On the night of August 6, 1966, three teenagers were sitting in a Ford near a baseball field at Everman, south of Fort Worth. Edna Louise Sullivan was sixteen. Her boyfriend Robert Brand was seventeen, and his cousin Mark Dunnam was fifteen. Kenneth McDuff and a young man named Roy Dale Green pulled up beside them. McDuff had a revolver.
He forced Brand and Dunnam into the trunk of their own car and drove Sullivan away in it, with Green following. In an isolated field he shot both young men in the face while they begged him not to, telling Green afterward that they could have identified them. Then he raped Sullivan over several hours and killed her by pressing a three-foot broomstick across her throat. Green later told police what McDuff had said about it: like killing a chicken, they both squawk.
Green went to the police himself. My God, I have got to tell somebody about it, he said, and he led them to the bodies. He became the state's principal witness.
McDuff was twenty, the fifth of six children of J. A. McDuff, who ran a successful concrete business in Rosebud, and his wife Addie, and he had a twin brother, Lonnie. At Rosebud High School he was known as a bully, and he quit to do manual labor for his father. He had been convicted in 1964, aged eighteen, of twelve counts of burglary and attempted burglary across three Texas counties, given twelve four-year terms to run concurrently, and paroled in December 1965 after little more than a year. At his November 1966 trial he said he had lent Green his car and knew nothing about the killings. The jury took under four hours. He was sentenced to death in 1968 and sat on death row for six years.
In 1972 Furman v. Georgia struck down every death penalty statute in the United States and his sentence became life with the possibility of parole. His mother, known around Rosebud as the pistol-packing mama for the gun she carried in her handbag, hired a good lawyer. He took correspondence courses and applied, with a dossier that claimed to show Green was the real killer. In a one-on-one interview he offered a member of the parole board ten thousand dollars and was given two years for bribery, and the board paroled him anyway, judging that he could still contribute to society.
He was released in October 1989, one of twenty former death row inmates and 127 murderers paroled in that period, and the reason has nothing to do with his case. A federal judge had found conditions in the Texas prison system unconstitutional, and the state was releasing about a hundred and fifty men a day to reduce the population. One reporter described how it worked: it started with the bad-check writers and the property crimes, and before long they were at the bottom of the barrel.
He took a four-dollar-an-hour job at a gas station and a class at Texas State Technical College in Waco. Within days of his release Sarafia Parker, twenty-nine, was found beaten and strangled at Temple, on October 14, 1989. He was never charged with it. He was soon sent back to prison for threatening to kill a Black teenager in Rosebud, and was released again on December 18, 1990.
On the night of October 10, 1991, he picked up Brenda Thompson, a sex worker, in Waco, tied her up and stopped about fifty feet short of a police checkpoint. As an officer walked toward the truck she kicked at the windshield until it cracked. McDuff drove straight at the officers, three of whom had to jump clear, and lost the chase by switching off his lights. Her body was not found until 1998. Five days later, on October 15, he was seen arguing at a Waco motel with Regenia DeAnne Moore, twenty-one; he drove her to a remote spot beside State Highway 6 and killed her. Valencia Joshua was last seen knocking at the door of his room at Texas State Technical College. He strangled her on February 24, 1992, and her body was found on March 15 on a golf course near the college.
On December 29, 1991 Colleen Reed, a twenty-eight-year-old accountant, was washing her car at an all-night car wash in Austin. McDuff pulled in beside her with a man named Alva Hank Worley, took her by the throat and lifted her until her toes barely touched the ground. She screamed, and two brothers who heard it came to look and found only her abandoned car. Worley's later account of what was done to her in the back of the Thunderbird, and afterward, is the most detailed evidence in the case.
On March 1, 1992 Melissa Ann Northrup, twenty-two and pregnant, was taken from the Quik-Pak convenience store in Waco where McDuff had once worked, along with $250 from the register. A college friend told police McDuff had tried to recruit him to rob the store. A fisherman found her body on April 26. His broken-down car was found a block away. He had already gone.
He was working as a refuse collector in Kansas City under the name Richard Fowler when America's Most Wanted broadcast his photograph. A workmate recognized him and telephoned. He was arrested on May 4, 1992.
He was tried twice and denied everything both times. A Waco jury convicted him of Northrup's murder on February 12, 1993, and on February 18 sentenced him to death. A year later, on February 23, 1994, another jury convicted him of the capital murder of Colleen Reed, although her body had not been found and was not found for another four years. He was sentenced to death again on March 1. Against his lawyers' advice he took the stand and said he had been nowhere near Waco. Prosecutors decided not to try him over Valencia Joshua, because the convictions he already had made it pointless.
Worley pleaded guilty in September 1994 to aggravated sexual assault and was sentenced to forty years. The murder and abduction charges against him were dropped as part of it.
On October 6, 1998, five weeks before he was due to die and with his appeals exhausted, McDuff was taken off death row and led officers to a shallow grave near the Brazos River in Falls County, south of Waco. The Travis County medical examiner identified the remains as Colleen Reed the following day, from dental records. Her sister Lori Bible had waited nearly seven years. Information he gave in the same period led investigators to the bodies of Brenda Thompson and Regenia Moore in McLennan County.
He was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville on November 17, 1998, aged fifty-two, having spent his last years in isolation for his own protection.
The number does not resolve. Five murders are covered by convictions. Investigators put the confirmed figure at nine and have said they suspect six more. What the case settled was not the count but the parole system: Texas tightened the rules for violent offenders by board regulation and then by statute, and Texans still call the result the McDuff laws.