of the Legion Hall and stare across the street at the B & B. Often, he would just cruise up the main street, by the tavern, by the store, swing by Dunbar's house, then back by the tavern, and eventually head out of town, driving slowly, steadily, never rushing, letting the low rumbling of the Chevy truck announce his presence.