Kenneth Allen McDuff was 20 when he abducted three teenagers near Fort Worth in August 1966 and killed them. A jury sentenced him to death. After the United States Supreme Court's 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, his sentence was commuted to life. In October 1989, at a time when the Texas parole board was under orders to release hundreds of prisoners a week, a panel voted to let him go.
By May 1992 he was a federal fugitive, sought in the disappearances and deaths of women around Waco and Austin. He was convicted of two capital murders, those of Melissa Ann Northrup and Colleen Reed, and was linked by investigators to several more. He was executed at Huntsville on November 17, 1998, at 52. Writing in 1992, the Texas Monthly reporter Gary Cartwright argued that McDuff was not simply a killer who had fallen through a crack in the system. The case led to a perjury conviction for a former parole board chairman and to changes in how Texas paroles violent offenders.
McDuff grew up in Rosebud, a small town in Falls County, in Central Texas. His father was a cement finisher. His mother ran the family's money and a washateria across from the family home, and Cartwright described her as a large, domineering woman of whom teachers were afraid. Townspeople called her "Pistol-Packing Mama McDuff," and a story went around that she had once threatened a school bus driver with a gun, though Cartwright noted it might not be true. Kenneth had four sisters and an older brother who was his closest confidant and, according to Cartwright, encouraged him to ignore the rules. His brother was later shot to death.
Kenneth was the family favorite and was shielded from discipline. With a measured IQ of 92, he was not a strong student. Classmates remembered him as a bully and a gambler with a cold stare. He lost a schoolyard fight in the eighth grade, an episode Cartwright says made him an object of local ridicule, and a few months later he left school for good to work for his father.
In the fall of 1964, by Cartwright's account, McDuff told his brother that he had sexually assaulted a woman and left her for dead in a ditch. The crime was never reported to police at the time. The woman survived.
That year McDuff was sent to prison for a string of burglaries. The penalties assessed against him totaled 52 years, but because he was 18 they were run concurrently. Within three months he was a trusty, and he was paroled in December 1965.
On the morning of August 6, 1966, McDuff and an 18-year-old companion from Marlin, Roy Dale Green, worked a concrete job in Temple. They then drove McDuff's Dodge Charger to the Fort Worth area and spent the evening in Everman, a small town south of the city, drinking beer and visiting friends.
Near a baseball field, McDuff noticed three teenagers talking in a 1955 Ford. Edna Louise Sullivan, 16, lived in Everman. Robert Hugh Brand, 17, and Marcus Dunnam were from Alvarado, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram's captions from that week; Cartwright gives Dunnam's age as 15 and says he was visiting Brand's family from California, while the newspaper captions give 16. Cartwright says McDuff chose them at random. He took the boys' billfolds at gunpoint and locked all three in the trunk of the Ford, then drove it along country roads while Green followed in the Dodge.
At a field, McDuff moved Edna Sullivan into the trunk of the Dodge and shot both boys where they lay in the Ford. The car was left in the field with their bodies, near Burleson. The two men drove south across the Johnson County line. McDuff sexually assaulted Edna Sullivan and then strangled her, and her body was left beside a fence on a gravel road.
On August 8, the Star-Telegram photographed search parties gathered at a stock tank near Burleson while a Burleson police officer in diving gear searched the water for Edna Sullivan. Its captions that day described her as missing since the Ford was found with the bodies of the two boys.
Green did not keep the secret long. Cartwright writes that the next afternoon, on a Sunday drive, he heard news of the killings on the radio and told the people he was with. Roy Green, 18, of Marlin, was one of two suspects seized by officers, the Star-Telegram reported in its August 8 caption. McDuff was arrested by Brady Pamplin, the Falls County sheriff, a former Texas Ranger who served nearly 30 years in the office; Cartwright writes that Pamplin shot up McDuff's car as McDuff tried to get away. Both men were charged with murder. On August 17, 1966, the Star-Telegram photographed McDuff at his examining trial.
Green became the prosecution's main witness. He served five years for his part in the crimes, Cartwright writes, and went back to live in Marlin.
McDuff was tried in Fort Worth. His mother told the court he had been with a girl from church at the time of the killings and called him "too good for his own good." On November 15, 1966, a Star-Telegram photographer recorded McDuff entering Criminal District Court, flanked by Earl Brown, the chief deputy sheriff, and Sheriff Lon Evans, after the jurors reported that they had reached a verdict. They sentenced him to death. On December 27, 1966, the paper photographed people attending his hearing on a motion for a new trial, which followed the death sentence.
Sources differ on the scope of the 1966 judgments. The Cleburne Times-Review, reporting on a regional crime series, says he was sentenced to die for the murder of Robert Brand. KWTX in Waco reported in 2024 that he was convicted in the kidnappings and murders of all three teenagers and received three death sentences. Texas Monthly, in 1998, described the 1966 conviction as being for the murder of Edna Sullivan. The published reports do not settle the question.
Stays of execution followed in 1969 and April 1970. Then, in 1972, came Furman v. Georgia. Cartwright writes that the ruling led to the commutation of all 88 Texas death sentences then in force to life imprisonment. McDuff had spent about six years on death row in Huntsville.
McDuff became eligible for parole in 1976, and for 13 years the board turned him down. Cartwright, drawing on board records, writes that he won a single vote in 1979, 1980, 1984 and 1985, short of the two he needed; in 1980 the vote came from board member Helen Copitka. In 1977 his family hired a lawyer, Gary Jackson. In 1979 Jackson sent the parole board a 26-page letter, and in 1980 he filed a habeas corpus petition claiming jury misconduct at the 1966 trial and arguing that Green was the real killer. At a 1982 evidentiary hearing in Fort Worth, the claims were rejected.
In 1981 McDuff offered a parole board member, Glenn Heckmann, 10,000 dollars for his vote. Heckmann reported it. McDuff was tried and convicted of bribery, his third felony conviction, but Cartwright says the jury misunderstood the habitual-offender instructions and gave him two years, time he had already served.
In 1988 the board voted to parole him, then rescinded the decision after new information arrived; Cartwright reports that it came in the form of protest letters from the trial judge and the prosecutor.
What changed in 1989 was not McDuff's case but the Texas prison system. A federal court had ruled in 1972 that Texas prisons were overcrowded, and Cartwright writes that the governors who followed talked tough on crime without paying for enough new prisons. By 1987 the system was near breakdown. Governor Bill Clements ordered the parole board to release 750 prisoners a week to stay within court-imposed population limits, and when too few prisoners met the standards for release, the standards were lowered. More than 36,000 people were paroled in 1989 from a system built for about 60,000.
The board approved applications in large batches. Old cases went to "special review" groups that gave them little scrutiny. Twenty former death row prisoners were released, McDuff among them, and he had served 23 years. One lawyer told Texas Monthly the board's decisions were "as random as throwing darts." The 1989 Criminal Justice Reform Act had placed the board under the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, which gave the prison division leverage over parole, and no law yet regulated the parole consultants and former board members who lobbied for prisoners.
In September 1989 a special review panel took up McDuff's file. Chris Mealy, a board member, cast the deciding vote. "I wish that I could take it back," he later told Cartwright. McDuff walked out on October 11, 1989.
McDuff was required to report to a parole officer in Temple, where his parents had moved. Larry Pamplin, Brady Pamplin's son and by then Falls County sheriff, told people McDuff would kill again. "The most frustrating part," Pamplin told Cartwright, "is that we knew he was going to kill someone."
Three days after the release, the body of Sarafia Parker, 29, was found in a field of weeds in southeast Temple. McDuff was never charged in her death, and the Cleburne Times-Review notes that he was never officially connected to it.
In July 1990 McDuff was charged with a misdemeanor, making a terroristic threat, after a racial confrontation in Rosebud. He was returned to prison in September. The Falls County district attorney, Tom Sehon, dropped the charge, and a parole hearings officer reinstated McDuff's parole. He was released again on December 6, 1990.
In the spring of 1991 he enrolled at Texas State Technical College in Waco and lived in a campus dormitory. That year several sex workers in Waco went missing. Cartwright reports that police did not pursue McDuff seriously at the time, even after Regenia Moore was seen kicking and screaming in the cab of his red pickup as it passed through a police checkpoint. Police questioned him several days later, and nothing came of it.
Little was reported about the lives of most of the women linked to McDuff after 1989.
Sarafia Parker was 29. Her death in Temple in October 1989 has been reported as unsolved.
Regenia Moore, called Regina in some reports and "Gina" in others, was a Waco woman last seen, as far as is known, in McDuff's truck at the checkpoint in 1991. Brenda Thompson also disappeared in Waco. Texas Monthly names both women among his victims. Their graves were found in McLennan County in September 1998. No charge against McDuff in either death was reported.
Cynthia Gonzalez was abducted in Arlington around September 15, 1991, and found shot. The Cleburne Times-Review says McDuff may have killed her but that this is unproven.
Valencia Kay Joshua was a Waco sex worker. She was last seen alive on the night of February 24, 1992, on the Texas State Technical College campus, looking for McDuff's dormitory room. A few weeks after Melissa Northrup disappeared, police found her body in a shallow grave in a wooded area behind the college. McDuff was never tried for her death.
Colleen Reed was 28 and lived in Austin. Melissa Ann Northrup was 22, a convenience store clerk in Waco and a mother, pregnant with her third child. Theirs were the two cases that reached a jury.
On December 29, 1991, Colleen Reed was washing her black Mazda at a car wash west of downtown Austin. A witness saw two men in a tan car with rounded taillights grab her and speed off the wrong way down West Fifth Street. The description matched McDuff's Thunderbird. Cartwright writes that she was a random choice.
The other man in the car was Alva Hank Worley, a 34-year-old concrete worker who knew McDuff. It was months before he talked. When he did, he said he had ridden with McDuff that day, that both men had sexually assaulted Colleen Reed, and that McDuff later put her in the trunk. Police believed she was buried near McDuff's parents' home. Her body was not found until 1998.
On the night of March 1, 1992, Melissa Northrup was abducted from the convenience store in Waco where she worked. KWTX reported in 2024 that McDuff had worked at the same store for a time. That same night his Thunderbird was left at a motel less than a block away.
The evidence later summarized by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, and repeated by the federal appeals court, placed McDuff near the store and driving her car, and placed him at a home in Dallas County with the car nearby. A fellow student testified that McDuff had talked about robbing the store and disposing of a body; another said McDuff had spoken of kidnapping a girl from a convenience store. Her body, bound, was found weeks later in a water-filled gravel pit in southeast Dallas County, not far from where her car had been found. She had been strangled with a rope.
Her two children were raised by their grandparents, KWTX reported in 2024.
McDuff abandoned the Thunderbird and vanished. His mother filed a missing persons report.
The task force that formed in Waco by early March 1992 brought together city and county police, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Texas Rangers, an investigator from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, and about two dozen federal marshals. It was led by two deputy U.S. marshals in Waco, the brothers Parnell and Mike McNamara, whose late father had also been a deputy marshal; both had been teenagers in 1966. Because McDuff had sold drugs to an informant, the federal prosecutor Bill Johnston could charge him with federal firearms possession and drug distribution. That made him a federal fugitive and brought him within Operation Gunsmoke, a national marshals' effort with 250 investigators assigned to target violent offenders.
Mike McNamara kept returning to Hank Worley until Worley gave a detailed statement about Colleen Reed. The statement was released to the press. On May 1, 1992, the television program America's Most Wanted aired the case, and some fifty tips came in. One came from a viewer in Kansas City, Missouri, who recognized the man known there as Fowler, a worker on a city garbage truck.
On May 4, 1992, McDuff surrendered without a struggle at the Kansas City dump. He was flown to Waco and arraigned on a federal weapons charge. On May 6 the Star-Telegram photographed him arriving at the McLennan County Courthouse and described him as a suspect in the slayings or disappearances of at least eight women.
McLennan County prosecutors brought the capital murder case. The trial was moved to Harris County, and a jury convicted McDuff in 1993 and sentenced him to death. The Harris County conviction is the one TDCJ lists for his execution.
The evidence included hair found in Melissa Northrup's car. The defense's own hair comparison expert, Fred Zain, conceded that the hairs would not exclude McDuff. Hank Worley testified about the abduction and death of Colleen Reed, which the jury heard as evidence of another offense. At the punishment phase, the state presented 16 prior felonies and testimony about the 1966 killings. McDuff's only punishment witness said he would not be a danger in prison.
McDuff was also convicted of capital murder in Colleen Reed's case and sentenced to death, as Texas Monthly and the Cleburne Times-Review report. The conviction came while her body was still missing. The date and the court of that trial were not reported.
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the Northrup conviction and death sentence in an unpublished opinion in 1997 (McDuff v. State, No. 71,700). The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 1998. The Court of Criminal Appeals then denied state habeas relief.
McDuff filed a federal habeas petition in the Western District of Texas, at Waco, raising twelve claims. The district court granted the state summary judgment on October 15, 1998. On the day of his execution, November 17, 1998, a panel of the Fifth Circuit (Judges Jolly, Smith and Wiener) refused him a certificate of appealability and a stay. The panel found no evidence that the hair testimony was false, and noted that McDuff conceded he could not show the state knew of any falsity. It held that a claim of actual innocence, without a separate constitutional violation at trial, was not a ground for federal relief; that the Constitution did not require an instruction on parole eligibility, since Texas then had no sentence of life without parole; and that the Texas rule on corroborating accomplice testimony was a state rule with no federal basis.
For years McDuff would not say where the women were buried. Cartwright wrote that he refused to reveal it and so prolonged the suffering of the families, and that he knew time was on his side.
In 1998 the McNamara brothers spent many weeks cultivating an informant, whose identity was closely guarded and who, Texas Monthly reported, was not an accomplice. In September the informant agreed to help. Precise directions led searchers to the graves of Brenda Thompson and Regenia Moore in McLennan County. Colleen Reed's grave, near a bridge over the Brazos River in Falls County, was harder. A bulldozer operator worked along the riverbank for most of a day while the informant gave hints, and her remains were found.
In October 1998 lawmen and prosecutors from about six agencies gathered for a memorial at an Austin church, led by an honor guard of uniformed police. The names of fourteen known victims were read aloud. Colleen Reed's sister placed fourteen white roses in a single vase.
A few days before the memorial McDuff won another stay. Less than two weeks later a Waco judge lifted it and set his execution for November 17, 1998.
He was put to death by lethal injection at Huntsville. TDCJ lists it as execution number 161 and records his age as 52. His last statement was: "I'm ready to be released. Release me." Parnell McNamara, who had helped catch him, attended. McDuff was buried in the prison cemetery at Peckerwood Hill in Huntsville, the Houston Chronicle reported.
The case reached far beyond the courtroom. By August 1992 an Austin grand jury was investigating claims that McDuff and other violent prisoners had bought their way out. Texas Monthly reported an accusation that his family had paid 25,000 dollars to a former board member; it presented it as an accusation that had prompted an investigation, and it was not reported to have been proved. The investigation into McDuff's later crimes led to the prosecution of a former chairman of the parole board, who was convicted of perjury, Texas Monthly reported in 1998.
The Legislature changed the system. Governor Ann Richards's legislative director, Jim Parker, said the strange thing was not that Texas had a McDuff. "It's that we don't have hundreds of McDuffs," he told Texas Monthly. In 1992 the magazine reported a new law requiring prisoners convicted of capital murder to serve at least 35 years before becoming eligible for parole, and funding for drug and alcohol treatment for 12,000 prisoners by 1995, and said the governor was weighing legislation to make the board independent again. Texas Monthly later wrote that the McDuff investigation prompted the Legislature to reform parole procedures.
The men who caught him kept telling the story. In August 2017 Parnell McNamara, by then McLennan County sheriff, presented the case with the former Falls County sheriff Larry Pamplin and the former federal prosecutor Bill Johnston to more than 300 people at a law enforcement conference in Waco. McNamara called the 1989 release the product of a "runaway parole system" and said McDuff "should never have been released." KWTX reported that the case is credited with changing the Texas criminal justice system.
Proven by final judgment: murder in the 1966 Tarrant County case (death sentence, later commuted); bribery; the capital murder of Melissa Ann Northrup (affirmed on appeal; he was executed on this judgment); and, as reported, the capital murder of Colleen Reed.
Attributed by investigators, never tried: the deaths of Brenda Thompson and Regenia Moore, whose graves were found in 1998 with an informant's help, and of Valencia Kay Joshua.
Possible or suspected, never charged: the death of Sarafia Parker in Temple in 1989 and of Cynthia Gonzalez near Arlington in 1991.
The count: the number of women he killed is not known. Estimates vary widely. The Star-Telegram described him in May 1992 as a suspect in the slayings or disappearances of at least eight women. Cartwright wrote that year that authorities thought there might be as many as nine, and later that there could be ten beyond Reed and Northrup. CBS News's 48 Hours said in 1998 that authorities suspected as many as 14 other women. KWTX reported in 2024 that he was believed to have killed at least six women between October 1989 and March 1992, and in 2017 that presenters at the Waco conference put the number at nine to 14, possibly as high as 22. Fourteen names were read at the 1998 memorial. Texas Monthly wrote that only McDuff knew for sure.
The scope of the 1966 judgments: one death sentence for Robert Brand's murder (Cleburne Times-Review), three death sentences for all three teenagers (KWTX 2024), or a conviction for Edna Sullivan's murder (Texas Monthly 1998). The reports do not agree.
Family claims: relatives told lawmen years later that he had sexually assaulted family members as a teenager and killed at least one other woman, Texas Monthly reported in 1998. These claims were never tested in court.
The nickname: later coverage calls him "the broomstick killer." The origin of the name was not explained in the reporting.
Smaller conflicts: Mark Dunnam's age (15 in Texas Monthly; 16 in the 1966 Star-Telegram captions) and the spelling of Melissa Northrup's surname (Northrup in the court record; Northup in Texas Monthly). KWTX in 2024 dated her abduction to February 1992; the court record gives March 1, 1992. CBS News in 1998 placed the 1966 killings in Rosebud; they happened near Fort Worth.
1964: sent to prison for burglaries; penalties totaling 52 years run concurrently.
December 1965: paroled.
August 6, 1966: Robert Brand, Mark Dunnam and Edna Louise Sullivan are abducted near Everman and killed; Roy Dale Green later tells what happened.
August 8, 1966: searchers look for Edna Sullivan near Burleson; Green is held as a suspect.
August 17, 1966: McDuff's examining trial.
November 15, 1966: a Fort Worth jury reaches its verdict; he is sentenced to death.
December 27, 1966: hearing on a motion for a new trial.
1969 and April 1970: stays of execution.
1972: Furman v. Georgia; his sentence is commuted to life.
1976: first eligible for parole.
1980: habeas petition alleging jury misconduct; rejected after a 1982 hearing in Fort Worth.
1981: offers a parole board member 10,000 dollars; later convicted of bribery and given two years.
1988: parole approved, then rescinded.
September 1989: a special review panel votes to parole him.
October 11, 1989: released.
October 1989: Sarafia Parker is found dead in Temple three days later.
July to December 1990: charged with a terroristic threat, returned to prison, charge dropped; released again December 6, 1990.
Spring 1991: enrolls at Texas State Technical College in Waco.
September 1991: Cynthia Gonzalez is abducted in Arlington.
December 29, 1991: Colleen Reed is abducted in Austin.
February 24, 1992: Valencia Kay Joshua is last seen.
March 1, 1992: Melissa Ann Northrup is abducted in Waco.
May 1, 1992: America's Most Wanted airs the case.
May 4, 1992: he surrenders in Kansas City, Missouri.
1993: convicted in Harris County of Northrup's capital murder; sentenced to death.
Date not reported: convicted of capital murder in Reed's case; sentenced to death.
1997: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirms the Northrup conviction.
1998: Supreme Court denies review.
September 1998: an informant leads investigators to the graves of Brenda Thompson, Regenia Moore and Colleen Reed.
October 1998: memorial in Austin; fourteen names read.
October 15, 1998: federal district court denies habeas relief.
November 17, 1998: Fifth Circuit denies a certificate and stay; he is executed at Huntsville.