Kenneth McDuff

What the record shows

Kenneth Allen McDuff was a Texas murderer whose two killing periods, 1966 and 1989 to 1992, were separated by a death sentence, a commutation and a parole. Courts convicted him of five murders: three teenagers killed near Fort Worth in 1966, and Colleen Reed and Melissa Northrup, killed in 1991 and 1992. Texas executed him on November 17, 1998. Wikipedia's summary of the reporting puts the attributed toll at nine to fourteen or more. According to the University of North Texas Press, anger that a condemned man had been freed to kill again produced parole reforms and prison construction known collectively as the "McDuff Rules."

The 1966 crimes appear in testimony recited by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Roy Dale Green testified that on August 6, 1966, McDuff locked two teenage boys and a girl in the trunk of a parked car, shot the boys through the trunk, raped the girl and choked her with a broomstick; Green later turned him in. Wikipedia names the victims as Robert Brand, 17, Mark Dunnam, 15, and Edna Louise Sullivan, 16, abducted at Everman. McDuff was convicted of murder with malice and sentenced to death. After the Supreme Court's 1972 Furman v. Georgia decision the sentence became life imprisonment. The board paroled him in October 1989. Wikipedia also lists four deaths attributed to him after release for which he was never charged: Sarafia Parker in Temple in October 1989; Brenda Thompson and Regenia Moore, who vanished near Waco in October 1991 and whose remains were found in 1998; and Valencia Joshua, found in Waco in March 1992.

The two capital cases are described in court opinions. The Texas Court of Appeals in Austin recorded that Colleen Reed was abducted from an Austin car wash in late December 1991 and that her body had not been found at trial. The Fifth Circuit summarized the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' findings on Melissa Northrup: around 4 a.m. on March 1, 1992, she was taken from the Waco Quik Pak where she worked and where McDuff had briefly been employed; a witness saw him driving her car with a frightened woman beside him; and her bound body was later found in a water-filled gravel pit. State experts linked hairs on her body and in her car to him.

McDuff abandoned his car in Waco and fled to Kansas City, Missouri, where, the Austin court noted, he lived under an alias from March 1992 and was arrested in May 1992 using a false name. Wikipedia reports that a co-worker recognized him from a May 1, 1992 America's Most Wanted broadcast and that he was arrested on May 4, 1992.

A McLennan County jury convicted McDuff of Northrup's capital murder and, according to Wikipedia, returned a death sentence on February 18, 1993. The Reed indictment, returned in Travis County, was tried in Guadalupe County after a change of venue. The Austin court recorded that the jury convicted him of capital murder, aggravated kidnapping and aggravated sexual assault, imposing death on the capital count and life terms on the others. The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the Reed death sentence in 1997; the Austin court that year reversed the sexual-assault count because the only witness was the accomplice, Alva Hank Worley, and affirmed the kidnapping count.

The Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the Northrup conviction in 1997, the Supreme Court denied certiorari in 1998, and state and federal habeas relief were denied. On November 17, 1998, the Fifth Circuit refused a certificate of appealability, rejecting claims that the hair testimony was false and that another man was the killer. McDuff was executed by lethal injection at the Huntsville Unit that evening, aged 52. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice records his last statement as "I'm ready to be released. Release me." Wikipedia and Spectrum News report that in his final weeks he led investigators to Reed's remains.

McDuff was born on March 21, 1946, in Rosebud, Texas. Wikipedia records that in 1964 he was convicted of twelve burglary counts and paroled in December 1965, eight months before the Everman killings.