Ken Rex McElroy: The Town Bully Shot in Front of Dozens — and No One Saw a Thing

Every other file in our season 2 picks ends in a courtroom. This one ends on a main street in daylight, in front of a crowd — and then simply stops, because the last chapter of the Ken Rex McElroy story is a silence that has now held for 45 years.

It is the greatest neighbor-from-hell story in American history, and the most uncomfortable: the case where the town became the suspect.

The bully of Nodaway County

Skidmore, Missouri, in the 1970s was a farm town of a few hundred people — the kind of place where everyone is, functionally, everyone else's neighbor. Ken Rex McElroy was its predator. A hog and cattle rustler by trade, he was accused across two decades of an astonishing catalog: livestock theft, burglaries, arson, shootings, intimidation — and the pursuit of girls barely into their teens. The woman who would become his wife, Trena, was a child when he fixated on her; the courtship, as documented in court records and Harry MacLean's In Broad Daylight, is its own file of horrors.

Here is the number that defines him: McElroy was charged with felonies roughly 21 times. Until 1981, he was convicted zero times.

The method wasn't legal brilliance. It was fear. Witnesses would be visited before trial. McElroy's truck would appear outside their homes at night, engine idling, a rifle rack in the window. By trial day, memories failed. Cases collapsed. And every collapsed case taught Skidmore the same lesson: the law could not protect you from Ken McElroy.

A piece of candy, a shotgun, and the first conviction

In 1980, the machine finally caught on something trivial. A dispute that began with an accusation that one of McElroy's children had taken a piece of candy from the town grocery metastasized, over months, into a campaign against the elderly grocer Ernest "Bo" Bowenkamp. It ended with McElroy shooting the 70-year-old man in the neck. Bowenkamp, incredibly, survived.

For the first time in his life, in June 1981, McElroy was convicted — of assault. And then the system did the thing Skidmore could not forgive: it released him on bond pending appeal. He came back to town, and witnesses reported him at the tavern with a rifle, telling people what he intended to do to the Bowenkamps.

The one time the law worked, it handed him back.

July 10, 1981

On the morning of July 10, dozens of Skidmore-area residents met with the Nodaway County sheriff at the Legion Hall to ask what could be done. The sheriff's advice was procedural: form a neighborhood watch. Don't confront him. Then the sheriff left town.

Word reached the meeting that McElroy was sitting in his pickup outside the D&G Tavern, his wife Trena beside him. The crowd walked up the street.

Moments later, gunfire — from at least two different firearms, per the physical evidence. Ken Rex McElroy died behind the wheel in front of a crowd most accounts put at several dozen people, on the main street of his own town, in broad daylight.

No one called an ambulance.

"No one saw a thing"

What followed is why this case is studied more than four decades later. A killing with that many eyewitnesses should be the easiest case a prosecutor ever files. Instead: local investigators, a grand jury, and the FBI all hit the same wall. Witness after witness said they had ducked, turned away, seen nothing. Trena — the one person who consistently said otherwise, and who publicly accused a local man she said she saw fire — was never corroborated by a single other witness. No one was ever arrested. No one has ever been charged. The man she named denied it and died decades later, still uncharged, and this file follows the record: the killing of Ken Rex McElroy is legally unsolved, and every person ever suspected in it is presumed innocent.

That silence became the case's name: the SundanceTV docuseries No One Saw a Thing (2019), and before it MacLean's Edgar-winning In Broad Daylight — the definitive account of how a town arrives at a morning like that one.

The hardest file on this channel

Understand what this case is not. It is not a story with a hero. A man was shot to death in front of his wife without trial, verdict, or sentence — and if the rule of law means anything, it has to mean something for the worst man in Nodaway County. That is the standard this channel applies to every file, and it doesn't bend here.

But the file also documents, more clearly than any case we've covered, what builds a morning like July 10, 1981: twenty years of a justice system that could not land a single conviction on a man everyone feared, followed by a bond release that sent him home to the people he'd promised to hurt. The killing was the final failure in a case that was nothing but failures — every institutional off-ramp missed, for decades, until the town stopped believing off-ramps existed.

Skidmore kept its secret. It is keeping it still.

Case status as of this writing: unsolved — no one has ever been arrested or charged in the July 10, 1981 killing of Ken Rex McElroy, and any person suspected of involvement is presumed innocent. McElroy's 1981 assault conviction was pending appeal at his death. This article is based on court records, investigative accounts including Harry N. MacLean's "In Broad Daylight," and contemporaneous reporting. Photo: frame from SundanceTV's official trailer for "No One Saw a Thing" (2019).