Authors: Harry N. MacLean
"It's quite a sight," Kirby said softly. The rain had stopped completely, and the air was sharp.
Q nodded, then mumbled, "Well, I guess we can get back to work." The two men descended the steps and ambled easily out to the combine, their gaits identical except for a little hobble in the older man's step.
In November, Mabel's frail body finally gave out, and she was laid to rest. Sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, nephews, and nieces came from all around for her funeral. Because the family had been offended by a remark the owner of the Price Funeral Home had made in the Kansas City Times about Ken's death, the service for Mabel was held in another funeral parlor in Maryville. Juarez, who had been staying at the small house helping to care for Mabel, had not yet recovered from seeing his father's puffy, yellowed face, and could not bring himself to attend his grandmother's funeral. It's too bad, thought Alice. The pain is gone from her face, and she looks like she's finally at peace.
Harvest was over by mid-December. The ground began to freeze, the snow began to fall, and the light faded by five in the afternoon. The grain had been either sold or stored, and the machinery put away in the sheds.
The emotional letdown was severe-the intensity of twelve-to sixteen-hour days had dissipated. The farmer might sleep a little later and take a nap after dinner, but it was hard to relax. For a few weeks, he would ask himself if farming was worth all the trouble, if it really made any sense to work so hard for so little.
As the weeks and months passed, Ken McElroy continued to hold sway over the community of Skidmore. If a stranger brought up the subject, even innocuously, a resident was likely to snap, "McElroy's dead, and that's the way it should be. Let's leave him buried." However much the community hoped that the memories and the feelings would fade with time, the events of 1981 merely sank deeper into the collective psyche, only to come flooding to the surface at the slightest provocation.
Eventually, the subject of McElroy became all but taboo among the townspeople, themselves. In the cafe, in the tavern, in the fertilizer store, no one talked about what had happened that July morning-not even about the safe parts. Perhaps talking about the nightmare had helped to keep it alive; perhaps if people turned their attention away from the killing, it would lose its power over their lives. Besides, no one knew who was going to be called to testify under oath as to what he had seen or heard. The murder charge was hanging over the community, the killers were in their midst, and nobody could tell what the next twist in the road might bring. The easiest thing to do was to hear nothing, to say nothing, and to go about your business of farming or pumping gas or serving beer.
In a sense, the town was cheated of its moment of relief after the long struggle. The people needed a chance to run up and down the main street, jumping and shooting firecrackers and yelling that McElroy was gone, that the good guys had finally won. Celebrating might also have helped purge the anxiety over the fact that McElroy had been one of them. Denied even the briefest moment of euphoria, the community was denied that cathartic effect.
As it was, the bonds of silence, never articulated, never sworn to, drew even tighter in response to the grand juries, the subpoenas, and the press. Regardless of the price to be paid, the community would not give up the guilty.
A Maryville businessman who had grown up, gone to school, drank beer, and chased women with several of the men who had been on the street when McElroy was shot spent five or six hours drinking with them at a Maryville bar a month after the shooting. When he casually asked what the hell had really happened that day, they looked at him as if he were from the FBI and said, "We don't know nothing." The harder he pushed, the stonier they got.
Although Ken McElroy was indeed gone, he could not be forgotten. Like a large stone falling into still water, his life and death kept rippling out and touching everyone and everything, seeming to lose no force along the way.
One immediate effect of McElroy's death was a steep decline in the number of hog and cattle thefts in Nodaway County. According to the records of the county extension agent, such thefts began decreasing in August 1981, the month after McElroy's death. Of course, some of the decrease may well have been due to the jailing of his friend Larry.
On December 15, 1981, Larry went to trial on charges stemming from the night he had driven a trailer full of hogs home on a rimless wheel. Without McElroy's largess, Larry could not afford to hire a private attorney, and his public defender apparently did not mount a spirited defense. The primary witnesses against him were the rat who had set him up and the cops who had found the trailer and the pigs. Larry didn't take the stand, and the jury promptly convicted him. His attorney waived his right to a pre sentence investigation, declined to file a motion for a new trial or an appeal, and judgment was entered that very day. Larry had four prior convictions-three assaults and one rape, which had been reduced to contributing to the delinquency of a minor. At the time of the trial, he also had two pending charges for second-degree assault and brandishing a weapon in a rude and angry manner on July 10, 1981. For the hog theft, Larry was sentenced to six years in prison. On December 29, less than two weeks after his trial, he went to jail. He eventually pleaded guilty to the weapons charge and received an additional sixty-day sentence.
Festival, which had recently settled into its new farm near Skidmore, was touring the West and Midwest after the release of a tape entitled "Just Another Band from Skidmore." As part of their performance, the band had always done a humorous routine about Skidmore, the tiny, out-of-the-way town in Missouri, but now members of the audience began interrupting the routine, yelling, "Who shot McElroy?" It happened everywhere-at state fairs, conventions, and night clubs; in Fargo, Indianapolis, and even
Las Vegas. At first, the band made a joke out of it. Each member would raise a hand, smile broadly, and yell out, "I did!" After a while, they dropped the routine, because the audiences wouldn't let go of it. Finally, the band members stopped mentioning Skidmore altogether.
The FBI's initial investigation was very limited; the agents reviewed the evidence collected by the local authorities and waited to see how the state grand jury turned out. In March 1982, when it was clear that nothing further was going to be done on the local level, the FBI launched a major investigation. In April, they sent a team of ten agents into the field under the supervision of an attorney from the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. The agents interviewed more than a hundred witnesses-questioning many of them several times-and issued sixty subpoenas to appear in front of the federal grand jury in Kansas City.
The townspeople knew that the FBI was involved in the case, but the federal invasion of the community caught most people by surprise. Although the agents' sudden appearance made everyone nervous, it sparked a lot of laughter, as well: The federal cops from the big city came dressed as farmers, wearing overalls, scuffed-up boots, seed-dealer hats, and wrinkled work shirts. With their soft hands and pale complexions, they were the funniest-looking farmers to float in and out of Mom's Cafe in quite a while.
A young bachelor farmer had just gotten out of bed at 5:30 one morning when he saw a light green four-door Ford LTD pull into his driveway. He knew right away who the men inside were. One of the passengers, about 6 feet 3 inches and muscular, wore a straw hat, a work shirt, and jeans; the other one wore bib overalls and a cap. They were much too clean looking to be farmers. When they flashed their badges and said, "FBI," the farmer invited them in. They sat at the breakfast table and began to chat amiably, asking how the farming was going, what the women around Maryville were like, whether there was any action, and so on. Then they shifted to the murder.
"Somebody told us you know who shot him," said the tall agent. "That you been running around shooting your mouth off about who did it."
"I wasn't even in town that morning," said the farmer. "I was here loading oats. I didn't see a thing,"
"We know that, but we think you know who did it."
When the farmer professed his ignorance, the agents switched the conversation back to women and places to go and the spring weather for a while. Then the tall agent stood up, leaned over, pounded the table, and stuck his finger in the farmer's face, saying, "We know you know who did it. Tell us or you'll never get us out of here!"
As the farmer repeated his denials, the pattern-pleasantries followed by accusations-continued. Because the farmer was known to be good friends with one of the primary suspects, the agents were convinced he was lying to protect the killers. One agent rattled off the names of the three suspects and said, "We know you know it was them."
"I don't know anything," said the farmer, "and I don't want to know anything."
"What?" said the agent. "In a small town this size, you expect us to believe nobody told you who did it?"
"Right," said the farmer. "That's how you can get in lots of trouble-if you know."
Finally, in order to give them something, the farmer told the agents about two cars that had sped down the gravel road by his farm on the morning in question. "I knew something was up that morning because around 10:30 a couple of cars came tearing down the gravel road about ninety miles per hour."
The agents demanded to know who was in the cars, but the farmer said that he didn't know, that he hadn't seen. He didn't tell the agents that one of the cars had stopped at his drive.
"They just shot McElroy!" the driver had said, after pulling to a halt in a cloud of dust.
"What?"
"Yeah, they shot McElroy." The man had been pale and shaking. "We're in trouble now; we don't know what's going to happen."
The agents finally left at about 9:30, after additional accusations and finger-wagging failed to produce results.
About two weeks later, when the farmer was on his tractor disking the fields, he saw the green Ford pull up by the fence. He motioned the agents to the gate, drove the tractor over, and turned it off. This time, they were interested in only one thing-who was in the two cars speeding down the road.
"I don't know," the farmer said. "I really don't remember."
The agents stayed nearly two hours and kept pumping him. Toward the end, they threatened to put handcuffs on him right there in the field and take him to Maryville.
"We just want to know who was in the cars."
Finally, he gave them the name of a neighbor who had been in one of the cars, and they left. But not before handing him a piece of paper that summoned him to appear before a federal grand jury in Kansas City the following week.
Trena, her three children, and Sharon's girls had moved down to Faucett to stay with Alice. Everyone seemed to need each other, and both women thought the kids would benefit from being together.
After the funeral, Alice took charge of cleaning out the house, collecting the papers, and dealing with the Silverado. A week or so after the killing, as she was driving up to the farm to deliver some papers to Tim, a pickup with three men inside had pulled over in front of her, forcing her to the edge of the road.
One of the men got out and came over to her, saying, "Don't you think it's a little dangerous to be driving around here in a McElroy truck?"
Alice picked up her shotgun from the passenger seat, pointed it out the window, and asked, "Don't you think it's a little dangerous to be threatening someone with a gun in their hands?"
"I just wanted to warn you," he said, stepping back a pace or two.
"I'll take care of myself," she said. "Don't you worry. And I'll do what I want to do and go where I want to go. If you or anybody else tries to stop me, you'll have to shoot me."
Alice would mellow as time passed, but at the moment she had more problems than she could handle. The kids were having difficulty adjusting to their father's death, and the reporters were hounding her constantly. She tried to explain how Ken really was-that he had a good side, too-but she stopped when she realized they didn't want to hear anything positive about him.
Her frustration peaked when photographers and reporters from People magazine came and spent the entire day at the house. While Alice was talking in the living room, the photographers were taking pictures of the two boys in their bedroom where a shotgun that Ken had given to Juarez hung on the wall. One of the photographers took the gun down, handed it to Juarez, and shot pictures of him aiming it in the air. Then they persuaded Alice and the kids to go to the cemetery, so the kids could be photographed next to their father's grave. Alice finally called a halt to the interview when the photographer suggested taking flowers from an adjoining grave and putting them on Ken's grave for the picture.
After the People interview, Alice stopped talking to reporters. She would go downtown for the day or hide out at a neighbor's house.
Not long after the shooting, after Alice's name and address had been in the paper, her three children were in the yard playing when two men in a jeep drove by and fired a rifle twice in the direction of the house. Juarez ran inside and got a rifle and shot back, but the jeep was down the road by then. Although Alice called the police, no action was taken.