Docuseries explores the cascading cost of small-town vigilantism
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. The case remains unsolved.
Mcelroy was widely regarded as a gun-toting bully who menaced the community. For years residents watched him wiggle out of one jam with the law after another. They became increasingly disenchanted with the legal system and took the law into their own hands. As many as 60 people witnessed his murder, but no one implicated anyone.
Israeli filmmaker Avi Belkin was looking for an interesting story for a documentary and stumbled onto the Mcelroy case in a library. He was intrigued by the murder but also fascinated by what came after it — a wave of violence in Skidmore.
The price you pay
“I decided to do a portrait of this small town but also explore the origin of violence in American society through that,” Belkin says. “Why is it continuing? And what’s the price you pay for vigilante culture?”
The answer is in “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 next week.
Belkin, a rising filmmaker who has been praised for the new film “Mike Wallace Is Here,” spoke to as many living participants in Skidmore as possible, and to law enforcement and Mcelroy’s family.
Tentacles of violence
As he poked around the town, Belkin found a legacy of violence following Mcelroy’s slaying: a townswoman stomped to death by her boyfriend, a 20-year-old man who vanished, and the slaying of a pregnant woman whose fetus was cut from her womb. While none of the cases was directly related to the Mcelroy murder, Belkin saw tentacles of violence stretching from the 1981 killing.
“The message that was sent to that community on that day is that if you have a problem, you solve it with violence. And that just perpetuates itself later on in future generations,” he says.
Mcelroy’s death and the collective town silence that followed have been chronicled in a book, “In Broad Daylight,” which was made into a TV movie, and the film “Without Mercy,” The message that was sent to that community on that day is that if you have a problem, you solve it with violence. And that just perpetuates itself later on in future generations. as well as several podcasts.
After Belkin spotted the story on Skidmore, he flew to the town about 80 miles northwest of Kansas City, Missouri, and started filming. He edited his footage down to an 8-minute clip to gin up interest from producers.
Marci Wiseman and
Jeremy Gold, co-presidents of Blumhouse Television, were instantly intrigued and bid for the project on the spot. They said Belkin’s approach was timely and representative of an American struggle.
A cautionary tale
Both executives also thought it was a perfect fit as they move the Blumhouse brand away from horror toward more provocative, complex fare, including “Sharp Objects” and “The Loudest Voice.”
“It’s a really cautionary tale about what happens when you abandon the rule of law,” Wiseman says. “In our current time, there is this tendency for anger and mob-think. This looks at the corrosiveness of what that does to a community.”
With financial backing secure, Belkin returned more than half a dozen times to Skidmore, staying for a week or two each time and doing interviews. A small army of researchers went through old TV news footage and newspaper archives.
“No One Saw a Thing” beautifully mixes intimate portraiture, re-creations using Super 16 format and sweeping shots of the town, captured by drones to show Skidmore’s isolation.
Belkin isn’t worried that his documentary series will reopen wounds in Skidmore — they really haven’t healed since 1981.
“I think very early on I let everybody know that I’m not here to do a whodunit series,” he says. “It’s about closure. It’s like you have this wound that will not close and then it’s infecting other places in your body.”