In July 1981, Cheryl Huston looked out the back window of her parents’ grocery store in Skidmore, Mo., and watched as a man was killed, shot multiple times as he sat behind the wheel in his pickup truck outside a local bar.

And then, she said, she went to make sure he was dead.

“There was a crowd of people there, and I was looking at him, and I said, ‘Oh, my God, if he’s not dead, they’re going to have to shoot him again,’” Huston said. “Or he’ll kill every one of those men.”

The dead man in the truck was Kenneth Rex McElroy, 47, known as a brutal local bully accused of everything from sexual assault to hog rustling. His slaying at the hands of an unknown assailant — or assailants — has echoed through this small town, and various threads of popular culture, for 45 years.

The reason for the lasting fascination is simple: The shooting occurred in midmorning sun, on Skidmore’s main drag, with all manner of witnesses near McElroy’s truck, including Huston, whose father had been shot in the neck by McElroy a year before.

And no one, it seems, saw who did it.

“They were looking under every stone, trying to dig something out,” said Huston, now 68. “And guess what? They didn’t find anything.”