Auguries Of Innocence

By Laurence Zuckerman

When paramedics answered an emergency call at the farm of James and Julie Schnick in the south Missouri hamlet of Elkland (pop. 200), they found James Schnick rolling on the floor and wailing in pain from a gunshot and stab wounds. He had spotted an unknown intruder in the house and fatally stabbed him after a ferocious struggle, he told Webster County Sheriff Eugene Fraker. In the bedroom Schnick's wife lay dead, shot twice in the head. The mysterious intruder, who was sprawled dead in the hallway, a .22-cal. pistol clutched in his hand, turned out to be Kirk Buckner, Schnick's 14-year-old nephew.

Two deputies dispatched to the Buckner's dairy farm five miles away discovered an even more gruesome scene: Kirk's mother and his three younger brothers had all been killed by gunshots to the head. The body of Kirk's father lay by the side of a gravel road, midway between the two farms.

Sheriff Fraker, along with others in the area, assumed that the family's dire economic circumstances had pushed Kirk over the edge. It seemed to be yet one more tragic testament to the desperation of so many of the country's debt- burdened family farmers. Said the Rev. Wilburn Steward at a funeral service for the slain family attended by more than 500: "In mankind, there's a breaking point. Something in Kirk had reached that point, and he just snapped."

But for many of the Buckners' friends the explanation just didn't ring true. They knew Kirk as a good-natured teen, devoted to his family, who seemed incapable of such cold-blooded violence. "I'd seen him with his brothers and how he loved his mother," says Neighbor Mary Shoemaker. Her son Billy, 15, was a close friend of Kirk's and once saved him from drowning. "I never thought Kirk did it," he says.

Haunted by his own suspicions, Sheriff Fraker began to probe a bit more. He called in Sergeant Tom Martin, a friend with the Missouri Highway Patrol. The two reviewed the evidence and discovered several curious discrepancies. How could Kirk, who weighed only 130 lbs., have moved his 250-lb. father so far from their farmhouse? Schnick's wounds, it turned out, were superficial. Although Schnick claimed he had attacked the boy only with a steak knife, an autopsy revealed that Kirk may have died from a gunshot. Then, at the high school where Kirk had just begun his freshman year, Fraker and Martin learned of a shattering piece of evidence: Kirk Buckner was lefthanded. The murder weapon had been found in his right hand.

Last week, as Schnick was about to undergo a lie-detector test, he broke down and confessed that he had committed the murders and tried to frame his dead nephew. Appearing in court wearing bib overalls and a white T shirt, he was charged with seven counts of first-degree murder. Though authorities suspect that Schnick may have killed to benefit from wills and insurance policies, Sheriff Frager still feels there is some mystery involved. "I don't know what was in the man's mind," he says. "There's always a possibility we'll never know."

With reporting by Staci D. Kramer/St. Louis