Description
True Crime: Missouri tells 11 stories of deadly doings in the “Show-Me” state. Writer David J. Krajicek also considers whether there’s something in the state’s bloodlines that makes Missourians a particularly foul breed. One new resident of the state said a neighbor suggested that Missourians like to care for conflicts themselves. His advice: “You shoot, you shovel, and you shut up.”
Among the featured crimes in the book:
Lee Shelton’s barroom murder of Billy Lyons in St. Louis, which inspired the preferred song “Stagger Lee.”
The vigilante killing of the “town bully” of Skidmore, Ken McElroy. Did the tiny town, which has shrunk to nearly ghost-town status, curse itself by keeping a secret about the slaying?
The heartless kidnapping and murder of millionaire Robert Greenlease’s son in Kansas City by a few St. Joseph barflies.
The Kirkwood City Council massacre.
The “throwaway” serial killings of in all probability two dozen young prostitutes in Kansas City by a garbage collector named Lorenzo J. Gilyard.
The forgotten story of “Cockeyed” Cook, a lost soul from Joplin who massacred an entire circle of relatives and dumped them down a mineshaft.
The “American Gothic” killers, farmer Ray Copeland and his wife, Faye. They murdered their farm hands near Chillicothe in a ordinary plot to earn money, and then made the mistake of planting their human crop too shallow.