Authors: Harry N. MacLean
On the first Sunday in September, Tim Warren was outside playing ball with his son, when the phone rang. Warren ran inside to answer it.
"I'm tired of warning you and telling you," said the familiar male voice. "I'm going to come over and castrate you, and then I'm going to cut your little boy up in pieces and feed him to you while you're laying there bleeding from the castration, we're going to send you pieces of your wife's body in an envelope, and you're going to know that we're killing her bit by bit. It's too late now, you fat son of a bitch, you pushed me too far."
"You're so brave on the phone," Warren practically yelled. "And I'm tired of your threats. If you're so brave, I'm going to set my little boy and my wife on the porch right now, and you come on and try and get them. You want to use knives, we'll use knives, you want to use guns, we'll use guns. But I tell you what, you're not going to walk away alive if you show up!"
No one came and the calls stopped, for a while.
Word of the Stratton and Warren incidents made it to the cafe and the tavern, and from there to the families and the farms, causing new fears to ripple through the community.
On September 13, Ken and Trena McElroy loaded six of his best hounds into the cages in the back of the green Chevy and headed out to a meet in Bruckner, Missouri. After stopping for lunch in St. Joe at the Dinky Diner, Trena was backing the Chevy out of the parking lot onto 6th Street, when an old Dodge swerved to avoid hitting them. A young woman was behind the wheel, and in the passenger seat her ex-husband held their six-month-old son. Their two-year-old daughter sat in back. The woman honked her horn, yelled "asshole!" out the window, and gave Trena the finger. As the Dodge sped away, the Chevy took up the chase and tried to cut it off several times. After four or five blocks, Trena stopped the truck, and McElroy came around to the driver's side and climbed in behind the wheel. The pickup flew down the street and pulled ahead of the Dodge and swerved into it, bashing its left front fender.
McElroy came out of the truck and headed for the man in the Dodge. Trena headed for the woman and began swearing at her. When the man emerged from the car, McElroy went back to the truck, brought out the shotgun, and strode back to the car. By this time, the police were on the way.
Sergeant Jake Rostock, the officer who had answered the call when McElroy fired a shotgun into the floor of the tavern to terrorize Otha Embrey, was only a few blocks away when he got the call about a man with a shotgun threatening people in the street. When Rostock pulled up, he recognized the driver of the truck as Ken McElroy and the passenger as McElroy's wife. Rostock could see the weapon, a model 916 Eastfield 12-gauge, sawed off to nineteen inches, lying on the dash, the barrel pointing out the driver's window. Knowing that McElroy was fully capable of picking up the gun and blowing him away, Rostock pulled out his .357 Magnum, aimed it right in the middle of McElroy's forehead, and approached the pickup in a crouch, his heart thumping in his ears.
"Kenny, you're under arrest, and if you touch that gun I'll blow your fuckin' head off!"
Rostock reached in the window and grabbed the shotgun, keeping his pistol leveled on McElroy's forehead, then backed off a few feet and waited for help to arrive. After McElroy had been cuffed and put in a patrol car, Rostock checked the shotgun. The safety was off, one round of 00 buck was in the chamber, and three rounds of 00 buck and one round of deer slugs were in the magazine. Under the seat of the Chevy, he found a large corn knife and a bottle of Jack Daniel's.
Next, Rostock talked to the man in the Dodge. He was small-about 5 feet 5 inches and 135 pounds. He shook as he told Rostock what had happened. "The guy told me he was going to blow my fuckin' head off!"
The woman was hysterical, telling Rostock that the lady in the truck had been yelling and screaming that she was going to "whip her ass."
"He pointed a gun at us," the woman told him. "He said he was going to kill us. My children were in the car, and that's not right! Who is going to pay for fixing my car?" She went on and on, crying.
Rostock thought they looked like poor folks, welfare types, and he doubted they would stick to their guns. He wouldn't be surprised if their stories changed before the day was out.
After being arrested, McElroy seemed to worry most about his four expensive coon hounds. He demanded that they not be put in the pound, where they might catch a disease, and he insisted that they stay in the truck parked in the shade and be watered every couple of hours.
Rostock drove McElroy to the station, and Trena drove the truck. While waiting for McElroy to be processed, Rostock noticed Trena becoming acquainted with the victims and heard her apologizing to them for McElroy's behavior.
A felony complaint was filed that afternoon charging McElroy with violating state law by "exhibiting a deadly weapon, to wit a shotgun, in a rude, angry and threatening manner." If convicted, McElroy would face five years in prison. McElroy could also have been charged with carrying a loaded weapon in public, a violation of a St. Joe ordinance, but he was not. The magistrate released him on a $ 10,000 bond that afternoon and set the preliminary hearing for the following Monday. At the time, the officials were not aware that McElroy was already under a $30,000 bond in Nodaway County.
Notice of the arrest appeared in the Sunday St. Joseph Gazette. By Monday morning, the incident was cafe talk in Skidmore. Although the details were skimpy, the farmers knew that McElroy had been busted for pulling a shotgun on someone in St. Joe and had been out on bond before the sun had set. They debated the implications: Would this cool him down or only make him worse? Could he go to jail for violating his bond in the Bowenkamp case?
Assistant County Attorney Dean Shepard was assigned to prosecute the St. Joe case. By midmorning on Monday, he knew he was in trouble. He had heard that McElroy had told the couple in the Dodge that any person who would testify against a friend ought to have his house burned down. And McFadin had sent his investigator around to talk to the victims on Sunday afternoon.
On the day of the incident, the woman gave the following statement:
He [McElroy] jumped out of the truck and came over to the passenger side of my car where my husband and baby were. He started cussing and pointing his finger at us. A white female came out of the passenger side of the pickup and came over to the passenger side of my car. The girl and the man were cussing at us. My ex-husband Pat got out of the car and the man and Pat were yelling. The man started walking toward Pat and Pat was backing away from him. The woman came over to my side of the car. She told me if I had anything to say to get out of the car. I kept asking her why did you hit my car. Then the man went back toward the pickup. I didn't watch him to see what side of the truck he went to, but when I saw him he was walking toward my car from the truck. He was carrying a rifle-type gun in his hand. He was holding it in both hands above his hip and he had it pointed directly at Pat, my ex-husband. The man stopped in front of Pat about four or five feet from him. He still had the gun pointed at Pat's stomach.
In his statement, the man said that when McElroy came at him with the gun, he backed off, saying he didn't want any hassle. While McElroy hadn't pointed the gun directly at him, he had waved it around in the air.
At the hearing on Monday, both of the victims testified that they had not been scared by McElroy; he had not intimidated them, nor had he approached the vehicle in an angry manner. The woman testified that she had not seen McElroy point the gun at her ex-husband, and the man said McElroy had been holding the shotgun with the barrel pointing down. Nevertheless, because of Rostock's testimony, the judge bound McElroy over for trial and a date was set for December 12, 1980.
The felony complaint in St. Joe was transmitted to Nodaway Prosecuting Attorney Nourie on September 19, and Nourie filed a motion in Judge Donelson's court to revoke McElroy's bond. The hearing was set for October 2, almost two weeks away.
Meanwhile, the pot was boiling in Skidmore. McElroy came to town every day and usually stopped at the tavern, leaving at least one backup outside, engine running. He would sit at the bar, drinking and talking about what he was going to do to Bo: The next time, McElroy said, he was going to do it right; he was going to kill Bo, and there would be no witnesses. The tavern would empty in a few minutes, leaving McElroy alone with bartender Red Smith. McElroy would sit and stare at Red, drilling holes into his mind, and Red would wonder what McElroy was going to do next. In desperation, Lois wrote to everyone she could think of, seeking help. Her state representative, Truman Wilson, forwarded her letter to the Missouri Department of Public Safety. The department's executive director, F. M. Wilson, wrote back that McElroy had a record of arrests dating back to the 1950s, but that he had never been convicted. Wilson offered no assistance. Senator Eagleton sent Lois a letter stating that the problem was a matter for state law enforcement, and that he did not intend to interfere in the affairs of the state attorney general. The attorney general responded that his office had no jurisdiction, that McElroy's actions were a matter for local law enforcement. Governor Teasdale didn't bother to respond at all.
One night during this period, a thief broke into a feed and chemical store in Tarkio, a small town about forty miles northwest of Skidmore, and took chemicals worth about $20,000. In the report over the police radio, the highway patrol identified McElroy as the chief suspect. In an angry letter to the patrol, McFadin complained about his client's name having been broadcast on the air in connection with a burglary, and he demanded an apology. The patrol sent an ambiguous letter to McFadin stating that it wasn't aware of the incident but would call his letter to the attention of all patrolmen. McElroy took the patrol's response as an apology and was proud of the letter; he carried a copy with him everywhere and showed it around. In the tavern, he would wave the document in the air and brag and laugh about the great highway patrol apologizing to him. "See this?" he would say. "The patrol says I ain't done nothing, that I been a good boy!"
To the townspeople, he was becoming invincible, untouchable, like some creature in a nightmare or an ancient myth. Their fear made him even stronger.
McFadin was busy taking depositions and preparing for the Bowenkamp case. He focused on the four teenagers because their testimony supported the element of premeditation in the shooting and undermined McElroy's claim of self-defense. The first boy, frightened that McElroy would come after him, changed his story. Under oath at his deposition, he said he had been fetching a bicycle tire from behind the pool hall and had not been there when McElroy approached the other boys.
The second boy said that although it was customary for McElroy to give them money for pop, he had always done so inside the tavern. This time, the boy said, McElroy-after talking to Bo-gave them $5 and told them to go inside. In responding to Nourie's questions, the boy said that he had talked to McElroy since the shooting but that the conversation had been about nothing in particular.
The third boy had previously given the police a written statement saying that he was present when McElroy gave them the money to go inside. But at his deposition, the boy claimed that he had left the group before McElroy came over to talk to them. He hadn't heard or seen a thing, the boy now said. He admitted that he had had two conversations with McElroy since the shooting, and that McElroy had asked him in detail what he had and hadn't seen, but the conversations had occurred during chance meetings.
No deposition was taken from the fourth boy. (McFadin would later claim that he had been unable to locate him.)
On October 2, 1980, in Bethany, Judge Donelson held the hearing on Nourie's motion to revoke McElroy's bond because of the St. Joe charge. No real issue was in dispute: The conditions of the existing bond explicitly stated that the bond would be forfeited if a subsequent felony charge were filed against McElroy, and there was no question that such a charge had been filed. Moreover, his bond required him to "keep the peace" and "be of good behavior," which obviously precluded his running around St. Joe with a loaded shotgun. Forfeiture of the bond should have been ordered on the spot. Inexplicably, Donelson refused to rule on the motion and instead set the matter for another hearing twelve days later. The authoritarian judge, who supposedly ran a tight ship and maintained control of his docket, was spending more than a month disposing of a routine motion on a clear-cut violation of a bond condition-a matter that should have been resolved within a few days.
On October 14 Donelson issued an order finding the inevitable-that Ken McElroy had violated his bond by having a felony charge filed against him. Donelson ordered the $30,000 bond forfeited and a new bond set in the amount of $40,000, but McElroy did not have to spend a day in jail or pay any money. The only inconvenience was that his mother and brother had to sign a new promise to pay an additional $10,000 if he failed to appear for trial.
Donelson added two conditions to the bond: McElroy could not carry firearms on his person or in any vehicle; and he could not travel outside of Nodaway, Atchison, Holt, Leavenworth, and Harrison counties, except that he could go to Buchanan County for medical treatment in St. Joe. The first condition, prohibiting firearms, should have been imposed in the first bond, and the second condition would have been laughable had it not been so serious. By restraining McElroy to Nodaway and adjacent counties, the court was ordering the fox not to stray from the hen house. Ken McElroy must have chuckled all the way from Bethany to Skidmore.