This show covers topics that are bizarre, unpleasant, sometimes even evil and very often inexplicable.
Today, the story of a murder in small town Missouri that people couldn’t explain, or, by some accounts, they just wouldn’t.
This was in Skidmore, in the northwest corner of Missouri.
This small town had a big problem, and his name was Ken McElroy.
He was known for taking anything he wanted, intimidating anyone he wanted, and retaliating against anyone who spoke out against him.
And when he ended up in trouble with the law, which was often, his hunting buddies seemed to always pop up and provide him with an alibi, or his lawyer found ways to drag out the case.
Once he married a teenager to stop her from testifying against him for burning down her parents’ house (!)
In 1981, McElroy was actually convicted, of assault, for shooting a local shopkeeper.
But his prison sentence had been put on hold while his lawyer appealed the case.
When he bragged in town about how he was going to finish his victim off, frustrated locals held a meeting to discuss the Skidmore bully, the man who terrorized everyone in his path and got away with it.
McElroy got word of the meeting and pointedly parked his truck right outside before heading to a nearby tavern with his wife.
The locals walked over to the tavern; they surrounded the McElroys, who soon headed outside to their truck.
Soon after, the sound of shots. From multiple guns.
McElroy’s wife screamed; someone opened the door on her side of the truck and led her away.
Ken McElroy had been shot and killed in broad daylight.
But while police concluded there were something close to 40 people in the street at the time of the shooting, no one had anything to say about it.
They all said the same thing: someone started shooting so I took cover, and no, I didn’t see who it was.
Police tried to get someone, anyone to talk; the FBI even showed up.
They got nothing.
Eventually the feds left Skidmore, and the local prosecutor said he couldn’t bring any charges in the murder.
The killing has been the subject of books and movies, as well as countless news stories and a few true crime podcasts.
But not once has a local come forward to say what they may have seen – or done.
Everybody who was there, except for Ken McElroy, just walked away.
The National Gallery Singapore is exhibiting a work called “Still Life” by Suzann Victor.
It’s a wall on which the artist has mounted a bunch of eggplants (it’s a commentary on the passage of time, deterioration, and feminism.)
And people can’t stop touching the eggplants!
The gallery had to even install signs asking people to please not pull the eggplants off the wall and walk off with them.
3 decades on, who killed Skidmore town bully still secret (McClatchyDC via Archive.org)
Visitors Can’t Keep Their Hands Off This Eggplant Artwork (Hyperallergic)