Authors: Harry N. MacLean
"When I came to the Graham school in fourth grade from the Elkhorn Country School, one of the first things the other kids told me was about Ken McElroy, the type of kid he was. I was told to stay away from him, not to have anything to do with him, that he pushed other kids around."
Another classmate recalled:
"I don't care who you were, you didn't mess with him. If he came up to where you were sittin' and said, "Hey, I wanna sit there," then you moved. He wasn't the biggest kid in class-there was one really big kid, he must have been six feet and two hundred pounds, and even he never crossed Ken's path."
Strangely, no one-students, teachers or friends-remembers an incident of Ken actually beating somebody up. Perhaps he didn't have to.
On Ken's first day on a school bus, he and an older brother got into a scuffle with two other boys. The McElroy boys pulled knives and threatened to cut the other two, who immediately backed off. After that, Ken always had plenty of room-if he sat in the back of the bus, the other kids sat in the front.
Ken was also known to steal. One winter day, the owner of the gas station and grocery store in Graham caught him and another boy stealing some items. The man called Tony and told him about it. Later in the day, Tony burst into the store with a long, curved hunting knife in his hand, slammed the owner up against the wall, and held the knife up to his throat.
"If you ever touch my boy again," Tony snarled, "I'll cut your heart out."
The school yearbooks have one or two pictures of Ken. One year the school put on a play called The Snow Queen. In the cast picture three rows of boys stood behind the girls, who were kneeling. In the far left corner, at the back, is a tall, thin boy with wavy hair, at least a head taller than everyone else. Ken was the stagehand for the production.
Tim, who was quiet and studious and liked by his teachers, caught up with Ken in school by the sixth grade. Ken was finally passed on to junior high, although he could neither read nor write.
Most farm boys got up at 5:30 in the morning, did their chores, and went to school. After school and sports, they went home and did chores again before dinner. Not Ken. After school he would roam the countryside on his strawberry roan horse, hunting and running his dogs, going wherever and doing whatever he pleased. If you wanted to ride across someone's land, the custom was to ask permission, unless you knew the owner and had done it before. Ken never bothered; he rode through the timber and across the fields as if it were all his land, as if nobody had the right to restrict where he went and what he did. If a fence blocked his passage, he cut it with wire snips and rode on through. A farmer called him on it once-challenged him for hunting on his land without permission-and Ken, not more than fourteen at the time, pulled up short and told him nobody was going to tell him what he could do. The landowner backed off.
By the seventh grade Ken had a best friend, a boy named John L. The two boys first met when they attended first grade together in a small country school. John would stand lookout while Ken took a girl from their class into the bushes, removed her clothes, and did something to her-John was never quite sure what-during recess. In the second grade John moved away and didn't see Ken again until he moved back a few years later.
In junior high, Ken and John both wore their hair slicked back and their shirt sleeves rolled up, and the two of them sat together in school, until the teacher split them up for disrupting the class.
The two boys were rebels with big chips on their shoulders. They played hooky a lot, and spent most of their time riding horses. Ken knew every inch of the land around there and they would ride for hours after school, checking traps and hunting. Once, as they were riding full speed alongside the timber, they came to a hidden embankment with a thirty-foot drop. Ken saw the danger first, nudged John, and turned his horse at the last second to keep him from plunging over the embankment.
When the two friends weren't hunting, they were riding around to girls' houses. Most parents didn't like Ken and John, and forbade their daughters to have anything to do with them. Several girls were attracted to them, though, and managed to meet the boys secretly after school and on the weekends. One girl used to sneak out of her parents' farmhouse and meet Ken in the timber after dark.
When John spent the night at Ken's house, people were stacked up like wood in the bedrooms and John slept in the same bed with him and Tim. There always seemed to be a lot of arguing and fighting going on. John felt sorry for Mabel because she worked hard all the time and barely seemed to stay even with things. She never had a new dress or anything for herself. The others seemed to just go on about their business. Ken stayed at John's house a few times and was always cleaned up, well-behaved, and polite to his parents.
Toward the end of eighth grade, Short Linville, the school bus driver, stopped by the McElroy farm three or four days in a row and found no one waiting. Each time, somebody came to the door and waved him on. Finally, one of Ken's sisters came out and explained to him that he needn't stop at the house because neither Ken nor Tim would be going to school anymore. (Short didn't bring the bus around to the McElroy farm until years later when he stopped for Ken's children.)
John started the ninth grade but didn't last long. He got into an argument with the principal, hit him in the mouth, and quit before he was kicked out.
Stealing wasn't a new activity for Ken and John-they had always swiped stuff-but when Ken got a 1936 Ford, theft acquired more purpose because they needed gas and parts. They took out the back seat and lined the space with plywood. At night the two boys would drive to a farm and scoop grain from a bin until the car was full to the windows. The next morning they would drive to an elevator and unload the grain for cash, usually with no questions asked. Sometimes they would spot tractors or trucks sitting in the fields during the day and come back at night and siphon gas from the tanks. When the transmission on the Ford went out, Ken and John looked around until they found another 1936 Ford sitting in a farmyard. Waiting until the farmer was gone for the weekend, they slipped in and removed the transmission in little more than an hour. They took it back to the farm and had it installed in Ken's car by dinnertime.
Ken never cared for work. He and John found jobs in a nursery in a small town in Iowa when they were about fifteen, but they were fired the first week when Ken was caught fooling around with a young girl who also worked there. The way John saw it, Ken never got over the fact that he was poor, and he resented people who had money and new cars and good clothes. He could never bring himself to do their shit work.
If you didn't go to school, and you wouldn't work, there was really only one other way to get by.
In 1952, when he was eighteen, Ken McElroy married Oleta, a sixteen-year-old girl from St. Joe. Soon afterward, they moved to Denver, where one of Ken's sisters lived. Her husband, a construction foreman, gave Ken a job. Ken and Oleta stayed in Denver for six months, then moved to the mountains, where Oleta had a stillborn child.
One day, as Ken was working on the construction crew, a cribbing form fell about thirty feet and hit him on the head, splitting his safety helmet and cutting his scalp. The accident jammed the nerves and muscles in his neck, causing him periodic episodes of severe pain and occasional blackout spells the rest of his life. (McElroy told people that this injury resulted in a steel plate being implanted in his head, and many people attributed much of his subsequent bizarre and violent behavior to the plate.)
The Colorado job was Ken's last attempt to function in the straight world. In 1955 or 1956, he and Oleta moved back to Missouri, where he initially centered his activity in the St. Joe area, although he soon began roaming the entire six-county area of northwest Missouri. The stealing he and his buddies had done in junior high school, for which they were never punished, convinced him there were easier ways to make a living than running a jackhammer, digging ditches, or hoeing beans.
He started off small time, stealing one hog or calf at a time. He rigged a toggle switch to shut off the running lights in his Ford and shored up the plywood lining in the back. During the day he roamed the gravel roads looking for calves or hogs that were fat and ready for market, noting the locations of the closest gates. He would return late at night, usually around 1 or 2 a.m." and park as close to the animals as possible. Dressed in dark clothes, he would isolate a fat hog and, if the gate was close by, guide it through by the tail. Otherwise, he would lift the beast, which could weigh 250 pounds, one arm under his neck and the other in back of his rear legs, >and carry it against his chest while he stepped over the barbed wire fence. With the hog in his trunk, he would drive away, rear end low, often to another farmer's house, where he would get fifty or sixty dollars for the animal. Occasionally, if the job went smoothly, he would take the hog up to his father's farm, and then return for a second and maybe a third animal.
But even this was a meager living. His friend John had joined the Navy at age seventeen and was now out. He tracked Ken down and found him living in a squalid flat in St. Joe with a woman who wouldn't even get out of bed for the visit; Ken was obviously embarrassed by his situation. He had a long way to go if he was ever to hold his head up around the rich farmers of Nodaway County.
Nevertheless, up north, around Skidmore, Graham, Maitland, and Quitman, the legend was growing. Children in junior high and grade school grew up hearing stories about Ken McElroy. People whispered that he had raped a fourteen-year-old Quitman girl who became pregnant and died delivering twins at home because she couldn't afford to go to the hospital. A year later, according to the rumors, he returned and raped her older sister, who later ended up marrying one of his best coon-hunting buddies. People talked about what happened whenever Ken was around-the heavy drinking, sex, and violence. Just hearing his name was enough to bring a taste of fear to a child's mouth.
Adults shook their heads over the stories and asked each other why he never got punished for the stealing and raping. Most people just stayed away from him and places he hung out. For the better-off families that wasn't that hard to do-McElroy didn't pick on people who had money for lawyers or had influence in the community. He picked on the poorer country folks.
When Ken was about twenty, he befriended an eleven-or twelve-year-old boy, Larry D." who came from a poor family of dedicated coon hunters in the Quitman area. Ken didn't have much then either, only his beat-up car, but he was friendly and generous to Larry. Ken bought him pop, gave him rides, and if Larry ever needed anything, Ken gave it to him and never brought it up again. Larry admired Ken's style; once he took a gun rack and strapped it to his leg, then sawed off an old shotgun and walked around with it stuck in the rack.
Larry came to understand that Ken was also a very dangerous man. If Ken didn't like someone, or heard he was saying bad things about him or a member of his family, that person would walk out of the tavern one day and find Ken waiting for him around the corner with a shotgun or a long-bladed corn knife. When Ken drank, his grievances would eat on him.
He would tell Larry what he was going to do to get even with someone who had crossed him, and then, as the wide-eyed boy watched, Ken would carry out his threats. Before long, Ken was asking Larry to come along on his nocturnal stealing jaunts.
During this period, a seventeen-year-old girl named Barbara T. was hanging out with her girlfriend at the bar in Burlington Junction, a small town north of Quitman. The girls noticed a good-looking, muscular man with dark hair and pretty, dark blue eyes begin to come around. He drove an old white Ford and was usually alone. He either sat by himself at the end of the bar, or played pool or shuffleboard. The girls got to know "Kenny," and soon they were partying with him regularly. They would be drinking and talking, and all of a sudden he would say "Let's go," and off they would go, never knowing where, usually to bars in other towns or somebody's place in St. Joe. Ken seemed happy in those days, unless he hit the liquor too hard. He had plenty of girls wherever he went, and they were always young-younger than his seventeen-year-old friends. He would laugh and tell them they didn't have to worry about him.
"You're too old for me," he would say. "I like my women young and tender. I like that young meat."
By "young meat," he meant thirteen or fourteen. One thirteen-year-old girl, Donna G." used to sneak out of her farmhouse in the middle of the night to see him. She lived with her grandparents, who owned a tavern in a nearby small town. One night, when Ken and the two girls had been running around and drinking heavily, they stopped in at the tavern. Ken teased the grandfather-asking how things were at the farm and how Donna was doing-until finally the old man lost his temper.
"You stay away from her, goddamn it, or I'll get the law on you!"
Ken stopped talking and joking. He sat perfectly still and stared at the old man. The two girls also quieted down. After four or five long minutes, the three of them left, not saying a word. In the truck, Ken announced that they were going to the farmhouse to burn it down.