In 1963, Treva and Ronnie married and moved into a house outside Graham, a couple of miles down the road from the McElroy place. The newlyweds’ house was run-down and had neither indoor plumbing nor electricity. Several months later, when Trena was almost seven years old, Treva brought her out from Kansas to become a part of the family.
Trena was a pretty girl, with clear blue eyes, light blond hair that fell to her shoulders, and a soft alabaster complexion. A little on the chubby side, she was an easy child, gentle, quiet, and very shy, responding to overtures with a slight smile. To some, she seemed a little too passive.
Ronnie got a job working on the bridge crew, and Treva began having more children. In a few years, Trena had three brothers and one sister. As
the older sister, she worked hard taking care of her siblings and doing housework. One friend of Trena’s, who stayed over at her house a few times, remembered Treva sitting around drinking coffee and smoking while ordering Trena to cook breakfast, do the laundry, or fetch water. The children came to call the person who took care of them “Sissy.” Although Sissy continued to use the last name McCloud, she soon came to call Ronnie “Dad.”
Trena grew up a rural kid in a rural family, meaning in the case of non-landowners, lots of kids, very little money, and not a whole lot of education. The man usually worked for someone else as a hired hand, driving combines and grain trucks in season, and maybe pumping gas or tending bar in the winter. The woman stayed at home and cared for the kids and possibly waited tables at the cafe in town a few evenings a week. Money was scarce even in decent times, and the kids who were tall enough to reach the tractor pedals worked during planting and harvest seasons. Education wasn’t that important; the goal was to find a decent job, get married, and have a family. Recreation consisted of hunting coons and trapping muskrat and, for some of the men, drinking. In terms of community affairs, these families usually had little interest or influence.
Although Trena went to school regularly, she seemed in some ways never to quite fit in. Classmates from better-off-families saw her as “rough” because of her poor grammar and the fact that her clothes were not the newest or the best. She was friendly enough to anyone who approached her, but otherwise she usually hung back, keeping quietly to herself. In class, she was not considered bright by her teachers or her classmates. She seldom had her homework done, and she seemed to have difficulty following the teachers’ instructions. She often looked over her classmates’ shoulders while doing her work. But she excelled in sports, particularly track and basketball.
Most small towns have one teacher who stands out among all the rest—one, who over the years, is a favorite of the kids in class after class. Stories of affection and admiration are passed down until she (it is always a woman) becomes a local folk hero, and the kids entering her class feel as if they’d known her all their life. What sticks with her students long after they’re gone and grown up is the feeling that, as children, this adult treated
them as human beings.
In the Nodaway-Holt school district, which included Graham, Maitland, and Skidmore, this teacher was Kathleen Whitney. She served as the guidance counselor, as well as teacher of algebra, art, business, psychology, and shorthand, from 1965 until she retired in 1985. As guidance counselor, she was the one students talked to about their problems and the one who talked to the parents about their kids’ problems. Even the toughest characters in the area—the drinkers, abusers, and active malcontents—remember with a laugh how, on a Monday morning, when they were bragging about their weekend’s exploits, she would sit them down and tell them the truth about men and manhood: “Boys,” she would say with a serious face, “there’s more to being a man than driving cars fast, drinking beer hard, and laying lots of women.” She would chide them that, if half of their numbers were true, there couldn’t be a virgin left in Nodaway or Holt County. She tried talking to parents about their sons’ drinking and fighting, but the fathers’ response was usually “Well, hell, that’s what I did in high school!”
Mrs. Whitney saw Trena as young for her age. She couldn’t recall her mother or stepfather coming to school for parents’ night; in fact, she never met Treva or Ronnie.
To Mrs. Whitney, Trena was soft and warm, and had a nice quality of friendliness about her, like a friendly puppy, always glad to see you. She and her friend Vicki were alike, except Vicki was a little bit bubblier.
Vicki, a pretty brown-haired girl from the Graham area, was Trena’s only close friend. The girls had become friends in fifth grade, when they first attended school together and by sixth grade, they had become inseparable. They sat next to each other in class, passing notes back and forth, and hung around together, during recess and after school. They talked on the phone at least once a day about schoolwork and boys. The girls often spent the night at each other’s house, and they promised they would always be best friends.
Trena gave Vicki a pendant for her birthday in the eighth grade, and a bracelet with her name engraved on it for Christmas. The pendant was a piece of oval red glass encased in a gold frame with a gold cross etched in the middle. Years later, Vicki still had the pendant and the bracelet
securely tucked away in a small box in her bedroom.
Through most of the eighth grade, everything seemed fine to Vicki. Trena had a boyfriend, David, who took her to the home coming dance, and she played basketball and competed in track, performing well against students from other schools. She seemed as happy as the average kid. Sometime that spring, Trena started to change.
“She started skipping school and getting in trouble. After a while, her attitude changed and she just didn’t care about anything.
“Ken McElroy began coming to the school and sitting outside in his big, fancy car and waiting for her. When school was out, Trena would go with him. The school didn’t like it, and there was trouble over it, but he kept on doing it.
“It got so she didn’t have time for me anymore. We were still friends, but we didn’t run around together anymore.
“After a while we weren’t really best friends anymore.”
Brenda, Treva’s sister, had married Russ Johnson, a Nodaway County deputy sheriff and a member of the numerous Johnson clan. (Several opposing forces met in this family: One of Russ’s sisters, Sue, was Ronnie McNeely’s mother, whom Trena called “Grandma"; another sister was Lois Bowenkamp’s mother—thus, when Ken married Trena, Lois would become his first cousin once removed by marriage.) Russ had suspected for some time that something was going on between Ken and Trena. In 1969 or 1970, when Trena was twelve or thirteen, Russ had been called to Graham regarding a shooting incident. He stopped by the junior high school to check out a dance and noticed Ken hanging around, talking to Trena. He learned later that Ken had intimidated Trena’s date into picking her up at home and bringing her to him, then coming for her later and taking her home. Russ told Brenda about it, and she told Treva, but Treva adamantly denied anything was going on between her daughter and Ken McElroy.
School children in Trena’s area had to take one bus to Skidmore and transfer to another bus which took them to the school in Graham. Many mornings McElroy was waiting in Skidmore to pick Trena up. He would bring her back in the afternoon in time to catch the bus home. Her clothes were usually disheveled, and she often cried all the way home. The other
kids on the bus would tell her she should stop going with McElroy, but she kept it up. At first, Ken took her to St. Joe and bought her things, like clothes and little gifts and candy. Then he began taking her to the Tic Toe Motel in St. Joe, where he molested her.
Although Cheryl (Bowenkamp) Brown was a year younger than Trena, they were in one class together—Introduction to Business. Trena sat next to her, and Cheryl felt sorry for her, so when she asked for the answers to the homework, Cheryl gave them to her. Cheryl and Trena rode the school bus from Skidmore to Graham together, and Trena would talk other kids on the bus into signing her mother’s name on a note for the teacher.
In the fall of her freshman year, when Trena was fourteen, she became pregnant and dropped out of school. Kathleen Whitney, the school counselor, was furious. She had heard the stories of McElroy taking Trena off the bus and could never understand why nobody—the school or the law—had done anything about it. Whitney believed Trena wanted to be rid of Ken but didn’t have the strength to free herself.
Although Vicki felt a little bitter over being abandoned by her best friend, she tried to understand what had happened.
“I know other girls thought he was good looking, but I didn’t. I think the reason Trena went with him was because he was an older guy with a fancy car and a lot of money. And you know, he paid a lot of attention to her. He was a friend of the family and went hunting with her dad, and she probably trusted him at first.
“In the beginning she was more or less his captive, and then sooner or later, when everybody abandoned her, she just gave up and went along with him.”
Ronnie, the skinny, likable coon hunter, was not the guy to stand up to Ken McElroy—not that he didn’t try. He told Ken more than once to leave Trena alone and he even pulled her out of school a couple of times, but what was he going to do when Ken didn’t stop? The law sure as hell wouldn’t help him in a war with Ken McElroy.
After Trena dropped out of school in 1972 (while Ken was in trouble in Savannah for stealing and in St. Joe for shooting Otha Embrey), her life essentially narrowed down to Ken McElroy. Although both Trena and Alice later denied that the two of them lived at the farm together (the townspeople swore they both lived there for years), Trena spent most, if
not all, of her time there until she had her baby. Trena would later
tell how Ken used to make love to them both in the same night,
going from one room to the other. It bothered Trena, but what could
she do? Trena learned that the way to get along with Ken was to do
as she was told without asking questions. In the beginning, it was simple
obedience, as a dog minds his master or a child her father. But in later
years, Trena grew to believe in him. Whatever Ken said was the
way it was.
13
On June 11, 1973, two weeks after her baby boy was born, Trena made a desperate bid for freedom. The baby was still in the hospital, and Trena told Alice she wanted to get away from Ken. Would Alice help her? Would she take her to Russ and Brenda’s house in Skidmore? Alice, who should have known better, said she would. They told Ken they were going to the hospital to see the baby and left, taking Alice’s two babies, Juarez and Tonia. They drove straight to Russ and Brenda’s house, and Trena asked Brenda if she and Alice and the babies could stay there until Russ could take them somewhere. She wanted to get away from Ken, she explained, and if she was ever going to escape, it had to be now. Brenda hesitated. She knew what she was getting into, but the two women were obviously quite desperate. Finally, she said they could stay if they promised not to leave the house; she didn’t want them going out and bringing McElroy back with them. The two women agreed, but it was only a few minutes before Trena called her parents and Ronnie came over to take her and Alice to the hospital to see Trena’s doctor.
Somehow, McElroy figured out that his two women had run off, taking his favorite child, Juarez, with them. He hit the streets of Maryville in his Buick, and soon spotted Alice and Trena in Ronnie’s truck. Driving alongside, he ordered them to pull over. McElroy aimed the shotgun at Ronnie and made him get in the Buick, then ordered the two women to drive back to Brenda’s house in Ronnie’s truck. (Ronnie thought for sure he was going to die. He would later tell his mother: “Ma, I wouldn’t have
given a nickel few my life that night.”)
McElroy burned. To think that his women and Ronnie, puny little Ronnie, were defying him, telling him to get fucked. They were leaving him! Him! When McElroy and Ronnie arrived at Johnson’s house, Trena and Alice had already gone inside. McElroy jumped out of the Buick and stood on the sidewalk, the stock of the shotgun resting on his hip.
“Come on out here you fuckin’ bitches,” he yelled, “or I’m coming inside and blow your fuckin’ brains out!”
Brenda took her two kids and Alice’s babies and stuffed them in a closet in the back bedroom.
McElroy was getting worse, out of control.
“Bring my little boy out here, you fuckin’ bitch,” McElroy screamed at Alice, “or I’m comin’ inside and blow you all away!” Alice relented and took Juarez outside. McElroy stuck him in his car. When Alice went back inside, she began clawing and scratching at Brenda, yelling, “You said you would help us!” “Yeah,” Brenda said, “but you left like I told you not to, and now look what’s happening!”
Brenda’s daughter escaped from the closet and looked out the front window.
“Careful!” Trena said, pulling her away, “you’ll get killed!” Now that McElroy had his son, he started yelling for Trena. She ventured out onto the porch, then came back inside a few minutes later.
“He said he just wants to talk to me,” she said.
“Don’t leave, or you’ll never make it back,” Brenda warned. “He’ll get you in the car and you’ll never get out.”
“He said he’ll come inside and kill us all if I don’t,” said Trena. Brenda gripped her loaded shotgun. “Well,” she said, “he’ll have to come through the door first.”
McElroy kept yelling about what he was going to do to Trena and Alice when he finally got ahold of them, and eventually both women gave in and went outside. Soon they all left, Trena riding in the car with Ken, and Alice riding with Tonia, Juarez, and Ronnie in the pickup.
Once at the farm, the rage inside McElroy boiled over. Worried that Russ Johnson might call in the law, he leveled the shotgun at the two
women and threatened to shoot them if anyone came to the farm. The shotgun roared forth inches from Alice’s legs to make his point.
Trena would later describe what happened under oath in a court of law.
Prosecuting Attorney John Fraze:: O.K., just describe what happened there [at the farm].
Trena: Oh, after we got there, he made us get out except my dad and he sat in the car and I was behind the corner and he was in front of us and he shot the gun and he saw the car coming up the hill so he made us line up on the side and he says, “You guys might as well look forward to it if somebody comes you are gonna get killed.” And then he just sat and talked for a while and then he took us behind the shed and he was going to shoot us because he thought another car came and after that he said we better take Ronnie home and he asked me if I wanted to go home and I said, I didn’t say nothing for a while and then I said, “I don’t know.” And then he says well you are not going to go home until this is cleared up. And he told Alice to get in the car and he was going to be right behind her and if she made a wrong move that he would get her. So we went and let dad off and went on a gravel road.
Fraze: O.K., after you let your dad off where did, you went where?
Trena: About a half a mile on a gravel road.
Fraze: What happened when you got there?
Trena: He made me get out of the pickup and Alice stayed in the car and he put the gun up on top of the pickup and he wanted to know whose idea it was to go to my uncle’s house and I said I didn’t know and Alice said she didn’t know. And then he got mad at me ’cause I kept on saying that I was feeling sorry for my mother and he kept on slappin’ me and then after a while when he got done we went back to his house.
Ken beat Alice badly that night for her role in the attempted escape. In the midst of his fury, he whirled on her, shotgun in hand, and yelled that he was going to blow her head off. Instead, in a lightning movement he
drew the barrel back and brought it around full force on her face, smashing her nose and breaking both cheekbones and her brow. Alice stumbled away from the barn and managed to drive to the hospital in Fairfax. She arrived with her face puffed up and split open where the metal had hit the skin
. In e few days, when the swelling dropped, her whole face turned an ugly, gruesome black-and-blue. The pain was excruciating, and it would leave her with headaches for the rest of her life.
McElroy’s rage was not yet spent. He had to establish complete dominance. The next morning he told Alice, who had returned the following morning, to go to his mother’s house down the road and make a phone call. Trena would later describe what happened under oath.
Prosecutor Fraze : O.K., would you tell the Court what happened from the time that Alice left to make this phone call until she got back? Just tell it in your own words, however you want to tell it.
In Broad Daylight (Crime Rant Classics) Page 9