It's been 18 years since Colorado author Harry MacLean's
book In Broad Daylight detailed the murder of a town bully as scores of people looked on, 18 years since the book hit The New York Times bestseller list, ultimately selling more than 2 million copies.

So why would readers want to revisit the story, so many
years later?

Two good reasons: It's a gripping story, painstakingly detailed by MacLean. And the new edition, just out from St. Martin's to mark the 25th anniversary of the killing, offers an epilogue from the author that comes as close to solving the crime as anyone may ever come.

The new edition of the Edgar-winning title is out to the tune of 100,000 copies. Get your hands on one of them for a page-turning read.

– Patti Thorn, Book Editor for the Rocky Mountain News

 

Click to Purchase at Barnes & Noble

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25th Anniversary Edition
Includes a complete update from the author with new
information on the killing and the investigation.

"In Broad Daylight"
A Murder In Skidmore, Missouri

From Edgar Award Winner
Harry N. MacLean

Ken Rex McElroy was an illiterate hog farmer who terrorized northwest Missouri for over twenty years. He robbed, raped, burned and assaulted almost at will. The residents were scared of him; the law mainly stayed out of his way. Referred to by outsiders as the “town bully,” McElroy lived by the rule “No Witness, No Case.” When prosecutors finally charged him, and when witnesses made it to court, the jurors were scared to convict him. He made a joke of the entire criminal justice system.

McElroy lived on a farm outside Skidmore with his wife, another woman, and the eight children they had borne him. His reign of terror came to an abrupt halt in July 1981. A year earlier he had become pathologically inflamed over the allegation by a grocer’s wife that one of his daughters had not paid for a jawbreaker. He terrorized the grocer and his wife for months, until one day he drove up to the loading dock behind the store and shot the grocer’s husband at point blank range with a shotgun. He was eventually tried and convicted of assault in a neighboring county, but the law turned him loose, and he returned to the small town with rifle in hand. In the bar he threatened to shoot one of the witnesses, a town elder, and several bystanders swore out a complain to have his bail revoked.

On the day of the bail hearing, seventy-five men met in town to form a protective guard to get the witnesses to the courthouse. McElroy heard of the meeting, and drove into town. He settled in the bar with his wife, Trena, whom he had raped when she was twelve. The men streamed down the street and into the bar. When he left a few minutes later, six-pack in hand, over fifty men streamed out behind him. As he sat in his Silverado pick-up, casually lighting a cigarette, one man in the street reached into the back of his pick-up and pulled out a 30.30. Another man, close by, pulled a .22 from the rack in the rear window of his truck. The high-powered rifle opened first, shattering the window and puncturing McElroy’s skull. The .22 followed.

Over fifty men saw the killing. Trena, who was pulled from the truck screaming, identified the man on the high-powered rifle as a local rancher. County and state grand juries investigated the killing, but no indictments were ever issued. Finally, the FBI moved in. A federal grand jury was convened in Kansas City. The farmers all swore under oath that they had seen nothing that morning. The grand jury disbanded without an indictment.

The book tells the story of McElroy’s reign of terror, the killing itself, and the cover-up. It lays out the deep flaws in the Missouri criminal justice system that allowed McElroy to run free for nearly a quarter of a century. It puts the reader in the place of the town and raises the fundamental question of the right of citizens to take the law into their own hands when the law has failed to protect them.

The local prosecutor, who first convicted McElroy of the assault, always said he would prosecute the killers if the evidence ever came to him. Twenty-five years passed, and nothing has happened. In 2006 the prosecutor released the investigative files to the author, who also interviewed many of the witnesses in preparation of the publication of a twenty-five year anniversary edition. This edition, released by St. Martin’s Press in 2007, contains new material on the investigation and the killing.

The man widely believed to be the shooter on the high-powered rifle died of alcoholism in 2009 at the age of 53.