Authors: Harry N. MacLean
Everything fell into place.
They swung McElroy's legs out the door, grabbed him by the shoulders and belt, and rolled him onto the cart, almost dropping him at one point. After placing his arms alongside his body, they strapped him in, pulled the sheet up over his head, and loaded him into the ambulance.
After they had him in the ambulance, Cheryl decided to walk around to the back and check on him. She sighed with relief when she saw the sheet pulled all the way up over his head. She walked back to the small crowd and announced, "He's dead. The sheet's over his face."
"Thank God!" someone said.
Cheryl went back to the grocery store. Evelyn Sumy had left earlier, not feeling well, and she had asked Cheryl to call and let her know whether McElroy was dead or alive. Cheryl made the call and then went back to work.
The ambulance moved slowly down the hill, leaving the town to police cars, the Silverado, and a few bystanders. The boy who had seen Trena enter the bar with the M-1 stooped down by the tin shed next to the tavern and examined the bullet holes. He and a friend stuck straws in the holes, matching the angle of entry, and projected an imaginary line that went to the top of the old bank building next to Sumy's. The boys ran over to the building, clambered up the back to the roof, crouched where the shooter would have crouched, and looked down at the straws poking out of the two holes. They searched excitedly for shell casings but found none. They did find some dents that could have been caused by someone kneeling on the tin roof.
In the bank, the customers talked about the killing. "Isn't it terrible what happened?" one said to the next in line. "It really was about time. The town didn't have much of a choice, did it?" a second said to the teller.
Herner had another concern: Rumor had it that some of McElroy's friends and family were bent on vengeance and were coming to town.
Herner went home for lunch and immediately flipped on his scanner and listened to the traffic.
At the McElroy farm, Tim had dialed the phone for Trena when she called some of Ken's sisters and Gene McFadin. McFadin suggested that, for her own protection, she leave immediately for the state patrol headquarters in St. Joseph. With Ken's sister Wilma driving, she arrived around 1 p.m. The first cop she saw inside was Sergeant Rhoades. She refused to talk to him alone, because she was convinced that either he or Estes had been behind the second gun. According to Trena, she and Wilma sat there for over two hours, virtually ignored by the cops, until finally they went up to the window and demanded attention.
Trena gave a full statement, positively identifying Del Clement as the killer. To observing officers, she appeared very calm, almost as if she were in shock. Sitting with a spray of blood on her blouse and jeans, she went over the details in a flat monotone. She refused to take a polygraph test.
The tow truck slipped its hooked tongue under the axle of the Silverado and cranked up its rear end. The six-pack of Budweiser rolled off the seat onto the floor, hissing. The few people in the street, including the cops, stopped and stared as the Silverado, pocked, shattered, and bloody, moved slowly down the street on its two front tires.
The only remnant of Ken McElroy was the pool of thick, purpling blood on the dirty pavement. One of the cops finally suggested that they hose it down. About fifteen minutes later, the new fire engine emerged from its cocoon in the city hall building and headed up the hill. The engine pulled alongside the hydrant on the corner by Johnson's gas station at the top of the hill, and a couple of men hooked up the hose. The lead man walked the hose to within twenty feet of the pool of blood and turned the nozzle on. When the water hit, the pool momentarily resisted, its mass changing shape but holding to the main boundaries, and then the thin crust broke and the blood spilled out into the dust, the bright red from the middle forming the leading edge as it ran downhill. The pinkish water turned clear before it reached the bottom of the hill. By early afternoon, the sun had dried the cracked pavement, and only a faint outline of the stain was visible.
Although eight to ten rifle shots had been fired, only two bullets hit Ken McElroy. The first one, from the .30-30, shattered the rear window in the cab, penetrated his lower neck or base of his skull, and splattered blood onto the top of the seat. A fine red mist, what the cops call "high-speed blood," sprayed the roof of the cab and the slivers of glass in the rear window. The bullet continued through his mouth, tearing through his tongue, his teeth, and his gum, before exiting through his lower left cheek. The blast blew the unlit cigarette, along with chunks of teeth and flesh, onto the dashboard. The slug shattered the driver's window and continued on into the side of the small Quonset hut a few yards down the hill from the tavern. Another .30-30 slug followed a similar path, but missed McElroy.
The high-powered rifle fired at least two more shots, which tore into the side of the truck bed, hit the metal wall of the cab, and careened off harmlessly.
The second shot that hit McElroy came from the .22. Apparently fired from further up the hill, more toward the middle of the street, the shot passed through the rear window, probably knocking out additional glass, and penetrated the upper part of McElroy's skull. By the time it had passed through the bone, the bullet was tumbling wildly, chewing the brain into tiny bits and pieces. This bullet, the .22, was the actual cause of McElroy's death, although given the time he sat unattended, he would have bled to death from the larger slug.
The .22 also fired at least two other shots, both low, leaving distinctly smaller holes in the side of the pickup, close to the passenger side. Wild shots punched other holes in the Quonset hut and shattered its front window.
A third man, the one Estes would yell at later, stood in the street armed with a shotgun, but whether he even fired the weapon or not was the subject of dispute. The cops found no pellets, and no one recalled hearing the distinctive sound of a shotgun firing. Some people said privately that when the shooting started, the third man lost his nerve and froze. Others said that the shotgun came out only as a defensive measure, in case McElroy pulled a gun, and when the man saw that his gun was not needed, he simply returned it to his truck.
But substantial evidence suggested that the shotgun was fired. Two small unexplained wounds in the back of McElroy's neck could easily have been made by pellets. The spider web cracks in the front windshield looked exactly like those made by BBs. Most important, the metal around the window behind the driver's head had numerous round indentations that, according to the men who later did the body work on the truck, could only have been made by shotgun pellets. They pointed out that the cops had not removed the dashboard, which was the most likely place for the pellets to have fallen. Even if the shotgun were fired, however, it was not the cause of McElroy's death.
David Baird was in the clerk's office in the Nodaway County Courthouse on Friday morning when his secretary burst in, pulled him out into the hall, and told him that McElroy had been shot and killed in Skidmore. Baird called the sheriff's office, and they confirmed the shooting and the death, but said no names were being used on the air yet. A short while later, Estes came into Baird's office, shut the door, and told him what had happened.
The circumstances created serious problems: The sheriff with primary jurisdiction had been at a meeting only minutes before the shooting, and had advised the townspeople how to deal with the man who had just been killed; and the man who would be responsible for prosecuting the killer had only days before convicted the dead man of assault. The two men decided to turn the investigation over to the Northwest Missouri Investigative Squad NO MIS a standing task force of lawmen from the surrounding counties set up to deal with special or unique crimes. Baird and Estes set a press conference for 3 p.m. that afternoon.
Richard and Margaret Stratton were eating lunch at her mother's house in Maryville when their daughter Pam telephoned to say that McElroy had been killed. Stratton, who took the call, exclaimed, "You've got to be kidding me!" Margaret heaved a big sigh of relief, then proclaimed enthusiastically, "July tenth should be made a national holiday!"
With Margaret driving, the Strattons left to run an errand, but when they came to the street leading to the Maryville police station, Stratton suddenly said to Margaret, "Turn here!" Several police, patrol, and sheriff's cars were parked in front of the station, and several officers were standing around.
"Pull over," Stratton directed. He leaned out the window and asked, "Is what I hear about Ken McElroy true?"
Several officers responded cheerfully, in a mood bordering on celebration.
"Yeah, they finally got him!"
"That son of a bitch is dead now!"
The responses struck Stratton as unprofessional.
Other people's words weren't enough. Stratton had to make it real, to see for himself. He told Margaret to drive to Price's Funeral Home.
Stratton walked into the office of the director, an old friend, and said, "Is there something you need to tell me about?"
"Yes," said the director. "I've got someone for you to see. Go ahead on in."
Stratton walked into the embalming room and stared at the huge form slabbed out on the porcelain table. It's over, he thought. Ken McElroy's dead. Staring at the still body, Stratton felt as if he had lost a part of his own life. A strange feeling came over him: What am I going to do with my extra time now?
Stratton worried about Skidmore, what the people there were feeling and thinking, and how they were handling the killing. He felt a sense of failure. They were good people, the law had let them down, and now they were in real trouble.
Instead of driving home to St. Joe, Margaret turned on V and headed for Skidmore. Stratton wanted to see the people, the scene, and try and visualize how it happened. He spoke to the locals standing around in front of Sumy's, and they seemed numb, as if they had just come down from a heavy shot of adrenaline. The most they could express was a sense of relief. "Well, he's gone now."
Stratton talked to the NO MIS investigators, and they were confident that they would find the killer or killers. "We'll get 'em sooner or later," one deputy said.
After half an hour, the Strattons left town. Damn it, Stratton thought, I always knew McElroy would die by a gun, but I never figured it to happen this way. He had expected to find one of McElroy's pickups in a ditch with the windshield blown out and his head shot full of holes. Apparently,
Stratton hadn't realized how bad the situation had become. He tried to express to Margaret his mixed feelings of relief and sadness.
McElroy's body made a strange journey-first to the hospital, where he was formally pronounced dead, then to the Price Funeral Home in Maryville, where he was embalmed, and finally to the hospital in St. Joe for an autopsy. At the funeral home, he was laid out on his back on the embalming table and incisions were made to drain the remaining fluids from his body. Around the table, supposedly gathering evidence, stood a couple of Maryville cops, a few deputy sheriffs, and two state patrolmen. As an officer from the Maryville Police Department took pictures, the mood shifted back and forth between joviality and shock.
Patrolman Dan Boyer attributed the good feeling in the room to a shared sense of relief: There the awful son of a bitch was, dead on the table. Some of the men clowned for the cameras. When the photographer was taking a shot of McElroy's head, Boyer leaned into the picture and gave a little Groucho-style grin and wave. In other moments, Boyer was almost awestruck by the sight: The body was huge, like a hairless grizzly bear, with a massive cAi est broad shoulders, a huge gut, and skinny legs. He seemed almost by'gger than life, even when dead, and Boyer waited for the eyes to pop or pen any second.
"Jesus Christ." I can't believe he's really dead!" one officer exclaimed.
From the Wiood in the cab, Boyer had expected more visible damage to McElroy's face, but there was only one long tear in his jaw where the .30-30 had exited. Fluid was drizzling out of his penis, and Boyer figured that either McElroy had had sex just before he was killed, or the impact of the shells had slammed his system awful hard. Three men were needed to roll the corpse over onto his stomach so that the holes in the back of his head could be photographed. He was lying in that position, face down, arms at his sides, when Boyer left to rejoin the investigation. Later, when the FBI came into the case, there were regrets and admonitions about the clowning photographs.
When Vicki Garner heard of the shooting, she immediately thought of Trena-how horrible it must have been for her when Ken was shot, how dreadful for her to witness her husband's murder. They maybe could have done it, she thought. But it was wrong for them to do it with her in the truck.
Vicki called the McElroy house, seeking to comfort Trena, but Tim said she was too upset to come to the phone. Vicki asked him to tell Trena that she felt sorry for her and cared for her. Tim said he would give her the message.