Slayings Shock Town Devoted to Travelers : Crime: Missouri hamlet’s first murders prompt residents to be wary of ‘interstate people.’

The skyline of this country junction is familiar to anyone who has driven America’s interstates.

Aloft, on 60-foot pylons, are the franchise logos. Scanning lower, plastic flags of every color flap in the muggy breeze. At ground level are the gas pumps, fast-food restaurants and chain motels. Big rigs lumber past rows of parked cars with plates from half a dozen states.

Like so many of the nation’s pit-stop towns, the setting seems benign, if less than scenic.

But catering to drifters and pilgrims can be a deadly business, as Kingdom City has discovered in recent weeks.

By gruesome coincidence, police say, two separate groups of cross-country serial killers exited Interstate 70 here last month to pillage and to slay. In each case, the murder victims were apparently Good Samaritans who offered help to stranded men with car trouble.

A Kansas City threesome--two of whom are still at large and believed to be in the western United States--allegedly began their spree with the abduction of a telephone company supervisor here late last month. Eight days later, authorities allege, another pair who had started their rampage in Ohio shot to death an elderly couple in their farmhouse less than three miles from I-70--and then went on to kill again in Oklahoma before their arrest in Santa Fe, N.M.

“I guess we really are the crossroads of America,” Darlene Bergerson said wryly, eyebrows raised, in the souvenir emporium she manages. “We’ve been saying it long enough.”

For a town with a population of 112 and no reported homicides in recent memory, the notion that their lifeline can bring death is a shock. In the wake of the killings, the workers and the local residents are re-evaluating their relationship with what they call “the interstate people.”

Nearly 24,000 vehicles pass through every day, on their way to Lake of the Ozarks, St. Louis, Kansas City, points east and west and south. Kingdom City owes its running water, and soon a sewer system, to the wayfarers, who pay a 1-cent village sales tax on every dollar’s worth of purchases.

But now Dale Bolton has loaded his .38 special and his .22 revolver and placed them in a night stand drawer next to his bed.

His wife used the deadbolt for the first time ever on the night of the double murder. He was locked out when he returned at midnight from his job driving a forklift at a nearby brickyard. “I didn’t have a key,” he said, “and I had a hard time waking her up.”

The town will install new lights in the darker sections. And there is talk of starting a police force, or hiring someone else’s, like the Callaway County Sheriff’s Department, to patrol regularly.

“I think it caught everybody off guard,” said T.J. Atkinson, who owns the Gasper-Atkinson restaurant and truck stop here. “It happens every day in other places. Now we realize the people from those other places are coming here.”

Authorities say the first set of marauders, whom they identify as Dennis Skillicorn, 34, and Allen Nicklasson, 22, hit town on Aug. 24. The two men met in a Kansas City drug rehab program. Along with a 17-year-old from the suburbs, they set out, friends later told police, to “make a name” for themselves. The teen-ager was driving the family car, an aging tan Caprice.

The vehicle broke down at least three times in Kingdom City. Once, mechanic Roger Redmon fixed the thermostat and was paid $43 in coins counted out from a Ritz cracker box (the trio is suspected of taking the money and three guns from a local residence). Later, a witness told police, the three got into a car driven by Richard Drummond, an AT&T; supervisor who frequently stayed at the local Days Inn while on business.

Drummond’s 1994 Dodge Intrepid was found three days later in Kingman, Ariz., near the corpses of a married couple, each shot in the head. His body was discovered in Lafayette County, about a two-hour drive west of Kingdom City, on Sept. 1.

Meanwhile, authorities here had found a 1980 red Buick Skylark belonging to a woman in Port Washington, Ohio, feared murdered by Lewis Gilbert II, 22, and Eric Elliott, 16. The car had been stuck in a ditch.

Then relatives of William and Flossie Brewer found their bodies in their basement nearby. The husband was 86; the wife, 74.

Gilbert and Elliott were later arrested in Sante Fe.

Until now, rural Callaway County’s main claim to fame had been Fulton, seven miles south on Highway 54. The county seat, population 10,000, is the home of Westminster College, where Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946.

Kingdom City was named for a much earlier episode. During the Civil War, the county seceded from both the Confederacy and the Union, declaring itself the “Kingdom of Callaway” in a largely successful effort to stay out of the conflict.

The town was incorporated just 15 years ago, to take advantage of the boom in traffic on I-70, which had been built in 1960. Kingdom City encompassed the new development burgeoning by the interchange and what had been a small settlement called McCredie.

Since then, travelers’ needs have taken precedence. There are three motels and two truck stops, but no library, no movie theater, no grocery store.

“We old folks all liked it better when it was McCredie,” sighed Iva Dean Reed, 63. The worst crime she can remember before incorporation was the time her mother left some pies to cool on the back porch and later noticed one slice missing. “They didn’t take anything else.”

Her twin sister, Jean Bolton--Dale’s wife--mourns the lost past too. “We moved out here because it’s nice and quiet,” she said.

By and large she still feels safe as she goes about her routine, harvesting tomatoes, pumpkins and enormous yams from the acre of land where her mobile home sits.

Yet she worries that the murders are a portent of the future. “It’s changing times,” she said. “The interstate’s helping us catch up.”

According to Nancy Lewis, director of the Callaway County Chamber of Commerce, several families near the expressway have put their houses up for sale, prompted by fear of more mayhem.

Roger Redmon hasn’t yet, but his wife and four daughters have made it known they’d like to leave the corrugated-metal residence attached to his garage and towing business. After all, he actually repaired a car for the Kansas City group accused of the first murder.

When he realized who his customers had been, he wondered why it took so long for something like this to happen. “Every day’s a weird day,” he said. “There’s drugs all up and down this interstate every day. I’ve seen the interstate people working the churches, putting a kid up front. They say ‘he’s hungry, can we have $5.’ They ain’t hungry. I’ve seen ‘em do that right after I saw them eating at Gasper’s.”