Authors: Harry N. MacLean
Shortly thereafter, the landlady told Alice she and her children would have to leave. With a real estate agent, they looked and found another house in Faucett and talked about renovating it. Two days later, the agent called and explained that Alice couldn't have the house because some of the neighbors in the area didn't want her and her kids around.
Juarez and Tammy were angry and bitter about their father's killing, and they didn't seem to be getting better. Against the advice of his mother and the coach, Juarez had gone ahead and pitched the baseball game his dad had planned to attend; his team lost. Alice explained to him that whoever shot Ken would pay for it throughout eternity, but Juarez didn't want to wait for eternity. Alice continued to see strains in him that reminded her of Ken-the way he withdrew in the face of pain, his anger ready to spill out-and she felt frightened for him. Ken, Jr." did not try to hide his pain. Others wouldn't let him forget who he was: The mother of one of his friends called Alice one day and said that upon learning that Ken, Jr." was a McElroy, her husband had insisted that the two kids not play together. Bluntly, the woman explained that little Ken was not to have anything to do with her son. The St. Joe cops had also picked up both Ken, Jr." and Juarez and hassled them on what Alice felt were bogus charges.
Tonia, after the shock had worn off, seemed to be adjusting better than her brothers, perhaps because she had friends and was active in church.
Sensing that the kids would never get away from the McElroy name in St. Joe, Alice began thinking seriously of moving.
After a few weeks with Alice, Trena moved to a small town in the Ozarks only a couple of miles from where her parents had moved when they fled Ken McElroy some eight years earlier. Initially, Sharon's three daughters lived with Trena and her children. After a few weeks, Tammy went back to the farm to help Tim care for Mabel, then Debbie went to live with Sharon in a small town not far from St. Joe. Finally, Tina went to visit Debbie and Sharon for Christmas and didn't come back.
Trena still lived with the vague fear that something bad was yet to come, that the violence wasn't over. She focused on her children, trying to settle them into a new life in the small community. When other kids on the school bus made cracks about their father, Trena put a stop to it with phone calls to their mothers.
In the beginning, Reno, the youngest, would ask every day or so, "Where's Daddy?" And Trena would tell him, "Daddy's in heaven, baby."
She enrolled in training to become a nurse's aide and waited for time to make things better.
Vicki thought about Trena a lot and wondered how she was doing. She sent Trena a birthday card on her twenty-fifth birthday, January 27, 1982, in care of lawyer McFadin's office in Kansas City. The card came back marked "address unknown." McFadin's got her isolated, Vicki thought. There's not much more I can do. (In fact, McFadin, along with everybody else, had lost track of Trena for a while.) Later, Vicki saw Trena's grandmother and asked about her. Well, Vicki thought afterward, Trena knows where to find me if she wants to.
"60 Minutes" aired its show on January 21, 1982. As in many things surrounding the killing, the town's reaction was ambivalent. Skidmore came off fairly well, although Morely Safer described it as "a town that had never seen better days." While saying that McElroy was a bad character and that the townspeople probably had no choice, the program pondered the complex ethical questions involved in taking a life outside the law. Dunbar's interview was chopped up in a way that made him appear to be a chicken. The highlight of the program was a scene showing Lois and Bo Bowenkamp, Tim Warren, and Romaine Henry sitting at a dining room table. (Steve Peter declined to be interviewed.) Lois, in her deliberate, biting style, proclaimed that everyone in town was resting better now that McElroy was gone. Safer asked them in turn if they would identify the killer if they knew who he was; each one said no. In a high-pitched voice, the rotund Reverend Warren quoted the Old Testament, saying, "Whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed."
The program made the town's agony a national topic. Skidmore was portrayed as something of a victim-hero-a victim for its long suffering, and a hero for finally blowing the bastard away. (There were always those who would ask, "What took them so long?") The community didn't want to be a hero any more than it wanted to be a victim-such a label assumed that it was a vigilante act, that the town deliberately decided to take the man's life, and that wasn't true. Protecting the killer afterward was one thing-what would giving him up solve? But accepting responsibility for the killing-as if the community had agreed to it beforehand-was another.
In the wake of the "60 Minutes" show, Mayor Steve Peter received stacks of letters from viewers offering support to the people of Skidmore.
Dear Sir:
I want to tell you how much I respect your town for what they did to protect their citizens from the "bully."
I wish some of the people who live there could come to Little Rock and help us with our "system."
I know it's all tragic, but I think you all are really what America is made of.
Thank you.
Dear Sir:
You and the citizens of Skidmore hang in there! The overwhelming majority of the people of America are behind you in the belief that the citizens of Skidmore have a right to safety and peace from the bastard who terrorized them for far too long.
Now the crooked lawyers, stupid, weak judges and his ignorant, trashy wife want to bleat about his rights: where were they when that filthy SOB was violating the rights of innocent people?
Sincerely,
Several letter writers offered to come to Skidmore and serve as the town sheriff; one even enclosed a picture of himself, stripped to the waist and holding an automatic rifle. Mayor Peter didn't answer any of the letters, the majority of which were from Florida and southern California.
As the federal subpoenas papered the Missouri countryside that spring, the old anxieties returned. This time, however, the farmers would be in Kansas City, in the federal courthouse, on the turf of the people who were trying to get to the bottom of the killing. And this time the recipients of the documents discussed a coordinated strategy. Someone suggested that they take the Fifth Amendment-simply refuse to answer any question on the grounds of self-incrimination. There would be no talking to the media, whose behavior the men could now predict.
The farmer who had been threatened with arrest in the fields spoke fervently to the Justice Department attorney, trying to persuade her to release him from the subpoena. "What the hell do I know?" he said. "I wasn't even in town that morning! I'm a farmer. I've got work to do." But she insisted that he honor the subpoena. To avoid driving to Kansas City, the farmer rode with friends. He spent the day waiting with the other witnesses in a small room. He was the last to be called, late in the afternoon. When he walked into the hearing room and saw twenty-two people sitting in four tiers, all higher than his head, he felt dizzy. He couldn't look in one direction and see them all. No one said a thing, they just sat and stared down at him. For a second, he thought he might pass out. He focused on the stenographer, a good looker who took down every move he made-he'd raise his hand to his mouth and cough, and she'd tap away on her little machine. When the questioning began, he nervously took the Fifth as they had agreed. He was scared as hell, but the prosecutor let him go after the fourth or fifth question. When he went outside, he discovered that he had been the only one who had refused to answer questions; the others had decided that taking the Fifth would make them look as if they had something to hide, which had been his reaction when he had first heard the suggestion!
Neither the FBI nor the grand jury developed evidence to support the theory that either Sheriff Estes or Mayor Peter had conspired to murder McElroy, but the investigation turned up three eyewitnesses to the killing -enough, in the government's view, to warrant an indictment of the actual killer or killers under state law. On September 2,1982, United States Attorney Robert Ulrich held a press conference to announce that there was insufficient evidence to conclude that McElroy's civil rights had been violated under color of law, but that "substantial new evidence" would be forwarded to the county prosecutor for his consideration in filing murder charges. The federal attorneys were certain that they had put together a solid murder case for Baird.
In developing the case, however, the government lawyers had granted immunity from prosecution to two of the three witnesses. When one changed his story before the grand jury, the lawyers considered bringing perjury charges. They were also eager to file obstruction-of-justice charges against a woman for allegedly tampering with witnesses before the grand jury. (None of these charges was brought.)
A few weeks before the press conference, Ulrich had asked for a meeting with Baird. In the presence of an FBI agent and a representative of the state attorney general's office, Ulrich explained that there was no evidence of a conspiracy under the federal statutes, but that he had two eyewitnesses (one had recanted) who had identified the shooter and provided details of the entire crime. He could not release the statements at that point because, under the law, he needed the court's permission to release grand jury material to local law enforcement officials. Ulrich, who wanted to be able to tell the grand jury that murder charges would be filed in state court, asked Baird for assurances that he would file charges based on the statements. Baird declined, saying he could not make such a promise without seeing the statements and interviewing the witnesses. The two attorneys discussed preparing the paper work to seek the court's permission to transmit the grand jury material to Baird.
Del Clement and one of the eyewitnesses filed suit in the federal district court to prevent the transfer of the grand jury material to the Nodaway prosecutor. The judge denied the motion, and an appeal to the circuit court of appeals was denied on the grounds that by then the material had already been transferred.
After he formally received the material from Ulrich, Baird issued a statement saying he would decide on a course of action after he had fully reviewed the documents and interviewed the witnesses. One witness was the man who had given a statement within forty-eight hours of the killing, only to recant it the next day. The man had told the federal investigators that he witnessed the murder, but when Baird interviewed him again, he claimed to have seen nothing on the morning of July 10,1981. Four different stories by the same witness-certainly not someone to base a prosecution on.
Reading the other witness's statement, Baird thought her identification of the killer seemed vague. When he reinterviewed her, she backed off completely. She admitted to having been in the area of the shooting, but said that she hadn't seen what had happened and simply could not identify the shooter. The FBI, she said, had leaned on her pretty hard, then taken her words and stretched them. Another pillar too weak to support a prosecution.
On November 11, 1982, Baird announced that the federal grand jury material did not contain "substantial new evidence" and that, therefore, no charges would be forthcoming. The case would remain open, of course, and he would review any new evidence that came to his attention. The feds were chagrined, and a few were angry.
Surely, thought the people of Skidmore, now the ordeal was over. Although the state had no statute of limitations on murder, the fact that the coroner's jury, the state grand jury, the federal grand jury, and the final prosecutorial review all had come up with nothing should be enough to convince those in the legal system that nobody in Skidmore was going to crack.
Meanwhile, the family harmony among the McElroy clan had disintegrated. Alice and Trena, the two women who had stuck together through all the trials during Ken's life and the various proceedings after his death, had severed their relationship. Alice, who had married Jim, remembered Ken saying he would give the old Chevy pickup to Juarez. According to Alice, Trena initially agreed to give the Chevy to Juarez, but later she changed her mind. Alice also thought the money Trena received for the photographs of Ken in People magazine was "blood money." One day about ten months after the killing, Trena called and said she had met a new man, and he didn't want her to have anything to do with the McElroys or people associated with them. Trena wouldn't be coming up to see Alice or her kids anymore, and Alice shouldn't come down or call. The four older girls got the same message from Trena's mother, Treva.
In the fall of 1982, fire swept the farmhouse on Valley Road where Ken McElroy had lived. Neighbors said they saw lightning strike the building in the middle of the night, but Tim said he didn't see anything from the small house down the road. By morning, only a stone foundation, ashes, and a few outbuildings remained. There was no
investigation because Sheriff Estes received no complaint, and as a matter of policy, he only investigated matters when somebody complained. The people in town speculated that one of the McElroys had probably burned the house to get rid of all the sightseers who had been poking around and taking pictures. The McElroys denied it, but they didn't seem upset that the old house was gone.