Authors: Harry N. MacLean
Just then, the boy who had testified about getting the pop money from McElroy walked into the bar. Ken nodded in the boy's direction and said, "And that's one of them right there."
The boy walked over to Ken. "You're not mad at me, are you, Ken?" the boy asked nervously.
"No, I don't have a thing against you," Ken replied sarcastically.
Ken and Trena asked Alice Wood if she would be custodian of their children if both of them died. Alice agreed, and papers were drawn up, executed, and put in lawyer McFadin's safe. At the time, Alice noticed that Ken seemed to have put on even more weight, not just in his stomach, but also in his face. He complained about the pain in his neck from the old injury and seemed drained. His eyes, the deep blue eyes that had always danced, were now flat. To Alice, he seemed tired of everything, looking for a way out, but doubtful of finding any..
To Trena, the fight seemed to simply have gone out of Ken, as if he didn't care anymore. When they were driving down the middle of a gravel road and met a car coming the other direction, Ken would wait to swerve out of the way until the last second.
Lying in bed one night, Ken turned to Trena and asked, "What are you going to do when I'm gone?"
Trena was silent.
"These people won't let you stay here," he said.
"I don't want to talk about it" was all she could say.
"Well, when it happens," he said, "I want you to take the girls and get the hell out of Skidmore."
He talked to the girls about what was going to happen to him, and they became upset and told him they didn't want to hear him talking like that. He told them where he wanted to be buried and what clothes he wanted to be buried in.
One day Trena asked him, "Why do you go to town when you know there's going to be trouble?"
"I have to do something to get back at them," he replied.
To a long-time partner in crime, the man who had been with him when he shot Romaine Henry, Ken admitted that the world was closing in on him. To another friend, he talked about men being hired to kill him.
"You know, Jack," said Ken, "I don't give a shit no more. I don't care if I fuckin' live or die, I just don't care."
On June 30, 1981, four days after his conviction, Ken McElroy drove into town in the Silverado, and Trena followed in the green Chevy. As had been the practice since Donelson prohibited him from carrying weapons, Trena carried a gun with her in the Chevy. Today, an army M-1 rifle hung in the rear window. In the tavern, Red Smith stood behind the bar, and Pete Ward, his two sons, Wesley and Wilson, Gary Dowling, a local farmer, and Larry Rowlett sat on barstools. Trena followed McElroy into the bar, which was strange, and none of the men left immediately, which was also strange. McElroy sat a few stools away from Rowlett, and ordered a beer from Red. After a few minutes, McElroy got up and walked over to where Pete Ward was seated beside his sons.
"You're an old war man, aren't you?" said McElroy.
"Yes, I am," replied Pete.
"Well, I've got a gun out here I want you to look at," McElroy said.
Ken turned to Trena, nodded to the door, and she left.
On the sidewalk, one of the boys whom McElroy had sent inside prior to shooting Bo saw Trena emerge from the tavern, walk over to the green Chevy pickup, reach in, and take out a rifle. As she turned and started back toward the tavern, the boy realized that McElroy was inside, and that she must be taking the gun in to him. The boy wavered for a moment: Going inside a tavern where Ken McElroy had a gun was scary, but, damn it, there was sure to be some action. In a snap, the boy turned and reached for the doorknob. The door was stuck, so he pushed and fumbled with the knob. By the time he had it open, Trena was upon him with a rifle in her arms. He had no choice but to step back and hold the door for her. She neither looked at him nor said anything as she walked by him into the tavern. This could look real funny, he thought, following her inside.
McElroy was at the north end of the bar, so Red Smith was hanging around at the south end. Red had not paid much attention when Trena left,
but now he looked up and thought he saw a blade flashing in the air. As he looked closer, he realized it was a bayonet attached to the barrel of an army rifle.
Trena handed the gun to McElroy, and he began showing it off, asking everyone what they thought of it, waving it around, and talking about what a neat gun it was. Then he reached inside his pocket and brought out a five-round clip. He slapped the clip in the rifle, jacked a shell into the chamber, and began talking about what he was going to do to Bo, all the while popping the clip in and out and jabbing the air with the bayonet. Once or twice, the rifle came to rest with the bayonet pointed in Rowlett's face, and McElroy described how he was going to cut the old man in half. Scared shitless, Rowlett figured he'd seen enough. He sucked down his beer and left. The Wards and Gary Dowling stayed, and McElroy demonstrated for them how he was going to shoot Bo in the face, then roll him over and rip him open from his ass up his spine to his neck.
Looking McElroy in the eye, Pete Ward said, "Like hell you will!" then stood up and marched out of the tavern, his sons behind him.
The grizzled former army officer had decided that the terrorizing had gone on long enough, and that the folks on the east side of town needed some help. The time had come to do something about Ken McElroy, and Pete was going to do it. He walked west up the hill toward Four Corners, past the bank, and another block west to his house. A minute or so later, he reappeared on his porch with a high-powered rifle and proceeded to walk back down to Four Corners. He stopped at the corner in front of Birt Johnson's gas station. If McElroy was coming for Bo, he would have to come up the hill toward Pete. He stood on the corner holding the rifle, shell in the chamber, the safety off.
"If that son of a bitch comes up this way with that rifle," said Pete, "I'm going to blow him away."
Perhaps McElroy sensed danger as he walked out of the tavern door, or perhaps he saw Pete Ward out of the corner of his eye. In any event, he got into the Silverado and drove in the other direction out of town, with Trena following in the Chevy.
Pete Ward's action was "like a drover cracking a whip over a dozing animal's head or a hypnotist snapping his fingers in the face of an entranced subject. Although only one or two people saw what Pete did, the word spread like fire on a dry prairie. In the cafe, the story was told and retold and people shook their heads in admiration. Pete Ward was one guy you didn't mess with. With his white, short-cropped hair, a white mustache, and a gravelly voice, Pete was the subject of a lot of stories, many about his heroics in World War II, always told with respect. Pete wasn't afraid of the devil himself.
More important, Pete was also a local boy and a highly respected farmer. If Pete said someone had crossed a line, then he had indeed crossed it.
For the community, Pete's action meant the long season of running and avoiding was over. It signaled the possibility that the community was not totally helpless in the face of this man, that there were things people could do to take care of themselves, that they could stand up to him. Fear would still pervade the town, but Pete Ward's simple act rekindled a spark of self-respect in the community, and began to transform the fear from a fragmenting force into a coalescing force.
Although Pete had pulled a weapon and had been prepared to defend Bo's life with it, this was not the way he would have chosen to deal with Ken McElroy. In Pete's eyes, he had fought to keep the country free, and he believed that a man should respect the law and play by the rules. So that same day, he turned to the law for help. Knowing that McElroy had violated his bond by carrying a firearm, and assuming that threatening to kill a witness was a crime, Pete called the sheriff, told him the story and asked him what he was going to do about it. Estes said he would talk to Baird. Baird told Estes to get affidavits from the witnesses spelling out what they had seen and heard. When he brought the affidavits in, Baird would file a petition with the court in Bethany to revoke McElroy's bond. Baird told Estes to explain to the witnesses that even if he were successful in court, McElroy would not necessarily go to jail.
This was when people usually backed off, when they had to come forward and point the finger for all the world, including Ken McElroy, to see. This was when they thought about Romaine Henry and Bo Bowenkamp, and what happened to them and their families. But Pete Ward didn't waver. He signed the affidavit himself, persuaded his sons and Gary Dowling to sign it, and took the document to the sheriff.
On July 2, 1981, only two days after the incident in the tavern, Baird filed a motion seeking to revoke McElroy's bond or, in the alternative, to add certain bond conditions. If the court wouldn't put him in jail, then Baird asked that the court prohibit McElroy from traveling through, crossing into, or being in the corporate city limits of Skidmore. Baird also requested that McElroy be prohibited from frequenting bars and taverns and from having any contact with any witness in the criminal case.
When Stratton heard of the M-1 incident, he assumed that McElroy had cracked up, that his obsession with the town and his fear of going to jail had pushed him over the edge. Flashing a gun in the middle of the day in front of several witnesses seemed contrary to his usual calculated approach.
Sam T." a Skidmore resident who knew McElroy from the bars and the timber, but wasn't really a friend, had spent some time in prison in Jefferson City a few years back. When he heard that McElroy had been convicted he wondered how the big guy was going to handle the time.
A day or so after the M-1 incident, Sam was standing in his yard when McElroy pulled into his drive. McElroy appeared anxious and asked if he could drive the Silverado inside Sam's garage. Sam asked why, and McElroy said only that it wouldn't be a good idea for anybody to see him there. McElroy had a case of beer in his truck, and the two of them stood around in the garage drinking. McElroy remarked that Sam's sweet corn and potato patches looked nice, that he noticed them when he drove by. Then he fell silent for a bit. Finally, he asked Sam about his time in prison. What was it like inside? What were the prisoners like? The guards? What did they do all day? Where did Sam think he would be placed? Sam answered as best he could and tried to assure McElroy that he could do his sentence standing on his head. But McElroy didn't seem to feel any better. At one point, he turned to Sam and said matter-of-factly that if he went to prison, he was dead, and that if he stayed outside, he was dead, so it didn't really matter anyway.
McElroy pulled his .38 out of the glove box and showed it to Sam. "I'll tell you what," he said emphatically, "I'm going to take a few of them with me."
McElroy stayed for about forty-five minutes and four or five beers. As he was preparing to leave, he asked Sam if he needed any money.
"I can always use money," Sam responded.
"Here," said McElroy, "here's five hundred dollars."
"Ken," said Sam, "I could never pay you back."
"It doesn't make any difference," said McElroy. "I won't live out the week, anyway."
Sam chuckled nervously, and Ken grinned at him. "I'll see ya," he said, then he backed out and drove off.
Possessing a gun in a public place was against the law in Missouri, and, as Ken well knew, displaying a gun "in a rude and angry manner" in the presence of one or more persons was a felony. Tampering with or threatening a witness was also illegal, and if the threat was for the purpose of inducing the witness to testify falsely, the act was a felony. Sheriff Estes
could have, when he first learned of the M-1 incident, arrested McElroy for violating these laws as well as the conditions of his bond. David Baird could have directed the sheriff to arrest McElroy and detain him until he could obtain a hearing on his motion to revoke the bond. Under Missouri Supreme Court rules, Judge Donelson had the specific authority to order that McElroy be arrested and held until a hearing on the bond petition could take place.
None of these things happened. Baird explained his action by saying that in a tampering charge the threat usually has to be made to the witness and, further, that if McElroy had been picked up, he probably would have been released on bond immediately, anyway. Estes and Donelson would not discuss their behavior.
In the cafe, the conversation turned briefly to the lack of rain, the rising price of fertilizer, and the falling price of winter wheat: Should they take the wheat to the elevator or store it in hopes that the price would rise? But the main topic was the petition that had been filed to revoke McElroy's bond and put him in jail. All the men knew that Pete, his sons, and Gary Dowling had signed the affidavits, and that, in effect, the four of them were walking around with targets on their backs-or would be as soon as McElroy learned their names. Unlike the Bowenkamps, however, the four signers did not experience the distancing of their neighbors. In fact, most people felt that the men had done the right thing and that they shouldn't have to fight the battle alone. What Pete had done, he had done not for himself, but for the Bowenkamps and for the community.