went out, Ken and John looked around until they found another 1936 Ford sitting in a farmyard. Waiting until the farmer was gone for the weekend, they slipped in and removed the transmission in little more than an hour. They took it back to the farm and had it installed in Ken’s car by dinnertime.
Ken never cared for work. He and John found jobs in a nursery in a small town in Iowa when they were about fifteen, but they were fired the first week when Ken was caught fooling around with a young girl who also worked there. The way John saw it, Ken never got over the fact that he was poor, and he resented people who had money and new cars and good clothes. He could never bring himself to do their shit work.
If you didn’t go to school, and you wouldn’t work, there was really only one other way to get by.
PART
TWO
4
In 1952, when he was eighteen, Ken McElroy married Oleta, a sixteen-year-old girl from St. Joe. Soon afterward, they moved to Denver, where one of Ken’s sisters lived. Her husband, a construction foreman, gave Ken a job. Ken and Oleta stayed in Denver for six months, then moved to the mountains, where Oleta had a stillborn child.
One day, as Ken was working on the construction crew, a cribbing form fell about thirty feet and hit him on the head, splitting his safety helmet and cutting his scalp. The accident jammed the nerves and muscles in his neck, causing him periodic episodes of severe pain and occasional blackout spells the rest of his life. (McElroy told people that this injury resulted in a steel plate being implanted in his head, and many people attributed much of his subsequent bizarre and violent behavior to the plate.)
The Colorado job was Ken’s last attempt to function in the straight world. In 1955 or 1956, he and Oleta moved back to Missouri, where he initially centered his activity in the St. Joe area, although he soon began roaming the entire six-county area of northwest Missouri. The stealing he and his buddies had done in junior high school, for which they were never punished, convinced him there were easier ways to make a living than running a jack- hammer, digging ditches, or hoeing beans.
He started off small time, stealing one hog or calf at a time. He rigged a toggle switch to shut off the running lights in his Ford and shored up the plywood lining in the back. During the day he roamed the gravel
roads looking for calves or hogs that were fat and ready for market, noting the locations of the closest gates. He would return late at night, usually around 1 or 2 a.m., and park as close to the animals as possible. Dressed in dark clothes, he would isolate a fat hog and, if the gate was close by, guide it through by the tail. Otherwise, he would lift the beast, which could weigh 250 pounds, one arm under its neck and the other in back of its rear legs, and carry it against his chest while he stepped over the barbed wire fence. With the hog in his trunk, he would drive away, rear end low, often to another farmer’s house, where he would get fifty or sixty dollars for the animal. Occasionally, if the job went smoothly, he would take the hog up to his father’s farm, and then return for a second and maybe a third animal.
But even this was a meager living. His friend John had joined the Navy at age seventeen and was now out. He tracked Ken down and found him living in a squalid flat in St. Joe with a woman who wouldn’t even get out of bed for the visit; Ken was obviously embarrassed by his situation. He had a long way to go if he was ever to hold his head up around the rich farmers of Nodaway County.
Nevertheless, up north, around Skidmore, Graham, Maitland, and Quitman, the legend was growing. Children in junior high and grade school grew up hearing stories about Ken McElroy. People whispered that he had raped a fourteen-year-old Quitman girl who became pregnant and died delivering twins at home because she couldn’t afford to go to the hospital. A year later, according to the rumors, he returned and raped her older sister, who later ended up marrying one of his best coon-hunting buddies. People talked about what happened whenever Ken was around—the heavy drinking, sex, and violence. Just hearing his name was enough to bring a taste of fear to a child’s mouth.
Adults shook their heads over the stories and asked each other why he never got punished for the stealing and raping. Most people just stayed away from him and places he hung out. For the better- off families that wasn’t that hard to do—McElroy didn’t pick on people who had money for lawyers or had influence in the community. He picked on the poorer country folks.
When Ken was about twenty, he befriended an eleven- or twelve-year-old boy, Larry D., who came from a poor family of dedicated coon hunters in the Quitman area. Ken didn’t have much then either, only his beat-up car, but he was friendly and generous to Larry. Ken bought him
pop, gave him rides, and if Larry ever needed anything, Ken gave it to him and never brought it up again. Larry admired Ken’s style; once he took a gun rack and strapped it to his leg, then sawed off an old shotgun and walked around with it stuck in the rack.
Larry came to understand that Ken was also a very dangerous man. If Ken didn’t like someone, or heard he was saying bad things about him or a member of his family, that person would walk out of the tavern one day and find Ken waiting for him around the corner with a shotgun or a long-bladed corn knife. When Ken drank, his grievances would eat on him. He would tell Larry what he was going to do to get even with someone who had crossed him, and then, as the wide-eyed boy watched, Ken would carry out his threats. Before long, Ken was asking Larry to come along on his nocturnal stealing jaunts.
During this period, a seventeen-year-old girl named Barbara T. was hanging out with her girlfriend at the bar in Burlington Junction, a small town north of Quitman. The girls noticed a good- looking, muscular man with dark hair and pretty, dark blue eyes begin to come around. He drove an old white Ford and was usually alone. He either sat by himself at the end of the bar, or played pool or shuffleboard. The girls got to know “Kenny,” and soon they were partying with him regularly. They would be drinking and talking, and all of a sudden he would say “Let’s go,” and off they would go, never knowing where, usually to bars in other towns or somebody’s place in St. Joe. Ken seemed happy in those days, unless he hit the liquor too hard. He had plenty of girls wherever he went, and they were always young—younger than his seventeen-year-old friends. He would laugh and tell them they didn’t have to worry about him.
“You’re too old for me,” he would say. “I like my women young and tender. I like that young meat.”
By “young meat,” he meant thirteen or fourteen. One thirteen- year-old girl, Donna G., used to sneak out of her farmhouse in the middle of the night to see him. She lived with her grandparents, who owned a tavern in a nearby small town. One night, when Ken and the two girls had been running around and drinking heavily, they stopped in at the tavern. Ken teased the grandfather—asking how things were at the farm
and how Donna was doing—until finally the old man lost his temper.
“You stay away from her, goddamn it, or I’ll get the law on you!”
Ken stopped talking and joking. He sat perfectly still and stared at the old man. The two girls also quieted down. After four or five long minutes, the three of them left, not saying a word. In the truck, Ken announced that they were going to the farmhouse to burn it down.
On the ride, they passed around a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Once inside the farmhouse, Ken said he was hungry and wanted a sandwich before they set to work. He found the bread, and the two girls got baloney and lettuce and mayonnaise from the refrigerator. By this time, the mood had lightened, and the three were joking and laughing, Ken describing with delight how the blazing farmhouse would light up the darkened countryside. Then they heard a noise overhead—the squeaking of bed springs and footsteps in the hallway.
“That must be Donna’s uncle,” Ken said, startled. “He’s not a bad ol’ guy, doesn’t deserve being burned up, anyway. We’ll have to come back.” Disappointed, they finished making the sandwiches and walked out the door, eating and swigging from the whiskey bottle. A year or so later, Donna bore Ken a son.
Not long after McElroy returned from Colorado, he began running around with Sharon, a fifteen-year-old girl from a poor family in the St. Joe area. Sharon was sweet and unworldly and seemed drawn to Ken because of his style and strength. One night, she and Ken were quarreling in his pickup, when Ken pulled out a shotgun and told her if she didn’t shut up, he was going to blow her head off. Whether by accident or design, the gun discharged and tore open the underside of Sharon’s chin, leaving permanent scars. The police were called and charges were filed. Ken explained to Oleta that he would have to divorce her and marry Sharon in order to avoid prosecution for assault with a deadly weapon. Oleta agreed to the divorce, and in 1958 Sharon became the second Mrs. Ken McElroy.
In July 1959, Sharon bore Ken a son, Jerome. The family moved to the farm outside of Skidmore, living in the two-bedroom house with Tony, Mabel, and Tim. Ken was gone a lot, and the family became concerned about the baby’s well-being. Once Tony almost backed his truck over Jerome, who sat unattended in the driveway. Ken’s sister Helen came to visit when Jerome was just over a year old and concluded that Ken and Sharon were leaving too much of the child care to Tony and Mabel. So Helen took Jerome back with her to California. Soon afterward, Ken and Sharon left the farm and moved to a tiny house outside Burlington Junction.
Sharon seemed to both love and fear Ken. More than once she tried to get away from him, but it never lasted very long. She had neither the
resources nor the strength to hold out. In 1961, she bore him a daughter, Tammy Sue.
One afternoon that year, Sharon appeared with her baby in the sheriff’s office in Maryville and told a story about how Ken had locked them in the house and left them for over two days. She had finally escaped and caught a ride to town. Now, she was scared about what he would do when he found out. She described the beatings she had suffered when he became angry. A social worker came to the sheriff’s office to help her, but Sharon was so frightened she could barely keep track of where she was and what she was saying. Her eyes darted constantly around the room, and she couldn’t sit still. The social worker arranged for both Sharon and her baby to stay with a foster family who lived on a farm outside Graham.
Linda B. and her husband loved children, but were unable to have any of their own, so they had begun taking in foster children that year. Sharon and her baby were two of their first guests.
To Linda, Sharon seemed a sweet, shy nineteen-year-old who obviously hadn’t been around much. She was anxious to learn homemaking skills and followed Linda around and watched her sew, cook, and clean house. Sharon was a conscientious mother and took good care of her baby. She had one false tooth in front that popped out every once in a while and made her look kind of silly.
Linda learned from the social worker that McElroy had brought a fourteen-year-old girl named Sally D. out to their house to live with him and Sharon. McElroy had sex with both of them and frequently beat them up. Sharon couldn’t handle it and wanted out.
Sharon and Tammy stayed on the farm for about six weeks. The prosecutor had filed a complaint charging Ken with abusing Sharon, and the social worker brought her to the courthouse to sign the complaint. The sheriff’s office and state patrol had been alerted and were standing by to execute the arrest warrant. Somehow, McElroy found out where Sharon was and appeared in the social worker’s doorway, demanding to talk to his wife. The social worker told him he had to get permission from the judge, which was granted on the condition that the meeting take place in the prosecutor’s office. Ken sweet-talked Sharon and told her that if she came home, he would bring Jerome back from California.
At the end of the conversation, Sharon told the prosecutor she wouldn’t sign the papers. That night, McElroy came to Linda’s farm and picked up Sharon, Tammy, and their belongings. Linda heard later that when Ken got Sharon home that night, he beat her terribly.
Sally was a skinny, gawky kid with pretty strawberry blond hair, brown eyes, and light freckles. Her mother had died when Sally was very young, and she lived in Quitman with her dad, who was a butcher, and her two brothers. In 1960 she was thirteen years old and very much a child—she would believe anything someone told her and do whatever an adult said. Ken McElroy hunted coons and traded dogs with one of her brothers, and soon he was hanging around and paying lots of attention to this trusting girl—picking her up after school, giving her rides home, and buying her candy.
Kirby Goslee, Q’s third oldest son, who was in junior high with Sally, thought she was cute and arranged to meet her at a school dance. But when he passed by her house the afternoon before the dance and saw Ken McElroy’s car in her driveway, he decided to forget the whole thing.
One night Sally was dumped out of the Ford onto a lawn in town, screaming and bleeding, her clothes torn and ripped. The people who found her took her to the hospital. In their words, she looked “like an animal hit on her.” Afterward, Ken got hold of her and threatened to kill her father if she didn’t do what he said. A few days later she moved in with him and Sharon.
By this time Larry had begun stealing with Ken, and he often went out to the house where Ken and the two women lived. One night, he and Ken had been out late prowling the countryside. When they came in around 1 a.m., Ken undressed and climbed into one of the three beds in the bedroom. Sharon was still up, and she started complaining to Larry that Ken was always taking Sally with him when he went places, and that Ken liked Sally more than he did her.
“You better be quiet,” Larry told her. “Ken might not be asleep yet.”
“Hey, Larry,” said Ken, hauling himself out of bed. “Have you ever seen the Saturday night fights?” McElroy then proceeded to knock Sharon around the room until she could no longer stand up.
With his two women, Ken ran the show. He did whatever he pleased, came and went at will, and had other girlfriends, but Sharon and Sally were to stay home and keep their mouths shut. If they kept quiet and did as he said, they would be all right.
Sally told a friend that sometimes McElroy would beat Sharon and her up and then have violent sex with them, using objects. Sometimes, he would simply go from one to the other. Sally grew tired of taking turns with Sharon, and after a while, she began to feel that she wasn’t worth much anymore. Being with Ken made her feel like trash, a wasted piece of flesh.
Sally’s friend could never understand why Sally and Sharon put up with Ken or why so many women were attracted to him. But they were—young and old, ugly and pretty, women fell all over themselves when he was around.
Sally began having Ken’s children—she had Ken, Jr., in 1961, Lisa in 1963, and Jeffery in 1964. At the same time, Sharon continued having Ken’s children. After Tammy Sue, she had Teresa Lyn in 1963, Tina Renee in 1964, and Debbie Ann in 1965. At one time, both Sharon and Sally were in the Fairfax hospital having Ken’s babies.
During this period, the thieving became more sophisticated. McElroy developed a network of girlfriends who lived on farms in the area. These women would take the stolen animals and sell them at various markets and auctions using their own names. Ken would stop by a few days later to settle up; he would have sex with the women and give them a little something for their effort.
Larry was a heavy drinker, and he and Ken drank constantly when they were just prowling. But Ken wouldn’t let him drink when they were rustling livestock, which was serious business. Once, Ken came for Larry in a truck with stock guards on the sides, and they headed off for some animals that Ken had spotted during the day. Ken pulled over by the side of the road and put on a pair of old boots he had picked up somewhere and would discard later that night. He felt for the corn knife under the seat, and then took the 12-gauge off the rack. He pumped a shell into the chamber and told Larry to begin rounding up the cattle. “If anybody comes,” said Ken, “you take off and get out of the way ’cause I’m gonna kill the sonofabitch.” Larry maneuvered two five-hundred- pound steers up the ramp into the truck. He and Ken headed for St. Joe to drop the cattle off at a friend�
�s place.
After Sally had had three children, McElroy was finally done with her. Her father had died, leaving Ken without one of his holds on her, and besides, he had started spending a lot of time with a new girlfriend in St. Joe. Sally had no friends or close family left, so she moved with her three kids into a tiny apartment in Maryville. She had trouble keeping a job, but she took good care of the children. Except for one night.
A girlfriend talked Sally into going to a party in St. Joe after promising her that she had a responsible baby-sitter for Sally’s kids. The baby-sitter, a high-school girl, invited her friends over, and they partied and drank and threw bottles from the rooftop, creating such a disturbance that the neighbors called the police. The police came and, finding no responsible adult, took the children into custody. When Sally learned what had happened, she went to see her children and cried when the authorities took the little baby back from her. The county filed dependency and neglect charges and the kids were placed in foster care. Without money, without friends or family, Sally didn’t fight. She simply disappeared.
In Broad Daylight (Crime Rant Classics) Page 5