Ken Rex McElroy was rarely called Kenneth or Rex or Ken Rex; to his friends he was Ken, pronounced something like “kin,” or Kenny. To everyone else he was McElroy. Ken McElroy was not quite a month over forty-seven-years old when he died on the main street of Skidmore. At 5 feet 10 inches and 230 pounds, he was grossly overweight, but except for a huge gut, he was mainly solid flesh. His shoulders were broad, he had a massive, barrel chest, and his arms were thick as tree trunks. His hair was naturally a dark brown, but he had dyed it pure black for years. (Alice Wood had seen pictures of him when he was younger with brown hair and a pencil-thin mustache.) He always kept it oiled and slicked back, 1950s style.
McElroy was dark complected, attributable no doubt to the fact that his father’s mother was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian. His eyes were dark blue, sometimes blue-black. (Many people in Skidmore recall him as having pitch black eyes and being well over six feet.) He had a broad forehead and heavy black eyebrows, and his eyes were set far apart. When he looked straight ahead, only the bottom three-quarters of the irises were visible, leaving white quarter-moons beneath. When he was young, girls saw his eyes as “sexy, but kind of cold”; when he was older, they became “icy black eyes that could see into your soul.” Full, wide sideburns reached just below his ears, almost even with the comers of his mouth. Thin lips, like a slash below the prominent nose, turned down at the comers, the left side turning up slightly when he smiled. In his
younger days, he was a handsome, almost dashing man, but in middle age his huge belly threw him out of proportion, making his legs seem almost a little too short for his body. And his face had become fleshy, a bit loose in the jowls.
McElroy had several tattoos. On his lower right forearm was a tattoo of a cross, and within the cross were the letters MOM (or WOW). The fingers of his right hand bore the name KEN. On his upper left arm was scratched the word LOVE and beneath that was a dagger inscribed with the name JOAN. On the back of his left hand was written the word OLETA, the name of both his first wife and his second child by his third wife.
McElroy took pride in his appearance. When he left the farm, particularly if he was going to town, he usually cleaned up, combed his hair, and put on good clothes--dark knit slacks and a western shirt or a nice T-shirt and cowboy boots. He was never seen in public looking dirty or wearing seedy clothes. He wore many of his shirts loose to conceal a .38-caliber pistol in a leather holster, custom designed to lie flat on his rib cage beneath his left armpit. Even in the winter he seldom donned a coat, and he never wore a hat.
When he wasn’t angry, McElroy was usually soft-spoken. He could sit unnoticed at a bar in Maryville, talking so low the waitress would have to lean over to hear him. When he played pool, he usually won, and he always graciously bought the next game. But he seldom laughed. When he did, in the words of a family member, it “was from the outside, not the inside”—there was never a belly laugh, just a ha, ha, ha, and then it was over.
McElroy moved slowly and deliberately, with a heavy person’s easy grace. When he stepped out of his truck, his head would turn slightly in several directions as his eyes flicked about, automatically scanning his surroundings. Outside his home ground, Ken moved about with even more caution, always very aware of everything around him. Until the very end, he sat in the taverns of Maitland, Graham, and Skidmore facing the door, with his back to the wall.
McElroy was happiest at a coon dog meet or trading hounds at a friend’s house or just telling dog stories and drinking Jack Daniel’s at the Shady Lady bar in Maryville. His skill as a dog handler and shrewdness as a judge of dog flesh was legendary among coon hunters and dog owners. He bought and sold dogs over the phone without ever laying eyes on them, sometimes at $200 or $300 apiece. He could control one
one of his hounds with a slight wave of his hand or a nod of his head.
Until the court ordered him not to carry firearms in the fall of 1980, Ken McElroy never went anywhere without a gun, whether it was a pistol in the shoulder holster, a shotgun in the window rack of his pickup, or both. But nobody remembers ever seeing him in a fist fight.
Across the Missouri River from St. Joseph, the land flattens out as though a huge steam roller had once run over it. This is the beginning of the great Midwest, cattle country, where the plains stretch far over the horizon and are broken only by occasional rises and clumps of cottonwood trees. Barbed-wire fences and telephone poles cross dry creek beds and stitch the endless windswept prairie. About seventy-five miles southwest of the river is Topeka, Kansas, and twenty or thirty miles south of Topeka is the tiny cattle town of Dover. Like Skidmore, Dover was once a thriving community, but now only a post office, a few stores, and 125 people remain. Here, on February 28, 1897, Mabel Marie Lister was born, third of five children of Oliver and Isabelle Lister. The Listers were tenant farmers, hired by the year, the season, or the month. They moved from ranch to ranch, living in little shacks without electricity or water, earning barely $30 a month. The Listers were good people who just never managed to accumulate much money.
On June 6, 1910, when she was just fourteen years old, Mabel Lister married twenty-year-old Tony Wyatt McElroy from nearby Shelton. Tony (“Tone” to his family) was known for his hot temper and terrible cursing. As a young man, he made moonshine, drank too much, and got in fights, usually over women. He was boisterous when sober, but he became downright quarrelsome when he drank. Tony farmed a little, but he mainly made a living with his wagon and horses. He hired out to haul hay for people and, when times were good, worked for the county cutting ditches and scraping roadbeds. He owned good horses and wagons and fine harnesses of oiled leather with shiny rings.
Mabel gave birth to a boy, on February 26, 1911, only two days before she turned fifteen. Hershel was the first of sixteen children Mabel would bear, losing a set of twins along the way. Seven boys and seven girls were spaced almost evenly over a twenty-eight-year span of child bearing. Ken Rex McElroy was born on June 16, 1934, followed by the
last child, Tim, born on June 1, 1936. Mabel worked hard feeding and raising her steadily increasing brood, always without running water or electricity. She baked bread every day, hung endless lines of wash in the backyard, and took her turn in the fields. The family was poor then, as it would be poor up to the last few years, but the children were always clean and presentable.
Times were tough in eastern Kansas in the predepression twenties, and somewhere around 1926 or 1927, Tony and Mabel packed up the family and set out for southern Missouri, ending up in the Ozarks. In the town of Lamar, they rented a four-hundred-acre farm and planted corn, and by early July the crops were doing well. But two rainless weeks of burning sun and hot winds destroyed the entire crop, and the McElroys went under.
The complete loss broke Tony. Eventually, he went back to road construction, working temporary jobs in small towns in southern Missouri and eastern Kansas, all the while having more kids and all the while staying dirt poor. The family wandered up to Quitman, a small town six miles north of Skidmore, and Tony and Mabel, like her parents, became tenant farmers, living in two- or three-room houses and working long days in the fields.
Soon after the McElroys came up from the Ozarks a farmer hired Tony at a dollar a day because he had four healthy-looking sons and they could help clear land, cut hay, and plow fields. Tony was a good worker and was always willing to help, but he talked a lot and his loud mouth sometimes got him in trouble. Mabel had put on a little weight by then, but she was still attractive.
Ken McElroy spent the first thirteen years of his life as the child of a tenant farmer, living in someone else’s house, working somebody else’s land, subsisting at near-poverty level in a large family continuously struggling for economic survival. The bitterness of these years never left him.
Ken was never Tony’s favorite child. (Years later, Tony would list for a Skidmore banker which of his kids were okay and which ones to stay away from, and he always put Ken in the latter group.) Timmy, born two years after Ken, ma
de things even worse. Timmy had a sweet disposition from the beginning, and he fit right into his role as baby of the family. Although Ken and Tim were close for a while because of their proximity in age, Tony’s preference for Tim, who would grow up to be the ideal
son, was always evident and eventually created a distance between them.
In the mid-1940s, the McElroys bought the old farmhouse and 17S acres on Valley Road. The house was always jammed with people. Three of the married children moved in, and at one point, eighteen people were living in the two-bedroom house. Ken and Timmy slept in one bed next to two boys in another bed. The house was usually a mess, mud tracked everywhere, clothes strewn about, dishes stacked in the sink. Mabel worked twelve-hour days keeping house, cooking, canning, and butchering animals, but the only one who really helped her was Timmy. Ken and most of the other children came and went and didn’t pay much attention to her. The yard was filled with broken-down automobiles, junked equipment, and hunting dogs in cages and on leashes.
Tony yelled at his children to discipline them. When Ken was young, Tony yelled at him a lot for not doing things and for doing the wrong things. But Tony spared Timmy, who had a knack for doing the right things—like feeding the pigs or sweeping the floor, and staying on the good side of his parents. Ken never did any chores, and as he grew into his teens, Tony backed off him altogether and let him do whatever he wanted. By the eighth grade, Ken essentially did as he pleased.
Except for his sister Dorothy, who seemed to care for him, Ken’s brothers and sisters—even the older ones—tended to leave him alone. To the extent that Ken modeled himself on anyone, it was on an older brother who was a serious troublemaker and who supposedly went to jail for stealing corn.
During the winter Ken would skate on a creek, from his farm to school, checking his traps for opossum, coon, and beaver on the way. More than once, he showed up smelling strongly of skunk. His fifth-grade teacher, a strict disciplinarian, would take him to the basement and attempt to get rid of the pungent odor by washing his hands and face using cleaning fluids on his clothes. Sometimes the smell was so bad she had to send him home.
Ken seldom went to school that year, and when he did show up he had never done his homework and displayed little interest in what was going on. The teacher considered him an attractive boy, but his good looks were ruined by the perpetual sneer on his face. He didn’t say much, but to her his sullen manner said it all.
Ken kept to himself, never mixing with the other kids, and seldom participated in any school activities. After school, when other boys played football or went to the cafe to shoot pool, Ken went off alone to trap and run his dogs. He was strong, though, and could have been a superb athlete. In choose-up football games during recess, no one could ever bring him down, and he could toss a basketball across a court as if it were a baseball.
His teacher found him mean and hard to control. He seemed to, think he could do anything he wanted to, that he need not obey her or anyone else, and she couldn’t do a thing about it. She held him back in the fifth grade twice because of his truancy and poor grades. By the time he made it to sixth grade, he was the biggest kid in the class, looming three or four inches over the others. The kids in school learned early to stay away from Ken. One former classmate explained it this way:
“When I came to the Graham school in fourth grade from the Elkhorn Country School, one of the first things the other kids told me was about Ken McElroy, the type of kid he was. I was told to stay away from him, not to have anything to do with him, that he pushed other kids around.”
Another classmate recalled:
“I don’t care who you were, you didn’t mess with him. If he came up to where you were sittin’ and said, ‘Hey, I wanna sit there,’ then you moved. He wasn’t the biggest kid in class—there was one really big kid, he must have been six feet and two hundred pounds, and even he never crossed Ken’s path.”
Strangely, no one—students, teachers or friends—remembers an incident of Ken actually beating somebody up. Perhaps he didn’t have to.
On Ken’s first day on a school bus, he and an older brother got into a scuffle with two other boys. The McElroy boys pulled knives and threatened to cut the other two, who immediately backed off. After that, Ken always had plenty of room—if he sat in the back of the bus, the other kids sat in the front.
Ken was also known to steal. One winter day, the owner of the gas station and grocery store in Graham caught him and another boy stealing some items. The man called Tony and told him about it. Later in the day, Tony burst into the store with a long, curved hunting knife in his hand, slammed the owner up against the wall, and held the knife up to his throat.
“If you ever touch my boy again,” Tony snarled, “I’ll cut your heart out.”
The school yearbooks have one or two pictures of Ken. One year the school put on a play called The Snow Queen. In the cast picture three rows of boys stood behind the girls, who were kneeling. In the far left corner, at the back, is a tall, thin boy with wavy hair, at least a head taller than everyone else. Ken was the stagehand for the production.
Tim, who was quiet and studious and liked by his teachers, caught up with Ken in school by the sixth grade. Ken was finally passed on to junior high, although he could neither read nor write.
Most farm boys got up at 5:30 in the morning, did their chores, and went to school. After school and sports, they went home and did chores again before dinner. Not Ken. After school he would roam the countryside on his strawberry roan horse, hunting and running his dogs, going wherever and doing whatever he pleased. If you wanted to ride across someone’s land, the custom was to ask permission, unless you knew the owner and had done it before. Ken never bothered; he rode through the timber and across the fields as if it were all his land, as if nobody had the right to restrict where he went and what he did. If a fence blocked his passage, he cut it with wire snips and rode on through. A farmer called him on it once—challenged him for hunting on his land without permission—and Ken, not more than fourteen at the time, pulled up short and told him nobody was going to tell him what he could do. The landowner backed off.
By the seventh grade Ken had a best friend, a boy named John L. The two boys first met when they attended first grade together in a small country school. John would stand lookout while Ken took a girl from their class into the bushes, removed her clothes, and did something to her—John was never quite sure what—during recess. In the second grade John moved away and didn’t see Ken again until he moved back a few years later.
In junior high, Ken and John both wore their hair slicked back and their shirt sleeves rolled up, and the two of them sat together in school, until the teacher split them up for disrupting the class.
The two boys were rebels with big chips on their shoulders. They played hooky a lot, and spent most of their time riding horses. Ken knew every inch of the land around there and they would ride for hours after school, checking traps and hunting. Once, as they were riding full speed
alongside the timber, they came to a hidden embankment with a thirty-foot drop. Ken saw the danger first, nudged John, and turned his horse at the last second to keep him from plunging over the embankment.
When the two friends weren’t hunting, they were riding around to girls’ houses. Most parents didn’t like Ken and John, and forbade their daughters to have anything to do with them. Several girls were attracted to them, though, and managed to meet the boys secretly after school and on the weekends. One girl used to sneak out of her parents’ farmhouse and meet Ken in the timber after dark.
When John spent the night at Ken’s house, people were stacked up like wood in the bedrooms and John slept in the same bed with him and Tim. There always seemed to be a lot of arguing and fighting going on. John felt sorry for Mabel because she worked hard all the time and barely seemed to stay even with things. She never had a new dress or anything for herself. The others seemed to just go on about their business. Ken stayed at John’s house a few times
and was always cleaned up, well-behaved, and polite to his parents.
Toward the end of eighth grade, Short Linville, the school bus driver, stopped by the McElroy farm three or four days in a row and found no one waiting. Each time, somebody came to the door and waved him on. Finally, one of Ken’s sisters came out and explained to him that he needn’t stop at the house because neither Ken nor Tim would be going to school anymore. (Short didn’t bring the bus around to the McElroy farm until years later when he stopped for Ken’s children.)
John started the ninth grade but didn’t last long. He got into an argument with the principal, hit him in the mouth, and quit before he was kicked out.
Stealing wasn’t a new activity for Ken and John—they had always swiped stuff—but when Ken got a 1936 Ford, theft acquired more purpose because they needed gas and parts. They took out the backseat and lined the space with plywood. At night the two boys would drive to a farm and scoop grain from a bin until the car was full to the windows. The next morning they would drive to an elevator and unload the grain for cash, usually with no questions asked. Sometimes they would spot tractors or trucks sitting in the fields during the day and come back at night and siphon gas from the tanks. When the transmission on the Ford
In Broad Daylight (Crime Rant Classics) Page 4