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He scared this poor community half to death.

During that time, to protect myself and my family,

I carried a gun.

So he brought out the worst in me.

(gunshots)

(Mark Reinig) No one talked, everyone stuck together.

That's what small towns do. They just band together.

(woman) They planned that murder.

They had a town meeting, they all sat down together,

they decided that they were gonna do it, and they done it.

It was my estimation that we did not have

sufficient evidence to go to trial.

(Steve Booher) After he decided not to press charges,

pretty much everybody

in Skidmore thought it's finally over.

(man 2) This is a town full of vigilantes.

Everybody else suffers, but they all carry on.

(Morley Safer) Aren't you now concerned that

now that he's gone,

this town has a dirty little secret,

and that, in it's own way,

will have as bad an effect on the town as McElroy did?

(man 3) The people who were involved in this

and the people who covered it up

think they may have been doing a good thing for the community.

They didn't realize that their children

are going to be negatively effected by this.

(Reinig) I think I counted nine mysterious deaths

since Ken Rex died.

(man 3) It perpetuates itself.

When's the next type of situation gonna occur

when the community turns on an individual?

(theme music playing)

-(man) Rolling. -(Jim Reich) All right, here we go.

I'll wait for the car to go by.

-Hair looks OK? -(man) Ah, yeah.

OK, here we go. Three, two and one...

It's one of America's most puzzling murders

and it happened 20 years ago today.

Hi, I'm NBC 8's Jim Reich. I'm in Skidmore, Missouri.

It's where they killed the town bully

right in front of this bar.

(Reich) All right, so we're rolling.

-Ah, first of all, thanks for taking your time. -Sure.

(Reich) And, uh, this is weird, isn't it?

I mean, the way I see it, and especially goin' over there,

I mean, you can see all the books

and all the movies, but this is pretty weird.

It's an unusual case

and it's gotten lots of attention in 20 years.

(Booher) I thought, for all intents and purposes,

it was over.

They shot Ken Rex, he's dead.

It's pretty clear nobody's gonna be apprehended for that crime.

People get away with crimes all the time.

I mean, we would like to say that's not true,

some of them get more attention and some of them get less,

but we have murders and other crimes

that occur all the time, for which there is no prosecution.

Unfortunately, in the United States,

we have cases like that all the time,

we have cases in this office like that all the time.

(Booher) Skidmore was trying to move past it...

but it seems like every anniversary,

there'll be journalists who'll come into town

dredging all this stuff up again.

(Reich) This town is so small.

You know, there's that phrase, "small town gossip".

During the past 20 years, uh, any validity to that?

Well, I'm sure there's been a few discussions,

but for the most part, people never talk about it.

(Cheryl Bowenkamp) The newspaper people and TV people, you can say,

"I don't want to talk to you, go away and leave me alone."

Him, you couldn't do that to.

So yeah, we had put up with all those,

but we didn't have to put up with him.

I think they'd been victimized by McElroy

for such a long time, then you had a lot of outsiders

trying to find out what happened.

You know, it was a bonding thing.

It's us against them now.

It used to be us against him.

And now it's us against everybody else.

(male reporter) McElroy's wife, Trena, has remarried,

and is living somewhere in the Ozarks,

still fearful of setting foot in Skidmore.

(Richard McFadin) See, the only thing I ever get out of this,

is a do get some free publicity.

I've gotten a lot of business through McElroy.

I've had a lot of people that have hired me to represent 'em.

I thought it would die down--

about a year, year and a half,

I wouldn't hear anymore about it.

Every year, it gets bigger and bigger.

(man) I know, all the people here, they want to forgotten,

put it behind them, because it wasn't a good time

for Skidmore and their citizens.

(Britt Small) The shooting-- the McElroy shooting--

definitely shriveled the town up.

It just sucked it right up.

People stayed in their houses.

People who socialized prior to that,

stopped socializing.

And that really was the bad thing

in the long run.

It just was so terrible,

it ruined the town.

And it was a shame. You know, it's a shame.

There are people who couldn't wait to get out,

people left town.

(eerie music)

(Booher) The next thing you know, the bank closes,

the grocery store goes out of business,

and the town just starts to dry up

and evaporate from the face of the earth.

This is where the old schoolhouse used to sit.

But it's gone now. Everything's gone.

I don't think Skidmore would've come down like that

if it hadn't been for that killing.

(Reinig) Since Ken's death, we've had a lot of tragedies

in the town that is unusual for a rural American town.

We're talking murders, suicides, deaths.

(Diane Fanning) Here's a crime that hasn't been solved for decades.

No resolution, no closure.

So how do you cope with that?

It's there, it's constant,

it's part of your fabric of life.

Does that compel more violent acts to occur?

Maybe it does.

On my first visit to Skidmore,

I was confronted with the trauma

of the murder of Ken Rex McElroy immediately.

I went in there to buy lunch

and I was greeted by a waitress who told me

that I wasn't welcome there and I would not get any service there.

From there, I went up to a convenience store,

and as I got to the door,

there was a man with his arms folded and said,

"No, you can't come in here."

Skidmore tends to view any outsiders

as someone coming in

to make an attack on their town.

But I did talk to one woman who said to me,

"Go ahead and write about McElroy and his murder,

but while you do that,

look at the whole picture."

The thing that really got to me

was the current crimes.

There was something wrong here.

(Booher) That's the inexplicable thing about it.

If Ken Rex was such a problem,

then why didn't the town live happily ever after?

Why didn't the violence end with his death?

Because it hasn't ended.

Horror and mayhem have visited that town

over and over and over again.

(Ben Espey) Skidmore wasn't on the map for anything

until Ken Rex McElroy.

And now, any little bitty thing that happens,

okay, it's Ken Rex McElroy and then this happens;

it's Ken Rex McElroy then this and this and this has happened.

But I think the outside community that looks in on Skidmore,

they would want you to think that, "Oh, Skidmore's this really bad place."

Well, it's not.

There's a few people that's made it look bad.

My name is Ben Espey.

I was the Nodaway County Sheriff for 16 years.

Back in the time Ken Rex McElroy was operating,

I had a different occupation.

I grew up on a farm.

Then when farming got really tough

in the early '80's around here,

I went to the Nodaway County Sheriff's Department.

People will tell you this and it's true.

If you get law enforcement in your blood,

you can't get it out.

(dramatic music)

In the time that I was the sheriff,

methamphetamine was beginning to become pretty popular.

Back then,

prosecuting attorney was David Baird.

He was prosecuting attorney for years and years

in Nodaway County.

Took a lot of cases in front of him.

In the early 2000's, methamphetamine was

by far the big issue.

The recipe's not that hard.

We arrested a guy who was walking around Walmart

with his shopping list he'd downloaded off the Internet

of what he needed to make meth.

(Espey) On October 16th, the year 2000,

we got a call at the sheriff's department

that there was a female layin' in the backyard

that was non-responsive.

I, myself, went and when we got there,

there was a young female layin' in the grass

on the backside of the house.

It looked like she was just beaten to death.

There was no...

life left in this girl.

(female reporter) Wendy Gillenwater left this house on 406 Elm

for the last time Monday.

The house remains quiet now, as the sheriff continues

its investigation.

Because no one knows exactly what happened inside this house,

friends and family are just going to have to wait

to see what the autopsy will bring them.

Wendy Gillenwater was a small town girl in Skidmore

who grew up in the shadow

of the murder of Ken McElroy.

She was the next generation,

and so was her husband, Greg Dragoo.

(Hayes) I really didn't know much about the girl,

just knew that she was involved with wild parties,

and involved with drugs, heavy.

And that's about all I knew about her.

She was living about six blocks from me.

And, of course, everybody lives six blocks from me

in this town.

She was killed four houses down.

Domestic.

(Reinig) We had police and ambulance come in,

and I heard that this young lady Wendy

had been killed.

And I'm going, "What is going on here?"

And it turns out it was the man

that was living with her.

(Kirby Goslee) He'd been abusing her for a long time.

You live with an abusive man long enough,

he will kill ya.

(Fanning) Greg brutalized her for years.

From early in their marriage,

she was beaten up by him regularly.

On the final day of her life,

he started beating her

and he just wouldn't stop.

(Reinig) A story I heard was it was methamphetamine rage.

He was high to the point,

he didn't just beat her up,

he pulverized her.

(Fanning) He broke eight ribs in one side

and six ribs in the other.

There were lacerations all over her face,

all over her arms.

He was merciless.

(Charlie Puckett) There was some mad blood there, over something--

And I don't remember what it was, but...

He beat her to death with a flashlight.

(Fanning) He dragged her boy

out of the house, down the stairs,

threw her in the yard,

and he saw a neighbor next door, looking on.

That didn't stop him.

Nobody would stop

and help Wendy Gillenwater

when she was laying, bleeding in her front yard.

That shows that there's a lot of people in that town

that don't care.

(Espey) When she was gasping for her last breath of air,

he took a bottle of Dawn dishwater soap

and poured it down her mouth.

It was a horrific scene.

(female reporter) A preliminary coroner's report said

Gillenwater died of severe trauma

to her chest and stomach.

Been the coroner for four years,

and we haven't dealt with one of these before.

As a policeman,

we've had some experience in this.

(female reporter)

No.

Wendy's mother was only able to identify her daughter

by the rings on her hand.

(female reporter) Dragoo's grandmother says

that seeing Gillenwater in the hospital

gave her nightmares.

The Skidmore residents don't want to talk about it,

and neither does the sheriff,

who points all inquires to the prosecutor.

We've got to figure out what the cause of death is,

and then you must be able to link that cause of death

to the actions of a particular individual.

(Puckett) All I know is,

he got life in prison over that.

(Fanning) For years, Greg was beating her.

People had to know about it that lived nearby.

In a small town like this,

everybody knows everybody's business.

Why didn't someone raise a red flag

and say, "This isn't right,

something's wrong here," but nobody did.

The silence was literally deadly.

(Marty Small) There's no reason to move to Skidmore.

If my family didn't have a farm in Skidmore,

I would never go there again.

My name is Martin Edward Small.

I am the oldest kid

in the Festival family.

I'm an Eagle Scout, and I'm in my 19th year

in the United States Army.

(Britt Small) My son Marty,

he's a captain and a paratrooper,

served in Iraq with Special Forces, twice.

My son was raised on three points.

Know your enemy,

never leave an enemy alive,

the guy with the most bullets wins.

My son happens to be a specialist

with a knife though,

because I am.

So he was taught how to kill with a knife

long before he was taught how to shoot.

(indistinct chatter)

You can't-- No you can't wander around, Dad.

-That's in the shot. -Oh, I see.

And if you're in the bedroom, you can't have the TV up.

OK. Phew.

(Marty Small) There's only certain things

that can be solved only within the legal system.

And if that works, that's great.

But sometimes violence is the only option.

Ken Rex McElroy was a problem in the '80's.

And I was a kid growin' up there.

The next major violent time

was when the Wendy situation happened.

Wendy Gillenwater was two years ahead of me in high school,

and she was another one of those great examples of,

you know, you get out of school,

you find a guy local,

and you never leave.

That happens a lot--

in which, in turn, resulted in her death.

And that's really sad.

And then soon after that,

Branson disappeared.

(male reporter 1) Folks here in Skidmore have lived

with a big question on their minds.

What happened to one of their own?

(male reporter 2) Branson Perry said he was going to put away jumper cables,

he hasn't been seen since.

(male reporter 1) Perry, who was 20,

vanished from outside his home.

Signs across the area are getting the message out

about this missing man, but still, there have been

no signs of Branson himself.

(James Klino) Branson is my stepson.

My name is James Klino.

I was married to Becky Perry, which is Branson's mother.

I believe it happened on a Thursday.

Branson's father was in the hospital,

and he was getting the house clean

for his dad to come home.

(car engine struggling)

He was also working on getting his father's car running

so he could pick him up.

Gina was the girl that happened to be in the house

trying to help him out

to get ready for his dad to come home.

(Fanning) While they're cleaning up the house,

Branson went into one of the kitchen cabinets

and starts rooting around and he came out with something,

and went outside and then came right back in again.

And Gina said, "What were you doing?"

He said, "Oh, nothing. Don't worry about it."

(Klino) He went to go to the shed to return some jumper cables...

and at that point, was not seen from thereafter.

(dramatic music)

(Fanning) Everything just seemed like

it was a normal day in Skidmore, Missouri.

(lawn mover whirring)

It took awhile for everyone to realize

that something was going on here.

(bird screeches)

(male reporter) Jo Ann Stinnett went to check on her grandson

at this house, where he lived with his dad.

Stinnett says the stereo was blaring

and the furnace blasting.

The 20-year-old Branson Perry was gone.

(Jo Ann Stinnett) They found no blood, no weapons,

nothing missing.

He didn't take a thing with him.

(Klino) By Saturday,

they still hadn't heard from Branson.

One of Becky's biggest frustrations

was the fact that the police

did not jump onto the investigation

as soon as they should have.

They should've jumped on it when it was first reported.

(Espey) Early on,

I don't think anybody

suspected foul play.

(Klino) The police said, "He's probably just out

sowing his oats. He'll be back."

And that upset her pretty much.

She goes, "He's not that kind of a boy

that would just do that."

(Fanning) The first question everyone wants to know is,

did he run away?

Well, when Sheriff Espey explored that possibility,

he found Branson's van, his wallet,

all his personal possessions

seemed to be there at the home.

The thing that kind of strikes me about this case is

that he just disappeared in thin air,

just taking some jumper cables out to a shed

behind his house and was never seen again.

The jumper cables were never returned

to the shed until

weeks after the fact.

All of a sudden, the jumper cables showed up.

(thunder rumbling)

(Fanning) Two weeks later,

those jumper cables that Branson was taking out to the shed

suddenly showed up in the shed right by the front door.

(Klino) It's like somebody's trying to cover something up,

cover their own tracks.

It was beginning to look like someone

in Skidmore was responsible for whatever happened

to Branson Perry.

(Britt) That is really strange.

Bob, his dad, and his mother

were good friends of ours.

In this particular case,

I think we had some strange people in town that day

and nobody really knows much about it.

But those signs have been up a long damn time.

(Hayes) They tried everything they could

to find what happened to the Perry boy.

I don't know if this is true or not,

but I was told

some man did it and he fed him to the hogs.

He was out in his yard and he just up and disappeared.

They even dug up places

and done all kind of stuff all around there,

but I don't know.

Was this drug related? Sex related?

We don't know.

(Booher) Nobody saw anything,

nobody overheard anything,

but make no mistake about this,

just like the murder of Ken Rex McElroy...

somebody knows.

began to suspect foul play in Perry's disappearance.

(female reporter 2) Officials say there's a lot of rumors circulating

about Branson's disappearance.

But still, no answers.

(woman) He's considered and listed

as an endangered missing person.

We've always believed in, and I think the investigation

has yielded that some kind of foul play has taken place.

(Marty) You know, growing up I learned that

there are predators out there everywhere.

And not all of them are in prison.

There's really two kinds of people in the world,

there's sheeps and wolves, okay.

The sheep is just happy to sit and eat all day.

And life is great, okay,

but then there's wolves.

The wolf is a predator.

It takes from others.

Branson was a pretty cool kid.

I used to go over to his house.

(Britt) Branson was a friend of my children.

He had a really cool play set

that his father built.

(Marty) His dad decided they wanted to be the fun place.

If all the kids come to his house and play,

his kids were going to be safe, right?

(Goslee) He was a young energetic high school boy

when I knew him.

He just got out of high school.

I knew his folks pretty well.

They were a very good family.

They were respected

by all the other people and the neighbors.

(Cheryl Bowenkamp) I knew who he was.

I think he was younger than my kids.

I knew his dad. I knew his grandma.

So I knew who he was.

(Booher) The question, I think, that you have to ask

with Branson Perry, certainly the one, you know,

that I ask as a journalist is, "Why him?"

(Marty) Branson had a lot of potential in life,

but wolves look for weakness, right?

And you don't always have to be physically weak.

Sometimes you can be emotionally weak.

And sometimes, that's even better,

because all they have to do is attack those emotion pieces

and latch on and give you some hope.

He became an easy target.

Branson was a sheep.

The world can't function with only sheep.

And the world can't function with only wolves.

You gotta have both.

(Reinig) Branson Perry was the son of my neighbor.

He was always a sweet child.

It's just one of those things,

we sit there and go,

"Why is this happening?"

There were no tell-tale signs

of something being wrong.

There was no, "Mom, Dad, I'm going, and,

well, I think I'll see you."

There was none of that.

It was one day he was here

and the next day he was gone.

They put out rewards,

they hired investigators.

They even brought a medium in,

(chuckles) to a séance or do whatever

to feel the vibes of the property.

That was our last resort.

And when you run completely out,

what's it gonna hurt?

(Becky Klino) No matter how trivial

you may think the information may be,

it could be a very vital clue that will help.

(male officer) This is the case that's went a year,

and we don't have anything really concrete.

We don't have anybody arrested for it,

um, we don't know he just completely disappeared

off the face of the earth.

(female reporter) Sheriff Estes reminds

all information is strictly confidential.

(officer) I just ask that the community get involved,

you know, for our closing, for the family.

They wouldn't want one of their own children missing

for a year.

So the community is gonna have to assist our department

in trying to solve this.

(Goslee) Story's kind of got out, you know,

that maybe some of the other kids in town

knew what happened and, of course, didn't say anything.

(Britt) There were a lot of different theories

about who was in the town and who wasn't.

There are other details,

very gruesome details,

that were told to my son.

(Fanning) Two years after Branson Perry went missing,

they got a break in the case.

A young man's disappearance unexplained,

and now there's a push for new leads in a cold case.

(male reporter) Two years after Branson vanished,

the FBI arrested Jack Wayne Rogers of Fulton.

They found disturbing messages on his computer

claiming he had driven to Skidmore and abducted

a blonde-haired boy.

(Fanning) Jack Wayne Rogers

was a lay minister in Fulton, Missouri.

He went into chat rooms

and he talked about...

how he had abducted and murdered

a blonde-haired young man

from Skidmore, Missouri.

That is what brought Jack Wayne Rogers

to the attention of the authorities.

It was pretty gruesome.

(Booher) He was investigated,

and as part of the investigation,

they searched his home.

(camera shutter clicking)

(Espey) We ended up in Fulton, Missouri

for three days doing a search warrant on a guy's house

and diggin' up his backyard.

(Booher) And among the things

that they found

was a leather necklace

that had a turtle's claw on it

that Branson Perry's father

positively said, "That's his necklace."

(Fanning) When they looked at that guy's computer,

they found child pornography, for one...

...but they also found images

of botched gender reassignment surgeries

he performed in motel rooms for another.

(Booher) Jack was a mutilator.

He allegedly performed procedures

on people who didn't like what gender they were,

and he would perform gender nullifications.

Sick-o people, right?

It's unfortunate-- there's people like that

out there in this world.

(Fanning) I got hold of the transcripts

of his chat room

and I couldn't believe

the horrible things he talked about.

Rogers claimed that he knew the perfect way

to impale an individual,

make them suffer.

I heard Branson was tied to a tree naked...

was impaled by a stake

through his nether regions,

had his genitals cut off

and eaten in front of him while he was still alive.

Like, they got a picture of 'em on a paper plate,

and then ate 'em right there in front of him

while he was dying.

had something to do with Branson Perry's disappearance.

But he always insisted that he was totally innocent

of any crime against Branson Perry.

He claimed that

what he wrote in a chat room

was not fact,

but fiction that was based

on a story he read about Branson Perry

in the local media.

(Espey) When you're in law enforcement,

you can't determine if a lead is good or bad

until you follow through with it and check it out.

it was just tough because you gotta follow every lead.

Every lead, you have to follow.

And the Branson Perry's case

led us in a lot of different directions.

There was rumor

that Branson was mutilated

and a lot of really bad things happened to him.

And of course, I imagine,

over the years, that got out to the public

that oh, that's what happened to Branson.

No, we figured that out.

And we went in with search warrants,

and that was not the case, we was led astray.

That didn't happen.

(James Klino) The necklace, they believed was Branson's,

in his possession, later found out it was not Branson's,

but Branson had one like it.

But Becky was at every one of his trials,

because, at that point in time,

she believed Jack Rogers had something to do with it.

(Fanning) Authorities chargd Jack Rogers

with the pornography, they charged him

with the body mutilation

and the gender reassignment surgeries.

He was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Branson Perry's mother was there.

She begged him to tell her

where her son was,

even if dead, where his remains were.

And Rogers insisted

he had nothing to do with Branson's death.

He would not give an inch on that.

(James Klino) When the police did more investigation

against Rogers and they said that they are

99% sure that he is not involved in this case,

Becky was devastated.

But she believed the police.

(Reinig) Needless to say,

Bob and Becky had a hard time

Bob was never the same after that.

There were times I'd just see him walking down the street,

just walking.

(Becky Klino) I have to keep believing he's alive.

I can't go the other side yet.

I can't go that way. I can't give up hope.

(Booher) I know the family holds out hope

that Branson Perry is alive somewhere.

That's what we all want to believe,

but he's probably not.

(Bob Perry) It'd be easier to know

that he went off with that man

and was murdered.

And, to me, that's what happened.

But it's a terrible thing for the family

to not know for sure.

(slow music)

(Goslee) We don't know what happened.

Really, just nobody knows.

I don't know. I don't know.

(Hayes) The last I knew about that boy was,

he was seen in the afternoon

by some friends, out here in a white van,

north of Skidmore,

on the side of the road.

That was the last that this one person'd seen him.

(man) There's stories out there, around town.

I have no idea, but...

something talk about, nothing else goes on here.

(Booher) I grew up in a small town.

I knew who the bad kids were.

So did my mom and dad.

I heard talk

about things that went on in my small home town.

You can't tell me that somebody in that town

doesn't know who Branson Perry was associating with.

(James Klino) Skidmore is a mysterious town.

Things go on there, but nobody has answers,

and nobody wants to come forward with the answers.

Mr. Rogers had nothing to do with it.

I think people are using Mr. Rogers

as a scapegoat for the truth.

They're trying to push itf

to somebody else

to relieve the pressure

from the investigation on them.

(Fanning) And that explains

the deathly silence

surrounding the disappearance

of that young man.

And that brings us back

to someone in Skidmore.

(dramatic music)

of having some very violent crimes

that's taken place there.

Why it happens in Skidmore

and why it's so infamous

and why the murders are so spectacular...

I have no idea why that happens.

We are now working the disappearance

of Branson Perry--

that case, I have open now,

since I come into office January 1.

We believe it is a homicide.

We believe we know who is responsible

for the murder.

Branson was no innocent young kid

that somebody just walked up and shot

that he didn't even know.

(Espey) He got involved in the wrong crowd,

and they got to where there was drugs being made.

Fixing and making methamphetamine.

And Branson Perry got shot

because they thought he might talk.

Stories kind of got out, you know, that maybe it was

a drug deal that went bad.

They killed him and got rid of his body

and end of the story.

(sirens blaring)

(Espey) We knew it was drug-related.

Back then, they would have labs

all over the entire county,

and we made a lot of arrests for methamphetamine.

And we hit 'em pretty hard, as hard as we could.

I'll be a son of a gun if they didn't have a drug house

two doors down from me.

Had one three doors down

the other way from me.

There was about 11 drug houses here in town.

(Hayes) We had one just down the road here,

this old gray house on the corner

where they was makin' meth.

Legalize the stuff!

Let 'em have to go buy it.

(chuckles) Instead of goin' out to the street

and doin' all this and that.

(Marty) When you're from a small town,

there's nothing to do except for go out and drink,

smoke, and nowadays, even more, do drugs.

Branson wanted to do things a certain way in his life,

and it came back to haunt him.

(Fanning) When you look at Branson

and the silence there,

it just makes you think

Skidmore is so haunted

by the vigilante killing of Ken McElroy

that it permeates their culture

and makes violence more likely.

(Reinig) I'm sure a lot of the people that were

the sons and daughters of the witnesses

and perpetrators had to have had an effect,

whether they knew what it was or not,

because the father or the mother

would not be the same person again.

You cannot experience

something like this and not have part of you die as well.

So I'm sure it had an effect

on the next generation.

(Espey) If a parent gets by with something,

then your next generation down, or two,

and they can think they're gonna get by with it.

And in the case of Skidmore,

there's a possibility that it did drop

from one generation to another to another.

Because we know exactly what's happened

to Branson Perry.

We know who was involved.

And I can tell you right now that they were from Skidmore.

(dramatic music)

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