Free to Kill
Kenneth McDuff is one of the most sadistic, vicious murderers Texas has ever produced. Why did the state parole board put him back on the streets?
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An entry in Kenneth McDuff’s prison file notes that as a youth he was never required to assume responsibilities or observe standards of conduct, adding, “If any problem arose [at school] … , the school was to blame and Kenneth was completely innocent.” Any attempt to discipline Kenneth was certain to bring Addie McDuff hurrying to the school in full fury, sometimes carrying a pistol or at least claiming to. Teachers referred to her as Pistol-Packing Mama McDuff. “Every teacher in school was afraid of her,” says Ellen Roberts, a special education teacher. Many people in Rosebud had heard the story about Addie McDuff flagging down a school bus with her pistol, then giving the driver, who had thrown her son off the bus the previous day for fighting, a tongue-lashing. The story may or may not be true, but it illustrates the cloud of intimidation the McDuffs cast over the small town.
Kenneth took pleasure in bullying classmates and intimidating teachers. A classmate remembered how he would goad other kids into flipping quarters—Kenneth loved to gamble—until he had relieved them of their lunch money. Ellen Roberts recounts a strange experience when Kenneth’s sixth-grade teacher sent him to her office for consultation. “He never said a word, no response whatsoever,” she says. “He just sat there in stony silence and refused to make eye contact. That was most unusual in a young boy.”
With an IQ of 92, Kenneth was not the brightest guy in class. He liked to call attention to his negative impulses. “When he scored zero on a test,” a classmate remembers, “Kenneth would make sure everyone in class knew about it, make some kind of joke just to let everyone know he did it on purpose and didn’t give a damn.” What this class-mate remembers most is McDuff’s maniacal laughter, usually at something that no one else thought was funny, and how, in an instant—“like turning a light on and off”—the laugh would dissolve into a glare so hard and cold it stopped conversation.
People who grew up in Rosebud with Kenneth McDuff recall with enormous satisfaction that day in the eighth grade when McDuff challenged Tommy Sammon to meet him after school. Tommy was one of the most popular boys in school, a good athlete, modest, unassuming, not easily provoked. McDuff had been trying to goad him into a fight. He finally succeeded one day between classes, bumping against Sammon in the hallway and calling him a chickenshit in front of his friends. Ellen Roberts says, “Kenneth was so hated that when word got around that he was going to fight Tommy Sammon after school down by the drainage ditch, my whole class talked of nothing else.” The fight, such as it was, lasted only a few minutes. Though McDuff was larger than Sammon—or almost anyone else in school—Sammon easily overpowered him. McDuff was big, but he wasn’t strong. Sammon got him in a headlock, and McDuff bit him. The incident went down in Rosebud history as the day Tommy Sammon liberated the town (or at least the eighth grade) from the bully McDuff. Kenneth never bothered Sammon or anyone else in his class after that. A few months later, he quit school for good and went to work for his father.
The only close friend Kenneth had, either before or after he dropped out of school, was his brother, who listened to the stories of how society had mistreated Kenneth and counseled him on the proper response—screw ’em, was Lonnie’s advice. Sometime in the fall of 1964, when Kenneth was about seventeen and spending his evenings breaking into buildings and prowling for sex, he confided to Lonnie that he had raped a woman, cut her throat, and left her for dead in a ditch. Lonnie told him to go to bed and forget it. Not long after that, McDuff was sent to prison for burglary. The rape and attempted murder were never reported; otherwise the parole board might not have looked so casually on McDuff when it decided to release him in December 1965.
Kenneth McDuff underwent a subtle but deadly change following that first parole. The belief that he had committed murder and gotten away with it—coupled with the short, easy prison term he served for pulling more than a dozen burglaries—hardened him, gave him an exaggerated sense of invulnerability. He wasn’t a boy any longer; he was a man, having grown to six feet three inches and two-hundred-plus pounds, his broad shoulders and large hands causing him to look even larger. The evil of his countenance was accented by a crooked smile and a bulblike Popeye nose. Though prison had not taught McDuff how to make friends, it had taught him how to attract smaller, weaker sidekicks who could be controlled through intimidation and counted on to take part in whatever twisted schemes appealed to McDuff’s appetites. Kenneth seemed to enjoy having a witness to his debauchery.
One such unfortunate companion was Roy Dale Green, who lived with his mother in Marlin and worked for Kenneth’s dad. Green was two years younger than Kenneth and was mesmerized by McDuff’s tales—and sometimes exhibitions—of sadistic sex: One of McDuff’s more brutal amusements, which he demonstrated once in a bedroom of Green’s mother’s home, was pinning a girl to the floor and squirting a tube of Deep Heat into her vagina. Kenneth bragged that he had raped and strangled several women in his time. “Killing a woman’s like killing a chicken,” he told Green. “They both squawk.” Green wasn’t certain that he believed McDuff—until the evening of August 6, 1966.
It was a Saturday and McDuff was aching to prowl. He and Green had worked that morning pouring concrete at a construction site in Temple, and after work they cleaned up and headed for Fort Worth in the new Dodge Charger that McDuff’s mother had given him when he got out of prison. Green, who was eighteen at the time, had never been to Fort Worth, but McDuff had worked there a few years earlier and said he knew some girls. They cruised the small town of Everman, just south of Fort Worth, drinking beer and visiting with friends, including a girl that Kenneth knew from church. Later that evening, after they had taken the girl home, Kenneth found what he was looking for—a pretty teenage girl in a red-and-white-striped blouse and cutoff jeans—a total stranger, standing near a baseball field talking to two boys in a 1955 Ford. Purely by chance, McDuff selected his three victims—sixteen-year-old Edna Sullivan, her boyfriend, seventeen-year-old Robert Brand, and Robert’s cousin, fifteen-year-old Mark Dunnam, who was visiting from California. Roy Dale Green watched with fascination as McDuff took a .38 pistol from under his car seat and walked over to the three young people. First, McDuff demanded that the boys hand over their billfolds, then he forced all three into the trunk of the car and locked them in. “They got a good look at my face,” he told Green. “I’ll have to kill them.”
McDuff drove the Ford, with the teenagers in the trunk, down dark and narrow country roads, and Green followed in McDuff’s Dodge, still not convinced that McDuff intended to harm his hostages. Presently, McDuff turned into a field and stopped. He opened the trunk and said, “I want the young lady out,” pulling her by the arm. He instructed Green to lock her in the trunk of the Dodge, which Green did. Still in the trunk of the Ford, the two boys were on their knees, begging for their lives, when McDuff brought the gun up to chest level and shot them both in the face. He shot Brand twice and Dunnam three times, then lifted Dunnam by the hair and shot him again. Green saw the fire from the gun and covered his ears, looking away from the horror but not before seeing the look on McDuff’s face, an expression of inner peace that seemed to say, How do you like it so far, Roy Dale? For some reason the trunk wouldn’t shut, so McDuff backed the Ford, with the trunk open, against a fence, then McDuff and Green drove away in the Dodge, the terrified Edna Sullivan still a prisoner in the Dodge’s trunk.
With McDuff driving, they headed south, crossing the Johnson County line, eventually stopping along a dirt road about eleven miles from where they had left the Ford with the boys’ bodies. McDuff took Edna Sullivan from the trunk, made her undress, then threw her in the back seat and began raping her. He raped her two times, made Green rape her, then he raped her again. In all this time, Green heard the girl say just one thing: “I think you ripped something,” she cried out as McDuff brutalized her for the third time. His sexual appetite momentarily in check, McDuff drove them to another location, down a gravel road. Stopping, he took the girl to the front of the car and told her to sit down on the road. Green wasn’t sure what McDuff had in mind. Then he saw McDuff force the girl’s head to the ground and begin choking her with a section of broomstick. “He mashed down hard,” Green told lawmen. “She started waving her arms and kicking her legs, and he told me, ‘Grab her legs.’” While Green held Edna Sullivan’s legs, Kenneth McDuff crushed the life out of her. Then they threw her body over the fence and headed home, stopping along the way to bury the boys’ billfolds and discard their own bloody underwear.
Roy Dale Green never fully recovered from the horror of that night. The next afternoon, while he was taking a Sunday ride with friends, news of the killings came over the radio and suddenly Green was blurting out the whole story. “My God, I’ve got to tell somebody!” he cried. He became the prosecution’s star witness in the case against Kenneth McDuff, served five years for his part in the crimes, and returned to Marlin, where he lives to this day. “He stays out at the old family home and spends most of the day in his sister’s beer joint, the Town Door,” says Sheriff Larry Pamplin, who has known Green all his life. “To say he’s messed up is a real understatement.”
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