156. Smells Like 1881 In 1981 - Ken Rex McElroy And The Vengeance Of A Small Town

If you’ve never experienced small town life, it’ll be almost impossible to comprehend the now-infamous tale of tiny Skidmore Missouri and the day nearly forty years ago that forever changed it.  That day – July 10, 1981 – was the day 47 year-old Ken Rex McElroy was gunned down in cold blood, in a hail of gunfire, in broad daylight while sitting in his truck alongside his wife, on Skidmore’s Main Street, with several dozen of its citizens surrounding the truck.  And yet, almost four decades after the fact, not a soul has admitted to seeing what happened.  How does this happen?  How does an entire town close ranks and keep a secret of such an unbelievably deadly act for so long?  The truth hides in the cracks of a story so wild it begs credulity.  It is a story of the sort of raw brutality and menace usually only found in cheap novels and overly broad morality plays.  It turns out that Bad Guys who are Bad Guys just for the sake of being Bad Guys do exist in this world.  And maybe the worst of the worst was the victim in this story – Ken Rex McElroy himself.  “Town Bully” is the name usually tagged on McElroy – but he was so much more than that.  An amazing force of dark nature, his subsistence – in fact, his entire existence - consisted of appropriation of that which he did not own,  rape, intimidation, destruction of property and the use of a shotgun against people he decided, at his whim, were his enemies.  Those enemies included not just the law, but parents of the 12 year-old girl he declared belonged to him, when those parents objected to his announced plans to marry their daughter.  Or the owner of the local general store, whose wife had asked the simple question “have you paid for that?” when she saw one of McElroy’s children with a piece of candy from the candy counter.  Add to all of this the complete absence of any police, and a County Sheriff’s office that was so intimidated by McElroy it completely abandoned the town of Skidmore to an ever-present sense of dread, waiting for the bully’s next outrage.  Join Melissa as she recounts McElroy’s life and the years and the days leading up to that incredible moment on an otherwise peaceful summer day on Main Street, when an entire community seems to have decided to revert to 19th Century wild-west justice and end the dread of its own volition – and the ramifications of that decision on the soul of Skidmore that will last forever.  You can learn more about the McElroy case in two excellent books Melissa refers to in this episode: In Broad Daylight by Harry N. MacLean (which was also made into a film starring Brian Dennehy); and Judgement Day by Bob Lancaster.  Melissa also recommends the six-part documentary series No One Saw a Thing, now available on Amazon Prime.