Authors: Harry N. MacLean
"Yes, they did it."
Kish said he had heard that the man had been holding a shotgun during the killing, and the man didn't deny it. He agreed to talk on the record and to take a polygraph test. But by the time he was wired up, he had changed his mind.
"Boys," he said, "I better not do this."
The following day, one of the men who had been standing on the corner at Sumy's gas station crumbled. Tipped off that he was the nervous sort, two officers confronted him at his home and grilled him. When he caved, they took him to Maryville for questioning. He gave a three-page, notarized statement setting forth in detail what had happened that morning. His version substantially confirmed Trena's statement that Del Clement had been one of the killers. The officers took him to the prosecuting attorney's office, where the statement was reviewed and signed.
The next day, however, the man reappeared with an attorney-the same one representing Del Clement. The man said that he had been under stress and duress when he talked to the officers, and that the statement was not true. When asked why a witness needed a lawyer, the attorney replied, "Everybody is entitled to an attorney."
Trena and McFadin became increasingly angry over the law's failure to arrest the man she had identified as the killer. From the very first interview, she had named Del Clement, and she had never wavered. "I saw him do it," she would say, "I saw him hit my husband." Her statement as to where Del had stood was completely consistent with the ballistics. She gave Del's name to the papers, but they wouldn't print it. On the Wednesday after the killing, she went on the attack. Through McFadin, Trena charged that NO MIS was "dragging its feet and was not trying to do anything about the murder. I don't see anything done yet." She claimed that the police "never did a thing with the information" she had given them.
In a radio interview, McFadin belittled the investigation by the NO MIS squad and threatened to file a wrongful-death suit and refer the matter to the U.S. attorney for a federal investigation. McFadin added that, in his opinion, the killing was a vigilante action.
Cameron Police Chief Hal Riddle responded that NO MIS had spent more than 1,000 hours investigating the killing, and that part of the problem was that the investigators couldn't find Trena for further questioning. "It appears," said Riddle, "that Mr. McFadin and Mrs. McElroy are more interested in giving information to the media than to NO MIS In Riddle's opinion, "If you don't know what you are talking about, keep your mouth shut."
Even after Trena had joined McElroy in harassing the Bowenkamps and others in Skidmore, a few people had hesitated to condemn her. They had difficulty blaming her for failing to stand up to a man who had been able to intimidate farmers and judges and cops. Her defenders felt that she wasn't acting of her own free will. But the last thread of sympathy snapped when, after his death had left her a free woman, Trena stuck up for McElroy and attacked the town.
In an interview with the Daily Forum, she accused the townspeople of making up stories about Ken and said that police officers had harassed the McElroys. Sobbing, she said, "I hope they just remember that he never kneeled down to them. They'll never forget him, because there will never be none like him. He was the best." She insisted that "they were all in on it."
Trena had loved Ken McElroy. "He was a goodhearted person," she said. "He'd help anyone that needed to be helped. He was good to his kids and good to me." In response to questions about the bad deeds people had accused him of, Trena said, "They're making most of it up. He was just a man who would stand up for his rights."
Some of the townspeople lashed back at Trena, ridiculing her for peeing in her pants and for sobbing and weeping every time the television cameras turned her way. One resident, a woman, said bitterly, "You know, some people said he was a nice man, that he was nice to his children. Well, how nice is it to rape a fifteen-year-old girl?"
Teacher Katherine Whitney found it sad and hard to believe that the gentle, naive girl she had known was saying the things quoted in the newspaper. In Whitney's mind, Trena didn't have the wherewithal to do and say what she was doing and saying. Someone else must have been putting words in her mouth.
Ginger Clement, who had seen Trena quake at the sound of McElroy's car, was outraged to read an article in which Trena said that she had never been scared of Ken McElroy and that they had planned to be married all along. Ginger remembered the little girl who had been afraid to sleep alone in her room for fear that Ken McElroy would come in the middle of the night and kill her and take the baby away. This couldn't be Trena talking.
Seeing Trena on television sobbing and feeling sorry for herself and talking about what a good husband and father Ken had been, Margaret Stratton thought, You were plenty tough when you were sitting in my driveway in your big car and looking in my garage windows.
Juarez told his mother he wanted to say good-bye to his father. A psychologist recommended to Alice that she allow the boy to view the body or else he might have a hard time accepting his father's death. The body was available for viewing only by family members on specific request, so on Sunday morning Alice made the arrangements. She, Juarez, and the two older girls took their last look at Ken. He was dressed in dark blue pants and a white shirt, and his black hair was slicked back. His face, a pasty yellow color, was puffed up, and Alice could see the thin red lines where they had put his face back together, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
Juarez grew more bitter by the day. He didn't cry or break down, except for occasional outbursts of anger at the people of Skidmore, particularly the sheriff, who he heard had been riding with the killers on the morning of the killing. His behavior-quiet, cold, defiant-continued to remind Alice of Ken.
Tonia was the most fragile, frequently slipping back into the scene at the farm, and Alice watched her closely. For a few months before the killing, Tonia had been going to a fundamentalist church with a friend and, her parents, and she went with them the Sunday after her father's death. The congregation said a prayer for the soul of Ken McElroy, and that seemed to make Tonia feel better. But even then, Tonia envisioned her dad lying in the cold ground, in pain, feeling abandoned and alone. She knew he didn't think his kids or anyone else loved or cared about him, and that he felt terribly lonely. She told her mother she might be able to make her dad feel better if she were with him. In long talks, and with the help of some church members, Alice tried to convince her that her father wasn't feeling alone, that he wasn't in pain, and that he knew that his kids and his family still loved him. She would sit Tonia down on the couch and take her in her arms.
"All suffering," Alice would say gently, "ends at death."
The funeral for Ken Rex McElroy was held at 1:30 p.m. on Tuesday, July 14, at the Price Funeral Home in Maryville. Funeral director Bob Braham had met Ken and other members of the family a few years earlier, when Tony McElroy died. For funeral plans, Tim acted as the primary spokesman for the family, although Trena, who seemed shaken but calm, offered several suggestions. The McElroys made it clear they wanted a private service-no strangers or media anywhere near. Two McElroy males stood at the door of the funeral home to control admission to the service. Braham tried his best to keep the media away, but reporters and television cameras from St. Joe and Kansas City filled the mortuary's two parking lots and recorded the coffin being loaded into the hearse and the widow being helped into the back of a limousine.
Swirling through the community on Monday and Tuesday morning were rumors that McElroy's friends and relatives were coming for revenge, and that Trena might be hit herself by the townspeople. The Maryville Police Department put extra officers on duty and stationed them at various locations around the funeral home.
Vicki Garner had not heard from Trena, but she continued to wonder and worry about her friend. On the day of the funeral Vicki and a friend drove over and parked in the funeral home lot. She watched as Trena was helped from a car into the building, sobbing and almost unable to walk, so unstable that several times she nearly fell down. Regardless of whatever had happened, Vicki thought, Trena obviously had loved Ken on the day he died.
Twenty or thirty people attended the brief service, which lasted about ten minutes and included no eulogies or extended prayers. The Reverend Mike Smith of the Skidmore/Graham/Maitland Methodist Church presided. Smith had moved to Skidmore only a few months earlier, and he had driven out to the McElroy farm on Friday afternoon when he heard of the shooting. Two rifle shots had been fired in his direction before he could make his mission known. Smith told others that he performed the service because no one else would, and because he wanted the members of the family to know that someone cared about them. He claimed that people tried to run his car off the road, threw rocks through his window, and sent threatening letters, because of his assistance to the family. Tim Warren had asked him how he could, in good conscience, hold a funeral for someone who was going to hell.
"Well, I don't know whether he's going to hell," said Smith. "The more I hear about the man, he could have been mentally ill. I would think he had some emotional problems."
Smith earned the town's everlasting enmity for preaching that the killers should step forward-some residents would describe him as troubled himself-and he left the area before the year was out.
All of Ken's brothers and sisters who lived in the area attended the funeral. Alice came with her three children by Ken, and Sharon attended with her four daughters. Even Ronnie McNeely, Trena's stepfather, showed up and served as one of the pallbearers.
The procession turned left on the main street, which became Highway 71 heading south to St. Joe. According to one of McElroy's brothers-in-law, a police officer usually directed funeral traffic through the stop light leading onto the highway, but on that day one cop sat a block north and another a block south, and allowed the light changes to break up the funeral procession.
The road south from Maryville was a familiar one to Ken McElroy, a road he had used when he had been drinking at the Shady Lady and wanted to head for Savannah or Faucett or St. Joe. But it might have been more fitting if the procession had headed down through Fillmore on the back roads he had known so well from his years of hunting and thieving.
The family had been so adamant about keeping outsiders away from the service that Alice had not thought to notify any of Ken's friends in St. Joe. Afterward, several of them told her that they would have liked to come. She felt bad about it-Ken probably would have wanted some of his drinking pals and coon-hunting buddies there. With his family present, Ken McElroy was buried in Memorial Park Cemetery in St. Joe.
During the first three or four days following the funeral, Trena and McFadin gave several interviews promoting their vigilante theory that the town had decided to kill her husband-and defending McElroy as a decent man who was hounded for sticking up for his rights. At a news conference one week after the killing, McFadin announced that he had asked for a probe by the FBI because of the evidence of a conspiracy: "He [McElroy] said they were having meetings all over town and following him around. I just told him to be careful because I knew he could take care of himself, and I told him to stay out of Skidmore. I didn't think anybody was going to shoot him."
Trena denied that Ken McElroy had ever mistreated her. "I was not a victim. We loved each other very much. I've heard those stories, too, about how he threatened my stepdad with a shotgun and burned his house down to get them to let me marry him. It's all lies."
She also denied that he had ever stolen anything. "He was a farmer, and he bought and sold antiques for a living. He did have a lot of hogs most of the time, but every one of them was his. He never stole from anybody."
She defended his actions. "He had his right to return to Skidmore. He was born not far away and has lived there nearly all of his life. Why should anybody be able to tell him he can't come here?"
She feared for her life if she returned to Nodaway County. "I'm scared they'd shoot me, too. I think they tried the other day. I'm not going back to find out."
In response to a statement by Ken Herner that the people of Skidmore didn't wish her any harm, she said, "They should have thought of that, and the kids, before they shot him."
Tammy McElroy defended her dad as a loving father. In an interview with the Kansas City Times on July 17, she said, "All my life they've blamed him for everything. He was the best father anyone can have. I worshipped the ground he walked on. He took good care of his family and loved us all. I don't know how anyone could shoot him down in cold blood."
The St. Joseph Gazette reported Lois Bowenkamp as saying, "The Bible says that there should be an eye for an eye. Those who live by the sword die by the sword. Ken McElroy lived by the gun. And that's the way he died."
Some residents shifted the responsibility for the killing, saying, for example, "The courts are to blame. If they hadn't postponed the court hearing, this wouldn't have happened."