Ken McElroy

Power over Women

He abandoned the other girls and their children and set up housekeeping with Alice, who began churning out more McElroy babies. Alice was joined in the bedroom and maternity ward in the early 1970s by Marcia, yet another of McElroy's nubile lovers.

Alice, older

What did they see in him? He was no dream lover. He beat every woman he was intimate with, and one would later tell author Harry N. MacLean that McElroy's sex tended to be violent and demeaning.

As a young man, McElroy was muscular and nominally handsome. His dark hair, sideburns and rather fine features gave him the vaguest resemblance to Elvis Presley. He had ample supplies of cash from his rustling profits. But by 1970 McElroy, like Elvis, had gone fat. He wasn't stupid, but he also wasn't nearly as smart as he thought.

He carried himself like a tough guy, but only when he was armed with a gun or a knife. No one had ever seen him throw a punch—except at women. He his body was covered with awful, amateur tattoos: Mom, Ken, Love, Joan, Oleta, a dagger. His belly lapped over his belt buckle, and his wide-set eyes and beetle brow were somehow exaggerated by his expansive girth.

And in an incongruous act of vanity for a fat redneck, he began dying his hair an inky black.