Authors: Harry N. MacLean
Heading west out of town on Road DD, McElroy drove past Cheryl Brown's farm and another two or three miles to Burr Oak Road. Heading north on Burr Oak, McElroy cruised by the farms of some of Skidmore's most respected citizens: on the west side was Pete Ward's farm, and another mile or two down was the Clements' ranch. To McElroy, Burr Oak was a rogues' gallery, a road lined with wealthy farmers and their sons who had always looked down on him and who were now trying to put him in jail out of spite and envy.
Pete Ward had retired from farming a few years earlier and moved to town. He lived with his wife, Helen, in a comfortable, two-story yellow clapboard house on the corner, one block west of Johnson's service station. Although Pete spent a lot of time in the cafe, he was out at the farm almost every day, doing one thing or another. Helen, who was nervous to begin with, became extremely upset and frightened when Pete made his stand against Ken McElroy.
On July 5, McElroy showed up at the Wards' house in town. After parking the Silverado in front, and leaving Trena inside, he went up to the porch.
"Pete," said McElroy, "did you sign the affidavit against me?"
"Yes," Pete replied.
"Why?"
"Because you threatened to shoot Bo."
McElroy insisted that Pete tell him who else had signed the affidavit, but Pete refused. Trena overheard Helen ask Ken how many children he had, which was a source of great speculation in the community. Finally, McElroy left and drove slowly east down the block.
Bill Everhart, who lived across the street from the Wards', watched the exchange from his porch. When the Silverado reached the end of the block, by the gas station, it turned the corner and stopped. McElroy emerged from the truck with a pistol in his hand, and Trena slid over behind the wheel. As the pickup slowly pulled away, McElroy started up the alley in the direction of the Wards' house. Everhart figured that Trena was going to drive around the block and pick up McElroy at the other end of the alley after he did whatever he was going to do.
Everhart yelled across the street to Pete, "He's got a gun! He's running up the alley!"
Pete turned, but couldn't quite make out his words. McElroy, who was in a slight crouch and had just started up the alley, turned his head and looked at Everhart. McElroy continued up the alley and got in the truck without further incident.
Bill Everhart was the garrulous sort, and the story of McElroy stalking Pete with a gun in the middle of town was on everyone's lips within hours. The next afternoon, Helen was alone in the backyard when McElroy walked up the alley. As he passed by, not looking at her, he said just loud enough for her to hear, "I might have to burn this fuckin' house down someday."
McElroy may have assumed that one of the Clement brothers had signed the affidavit, or perhaps he simply lumped the Clements together with the rich farmers on Burr Oak Road. In any event, he turned his attention to Greg Clement's wife, Kathi. She told Cheryl Brown that as she drove into Maryville one afternoon, she noticed McElroy following her in the Silverado. He turned off in town, but she was frightened enough to begin carrying a pistol in her purse.
Now that McElroy had added the Wards and the Clements to his list of targets and had begun prowling Burr Oak Road, the Bowenkamps and Sumys found a snowballing number of allies. By bothering the Wards and the Clements, McElroy had bothered their many friends. Cheryl Brown remembered the feeling:
"As I remember, during the time from the filing of the motion to the day it was supposed to be heard, underneath the current of fear there was a strange calm. Anyway, there was for me and my family. I guess deep down there was a sense that something was going to happen one way or another. Either they would revoke his bond and put him in prison, or the tension would finally break someone and they would get rid of him, or at least attempt to. I can't say that anyone actually thought that way, but there was a feeling of some kind of inevitability."
McElroy continued to twist the situation. One afternoon, a few days after the petition was filed, he was in the tavern alone with Red Smith. McElroy was drinking hard, and he was angry. "Who signed that petition?" he asked Red.
"I don't know, Ken."
"Whoever signed that son of a bitch is going to pay for it," growled McElroy. "I'm going to shoot their cattle and their horses and their hogs."
During the first week of July, one of the Ward boys was on a tractor when a Silverado parked alongside the fence about fifty yards away. Ken McElroy was sitting in the driver's seat, and the long barrel of a high-powered rifle poked out of the window. McElroy sat there for fifteen or twenty minutes, then drove off. Two days passed, then the same thing happened again. Later, McElroy was seen parked alongside a field on the Clements' ranch, his rifle pointed in the direction of some of their horses. After these incidents, many farmers began carrying weapons on their tractors as well as in their pickups.
David Baird had been pleased when the jury found McElroy guilty. He had hoped for a more severe sentence, but he was confident the conviction would stand on appeal. Assuming that any man convicted of assault and out on a $40,000 bond would stay out of trouble, he had not been worried about any further trouble between McElroy and the people of Skidmore.
When Baird received the affidavits concerning the M-1 incident, he immediately prepared the petition and sent it to the court. He also advised the clerk of the court that the petition was being filed and asked for a hearing date as soon as possible. The judge scheduled a hearing for July 10, and Baird sent notices of the hearing to McFadin and McElroy, along with copies of the petition.
On July 5, the three Wards and Gary Dowling received notice of the July 10 hearing, along with copies of the petition and affidavits, and were informed that they should be available to testify on that day. The signers had five days to wait.
The Masonic cemetery, below the old Skidmore house on DD, overlooked the bridge on the route into town from Burr Oak Road. Across the road from the cemetery, on a high bluff overlooking the cemetery and the river, the Hubbell family lived in a sizable house in the midst of the pine, maple, and walnut trees. One afternoon, Whitey Hubbell, a popular man of forty-nine or fifty, with wavy blondish hair, was riding his horse down his winding rock driveway, when he noticed a pickup parked in a clump of pines in the cemetery. The truck's cab pointed west toward the river and the bridge. When he got a little closer, Whitey recognized McElroy's Silverado. He felt uneasy: What legitimate reason could McElroy have to be parked in the pines? When Whitey reached the bottom of the drive and turned his horse east toward town, the Silverado moved slowly out of the pines and wound its way out of the cemetery. As Whitey rode on, the Silverado pulled in a few feet behind him and stayed there, creeping all the way up the hill. At the top, the Silverado swerved out and around him. Whitey took it as a warning not to mention what he had seen. After that incident, Whitey carried a shotgun with him in his pickup. He also began checking the cemetery and surveying the grounds around his house for any sign of a pickup before pulling into his drive.
The line of fire from the clump of pines in the cemetery to the bridge was clear and unobstructed, a downward sloping shot of 150 yards. To hit the driver of a pickup just as it left the bridge would be difficult-but not impossible for a good marksman using a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight.
People began discussing the best way to take care of McElroy, although most of what they said was just bar talk. Chatting with Dave Dunbar and Larry Rowlett in the tavern one day, Kirby Goslee noted that when McElroy left town, he frequently drove east on V, then turned south on Valley Road to his house. At the intersection of Valley and V stood a clump of trees and brush large enough to hide a pickup and a man with a rifle. Crouched in the brush, with the butt of the rifle pressed against his shoulder and the stock against his cheek, a man could snap off a clean shot when McElroy slowed to make the right turn. The shot would be easy, no more than ten or fifteen yards. Within seconds of firing, as soon as the Silverado started veering for the ditch, the shooter could head for his pickup and be on his way.
A few of the local boys circulated a petition demanding that the board of aldermen bar McElroy from coming into Skidmore. After only a few signatures had been collected, someone on the board told the men that such a law would be illegal, so they dropped the effort. The significance of the petition lay in its existence: Before Pete Ward stood up and said, "The hell you will!" few people would have dared to sign such a document.
On Thursday, July 9, McElroy roamed the countryside in the Silverado, eventually finding his way to the home of his friend Larry. Larry had a serious problem and needed Ken's help. A few weeks earlier, Larry had gone out with another man to steal some hogs from a farmer who lived north of Skidmore. Larry had planned to take the hogs to Ken's place and let Ken take them to the auction barn in St. Joe or Rockport. The other man, whom Larry had met in jail, turned out to be a stoolie for the Nodaway County sheriff's department.
The whole operation had been a setup. Eight policemen in three cars sat outside Larry's house in Quitman and watched as he hooked a trailer to his pickup and drove with his girlfriend and the stoolie to Burlington Junction, where they drank for a while in one of the bars. Somehow, the cops managed to lose Larry on the way from the bar to the farm, and the three thieves were alone when they backed the trailer up to the hog chute and loaded ten hogs into the trailer. The truck had moved about a foot when its right rear tire went flat from the weight. Larry wanted to let the hogs out and leave, but the stoolie insisted that they keep going. After about ten feet, the rubber tore off the wheel, and the rim carved a groove in the dirt road for the entire three miles back to Quitman. Larry dropped the hogs off at a holding pen, and the stoolie went looking for the cops. Following his directions, the cops went to the farm, where they found the gate hanging open and hogs running loose. The cops then followed the groove to the holding pen and on to Larry's house, where they arrested Larry and his girlfriend. The trial was coming up, and Larry's prospects didn't look too good.
As Ken and Larry rode around that afternoon, going from Quitman to Skidmore, then on to the bars in Maitland and Graham, and finally to Fillmore, they drank heavily. Before the day was done, they had finished two fifths of Jack Daniel's. Ken was wearing blue slacks and a nice shirt, and seemed to be in a good mood, joking and laughing. He didn't mention the petition to revoke his bond, and he didn't rail against the farmers. When Larry brought up the problem of his own upcoming trial, McElroy turned to him and said reassuringly, "I'll never do a day's time, and you won't either. I'll get you out of it." Larry hoped that meant Ken would hire his Kansas City lawyer to represent him, which would be a lot better than having the public defender.
When Pete Ward had learned on Monday that the hearing was set for Friday morning, he knew that the community had to prove to McElroy and to themselves that he could no longer isolate people and terrorize them. Pete didn't intend to drive to Bethany alone on Friday morning, as the Bowenkamps had. He had in mind a caravan of trucks filled with farmers driving over together in a long steel line. The farmers would fill the benches in the courtroom and make it clear to the judge and McElroy and the cops, and anybody else around, that the old days were gone.
Farmers were not natural followers. They liked to think things through for themselves, and anyone who tried to tell them what to do was immediately suspect, especially another farmer. And getting farmers to agree on anything was an almost impossible task. But when Pete Ward said he wanted some company on the trip to Bethany on Friday, the others listened.
Pete appealed directly to the farmers. He showed up at a friend's house on Tuesday night and explained that the four signers of the affidavits were trying to recruit a group of farmers to go with them to Bethany. The farmer said he would go. Pete's sons talked to other farmers, and they also agreed to the plan.
Gary Dowling called Steve Peter and said, "A bunch of us guys, four of us, we're going over to testify that McElroy had a gun, and we'd like to have some people behind us, the support of the community, when we go in the courtroom over there."
"Sure," Mayor Peter replied, "I'll go."
The recruiting spread beyond the original four. The mayor called Dave Dunbar, and he agreed to go. Soon, the word was all over town, eventually reaching Graham and Maitland. A feeling of enthusiasm developed, with people seeking out their friends and offering them rides. The farmers were going to stand up to McElroy this time.
The plan was loose: They would meet at the cafe at 7:30 or 8:00 am Friday morning and organize into a caravan for the drive. The avowed purpose was to show support for the four signers at the hearing, but the group also meant to ensure that nothing happened to the Wards and Dowling on the road to Bethany.
Meanwhile, McFadin had called Baird on Wednesday and explained that the defense needed a continuance because he had a trial scheduled for July 10. Baird understood the problem with scheduling conflicts but said he could not agree to a continuance, because he was concerned that something might happen in Skidmore. McFadin said he had spoken to his client and instructed him not to go into Skidmore, so that would not be a problem. On that assurance, Baird finally acquiesced to the continuance, asking only that the hearing be set as soon as possible. That afternoon McFadin sent a letter to Judge Donelson requesting that the hearing be postponed until July 20, 1981. The judge granted the request.