Kenneth Allen McDuff was born on March 21, 1946 in Rosebud, in central Texas, the fifth of six children. His father ran a concrete business through the Texas construction boom of the 1960s and the family had money. Neighbours remembered him as a bully with a short temper whose mother carried a pistol in her handbag and was known around town for it. He stayed out of prison until he was nineteen, when he was convicted of a string of twelve burglaries and an attempted burglary and given four-year terms to run concurrently. He was paroled after less than a year.
On August 6, 1966 he and Roy Dale Green abducted three teenagers, Robert Brand, his cousin Mark Dunnam and Edna Louise Sullivan. First names and spellings vary between sources. The two young men were forced into a car boot and shot. Sullivan was raped over several hours and then killed with a broomstick pressed across her throat, which is where the name the Broomstick Murders comes from. Green gave evidence against McDuff, and the reported outcome for him differs sharply between accounts, from a long prison term to probation. McDuff was convicted in 1968 and given three death sentences.
He sat on death row until 1972, when Furman v. Georgia struck down every death penalty statute in the United States. His sentence became life with the possibility of parole. He applied repeatedly. One account holds that he offered members of the parole board ten thousand dollars in 1981 and was convicted of bribery for it.
He was released in October 1989. The Texas prison system was under federal pressure over unconstitutional conditions and was paroling prisoners at a rate that left little room for scrutiny of individual cases. Three days after his release a woman named Sarafia Parker was found beaten and strangled in Temple. Reporting on this period is inconsistent: some accounts have him returned to prison after pulling a knife on someone and then paroled a second time.
Over the next three years women disappeared across central Texas. Brenda Thompson was last seen in October 1991 at a police roadblock, with her hands behind her back, trying to kick out the windscreen of the truck she was in. Regenia Moore vanished days later. Valencia Kay Joshua was last seen looking for his room. On December 29, 1991 he took Colleen Reed, an accountant, from an all-night car wash in Austin in front of witnesses; his companion Alva Hank Worley later gave evidence about what was done to her. On March 1, 1992 he abducted Melissa Ann Northrup, a convenience store clerk, from the shop where he had worked.
Northrup's body was found weeks later. McDuff had already left the state and was working as a rubbish collector in Kansas City, Missouri under a false name. A profile on America's Most Wanted brought a call from a workmate, and he was arrested on May 4, 1992.
He was tried separately for Northrup and for Reed, convicted of capital murder, and sentenced to death by two juries. He denied the killings for years. In the weeks before his execution he drew maps that led investigators to remains, though accounts differ over which victims were recovered that way and whether he ever gave up the location of Colleen Reed's body. He was held in isolation on death row for his own protection until he was executed by lethal injection at Huntsville on November 17, 1998.
The counts do not resolve into one number. He was convicted of five murders across two eras, at least six women are generally attributed to the years after his parole, and Murderpedia and Wikipedia both give a range of nine to fourteen or more.
What sets the case apart is what happened afterwards. Texas stiffened parole requirements for violent offenders both by board regulation and by statute, and the resulting laws are still referred to in the state as the McDuff laws. He is described as the only man in Texas to have been sentenced to death, paroled, and then returned to death row for killings committed after his release.