and from another article on him:
Still, McElroy is not without mourners. By his first wife, Sharon, he had four daughters, now 16 to 19, and a son, 22. The four girls chose to live with him after he and Sharon parted. McElroy next became involved with Alice Woods, now 35, who says she isn’t sure they were ever legally married, but lived with him for 15 years. She bore him two sons and a daughter. Ten years ago McElroy began a relationship with 14-year-old Trena McCloud, who first accused him of rape, then married him in 1974, a year after the first of their three children was born. But he never abandoned Alice, by whom he had two more children after his marriage to Trena.
Though neighbors were disgusted by the arrangement, Alice and Trena, who are friends, insist that McElroy treated them well. “Ken was totally different from the way they are saying he was now,” says Alice. “Oh, he was wild, but he wasn’t guilty of all those things they say. He was honest and generous. I never knew him to steal anything, ever.” Trena agrees, and says McElroy was harassed by police. “The officers were always hassling him,” she claims. “They’d accuse him of anything, even things I know he didn’t do because I was with him. They just hated him because he wouldn’t kneel down to them.” She angrily denies a rumor that her stepfather at first refused McElroy permission to marry her, and that McElroy retaliated by burning his house down. “That’s a lie,” she snaps. “It was just faulty wiring.”