SYSK’s Fall True Crime Playlist: The Strange Unsolved Murder of Ken McElroy

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1:30the year with confidence. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The murder of Ken McElroy is an example of the kind of small town justice so well served that it seems like it's got to be a movie. And it was a movie, not a very good one, starring Brian Dennehy. But the actual crime came first, and it was true. Hence, it's inclusion on this playlist. At any rate, the town of Skidmore, Missouri doesn't play around if they're pushed too far. You can bet on that.

2:06Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

2:16Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too, pushing us around as usual for this episode of Stuff You Should Know. our second episode for us of the new year. And why didn't we save like a pretty happy one to get going with? I don't know. I don't know. Probably because we knew we were going to be so bummed out after Jonestown, we needed something that was a pick-me-up. And what's crazy is this story actually is a pick-me-up compared to Jonestown. Oh boy, that's tough to parse out. So thank you to Livia for diving into this tough story. And also, this episode, we want to issue a very big trigger warning because in it we are going to talk about a very bad man and some of the bad things he did, which included sexual assault and some of which were with minors.

3:15So trigger warning. Know that going in. There's no way around it. there's very few stories that have like a clear-cut villain and but this is one of them and the villain who's also the center of our story the person at the center of our story is a man named Ken Rex McElroy yeah which I mean all you need to hear is that name really I think and it kind of just puts it puts a weird chill down your spine that you can't quite identify yet Yeah, this is a story that you may have heard of before. There is no shortage of content about Ken McElroy. There was a book written in 1988 by Harry McClain, a crime writer called In Broad Daylight.

4:01You know what's coming. Colon, a murder in Skidmore, Missouri. There was a documentary just a few years ago in 2019 called, a documentary series actually called No One Saw a Thing, of which I watched the first episode. How is it? I didn't get a chance to yet. Well, we'll talk about it. It's okay. It's got like a 7 plus on IMDb. That's really saying something. Yeah. Chuck gives it a 6 minus. Okay. Still, it's not too bad. It's okay. I mean, not a ton of light was shed, so maybe it's because if I went into it blind, it might have been a little better. Gotcha. But there's also a 1991 TV movie starring Brian Dennehy and Marsha Gay Harden, which I actually watched a very bad YouTube version of it, mostly.

4:49I scrubbed through a little bit of it, but it's actually not terrible for a 1991 TV movie, largely because Brian Dennehy is perfectly cast and awesome. Yeah, he really is. I don't understand why they changed the names. Did Harry McLean change the names for In Broad Daylight? I didn't read the book, but I don't know. Sometimes they do that with TV movies. Well, regardless. Protect the Innocent, you know. I scrubbed ahead to the last probably 30 minutes, saw the good stuff. That's kind of all you need. And you're right. Brian Dennehy was great in it. And Marcia Gay Harden did a great job at the really important point.

5:29Yeah, she's a tremendous actor, as was Dennehy, RIP Brian Dennehy. So, Ken Rex McElroy, he was from Skidmore, Missouri. That's where this story takes place. He was the 15th of 16 kids, from what I saw. He was born in 1934. And you can be the wealthiest person in your state and have 16 kids, and you're still going to be hardscrabble. His dad wasn't the wealthiest person in the state. So, the McElroys grew up kind of doing what they could to make their own way. And Ken himself, I saw either he made it up to age 15 in school, which is a surprising statistic to me after I know a little more about him.

6:14I also saw that he was illiterate, which I would definitely believe more than the fact that he made it up to age 15 in school. Either way, at a young age, he started taking up crime. You get the impression not just out of necessity, but also probably out of a certain amount of pleasure. Yeah, and this was, to frame it, in the 1940s. He was born in 34. So by the time he was criming, it was in the 1940s. One thing we should mention is, and I'm glad Livia dug this up, and this is no way excusing any of his behaviors, but when he was 18 years old, he was working construction, and there was an accident where some very heavy cribbing fell about 30 feet and hit him in the head.

7:01He had a construction helmet, but it cut his scalp, so it clearly provided minimal protection. And he said that he had a steel plate implanted and had blackout episodes and pain throughout the rest of his life. And it should be noted that one common denominator in many cases of sick people who do awful things is head injury when they're younger. Uh-huh. So that very well may have been the case. Again, not excusing anything he did, but we're trying to paint a full picture here. He was like a modern-day Phineas Gage. Yeah, exactly. And like you said, it seemed like he enjoyed criming from a young age.

7:42He was a pretty – I mean, this is before the accident even. He was a pretty disturbed young man. Yeah. Safe to say? Yeah, I would say I would definitely agree with that. But he did do stuff. He wasn't just like a layabout. Like he was a kind of an industrious criminal. He also trained hunting dogs. He was a dealer of antiques, a buyer and seller. Mm-hmm.

8:42He could support. He ended up having at least 10 kids, could support them all. He had a lot of money and all of it essentially was from crime because he had a tiny little farm and he wasn't making much, if any, money off of that. He was making it from from stealing. Yeah. And when we say he had a lot of money, it's not the kind of it's not wealth. He had the kind of money for a criminal in the 1960s in Skidmore, Missouri. He had Skidmore money. Yeah, which is to say, oh, I hope there's no Skidmoreans. There's a couple hundred of them. Well, listening to us? Yeah, I just assume the whole town listens to us anyway.

9:27They're probably so sick of the story. But he's the kind of money guy that, like, he always had, like, a few grand in his pocket with a big fat money roll. Yeah. Like, that kind of dude. He was a big guy. He was, like, 6 '2 or 6 '3. Had this sort of, here again, kind of like Jim Jones, men of the time, had this jet black hair and these huge sideburns. He was imposing, but he picked on people smaller than him. He picked on women and children and young girls and took advantage of all these people. And he was arrested and charged at least 21 times without being convicted. And if you're thinking, like, how in the world does that happen when, like, people know he's committing crimes?

10:12He's getting arrested of committing these crimes. is because he had a very, I guess, good, slippery attorney named Richard Gene McFadden, who was supposedly a mob attorney in Kansas City. And upon their first meeting, he was like, you can't afford me. And McElroy said, let me be the judge of that, pulled out that big fat roll from his pocket, threw it on the desk, and McFadden was delighted to have him as a cash-paying client who listened to him. Yeah. So McFadden was so good at getting him off. Well, actually, they worked together. McFadden was good at getting him off, but he probably wouldn't have been nearly as successful if Ken McElroy hadn't been also a very active participant in getting himself off.

11:07Yeah. He so Gene McFadden would get delay after delay, all these procedural delays to just really put as much time between Ken McElroy's arrest and the actual trial date as possible. And then Ken McElroy would get busy intimidating witnesses. And if it got closer and closer to trial and a jury was impaneled, he would intimidate the jurors. he would threaten their lives. He would threaten the lives of their families. He would threaten to burn their houses down. He would threaten to kill them. He would threaten not just with words. He would intimidate them by parking in their driveways, by brandishing guns at them, by shooting guns in the air sometimes in the night outside of their house.

11:53Like, just, it would take a couple of these. For the average person to be like, I can't. This is not what I've signed up for. This guy is scaring me to death. Some people lasted longer than others, but most of the time, almost in every single time, eventually he would intimidate enough of the witnesses that the cases would fall apart. And that is how he became what Crime Library referred to as this Teflon coated hick. Yeah, absolutely. Like, he shot a guy in the stomach in July of 1976, a guy named Romaine Henry. And yes, you heard me right. He's a farmer. Romaine spelled exactly like the lettuce.

12:36Was he named after the lettuce? Because was he a lettuce farmer? I don't know. Did they farm lettuce in Missouri? They did in Yuma, Arizona. I think just for the sake of this story, yes. He absolutely was a Romaine lettuce farmer. His parents raised him to be one. and named him after that lettuce. So he was shot in the stomach with a shotgun, was not killed, and got away with it. He, you know, in the documentary, like Romaine Henry pulls up his shirt and he's like, here's where he shot me. And court witnesses, he, you know, like you said earlier, he was, one of his side hustles was raising and training and selling hunting dogs.

13:16And he was well liked by some people, like the people that he dealt with, with these hunting dogs. Other crimey type people liked him. So he had this stable of dudes that would go to court and testify on his behalf and provide him with alibis and say, like, he didn't shoot him in the stomach. He was with us at the time of the shooting. So he got away with shooting Romaine Henry in the stomach with a shotgun even. Yeah. And just to make sure that you understand what kind of person Ken McElroy was, the reason that he shot Romaine Henry in the stomach was because Romaine Henry approached him and said, hey, will you please not shoot pheasants out of season on my land anymore?

13:56And Ken McElroy responded by shooting him in the stomach because he told him basically to stop shooting birds illegally on that man's land. Yeah. It didn't matter who you were. There was a cop even, a highway patrolman named Richard Stratton. Hashtag hero. Yeah. Who had, you know, plenty of run-ins, obviously, with McElroy, because like you said, this This is a town of, you know, a few hundred people at the time, I think. Yep. Maybe like four or five hundred. Yeah. So everyone knew this guy, including obviously Richard Stratton. And he had a bunch of run ins. And so McElroy started threatening his home and his family.

14:35One day, his wife, Margaret, was on her way to church. She got in the car to go to church and McElroy walks up to the car, puts a shotgun in her face. And he did that to cops wives. He did it to judges. The county magistrate Montgomery Wilson was so fearful that he wouldn't take these cases. He would have them move to other nearby counties. Like he was – people called him the town bully, but that is the kindest way to describe him because he was also a child molester and rapist. Yeah, I say we take a break and then come back and talk about this. All right. We'll be right back.

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17:59All right. So when we left off, I leveled a pretty serious allegation, which is absolutely true that Ken McElroy was a child molester and rapist. And this is 100 % true. The story gets very twisted and convoluted here, but it's kind of hard to follow along because he was married and then had a girlfriend and a wife at the same time. But then another one and then another one would come in and they're overlapping and he's having kids with most of them. And it gets very confusing. But like you said, he fathered 10 kids. A lot of them were with underage girls. He got married for the first time in 1952 when he was 18 and his wife Olita was 16.

18:42And it's not like he calmed down or anything. He would pray and stalk and groom girls as young as 12 and 13 years old, one of which was a 15-year-old named Sharon. And it was sort of a familiar pattern where he would groom and stalk these young teenage girls. he would abuse them, he would rape them, and threaten them with death and somehow end up with them. And not somehow, through coercion and threatened intimidation. Yeah, and he would get, so he would be married already. And like you said, he'd be stalking and raping and abusing some other younger girl at the same time. And then inevitably, when charges were about to be brought against him because of his rape and abuse and, in one case, shooting of one of the girls, he would convince them to marry him.

19:44He would go to his wife and be like, we have to get divorced because I got to marry this girl so that she won't testify against me. And he would be successful. And if they refused at first, he would use those same tactics that he used to intimidate witnesses to intimidate these girls into marrying him and becoming his wife. And then astoundingly, he would go find a younger girl and start the whole thing over again. Like this guy got married more than once to keep the girl that he was raping from testifying against him. Because back then, a wife couldn't testify against her husband. Yeah. So, I mean, we don't need to get into every single one of those details, but suffice it to say this was happening over and over and over remarkably.

20:30Sometimes, you know, obviously these these girls' parents would put up a fight and get involved and he would intimidate and threaten them to the point where at one point he and this is the wife he had sort of when the final incident went down. Trina McLeod, who he got together with, this is just so sick. When she was 12 or 13 years old, was like picking her up from the school bus. Yeah. And school officials were like, something's going on with this creep. No one ever did anything. Got her pregnant at 14 and moved her into the house he shared with the previous young girl that he was with. So he had a son with Trina in 1973 and a couple of others with this young girl, Alice, and went to Trina's parents' house.

21:21They obviously are saying, like, you can't keep our daughter like this. And he held them back at gunpoint, brought the girls back, continued to abuse them, and then eventually would burn down the house of Trina McLeod's parents and shoot and kill their family dog. Yeah. Is he a bad enough guy at this point, dear listener? Apparently, somehow Trina ended up being treated by a doctor somewhere or other, and the doctor got the story out of her, and the doctor was like, wait, can you tell me all that one more time? And I guess she did, and the doctor called the authorities, And this time, McElroy was in a lot of trouble.

22:04And they took Trina to child services and took her to a foster family. And he started stalking the foster family and stalking their biological kids and threatening to rape and kill them. And that foster family would not give in. They were protecting Trina. Up until the time, Trina's like, all right, I forgive you. I'm going back to you. And I'm sure that foster family is like, oh, my God, I can't believe. I can't believe this. Like, you can't make that decision. And she did. And he got away with it yet again because he got her to marry him to keep her from being able to even testify against her.

22:42And Gene McFadden, in a show of just how sleazy lawyers can be, served as the witness to their wedding. I think she was 15 at the time. And at the end of the ceremony, got her to sign a document saying all the things she told that doctor were lies. And they lived as husband and wife. That's right. So this was his final wife, young Trina McLeod. He apparently got her parents because, you know, you needed to have permission to get married at that age. And her parents acquiesced because he threatened to burn down the new house that they either bought or built. And this is where I get to the documentary.

23:23Like a lot of it should be taken with a grain of salt because some of the local townspeople they interview are clearly sort of just maybe don't have all the facts straight because someone in that documentary said that he burned their house down again and shot their other new dog. And I didn't see anywhere else where that happened. I think it was just a threat or whatever. He killed a monkey, too. Right. That's what I heard. That's a good deal with the documentary. So this is going on. He's terrorizing this town. Everyone knows he's an awful guy. He's just, it can't be overstated what an awful creep that he is.

24:03And, I mean, creep isn't even, that's way too soft to describe a guy like this. Finally, in 1980, he sort of pushes his luck, as Livvy would call this section. Things kind of come a little bit to a head. There are these local shopkeepers. They ran the B &B grocery there in town. Lois and Ernest Bo Bowenkamp. And they, apparently his kids would go in there and shoplift all the time, his very young kids. And one of his young daughters, her name was Tanya, I'm not sure how that's pronounced, T-U-N-I-A, Tanya, was like four years old and was stealing candy from the store. They confronted this young girl.

24:47And, of course, McElroy wouldn't stand for that. So he starts up with his usual routine, parking outside their store, staring them down, brandishing a shotgun and carrying it around with them. And in July of that year, McElroy approached Bo Bowenkamp, the grocery store owner. They had a brief conversation and he shot the 70-year-old man through the neck, again, not killing him, but wounding him. Yeah. And so Bo and Lois Bowenkamp were like beloved in the town. Oh, yeah. This is a big deal. He had assaulted a beloved elderly shopkeeper, grocer, who fed the town. And even McElroy knew it was a big deal.

25:34He fled. He tried to get out of the state. And you mentioned Richard Stratton, the Missouri Highway Patrolman who had run-ins over and over and over again with Ken McElroy. Well, he was out on patrol that night when that happened, or that day, I guess. And he got the all-points bulletin or the beyond-the-lookout for Ken McElroy. And at the time, the sheriff's office, the rest of the highway patrol, they were setting up roadblocks, looking on every highway that they could for Ken McElroy. But Richard Stratton said, no, I know this guy. He's got a police scanner. He knows exactly where they are.

26:10He's going to take every back road he can find to get to Kansas and get out of the state and lay low for a while. And Richard Stratton said, I know he's going to have to go through Fillmore, Missouri to get to Kansas. And I'm going to stake that place out. And in short order, Ken McElroy came driving through in his Silverado with Trina in the seat. And he ended up getting busted by Richard Stratton. He was caught. And this, again, even he knew this one was a big deal. Yeah, yeah. He finally was taken into custody. This time he, I don't know if he just had an instinct that there was probably no way out of this one.

26:48But he hired his trustee lawyer again, McFadden, who said, all right, let's move this thing to Harrison County, first of all. And here's our plan, is we're going to say that this was a dispute with Bowenkamp. this sort of argument you guys had over your daughter stealing, and that he pulled a knife on you, and that it was self-defense. And you were forced to do that. He was still using his, you know, typical playbook intimidation tactics on the Bowen camps, but they refused to budge, which was great. So that was their defense. We should also mention, while this was going on, he continues his reign of terror on the town.

27:27There was a Christian church whose minister was Tim Warren. And if you don't know anything about sort of small town, actually probably even larger town ministers, part of their job, they don't just get up there and preach on Sundays, is they have to minister to the congregation and their community. So they will do things. Preachers and ministers will, like, come and check in on people if they're sick. They will visit people in the hospital if they're injured or, you know, or having some troubles. And this is what Tim Warren was doing when he checked in on or had planned to check in on Lois Bowenkamp.

28:03And he got a call saying, don't go see old man Bowenkamp. It's going to be bad news for you. He did it undercover by borrowing a friend's truck and going in that. But got a call, was like, hey, I knew that that was you there in your friend's truck. Nice try. And if you do this again, I'm going to rape and murder your wife. Yeah. So the reverend, the local reverend, Reverend Lovejoy, is just told that his wife is going to be raped and murdered, right? That's right. I didn't get what the point of that was. Did you? I didn't see any interpretation of that. I just saw it explained or described. I never saw it explained.