Editor's notebook, December 15

Patti Thorn, Rocky Mountain News

Published December 15, 2006 at midnight

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New end to spellbinding account of public killing

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.

MacLean was practicing law here in 1981 when the sensational story hit the papers: A man had been gunned down in Skidmore, Mo., in the middle of the morning, with a host of people looking on. The victim, Ken McElroy, had terrorized the town for years, robbing and assaulting people with scant punishment. Given his menacing ways, witnesses were always too afraid to testify against him.

After McElroy's killing, the story took on a mythical tone in the media. "They played it as the Old West: Here's a town taking the law into its own hands," says MacLean, who scoffs at the notion it was a coordinated, vigilante killing. "I was intrigued most by the fact that nobody was talking."

Mouths in the small town were, in fact, sealed as tight as Fort Knox - even through FBI investigations and the convening of three grand juries. It took MacLean four years to win the town's confidence and get enough information for his book, which could only make an educated guess at the killers' identities.

MacLean's new epilogue includes details of the town's demise in the years since the shooting (in a creepy development, the town was recently back in the national news, with the death of Skidmore's Bobbi Jo Stinnet, a pregnant housewife who was strangled, her baby ripped from her womb). The book also offers information from police documents only recently made available that pinpoint more clearly who the possible shooters were.

Readers will likely be satisfied with this new ending to the story, but the elusive truth still haunts MacLean. He says he'd happily promise to keep the shooters' identities secret if someone would level with him.

"If one person who was actually on the street that day would sit down and say to me, 'Harry, look. I was eight feet away, and here's exactly how it started, and here's who was firing which weapon,' I'd hold it to my heart. No doubt about it."

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.

INSPIRED TITLES

Backstabbers, Crazed Geniuses,and Animals We Hate,edited by David Plotz (Atlas Books, $12.95). A feel-good holiday choice.

UNINSPIRED TITLES

Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales, by John Tyler Bonner (Princeton University Press, $16.95).

Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness and Success of Boys - and the Men They Become, by Stephen Hall (Houghton Mifflin, $26).

A case of title-writers spying on each other? Simple synchronicity?I'll size up the problem and get back to you-shortly.

LAST CHANCE . . .

To get to the Leah Cohen Festival of Jewish Books & Authors. The popular book fair, featuring author appearances and book sales,ends Sunday. Wrapping things up, at 3 p.m. Sunday,author Jeffrey Goldbergdiscusses his book Prisoners: A Muslim and Jew Across the Middle East Divide, the story of Goldberg'sstint in the Israeli army guarding prisoners during the 1990 Palestinian uprising, and the dialogue he began and continues to this day witha prisoner named Rafiq. Goldberg's talk is $10. The festivalis held at the Jewish Community Center,350 S. Dahlia St. Information:303-316-6360or www.mizelcenter.org.

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