"They Don't Even Know Me Personally": Kenneth McDuff on Tape

Name: "They Don't Even Know Me Personally": Kenneth McDuff on Tape
Uploaded: 2020-12-18
Duration: 19 min 36 s
Description: In a short archive recording, Kenneth McDuff complained that the people saying bad things about him in the news did not even know him.

In a short archive recording, Kenneth McDuff complained that the people saying bad things about him in the news did not even know him.

Subject: Kenneth Allen McDuff
Runtime: 19:36

Content warning: Concerns the abduction, torture and murder of young women, the recovery of their remains, and a retold account of McDuff chasing one of his victims.

The Recording

This episode of Robert Riggs's True Crime Reporter podcast, about the final months before McDuff's execution in November 1998, includes a short archive clip in which McDuff answers an interviewer. In it he complains that people who said negative things about him on the news "don't even know me personally", and names the McNamara brothers, the deputy U.S. marshals who had hunted him in 1992, as men who had never had a conversation with him. Asked whether anyone outside the news really knew him, his answer trails off.

Historical Context

In August 1966, aged 20, McDuff abducted and murdered three teenagers near Everman, Texas: Robert Brand, 17, his cousin Marcus Dunnam, 15, and Edna Louise Sullivan, 16. He was sentenced to death, but his sentence was commuted to life after 1972, and he was paroled in 1989 and again in December 1990. Within two years he was suspected in the disappearances and murders of a series of women in central Texas. He was arrested in Kansas City, Missouri, on May 4, 1992, living under the name "Richard Fowler". He was sentenced to death for the murder of Melissa Northrup, a Waco convenience store clerk, and convicted of capital murder a second time for the murder of Colleen Reed of Austin.

Circumstances of the Recording

The date, place and interviewer of the McDuff clip are not documented. It is placed in the episode immediately after the narrator says McDuff told author Gary Lavergne "everyone just misunderstood him", but the episode does not say Lavergne's death-row interview was recorded, and Riggs's credits say the series' archive soundbites come from his own tape recordings as a reporter. What the clip itself establishes is that it was made after the McNamaras' 1992 manhunt.

What the Episode Covers

Most of the episode is narration and interviews. Lavergne, author of "Bad Boy from Rosebud", describes meeting McDuff on death row at the Ellis Unit near Huntsville for nearly five hours and calls him "a genius when it comes to lying". The episode then describes how federal prosecutor Bill Johnston and Deputy U.S. Marshals Parnell and Mike McNamara recruited a relative of McDuff's as an informant, how her information led to the remains of Regenia Moore, and how Johnston found the remains of Brenda Thompson. It closes with a preview of how prison investigator John Moriarty brought McDuff to the place where Colleen Reed was buried, and, after the credits, a retold account of what McDuff said about Reed's last moments.

What Makes the Recording Significant

The clip preserves McDuff's own voice. In it he presents himself as misunderstood and misrepresented by the press, the same posture Lavergne describes from his death-row interview. It shows how McDuff spoke about himself in custody, while he was still refusing to say where the missing women were buried.

Archival Importance

Before his execution McDuff gave information that led investigators to the remains of Regenia Moore, Brenda Thompson and Colleen Reed, all recovered in 1998. The episode records the first-hand accounts of the people involved, alongside a short recording of McDuff himself.

Important Caveats

McDuff speaks for less than a minute of a 19-minute episode; the rest is narration and interviews. The origin of his clip is not documented, and the machine transcripts of it disagree in several places, so only the excerpt below should be quoted until a listener has checked it. Statements in the episode about what McDuff said to Lavergne, to the informant and to Moriarty are other people's accounts, not recordings of McDuff. The upload's title, "Face-To-Face With Serial Killer Kenneth McDuff", refers to Lavergne's meeting; the episode is not a recording of that meeting. The narrator's description of McDuff as "the only man in Texas history convicted of capital murder three different times" is the episode's claim.

Robert Riggs: The True Crime Reporter never settles for standing outside the yellow crime scene tape. You knock on doors, dig through records, and cultivate sources to get to the bottom of the story. I'm Robert Riggs, the host and creator of the True Crime Reporter podcast, back with another story from three decades of investigative reporting. In this episode, I pulled out my reporter's notebooks, my law enforcement sources opened up their confidential case files, we sat down together to talk, and you can listen in to our journey into darkness.

Robert Riggs: But before you do, be advised that this podcast is for a mature audience and not for the faint of heart. Some episodes may contain profanity and graphic details of violent crimes. To follow True Crime Reporter, text truecrime to 33777. Text truecrime, that's two words, truecrime, to 33777. With that said, here we go on another journey into darkness.

Robert Riggs: Kenneth McDuff was finally scheduled to die by lethal injection on November 17th of 1998. The serial killer had exhausted his appeals for the pair of capital murder sentences handed down six years earlier. Time was running out for investigators. They wanted to find the bodies of Brenda Thompson, Regenia Moore, and Colleen Reed before McDuff took his secrets to the prison graveyard.

Robert Riggs: Serial killer Kenneth McDuff held on tightly to three secrets. Where did he bury the bodies of Brenda Thompson, Regenia Moore, and Colleen Reed? McDuff's date with the executioner was a few weeks away. Investigators were desperate for answers. Author Gary Lavergne went inside Texas death row to try to find out. Lavergne wrote "Bad Boy from Rosebud: The Murderous Life of Kenneth Allen McDuff."

Gary Lavergne: I was never afraid of McDuff because I knew that in the end, McDuff would back down from anyone who looked him dead in the eye and was deadly serious with him. And I made up my mind he was not going to scare me.

Robert Riggs: Investigators suspected McDuff kidnapped and murdered more than 15 missing women. Some bodies had been found, but not enough physical evidence to tie McDuff to their murders. The body of Melissa Northrup, the Waco convenience store clerk, had been found 100 miles away in a remote corner of Dallas County in a flooded gravel pit. McDuff's date with the executioner for her murder was fast approaching. Time was running out on getting McDuff to disclose where he buried Brenda Thompson, Regenia Moore, and Colleen Reed.

Gary Lavergne: At that time, none of the bodies except for Melissa Northrup had been recovered, and were missing, and they all knew McDuff did it. But at the time, he had not admitted to any of it. And so, you know, maybe there's a chance, a slight chance, but maybe there's a chance that he would talk to someone who would be willing to write this story.

Robert Riggs: Gary Lavergne went to the Ellis Prison Unit, located 12 miles north of Huntsville, Texas. It's an old-style red brick prison farm of more than 11,000 acres. Inmates raise crops, run a cotton gin, breed cows and horses, and refurbish school buses here. Inmates wear white pants and shirts and black shoes made by fellow inmates in the Texas prison industry. Death row occupied a cell block inside the Ellis unit. Some of its inmates were allowed to work in the death row garment factory, sewing new gray pants for prison guards. Guards armed with rifles stood watch in sentry towers mounted with giant spotlights. Three rings of tall chain-link fences topped with razor-sharp concertina wire circled the prison.

Robert Riggs: McDuff first arrived here in 1966, a year after the prison opened, to serve his death sentence for the broomstick murders. McDuff was back where he had already spent more than half of his life, the only man in Texas history convicted of capital murder three different times. Lavergne walked up to the Ellis unit's front gate. A guard in the sentry tower lowered a bucket attached to a chain. Lavergne placed his driver's license inside. The guard reeled up the bucket, checked Lavergne's identification, and lowered it back down.

Gary Lavergne: And I said to myself, well, this is one of the largest prison systems in the world, and they use a bucket to check your ID. Like I said, it is an old-style prison farm.

Robert Riggs: Inside, Lavergne found McDuff waiting in a prison visitation room. Lavergne avoided shaking hands with McDuff, exchanged a few pleasantries, and got down to the interview. Lavergne could not help fixating on what I always described in my news reports as McDuff's dead, shark-like eyes.

Gary Lavergne: He had, uh, brown eyes that were not just like the brown eyes that you would see in most people. They were darker. And they were piercing. But he only used that gaze, that famous gaze of his, if he thought he could intimidate you. And once I made it clear I was not afraid of him, and I didn't say, "Mac, I'm not afraid of you" or anything like that, I didn't have to. It bothered him if you returned his gaze and you didn't flinch. And again, I made a decision that that's what I was going to do.

Gary Lavergne: I got extraordinary access to him, insofar as the deal was, and this is prison policy: as long as you can keep him talking and as long as he's willing to talk, we'll leave you alone, more or less. And so in the end I ended up sitting down with him for five hours. I think it's exactly like four hours and 47 minutes, but, uh, it was one of the most exhausting things I have ever done in my life.

Robert Riggs: Was the exhaustion from trying to get him to tell you something, or how he would kind of race around in other directions and try to take you off the trail, or?

Gary Lavergne: It was a combination of many things. Number one, I knew who he was and what he had done. So it was, you know, his capacity to do evil things was always in my mind, and I don't know how anybody could even approach him without some consciousness of that. Then secondly, he had been through so many interrogations that he was really good at lying. I'll give him credit for that. He could spin a story, and I didn't believe any of it because I knew who he was, but it was exhausting just to listen to him go on.

Robert Riggs: Well, he was a career serial killer. You know, interrogated all of his life on different crimes, so I guess you would develop some expertise.

Gary Lavergne: Well, you know, I've been asked about him, and my background is teaching, and the word "genius," I think, is an overused term. I think everyone is a genius in some way. He would be a genius when it comes to lying.

Robert Riggs: Wow.

Gary Lavergne: Yeah. I mean, I think all of us, by virtue of our individuality, have something in us that is exemplary. And as a teacher, I tried to find that in every one of my students, but with him, it was just deceit and lying.

Robert Riggs: McDuff didn't give up the location of any of his victims' bodies. He told Lavergne everyone just misunderstood him.

Kenneth McDuff: See, you always find someone [unclear: "said" / "who's said"] something negative about somebody. If I was to have been [unclear: "having an" / "out in the"] outstanding quarterback or something and you [unclear: "go to" / "escort" / "used to go to"] my hometown, everybody has something positive, you know. And by the same token, all the way around, people that's been saying something negative, and most people that was, you know, [unclear: "they showed on the news" / "in the news"], but saying bad things about me, they don't even know me personally. You know, the [unclear: "pamphlets" / "people that"], [unclear: "I don't know personally" / "they don't know me personally"]. Uh, but who [unclear: "doesn't know" / "does know me"]? Does anybody know [unclear: "me" / "you"]? The McNamara brothers, they didn't never have carried on [unclear: "conversation" / "all the conversation"]. There's very few people that really, uh, [unclear: "have" / "know"]. [unclear: "It's been in the newspaper talking about" / "they've been in the news feeding"], they don't know [inaudible] conversation.

Interviewer: But other than the news media, is there anybody out there who really knows [unclear: "him" / "you"]?

Kenneth McDuff: Uh, no, I [unclear: "didn't say" / "I'm gonna say"] that, um, there really is. [unclear: "My line's been here" / "That's my last minute, of course"] [clip ends].

Robert Riggs: Lavergne asked McDuff why he spent so much time with streetwalkers. McDuff replied that it was hard to get a date after you've been on death row. Lavergne left thinking that McDuff was the personification of evil, that was complete selfishness.

Gary Lavergne: McDuff was a pathological example of selfishness, complete, total self-centeredness. And like I said a few moments ago, he felt that if he said something, you had to believe it because he said it. And because he said it, it was the truth. And that everybody and everything existed for his own personal pleasure. I studied that guy from middle school on through his execution, and I never uncovered a single example of him being selfless or charitable. His entire adult life was selfishness and self-gratification.

Robert Riggs: Investigators tried another tactic. U.S. Attorney Bill Johnston and U.S. Deputy Marshals Parnell and Mike McNamara recruited an informant. A distant cousin paid McDuff a visit on death row.

Bill Johnston: She's a cousin, second cousin maybe, to McDuff. But a fairly decent person, sort of in that world, but a fairly decent person, I mean a decent person, honestly. She had the bad luck of being related to him.

Robert Riggs: The informant obtained McDuff's directions to where Regenia Moore and Brenda Thompson's bodies were buried. Seven years after he murdered Regenia Moore, McDuff clearly remembered the exact number of steps to her grave that he dug in a wooded farmland in rural Texas.

Bill Johnston: It was amazing. I mean, it was like, wow, you know. He remembered exactly where it was, and he was honest about it, so to speak. And so we got the forensic team out there, and they unearthed her. She was skeletal, very, very, very shallow. And then the other description, Brenda Thompson. He didn't say that, but that's who he knew it was.

Robert Riggs: But finding the remains of the other victim, Brenda Thompson, proved to be a challenge. They brought in a cadaver dog to search for her scent.

Bill Johnston: And that dog tramped all across an acre, probably, of poison ivy vines and thorns and everything. It was so thick you could barely walk through this place. And the poor dog worked and worked and worked and never hit on anything. And there wasn't anything of any description that could be seen. Just nothing. It was nothing unique about any of it. Of course, it had been seven years.

Robert Riggs: Johnston did not want to give up. He went back to try searching again. He used a technique he had learned from a Civil War researcher from the Smithsonian Institution. He rushed to a plumbing supply store and bought a fiberglass rod with a brass tip. It's used to find underground water lines. Johnston methodically poked the ground with the rod. He felt around for soft spots beneath the topsoil that might cover a grave. He was about to give up.

Bill Johnston: And I hit something, and it made a scraping sound. It seemed hard, and I didn't know if I'd hit a rock or what. I got down on my hands and knees and I spread the dirt away, and there was an off-white looking object. And I further spread the dirt away, and I grabbed it with my fingers and I pulled it, and I pulled it out, and it looked to me like a human arm bone.

Robert Riggs: Johnston discovered the skeletal remains of Brenda Thompson hidden in a field thick with poison ivy and vines. McDuff's directions were correct. The terrain had changed since her murder seven years earlier. What do you make that McDuff could remember with great detail where he put a body in a remote area years and years earlier?

Bill Johnston: He gloried in it and relived it, I think, and I think it was his mental pornography. I think he, uh, that was his essence. And he used this term, "I'm going to use them up."

Robert Riggs: Right. What did that mean? You know, what was McDuff thinking?

Bill Johnston: Um, I believe McDuff did want to have power over life and death, but the torture, um, they say he was gratified in some fashion by the torture. Um, I don't really, I don't understand that, and I don't know how you'd get to the bottom of that and figure it out, or what was motivating him. But to me, I was with McDuff on a few occasions, very close to him. I was a couple of feet away from him for a pretty good while and was speaking with him, and his eyes were dead. Um, his eyes had no spark of life, had no, um, humanity in them. There was something wrong with the guy. And I don't mean psychologically, I mean in his creation.

Robert Riggs: Next on True Crime Reporter: John Moriarty, the prison investigator, tricks Kenneth McDuff into drawing a map of where he buried Colleen Reed.

John Moriarty: I got him off of death row and brought him out to the scene. We had media there at the time on this bridge nearby the location, and, um, outside of Waco, and, uh, we actually disguised him and snuck him in past the media in one of the cars, and he wasn't on the scene more than a couple minutes and said, "Right over here," even though the terrain had changed tremendously, with trees growing and that kind of thing. And sure enough, that's where she was.

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Robert Riggs: True Crime Reporter is a trademarked and copyrighted news show. It is an original co-production with Podcast Ad Reps, hosted and written by me, Robert Riggs. Executive producer Elizabeth Arnold, audio production by Matt Stoker, original music by Blair King, associate producer [unclear: "Siler Burr" / "Sylar Burr"], social media producer Grace Woodward, publicity Tim Livingston PR, photography Igor [unclear: "Kurgulitz" / "Cargulats"], graphics Brian David Kerr Designs. Special thanks to Gary Lavergne, author of "Bad Boy from Rosebud: The Murderous Life of Kenneth Allen McDuff." The audio recordings of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee hearings are courtesy of the Texas State Archives. Archive soundbites included in the episodes are from my original reporter's notebook tape recordings. And for our listeners who stayed to hear the credits, here's a little bonus.

Gary Lavergne: "Hypothetically, uh, if somebody was doing this, how would this happen?" But he kind of strayed from it. Um, you know, he talked about, well, probably the most chilling thing he told me was, because he strayed from it, it wasn't hypothetical anymore, obviously. He told me that he had taken Colleen Reed out to the location where she was found, and, um, that she had run off from him, and that he couldn't catch her. And he said it was just like the movies. I said, "What do you mean, it was just like the movies?" "Have you ever seen the movies where they're screaming and yelling and running and looking behind them and they trip?" He said, "There was no way I would have caught her. But she tripped, and I was on her." And he said that was that.