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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Vowing Kenneth’s innocence, Addie McDuff hired a lawyer from Waco and sat in the courtroom with her daughters throughout the trial. McDuff denied any knowledge of the killings, of course, suggesting that Roy Dale Green was probably responsible and, in an aside to the jury, whining that Falls County sheriff Brady Pamplin had had it in for poor Kenneth McDuff for years. During one recess, Mama McDuff told reporters that Kenneth had been with a girl from his church at the time the three teenagers were murdered, that her son was willing to risk death in the electric chair to spare the girl’s reputation. “He’s too good for his own good,” she said.
Justice for McDuff, Inc.
Two times in 1969 and again in April 1970, Kenneth McDuff came within a few days of his execution date, and each time he was granted stays. McDuff probably wasn’t sweating it. Only a handful of executions had taken place in the United States in the two years before he was convicted and none in the time he had been on death row. And the case of Furman v. Georgia was working its way through the system. In 1972 the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision, ruling that the unlimited discretion given to juries in capital trials—the ability, for example, to sentence someone to death without first focusing on the particular nature of the crime and the particular characteristics of the accused—amounted to cruel and unusual punishment and thus was unconstitutional. In effect, all the capital convictions in the country were overturned. Within a few months, the death sentences of all 88 inmates on death row in Texas were commuted to life.
McDuff was transferred to the Ramsey Unit and assigned to work in the fields, which was where prison officials put inmates who needed the tightest supervision. “We considered McDuff to be extremely dangerous and a high escape risk,” says David Christian, who was an assistant warden at the unit in the seventies.
In 1977, Addie McDuff hired a new lawyer, and the Kenneth McDuff story took on the trappings of a Hollywood melodrama. A Dallas attorney named Gary Jackson began a long and costly effort to prove that McDuff had been framed and that the true killer was his evil running mate, Roy Dale Green. Over the next decade, Kenneth McDuff became more than merely a client for Gary Jackson; he became an industry, incorporated in 1989 under the name of Justice for McDuff, Inc. There was, until recently, talk of book and movie deals. Jackson, who refused to be interviewed for this article and no longer represents McDuff, seemed a curious candidate to lead the McDuff crusade—he and his wife were both active in the Republican party of Texas, and Jackson had a career in the U.S. Army Reserve, where he now holds the rank of colonel. He didn’t usually practice criminal law. Nevertheless, Gary Jackson became a zealous advocate for the convicted killer. Poring through old trial records and newspaper accounts and crossing the country to interview witnesses, Jackson devised a new scenario for the events of August 6, 1966.
In a 26-page, single-spaced letter written to the chairman of the Board of Pardons and Paroles in 1979, Jackson presented what he considered dramatic new evidence. At the trial thirteen years before, McDuff had testified that on the night of the killings he handed over the keys to his new Dodge Charger to Green so that Green could go on a date. In the revised version, Gary Jackson claimed that Green needed the car to pull a robbery—the implication being that McDuff wanted no part of the robbery but had no objection to loaning his car to Green. In both versions McDuff had waited for Green in a burned-out shopping center in Everman, napping while Green satisfied his lust for murder. The problem, of course, was how Green could have driven both the Dodge and the Ford.
To get around this apparent impossibility, the lawyer developed a theory in which Green rendezvoused with the teenagers, whom he had met earlier that evening, to do some “underage drinking” in the field where the boys’ bodies were later discovered. Running out of beer, Green and his new friends left the Dodge in the field and took the Ford to buy more, which they consumed at the second location—the spot in Johnson County where Edna Sullivan’s body was found. There, Green made his move. Forcing the boys into the trunk at gunpoint, he proceeded to rape Edna Sullivan. While Green was occupied, the boys forced open the trunk. Realizing the impending danger, Gary Jackson wrote, Green “jumps out of the car and, without thinking, shoots the boys … using all six shells in his pistol.” The six shots were a nice dramatic touch—it always is in the movies—because it meant that Green was out of bullets and had no choice except to strangle Edna Sullivan with a broomstick. He leaves her body there and returns the Ford, with the two dead boys in the trunk, to the first location, where he picks up the Dodge and heads for the shopping center where McDuff has been waiting. This scenario had the added advantage of placing all three murders in Johnson County, out of the jurisdiction of the judge and jury that found McDuff guilty in the first place.
Gary Jackson’s letter impressed at least one member of the parole board enough to vote for McDuff, but it did not result in a parole for his client. In 1980 the Dallas attorney came up with additional evidence, alleging in a writ of habeas corpus several incidents of jury misconduct and tampering. Rumors of improper conduct had first surfaced back in 1966 in a newspaper report that one of the jurors had carried a flask of “needful intoxicant” into the dorm where the jury was quartered and in a story in the old Fort Worth Press, alleging that the sheriff of Tarrant County had come to the dorm and told jurors about another crime that he believed McDuff had committed. This one involved a rape and disfigurement, and the sheriff supposedly told jurors that because of “stupid” laws, they hadn’t been permitted to hear about it. The story had been leaked to the media by a bailiff named Rose Marie Anderson, who had vanished after the trial, claiming that she had been threatened by the sheriff for speaking up. Gary Jackson tracked the ex-bailiff to Arizona, where she repeated her allegations in an affida-vit. Jackson was able to get McDuff an evidentiary hearing in Fort Worth in 1982, but the court found the allegations not worthy of belief. During that same time period, McDuff wrote several letters of his own, one of them to the Court of Criminal Appeals in Austin, reporting a rumor that his trial judge in Fort Worth had taken $750,000 from the Mafia.
“My Family’s Got the Money”
In his six years on death row and his seventeen years among the general prison population, Kenneth McDuff wasn’t necessarily a model prisoner, but he knew how to keep his shirt clean. Hard cases like McDuff are given maximum leeway: As long as they are not putting a knife into someone or openly smuggling drugs, they can do almost what they please. After transferring to the Retrieve Unit, near Angleton, McDuff became boss of his tier of cells. In that position, a man of McDuff’s talents would have enjoyed not only the blessing of the wardens but substantial clout among inmates, meaning, among other things, that McDuff was able to influence which inmate was assigned as his cell mate. While McDuff was at Retrieve, his cell mate—or punk, to use the vernacular—provided whatever McDuff required in the way of sex and drugs, which he squirreled away in a red balloon inserted up his rectum—keistering drugs, they call it. Not your garden variety punk, this particular one was large and cold-eyed, with an excess of body hair and tattoos, but his menacing appearance was handicapped by the fact that he had offended the Aryan Brotherhood and faced the daily threat of assassination. It was a measure of McDuff’s prestige that he was able to protect his punk without tarnishing his own good record.
Mastering the angles came naturally to Kenneth McDuff. The parole board looked favorably on inmates who tried to better themselves—so this eighth-grade dropout enrolled in correspondence courses. If there was a shift in policy, or a subtle trend among parole board members, McDuff was one of the first to sniff it out. The procedure for considering which inmates deserved parole was—and is—for one of the three members of the parole team to interview a batch of inmates (usually fifteen to twenty in a single day) as they become eligible, then vote yes or no on each one and pass the files to the second member. Most of the time the members don’t even bother to discuss the cases with each other. In the early eighties, during Bill Clements’ administration, the governor had to approve paroles, which is no longer the case. Scuttlebutt among prisoners held that if a Clements appointee voted yes on an applicant that he had personally interviewed, at least one of the other members was likely to go along and so was the governor.
When McDuff’s name came before the parole board in 1980, he received the vote of one member, Helen Copitka, who had been a parole commissioner since 1975 (before 1989 both commissioners and board members voted on parole). Copitka was swayed by the material that attorney Gary Jackson had sent to the parole board. Copitka was still on the board in 1981, but McDuff asked to be interviewed by Glenn Heckmann, who had been appointed by Governor Clements in January 1980. As soon as he was alone with Heckmann in the chaplain’s office, McDuff said, “If you can get me out of this pen, I guarantee that $10,000 will be left in the glove compartment of your car. I know you’re the governor’s man. Word is, I get your vote, I’m out of here. My family’s got the money.” Heckmann mumbled that he would take McDuff’s offer under advisement and went straight to the office of the Brazoria County district attorney, who filed a charge of bribery against McDuff.
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