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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The charge resulted in McDuff’s third conviction, which meant that the jury had an opportunity to give him life under the state’s old habitual felon act; another life sentence would have pushed McDuff’s eligible parole date into 1992. Instead, McDuff (with help from Gary Jackson) once again displayed his uncanny talent for slithering through the system. Over the objection of prosecutor Ken Dies, the judge granted McDuff considerable latitude to tell the jury about his criminal past—not the details of his murder spree in 1966, but his own fantasy of how the system had conspired against him, time after time, injustice heaped upon injustice, the good name of “McDuff” besmirched by charlatans. It was a soliloquy of soap opera proportions, and McDuff carried it off with a straight face.
Under the provisions of the habitual felon act, the jury first voted on McDuff’s guilt or innocence in the charge of bribery; that part was easy. The law then called for a separate deliberation, one that was strictly technical, in which the jury was required to find that the Kenneth A. McDuff they had just found guilty was the same Kenneth A. McDuff that two previous juries had found guilty. But the jury misunderstood the instructions. “They got confused by McDuff’s testimony, which was partly my fault,” Ken Dies admits. “They thought that they were supposed to rule on McDuff’s guilt or innocence in the two previous cases.” Of course, the jury couldn’t be sure, since it didn’t hear the evidence in those cases. So instead of giving McDuff life, the jury opted for two years—a meaningless punishment, since McDuff had accumulated more than two years of good time merely waiting for his trial. In effect, McDuff offered a bribe to a parole officer and got away with it.
So why did a 1989 parole board—fully aware of McDuff’s criminal history and cognizant that the jury that found him guilty of murder also found that he was likely to kill again—decide to put him back among us? The quick answer is that by 1989 Kenneth McDuff was no longer a name or even a case history; he was just a number. Two years before, Bill Clements, the parole board, and the prison system had decided that to prevent Texas prisons from becoming overcrowded in violation of court-imposed ceilings, 750 inmates a week had to be paroled. That meant the fifteen members of the parole board (the number was elevated to eighteen in 1989) had to interview and study the files of at least 1,000 inmates every five working days. Old-timers like McDuff, convicts whose names came up year after year, weren’t even interviewed anymore but were lumped with similar inmates in special review groups. Their files—if board members bothered to study them at all—contained only the most basic and banal information, hardly anything to suggest the true nature of an inmate. By the time McDuff was paroled, eight of every ten parole applications were being approved, and the system was still falling behind. All the good risks for parole had been exhausted; the parole board was getting down to the bottom of the barrel. And then the bottom was lowered: Time was awarded so liberally that an inmate could get credit for serving one full year in just 22 days. In a prison system with a capacity of 60,000 inmates, more than 36,000 received paroles in 1989, the year Kenneth McDuff went free. The goal of the state became not to keep the streets safe but to keep the tap flowing and the federal courts at bay.
Chris Mealy, the parole board member who cast the deciding vote that freed McDuff, recalls that when McDuff came up for special review in September 1989, he was impressed by two things. First, McDuff had begun to improve himself by taking college-credit courses, and second, the file showed that in six of the fifteen years since he had become eligible for parole, McDuff had received one affirmative vote. In hindsight, Mealy admits that maybe he made an error: “If any of what we know is true, then obviously a mistake was made. It’s a human system. Errors will be made. Some of them will be very costly. I wish that I could take it back.”
But in the case of Kenneth McDuff, the parole board blew it not once but twice. In July 1990, nine months after he was released, McDuff was charged with a new crime, making a terroristic threat—a misdemeanor, but also an offense sufficient to put him back behind bars for the remainder of his life, because it was committed while he was on parole. The charge grew out of a racial incident in downtown Rosebud. McDuff directed some slurs at a group of black teenagers who were minding their own business, then chased one of them down an alley with a knife and threatened to kill him. At his preliminary parole revocation hearing, McDuff spewed forth his loathing for blacks with such intensity that Gary Jackson had to shout at his client to prevent him from doing additional damage to his claim of innocence. McDuff was returned to TDCJ in September, but once again the system faltered. After conferring with Sheriff Larry Pamplin, Falls County district attorney Tom Sehon made the fateful decision to drop the misdemeanor charge—most of his witnesses were too frightened to testify, anyway—and allow the parole board to deal with McDuff. To make sure the board understood that the people who knew McDuff best considered him a continuing menace, Sehon wrote a letter in which he called McDuff “the most extraordinarily violent criminal ever to set foot in Falls County” and advised the board against ever reinstating McDuff’s parole.
Nevertheless, Gary Jackson filed a motion to have McDuff’s parole reinstated. He made the point that the charge that had caused it to be revoked had been dismissed. What happened next was bureaucracy at its worst. The board had long considered the revocation and reinstatement process a waste of time and, for years, had delegated to its staff (known as hearings officers) the power to revoke and reinstate paroles, even though some lawyers believe that the practice is illegal. There was no hearing, no testimony, no advocacy of any kind. The board made no formal decision to reinstate McDuff’s parole. Some anonymous hearing officer simply decided that there was no reason to keep Kenneth McDuff locked up. On December 6, 1990, Kenneth McDuff went free again.
“Please, Not Me!”
Sheriff Larry Pamplin and his friends in the U.S. marshal’s office in Waco, the McNamaras, sensed that McDuff was back on the prowl long before they could prove it. “The most frustrating part,” says Pamplin, “is that we knew he was going to kill someone. We just didn’t know when or where.” In any case, it wasn’t clear what they could do about it. Unless McDuff committed a crime in Falls County, Pamplin wouldn’t have jurisdiction, and the only way the McNamaras would be able to investigate would be if McDuff became a federal fugitive. Still, the three lawmen did what they could to keep track of McDuff. In the beginning, at least, McDuff was cool enough to keep on the good side of his parole officer, and no other law enforcement agency seemed at all interested in his activities.
McDuff moved frequently—Temple, Rockdale, Cameron, Bellmead, Tyler, Dallas—usually staying close to his mother or one of his sisters, most of the time with no apparent means of support, driving new cars, spending freely, robbing crack dealers on the street. The randomness of his movements made connecting him with specific murders almost impossible for Pamplin and the McNamaras. They didn’t even learn about several of the killings McDuff is now suspected of committing until weeks after the fact.
In the spring of 1991, McDuff enrolled in Texas State Technical College in Waco and moved into a dormitory on campus. Starting then, and in the months that followed, several Waco-area prostitutes were reported missing, a fact that didn’t appear to alarm Waco police or prompt them to ask hard questions of McDuff. A woman named Regenia Moore was seen kicking and screaming in the cab of McDuff’s red pickup truck as it ran through a police checkpoint, and though the police did look up McDuff several days later and question him, nothing came of the incident. He seemed to be living a charmed life; he beat up and nearly blinded a fellow student at TSTC and threatened several others, and still nobody reported him to the police. It was a cool life: student by day, drug-crazed prowler by night, nobody asking questions.
Then, a week before he was scheduled to take his final exams, McDuff abandoned all pretense of cool. Sometime late on the evening of March 1, 1992, he parked his tan Thunderbird at the New Road Inn just south of Waco and vanished into the shadows. That same night, less than a block away, 22-year-old Melissa Northup was kidnapped from a convenience store where she worked. Her body was found weeks later, bound and floating in a gravel pit in Dallas County, near the spot where the killer had left her car. A few weeks after Northup’s disappearance, police discovered the naked and badly decomposed body of Valencia Kay Joshua in a shallow grave in a wooded area behind TSTC. Joshua was one of the missing prostitutes. She was last seen alive on the night of February 24, on the TSTC campus, looking for McDuff’s dormitory room. McDuff’s sudden disappearance caught the parole board and everyone else by surprise. Addie McDuff was so worried that she filed a missing persons report.
Knowing McDuff’s history, the McNamaras realized they had to act quickly, and for once, the system cooperated. McDuff had made a mistake that played into the hands of the law: He had sold drugs to an informant. Using information provided by two informants, assistant U.S. attorney Bill Johnson of Waco charged McDuff with possession of firearms and distribution of drugs. McDuff had unwittingly become a federal fugitive, which was all the McNamaras needed to get on his trail. The U.S. Marshals Service had already assigned 250 investigators to Operation Gunsmoke, a nationwide effort to target violent offenders and get them off the streets. McDuff fit the mandate of Operation Gunsmoke right down to his evil smirk.
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