Readorama: Prosecutor navigates 1st murder case, patriarchal system in the Ozarks in “A Killing at the Creek”

Elsie Arnold, assistant prosecutor in southwest Missouri, has been dying to try a murder case.

But she’s rattled by the case she finally gets: A school bus driver is found with her throat cut, and the suspect is a 15-year-old boy.

“A Killing at the Creek” is the second legal procedural by Nancy Allen of Springfield, Mo., former Greene County assistant prosecutor. The killing is accordingly grisly, but that’s not the real story being told.

That concerns the path Elsie must navigate as a female prosecutor in the Ozarks.

“My part of the state is strangely patriarchal,” Allen said recently. The trial described in her book is not taken directly from her own case file, she added.

But Elsie’s experience is not far removed from what Allen faced as an assistant prosecutor in the early 1980s. When she joined the Greene County office about one year out of the University of Missouri law school, Allen was only the second woman to serve as a prosecutor in southwest Missouri.

“They gave me a lot of the sex cases, and we had a lot of them in Greene County, especially involving children,” Allen said.

Her first murder case involved a 16-year-old charged with first degree murder.

“I was only 26 years old,” Allen said. “Everybody in my office was running for something that fall, and they didn’t want to lose a murder case just days before the election.

“But being assigned a murder prosecution is a rite of passage.”

In that 1982 case, a jury convicted the 16-year-old.

Much of the condescension endured by Allen’s fictional counterpart comes courtesy of an assistant prosecutor transferred from the Jackson County office in Kansas City. But Elsie Arnold has her own issues. Allen devotes an early passage to a seemingly unrelated change of venue hearing in which Elsie prevails over a defense attorney several decades older than her.

She’s not magnanimous in victory. He promises not to forget.

“Elsie is flawed,” said Allen, who today teaches business law at Missouri State University. “Let’s just say that in my youth I resembled Elsie and, now that I am 58 years old, I am able to look back at a young woman’s misdeeds and know that people do grow up.”

To learn more, go to nancyallenauthor.com.

Thorpe Menn Award

The nominations deadline for the annual Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award is May 1.

The award, coordinated by the American Association of University Women-Kansas City Branch and the Kansas City Public Library, will be presented to an area author this fall. For submission guidelines, go to kansascity-mo.aauw.net/events/thorpe-menn-literary-award.

This story was originally published April 25, 2015 at 7:00 AM with the headline "Readorama: Prosecutor navigates 1st murder case, patriarchal system in the Ozarks in “A Killing at the Creek”."