September 26, 2025 • 46 mins
The murder of Ken McElroy comes off like a story from a cheap paperback book you’d get to read on a plane. But this is a true crime story, set in Missouri in the early 80s. And boy does it pack a punch.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
The murder of Ken McElroy is an example of the
kind of small town justice so well served that it
seems like it's gotta be a movie. And it was
a movie, not a very good one starring Brian Denahey,
but the actual crime came first and it was true,
hence its inclusion on this playlist. At any rate, the
town of Skidmore, Missouri, doesn't play around. If they're pushed
(00:23):
too far, you can bet on that.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, pushing us around as usual
with this episode of Stuff you Should Know.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Our second episode for us of the new year, And
why didn't we save like a pretty happy one to
get going with.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I don't know, I don't know, probably because we knew
we were going to be so bummed out after Jonestown.
We needed something that was a pick me up. And
what's crazy is this story actually is a pick me
up compared to Jonestown.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeh boy, that's tough to parse out. So thank you
to Olivia for diving into this tough story and also
this episode we want to issue a very big trigger
warning because in it we are going to talk about
a very bad man and some of the bad things
he did, which included sexual assault, and some of which
(01:34):
were with minors. So trigger warning. Know that going in.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
There's no way around it.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
There's very few stories that have like a clear cut villain,
but this is one of them. And the villain who's
also the center of our story. The person at the
center of our story is a man named Ken Rex McElroy. Yeah,
which I mean all you need to hear is that name, really,
I think, and it kind of just puts a weird
(02:05):
chill down your spine that you can't quite identify yet.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Yeah, this is a story that you may have heard
of before. There's no shortage of content about Ken McElroy.
There was a book written in nineteen eighty eight by
Harry McClain, a crime writer, called in Broad Daylight You
Know What's Coming colon Our Murder in Skidmore, Missouri. There
was a documentary just a few years ago in twenty
(02:31):
nineteen called documentary series actually called No One Saw a Thing.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Of which I watched at the first episode.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
How is it I didn't get a chance to yet, Well.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
We'll talk about it. It's okay.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
It's got like a seven plus on IMDb. That's really
saying something.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Yeah, Chuck gives it a six minus.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Okay, Still it's not too bad.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
It's okay.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
I mean, not a ton of light was shed. So
maybe it's because if I went into it blind it
might have been.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
A little better.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Gotcha.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
But there's also a nineteen ninety one TV movie starring
Brian Denahey and Marcia gay Harden, which I actually I
watched a very bad YouTube version of it. Mostly I
scribbed you a little bit of it. But it's actually
not terrible for a nineteen ninety one TV movie, largely
because Brian Dennehey is perfectly cast and awesome.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah, he really is. I don't understand why they changed
the names. Did Harry MacLean change the names for in
Broad Daylight?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I didn't read the book, but I don't know. Sometimes
they do that with TV movies, huh.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Well, regardlessly innocent, you know.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
I scrubbed ahead to the last probably thirty minutes, saw
the good stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
That's kind of all you need.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
And you're right, Brian Dennehey was great in it, and
Marcia gay Harden did a great job at the really
important point.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, she's a tremendous actor, as was Dennehee Rip, Brian Dennhey.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
So Ken Rex McElroy. He was from skid' More in Missouri.
That's where this story takes place. He was the fifteenth
of sixteen kids. From what I saw, he was born
in nineteen thirty four. And you can be the wealthiest
person in your state and have sixteen kids and you're
still going to be hard scrabble. Sure, his dad wasn't
(04:18):
the wealthiest person in the state. So the mcilroys grew
up kind of doing what they could to make their
own way. And Ken himself, I saw either he made
it up to age fifteen in school, which is a
surprising statistic to me after I know a little more
about him. I also saw that he was illiterate, which
(04:38):
I would definitely believe more than the fact that he
made it up to age fifteen in school. Either way,
at a young age he started taking up crime. You
get the impression not just out of necessity, but also
probably out of a certain amount of pleasure.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Yeah, and this was to frame it in then nineteen forties.
He was born in thirty four, so by the time
he was criming, it was in nineteen forties. One thing
we should mention is, and I'm glad Livia dug this up,
and this is no way excusing any of his behaviors,
but when he was eighteen year years old, he was
(05:14):
a working construction and there was an accident where some
very heavy cribbing fell about thirty feet and hit him
in the head. He had a construction helmet, but it
cut his scalp, so it clearly, you know, provided minimal protection.
And he said that he had a steel plate implanted
and had episodes of like blackout episodes and pain throughout
(05:36):
the rest of his life. And it should be noted
that one common denominator in many cases of you know,
sick people who do awful things is head injury when
they're younger, So that very well may have been the case. Again,
not excusing anything he did, but we're trying to paint
a full picture here.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
He was like a modern day Phineas Gage.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah, exactly, like you said, It seemed like he enjoyed
criming from a young age.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
He was a pretty i.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Mean this is before the accident, even he was a
pretty disturbed young man.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Yeah. Oh, I have to say, yeah, I would say
I would definitely agree with that. But he did do stuff.
He wasn't just like a lay about like. He was
a kind of an industrious criminal. He also trained hunting dogs.
He was a dealer of antiques, a buyer and seller.
(06:36):
But more than anything, he was a cattle wrestler. Apparently,
the year before his death, the county that skidaways in
our Skidmores in not Away County, the cattle thefts were
six times that of any other place in the state.
It led the state in cattle thefts. And apparently a
(06:57):
lot of that was Ken Mackle. He was flush with cash.
He would buy new cars, he could support. He ended
up having at least ten kids, could support them all.
He had a lot of money and all of it
essentially was from crime because he had a tiny little
farm and he wasn't making much of any money off
(07:19):
of that. He was making it from stealing.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And when we say he had a lot of money,
it's not the kind of it's not wealth. He had
the kind of money for a criminal in the nineteen
sixties and skid More, Missouri, he.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Had skid More money.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Yeah, which is to say, oh, I hope there's no
skidded Marians. There's a couple hundred of them well listening
to us. Yeah, I just assume the whole town listens
to us anyway.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
They're probably so sick of a story.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
But he's the kind of kind of money guy that
like he always had like a few grand in his
pocket with a big, fat money roll, like that kind
of dude. He was a big guy. He was like
six two or sixty three, had this sort of here
again kind of like Jim Jones men of the time,
had this jet black hair and these huge sideburns. He
(08:14):
was imposing. But he picked on people smaller than he
picked on women and children and young girls, and took
advantage of all these people. And he was arrested and
charged at least twenty one times without being convicted. And
if you're thinking, like, how in the world does that
happen when people know he's committing crimes, he's getting arrested
(08:36):
of these committing these crimes, it's because he had a
very I guess good, slippery attorney named Richard Gene McFadden
who was supposedly a mob attorney in Kansas City, and
upon their first meeting, he was like, you can't afford me,
and McElroy said, let me be the judge of that,
(08:57):
pulled out that big fat role from his pocket. Uh huh,
threw it on the desk, and McFadden was delighted to
have him as a cash paying client who listened to him.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Yeah, so McFadden was so was so good at getting
them off. He well, actually they worked together. McFadden was
good at getting them off, but it was he probably
wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Ken McElroy hadn't
have been also a very active participant in getting himself off.
(09:31):
So Gene McFadden would get delay after delay, all these
procedural delays to just really put as much time between
Ken McElroy's arrest and the actual trial date as possible,
and then Ken McElroy would get busy intimidating witnesses, and
if it got closer and closer to trial and a
(09:52):
jury wasn't paneled, he would intimidate the jurors. He would
threaten their lives. He would threaten the lives of their families.
He would threaten to burn their houses down, he'd threaten
to kill them. He would threaten, not just with words,
he would intimidate them by parking in their driveways, by
brandishing guns at them, by shooting guns in the air,
(10:12):
sometimes in the night, outside of their house, like just
it would take a couple of these for the average
person to be like, I can't this is not what
I've signed up for. This guy's scaring me to death.
Some people lasted longer than others, but most of the time,
almost in every single time, Eventually he would intimidate enough
(10:34):
of the witnesses that the cases would fall apart. And
that is how he became what Crime Library referred to
as this teflon coated hicic.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Absolutely, like he shot a guy in the stomach in
July of nineteen seventy six, a guy named Romaine Henry.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
And yes, you heard me right, Romaine Farmer spelled exactly
like the lettuce. Was he named after the lettuce? Because
was he a lettuce farmer?
Speaker 1 (11:01):
I don't know. Did they farm let us in Missouri?
Speaker 3 (11:04):
They did in you in Arizona, I think, just.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
For the sake of this story, Yes, he absolutely was
a Romaine Lettuce. Farmer's parents raised him to.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Be one and named him after that lettuce.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
So he was shot in the stomach with a shotgun,
was not killed and got away with it. You know,
in the documentary, like Romaine Henry pulls up his shirt
and he's like, here's where he shot me, and court
witnesses he you know, like you said earlier, he was
one of his side hustles, was raising and training and
(11:36):
selling hunting dogs, and he was well liked by some people,
like the people that he dealt with with these hunting dogs.
Other crime type people liked him. So he had this
stable of dudes that would go to court and testify
on his behalf and provide him with alibis and say, like,
he didn't shoot him in the stomach. He was with
us at the time of the shooting, So he got
(11:59):
away with shooting Romaine Henry in the stomach with a shotgun.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Even Yeah, and just to make sure that you understand
what kind of person Kim McElroy was. The reason that
he shot Romayne Henry in the stomach was because Romayne
Henry approached him and said, hey, will you please not
shoot pheasants out of season on my land anymore? And
Kim McElroy responded by shooting him in the stomach because
he told him basically to stop shooting birds illegally on
(12:25):
that man's land.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yeah, it did matter who you were. There was a cop,
even highway patrolman named Richard Stratton hashtag hero. Yeah who
had you know, plenty of run ins obviously with McElroy
because like you said, this is a town of you know,
a few hundred people at the time. I think yep,
maybe like four or five hundred. Again, so everyone knew
(12:47):
this guy, including obviously Richard Stratton, and he had a
bunch of run INDs, and so McElroy started threatening his
home and his family. One day, his wife, Margaret, was
on a to church. She got in the car to
go to church and mclroy walks up to the car,
puts a shotgun in her face. And he did that
to cops wives, he did it to judges. The county magistrate,
(13:10):
Montgomery Wilson, was so fearful that he wouldn't take these cases.
He would have them move to other nearby counties.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Like he was.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
People called him the town bully, but that is the
kindest way to describe him, because he was also a
child molester and rapist.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Yeah. I say we take a break and then come
back and talk about this all.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Right, we'll be right back, all right.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
So when we left off, I leveled a pretty serious allegation,
which is absolutely true, that Ken McElroy was a child
molester and rapist. And this is one hundred percent true.
The story gets very twisted and convoluted here, but it's
kind of hard to follow along because he was married
(14:16):
and then had a girlfriend and the wife at the
same time, but then another one and then another Wooden
would come in and they're overlapping, and he's having kids
with most of them, and it gets very confusing. But
like you said, he fathered ten kids. A lot of
them were with underage girls. He got married for the
first time in nineteen fifty two when he was eighteen
and his wife, Alita, was sixteen, and he is not
(14:40):
like he calmed down or anything. He would pray and
stalk in groom girls as young as twelve and thirteen
years old, one of which was a fifteen year old
named Sharon, and they it was sort of a familiar
pattern where he would he would groom and stalk these
young teenage girls. He would abuse them, he would rape
(15:03):
them and threaten them with death and somehow end up
with them and not not somehow through coercion and threatened intimidation.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, and he would get so he would be married already,
and like you said, he'd be stalking and raping and
abusing some other younger girl at the same time. And
then inevitably, when charges were about to be brought against
him because of his like rape and abuse and in
one case shooting of one of the girls, he would
(15:37):
he would convince them to marry him. He would go
to his wife and be like, we have to get
divorced because I got to marry this girl so that
she won't testify against me, and he would be successful.
And if if they refused at first, he would use
those same tactics that he used to intimidate witnesses to
intimidate these girls into marrying him and becoming and then astoundingly,
(16:02):
he would go find a younger girl and start the
whole thing over again. Like this guy got married more
than once to keep the girl that he was raping
from testifying against him, because back then a wife couldn't
testify against her husband.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
So, I mean, we don't need to get into every
single one of those details, but suffice it to say
this was happening over and over and over remarkably sometimes
you know, obviously, these girls parents would put up a
fight and get involved, and he would intimidate and threaten
them to the point where at one point, and this
(16:39):
is the wife he had sort of when the final
incident went down, Trina McLeod, who he got together.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
With, this is just so sick.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
When she was twelve or thirteen years old, was like
picking her up from the school bus. Yeah, and school
officials were like, something's going on with this creep. No
one ever did anything, got her pregnant at fourteen, and
moved her into the house he shared with the previous
young girl that he was with. So he had a
son with Trina in nineteen seventy three, and a couple
(17:11):
of others with this young girl Alice, and went to
Trina's parents' house. They obviously are saying like, you can't
keep our daughter like this, and he held them back
at gunpoint, brought the girls back, continued to abuse them,
and then eventually he would burn down the house of
(17:31):
Trina McLeod's parents and shoot and kill their family dog.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Yeah, is he a bad enough guy at this point?
All right, dear listener.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Apparently somehow Trina ended up being treated by a doctor
somewhere or other, and the doctor got the story out
of her, and the doctor was like, wait, can you
tell me all that one more time? And I guess
she did. And the doctor called the authorities, and this
time McElroy was in a lot of trouble and they
(18:01):
took Trina to child Services and took her to a
family foster, a foster family, and he started stalking the
foster family and stalking their biological kids and threatening to
rape and kill them, and that foster family would not
give in. They were protecting Trina up until the time.
Trina's like, all right, I forgive you. I'm going back
(18:21):
to you, and I'm sure that foster family is like,
oh my god, I can't believe Yeah, I can't believe this.
Can you can't make that decision? And she did and
he got away with it yet again because he got
her to marry him, to keep her from being able
to even testify against her, and Gene McFadden in a
(18:42):
show of just how sleazy lawyers can be, served as
the witness to their wedding. I think she was fifteen
at the time, and at the end of the ceremony,
got her to sign a document saying all the things
she told that doctor were lies, and they lived as
husband and wife.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Right, So this is this was his final wife, young
Trinam of Cloud. He apparently got her parents because you know,
you needed to have permission to get married at that age,
and her parents acquiesced because he threatened to burn down
the new house that they either bought or built. And
this is where I get to the documentary, like a
(19:20):
lot of it should be taken with a grain of
salt because some of the local townspeople they interview are
clearly sort of just maybe don't have all the facts straight.
Because someone in that documentary said that he burned their
house down again and shot their other new dog. And
I didn't see anywhere else where that happened. I think
it was just a threat or whatever.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
He killed a monkey too, right, That's what I heard.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Deal with the documentary. So this is this is going on.
He's terrorizing this town. Everyone knows he's an awful guy.
He's just it can be overstated, what.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
An awful creep that he is.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
And I mean, and creep isn't even that's way too
soft to describe a guy like this. Finally, in nineteen
eighty he sort of pushes his luck. As Livia would
call this section, things have kind of come a little
bit to a head.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
They're these local shopkeepers.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
They ran the B and B grocery there in town,
Lois and Earnest bo Bowen Camp, and they apparently his
you know, his kids would go in there and shoplifts
all the time, his very young kids. And one of
his young daughters, her name was Tonia or Tanya, I'm
not sure how I was pronounced Unia. Tanya was like
(20:38):
four years old and was stealing candy from the store.
They confronted this young girl, and of course McElroy wouldn't
stand for that, so he starts up with his usual routine,
parking outside their store, staring them down, brandishing a shotgun
and carrying it around with him. And in July of
that year, McElroy approached bow Bowen Camp, the grocery store owner.
(21:02):
They had a brief conversation and he shot this seventy
year old man through the neck again, not killing him,
but wounding him.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Yeah, and so bow and Lois Bowen Camp were like
beloved in the town. Oh yeah, this is a big deal.
He had assaulted and a beloved elderly shopkeeper grocer who
fed the town, and even McElroy knew it was a
(21:30):
big deal. He fled, he tried to get out of
the state. And you mentioned Richard Stratton, the Missouri Highway
patrolman who had run ins over and over and over
again with Ken McElroy. Well, he was out on patrol
that night when that happened. That day, I guess, and
he got the all points bulltener to be on the
(21:51):
lookout for Ken McElroy. And at the time the Sheriff's office,
the rest of the Highway patrol they were setting up roadblocks,
looking on every highway that they could for Ken McElroy.
But Richard Stratton said, no, I know this guy. He's
got a police scanner. He knows exactly where they are.
He's going to take every back road he confined to
get to Kansas and get out of the state and
lay low for a while. And Richard Stratton said, I
(22:14):
know he's going to have to go through Fillmore, Missouri
to get to Kansas, and I'm going to stake that
place out. And in short order, Ken McElroy came driving
through in his Silverado with Trina in the seat and
he ended up getting busted by Richard Stratton. He was
caught and this again even he knew this one was
a big deal.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah yeah, he finally was taken into custody this time.
He I don't know if he just had it instinct
that there was probably no way out of this one.
But he hired his trustee lawyer again McFadden, who said,
all right, let's move this thing to Harrison County first
of all, and here's our plan is. We're going to
(22:54):
say that this was a dispute with Bowen Camp, this
sort of argument you guys had over your daughter stealing
and that he pulled a knife on you, and that
it was self defense and you were you were forced
to do that. He was still using his you know,
typical playbook intimidation tactics on the Bowen Camps. But they
refused to budget, which was great. So that was their
(23:16):
that was their defense. We should also mention while this
is going on, he continues his reign of terror on
the town. There's a there was a Christian church whose
minister was Tim Warren. And if you don't know anything
about sort of small town, actually probably even larger town, ministers.
Part of their job they don't just get up there
(23:37):
and preach on Sundays, is they have to minister to
the congregation in their community.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
So they will do things.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Preachers and ministers will like come and check in on
people if they're sick. They will visit people in the
hospital if they're injured or you know, or having some troubles.
And this is what Tim Warren was doing when he
checked in on, or had planned to check in on
Lois Bowen Camp and he got a call saying, don't
go see old man Bowen Camp. It's gonna be bad
(24:04):
news for you. He did it under cover by borrowing
a friends truck and going in that, but got a
call was like, hey, I knew that that was you
there within your friend's truck. Nice try and if you
do this again, I'm going to rape and murder your wife.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah. So the reverend, the local reverend, Reverend Lovejoy is
just told that his wife is going to be raped
and murdered.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
I didn't get what the point of that was, did you.
I didn't see any interpretation of that. I just saw
it explained or described. I never saw it explained.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Well, I think just anyone sort of on the Bowen
camp side, because who knows, like the reverend could have
been called to testify or something.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Who knows, I got you.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
That makes I think he was just trying to shut
it all down, kind of like with the town marshall.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Right, yeah, so the town Marshal nice setup. David Dunbar
was twenty four at the time, and if you were
tow Marshall of Skidmore, you not only had to call
the sheriff when there was an actual, real, real trouble
because you weren't really allowed to do anything. You had
to provide your own gun. The city would pay for
(25:15):
your ammunition, but you had to provide your own gun.
And David Dunbar was like, I don't even care about
this job. I took this job because I wanted to
win a bet that I had with my buddy for
a case of beer. And so in short order he
gets pulled into this whole thing by Ken McElroy who
pulls a gun on him, holds him at gunpoint. I
saw for like twenty minutes at the Punkin Festival.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Yeah, not punkin Junkin.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
No, the Punkin Festival or the Punkin show. That's what
I saw it as.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Yeah, they chunk in no punks, yes.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
No, but David Dunbar. David Dunbar did say, like that's
it for me. Man, I really didn't care that much
about this job anyway. I'm not going to stand up
to Ken McElroy. You guys need to find yourself another
marshal and they said, fine, we will, and then they couldn't.
So the town was without a marshall even for a
little while.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
They probably didn't need one.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
I mean, it doesn't sound like it was very effective
as positions go. And also the other thing I said,
they need to call the sheriff. I saw someone intimate
that the sheriff may not have either taken Ken McElroy
and the trouble he caused seriously, or he may have
been a friend or a sympathetic ally or something to
Ken McElroy, because apparently he was not super responsive to
(26:31):
Ken McElroy trouble calls.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
You know, he was interviewed in this documentary. He certainly
didn't seem sympathetic. He might have been intimidated as well.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, I guess that's possible. I wouldn't blame him, frankly.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
So this takes more than a year or I'm sorry,
close to a year to come to trial because of
all the delays that you know, McFadden, that's his game.
Finally it does and there's another green. Like almost everyone
in this story seems like they were like very young
at the time.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
The prosecutor, his name was David Baird. He was a
super young attorney. He was the county prosecutor so named,
just a few months earlier, and all of a sudden,
this kid is charged with prosecuting the case. He convicted
him of second degree assault and sentenced him to two
years in jail. And this was the very first conviction
(27:20):
after this years long reign of terror on this town
that he faced. Of course, McFadden appealed. The judge said
you're out on forty thousand dollars bail, and Baird said, oh,
it sounds.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
Fine to me. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
So like after shooting Bo Bo and Camp getting caught
by the highway patrol, he gets let out on forty
thousand dollars bond, which you probably paid his bail in
cash from his pocket. And the town was like, you
got to be kidding me, Like you let this guy free. Okay,
we will hang in there. We're just gonna ride this out.
(27:57):
And almost immediately Ken McRoy was like, how can I
get my bond revoked? I know, I'll go show up
at the local tavern in Skidmore, the D ANDNG Tavern,
and I'll bring an M one carbine rifle with bayonet
on me, and I'll talk about how I'm going to
use it to finish off bo Bowen Camp in front
of everybody in the bar. And that's exactly what he did.
(28:19):
And there just happened to be a couple of brave souls.
One of them was Pete Ward. I think it was
he and his sons who went and fought, like confronted
him about it and then went and filed the complaints,
said this guy needs his bond revoked, and a bond
hearing was set up ten days from then, and that
set up all of the machinations that were now going
(28:41):
to bring this story to its climax. Is it time
for ad break? Have we had our second one?
Speaker 2 (28:47):
I mean, if that's not a perfect setup for ad break,
then we've never had one.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
So I said that Ken McElroy has basically just brandished
an arm. He's walking around town talking about he's going
to finish off the guy he's been now convicted of assaulting,
but he's out on bail, and Pete Ward and his
sons go file a complaint and a bond hearing to
see if his bond should be revoked is set up
for ten days, and those ten days pass, and on
(29:35):
the tenth day, the day of his bond hearing, a
group of farmers around town who have just had it
up to here with Ken McElroy come to the American
Legion Hall to basically go to court with Pete Ward
and Bobo and Camp and show solidarity but also show
that these guys are protected. You better not mess with them.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Absolutely, By most accounts, it was the adults in the
town were at this American Legion Hall meeting. I think
there were like a little over one hundred adults maybe
living there, and it seemed like eighty of them were
at this American Legion Hall meeting.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Yeah, there was a lot of people there.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
So they find out there that McFadden had gotten that
hearing delayed, that bond hearing delayed for ten more days,
so instead of July tenth, it's going to be July twentieth.
They called the sheriff Danny EST's in that we talked
about and he basically said, you know, there's nothing that
we can do about it. And this is where I
(30:37):
think that maybe I don't think he was friendly to McElroy.
I think he was just a law about biting sheriff
that was like, you know, what do you want to do,
like go kill this guy in the street, Like, we
can't do that. All we can do is keep tabs
on this guy and you know, stick together. It is
probably a good idea. So they said, that's a great idea.
We should form a large group and stalk him, follow
(31:00):
him around. Their strengthen numbers if we get enough of
us together, Like what's this guy going to do?
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Kill all of us? There are some people that were
at this.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Meeting that was like, you know, no one was talking
about doing anything more than that.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Other people said yeah. There were some people that were so.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
You know, pissed off about all this that were like,
we need to take matters into our own hands, vigilanti style.
And they found out at this meeting that he's back
in town with his wife. They went to the tavern,
the DNG tavern still morning, mind you, they're in there
(31:38):
drinking and they all go down there. They walk in
there as a group and fill this tavern about fifty
to sixty people, and it's clear what's going on. McElroy
would not be intimidated. He did leave, but he apparently
just sort of thumbed his nose in their faces, bought
a six pack to go and was like, you know,
(32:00):
let's get out of here, Trina and walked out.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah. So this crowd was like, okay, I kind of
like this, following this guy around, watching his every step thing,
and they actually walked out of the bar with him,
and supposedly there was between thirty and sixty people. Some
people had cleared out. Romayne Henry, whom he'd shot in
the stomach before, said that he sensed that this crowd
was possibly out for blood, and he didn't want to
(32:25):
have anything to do with it, so he laughed. So
not everybody who was in the VFW Hall or the
American Legion Hall was in the parking lot of the
D ANDNG tavern, but a significant number of people were,
and they had Ken McElroy and Trina surrounded in Ken
McElroy's Silverado. Ken McElroy apparently had the car turned on
(32:49):
still had him park. He pulled out a cigarette and
I saw that he either had just lit it or
was about to light it when somebody shot him in
the head with a high powered hunting rifle and then
follow that up with a shot to the neck with
Trina right next to him, who is suddenly covered in
his blood.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yeah, through the back wind shield of the pickup truck,
I imagine instantly killed him with that first shot. His foot
slams on the gas and this thing is revving at.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Like full bore.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
This old truck starts smoking and eventually blows the engine
and it just goes silent. Trina apparently urinated herself, was
initially told to stay in the car or she would
be killed two and then gets hustled out of this
truck into a nearby bank and a bunch of more
(33:44):
shooting happens until the shooting stops. It's about twenty seconds
worth of shooting. People go up peek in this truck.
Mclaroy is hunched over. No one helps the.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
Guy at all, and in the end they.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Figure out he was hit by two different bullet types,
so two different guns had actually made contact with his body,
two different bullets, So.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
You know.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
In the documentary again, there were people that were like,
you know, five or six people shot him, three or
four people shot him. Like everyone sort of got their
own story. But as far as the you know, autopsy goes,
there were two different calibers of bullet.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
Yeah, because here's the twist to this whole story. We
don't know. At the very least, the law can't say
who killed Kim McElroy. They were between thirty to sixty
people who were standing right there when he was killed
from several feet away, and no one saw a thing.
(34:47):
The town circled the wagons and clammed up to this day.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah, the town fully cleared out right after that, and
like he was just sitting there alone in the middle
of town deadness truck. Apparently they went into some local
businesses in this One woman in the documentary said, we
were just sort of hanging out in there and someone
came in and said it's over. You can sleep tonight,
now just stand behind us.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yeah, And they did. Man, I mean they did the
law I saw. Depending on who you ask, the law
took this very seriously like any other murder, and investigated
and tried to prosecute it. Others are like Yeah, the
local law didn't try that hard because everybody knew that
this was actually justice, even though it was a grotesque
(35:35):
form of justice.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Either way, no one was ever prosecuted, No one was
even ever arrested or charged with the murder of Ken McElroy,
because not a single witness would crack. There was apparently
one witness who shortly after said that they saw a
man named Dell Clement and another man speed off very
(35:59):
quickly right after the shooting, and that person apparently said, oh,
I'm sorry, I was mistaken. That's the closest the cops
got to a witness statement about who may have shot
Ken McElroy. No one would say anything. Some people were
interviewed five to six times. Yeah, and no one cracked.
(36:21):
They would not crack. And yet whoever said that they
saw Deel Clement speed off was probably telling the truth.
Because Trina, Ken's wife, who by this time is twenty
four and looks a lot like somebody who would have
been friends with Eileen Warnos, it says that she turned
around right before the shooting started and saw very clearly
(36:43):
del Clement, owner co owner of the DNG tavern, taking
aim and shooting Ken McElroy in the head with his
deer rifle.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Yeah, he was not only the owner of the tavern,
but he had a livestock that had been Pilford. Apparently
it was a big hothead, and I get the sense
took great pleasure in pulling that trigger, as the sense
I got.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
There was a lady in.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
The documentary and again this is the grain of salt,
that said that the main gun was thrown in a river.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
So I was like, oh, very interesting. I hadn't heard
that anywhere else.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
But she also said right after that she heard that
they had maclroy's head in a head somewhere and a
freezer thing. So they couldn't do like more I guess
bullet ballistics work or whatever.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah, you couldn't find it because it was stolen by
a monkey.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Yeah, I don't think that happened.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
There was another guy in there named Britt Small, and
I get the feeling they just kind of gathered up
whoever was still around and was like, you know, talk
to me. And Britt was a local guy, a Vietnam veteran,
who was like, you know what. The only mistake they
made is that they let Trina live. I would have
killed him in his driveway. I would have ambushed them both,
killed her and him and burned his house down.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
That's what I would have done.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Well, she if you read the newspaper accounts, like immediately after,
the Kansas City Star had a couple of articles like
the week after, like she's scared to death or she
sounded scared to death that she was going to be
next or that her kids were going to be murdered.
And then of course the town's people that they interviewed
for the same article are like, no one wishes her
(38:18):
any ill, will right, you know, she's not in any danger.
But she swore that she was told to stay out
of Skidmore, doon't ever come back, or else she was
going to get it and her kids would be after that.
It's I don't know. It probably just depends on which
town person you talk to.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
I mean, both things can be true. They could have
felt like she was a victim, but also please leave.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Yeah, exactly. And apparently when she was hustled off to
the bank, whoever did that saved her life because even
if they hadn't have been aiming for she probably would
have gotten hit by a stray bullet. After that second
round but when she was hustled at the bank, there
was like a crowd, like you said to people there
that seemed to be just sitting there watching, like people
knew what was about to happen or what was going down.
(38:58):
And she said they didn't need to do him like that,
and someone said they had no choice. So even if
you didn't agree with that mob, justice that had taken place,
and you were a Skidmore resident, at the very least
you weren't about to turn on your you know, fellow townspeople.
Certainly not for the likes of somebody like Ken McElroy
(39:21):
or Trina.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Yeah, And in the end, you know, they couldn't with
only Trina's word, there was nothing they could do that
young Prosecutor Baird and the FBI said, you know, this
is all we've got. We can't move forward. Everyone else
is saying they don't know what happened. The FBI closed
their investigation on September two, nineteen eighty two, And I
(39:44):
believe the shariff, I'm sorry, the police chief, Hal Riddle
was running the investigation and he said, you know, he
was really trying to get this case to go to
trial because he's he is a law enforcement officer, and
they weren't all like great mob justice, you know, they're like,
we we should have handled it to begin with, but
you certainly can't handle it this way. And he said
(40:04):
it was the most frustrating case of his career, and
basically like this town got away with murder.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Yeah, and if the local law enforcement didn't work hard enough,
that was par for the course. Because if there was
any theme to this aside from this horrible bully, it
was the local institutions failing the community time after time
after time after time for any number of reasons because
they were intimidated because they were crup two no's. But
(40:32):
that was like the subtext of this whole thing is
that this community essentially had to take matters into their
own hands or else this guy was going to eventually
kill somebody, and they just decided that that was not
going to happen. They were going to stop it before
it happened. So it's tough to fault them for what
they did. Even though I don't agree with that, I
(40:54):
still I understand why they did it.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
Well.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
I think you cannot agree with mob justice and also
say the town of Skidmore in the world was probably
better off without this child rapist walking around.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Yeah, no, you're right. I like your theories. I'm going
to subscribe to your newsletter.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
So as for Clement, the supposed one of the supposed shooters,
he never said a thing about it. He died in
two thousand and nine. Trina in nineteen eighty five filed
a wrongful death civil case against the mayor, Clement, and
the sheriff for five million bucks, settled for seventeen thousand,
six hundred. The defendants didn't have to admit to any wrongdoing,
(41:39):
they just wanted it to go away. She got remarried
and a couple of years before that, in nineteen eighty three,
so two years after the killing, and she died in
twenty twelve. And you know, there was no mention of
that life of hers in her obituary. I think she
really put it behind her, and I hope at some point,
(42:00):
you know, there are interviews with her. That's the one
interesting thing about the doc, Like not too long after
their interviews with Trina McLoud. I would hope that at
some point she realized that.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
She was a victim.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
I hope so too, and came to on that.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
But who knows, because I mean, you you there's a there,
there's a certain amount of like grudging admiration you have
for at the very least. It's like, man, this girl
is so twisted. She was like a really ardent defendant
of her husband's reputation and honor and memory and like
(42:36):
really went would She was really like mad that they
had killed him.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
One other detail I saw was that she offered a
five thousand dollars reward for the for information about who
killed them. Somebody had come forward, but she didn't have
five thousand dollars. She was putting it up against the
movie rights. She presumed she would eventually be paid for.
Speaker 3 (42:58):
Oh interesting.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Yeah, so I'm not sure. I don't think anybody would
have take the five grand anyway, but certainly not a
phantom five grand that didn't actually exist yet.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
As for the attorney, he was always like he was
never like, you know, I really regret representing that dirt bag.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
He was pretty proud of his work.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
He had a long career as a lobbyist working in
the legislature there in Missouri, and apparently would like buy
copies of McLean's book and have McLean sign them and
hand them out to all the delegates in the state Senate.
He died in twenty twelve, Like I said, very proud
of his work. And Stratton, the highway patrolman that we mentioned,
(43:40):
was the guy who in an interview said, you know
they did what they did because we didn't do our job,
and I think he felt forever bad that the law
enforcement had failed that town.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
Yeah. He also said in that same interview he knew
for sure who did it, and he was never going
to say.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
I think it was Clement, I just don't know who
the second shooter was. The guy that says he would
have killed them both and burned their house down, claims
that he knew the second shooter, but he wouldn't say
it either.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker 3 (44:09):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Quite a story, yeah, man, Yeah, thanks and thanks Olivia
for helping us with it. And since Chuck said good pick,
that means, of course it's time for a brand new
listener mail.
Speaker 3 (44:24):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
This is a follow up on our what I thought
was a really good episode that I enjoyed on Kenton
Grua and the Grand Canyon River speed Record.
Speaker 3 (44:34):
Great episode on that guys.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
I read the book a few years ago, and to
answer a question you had about the eleven pm start time.
As I recall, you're correct in their desire to employ
the cover of darkness. There was also another, probably more
important issue that led to that decision. Per my recollection
of the book, it was the timing of when they
would run into the rapids where they eventually swamped the boat.
(44:56):
That was a stretch they had expected would be the
crux of the trip. Pointed out Kitting in his team
were tenured river rats who knew all the river like
the back of their hand. However, the unique dynamics of
the unprecedented CFS meant that they were uncertain of exactly
how fast they would be moving. By starting when they did,
they were able to more or less ensure that section
of the river where they flipped would be squarely in
(45:18):
the middle of the day. A good worst case scenario
and good pre planning.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
And that's from Noah. That sounds like a very reasonable assertion.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
Yeah, thanks a lot, Noah. I'm not going to challenge
him on it. Heck no, yeah, Okay. Well, if you
want to be like Noah and be like, hey, I
got you guys, you have a question, I'm in Noah,
then get in touch with us. Do it like Noah did.
Do everything like Noah did. Send us an email to
Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
M
The murder of Ken McElroy is an example of the
kind of small town justice so well served that it
seems like it's gotta be a movie. And it was
a movie, not a very good one starring Brian Denahey,
but the actual crime came first and it was true,
hence its inclusion on this playlist. At any rate, the
town of Skidmore, Missouri, doesn't play around. If they're pushed
(00:23):
too far, you can bet on that.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:38):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, pushing us around as usual
with this episode of Stuff you Should Know.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Our second episode for us of the new year, And
why didn't we save like a pretty happy one to
get going with.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
I don't know, I don't know, probably because we knew
we were going to be so bummed out after Jonestown.
We needed something that was a pick me up. And
what's crazy is this story actually is a pick me
up compared to Jonestown.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Yeh boy, that's tough to parse out. So thank you
to Olivia for diving into this tough story and also
this episode we want to issue a very big trigger
warning because in it we are going to talk about
a very bad man and some of the bad things
he did, which included sexual assault, and some of which
(01:34):
were with minors. So trigger warning. Know that going in.
Speaker 3 (01:40):
There's no way around it.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
There's very few stories that have like a clear cut villain,
but this is one of them. And the villain who's
also the center of our story. The person at the
center of our story is a man named Ken Rex McElroy. Yeah,
which I mean all you need to hear is that name, really,
I think, and it kind of just puts a weird
(02:05):
chill down your spine that you can't quite identify yet.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Yeah, this is a story that you may have heard
of before. There's no shortage of content about Ken McElroy.
There was a book written in nineteen eighty eight by
Harry McClain, a crime writer, called in Broad Daylight You
Know What's Coming colon Our Murder in Skidmore, Missouri. There
was a documentary just a few years ago in twenty
(02:31):
nineteen called documentary series actually called No One Saw a Thing.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
Of which I watched at the first episode.
Speaker 1 (02:37):
How is it I didn't get a chance to yet, Well.
Speaker 3 (02:40):
We'll talk about it. It's okay.
Speaker 1 (02:42):
It's got like a seven plus on IMDb. That's really
saying something.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Yeah, Chuck gives it a six minus.
Speaker 1 (02:50):
Okay, Still it's not too bad.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
It's okay.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
I mean, not a ton of light was shed. So
maybe it's because if I went into it blind it
might have been.
Speaker 3 (02:58):
A little better.
Speaker 1 (02:59):
Gotcha.
Speaker 2 (03:00):
But there's also a nineteen ninety one TV movie starring
Brian Denahey and Marcia gay Harden, which I actually I
watched a very bad YouTube version of it. Mostly I
scribbed you a little bit of it. But it's actually
not terrible for a nineteen ninety one TV movie, largely
because Brian Dennehey is perfectly cast and awesome.
Speaker 1 (03:20):
Yeah, he really is. I don't understand why they changed
the names. Did Harry MacLean change the names for in
Broad Daylight?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I didn't read the book, but I don't know. Sometimes
they do that with TV movies, huh.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Well, regardlessly innocent, you know.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
I scrubbed ahead to the last probably thirty minutes, saw
the good stuff.
Speaker 3 (03:43):
That's kind of all you need.
Speaker 1 (03:44):
And you're right, Brian Dennehey was great in it, and
Marcia gay Harden did a great job at the really
important point.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Yeah, she's a tremendous actor, as was Dennehee Rip, Brian Dennhey.
Speaker 1 (03:55):
So Ken Rex McElroy. He was from skid' More in Missouri.
That's where this story takes place. He was the fifteenth
of sixteen kids. From what I saw, he was born
in nineteen thirty four. And you can be the wealthiest
person in your state and have sixteen kids and you're
still going to be hard scrabble. Sure, his dad wasn't
(04:18):
the wealthiest person in the state. So the mcilroys grew
up kind of doing what they could to make their
own way. And Ken himself, I saw either he made
it up to age fifteen in school, which is a
surprising statistic to me after I know a little more
about him. I also saw that he was illiterate, which
(04:38):
I would definitely believe more than the fact that he
made it up to age fifteen in school. Either way,
at a young age he started taking up crime. You
get the impression not just out of necessity, but also
probably out of a certain amount of pleasure.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Yeah, and this was to frame it in then nineteen forties.
He was born in thirty four, so by the time
he was criming, it was in nineteen forties. One thing
we should mention is, and I'm glad Livia dug this up,
and this is no way excusing any of his behaviors,
but when he was eighteen year years old, he was
(05:14):
a working construction and there was an accident where some
very heavy cribbing fell about thirty feet and hit him
in the head. He had a construction helmet, but it
cut his scalp, so it clearly, you know, provided minimal protection.
And he said that he had a steel plate implanted
and had episodes of like blackout episodes and pain throughout
(05:36):
the rest of his life. And it should be noted
that one common denominator in many cases of you know,
sick people who do awful things is head injury when
they're younger, So that very well may have been the case. Again,
not excusing anything he did, but we're trying to paint
a full picture here.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
He was like a modern day Phineas Gage.
Speaker 2 (05:58):
Yeah, exactly, like you said, It seemed like he enjoyed
criming from a young age.
Speaker 3 (06:04):
He was a pretty i.
Speaker 2 (06:06):
Mean this is before the accident, even he was a
pretty disturbed young man.
Speaker 1 (06:13):
Yeah. Oh, I have to say, yeah, I would say
I would definitely agree with that. But he did do stuff.
He wasn't just like a lay about like. He was
a kind of an industrious criminal. He also trained hunting dogs.
He was a dealer of antiques, a buyer and seller.
(06:36):
But more than anything, he was a cattle wrestler. Apparently,
the year before his death, the county that skidaways in
our Skidmores in not Away County, the cattle thefts were
six times that of any other place in the state.
It led the state in cattle thefts. And apparently a
(06:57):
lot of that was Ken Mackle. He was flush with cash.
He would buy new cars, he could support. He ended
up having at least ten kids, could support them all.
He had a lot of money and all of it
essentially was from crime because he had a tiny little
farm and he wasn't making much of any money off
(07:19):
of that. He was making it from stealing.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
And when we say he had a lot of money,
it's not the kind of it's not wealth. He had
the kind of money for a criminal in the nineteen
sixties and skid More, Missouri, he.
Speaker 3 (07:36):
Had skid More money.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
Yeah, which is to say, oh, I hope there's no
skidded Marians. There's a couple hundred of them well listening
to us. Yeah, I just assume the whole town listens
to us anyway.
Speaker 3 (07:50):
They're probably so sick of a story.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
But he's the kind of kind of money guy that
like he always had like a few grand in his
pocket with a big, fat money roll, like that kind
of dude. He was a big guy. He was like
six two or sixty three, had this sort of here
again kind of like Jim Jones men of the time,
had this jet black hair and these huge sideburns. He
(08:14):
was imposing. But he picked on people smaller than he
picked on women and children and young girls, and took
advantage of all these people. And he was arrested and
charged at least twenty one times without being convicted. And
if you're thinking, like, how in the world does that
happen when people know he's committing crimes, he's getting arrested
(08:36):
of these committing these crimes, it's because he had a
very I guess good, slippery attorney named Richard Gene McFadden
who was supposedly a mob attorney in Kansas City, and
upon their first meeting, he was like, you can't afford me,
and McElroy said, let me be the judge of that,
(08:57):
pulled out that big fat role from his pocket. Uh huh,
threw it on the desk, and McFadden was delighted to
have him as a cash paying client who listened to him.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
Yeah, so McFadden was so was so good at getting
them off. He well, actually they worked together. McFadden was
good at getting them off, but it was he probably
wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Ken McElroy hadn't
have been also a very active participant in getting himself off.
(09:31):
So Gene McFadden would get delay after delay, all these
procedural delays to just really put as much time between
Ken McElroy's arrest and the actual trial date as possible,
and then Ken McElroy would get busy intimidating witnesses, and
if it got closer and closer to trial and a
(09:52):
jury wasn't paneled, he would intimidate the jurors. He would
threaten their lives. He would threaten the lives of their families.
He would threaten to burn their houses down, he'd threaten
to kill them. He would threaten, not just with words,
he would intimidate them by parking in their driveways, by
brandishing guns at them, by shooting guns in the air,
(10:12):
sometimes in the night, outside of their house, like just
it would take a couple of these for the average
person to be like, I can't this is not what
I've signed up for. This guy's scaring me to death.
Some people lasted longer than others, but most of the time,
almost in every single time, Eventually he would intimidate enough
(10:34):
of the witnesses that the cases would fall apart. And
that is how he became what Crime Library referred to
as this teflon coated hicic.
Speaker 3 (10:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
Absolutely, like he shot a guy in the stomach in
July of nineteen seventy six, a guy named Romaine Henry.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
And yes, you heard me right, Romaine Farmer spelled exactly
like the lettuce. Was he named after the lettuce? Because
was he a lettuce farmer?
Speaker 1 (11:01):
I don't know. Did they farm let us in Missouri?
Speaker 3 (11:04):
They did in you in Arizona, I think, just.
Speaker 1 (11:06):
For the sake of this story, Yes, he absolutely was
a Romaine Lettuce. Farmer's parents raised him to.
Speaker 3 (11:12):
Be one and named him after that lettuce.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
So he was shot in the stomach with a shotgun,
was not killed and got away with it. You know,
in the documentary, like Romaine Henry pulls up his shirt
and he's like, here's where he shot me, and court
witnesses he you know, like you said earlier, he was
one of his side hustles, was raising and training and
(11:36):
selling hunting dogs, and he was well liked by some people,
like the people that he dealt with with these hunting dogs.
Other crime type people liked him. So he had this
stable of dudes that would go to court and testify
on his behalf and provide him with alibis and say, like,
he didn't shoot him in the stomach. He was with
us at the time of the shooting, So he got
(11:59):
away with shooting Romaine Henry in the stomach with a shotgun.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Even Yeah, and just to make sure that you understand
what kind of person Kim McElroy was. The reason that
he shot Romayne Henry in the stomach was because Romayne
Henry approached him and said, hey, will you please not
shoot pheasants out of season on my land anymore? And
Kim McElroy responded by shooting him in the stomach because
he told him basically to stop shooting birds illegally on
(12:25):
that man's land.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yeah, it did matter who you were. There was a cop,
even highway patrolman named Richard Stratton hashtag hero. Yeah who
had you know, plenty of run ins obviously with McElroy
because like you said, this is a town of you know,
a few hundred people at the time. I think yep,
maybe like four or five hundred. Again, so everyone knew
(12:47):
this guy, including obviously Richard Stratton, and he had a
bunch of run INDs, and so McElroy started threatening his
home and his family. One day, his wife, Margaret, was
on a to church. She got in the car to
go to church and mclroy walks up to the car,
puts a shotgun in her face. And he did that
to cops wives, he did it to judges. The county magistrate,
(13:10):
Montgomery Wilson, was so fearful that he wouldn't take these cases.
He would have them move to other nearby counties.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Like he was.
Speaker 2 (13:18):
People called him the town bully, but that is the
kindest way to describe him, because he was also a
child molester and rapist.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
Yeah. I say we take a break and then come
back and talk about this all.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
Right, we'll be right back, all right.
Speaker 2 (13:56):
So when we left off, I leveled a pretty serious allegation,
which is absolutely true, that Ken McElroy was a child
molester and rapist. And this is one hundred percent true.
The story gets very twisted and convoluted here, but it's
kind of hard to follow along because he was married
(14:16):
and then had a girlfriend and the wife at the
same time, but then another one and then another Wooden
would come in and they're overlapping, and he's having kids
with most of them, and it gets very confusing. But
like you said, he fathered ten kids. A lot of
them were with underage girls. He got married for the
first time in nineteen fifty two when he was eighteen
and his wife, Alita, was sixteen, and he is not
(14:40):
like he calmed down or anything. He would pray and
stalk in groom girls as young as twelve and thirteen
years old, one of which was a fifteen year old
named Sharon, and they it was sort of a familiar
pattern where he would he would groom and stalk these
young teenage girls. He would abuse them, he would rape
(15:03):
them and threaten them with death and somehow end up
with them and not not somehow through coercion and threatened intimidation.
Speaker 1 (15:13):
Yeah, and he would get so he would be married already,
and like you said, he'd be stalking and raping and
abusing some other younger girl at the same time. And
then inevitably, when charges were about to be brought against
him because of his like rape and abuse and in
one case shooting of one of the girls, he would
(15:37):
he would convince them to marry him. He would go
to his wife and be like, we have to get
divorced because I got to marry this girl so that
she won't testify against me, and he would be successful.
And if if they refused at first, he would use
those same tactics that he used to intimidate witnesses to
intimidate these girls into marrying him and becoming and then astoundingly,
(16:02):
he would go find a younger girl and start the
whole thing over again. Like this guy got married more
than once to keep the girl that he was raping
from testifying against him, because back then a wife couldn't
testify against her husband.
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:17):
So, I mean, we don't need to get into every
single one of those details, but suffice it to say
this was happening over and over and over remarkably sometimes
you know, obviously, these girls parents would put up a
fight and get involved, and he would intimidate and threaten
them to the point where at one point, and this
(16:39):
is the wife he had sort of when the final
incident went down, Trina McLeod, who he got together.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
With, this is just so sick.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
When she was twelve or thirteen years old, was like
picking her up from the school bus. Yeah, and school
officials were like, something's going on with this creep. No
one ever did anything, got her pregnant at fourteen, and
moved her into the house he shared with the previous
young girl that he was with. So he had a
son with Trina in nineteen seventy three, and a couple
(17:11):
of others with this young girl Alice, and went to
Trina's parents' house. They obviously are saying like, you can't
keep our daughter like this, and he held them back
at gunpoint, brought the girls back, continued to abuse them,
and then eventually he would burn down the house of
(17:31):
Trina McLeod's parents and shoot and kill their family dog.
Speaker 3 (17:35):
Yeah, is he a bad enough guy at this point?
All right, dear listener.
Speaker 1 (17:39):
Apparently somehow Trina ended up being treated by a doctor
somewhere or other, and the doctor got the story out
of her, and the doctor was like, wait, can you
tell me all that one more time? And I guess
she did. And the doctor called the authorities, and this
time McElroy was in a lot of trouble and they
(18:01):
took Trina to child Services and took her to a
family foster, a foster family, and he started stalking the
foster family and stalking their biological kids and threatening to
rape and kill them, and that foster family would not
give in. They were protecting Trina up until the time.
Trina's like, all right, I forgive you. I'm going back
(18:21):
to you, and I'm sure that foster family is like,
oh my god, I can't believe Yeah, I can't believe this.
Can you can't make that decision? And she did and
he got away with it yet again because he got
her to marry him, to keep her from being able
to even testify against her, and Gene McFadden in a
(18:42):
show of just how sleazy lawyers can be, served as
the witness to their wedding. I think she was fifteen
at the time, and at the end of the ceremony,
got her to sign a document saying all the things
she told that doctor were lies, and they lived as
husband and wife.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
Right, So this is this was his final wife, young
Trinam of Cloud. He apparently got her parents because you know,
you needed to have permission to get married at that age,
and her parents acquiesced because he threatened to burn down
the new house that they either bought or built. And
this is where I get to the documentary, like a
(19:20):
lot of it should be taken with a grain of
salt because some of the local townspeople they interview are
clearly sort of just maybe don't have all the facts straight.
Because someone in that documentary said that he burned their
house down again and shot their other new dog. And
I didn't see anywhere else where that happened. I think
it was just a threat or whatever.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
He killed a monkey too, right, That's what I heard.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Deal with the documentary. So this is this is going on.
He's terrorizing this town. Everyone knows he's an awful guy.
He's just it can be overstated, what.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
An awful creep that he is.
Speaker 2 (19:59):
And I mean, and creep isn't even that's way too
soft to describe a guy like this. Finally, in nineteen
eighty he sort of pushes his luck. As Livia would
call this section, things have kind of come a little
bit to a head.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
They're these local shopkeepers.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
They ran the B and B grocery there in town,
Lois and Earnest bo Bowen Camp, and they apparently his
you know, his kids would go in there and shoplifts
all the time, his very young kids. And one of
his young daughters, her name was Tonia or Tanya, I'm
not sure how I was pronounced Unia. Tanya was like
(20:38):
four years old and was stealing candy from the store.
They confronted this young girl, and of course McElroy wouldn't
stand for that, so he starts up with his usual routine,
parking outside their store, staring them down, brandishing a shotgun
and carrying it around with him. And in July of
that year, McElroy approached bow Bowen Camp, the grocery store owner.
(21:02):
They had a brief conversation and he shot this seventy
year old man through the neck again, not killing him,
but wounding him.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
Yeah, and so bow and Lois Bowen Camp were like
beloved in the town. Oh yeah, this is a big deal.
He had assaulted and a beloved elderly shopkeeper grocer who
fed the town, and even McElroy knew it was a
(21:30):
big deal. He fled, he tried to get out of
the state. And you mentioned Richard Stratton, the Missouri Highway
patrolman who had run ins over and over and over
again with Ken McElroy. Well, he was out on patrol
that night when that happened. That day, I guess, and
he got the all points bulltener to be on the
(21:51):
lookout for Ken McElroy. And at the time the Sheriff's office,
the rest of the Highway patrol they were setting up roadblocks,
looking on every highway that they could for Ken McElroy.
But Richard Stratton said, no, I know this guy. He's
got a police scanner. He knows exactly where they are.
He's going to take every back road he confined to
get to Kansas and get out of the state and
lay low for a while. And Richard Stratton said, I
(22:14):
know he's going to have to go through Fillmore, Missouri
to get to Kansas, and I'm going to stake that
place out. And in short order, Ken McElroy came driving
through in his Silverado with Trina in the seat and
he ended up getting busted by Richard Stratton. He was
caught and this again even he knew this one was
a big deal.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
Yeah yeah, he finally was taken into custody this time.
He I don't know if he just had it instinct
that there was probably no way out of this one.
But he hired his trustee lawyer again McFadden, who said,
all right, let's move this thing to Harrison County first
of all, and here's our plan is. We're going to
(22:54):
say that this was a dispute with Bowen Camp, this
sort of argument you guys had over your daughter stealing
and that he pulled a knife on you, and that
it was self defense and you were you were forced
to do that. He was still using his you know,
typical playbook intimidation tactics on the Bowen Camps. But they
refused to budget, which was great. So that was their
(23:16):
that was their defense. We should also mention while this
is going on, he continues his reign of terror on
the town. There's a there was a Christian church whose
minister was Tim Warren. And if you don't know anything
about sort of small town, actually probably even larger town, ministers.
Part of their job they don't just get up there
(23:37):
and preach on Sundays, is they have to minister to
the congregation in their community.
Speaker 3 (23:42):
So they will do things.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Preachers and ministers will like come and check in on
people if they're sick. They will visit people in the
hospital if they're injured or you know, or having some troubles.
And this is what Tim Warren was doing when he
checked in on, or had planned to check in on
Lois Bowen Camp and he got a call saying, don't
go see old man Bowen Camp. It's gonna be bad
(24:04):
news for you. He did it under cover by borrowing
a friends truck and going in that, but got a
call was like, hey, I knew that that was you
there within your friend's truck. Nice try and if you
do this again, I'm going to rape and murder your wife.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
Yeah. So the reverend, the local reverend, Reverend Lovejoy is
just told that his wife is going to be raped
and murdered.
Speaker 3 (24:27):
Right, that's right.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
I didn't get what the point of that was, did you.
I didn't see any interpretation of that. I just saw
it explained or described. I never saw it explained.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Well, I think just anyone sort of on the Bowen
camp side, because who knows, like the reverend could have
been called to testify or something.
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Who knows, I got you.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
That makes I think he was just trying to shut
it all down, kind of like with the town marshall.
Speaker 1 (24:53):
Right, yeah, so the town Marshal nice setup. David Dunbar
was twenty four at the time, and if you were
tow Marshall of Skidmore, you not only had to call
the sheriff when there was an actual, real, real trouble
because you weren't really allowed to do anything. You had
to provide your own gun. The city would pay for
(25:15):
your ammunition, but you had to provide your own gun.
And David Dunbar was like, I don't even care about
this job. I took this job because I wanted to
win a bet that I had with my buddy for
a case of beer. And so in short order he
gets pulled into this whole thing by Ken McElroy who
pulls a gun on him, holds him at gunpoint. I
saw for like twenty minutes at the Punkin Festival.
Speaker 3 (25:38):
Yeah, not punkin Junkin.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
No, the Punkin Festival or the Punkin show. That's what
I saw it as.
Speaker 3 (25:43):
Yeah, they chunk in no punks, yes.
Speaker 1 (25:45):
No, but David Dunbar. David Dunbar did say, like that's
it for me. Man, I really didn't care that much
about this job anyway. I'm not going to stand up
to Ken McElroy. You guys need to find yourself another
marshal and they said, fine, we will, and then they couldn't.
So the town was without a marshall even for a
little while.
Speaker 3 (26:05):
They probably didn't need one.
Speaker 1 (26:07):
I mean, it doesn't sound like it was very effective
as positions go. And also the other thing I said,
they need to call the sheriff. I saw someone intimate
that the sheriff may not have either taken Ken McElroy
and the trouble he caused seriously, or he may have
been a friend or a sympathetic ally or something to
Ken McElroy, because apparently he was not super responsive to
(26:31):
Ken McElroy trouble calls.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
You know, he was interviewed in this documentary. He certainly
didn't seem sympathetic. He might have been intimidated as well.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
Yeah, I guess that's possible. I wouldn't blame him, frankly.
Speaker 2 (26:45):
So this takes more than a year or I'm sorry,
close to a year to come to trial because of
all the delays that you know, McFadden, that's his game.
Finally it does and there's another green. Like almost everyone
in this story seems like they were like very young
at the time.
Speaker 3 (26:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (27:00):
The prosecutor, his name was David Baird. He was a
super young attorney. He was the county prosecutor so named,
just a few months earlier, and all of a sudden,
this kid is charged with prosecuting the case. He convicted
him of second degree assault and sentenced him to two
years in jail. And this was the very first conviction
(27:20):
after this years long reign of terror on this town
that he faced. Of course, McFadden appealed. The judge said
you're out on forty thousand dollars bail, and Baird said, oh,
it sounds.
Speaker 3 (27:33):
Fine to me. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
So like after shooting Bo Bo and Camp getting caught
by the highway patrol, he gets let out on forty
thousand dollars bond, which you probably paid his bail in
cash from his pocket. And the town was like, you
got to be kidding me, Like you let this guy free. Okay,
we will hang in there. We're just gonna ride this out.
(27:57):
And almost immediately Ken McRoy was like, how can I
get my bond revoked? I know, I'll go show up
at the local tavern in Skidmore, the D ANDNG Tavern,
and I'll bring an M one carbine rifle with bayonet
on me, and I'll talk about how I'm going to
use it to finish off bo Bowen Camp in front
of everybody in the bar. And that's exactly what he did.
(28:19):
And there just happened to be a couple of brave souls.
One of them was Pete Ward. I think it was
he and his sons who went and fought, like confronted
him about it and then went and filed the complaints,
said this guy needs his bond revoked, and a bond
hearing was set up ten days from then, and that
set up all of the machinations that were now going
(28:41):
to bring this story to its climax. Is it time
for ad break? Have we had our second one?
Speaker 2 (28:47):
I mean, if that's not a perfect setup for ad break,
then we've never had one.
Speaker 1 (29:14):
So I said that Ken McElroy has basically just brandished
an arm. He's walking around town talking about he's going
to finish off the guy he's been now convicted of assaulting,
but he's out on bail, and Pete Ward and his
sons go file a complaint and a bond hearing to
see if his bond should be revoked is set up
for ten days, and those ten days pass, and on
(29:35):
the tenth day, the day of his bond hearing, a
group of farmers around town who have just had it
up to here with Ken McElroy come to the American
Legion Hall to basically go to court with Pete Ward
and Bobo and Camp and show solidarity but also show
that these guys are protected. You better not mess with them.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:55):
Absolutely, By most accounts, it was the adults in the
town were at this American Legion Hall meeting. I think
there were like a little over one hundred adults maybe
living there, and it seemed like eighty of them were
at this American Legion Hall meeting.
Speaker 1 (30:13):
Yeah, there was a lot of people there.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
So they find out there that McFadden had gotten that
hearing delayed, that bond hearing delayed for ten more days,
so instead of July tenth, it's going to be July twentieth.
They called the sheriff Danny EST's in that we talked
about and he basically said, you know, there's nothing that
we can do about it. And this is where I
(30:37):
think that maybe I don't think he was friendly to McElroy.
I think he was just a law about biting sheriff
that was like, you know, what do you want to do,
like go kill this guy in the street, Like, we
can't do that. All we can do is keep tabs
on this guy and you know, stick together. It is
probably a good idea. So they said, that's a great idea.
We should form a large group and stalk him, follow
(31:00):
him around. Their strengthen numbers if we get enough of
us together, Like what's this guy going to do?
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Kill all of us? There are some people that were
at this.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
Meeting that was like, you know, no one was talking
about doing anything more than that.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
Other people said yeah. There were some people that were so.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
You know, pissed off about all this that were like,
we need to take matters into our own hands, vigilanti style.
And they found out at this meeting that he's back
in town with his wife. They went to the tavern,
the DNG tavern still morning, mind you, they're in there
(31:38):
drinking and they all go down there. They walk in
there as a group and fill this tavern about fifty
to sixty people, and it's clear what's going on. McElroy
would not be intimidated. He did leave, but he apparently
just sort of thumbed his nose in their faces, bought
a six pack to go and was like, you know,
(32:00):
let's get out of here, Trina and walked out.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah. So this crowd was like, okay, I kind of
like this, following this guy around, watching his every step thing,
and they actually walked out of the bar with him,
and supposedly there was between thirty and sixty people. Some
people had cleared out. Romayne Henry, whom he'd shot in
the stomach before, said that he sensed that this crowd
was possibly out for blood, and he didn't want to
(32:25):
have anything to do with it, so he laughed. So
not everybody who was in the VFW Hall or the
American Legion Hall was in the parking lot of the
D ANDNG tavern, but a significant number of people were,
and they had Ken McElroy and Trina surrounded in Ken
McElroy's Silverado. Ken McElroy apparently had the car turned on
(32:49):
still had him park. He pulled out a cigarette and
I saw that he either had just lit it or
was about to light it when somebody shot him in
the head with a high powered hunting rifle and then
follow that up with a shot to the neck with
Trina right next to him, who is suddenly covered in
his blood.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
Yeah, through the back wind shield of the pickup truck,
I imagine instantly killed him with that first shot. His foot
slams on the gas and this thing is revving at.
Speaker 3 (33:21):
Like full bore.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
This old truck starts smoking and eventually blows the engine
and it just goes silent. Trina apparently urinated herself, was
initially told to stay in the car or she would
be killed two and then gets hustled out of this
truck into a nearby bank and a bunch of more
(33:44):
shooting happens until the shooting stops. It's about twenty seconds
worth of shooting. People go up peek in this truck.
Mclaroy is hunched over. No one helps the.
Speaker 3 (33:56):
Guy at all, and in the end they.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
Figure out he was hit by two different bullet types,
so two different guns had actually made contact with his body,
two different bullets, So.
Speaker 3 (34:12):
You know.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
In the documentary again, there were people that were like,
you know, five or six people shot him, three or
four people shot him. Like everyone sort of got their
own story. But as far as the you know, autopsy goes,
there were two different calibers of bullet.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
Yeah, because here's the twist to this whole story. We
don't know. At the very least, the law can't say
who killed Kim McElroy. They were between thirty to sixty
people who were standing right there when he was killed
from several feet away, and no one saw a thing.
(34:47):
The town circled the wagons and clammed up to this day.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah, the town fully cleared out right after that, and
like he was just sitting there alone in the middle
of town deadness truck. Apparently they went into some local
businesses in this One woman in the documentary said, we
were just sort of hanging out in there and someone
came in and said it's over. You can sleep tonight,
now just stand behind us.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
Yeah, And they did. Man, I mean they did the
law I saw. Depending on who you ask, the law
took this very seriously like any other murder, and investigated
and tried to prosecute it. Others are like Yeah, the
local law didn't try that hard because everybody knew that
this was actually justice, even though it was a grotesque
(35:35):
form of justice.
Speaker 3 (35:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Either way, no one was ever prosecuted, No one was
even ever arrested or charged with the murder of Ken McElroy,
because not a single witness would crack. There was apparently
one witness who shortly after said that they saw a
man named Dell Clement and another man speed off very
(35:59):
quickly right after the shooting, and that person apparently said, oh,
I'm sorry, I was mistaken. That's the closest the cops
got to a witness statement about who may have shot
Ken McElroy. No one would say anything. Some people were
interviewed five to six times. Yeah, and no one cracked.
(36:21):
They would not crack. And yet whoever said that they
saw Deel Clement speed off was probably telling the truth.
Because Trina, Ken's wife, who by this time is twenty
four and looks a lot like somebody who would have
been friends with Eileen Warnos, it says that she turned
around right before the shooting started and saw very clearly
(36:43):
del Clement, owner co owner of the DNG tavern, taking
aim and shooting Ken McElroy in the head with his
deer rifle.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Yeah, he was not only the owner of the tavern,
but he had a livestock that had been Pilford. Apparently
it was a big hothead, and I get the sense
took great pleasure in pulling that trigger, as the sense
I got.
Speaker 3 (37:06):
There was a lady in.
Speaker 2 (37:06):
The documentary and again this is the grain of salt,
that said that the main gun was thrown in a river.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
So I was like, oh, very interesting. I hadn't heard
that anywhere else.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
But she also said right after that she heard that
they had maclroy's head in a head somewhere and a
freezer thing. So they couldn't do like more I guess
bullet ballistics work or whatever.
Speaker 1 (37:31):
Yeah, you couldn't find it because it was stolen by
a monkey.
Speaker 3 (37:34):
Yeah, I don't think that happened.
Speaker 2 (37:36):
There was another guy in there named Britt Small, and
I get the feeling they just kind of gathered up
whoever was still around and was like, you know, talk
to me. And Britt was a local guy, a Vietnam veteran,
who was like, you know what. The only mistake they
made is that they let Trina live. I would have
killed him in his driveway. I would have ambushed them both,
killed her and him and burned his house down.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
That's what I would have done.
Speaker 1 (37:58):
Well, she if you read the newspaper accounts, like immediately after,
the Kansas City Star had a couple of articles like
the week after, like she's scared to death or she
sounded scared to death that she was going to be
next or that her kids were going to be murdered.
And then of course the town's people that they interviewed
for the same article are like, no one wishes her
(38:18):
any ill, will right, you know, she's not in any danger.
But she swore that she was told to stay out
of Skidmore, doon't ever come back, or else she was
going to get it and her kids would be after that.
It's I don't know. It probably just depends on which
town person you talk to.
Speaker 2 (38:33):
I mean, both things can be true. They could have
felt like she was a victim, but also please leave.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Yeah, exactly. And apparently when she was hustled off to
the bank, whoever did that saved her life because even
if they hadn't have been aiming for she probably would
have gotten hit by a stray bullet. After that second
round but when she was hustled at the bank, there
was like a crowd, like you said to people there
that seemed to be just sitting there watching, like people
knew what was about to happen or what was going down.
(38:58):
And she said they didn't need to do him like that,
and someone said they had no choice. So even if
you didn't agree with that mob, justice that had taken place,
and you were a Skidmore resident, at the very least
you weren't about to turn on your you know, fellow townspeople.
Certainly not for the likes of somebody like Ken McElroy
(39:21):
or Trina.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Yeah, And in the end, you know, they couldn't with
only Trina's word, there was nothing they could do that
young Prosecutor Baird and the FBI said, you know, this
is all we've got. We can't move forward. Everyone else
is saying they don't know what happened. The FBI closed
their investigation on September two, nineteen eighty two, And I
(39:44):
believe the shariff, I'm sorry, the police chief, Hal Riddle
was running the investigation and he said, you know, he
was really trying to get this case to go to
trial because he's he is a law enforcement officer, and
they weren't all like great mob justice, you know, they're like,
we we should have handled it to begin with, but
you certainly can't handle it this way. And he said
(40:04):
it was the most frustrating case of his career, and
basically like this town got away with murder.
Speaker 1 (40:11):
Yeah, and if the local law enforcement didn't work hard enough,
that was par for the course. Because if there was
any theme to this aside from this horrible bully, it
was the local institutions failing the community time after time
after time after time for any number of reasons because
they were intimidated because they were crup two no's. But
(40:32):
that was like the subtext of this whole thing is
that this community essentially had to take matters into their
own hands or else this guy was going to eventually
kill somebody, and they just decided that that was not
going to happen. They were going to stop it before
it happened. So it's tough to fault them for what
they did. Even though I don't agree with that, I
(40:54):
still I understand why they did it.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
Well.
Speaker 2 (40:57):
I think you cannot agree with mob justice and also
say the town of Skidmore in the world was probably
better off without this child rapist walking around.
Speaker 1 (41:08):
Yeah, no, you're right. I like your theories. I'm going
to subscribe to your newsletter.
Speaker 2 (41:15):
So as for Clement, the supposed one of the supposed shooters,
he never said a thing about it. He died in
two thousand and nine. Trina in nineteen eighty five filed
a wrongful death civil case against the mayor, Clement, and
the sheriff for five million bucks, settled for seventeen thousand,
six hundred. The defendants didn't have to admit to any wrongdoing,
(41:39):
they just wanted it to go away. She got remarried
and a couple of years before that, in nineteen eighty three,
so two years after the killing, and she died in
twenty twelve. And you know, there was no mention of
that life of hers in her obituary. I think she
really put it behind her, and I hope at some point,
(42:00):
you know, there are interviews with her. That's the one
interesting thing about the doc, Like not too long after
their interviews with Trina McLoud. I would hope that at
some point she realized that.
Speaker 3 (42:11):
She was a victim.
Speaker 1 (42:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:12):
I hope so too, and came to on that.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
But who knows, because I mean, you you there's a there,
there's a certain amount of like grudging admiration you have
for at the very least. It's like, man, this girl
is so twisted. She was like a really ardent defendant
of her husband's reputation and honor and memory and like
(42:36):
really went would She was really like mad that they
had killed him.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:43):
One other detail I saw was that she offered a
five thousand dollars reward for the for information about who
killed them. Somebody had come forward, but she didn't have
five thousand dollars. She was putting it up against the
movie rights. She presumed she would eventually be paid for.
Speaker 3 (42:58):
Oh interesting.
Speaker 1 (43:00):
Yeah, so I'm not sure. I don't think anybody would
have take the five grand anyway, but certainly not a
phantom five grand that didn't actually exist yet.
Speaker 3 (43:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:08):
As for the attorney, he was always like he was
never like, you know, I really regret representing that dirt bag.
Speaker 3 (43:15):
He was pretty proud of his work.
Speaker 2 (43:17):
He had a long career as a lobbyist working in
the legislature there in Missouri, and apparently would like buy
copies of McLean's book and have McLean sign them and
hand them out to all the delegates in the state Senate.
He died in twenty twelve, Like I said, very proud
of his work. And Stratton, the highway patrolman that we mentioned,
(43:40):
was the guy who in an interview said, you know
they did what they did because we didn't do our job,
and I think he felt forever bad that the law
enforcement had failed that town.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
Yeah. He also said in that same interview he knew
for sure who did it, and he was never going
to say.
Speaker 2 (43:57):
I think it was Clement, I just don't know who
the second shooter was. The guy that says he would
have killed them both and burned their house down, claims
that he knew the second shooter, but he wouldn't say
it either.
Speaker 1 (44:06):
Yeah, you got anything else?
Speaker 3 (44:09):
I got nothing else?
Speaker 1 (44:10):
Quite a story, yeah, man, Yeah, thanks and thanks Olivia
for helping us with it. And since Chuck said good pick,
that means, of course it's time for a brand new
listener mail.
Speaker 3 (44:24):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
This is a follow up on our what I thought
was a really good episode that I enjoyed on Kenton
Grua and the Grand Canyon River speed Record.
Speaker 3 (44:34):
Great episode on that guys.
Speaker 2 (44:35):
I read the book a few years ago, and to
answer a question you had about the eleven pm start time.
As I recall, you're correct in their desire to employ
the cover of darkness. There was also another, probably more
important issue that led to that decision. Per my recollection
of the book, it was the timing of when they
would run into the rapids where they eventually swamped the boat.
(44:56):
That was a stretch they had expected would be the
crux of the trip. Pointed out Kitting in his team
were tenured river rats who knew all the river like
the back of their hand. However, the unique dynamics of
the unprecedented CFS meant that they were uncertain of exactly
how fast they would be moving. By starting when they did,
they were able to more or less ensure that section
of the river where they flipped would be squarely in
(45:18):
the middle of the day. A good worst case scenario
and good pre planning.
Speaker 3 (45:24):
And that's from Noah. That sounds like a very reasonable assertion.
Speaker 1 (45:28):
Yeah, thanks a lot, Noah. I'm not going to challenge
him on it. Heck no, yeah, Okay. Well, if you
want to be like Noah and be like, hey, I
got you guys, you have a question, I'm in Noah,
then get in touch with us. Do it like Noah did.
Do everything like Noah did. Send us an email to
Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
M
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