Ken McElroy was a bully, a stalker, a drive-by shooter, a livestock rustler, a wife-beater and a pedophile. He dominated the town of Skidmore like a gangster. To know him was to fear him. But it was not the way Ken McElroy lived that put Skidmore on the map. It was the way he died.
He was born in 1934, the fifteenth of sixteen children. He grew up in the Skidmore area, where he dropped out of school without mastering the ability to read or write.
As a teenager, McElroy spent many nights tramping through the woods with his buddies and his hunting dogs searching for hapless raccoons. His passion for coon-hunting worked well for a man who felt most comfortable lurking in the dark of the night. It was an inclination that served him well in his other nocturnal occupation—stealing from his neighbors.
He wasn’t particular about what he stole—from gasoline to antiques—if he could fence it, he took it. Livestock theft, though, was his specialty. There was no branding requirement in the state of Missouri, making it easy for McElroy to bribe auction houses to sell his ill-gotten goods. After his successful plunders, he often taunted his victims by flashing wads of money he’d obtained at their expense. He loved to visit the D&G tavern and laugh in their faces as they cried in their beer.
McElroy was just 18 when he married his first teenage bride, Oleta. The couple moved to Denver for a short time. McElroy found no financial success in Colorado—not in legitimate work or in criminal activity. They moved back to northwest Missouri.
McElroy strayed from the marital bed early and often. He liked to spend time on junior high school grounds assessing the “young meat” at play. He wooed and bedded many young girls from poor, uneducated families. If one of his victims got pregnant, he used a combination of payoffs and threats to discourage the girls’ parents from pressing criminal charges.
After a few years, when Oleta was no longer the sweet young thing he wed, he tossed her out of his home, divorced her and went on the hunt for another wife.
Using his rough, hillbilly good looks and cheap tokens of affection, he snared 15-year-old Sharon. His fidelity to his marriage vows did not last long. As soon as Sharon was pregnant, he wooed 13-year-old Sally. The young girl at first refused his sexual advances, but when McElroy threatened to kill her father, Sally acquiesced and moved in with Ken and Sharon.
By 1964, McElroy was the father of seven children, courtesy of Sharon and Sally. With both women caring for newborns, and Sharon pregnant again, McElroy’s eye roamed to another teenager, 15-year-old Alice Wood from St. Joseph, Missouri.
After years of getting away with his outrageous thieving behavior, McElroy faced his first livestock rustling charge in 1972. His Kansas City lawyer Richard McFadin got the case dismissed. It was the first time McElroy teamed up with McFadin. But it would not be the last.