In Broad Daylight (Crime Rant Classics)

by HARRY N. MACLEAN

  “It’s over for me,” she said, looking me in the eye. “I don’t really hurt anymore.”

  But she was still bitter, still certain that the entire community, including Sheriff Estes, was in on the killing. She believed their day would still come.

  “I would never go back to Skidmore,” she said. “People who would kill a man in broad daylight don’t deserve to live. They would have shot him even if the kids were in the pickup. I could never live around people like that. It amazes me that Timmy can live among people that killed his brother.”

  She no longer sees Ken as the perfect human being. “He maybe shouldn’t have done what he did, but they shouldn’t have either.” When asked about her life today, Trena relaxed further and leaned forward on her elbows.

  “I’ve changed,” she said confidently. “I don’t have to hold my head down to nobody anymore. I can look up at people and not have to worry about looking at the wrong person and getting in trouble over it.”

  She turned to her husband several times with affectionate looks or pats on the thigh. Thin, about average height, with slightly graying brown hair, Howard had a pleasant countenance. He was soft-spoken and genial.

  “I’ve got a pretty good man right here,” she said, smiling.

  She still worries about her children. “They don’t talk about Ken much anymore,” she said softly. “Howard is real good to them, and they have a lot of love for him. They’re starting to see him as their daddy. But once in a while, I can see one of them is hurting inside and not expressing it.”

  Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked away.

  “When they grow up, what will they think of me? Will they think I didn’t do enough to punish their father’s killer?”

  I asked her about the time she had pointed a shotgun at Kriss Goslee and Dave Dunbar in the drive outside the tavern. “Yes, I did it, but I never knew why. I was told to get the gun out and I did it. I always did as I was told.” I thought of the incident when Trena and McElroy held guns on Beech Vogel, and McElroy explained to Beech that if his women didn’t shoot when he said shoot, he would shoot them.

  Trena explained that although her mother had always told her she had no idea where Trena’s father was, Trena had heard in 1974 that he was

  still alive and had been paralyzed in a car accident. When Ken found out, he had taken her to the Social Security office in Kansas City to see if she had any money coming to her, but they couldn’t track her father down.

  She has had no contact with the McElroys since 1982. The price of her new life with Howard has been cutting all ties with her former one. Her life has always seemed to be separated into compartments.

  Trena was full of questions. Had Alice married Jim? What did the farm look like? How was Timmy? Did Vicki get married? How many kids did she have? How was Juarez? (Ken had let him get away with too much, in her opinion.)

  After three and a half hours, Howard turned sideways on the bench, a signal that he was ready to go.

  She leaned forward slightly on the table. “I’m happy,” she said. “The kids are happy. I love Howard.

  “There’s some things I could tell you, but I won’t because of the kids. But, you know, I wish I had listened to Ginger and the others back then. It was a mistake to go back. I just had nowhere else to turn. If I had it to do over, he wouldn’t be in my life.”

  She stood up, and the interview was over.

  The south Missouri sun beat down on us as we walked back to our vehicles. She apologized for having given me mixed-up directions to the small town, and Howard described the quickest route to Kansas City.

  “Have a nice trip back,” Trena said. We shook hands, then she smiled and said good-bye. Howard was in the van waiting, and I watched for a moment as she walked away. After a few steps, she stopped and turned toward me. In the afternoon sunlight, her hair shone brightly above her red blouse.

  “If you see Vicki,” she said, “would you say hello to her for me?”

  EPILOGUE

  2006

  Summer 2006

  Twenty-five years have passed since Ken Rex McElroy was shot to death on the main street of Skidmore. No one has yet been charged with his murder. I often think that were it up to the citizens of Skidmore, McElroy would still be sitting slumped over the wheel in his Silverado in front of the D&G Tavern, his face jig sawed from the impact of the high- powered bullet. A reminder to all who passed that true justice is in the eye of the beholder.

  I researched the story of the killing for three years in the mid-eighties. After In Broad Daylight was published in 1988,1 returned to the town every couple of years. I had developed an odd sort of affection for the place and its citizens. I didn’t believe the deep wound it suffered could heal without some sort of expiation, some act of contrition or acknowledgment, and yet I doubted it would ever happen. You never heard the word “murder” in reference to the incident, only “killing.” Moral issues raised by the death were often answered with a single question: “What choice did we have?” As I drove the farm roads and knocked on doors, and approached strangers in bars and on their combines in the fields, notebook in hand, I didn’t argue with them. I told the people who would give me a chance that I wasn’t interested in the names of the killers. The better story was the “Why?” of the whole thing. And so I never asked straight out—Who

  killed Ken McElroy? Still, I listened to the whispering: There were three men—one, the primary shooter, fired first with a high-powered rifle; a second opened up with a .22; and a third brought out a shotgun, which was or wasn’t fired. Or there were only two men, both with rifles.

  It had been several years since my last visit when I drove into town in December 2005.1 had come to spend time with the Goslees, the farm family who took me in, and other friends I had made during my years there. Driving into town on Highway V, under a canopy of tall maples and past small white houses, I felt again the stark isolation of the place. Skidmore was not on the road to anywhere.

  I drifted down the hill, then pulled to a stop in front of a low brick building with a tin roof. It used to be Mom’s Cafe; now it was Newton’s Community Center. The building had been repainted and fixed up some, but the wide sidewalk in front of it was still cracked and broken. Up the street to the right was the tavern where McElroy had been sitting with his wife in the Silverado when he was shot. I thought back to my first day in town, over twenty years ago, when I had sat in my car here and tried to work up the courage to go in the cafe. The moment I entered, the voices of the farmers at the tables fell dead silent, as if somebody had switched off the sound system.

  The town was dying. The high school had been tom down. The bank on the corner had closed a few years earlier. Across the street was the old post office, which now stood empty. The paint was peeling and a window was broken. By most accounts, the shooters had stood in front of or just a few feet west of the building. A cluster of 30.30 shells had been found by the curb in front of it. Newton’s Corner, a gas station at the top of the hill, was also closed, and was fast falling into disrepair. I stopped in front of what used to be the B & B Grocery; it was shuttered, too, and had been for many years. On the dock in the back was where McElroy had shot Bo Bowenkamp in the neck with a shotgun, leaving him there to bleed to death. People now bought their groceries in Maryville.

  The Legion Hall across the street, where the men had met the morning of the killing to talk about what to do with McElroy, was closed up and tattered and peeling. The wooden bench at the north end of it, where old-timers used to sit and watch the comings and goings of the town, was broken and crooked. There wasn’t anybody in the streets now, I saw. The town was uptight about another grisly murder that had recently occurred in its midst. Last year, in a house a couple of blocks from where I stood, a stranger had strangled a young pregnant woman to death and cut open her womb and taken her baby. The mother’s name was Bobbi Jo Stinnet: I remembered her as a little girl playing in the aisles of the grocery store, where her mother, Becky, worked as
a clerk. Becky had found her daughter in a pool of blood. She said her stomach looked like it had “exploded.” The media has descended on the town once again. Many of the articles recalled the shooting of Ken Rex McElroy. People were quoted as wondering if maybe there was some sort of a curse on Skidmore. The town was taking it badly, I knew. By pure chance, I had arrived in town the day before a memorial service for Bobbi Jo was to be held.

  The town just wanted to be left alone, like it always had, I thought, as I drove east to the Goslee farmhouse. The problem with being left alone was that it provided fertile ground for the likes of McElroy to spring up from. McElroy, for his part, had been simply trying to right the wrongs that had been done him and his family by the rich farmers. He hadn’t done too badly, when you looked at the hell his death had brought down on the town. McElroy would be 73 now, but I doubted he would have survived prison, which was where he was headed. One lawman, who had lots of dealings with McElroy, saw what happened that July day as a form of suicide by vigilante. McElroy knew they were holding a meeting in town about him, and he went in unarmed as a provocation. Personally, I had always thought it was his ultimate bluff. Maybe the only one he didn’t pull off.

  In the evening, I met a few friends at the Palms Bar in Maryville, the county seat. I had logged lots of hours in this place, listening to

  drunks talk and brag, and getting drunk myself. I used to write notes to myself in the bathroom about what was said—one night the discussion turned to the murder weapons and what had happened to them—and then stay up until dawn in my second-floor room of the farmhouse drunkenly typing up the notes.

  The conversation in the bar turned to the upcoming twenty-five-year anniversary. One fellow, who was in the tavern when the shooting began, allowed as how he didn’t think Del Clement—the person identified consistently by Trena as the man on the 30.30—had killed McElroy. He refused to say why. A local seed dealer had told me the same thing earlier in the day. According to him, Del had had a rifle in his hand when someone called out, “Shoot the sonofabitch!” When Del hesitated, another man took the rifle from his hands and fired. In all my years on this case, I had never heard a name other than Del’s seriously mentioned as the primary shooter. I had never been interested in proving Del’s guilt, partially because I had always thought Trena’s statement spoke convincingly for itself. But what if Trena had been mistaken? Who had killed Ken McElroy?

  I stopped into the prosecutor’s office the next day. David Baird, who was three years out of law school when he successfully prosecuted McElroy for shooting the grocer, and who had also failed to indict anyone for McElroy’s murder, was still in office. As amiable as ever, his hair a little thinner, he readily—and to my shock—agreed to my request to look into the investigative files on the McElroy killing. No one outside of law enforcement, as far as I knew, had ever seen the files. I was particularly anxious to read the statement of Frankie Aldridge, the witness who had, I had heard, identified the killer or killers within days of the shooting and later recanted. Baird sent me to the sheriff’s office, where the official files were kept.

  Sheriff Ben Espey had been in office for ten years. He had obtained some renown for his handling of the Bobbi Jo Stinnet case. The baby was found alive and well in the arms of a woman in a small town in Kansas less than twenty-four hours after the murder. When I

  I asked to see the McElroy files, he glumly told me there weren’t any. In his first day in office, he had looked for them, and they were nowhere to be found. At my request, Espey had the storage room searched, but no files were found.

  The remembrance service for Bobbi Jo began at 7 p.m. in the park just west of the old post office on the main street. In the center of the park, candles had been placed around a brick memorial. Thirty or forty chairs had been lined up in front of a gazebo, which had been hung with Christmas tree lights. It was a bitterly cold night, barely 15 degrees above, and the wind pushed it well below zero.

  The television satellite trucks, antennas poking up into the black winter sky, were lined up across the street. The print reporters circulated warily on the edge of the crowd, trolling for a useful comment. The hostility in town toward the media was palpable. In the tavern earlier, I had heard one fellow curse the media—he argued they should all be run out of town. Cheryl Huston (Brown), who, along with her friend Carla, had organized the event, had assigned several locals the sole task of keeping the media away from Becky when she arrived. This was part of the legacy of Ken McElroy, I knew. In 1981, his death had been labeled a vigilante murder, and now, twenty-five years later, the papers were wondering if there wasn’t something still evil in the town. The gazebo sat not thirty yards from where the shooters had stood on that hot, bright morning.

  Candles were passed among the crowd. I took one and cupped it for warmth. A small elderly lady pulled me aside and reminded me that I had had dinner at her house years ago. I asked her what she thought should happen to Bobbi Jo’s killer. “She should be forgiven,” the lady said kindly. “But she should die for what she did.”

  A brilliant rim of a full moon slipped over the top of the post office, just as a car pulled up to the curb. Two women stepped out, and were escorted to seats in the front row. The baby’s birthday, I realized, would always be the day of her mother’s death. The service

  was short. Carla asked the media to please leave the family alone, Cheryl recounted the terrible pain suffered by the family and the town from the killer’s selfish act, and Sheriff Espey recounted in detail how the case had been solved. The crowd clapped loudly when he stepped down, as if to say, That was how the law was supposed to handle things—rather than how it had when it let McElroy run wild all those years.

  The moon, high in the sky now, illuminated our ghostly walk across the street to the community center for a reception. I went in, and wandered over to the table where pictures of Bobbi Jo and the “miracle baby” stood. In one photo, the baby was wearing a sundress and hat, and she had an amused smile on her face, like “What’s the big deal?” It was a big deal that she was alive at all. The killer had used a kitchen knife to cut her mother open, and the baby had suffered only a minor scratch on her head. I erased from my mind the image of a bloody-handed woman lifting a baby from the womb of its dead mother. It seemed more evil than anything McElroy had ever done.

  The sheriff and his deputies stood on one side of the room; the few reporters that had braved the door hovered by the buffet table. I made my way over to Becky, who was small with long blond hair reaching the middle of her back, and who was surrounded by friends. I slipped through the cordon, and mumbled words of condolence. She said she remembered me well, and thanked me for coming. I went back outside into the cold.

  I left town in the early morning a few days later. A thick, white fog lay over the land as I drove down the drive of the Goslee farmhouse. I paused on the main street for a few minutes waiting to see if it would lift. The heavy grayness collected in the troughs between the steep hills, and the roads were narrow and twisty and harbored several one-way bridges. I made a few notes in my book about what I’d learned: Trena had gotten divorced and remarried; one of McElroy’s boys had ended up in jail for pulling a knife in a bar; Cheryl, diagnosed with PTSD, had been married and divorced three

  times; lawyer McFadin, ill with heart disease, diabetes, and neuropathy, was practicing law in Gallatin, a small town to the east; Pete Ward, one of the few men in town to stand up to McElroy, had died. Lots of people had died. The town itself was falling apart. In addition to everything else, an outsider had been buying up houses in town and using them as junkyards. There were a lot of riff-raff moving in because of depressed housing prices. Skidmore might hang on for a while, but it would never outlive its reputation as the town that shot the bully to death on its main street; and, now, the town where a young woman had been murdered and cut open for her baby.

  The temperature had climbed to ten degrees above by the time I swung north out of town. The fog was lifting over the fields.
Frost glazed the barbed wire and the tops of the fence posts. The wind had blown the snow into ridges on the edge of the field, and tall grasses sheathed in ice were bent over like ballet dancers. I passed the road leading to the Clement ranch. Skidmore would never give up the killers, I thought. It would mean all the suffering had been for nothing.

  Murder—whether it’s of a mother to get her baby, or a bully to end his reign of terror—is still murder. The fact that this murder, conducted almost in a public forum, hadn’t been cracked in twenty-five years remained probably the most compelling fact about the crime. I had run into this wall around the killers in the eighties, and I had gone around it. But now doubt had been raised in my mind about the identity of the killers, and the investigative files were missing. I wanted to see what those witnesses on the street that day had told the officers; I wanted to see what Frankie Aldridge had said in his statement. And what about the second, and possibly third, shooters? Although the official files in the sheriff’s office were missing, Baird had maintained copies of the NOMIS reports, which contained all the interviews. After much pushing and negotiation, he and Sheriff Espey agreed to turn them over to me. As I suspected, they contained a wealth of information about the murder, the murderers, and the witnesses.