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The Town That Got Away With Murder and Other Largely Forgotten Historic Events

Khalid Elhassan November 23, 2019 33 min

In 1981, the people of tiny Skidmore, Missouri (pop. 441 then, about 280 now) got together to figure out what to do with a town bully who had terrorized them for years. What they decided to do and did was to meet him out of lethal justice, in public, in front of dozens of witnesses. And they got away with it. That is just one of many fascinating tales from history that created a stir for a while, only to fade from memory soon thereafter. Following are forty things about fascinating stories such as that of Skidmore’s vigilantes, that were big news for a time, but are now all but forgotten by most.

40. The Terror of Skidmore

Ken Rex McElroy of tiny Skidmore, Missouri, was bad news from early on. Born in 1934, the 15^th of 16 children of poor sharecroppers, McElroy fell off a hay wagon in his parents’ farm when he was a child, and cracked his skull bad enough to require a steel plate implanted in his head. Many attributed the godawful character he became to that childhood accident.

Whatever the reason, McElroy became a delinquent before reaching puberty – a bad kid who grew into an evil man. He got started small with petty thefts, graduated to livestock rustling, and soon escalated into violent assaults and vicious mayhem. He was helped by an intimidating appearance: the adult McElroy stood at over six feet, weighed in at 270 pounds, had bushy eyebrows and bushier sideburns, and heavily lidded, crazy-looking, cold steel-blue eyes that sent shivers down spines.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.