In Broad Daylight (Crime Rant Classics)

by HARRY N. MACLEAN

  Before the great day arrived, the farmers had to loosen and turn the earth, preparing the soil for the planter. Some farmers plowed in the fall, after the harvest but before the ground froze. They chopped up the stalks and perhaps spread a layer of fertilizer at the same time. This allowed them to make one less pass over the earth in the spring, resulting in less compaction of the soil; but the plowing in the fall could work against the delicate soil by exposing it to wind and water erosion after a thaw.

  So, a few days before planting, most farmers hooked up the discs or chisel plows behind their tractors. The newer models had two rows of twelve discs, one behind the other. These steel saucers sliced into the ground at angles, picked the dirt up, and turned it over. The discs on either end were attached to arms that folded up for road travel.

  In the mornings the highways were clogged with tractors pulling the discs to different fields. Wings folded, lights blinking, the machines looked like huge insects seeking a place to light. Cars lined up behind them and darted past in the stretches. Once in the fields, they moved steadily across the earth, crawling up and down the hills, leaving trails of dust floating in the afternoon light. The tractors chugged on into the night, weaving back and forth across the fields and streaking the darkness.

  The town came alive and bustled with energy. Machines and people were everywhere and in constant motion. The cafe was noisy by 6:30. Voices mixed and competed with backfiring trucks and chugging tractors. The farmers ate quickly, then hurried off. The seed dealers sat with their order books open, touting the excellent match of soil and weather conditions with their brands of seed. Now that the machines were running, opinions about planting were voiced with more conviction. The soil was about right, the consensus seemed to be, and if the sky held, planting could begin in a day or two.

  As winter yielded to spring in 1981, Tim Warren stayed in touch with the Bowenkamps. One day in March, he was parked in front of Maurer’s hardware store, a half block south of the grocery store, when McElroy pulled up beside him in the Silverado and leaned over toward him.

  “You fat son of a bitch,” McElroy said. “You’re going to be sorry!”

  “Why?” Warren asked.

  “Because you ain’t been minding your own goddamn business,” said McElroy.

  “I am.”

  “You are not, you lying cocksucker!” McElroy leaned forward as if to retrieve something from under the seat, and Warren was sure it was a gun.

  Warren had forgotten his .38 that day, so he figured his only chance was to bluff.

  “You better not do that,” he said, “because I’ve got a gun, too, and I’ll use it."

  McElroy stopped short and looked back at Warren.

  “You’re going to pay for this,’’ McElroy said in a low, mean voice. “This whole fuckin’ town’s going to be sorry!” He backed the Silverado into the street and drove off.

  Warren was not so foolish as to leave home without his pistol again. In late April, he noticed a caravan of four McElroy trucks rumbling down the main street, just a few yards apart. McElroy took the lead in the Silverado, and women followed in the other vehicles, which had rifles in the rear windows. Seeing them turn north at the top of the hill, in the direction of the church and his house, Warren took off. He went the back way and parked behind the church, which was north of his house. The Silverado was parked in front of his house, another truck was in the driveway, the third was in front of the church, and the fourth was across the street.

  McElroy got out of the truck, holding a Thompson .45-caliber submachine gun in one hand and a 21-bullet clip in the other.

  Beside the house, Warren checked his pistol to make absolutely sure it was loaded. He cocked it and climbed up on his porch. Holding the pistol at waist level, he pointed it at McElroy. The machine gun still in one hand and the clip in the other, McElroy stood and glared at Warren for a minute or two. Finally, McElroy turned back to his truck and put the machine gun in the rack. The four trucks sat there for a while and then pulled away, single file, like ducks in a row. To see whether they left town, Warren got into his car and followed at a distance, until they pulled into Birt Johnson’s gas station.

  Physically, Ken McElroy was sliding downhill. At forty-seven, the weight he had put on was there to stay. His face was flabby, and his gut hung out over his belt like a fifteen-pound ham. In the door pocket of the Silverado he carried a bottle of pills for high blood pressure, which was worsening, and cough drops for his throat, which was sore from smoking two or three packs of Pall Malls a day. The doctor had told him to wear tennis shoes rather than cowboy boots, because his feet were swollen. He chewed Rolaids constantly for the pain in his stomach. Sometimes he coughed and coughed until he spat out chunks of blood and mucus. His

  old neck injury periodically flared up in the middle of the night, and at times the pain was so severe that he could barely get out of bed to call the doctor. Despite his ailments, his drinking never subsided. In fact, he probably drank more than ever. Each day, he replaced the bottle of Jack Daniel’s under the seat of the Silverado, and whenever he stopped in a tavern, he had at least five or six bottles of beer.

  Ken McElroy also grew more sullen and moody. Slipping into an obsession with the town and what people were saying about him and his family, he quizzed his friends and sympathizers in the community. His informants not only repeated the usual stories but they began telling him that some people were talking about doing something about him. McElroy was worried that somebody would come by one day while he was gone and gun down his kids in the yard, or shoot the propane gas tank alongside the house and blow the place up.

  McElroy had about twenty dogs at his place at the time. Most of them were hunting dogs, but he had two German shepherds and two Dobermans. The dogs were usually tied up, but when a friend stopped by one day, he found two dogs running loose, growling, and snarling. They were so vicious that he crawled up on the roof of his car and yelled for McElroy, who eventually came outside and chained them up. He chuckled as he explained how they got that way.

  “You’d be surprised what’ll happen to a dog when you keep him chained up and give him speed and don’t feed him for three or four days in a row.”

  One day in the spring of 1980, Ken McElroy spotted Beech Vogel, a local farmer, at the car wash in Maitland. After bringing his truck to a stop directly in front of Vogel, McElroy got out of the driver’s side with a .38 in his hand. Trena got out with a .357 rifle, and his daughter got out with a shotgun. McElroy leveled the pistol at Vogel and demanded to know what he had been doing hanging around his place. Realizing that McElroy had him confused with someone else, Vogel managed to calm him down. McElroy stuck the .38 in the holster that lay against his rib cage beneath his shirt. He tilted his head and made some hand signals, the way a hunter would with his dogs. The daughter got back in the car with the two guns, but Trena stayed outside. McElroy, who seemed paranoid as hell, explained that a guy had been hanging around the house, acting weird and

  scaring his women. McElroy had cornered him one day, and the guy confessed that some man from around Mound City had offered him $2,000 to kill McElroy.

  In mid-April, as if in response to the falling of a conductor’s baton, the farmers drove their tractors into the fields and began planting. On the main street, stock trucks lined up at the city water pump to fill the large tanks of water that would be taken to the fields for mixing with herbicides. Huge machines, called Big A’s because they sat on three wheels about ten feet off the ground and could spray twenty-four rows at a time, moved slowly down the main street like intergalactic vehicles. Spirits were high in the stores and at the gas stations. By the end of the month, however, some farmers had become anxious over the lack of rain. If the seed lay in the hot soil without water, it might dry up. Finally, rain began to fall, and it kept on falling. By the fourth day, those who drank hit the tavern early, and those who didn’t became restless and irritable, doing endless chores at their farms, taking naps, watching the soaps, a
nd going to the cafe three or four times a day. If the seeds received too much moisture and no sun, they would become susceptible to rodents and cutworms.

  As Ken McElroy’s trial date drew near, the farmers worried about more than just the weather. Every day, sooner or later, McElroy came to town. The minute the Silverado hit the main street the word spread. In the cafe, heads turned as the truck cruised by. When he walked into the tavern, the farmers drained their beers, shot the eight ball in the pocket, and put up their cues. Within ten minutes, the place emptied, except for McElroy and Red Smith. Red, who didn’t have any choice, was tense; his two coon dogs had disappeared, and he heard that McElroy had bragged about stealing them and then shooting them.

  One afternoon, someone walked in and told Red that the Silverado was parked in front of the grocery store, and the two-tone green Chevy was across the street in front of the Legion Hall. Red said to hell with it, closed the tavern, and went home. The next day, McElroy came in early and asked him irritably why the tavern had closed so early the day before.

  “Wasn’t no business,” Red said.

  Ken McElroy’s presence hung over the town like the threat of a May frost. In the early hours of a spring morning, the temperature sometimes

  dropped below 32 degrees, freezing the moisture in the air and in the veins of the plants, whose tiny stalks were about three inches high. By early afternoon, the tips of the rich green leaves would have darkened, and by the end of the day, the leaves would be black to the stalk. To a passerby, the fields looked as if some evil, punishing plague had passed over. Such a frost was so rare that the farmers couldn’t plan for it, and so devastating that some couldn’t recover from it. The killing frost was a freak, a moment when the forces of nature fell out of their delicate balance, reminding the farmers, as if they needed reminding, of their dependence on the harmony of the elements and the precariousness of existence. The farmers who had survived the disease wondered whether they were now immune.

  By mid-May, as the farmers began planting beans, the thin stripes of green running across the earth were becoming fuller and brighter each day. The lustrous green balanced with the deep brown soil, and the light spots, where the water had washed away the topsoil, stood out on the hillsides.

  By May, the struggle between McElroy and his victims pervaded the entire community. The tavern began closing around 6:00, whether McElroy was in town or not. Business in the grocery store dropped to almost nothing. Kids were called home by 4:00, and the streets were silent and empty by suppertime. People stayed in their homes with the doors locked. Business got so bad at the liquor store that some evenings Rowlett didn’t have a single customer. Finally, he just gave up and closed the store for good.

  A coon hunter from south Missouri came to town one day looking to trade a dog or two with Ken McElroy. When the man asked around for McElroy, people mumbled nervously, as if they were afraid even to have a conversation about him. They wouldn’t say where McElroy lived or whether they had seen him in town that day.

  Some of the cops understood what was happening, but they felt helpless to do anything about it. Among themselves, they often said that if they ever caught McElroy alone on a back road, they would blow him away. Patrolman Dan Boyer, who had been trained to kill and was nonetheless nervous around McElroy, tried to imagine what the people in the community must be feeling.

  “I would get a call about McElroy sitting somewhere in his truck, and I would drive into town, and it would be like a graveyard, quiet and empty.

  It made my hair stand on end, to tell you the truth. Now and then, a face would poke out the window and stare at the patrol car. It seemed to make it worse, because my presence meant he was somewhere around. They didn’t really see us as a source of protection anymore.”

  The Bowenkamps waited for the trial and simply tried to survive. Except for Tim Warren and the Sumys, most people left them alone. Everyone felt sorry for Bo, but nobody gave him any support or help. Nobody walked up and said, “I’m on your side, Bo. Let’s see what we can do to take care of this bastard.” They talked about helping him out, but nobody ever did.

  Ever since his talk with McElroy’s friend in St. Joe, Stratton felt that he and McElroy had a clear understanding that Stratton—if he got the chance, if he found McElroy with a weapon and had the slightest provocation—would nail him. One afternoon, Stratton went looking for McElroy and found him on a blacktop south of Graham, cruising in his new Silverado. Deciding to check out the truck, Stratton turned on his top light. McElroy pulled over immediately. Trena was with him, and no guns were visible. Stratton checked McElroy’s driver’s license and called in the registration, which was in Tammy’s name. Neither McElroy nor Trena said a word, but McElroy glared as Stratton gave back the documents and said they could go.

  Tom, one of the boys who stole for Ken, had been spending some time with him in the spring of 1981. At the farm, the mean dogs were off their chains, growling and snarling as they circled Tom, even after Ken called them off. Ken had been going on two-and three-day binges, drinking whiskey from the bottle constantly. When that happened, he talked a lot and acted scary, as if he could go off on anybody any minute. By the third or fourth day of a binge, Ken was really weird, talking about how he didn’t like somebody and was going to kill him.

  One day, Ken stopped in town and picked up Tom in the new Silverado, saying, “Get in and drive.” Ken drank heavily from a fifth of Jack Daniel’s as he gave Tom directions to a certain farmer’s house. When they neared the house, Ken reached behind the seat and pulled out a shotgun. He laid it on his lap and fondled it, saying, “This goddamn farmer has been talkin’ about me.” As they rode, Ken drank more and got crazier

  and scarier. Looking out the window at the farmhouses, he stroked the metal barrel and said he was going to have to kill somebody because “they were always fuckin’ with me.” He went on and on about the Bowenkamps, how they had fucked with his kid, and how he was going to have to take care of the old man and do it right this time. His voice grew louder, and he took longer swigs from the bottle and smoked one cigarette after another. Toward the end of the ride, he reached inside his shirt, pulled the .38 out of its leather holster, and laid the pistol on his lap alongside the shotgun.

  “I’m gonna get that goddamn Bowenkamp,” he said, again and again.

  Tom knew what Ken was doing to the town, and that night, the last time they rode together, Tom understood in his gut that Ken meant to push the struggle to the point of destruction.

  Rain fell for three straight days, soaking the earth and turning everything into mud. Finally, the morning sun reappeared on the hilltops and threw a soft white light across the fields. The air smelled fresh, and the countryside emerged in full bloom. The timber awoke to the music of meadowlarks and robins and mourning doves. Orange butterflies in black trim fluttered about, skimming the verdant raspberry bushes. Masked cardinals monitored the morning activity from their stately perches.

  In the fields, the earth remained a damp black, and the spikes of corn ran over the contours of the land like a pattern stitched in light, shimmering green.

  33

  In April 1981, Robert Nourie resigned as prosecuting attorney for Nodaway County to return to the Marine Corps in the judge advocate general’s office. Some people in Skidmore said that he must have left because he couldn’t take the heat that came with prosecuting Ken McElroy, but they had no evidence to substantiate this charge. Nourie’s departure could have been a break for the defense. The prosecuting attorney’s job was not highly sought after by lawyers in Nodaway County. The annual pay was $21,500, and the job was so time-consuming that the opportunities for an outside practice were limited. Probably none of the senior experienced attorneys in Maryville would be willing to abandon their practices to accept the position, and if one of them were to accept the case as a special prosecutor, his busy schedule might well require a postponement to allow him time to prepare for trial. A younger, inexperienced lawyer might not be anxious to
go all the way to a jury trial, so a deal for a misdemeanor might be possible.

  Neither the townspeople nor the defense anticipated the skills and abilities of the twenty-eight-year-old legal-aid lawyer, three years out of law school, who accepted the appointment as the new prosecuting attorney.

  David Baird seemed more like a man born and raised in a refined Boston suburb than a man from agricultural northwest Missouri. Studious looking, with dark-rimmed glasses, he had an educated demeanor and an easy professional poise. He was well spoken, thoughtful, and sure of himself—without a trace of a typical barrister’s arrogance. Baird had

  attended grade school and high school in Maryville, and had been graduated from Notre Dame in 1975. He obtained a degree from the University of Missouri at Columbia School of Law in 1978, then worked for legal aid in St. Joe. In June 1978, he returned to Maryville as a legal-aid lawyer.