In Broad Daylight (3 page)

Boyer had joined the patrol in 1975 and was eventually assigned to Troop H in St. Joseph. His unit, based in Maryville, the Nodaway County seat, consisted of seven troopers. From the patrol office in the Nodaway County Courthouse, they fanned out over the highways and county roads of their zone. In six years with the patrol, Boyer had come to know most of the zone's small towns fairly well, and Skidmore had always seemed much like any other small farm town in northwest Missouri.

As he drove to Skidmore that July morning, Boyer described McElroy to Bryan, a young academy graduate who was riding along as the final stage of his training. Boyer didn't know what had happened, he said in his low, almost gentle voice, but he was sure that McElroy wasn't the one dead. The patrolmen had just driven through Savannah, about thirty miles south of Maryville, when the second call came over the radio.

McElroy's wife had just called, the dispatcher said, crying hysterically and sobbing that her husband had been shot and killed. Over and over, she said that they wouldn't stop firing, that the killers just kept shooting him and shooting him, and that they wanted to kill her, too.

Telling the dispatcher to call the ambulance in Maryville and the Nodaway County sheriff's office, Boyer flipped on the siren and the light. He told Bryan to hang on, and within seconds the black 1980 Plymouth Grand Fury was barreling up Highway 71 at more than 100 mph.

About twenty miles north of Savannah, at Pumpkin Center, a combination gas station and grocery, Boyer slowed and took a hard, screeching left onto Route A. Bryan grabbed the dashboard as he slid into the door. The road running west out of Pumpkin Center descended a steep hill and then broke into a wide, sweeping curve before straightening out briefly to cross a narrow bridge. Halfway through the curve, which was banked as poorly as most of the curves on the county blacktops, Boyer glanced over and saw that Bryan had turned white.

As they whipped across the bridge, Boyer thought back on the night a year or so earlier when he had stopped McElroy at Pumpkin Center.

Boyer had been parked} in the gas station when the green Dodge pickup sped by at 75 mph. Not until he was walking toward the pickup with his flashlight in his hand did Boyer realize he had stopped Ken McElroy. A wrenching fear had hit Boyer's gut: He was only a move away from having a shotgun stuck in his face and his head blown away.

Every law officer in northwest Missouri, even those who had never met him, knew Ken McElroy-and knew he hated cops. Only a few days before, Boyer had read a notice at the patrol office, in which an informant had warned that McElroy was traveling in a caravan of three pickups and that each truck carried guns. The two female drivers were backing up McElroy wherever he went, the informant had said, and they had orders to shoot and kill any cop who came upon them.

In the dark at Pumpkin Center, Boyer had quickly recovered from the shock and the clench of fear. He slowed his step, dropped into a slight crouch, and pulled his service revolver from its holster. Holding the revolver at his side, he continued his approach but swung out in an arc away from the cab so that he could see inside the truck before he was upon it. Backlit by the spotlight on the patrol car, McElroy sat looking straight ahead, both of his hands in plain view on top of the steering wheel. Shaking slightly, Boyer went through his routine about the radar gun, the speed of the truck, and the option of paying or contesting the fine. To Boyer's surprise, and somewhat to his consternation, McElroy just sat there. He was polite and soft-spoken and offered no argument. He kept his hands on the steering wheel at all times, except to reach for his driver's license, which he did very slowly, and to accept the ticket from Boyer. He looked at Boyer only once, and Boyer noticed the hard, flat eyes and the thin mouth. The incident seemed to be over almost before it began.

The patrolmen said little on the fast ride to Skidmore. Bryan tried to relax, but he continued to grab the dash in the tight curves. Boyer's imagination spun out different versions of what might have happened, but none of them made sense: Who in Skidmore would shoot Ken McElroy in broad daylight in the middle of town? If he really had been shot, there must be other casualties, given the firepower he always maintained around him. Hardest of all to believe was that McElroy was really dead. Something that horrible couldn't die that easily.

The blacktops and dirt roads curved and twisted up and down the steep hills and through the creases of the rumpled countryside. Hitting the hills at anything over 40 was like riding a roller coaster without rails. Boyer knew all the roads in the area and prided himself on being an expert high-speed driver, which meant knowing exactly how fast he could take the hills and curves without sliding into a ditch or smashing into a fence.

He raced eight miles west over Route A, flew past 22 (which ran north and came within a few miles of the McElroy farm), then sped through Graham and Maitland with siren wailing and lights flashing, finally turning north on 113 toSkidmore.

Boyer's watch read close to 11:30 by the time the Plymouth reached the edge of town. They had covered the forty miles in thirty minutes. Entering from the south, the Plymouth cruised through six residential blocks before coming to the grocery store and bank and turning east onto Elm Street. Boyer saw the ambulance parked behind the Silverado, which was angled in front of the D & G Tavern. Two sheriff's cars were parked in the middle of the street, and another patrol car was arriving from the east. As Boyer pulled to a stop, he saw two attendants loading a stretcher into the rear of the ambulance. A white sheet covered a large form.

One look at the rear of the truck cleared up Boyer's confusion about what had happened: Somebody had taken McElroy from behind. There was no gunfight, and nobody stood up to him face to face. The bullets came from across the street, undoubtedly from a rifle, while McElroy sat in his pickup facing the tavern. He never saw his killer, and he never had a chance. A crazy act, it had to have been committed out of a terrible well of fear.

Behind the driver's seat, the rear window had been blown out. The driver's door hung open, its window shattered. There obviously had been a hell of a lot of shooting, probably from more than one rifle, and much of it had been wild.

Boyer walked up to the truck and looked in. Teeth and pieces of bone lay scattered on the dashboard in front of the steering wheel. Blood splotched the seat and formed a deep puddle on the floor; it had run over the edge of the door jamb and collected in a purplish, jelly-like pool on the ground. The air was dead still. As Boyer turned away, he felt a searing blast from the 100-degree midday sun.

Boyer stepped back and surveyed the scene. Other than the law and a few people watching the loading of the body, the town was deserted. Occasionally, a male face would peer out of the window of the cafe, or someone would leave the tavern, walk nonchalantly past the truck, glance in, and disappear down the street. Now and then, a passing pickup would slow almost to a halt as the driver leaned over and stared inside the familiar two-tone brown Silverado.

Boyer reckoned that people were trying to convince themselves that Ken McElroy was really dead and was going to stay dead, that he wouldn't come cruising the streets of town that afternoon with his guns and his trucks and his women. It was too late, but for an instant Boyer wished he had looked under the white sheet before the ambulance left.

Boyer wasn't surprised that something had happened, but he was surprised that this had happened. He had expected that McElroy would perish some night on a back road, at the hands of a cop given half a reason to blow him away. Maybe then his death could have been dealt with quietly, in a way that would have solved the problem without creating an uproar. But Boyer hadn't realized the town was so twisted over McElroy that it would come to this.

Boyer had left his car running to provide a cool refuge from the heat, but when he returned to it, he stood outside with a foot on the bumper. Other cops came over and told him what they knew. Earlier that morning, Nodaway County Sheriff Danny Estes had been at a meeting at the town's Legion Hall, at which the sole topic had been what the town was going to do about McElroy. Estes hadn't even made it back to Maryville before McElroy was shot, and now people would think that Estes had told the men at the meeting to do it.

Estes was shaken up and excited, pacing around, arms flapping, shouting at nobody in particular, "What the hell happened? Why the hell did you do this?"

Boyer's radio crackled. The dispatcher told him to meet another car at the McElroy farm. Trena had called and asked the patrol to drive her to St. Joseph for her own safety. When Boyer reached the farm, a pickup with a woman at the wheel was pulling out of the drive onto the gravel road. He went to the house and knocked on the door several times. When he got no response, he wondered if Trena or somebody else was setting him up. Finally, Tim McElroy, Ken's younger brother, came to the door. He explained that Trena had been crouched down on the passenger's side of the truck that had just left. She had mistaken the approaching patrol car for a sheriff's car and, believing the local police to be involved in her husband's murder, had fled with one of Ken's sisters. Tim was sure they were on their way to patrol headquarters in St. Joseph.

Boyer returned to Skidmore to assist in the investigation. As the officers interviewed witnesses, a pattern developed:

"Where were you when he was shot?"

"Standing in front of the tavern."

"Did you see anything?"

"No, I didn't see a thing. I heard something, a couple of shots, and then I hit the ground. There were more shots and, by the time I got up, it was all over."

They were lying. It would have been impossible for one or two gun men to stand across the street from the Silverado and fire ten to fifteei shots, put the guns away, and drive out of town without being recognized Yet the answer was always the same: Nobody looked up until the shooting stopped, and nobody saw a thing.

Boyer soon realized that he had become the enemy. Normally, the best people were open and friendly with the patrol, willing to help, ready to discuss the facts of any incident they might know about. Now, they were closed up so tight some of them wouldn't even speak to him.

Several locals were openly hostile. Boyer and Sergeant Barnet worked on tracing the trajectory of the bullets by lining up the holes in the tin hut next to the D & G Tavern with the holes in the front and rear windows of the truck. They were drawing a chalk line across the street when a man walked up and demanded, "Where in the hell were you guys when we needed you?"

Whether he was being charged with incompetence or cowardice Boyer felt he had to respond. He followed the man into the cafe and joined him and several other men at a center table. The others looked away in silence, but the accuser's anger had grown.

"If you guys had caught the son of a bitch and thrown him in jail, he wouldn't be dead now!"

"I understand how you feel," replied Boyer, "but it isn't fair to blame the law for the murder. We've always come when we were called, and we have no choice now but to conduct a full and fair investigation."

The man was still cursing McElroy and insisting that the cops were to-scared of him to do their jobs, when two cops burst into the cafe, apparently worried about Boyer being alone with the townspeople.

In a way, Boyer sympathized with the townspeople who felt the justice had been done in their town for the first time since McElroy started terrorizing the place. The very system that had failed to protect its citizens was now persecuting them for doing what it had failed to do.

Boyer knew lots of reasons why it had reached this point: Many of them involved the failure of the criminal justice system. But the town was partly to blame, too. People wanted to be protected, to have their littl community made safe from their tormentor, but no one wanted to step forward and file charges.

Boyer and his sergeant continued to look for evidence. They followed the trajectories across the street and found two different piles of shell casings. One pile, from a .30-30, lay in the street, a few feet west of the post office door. The second, from a .22-caliber rifle, was ten yards up the hil The bullets from the high-powered rifle had been tumbling by the time they blew out the window in the driver's door, which accounted for the large, ragged holes in the tin building next to the tavern. The low-velocity .22 was an odd choice of murder weapon, particularly when the target was down and across the street and on the other side of a truck window.

Noting the locations, the patrolmen picked up the casings and put them in plastic bags. Boyer retreated to the cool interior of the Plymouth to write his report. Somebody came over and said that the body had been taken to the funeral parlor in Maryville. Boyer put away his notes, told Bryan to work with the sergeant, and headed east out of town toward Maryville, curious to see the remains of Ken McElroy.

Skidmore, a small town in the heart of northwest Missouri farm country, has always been a farming village, off by itself, every aspect of its existence rooted in the process of coaxing substance from the earth. The town's population has hovered around 450 for the past fifty years. During the town's heyday, around the turn of the century, when the railroad ran through the middle of town and carried cattle and grain to Omaha and Kansas City, the population blossomed to about 600; but it faded with the end of World War I, the coming of the depression, and the availability of automobiles.