McElroy may have been the best dog handler in the entire area. He knew dogs, he loved dogs, and in the trading, buying, and selling of them, he always came out ahead. A few dogs, the champions or potential champions, went for $2,000 or $3,000 apiece. And he could talk a guy into paying $500 for a dog he had just seen fall headfirst into a creek. But he would have had to make a lot of dog deals to live the way he did—to afford the women, the kids, the cars and trucks, the fancy guns, the good whiskey, and the enormous legal fees.
Ken was an honored figure at the dog meets. He had hunted and traded dogs with the other men for years, and his word was always good: If he told you that this pup came from that bitch, then it was a fact. And he was a gentleman. Coon hunters were a pretty rough crowd, arguing and
cursing when they thought a judge had favored a friend or had miscounted the number of times a particular dog had barked when it hit a tree with a coon in the branches. But McElroy never joined in these disputes. If he received a bad call, he simply shrugged and walked away, without so much as raising his voice. If anything, McElroy was the conciliator, the one who tried to smooth things over. He drank quite a bit, and he made his women work hard training and exercising his dogs, but he was always polite and friendly. Everyone at the meets had heard the stories about Ken’s thieving and violence, and some of them had been in on a few activities with him. But he never showed that side of himself at the gatherings.
Few people at the meets thought Ken McElroy was a farmer. He came dressed in slacks and a nice shirt, all cleaned up with his hair slicked back. His hands were soft and clean and his nails trimmed, like a woman’s. He drove new, fancy pickups and he was always flashing a wad of money around. Once, he popped the hubcaps off the wheels and laughed as wads of money tumbled out on the ground.
Family members argued, with some justification, that Ken couldn’t possibly have committed all the crimes he was accused of —unless he could be in twenty places at the same time. He could be, indirectly. By the time he moved back to the Skidmore farm, McElroy had graduated from popping a hog or two into the trunk of his car to stealing two or three trailer-loads of cattle in an evening and, more lucratively, fencing animals and other items for a network of other thieves. Some of the thieves were his buddies, who stole both with him and for him, and others were young boys from the area. McElroy seemed to know which boys would be amenable to his propositions—boys from poor families, misfits, malcontents, boys that would look up to him because he ignored the rules and lived life his own way. He bought them pop and beer and played pool with them, and let them drive his pickup, even though they were under age.
Sam S. began stealing for him at the age of fourteen and kept it up for ten years:
“There was a bunch of us that stole for him, kids that he trusted. He would buy whatever we would bring him: corn, tools, air compressors, chemicals, anything. We would go to a farmer’s yard, scoop the grain into the back of our truck, drive to his place and scoop it out in his yard or one
of the sheds. He would give us a dollar a bushel and the next day he would scoop it up and sell it at the elevator in Maitland for two or three dollars a bushel. Whatever you took him, you always got cash on the spot, usually one- third to one-half the price. There were never any confrontations or disputes—he was always fair with us.”
A few of the boys formed more of a bond with McElroy. Tom L., who came from a poor rural family, was also fourteen when he began stealing for him.
“Ken always stopped to talk to us about things he had done, about his cars and women. Other times, he would buy us beer and give us money to play pool. He would talk a lot about how he didn’t like farmers, that they were always fuckin’ with him.
“Once, he pulled out a stack of money and asked a friend and me if we would like some of it. ‘Shit yes,’ we said, and he told us exactly what he wanted and where it was. He would drive around during the day and look at stuff and then tell us where it was and how much he could give us for it. He always paid cash.
“I never went out to the farm uninvited; he always came and found me. 1 never liked it out at his house. It was scary. His wife and kids never said a word. They would fade into the background the minute we arrived. He kept a bottle of speed in the house; I never saw him use it, but he would give it to me to keep me awake when we were out stealing at night.
“He knew when the farmers were going on vacation and how to get in all their places. He told me once that the key to this one house was in the fruit cellar, and there it was. How in the hell did he know that?
“Sometimes he would find me in town and he’d be in jeans and a jean jacket with a pistol under the jacket. ‘I need you to do some things that my women can’t,’ he would say. We would take off in the middle of the night in his big Buick or Delta 88—they all had toggle switches on them to shut off the tail lights and brake lights when he was running—and he would slow down as we went by the place, and I would jump out the door. I’d go steal whatever it was and wait crouched in the ditch for him to come back around. He’d slow down and I’d run alongside the car with whatever I had and jump in.
“Some of his dogs were real bad. He had fifteen or twenty of them chained up outside, and he fed some of them speed to keep them mean.
When he would give me a pill, he would always pop a couple down their throat—it really fucked them dogs up.
“I liked him, I really did. He was always really good to us kids. A helluva lot better than the farmers that hired us for nothing to slop around in their pens and do their nigger work. Once or twice I went back when I was stealing for Ken and nailed a couple of farmers I had worked for.
“I got a lot of respect hanging around him; people thought more of me after I was seen with him two or three times. The guy never did nothing wrong to kids. He was like a father to me.”
McElroy loved to prowl the countryside at night, cruising the small towns and the back roads in his cars and pickups, stopping by bars and friends’ houses, running his dogs and stealing cattle, until the early hours of the morning. He could be hunting or working, or both; more than one farmer came up on Ken McElroy on a dark night, parked alongside a gravel road, supposedly tracking down a dog he had lost in the timber.
Stories about Ken McElroy’s exploits flourished. Many, though highly suspect, were repeated enough to become part of the legend. Some had a grain or more of truth to them, and others—often the wildest ones—were outright fact. One of those was the horse- trailer incident.
Fillmore, a town about twenty-five miles south of Skidmore, was a place unto itself, a grimy, wasted little rural slum where dilapidated buildings and run-down streets went unfixed for years, and rusted-out trucks and old farm equipment sat out on the street in front of ramshackle houses. Fillmore had a serious reputation for hard drinking and mean fighting, which the residents, men and women alike, did their best to live up to. It was a town of coon hunters, tenant farmers, and truck drivers. At midday people stood on the sidewalk on the main intersection of town drinking beer and spitting pools of tobacco juice on the dusty pavement, staring silently at strange cars that happened to wander in off the track. At one time, McElroy lived a few miles outside of town and used to hang out in the bar.
Nick P., a regular at the bar in Fillmore, had met Ken a few years back through a friend, trading dogs. Nick was a rough-looking dude; about forty-one, thick upper torso, bald with a little fuzz on the sides, beady eyes—“mangy,” in the words of an acquaintance. His nature was decent
enough until he got drunk, and then he was mean as hell. He had sold Ken a few hogs in the past and had always received a fair price for them. The night that Ken found him at the bar in Fillmore, Nick had just been released on parole after serving three months on an assault conviction. Ken had a goosenecked horse trailer hooked on behind his pickup and was out to rustle some cattle. He needed someone to stand lookout and help him load the animals into the trailer. Nick readily agreed to assist, and in the course of a few hours the two of them r
ustled four cows from nearby farms. They were heading south through Fillmore on their way to St. Joe when Ken spotted a sheriff’s car sitting in the driveway of the park. The deputy sheriff pulled out after them.
“I haven’t got time to talk to any cops,” Ken said casually, and stepped on the gas.
When they came to a bridge, Ken said, “Here’s where we lose them.” He stopped the pickup in the center of the bridge and backed the trailer up at an angle until it blocked the road. He jumped out, unhooked it, and off they drove in the pickup, leaving the deputy, who was too far behind to see the license or the occupants of the truck, stuck on the other side of the trailer. Ken chuckled about it, continued driving south unconcernedly for a few miles, then hopped on the interstate. He got off at the Oregon exit and drove to a phone booth across from the courthouse. From there he called the highway patrol and the Andrew County sheriff’s department and reported his horse trailer missing, saying that somebody must have stolen it from his farm. He dropped Nick off at the closest bar and headed home.
The next day, McFadin’s investigator retrieved the trailer from the Andrew County sheriff’s department and returned it to its rightful owner, Ken McElroy.
17
Romaine Henry was a typical Skidmore farmer. Forty-one years old, about medium height, with thinning hair and a pot belly, he was a quiet man with a steady-as-she-goes philosophy. Farming was Romaine’s way of life; he worked from sunup to sunset and beyond. Born and raised in the area, he lived with his wife and three kids on a 1,000-acre farm accumulated over the years since 1952, when he had bought the first acreage.
About two and a half miles before Route V hits the edge of Skidmore, Route ZZ, a decent blacktop, cuts off and runs south to Graham. At the third curve, a gravel road turns off to the left and passes Romaine’s farm about a quarter-mile further on. Down ZZ another mile and a half is the Valley Road, which leads to the McElroy farm.
In the late afternoon of July 27, 1976, Romaine had just returned from having new tires put on his truck in Skidmore, and was working in the shop, sharpening a sickle, when one of his sons came in and told him he had heard gunshots. The boy said it sounded like a shotgun, and that it seemed to have come from down the gravel road alongside their property. Romaine got in his 1974 GMC pickup and drove over to investigate. As he approached the area, he recognized Ken McElroy’s green Dodge pickup parked along the right side of the road, and decided to keep going and forget about whatever was going on. As he swung out to pass, Ken McElroy stepped into the middle of the road, directly in front of Romaine, holding a shotgun in the air. Romaine braked, and as he did so, he noticed
another man, younger, behind the wheel of the green Dodge. The man looked him squarely in the face, then ducked out of sight.
Romaine hoped that whatever was happening was something innocuous—maybe McElroy wanted to go on his land to get a rabbit or squirrel he had shot. McElroy jerked on the GMC’s passenger door, but it was stuck. Romaine reached over and opened it for him. McElroy leaned in and stuck the shotgun about three inches away from Romaine’s face.
“Were you the dirty son of a bitch over at my place in a white Pontiac?” McElroy demanded.
Confused and scared, looking down the barrel of the gun, Romaine said he didn’t know anything about a white Pontiac.
“You’re a lying son of a bitch!” snarled McElroy. He lowered the barrel and fired the shotgun. The blast tore a big hole in Romaine’s stomach, spattered blood and pieces of flesh against the driver’s door, and ripped holes in the panel. Romaine tried to move, but McElroy quickly pumped another shell into the chamber, thrust it in Romaine’s face, and fired again. Romaine ducked just as the gun went off, but he felt a stinging as the pellets tore a huge gash in his forehead and cheek.
By now, Romaine was moving. He jumped from the pickup and crouched alongside the front fender, intending to take off across the fields and head for home. He heard the gun fire again, but felt nothing. He had gone about ten feet when he heard the sound of Ken working the gun and swearing. Those guns only hold three shells, Romaine thought, and he must have jammed it reloading. He turned back, jumped into his truck, slammed the gearshift into first, and stomped the accelerator.
“Get the hell out of here!” yelled McElroy. “I don’t want to see you again!” Looking in the mirror to see if the Dodge was following, Romaine noticed blood streaming down his face and neck. The green pickup, with McElroy at the wheel and a shotgun hanging out the window, was coming after him.
Because he was heading away from home, Romaine had to make a series of right-hand turns along section lines to get back on ZZ and the gravel road to his farm. Shaking and spattered with blood, he drove as fast as he could. McElroy hung right on his bumper, and at each turn Romaine figured McElroy would take the angle and fire at him. After the third turn, for some reason Romaine would never understand, the green Dodge
dropped back and gave up the chase. The pain in Romaine’s stomach sharpened and he came close to losing consciousness before he turned into his drive.
Finally, he stood in the doorway of his house, blood streaming from his face and stomach, and told his wife, “I think we better get me to the hospital.”
At the hospital in Maryville, doctors found a gaping tear from the first gunshot, running eight inches to the left from his navel. He had powder bums, and x-rays revealed seven pellets in his abdominal wall. A doctor cut away the damaged skin, placed a drain in the wound, and closed it. No pellets had penetrated the skull, so the lacerations in his forehead were cleaned and sutured. The doctor dressed the wounds and admitted Romaine to the hospital for continued treatment, which lasted a week. (The pellets were removed later. The wound became infected, and the doctors eventually had to go back in and clean it up.)
McElroy was arrested the next day, and Prosecuting Attorney Fraze charged him with feloniously assaulting Romaine Henry with the intent to kill him or do him great bodily harm.
McElroy’s defense was simple from the very beginning: He wasn’t there, and he didn’t do it. Romaine Henry had obviously been shot, but he was mistaken about who had shot him.
Five people, other than McElroy and Romaine, initially claimed to have knowledge of McElroy’s whereabouts at the time of the shooting: Three people placed him on the roads in the vicinity of Romaine’s farm, and two swore he was at home.
Short Linville, the man who drove McElroy, Trena, and later McElroy’s kids to school, lived in Graham in a house right across the street from a stop sign where ZZ dead-ended into Route A. A friendly man with a huge gut, Short happened to be in his yard around 5:30 that July afternoon. He looked up to see Ken McElroy’s green Dodge come barreling down ZZ about 50 miles an hour. Ken was driving and a young man wearing a felt hat was hanging on to the dash. McElroy barely slowed as he hit the corner, and the Dodge went into a four-wheel sideways skid that ended about half a foot shy of the ditch. Short, who had been standing only a few feet from the ditch, jumped back in alarm. “Goddamnit, Ken, ” he swore to himself, “you knew that corner was there. What the hell’s wrong with you?” The instant before the truck came to a stop, Ken downshifted,
hit the gas, and roared out in a screeching fishtail.
Danny Kinder, a hand on Romaine Henry’s farm, lived with his wife and kids about a mile away from Romaine. Kinder was driving home at 5:30 after the day’s work, heading west on Route A, when Ken McElroy passed him in a green Dodge going east faster than hell. There was no question in his mind that it was McElroy’s truck and that McElroy was behind the wheel.
Two farmers who lived close by Route ZZ also saw Ken McElroy around 5:30 that afternoon, traveling east at a high rate of speed on ZZ.
But Maurice O’Connor and Alvin Smith told a different story. Both men were from Bedford, Iowa, a small town over the Iowa border and a favorite hangout of Ken McElroy and other coon hunters. They claimed that they were at Ken McElroy’s farmhouse doing carpentry work the afternoon of July 27, and that McElroy had been there from sho
rtly after 5 until 6 P.M.
Lawyer McFadin, with one of his best clients in trouble again, set about methodically constructing a defense. First, he took Romaine’s deposition, spending considerable effort nailing Romaine down as to the exact time the shooting had occurred. Romaine couldn’t say what time he left home, but he was very clear on the time he returned: “Well, all I know is when I got home I looked at my watch and it was twenty-five minutes till six and so from the time I left home until I got back home I wasn’t gone over five or six minutes.”
McFadin had him repeat time and again that he was positive he arrived home at twenty-five to six. Under McFadin’s questioning, Romaine acknowledged the incident could have occurred fifteen minutes earlier, thus setting in concrete the time period for McElroy’s presence from 5:20 to 5:35.
In Broad Daylight (Crime Rant Classics) Page 12