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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By early March, a formidable Kenneth McDuff task force had been assembled in Waco. It consisted of lawmen from several county and local police departments, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the Drug Enforcement Agency, Texas Rangers, an investigator from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, and about two dozen federal marshals from Operation Gunsmoke, including two of the agency’s international supersleuths, Mike Carnevale of San Antonio and Dan Stoltz of Houston. Capturing McDuff was becoming a national priority. “Until I actually got on the scene down in Texas,” says Mike Earp, a supervisory inspector of the Marshals Service’s enforcement division in Washington, D.C., “I didn’t realize what an impact McDuff had had on those small communities, that people were absolutely terrified of the man.” Earp, a distant relative of the most famous marshal of all, Wyatt Earp, dispatched one of the service’s mobile command centers, a double tractor trailer rig called Red October. Parked on the lot behind the federal building in Waco for the duration of the search, Red October put the task force in communication with every law enforcement agency in the country. It seemed somehow appropriate that the job of tracking down one of the worst killers in modern times should fall on the Marshals Service, the oldest law enforcement agency in the country, founded in 1789 by George Washington. It seemed appropriate, too, that Parnell and Mike McNamara (assisted by another Waco-based deputy, Alonda Guilbeau) should take the point in this deadly race against time.
Many of McDuff’s ex-convict running mates lived in Temple and nearby towns, so that’s where the task force focused its search. Layer by layer, McDuff’s sordid past was overturned. In the community of Holland, they questioned some people whose family album consisted almost entirely of photographs taken at TDCJ. One marshal said matter-of-factly that one of the boys told them that after his daddy killed his mama, “the old man had only stabbed him once and beat him twice with a tire tool.” A major shock was the discovery that Kenneth McDuff had a daughter. The woman that he raped and left for dead in 1964 not only survived but also had his baby. The daughter, Theresa, was 21 when she learned that her real father was a convicted killer named Kenneth McDuff. Theresa told the marshals that she had visited McDuff in prison and became fascinated by him. He tried to persuade her to smuggle drugs. After his parole, McDuff offered to take her to Las Vegas and be her pimp. She also told the marshals that McDuff’s family had paid $25,000 to a former member of the parole board to secure his release from prison in 1989, an accusation that has led to an ongoing investigation of several former parole board members. Disenchanted with the man she once found so fascinating, Theresa has moved out of state, as far from Kenneth McDuff as possible.
At first McDuff’s associates were too loyal—or maybe they were simply too frightened—to give up much information. The McNamaras developed a technique for softening them up. They would launch into a bloody description of McDuff’s murder spree in 1966, watching the reaction as the story spilled out. Sure, his friends knew from being in prison that McDuff had killed some people, but nobody inside went into details: They didn’t realize that there were three of them, that they were kids, for Christ’s sake, that the boys had begged on bended knees as McDuff blew off their faces, that Edna Sullivan’s eyes had filled with terror as McDuff leaned his full weight onto the broomstick pressed across her throat. The story always got a reaction, even from the sorriest of criminals.
The search was as arduous as it was intense, requiring the lawmen from the various agencies to pull eighteen-hour shifts, usually without a day off. Sometimes they didn’t bother going back to their motel room to sleep, curling up instead on the floor of the marshal’s office in Waco for a few hours. But piece by piece, they began putting things together. The first big break came when they cornered McDuff’s onetime punk in the parking lot outside of Por Boy’s Lounge in Temple. After some persuasion, he told them about a woman drug dealer in Harker Heights, who in turn directed them to a thug in Dallas, who told about spending Christmas Day with McDuff in Austin. This was an especially interesting revelation because it established that McDuff had been in the Capital City five days before 28-year-old Colleen Reed was abducted from a car wash west of downtown. Witnesses had reported that two men in a tan car with rounded taillights—a good description of McDuff’s Thunderbird—had grabbed Reed and sped off, going the wrong way on West Fifth Street. Driving the wrong way on one-way streets was a McDuff trademark, one of the many ways he demonstrated his contempt for the rules of society. The Austin police were under enormous public pressure to solve the Reed case, but they had dismissed McDuff as a suspect because, according to their sources, McDuff hadn’t been in Austin since October.
But the McNamaras were sure that McDuff was their man. They began running through a list of McDuff’s buddies, looking for someone who fit the description of the second occupant of the tan car—a Hispanic or dark-complected white male. They stopped at the name of Alva Hank Worley. A 34-year-old concrete worker who hung out with McDuff, Worley fit the description fairly well, but more than that, he was a textbook example of the kind of weak-willed sidekick McDuff liked to have around. They saw Hank Worley as a nineties version of Roy Dale Green, a man haunted by what he had done, a man ready to talk.
Worley lived with his fourteen-year-old daughter at Bloom’s Motel, south of Temple, and late one night the McNamaras, along with a deputy from the Bell County Sheriff’s Department, knocked on his door. The late hour was calculated for maximum psychological effect. They didn’t expect much out of Worley on the first visit and that’s what they got: He claimed that he barely knew Kenneth McDuff. When Mike McNamara went into his bloody account of McDuff’s murder spree, Hank Worley didn’t blink. “That was not a normal reaction,” Mike told his brother as they drove away. “He knows something.”
Over the next two weeks, the marshals and the deputy dropped by Bloom’s Motel at odd hours, always taking Worley by surprise—what lawmen call “driving a suspect up.” One thing Mike McNamara had learned in his 21 years on the job: Criminals are basically lazy, you drive them up by outhustling them, by working while they’re sleeping (or trying to), by imprinting on their brains the relentlessness of your pursuit and the hopelessness of their attempts to outrun or outlast it. On the fifth visit, several marshals found Worley barbecuing and drinking beer with some friends. Over Worley’s shoulder, Mike McNamara could see Worley’s young daughter, and he kept his eyes on her as he began his litany: “Hank, you’re hiding a kid killer, you know that? You’re protecting a man who raped and brutalized and strangled a girl not much older than your daughter over there. Picture her on the ground, a broomstick across her throat, crying out to you for help, begging you to speak out, to do what’s right, to save the life of some other young girl, to …” About that time Hank Worley began to scream.
When Worley had calmed down, this is the story he told: Four days after Christmas, he rode with McDuff to Austin to look for drugs. They cruised the university area and scouted the bars on Sixth Street; then they crossed Lamar and turned south on a side street to double back in the direction they had come. That’s when McDuff spotted Colleen Reed, washing her black Mazda in one of the bays at the car wash on Fifth. She was a random choice, just as Edna Sullivan had been in 1966. McDuff parked his Thunderbird in the adjacent bay and disappeared for a moment. When he returned, he had Colleen Reed by the throat, holding her up so that just her toes touched the cement floor. “Please, not me,” she cried. “Not me.” McDuff threw her in the back seat and put Worley back there to control her.
A few miles out of Austin, McDuff pulled over and changed places with Worley. While Worley drove along I-35, McDuff stripped Colleen Reed naked, stubbed out a cigarette between her legs, and began raping her. When Worley stopped again to change places, he noticed that her hands were tied behind her back. While McDuff drove, Worley took off his own clothes and forced her to perform oral sex. Then he raped her. North of Belton, McDuff turned off the interstate onto Texas Highway 317, close to the house where his parents lived. He stopped on a narrow dirt road and raped Colleen Reed again.
When she was able to stumble to her feet, the young woman put her head on Worley’s shoulder and said in a quivering voice, “Please don’t let him hurt me anymore.” McDuff grabbed her by the back of the neck, shoved her into the trunk of the Thunderbird, and slammed it shut. When McDuff dropped Worley off that night, Worley asked what he intended to do with the woman. “I’m gonna use her up,” McDuff grinned. That was one of McDuff’s pet phrases: It meant that he intended to kill her. Police believe that McDuff buried Colleen Reed in a field a few hundred yards from the frame house where J. A. and Addie McDuff live, but her body hasn’t been found.
Worley’s statement was released to the media, giving the McDuff task force what it needed most—national attention. On May 1, America’s Most Wanted featured the search for Kenneth McDuff, generating fifty tips. Three days later, Kansas City, Missouri, police received a call from a viewer who had suddenly realized that a womanizing garbage truck worker known as Fowler was in fact a killer from Texas named McDuff. A few hours later, at the city dump, McDuff surrendered without a struggle.
While the investigation continues, authorities believe that McDuff may have killed as many as nine women, going back to Sarafia Parker, whose body was found near Temple three days after he was paroled. He has been charged with capital murder in Waco in the deaths of Valencia Kay Joshua and Melissa Northup, and almost certainly will be charged with the kidnapping and murder of Colleen Reed. Federal and state prosecutors are discussing the appropriate way to deal with McDuff, but they are in general agreement that the prosecutor who can make the best capital case should get the first chance at him. This time, God willing, the system will do the right thing. If there has ever been a good argument for the death penalty, it’s Kenneth McDuff.
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