In Broad Daylight (Crime Rant Classics)

by HARRY N. MACLEAN

  come and get her. Trena had been a mess, a whirling, bloody, blond apparition, and she blurted out the story in spasms of words and sobs, her eyes still wild with fear for herself. The people in the bank had tried to lure her into a back room and kill her, Trena had said, and they might still be coming out to the farm to get her.

  Several of McElroy’s sisters, who lived in surrounding towns and farms, came to the farm immediately when they learned of the killing. They found Tonia in such bad shape, crying and sobbing uncontrollably, that they took her and Oleta, Ken and Trena’s four-year-old daughter, to Maitland, away from the scene, and tried to calm them down. Tonia wasn’t in much better shape when Alice found her—her body was convulsed in wrenching sobs, and she was absolutely inconsolable.

  Ken, Jr., sat in a corner of the farmhouse living room by himself and cried softly. Juarez, a tough guy like Ken who never showed his feelings, took his bike a few hundred yards down the road to Tim’s house and rode in circles in the driveway for hours.

  Someone called and warned them that it might be dangerous to stay around the farm—that some of the townspeople might be coming out to the house—so they left, vowing to come back that night to claim the family possessions. After dark, with the younger kids parceled out to Ken’s sisters, Tim, Alice, Jim, Juarez, and the older girls returned with two trucks and a horse trailer. They worked through the night moving the personal items and furniture to Faucett, where Trena could retrieve them later. They made three trips that night, hauling items out of the darkened house, loading them silently onto the vehicles, and creeping down the drive to the gravel road.

  By Saturday morning Tonia had calmed down somewhat. She and the boys were watching TV around noon when news of the killing came on. A picture of their father with a thick, fleshy face and cold eyes staring out under heavy black eyebrows appeared on the screen, while the announcer recounted his reputation as the most hated and feared man in Nodaway County.

  The newscast also showed a photograph of the killing scene that would later become a part of almost every story that was written or produced about the incident—a close-up of the driver’s side of the Silverado. The window in the driver’s door was shattered, and the shards of glass around the edges framed the side of the tavern and the D & G

  sign. Through the window, two people could be seen examining the building for bullet holes. The right edge of the picture showed the bullet holes in the rear window behind the driver’s seat. The upholstery was splotched with a wide, dark spill of blood. The television cameras had arrived at the scene just as the truck was being towed away, and the station replayed the footage of the Silverado hanging by a hook from the back of the truck, shot full of holes and looking, as it would later be described, as if it had been the target in a shooting gallery.

  By the time Alice realized what was happening and got over to turn off the TV, Tonia was hysterical and Ken, Jr., had burst into tears. That afternoon, when she couldn’t calm Tonia, Alice took her to a doctor, who prescribed tranquilizers for her. By evening, Tonia finally fell asleep and was put to bed.

  On the morning of July 10, 1981, Highway Patrolman Dan Boyer was heading north on Highway 71, only a mile or so out of St. Joseph, when the call came over the radio to return to Troop H headquarters immediately. When Boyer pulled in a few minutes later, the dispatcher explained that someone had called in a report that Ken McElroy had been shot and killed on the main street of Skidmore. Boyer froze for a second, and then shook his head. Probably just another one of the weird calls the patrol got all the time, he thought as he walked back to the patrol car. Who would have the guts—or be crazy enough—to go up against McElroy with a gun? Skeptical but curious, Boyer headed back out north on Highway 71, driving without lights or siren and barely exceeding the speed limit.

  Boyer was 32 years old, a stocky man of medium height with short brown hair and brown eyes. He lived with his wife and two kids in a small town in Worth County, bordering Nodaway to the east. Boyer liked the people and the country life, but most of all he loved being a patrolman.

  Many people in northwest Missouri considered the Missouri State Highway Patrol the best law enforcement agency in the area. All the patrolmen had survived six months of rigorous training, and many of them, including Boyer, had college degrees. Patrolmen drove the fastest cars with the fanciest equipment, and they carried the most firepower. They projected a crisp, professional look with their tailored blue wool uniforms, black ties, and patent leather Sam Browne belts. Patrolmen

  IN BROAD DAYLIGHT 11

  were trained to be gentlemen cops—tough but even-handed, polite but firm, treating citizens with respect but always retaining control of every situation. As a matter of policy, they were never assigned to areas where they had grown up or lived before joining the patrol.

  Boyer had joined the patrol in 1975 and was eventually assigned to Troop H in St. Joseph. His unit, based in Maryville, the Nodaway County seat, consisted of seven troopers. From the patrol office in the Nodaway County Courthouse, they fanned out over the highways and county roads of their zone. In six years with the patrol, Boyer had come to know most of the zone’s small towns fairly well, and Skidmore had always seemed much like any other small farm town in northwest Missouri.

  As he drove to Skidmore that July morning, Boyer described McElroy to Bryan, a young academy graduate who was riding along as the final stage of his training. Boyer didn’t know what had happened, he said in his low, almost gentle voice, but he was sure that McElroy wasn’t the one dead. The patrolmen had just driven through Savannah, about thirty miles south of Maryville, when the second call came over the radio.

  McElroy’s wife had just called, the dispatcher said, crying hysterically and sobbing that her husband had been shot and killed. Over and over, she said that they wouldn’t stop firing, that the killers just kept shooting him and shooting him, and that they wanted to kill her, too.

  Telling the dispatcher to call the ambulance in Maryville and the Nodaway County sheriff’s office, Boyer flipped on the siren and the light. He told Bryan to hang on, and within seconds the black 1980 Plymouth Grand Fury was barreling up Highway 71 at more than 100 mph.

  About twenty miles north of Savannah, at Pumpkin Center, a combination gas station and grocery, Boyer slowed and took a hard, screeching left onto Route A. Bryan grabbed the dashboard as he slid into the door. The road running west out of Pumpkin Center descended a steep hill and then broke into a wide, sweeping curve before straightening out briefly to cross a narrow bridge. Halfway through the curve, which was banked as poorly as most of the curves on the county blacktops, Boyer glanced over and saw that Bryan had turned white.

  As they whipped across the bridge, Boyer thought back on the night

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  a year or so earlier when he had stopped McElroy at Pumpkin Center. Boyer had been parked in the gas station when the green Dodge pickup sped by at 75 mph. Not until he was walking toward the pickup with his flashlight in his hand did Boyer realize he had stopped Ken McElroy. A wrenching fear had hit Boyer’s gut: He was only a move away from having a shotgun stuck in his face and his head blown away.

  Every law officer in northwest Missouri, even those who had never met him, knew Ken McElroy—and knew he hated cops. Only a few days before, Boyer had read a notice at the patrol office, in which an informant had warned that McElroy was traveling in a caravan of three pickups and that each truck carried guns. The two female drivers were backing up McElroy wherever he went, the informant had said, and they had orders to shoot and kill any cop who came upon them.

  In the dark at Pumpkin Center, Boyer had quickly recovered from the shock and the clench of fear. He slowed his step, dropped into a slight crouch, and pulled his service revolver from its holster. Holding the revolver at his side, he continued his approach but swung out in an arc away from the cab so that he could see inside the truck before he was upon it. Backlit by the spotlight on the patrol car, McElroy sat looking straight ahead, both of
his hands in plain view on top of the steering wheel. Shaking slightly, Boyer went through his routine about the radar gun, the speed of the truck, and the option of paying or contesting the fine. To Boyer’s surprise, and somewhat to his consternation, McElroy just sat there. He was polite and soft-spoken and offered no argument. He kept his hands on the steering wheel at all times, except to reach for his driver’s license, which he did very slowly, and to accept the ticket from Boyer. He looked at Boyer wily once, and Boyer noticed the hard, flat eyes and the thin mouth. The incident seemed to be over almost before it began.

  The patrolman said little on the fast ride to Skidmore. Bryan tried to relax, but he continued to grab the dash in the tight curves. Boyer’s imagination spun out different versions of what might have happened, but none of them made sense: Who in Skidmore would shoot Ken McElroy in broad daylight in the middle of town? If he really had been shot, there must be other casualties, given the firepower he always maintained around him. Hardest of all to believe was that McElroy was really dead. Something that

  horrible couldn't die that easily.

  The blacktops and dirt roads curved and twisted up and down the steep hills and through the creases of the rumpled countryside. Hitting the hills at anything over 40 was like riding a roller coaster without rails. Boyer knew all the roads in the area and prided himself on being an expert high-speed driver, which meant knowing exactly how fast he could take the hills and curves without sliding into a ditch or smashing into a fence. He raced eight miles west over Route A, flew past ZZ (which ran north and came within a few miles of the McElroy farm), then sped through Graham and Maitland with siren wailing and lights flashing, finally turning north on 113 to Skidmore.

  Boyer’s watch read close to 11:30 by the time the Plymouth reached the edge of town. They had covered the forty miles in thirty minutes. Entering from the south, the Plymouth cruised through six residential blocks before coming to the grocery store and bank and turning east onto Elm Street. Boyer saw the ambulance parked behind the Silverado, which was angled in front of the D & G Tavern. Two sheriff’s cars were parked in the middle of the street, and another patrol car was arriving from the east. As Boyer pulled to a stop, he saw two attendants loading a stretcher into the rear of the ambulance. A white sheet covered a large form.

  One look at the rear of the truck cleared up Boyer’s confusion about what had happened: Somebody had taken McElroy from behind. There was no gunfight, and nobody stood up to him face to face. The bullets came from across the street, undoubtedly from a rifle, while McElroy sat in his pickup facing the tavern. He never saw his killer, and he never had a chance. A crazy act, it had to have been committed out of a terrible well of fear.

  Behind the driver’s seat, the rear window had been blown out. The driver’s door hung open, its window shattered. There obviously had been a hell of a lot of shooting, probably from more than one rifle, and much of it had been wild.

  Boyer walked up to the truck and looked in. Teeth and pieces of bone lay scattered on the dashboard in front of the steering wheel. Blood splotched the seat and formed a deep puddle on the floor; it had run over the edge of the doorjamb and collected in a purplish, jelly-like pool on the ground. The air was dead still. As Boyer turned away, he felt a

  14 Harry N. MacLean

  searing blast from the 100-degree midday sun.

  Boyer stepped back and surveyed the scene. Other than the law and a few people watching the loading of the body, the town was deserted. Occasionally, a male face would peer out the window of the cafe, or someone would leave the tavern, walk nonchalantly past the truck, glance in, and disappear down the street. Now and then, a passing pickup would slow almost to a halt as the driver leaned over and stared inside the familiar two-tone brown Silverado.

  Boyer reckoned that people were trying to convince themselves that Ken McElroy was really dead and was going to stay dead, that he wouldn’t come cruising the streets of town that afternoon with his guns and his trucks and his women. It was too late, but for an instant Boyer wished he had looked under the white sheet before the ambulance left.

  Boyer wasn’t surprised that something had happened, but he was surprised that this had happened. He had expected that McElroy would perish some night on a back road, at the hands of a cop given half a reason to blow him away. Maybe then his death could have been dealt with quietly, in a way that would have solved the problem without creating an uproar. But Boyer hadn’t realized the town was so twisted over McElroy that it would come to this.

  Boyer had left his car running to provide a cool refuge from the heat, but when he returned to it, he stood outside with a foot on the bumper. Other cops came over and told him what they knew. Earlier that morning, Nodaway County Sheriff Danny Estes had been at a meeting at the town’s Legion Hall, at which the sole topic had been what the town was going to do about McElroy. Estes hadn’t even made it back to Maryville before McElroy was shot, and now people would think that Estes had told the men at the meeting to do it.

  Estes was shaken up and excited, pacing around, arms flapping, shouting at nobody in particular, “What the hell happened? Why the hell did you do this?”

  Boyer’s radio crackled. The dispatcher told him to meet another car at the McElroy farm. Trena had called and asked the patrol to drive her to St. Joseph for her own safety. When Boyer reached the farm, a pickup with a woman at the wheel was pulling out of the drive onto the gravel road. He went to the house and knocked on the door several times. When

  IN BROAD DAYLIGHT I5

  he got no response, he wondered if Trena or somebody else was setting him up. Finally, Tim McElroy, Ken’s younger brother, came to the door. He explained that Trena had been crouched down on the passenger’s side of the truck that had just left. She had mistaken the approaching patrol car for a sheriff’s car and, believing the local police to be involved in her husband’s murder, had fled with one of Ken’s sisters. Tim was sure they were on their way to patrol headquarters in St. Joseph.

  Boyer returned to Skidmore to assist in the investigation. As the officers interviewed witnesses, a pattern developed:

  “Where were you when he was shot?”

  “Standing in front of the tavern.”

  “Did you see anything?”

  “No, I didn’t see a thing. I heard something, a couple of shots, and then I hit the ground. There were more shots and, by the time I got up, it was all over.”

  They were lying. It would have been impossible for one or two gunmen to stand across the street from the Silverado and fire ten to fifteen shots, put the guns away, and drive out of town without being recognized. Yet the answer was always the same: Nobody looked up until the shooting stopped, and nobody saw a thing.

  Boyer soon realized that he had become the enemy. Normally, these people were open and friendly with the patrol, willing to help, ready to discuss the facts of any incident they might know about. Now, they were closed up so tight some of them wouldn’t even speak to him.

  Several locals were openly hostile. Boyer and Sergeant Barnett worked on tracing the trajectory of the bullets by lining up the holes in the tin hut next to the D & G Tavern with the holes in the front and rear windows of the truck. They were drawing a chalk line across the street when a man walked up and demanded, “Where in the hell were you guys when we needed you?” Whether he was being charged with incompetence or cowardice, Boyer felt he had to respond. He followed the man into the cafe and joined him and several other men at a center table. The others looked away in silence, but the accuser’s anger had grown.

  “If you guys had caught the son of a bitch and thrown him in jail, he wouldn’t be dead now!”

  “I understand how you feel,” replied Boyer, “but it isn’t fair to blame the law for the murder. We’ve always come when we were called, and

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  we have no choice now but to conduct a full and fair investigation.”

  The man was still cursing McElroy and insisting that the cops were too
scared of him to do their jobs, when two cops burst into the cafe, apparently worried about Boyer being alone with the townspeople.

  In a way, Boyer sympathized with the townspeople who felt that justice had been done in their town for the first time since McElroy started terrorizing the place. The very system that had failed to protect its citizens was now persecuting them for doing what it had failed to do.

  Boyer knew lots of reasons why it had reached this point: Many of them involved the failure of the criminal justice system. But the town was partly to blame, too. People wanted to be protected, to have their little community made safe from their tormentor, but no one wanted to step forward and file charges.