In Broad Daylight (23 page)

Lois and Evelyn began calling the children to tell them that their father had been shot and to come to the hospital in Maryville.

Evelyn reached Cheryl at home. "I don't know how to tell you this," Evelyn said, "but your father's been shot. He's at the store." Cheryl began screaming for her husband and grandfather, who were in the basement. They rushed up the stairs, and she blurted out what had happened. Her husband called the babysitter, Cheryl changed her clothes (something that would later strike her as strange), and they left.

The patrol arrived about half an hour after the shooting. Rowlett and Jones left, and Dunbar maintained order outside the store.

Patrolman Bruce Richards had been in Maryville when the dispatcher radioed that there had been a shooting in Skidmore and ordered him to proceed there immediately. He fired out with siren wailing and lights flashing, and arrived at the scene shortly before nine. Deputy Russ Johnson, who had arrived a few minutes earlier, motioned him up the back stairs. Richards knelt beside Bo and administered first aid, checking the wound and redoing the compress. Because of the heat and Bo's age, Richards was worried about shock. He checked Bo's pulse and found it a bit rapid. Bo was awake and agitated, and Richards tried to calm him down, urging him to relax and simply lie there and wait for the ambulance. He asked Bo what happened.

"I was shot," Bo gurgled.

"What were you shot with?" Richards asked.

"A shotgun."

"Who shot you?"

"Ken McElroy."

Bo managed to give him a brief version of what had happened. While he talked, Richards glanced around and noticed the butcher knife lying in a stack of boxes about fourteen or fifteen inches behind Bo's head. He stayed with Bo for another twenty minutes, trying to keep him calm, until the ambulance came. Paramedic Steve Jackson checked Bo's blood pressure and pulse and gave him medicine to stabilize his heart. By then, thirty or forty people had gathered in the drive and the street, and the paramedics had to push their way through the crowd.

The first person Cheryl saw when she got to the store was the repairman, who looked pale and sick. Somebody brought Bo's cap over to her, and it was covered with blood. My God, she thought, if there's blood on his hat, he's got to be dead. She watched as Bo was loaded onto the stretcher, then stepped out onto the loading dock. People were standing around in small groups, talking and staring up at them. In their faces she thought she saw guilt for not helping her family before, guilt for letting the persecution go on for so long that her dad finally got shot. Maybe this will shock them out of it, she thought bitterly.

When the ambulance took Bo away, Lois followed in the station-wagon. Evelyn stayed behind to clean up the blood and mess.

On the ride to Maryville, Bo politely answered all of Jackson's questions, but didn't volunteer anything. He was undoubtedly in severe pain, but he didn't complain.

Bo was still conscious when the ambulance reached the emergency room around 9:30. Dr. E. R. Wempe, the attending emergency-room physician, asked him what had happened. Bo replied that he had been shot by a man with a shotgun about four feet away. Dr. Wempe checked Bo's vital signs, and everything seemed stable. After removing the dressing from Bo's neck, the doctor noted four wounds, measuring from one to two inches in length and about two or three inches apart. One wound was behind Bo's left ear and the other three were on the left side of his neck. All four wounds were oozing blood, and the entire area was swollen.

The profusion of blood prevented Dr. Wempe from determining the presence of gunpowder burns or residue. When the x-rays revealed no evidence of metal in the neck, the doctor cleaned out the wounds and tied off the bleeding points. Then he sewed the wounds, inserted rubber drains in them, and applied a bulky dressing to the neck. Bo received a unit of blood and was transferred from the emergency room to intensive care at 10:40 p.m.

Dr. Wempe had treated patients with rifle wounds in the army. While exit wounds from rifle bullets were almost always larger than the entrance wounds, the holes in Bo's neck were the same size, leading the doctor to conclude that they had been made by shotgun pellets. He also believed that two of the wounds were entry wounds and two were exit wounds, because when he stuck his finger in one wound, it came out another.

The doctor was amazed that Bo was alive. The pellets had passed wVmiTi haVi an intti tfl two mapx vessels, tire VogtAtf *reiv. awd the, c&to&A artery. If either one had been hit, Bo would have bled to death on the floor of the grocery store.

As soon as Bo arrived in the intensive care unit, police officers asked to talk to him. Dr. Wempe gave his permission and accompanied them to Bo's bedside. Present were Sheriff Estes, Deputy Russ Johnson, and patrolmen Bruce Richards and Alvin Riney. Dr. Wempe described Bo's wounds and pulled the gauze back to show them to the lawmen. Bo seemed traumatized and in substantial pain, but rational. He supplied his age and date of birth and answered other general questions.

Richards asked Bo to tell him again what had happened, and Bo repeated in a croaking whisper that Ken McElroy had shot him with a double-barreled, side-by-side shotgun.

Then, for the third time that night, Richards asked, "Who was it that shot you, Mr. Bowenkamp?"

For the third time, Bo told him without hesitation, "Ken McElroy."

At about one in the morning, shortly after Evelyn Sumy had finished cleaning up the blood and had locked up the B & B Grocery, Bo was transferred by ambulance to the Methodist Hospital in St. Joe, where all his medical records and his personal physician were. Bo would remain there for ten days before being released to go home. He would talk in a hoarse whisper for months, and his left shoulder would develop a permanent droop.

Estes and Richards had begun investigating the crime scene before going to the hospital. First, they talked to the four boys who had been loafing by the tavern. They had told essentially the same story-McElroy sent them into the tavern to buy some pop moments before they heard the shotgun blast. One boy remembered hearing McElroy's pickup drive away seconds later. Estes and Richards found no other witnesses to the shooting, nor could they locate any weapons or spent shotgun shells.

The Maryville chief of police came over and drew a sketch of the scene, and a photographer took pictures. The sketch and the bloodstains showed Bo to be about three feet inside the door.

In the ceiling of the store, Richards and Estes made a critical find-fourteen holes grouped in a tight pattern in the ceiling tiles. Richards climbed up on the meat counter and dug out some of the pellets. Most of them had penetrated the ceiling and had either gone into the roof structure or been deflected by the lumber into the insulation above the ceiling. Estes climbed up onto the roof, tore up the tar, and dug out a few more pellets. The men looked around the floor of the grocery for more pellets, without success. All in all, they came up with eight of the fourteen pellets. After weighing, the pellets would be found to be 00 buck. Estes stepped off the distance between the rear doors and the pellet holes and estimated it to be seventeen feet, a measurement later confirmed by taping.

The only other piece of physical evidence was the butcher knife. Estes later described it as being about a foot long with a long, thin blade and a wooden handle. Although both Estes and Richards noticed the knife near Bo's head, neither officer took it into custody.

That night, before Dunbar went home, two cops took him aside and said, "Look, Dave, if you ever get McElroy alone somewhere, all by himself, blow him away." Irritated, Dunbar said, "Hey, guys, you're the real cops. If you can't handle him, how in the hell do you expect me to?" Dunbar knew as well as they did that Richard Stratton was the only cop that McElroy feared.

The heat of the sun had become so intense on the afternoon of July 8 that the blacktop had begun erupting and cracking, causing dangerous fissures in several places on the highways. Early that evening, Corporal Richard Dean Stratton was flagging traffic for the repair crews on the Interstate 29 and Highway 71 overpass just north of St. Joe. To break the boredom, he was snooping on other police bands, checking the activity. He had just flipped to the Nodaway County sheriff's frequency when he heard a call about a shooting in Skidmore. The dispatcher said that an elderly man, believed to be the grocer, had been shot. The assailant had used a shotgun and was driving a green Chevy pickup.

Hearing the words shotgun, Skidmore, and grocer, Stratton knew immediately what had happened. The patrolman didn't know the green Chevy as well as he knew the Dodge with the white camper top, but he would bet his life that it had a white CB antenna on the roof and that the driver was listening to police bands.

Realizing he was too short of fuel for an extended chase, Stratton headed immediately back to Troop H headquarters in St. Joe, not bothering to call in. He was pumping gas in his car when the dispatcher frantically yelled his number over the radio: "507, where are you? Where are you?"

As the dispatcher repeated the information, Stratton formulated his plan: He had to get between Ken McElroy and the Missouri River.

Over the years, Stratton had tried to learn everything he could about Ken McElroy. When he pulled McElroy over, he talked to him, and when he went to the farm looking for him, he drank coffee and chatted with his mother, who was always very hospitable and somewhat apologetic about Ken. He talked to other cops about him, kept track of his whereabouts, questioned his friends, studied his cases, and tried to figure out how he worked, and, especially, how he got away with everything he did. Stratton couldn't account for his immunity from the law; eventually he came to believe that McElroy either got to the prosecutors, the judges, or the witnesses. This made Stratton more determined to pull him up short at every possible turn.

Stratton's reputation had grown over the years. In addition to incidents involving Ken McElroy, there were many stories about how he stuck his neck out for people in trouble, and how he personally broke up fights in the meanest, most derelict bars in the area, like the dive in Fillmore. People considered him to be a friendly cop, a good guy who became unpleasant only if he thought somebody wasn't being straight with him. If someone broke the law, he would do his best to nail him; but if he needed a break, he would give it to him. Above all, he was considered to be fair, a cop with nothing to prove.

When word spread in Nodaway County in 1979 that the patrol was transferring Stratton from Maryville to St. Joe, people protested. Residents circulated petitions at gas stations, taverns, fertilizer stores, auctions, and door to door. When the petitions failed, several people sought to convince him to resign from the patrol and run for sheriff of Nodaway County. One morning Stratton and his wife woke up to find a sign saying STRATTON FOR SHERIFF stuck in their front lawn. Most people believed he would have been elected easily.

Stratton had not forgotten the feeling of McElroy's shotgun in his face, and he had never stopped believing that one day things would settle out. So when the call came about the shooting, Stratton was ready. He swung out of the driveway of patrol headquarters and headed north. I'm coming for you now, you son of a bitch, he said to himself.

The call went out to law enforcement officials in a four-county area, but Stratton knew that if they didn't use their heads, McElroy would get away. It had happened before; McElroy would head south to St. Joe and jump the Missouri River into Kansas at Elwood or Atchison or Leavenworth, and stay out of the state until the situation cooled down. If he was charged and a warrant was issued, his lawyer would call the patrol and say he would bring in his client in a couple of days. By then, McElroy would have disposed of the evidence and arranged his alibis.

McElroy knew every blacktop and gravel road between Skidmore and St. Joe, and the cops could not possibly cover them all. But Stratton knew them as well as McElroy, and he meant to nail his quarry before he got to the crossings. McElroy wouldn't come down Interstate 29 because the police would easily spot him there. And he wouldn't come down Highway 71 because that would bring him through Savannah, where he was too well known. The gravel and dirt roads were too twisty and slow for a man in a hurry. McElroy would run the blacktops for both speed and secrecy.

Stratton pulled onto the interstate and drove a few miles north to the Amazonia exit. From there, he headed north on CC, then west on Highway 59 until it ran into H. He stopped at the intersection and pondered his options. If he stayed on H and headed north, he would end up in Fillmore, only about fifteen miles away and a favorite stomping ground of McElroy's. Or he could head west on B until it intersected 113 and watch for McElroy around Oregon. But according to the radio chatter, Trooper Monahan was already in the Oregon area. Besides, Stratton felt in his gut that McElroy would come through Fillmore. He chose H. Stratton resisted the temptation to radio for a blockade of the bridges over the Missouri. He had seen the CB equipment in McElroy's trucks and had no doubt that McElroy knew the call numbers of the patrol cars. McElroy would be listening and planning a counter-strategy. Stratton would stay off the airwaves and keep his plan to himself.