BROADCASTS.com

If you\u2019ve never experienced small town life, it\u2019ll be almost impossible to comprehend the now-infamous tale of tiny Skidmore Missouri and the day nearly forty years ago that forever changed it.\xa0\xa0That day \u2013 July 10, 1981 \u2013 was the day 47 year-old Ken Rex McElroy was gunned down in cold blood, in a hail of gunfire, in broad daylight while sitting in his truck alongside his wife, on Skidmore\u2019s Main Street, with several dozen of its citizens surrounding the truck.\xa0\xa0And yet, almost four decades after the fact, not a soul has admitted to seeing what happened.\xa0\xa0How does this happen?\xa0 How does an entire town close ranks and keep a secret of such an unbelievably deadly act for so long?\xa0\xa0The truth hides in the cracks of a story so wild it begs credulity.\xa0\xa0It is a story of the sort of raw brutality and menace usually only found in cheap novels and overly broad morality plays.\xa0 It turns out that Bad Guys who are Bad Guys just for the sake of being Bad Guys do exist in this world.\xa0 And maybe the worst of the worst was the victim in this story \u2013 Ken Rex McElroy himself.\xa0\xa0\u201cTown Bully\u201d is the name usually tagged on McElroy \u2013 but he was so much more than that.\xa0 An amazing force of dark nature, his subsistence \u2013 in fact, his entire existence - consisted of appropriation of that which he did not own, \xa0rape, intimidation, destruction of property and the use of a shotgun against people he decided, at his whim, were his enemies.\xa0\xa0Those enemies included not just the law, but parents of the 12 year-old girl he declared belonged to him, when those parents objected to his announced plans to marry their daughter.\xa0 Or the owner of the local general store, whose wife had asked the simple question \u201chave you paid for that?\u201d when she saw one of McElroy\u2019s children with a piece of candy from the candy counter.\xa0\xa0Add to all of this the complete absence of any police, and a County Sheriff\u2019s office that was so intimidated by McElroy it completely abandoned the town of Skidmore to an ever-present sense of dread, waiting for the bully\u2019s next outrage.\xa0\xa0Join Melissa as she recounts McElroy\u2019s life and the years and the days leading up to that incredible moment on an otherwise peaceful summer day on Main Street, when an entire community seems to have decided to revert to 19th Century wild-west justice and end the dread of its own volition \u2013 and the ramifications of that decision on the soul of Skidmore that will last forever.\xa0\xa0You can learn more about the McElroy case in two excellent books Melissa refers to in this episode: In Broad Daylight by Harry N. MacLean (which was also made into a film starring Brian Dennehy); and Judgement Day by Bob Lancaster.\xa0 Melissa also recommends the six-part documentary series No One Saw a Thing, now available on Amazon Prime.