In Broad Daylight

For roughly two decades, Ken Rex McElroy terrorized the farm country around Skidmore, Missouri, a town of a few hundred people, piling up felony charges for theft, assault and worse while slipping free of nearly all of them. In July 1981 he was shot dead on the town's main street in front of dozens of witnesses, and no one has ever been charged. Harry N. MacLean, a lawyer turned writer, spent years in the area reconstructing McElroy's life, the town's mounting fear and its frustration with a legal system that kept failing it, and the silence that settled over Skidmore afterward. The result is a portrait of a community pushed past its limits. The book won the 1989 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and was adapted for television.