In Broad Daylight (8 page)

Two things made McElroy's business easier. Some sale barns cooperated by not keeping good records and by not making readily available to law enforcement the records they did keep. Also, Missouri law did not require branding of livestock, and farmers had difficulty making their identifications stick in court. If a farmer said he recognized his five hogs in a pen of fifty, he'd better be able to point out identifying characteristics, such as a scar, a split ear, or unusual coloration. In the larger hog operations, holding as many as 500 or 1,000 hogs, identification was virtually impossible. The fact was, as McElroy well knew, to make the charges stick, the cops would virtually have to catch him loading someone else's hogs into his truck.

Some assault charges were filed against McElroy in Buchanan County in those days, but they never stuck either. One was filed by a woman, and later dismissed on her request. And a farmer filed charges after catching McElroy stealing two of his horses, but withdrew them after McElroy smashed him across the face with a rifle.

In 1961, when Ken was twenty-six, he met Alice Wood. Fifteen years old, with brown hair and pretty blue eyes, Alice worked as a clerk in Herman's drugstore in St. Joe. The boyfriend of a fellow clerk stopped in frequently, and one day he came in with a tall, dark, well-built, good-looking guy, and introduced him to Alice. Alice found him charming and dashing, with a flair for doing things his own way and spending money as if it didn't matter. She was impressed.

Alice's experience with men before this had not been good. She had not known her father, but her mother told her he was an alcoholic who had walked out on the family when Alice was a baby. Later, her mother wouldn't let him around the kids and had only bad things to say about him. (After Alice was grown, he would come to see her, but only when he wanted something.)

When Alice was four or five years old, her mother married a man named Otha Embrey, whom Alice disliked from the very beginning. If she was made to go to the store with him, she would refuse to let him buy her a candy bar. According to Alice, he would often come home drunk and abusive, but her mother didn't seem to see it as a problem. Finally, when Alice was thirteen years old, she ran away from home and moved into an apartment with a friend. When she met Ken McElroy, she was young, naive, and on her own, without any real family support. Soon, she became fascinated with Ken McElroy, with the sheer force of the man.

In 1964, Ken left Sharon and the four girls at the farm in Skidmore, and moved in with Alice in St. Joe. In those days Alice loved him-in fact, she idolized him. She was the little girl without a father who needed taking care of, and he was the older man, knowledgeable in the ways of the world, tough, and strong. But it didn't work out that way. Ken was almost never around, and when he left, he never said where he was going or when he would be back. He could be gone for two days, or two weeks, and when he did return, he never gave any explanations. Although he was free to come and go, Alice wasn't. She was to be there for him whenever he came home, to keep his house, satisfy his needs, and make no demands. If she asked questions or tried to do things on her own, she risked a beating. When he was drinking, he often flew into violent rages over the smallest thing-a look she gave him, or another man saying hello to her on the street. Sometimes, he would crack her across the face with a backhand; other times he would grab her by the hair and yank her across the room.

He erupted when she complained about his being gone all the time or seeing other women. Afterward, the beating was always her fault; if she hadn't complained, she wouldn't have gotten beaten. He was never to blame. In all the years he beat her, Ken never once apologized. Many times, she was so black-and-blue and swollen that she was ashamed to go outside. In the later years, more than once in the middle of a beating she fantasized about grabbing one of his guns and shooting him.

One time, when he had been gone for days, he walked in the bedroom and found her packing boxes of clothes. He went crazy over her walking out on him, and before she could explain that she was just putting the clothes away, he had grabbed her by the hair and swung her into the wall. He ended up with a fistful of her hair and she was left with lumps and a bald spot.

Other times, the rage seemed to come from nowhere. He would be fine, and then he would start drinking whiskey and brooding about something that somebody had said to him two months ago, or some imagined slight in a pool game. The memory would eat away inside him until he couldn't handle it anymore, and he would explode. If Alice got involved, if she tried to reason with him, even if she just tried to calm him down, she was immediately favoring the other side and became the enemy-another person to be punished. She learned to keep her mouth shut and stay out of his way.

The other women in Ken's life were hard for Alice to accept at first. When she met him, she had a schoolgirl's version of fidelity between a man and a woman in love. She knew that Ken saw other women, but she thought maybe he would settle down once they lived together. He didn't. The same thing that fascinated her about Ken fascinated lots of women, and he had girlfriends everywhere. After a while, she could tell when Ken had a new girlfriend because he calmed down, and would even be nice to her.

As the years passed, Alice learned that women were merely possessions to Ken-that he needed and used them. As far as sex went, it was for his gratification alone: he had it with a woman, and then went on his way. In fact, Alice felt that his real need for women was not sexual, but to boost his ego. The way Ken saw the world, he was always having to prove himself, always having to show that he was more of a man than the next guy, and one of the ways to prove it was by collecting women, the younger the better. Another way was to screw the women of men who thought they were better than he was, the rich farmers and ranchers. He would laugh and remark to Alice that he was really doing those men a favor by keeping their wives satisfied.

Ken and Alice moved to Amazonia and then Rosendale, two small towns close by St. Joe. Alice had a stillborn child during this period and became pregnant again in early 1968. She gave birth to Juarez on September 19 of that year.

Meanwhile, Sharon and her four girls, who had stayed on the farm Ken left, moved to Florida to live with Sharon's mother.

In the late sixties, McElroy hooked up with a man who would run with him until the very end. Like most of Ken's pals, Fred M. was a coon hunter. He met McElroy at a dog meet in Bedford, Iowa, and took an immediate liking to him.

About ten years younger than McElroy, Fred was a known rowdy, drinker, and thief. He would steal anything, but he preferred to steal guns. He threw in with Ken McElroy because McElroy was bigger and better at stealing: he knew which farmhouses had valuable furniture and guns; he knew when the residents were going to be away, and he always had plans on how to get in the house, get the goods, and dispose of them. Fred also threw in with Ken because Ken had more guts than most other guys. He would do things most of them wouldn't dream of doing, and just being around him made Fred feel stronger and tougher. Nobody ever, ever fucked with Ken McElroy. Being Ken's buddy, Fred got a little more respect than otherwise.

Ken treated him like a father. Once, when Fred said he wanted a job in a town about 100 miles away, but he had no way to get there, Ken gave him $300 to buy a car and $100 for gas. The money was never mentioned again. The two of them also played a lot of pool in the bars, and one night Ken won all Fred's money, his watch and ring, then gave it all back to him with a smile and a pat on the back at the end of the evening.

For Fred, the most exciting times were when Ken got twisted over something and decided he had to get even. He would start drinking and talking about it, and the more he drank, the madder he got. His face would get red, and he would start describing loudly and angrily just what he was going to do for revenge. He would turn to the man on the stool next to him and say, "You think I won't?" Eventually, Ken would fall silent and stare at the counter or the wall; finally he would stand up and demand of Fred, "You in or out?" Fred was almost always in, because he wanted to see what was going to happen.

Ken McElroy and his sidekicks were known characters to the law in Doniphan County, Kansas; they were suspected of regularly stealing animals, grain, and chemicals. Troy, the county seat, is thirteen miles west of St. Joe, on Highway 36, an easy jump across the Missouri River. On February 7, 1969, the farmers' co-op warehouse at Leona, a tiny town a few miles west of Troy, was broken into and burglarized. The thieves took several cases of a new herbicide which was so expensive that the trunk of a car could easily hold more than $1,000 worth. Two nights later, the warehouse was burglarized again, and the thieves took more of the chemical.

The local cops speculated that Ken McElroy was behind the breakins, and figured that if he had come twice, he might come a third time. The co-op hired an elderly night watchman, placed him inside the warehouse with a 20-gauge shotgun, and told him to protect the goods. Five nights later, the watchman was standing guard when he heard somebody breaking in the door. He yelled at the thieves to stop, and they turned and ran. He fired the shotgun at the retreating figures, then called the sheriff's department.

When Undersheriff Jerry Dubach received the call in Troy, he jumped in his car and headed west toward Leona. The night was cold and snowy and the roads were icy; any speed over 35 or 40 mph was extremely dangerous. On the edge of town Dubach met a yellow Cadillac heading east toward Missouri at 65 mph. He flipped around and chased the Caddy, but couldn't close in on it without risking losing control. He followed the car as it crossed the bridge over the Missouri River into St. Joe and turned off at the 22nd Street exit. But by the time Dubach reached 22nd Street, his quarry was gone. He drove around awhile looking for it, but the Caddy had simply disappeared.

Jim McCubbin was the special agent for the Kansas Bureau of Investigation assigned to the investigation. Like every other cop around, he knew Ken McElroy and was anxious to nail him. McCubbin had been unable to develop any proof of McElroy's involvement in the chemical thefts, until he learned that the night of the third burglary, February 14, 1969, a man had had some shotgun pellets removed from his rear end in a small town not far from St. Joe. McCubbin visited the hospital and discovered that the man was Ken McElroy, and that the size of the pellets taken out of his ass were the same size as the pellets from the watchman's gun. He turned up some corroborating proof, and took McElroy in for questioning at Troop H Headquarters in St. Joe. McElroy denied everything.

Nevertheless, on October 27, 1971, prosecutors in Doniphan County filed an indictment charging McElroy and another man with five counts of burglary and theft. The judge in Troy issued warrants for their arrest, which were sent to the sheriff's department in Andrew County for execution, along with a request for extradition. The warrants were never executed and the case was never prosecuted.

In the early sixties, a man joined the Missouri State Highway Patrol who would in time earn a reputation as the only cop around who was not afraid to go up against McElroy one on one. Richard Dean Stratton-called Dean by his family and friends, Stratton by Ken McElroy, and "Lean and Mean" by his many admirers-was a tall man with a spare, wiry build, a thin face, and short brown hair. Even as a rookie trooper, Stratton had a certain presence, an air of confidence and self-assurance. As time passed, the legend surrounding him would span almost as many counties as Ken McElroy's, but Stratton never fit the image of the highway cop in dark blue, swarthy face masked in aviator glasses, swaggering with the authority of law and justice. Instead, he was an easygoing man who smiled easily and appeared very relaxed. He talked in a low, mellow voice and chuckled readily. He could have been the basketball coach at the local high school.

But when Stratton was on the job, his bearing changed slightly: His spine straightened, his moves became efficient and graceful, and his voice grew steady and even. As his concentration centered, his eyes locked in on his subject. A smile lingered on his face, but his eyes became still.

Born in southwestern Nebraska in 1936, Stratton joined the patrol when he was twenty-six. His first assignment was Maryville, and he broke in under a sergeant who drummed into him the importance of getting out of his patrol car and meeting the people in the small towns. Stratton would park in front of Mom's Cafe in Skidmore and drink coffee with the farmers and seed dealers, and when his turn came, he would pick up the check. He hunted and fished with some of the local boys, tramping through the fields and timber and stream beds with them for pheasant, coon, and deer. He could talk corn prices, weather, and women right along with the rest of them.

One of the first conversations he had with his sergeant was about Ken Rex McElroy. Even in those days he was a known hog thief and cattle rustler.

"He's a rogue and a troublemaker," the sergeant told Stratton. "He's a thief and a bully who will use a shotgun-don't ever trust him and don't ever turn your back on him."

Stratton learned how to deal with McElroy the hard way. One morning around 4 o'clock, Stratton was cruising the blacktops west of Skidmore, keeping track of who was where and what was going on, when McElroy's green pickup went by, riding low in the rear. Stratton pulled him over. The patrolman was struck by McElroy's eyes up close: They were dark and cold and deep, and Stratton felt as if they were looking into the far reaches of his soul.