Documentary series examines cost of small-town vigilantism
Posted July 24, 2019 10:20 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
NEW YORK — It’s been 38 years since a man named Ken Rex McElroy was shot to death by an angry crowd in the dusty farming community of Skidmore, Missouri.
McElroy was widely regarded as a gun-toting bully who menaced the community. As many as 60 people witnessed his murder but no one implicated anyone.
Israeli filmmaker Avi Belkin was looking around for an interesting story to base a documentary and stumbled onto the McElroy case in a library. He was intrigued by the murder and by what came after it — a wave of violence in Skidmore.
The result is “No One Saw a Thing,” a six-episode meditation on what happens when a small town finds itself outside the law. It airs Thursdays on Sundance TV starting Aug. 1.
Mark Kennedy, The Associated Press
