The Broomstick Killer
The tale of The Broomstick Killer is easily one of the most sinister stories in Texan history. Kenneth McDuff was a bloodthirsty killer who was granted unprecedented leniency by a justice system that allowed him to continue killing even after he had shown that he was a sadistic psychopath.
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The tiny town of Rosebud in central Texas was the home of a notoriously strange family: the McDuffs. J.A. McDuff, the father, owned a cement finishing business that did quite well during the building boom of the late seventies, and the family was well-off by small town standards. The mother, Addie McDuff, ran the laundromat across from their home and doted over her six children. She was a large, headstrong woman known for being over-protective of her children, and would come running if they ever encountered trouble.
Addie was notoriously known to carry a gun in her purse and was referred to as the “Pistol-Packin’ Mama” by the locals in Rosebud. Her children’s teachers feared her because she would storm into the school in a huff any time one of her children was accused of misconduct. To Addie, her children could do no wrong whatsoever, and if someone accused them of anything, the school was likely to blame.
The eldest son, Lonnie, was the bully of the family. He once pulled a knife on the school principal who subsequently threw him down a flight of stairs.
Lonnie spoke with a speech impediment and referred to himself as “Wuff and Tuff Wonnie McDuff.”
Addie McDuff was particularly fond of her youngest son, Kenneth. Though technically he wasn’t the youngest of the children, she fawned over him as her “baby boy.” Even in his early teens when Kenneth started getting into trouble, somebody else was always to blame in her eyes.
Kenneth was a known troublemaker and a bully like his older brother Lonnie. He was always the kid with a pocketful of money, and new clothes, and he rode a loud motorcycle to school. Though he had an average IQ, he didn’t do well in school. Kenneth didn’t seem to care about school and his only genuine friend was his brother Lonnie.
By the fall of 1964 Kenneth was seventeen and spent most of his time causing trouble. He broke into businesses and homes looking for things to steal and drove around town looking for girls. But he wasn’t looking for a girl to date: He was looking for a girl to rape. McDuff confided in his brother that he had once raped a woman, slit her throat, and left her dying. Whether the story was authentic is uncertain, as the crime was never reported.
Even at an early age, local law enforcement was all too familiar with Kenneth McDuff. Inevitably he was arrested in 1965 for a string of more than a dozen burglaries. The sentence for his crimes totaled fifty-two years, but because he was only eighteen the judge was lenient. McDuff was allowed to serve his time concurrently instead of consecutively. The fifty-two years of prison was reduced to a meager three years, and he only ended up serving ten months before they released him.
The brief sentence gave McDuff a sense of invincibility and just eight months later he moved on to much more heinous crimes.
On a hot August night in 1966, McDuff and his new friend Roy Dale Green were on their way to Fort Worth. Roy assumed they were on their way to drink some beer and look for girls, but McDuff had much more diabolical plans in mind.
Roy Dale Green was a skinny eighteen-year-old who was impressed with, and excited to be hanging out with twenty-year-old McDuff. Green knew that McDuff was a troublemaker, but when Kenneth told him he wanted to rape a girl that night, Roy didn’t take him seriously. When McDuff pulled into the parking lot of the baseball field in Everman, Texas, Roy had no idea what a mess he had got himself into.
McDuff pulled his car up next to a parked car near the baseball diamond; he could see there were three teenagers inside the car. He reached under the seat and pulled out a Colt .38 revolver, got out of the car, and walked up to the driver’s side door of the parked car.
Pointing the revolver at the window, McDuff ordered the three teens out of the car. Inside the car was sixteen-year-old Edna Louise Sullivan, her boyfriend seventeen-year-old Robert Brand, and his fifteen-year-old cousin Mark Dunham. McDuff led them to the trunk of the car and commanded them to get in. The three teens climbed in, and he closed the lid.
McDuff drove their car while Roy Green followed in McDuff’s car to an isolated area where they stopped. McDuff and Green got out of the cars and McDuff turned to Green and said, “We’re gonna have to knock ‘em off.” Kenneth then opened the trunk and pulled Edna out. The teen girl screamed as he dragged her away from her friends to his own car and locked her in his trunk. He then went back over to the young boys. Unable to see, Edna’s terror only intensified when she heard six gunshots. McDuff had emptied the revolver into the two other boys’ bodies. When he could not close the trunk, McDuff became frustrated and backed the car up to a fence and abandoned it with the boy’s bodies hanging out of the back.
Roy Green was in shock. They both got back in to McDuff’s car and drove to another location where McDuff pulled Edna out of the back of the car and raped her. After he raped her, McDuff ordered Green to rape her too. Then McDuff yelled to Green, “Find something for me to strangle her with.” Green pulled the belt off of his pants and handed it to him, but McDuff found something he liked better. He had a broom in the back of his car. He raped her with the broomstick, then sat on her chest and held it across her neck. He leaned forward on the broomstick, putting more and more pressure on her neck until he crushed her throat. McDuff threw her body over his shoulder, walked to the side of the dirt road and tossed her body into the nearby bushes; the two drove away.
The next day Roy Green was consumed with guilt and told his friend’s mother what they had done. His friend’s mother went to Green’s mother, who subsequently convinced him to turn himself in.
Green was arrested and led the police to the bodies, and McDuff was quickly arrested as well. Green gave the police the gun that McDuff had buried next to his garage.
During the trial, a terrified Roy Green stuttered and stammered as he testified against McDuff. McDuff was cocky and nonchalant, taking the stand in his own defense, but it didn’t help his case.
In November 1966 a jury found Kenneth McDuff guilty on three counts of murder. Roy Green served eleven years in prison for his part in the murders, while McDuff was handed three death sentences in the electric chair. In a normal world, this would be the end of the story, but it was nowhere near over.
On June 29, 1972 after six years on death row, the US Supreme Court decided that the death penalty, as it was then written, was a cruel and unusual punishment and was therefore unconstitutional under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. In an extraordinary event, all death penalty cases in the United States were commuted to life sentences.
McDuff was now eligible for parole and applied for it every time he was allowed. He was convicted of such heinous crimes; it was unimaginable that he would ever be paroled. The residents of Central Texas thought that such a vicious killer could never be paroled. Over and over he applied, and he was repeatedly denied.
Fifteen years later in 1987, McDuff saw his chance. The Texas Federal Court ruled that the prisons of Texas were far too overcrowded, violating the civil rights of the inmates. Rather than spend money building more prisons, the courts set population limits in the prisons which led to a massive backlog of inmates being held in county jails across the state.
Texas Governor Bill Clements made an unthinkable deal with the parole board. In order to reduce prison population, they were required to release 150 inmates per day. Initially, the white-collar crimes were released, then the minor drug offenses. Within two years the only people left in the prisons were murderers. This is when McDuff saw his chance.
Each time he applied for parole, McDuff still had to appear before a parole board of three members, plead his case, and get two out of three votes in his favor. He had tried several times and was denied each time. In one instance he actually received two votes, but it was ultimately denied when an unknown party argued against his release. In another instance he tried to bribe a parole board official by offering him $10,000. Each time he was denied, but it didn’t deter him.
Outside of the prison, McDuff’s mother was busy doing her part. She hired two well-known attorneys from Huntsville, paying them $2,200 to try to find a way to get her beloved son released from prison.
Unbelievably, in 1989, after serving twenty-three years in prison, McDuff was paroled. The two members of the parole board that voted to release him were James Granberry and Chris Mealy. Mealy later blamed the tremendous pressure he was under from the government. Granberry was later charged with perjury in an unrelated case and ordered to serve six months in a halfway house.
During those years, the Texas parole board set free 127 murderers and twenty death row inmates.
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The people of Rosebud were in shock at the news of McDuff’s release. Some put bars over their windows and many feared walking the streets of the tiny town without a gun.
Immediately after his release, McDuff was required to visit his parole officer in Temple, Texas. After their first visit, the parole officer told police,
“I don’t know if it’ll be next week or next month or next year, but one of these days, dead girls are gonna start turning up, and when that happens, the man you need to look for is Kenneth McDuff.”
The parole officer was right. Just three days after his release, the body of twenty-nine-year-old Sarafia Parker was found in a field twenty-five miles west of Rosebud in Temple, the town that McDuff’s parents had moved to while he was in prison. Though they had no evidence, police suspected McDuff was responsible for the killing.
McDuff was known as a racist. Just seven months after his release he harassed a young black man in Rosebud, yelling racial slurs at him, and pulled a knife on him. This violated his parole, and he was quickly sent back to prison, but McDuff knew how the prison system worked. He knew about the overcrowding issues and he was back on the streets just two months later.
After his release from prison, McDuff enrolled at Texas State Technical College in Waco and briefly got a job as a cashier at a convenience store called Quik-Pak. But working for a lowly $4 an hour did not satisfy him, and he quit after only a month.
By the summer of 1991, McDuff had given up his feeble attempts at the straight-and-narrow life and continued his life of crime. Living in the college dorms, he started dealing and using drugs. He knew this violated his parole, but he didn’t care. He spent his spare time picking up prostitutes in Waco and used them to satisfy his need for violent sex.
In the late hours of October 10, 1991, McDuff picked up a young crack-addicted prostitute from Waco, Brenda Thompson, intent on killing her. McDuff had Brenda tied up in the passenger seat of his red pickup truck when he noticed a police checkpoint up ahead. Brenda saw her opportunity and screamed as she raised her legs up to the windshield and began kicking, cracking the windshield several times. When the police ran toward his truck McDuff hit the gas and crashed the roadblock. Several police officers had to jump out of the way to avoid being run over.
McDuff led police on a high-speed chase but escaped into the night by turning off his lights and driving the wrong way down one-way streets. After he escaped, he took Brenda Thompson down an old abandoned road into a wooded area near Route 84 where he raped, tortured, and murdered her. Her body wasn’t found until seven years later.
Just a week later McDuff picked up another Waco prostitute. Seventeen-year-old Regina DeAnne Moore was last seen arguing outside a motel with McDuff on the night of October 17. Again, McDuff tied her arms and legs with her own stockings, then took her to a remote area where he raped and murdered her. Her remains were not found until 1998.
Two months later in Austin, twenty-eight-year-old Colleen Reed was washing her shiny new Mazda Miata convertible at a self-serve car wash.
One thing that McDuff learned in prison was to find a malleable sidekick. That evening he was driving around Austin with his latest sidekick, Alva Hank Worley. As they drove past the car wash McDuff spotted Colleen and made a quick U-turn.
McDuff pulled his tan Thunderbird into the bay next to hers, got out of the car and walked into Colleen’s stall. Without a word, McDuff grabbed her around the neck and lifted the tiny girl off the ground. When Colleen screamed, neighbors behind the car wash came out to see what was happening. They watched as McDuff threw Colleen in his car and he and Worley drove away, again driving the wrong way on a one-way street.
The witnesses got a good look at Worley and alerted the police of his description and the type and color of the vehicle that sped away. Right away police suspected that McDuff was behind the abduction.
When police got the description of Worley, they began looking through McDuff’s known associates and noticed Hank Worley immediately as one of his known drinking buddies. Like Roy Dale Green, Worley was timid and easily influenced by McDuff.
Worley wasn’t hard to find, living in a motel with his fourteen-year-old daughter. When police knocked on his door, he was already terrified with guilt.
Though his guilt consumed him, he feared McDuff and wasn’t quite ready to point a finger at him. On the first visit to his motel room, Worley claimed he barely knew McDuff. It took a few visits to his motel room for police to persuade him to admit to what had happened that night. They stopped by while he was having a barbecue by the motel pool with his daughter, and Detective Mike McNamara whispered in his ear, “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 for you to help, begging you to speak out, to do what’s right, to save the life of some young girl, to…”
McNamara couldn’t finish his sentence before Worley screamed. He was ready to talk. When investigators got him into the interrogation room, he told the complete story of the night of Colleen’s abduction.
Worley said he and McDuff were in Austin looking for drugs when McDuff saw Colleen washing her car. When McDuff lifted her off the ground by her throat she screamed “Please, not me! Not me!” He then threw her in the back of their car and told Worley to hold her down as they sped off.
When they got a few miles out of Austin McDuff got in the back with Colleen and commanded Worley to keep driving out of town. McDuff tied her hands behind her back with her shoelaces, then took his cigarette and put it out between her legs as she screamed. He beat her and raped her. When he finished, he told Worley to change places with him and Worley raped her while McDuff drove.
Worley recalled, “I didn’t want to have sex with her but if I didn’t have sex with her, I knew that he was gonna get back there with her and beat her up some more and burn her with cigarettes. He was taking the cigarettes and getting the fire real hot and burning her down there in the wrong spots.”
When they got near the town of Belton, McDuff pulled onto a secluded dirt road and raped her again.
“He turned around, and he hit her. Slapped her real hard and knocked her backwards. Then he took another cigarette, and he lit it, and got the fire real hot and he burned her like that again.”
When she was able to stand Worley claimed Colleen put her head on his shoulder and said “Please don’t let him hurt me anymore.” McDuff was having none of that. He grabbed her by the neck and stuffed her into the trunk of the car and turned to Worley and said, “I’m gonna use her up.” McDuff used the term often to mean that he was going to terminate her life.
“Then he put her in the trunk of the car, closed the trunk down and he takes me home. On the way home he asked me for my pocketknife and I told him I don't know where it is.”
“Then he asked me, ‘Well, I need a shovel. Let me borrow a shovel.’ And I said, ‘I ain’t got one.’ He didn’t say what he was going to do with it, but I knew what he was gonna do with it. He wanted to kill her with it.”
“Ain’t nothin’ I could do. Real scary being like that. If you can’t help yourself, there ain’t no way you gonna help anybody else. I wasn’t even sure if I was gonna make it outta that.”
“I’ll always have a tear for that girl. I’ll always cry for her, for what she went through. Nobody should be put through that type of torture.”
McDuff was nowhere to be found, but police knew he was still in the area the following February when they found the body of another young prostitute. Twenty-two-year-old Valencia Joshua, a student at the same college that McDuff had attended was found on a golf course near the school. She had been strangled. The last time anyone had seen her, she was looking for Kenneth McDuff on the campus of their school.
Then on March 1, 1992, Melissa Northrup was working the night-shift at the Quik-Pak convenience store. She was a pregnant mother of two who knew the dangers of working the night shift, but needed to pay the bills. She would regularly call her husband during her shift to let him know she was okay.
Late that night McDuff was cruising the streets looking for drugs when his tan Thunderbird broke down just 100 yards from the Quik-Pak. This was the same store that McDuff had worked for only a month. McDuff knew that the store was open twenty-four hours a day and had no security to speak of. He also knew that there was a cute twenty-three-year-old who worked the night shift and had told friends that the place could easily be robbed.
When Melissa’s husband didn’t hear from her at 4:00 a.m. that night he got worried and called the store. He repeatedly got no answer so he drove to the store, but there was no sign of his wife.
When police found McDuff’s car abandoned at the New Road Inn just 100 yards away, their suspicions were confirmed. McDuff was on a killing spree, and they started a massive nationwide manhunt.
Knowing how close McDuff was with his family, they started by questioning his parents. As always, his mother stood by her beloved son and claimed he was innocent but didn’t know where he was. His father, however, was less loving, “I don’t know where he is. If you find him, you can kill him if you want to.”
On April 26, the badly decomposed body of Quik-Pak employee Melissa Northrup was found floating in a gravel quarry in Dallas County. Her hands were still tied behind her back with shoelaces - a signature of Kenneth McDuff.
The big break came on May 1 when the manhunt was aired on America’s Most Wanted. The TV show was massively popular; through the years it has helped capture 1,200 fugitives. This airing was no exception. Shortly after it aired a man called from Kansas City, Missouri claiming that McDuff worked for a trash company under the assumed name Richard Fowler.
Texas police called Kansas City police who looked up the name Richard Fowler in their records. Someone had been using the name and had been arrested and fingerprinted for soliciting prostitutes. The fingerprints matched that of Kenneth McDuff. McDuff was arrested on May 4, 1992 as he was driving a trash truck to a landfill.
When he was brought back to Texas, crowds of angry people gathered outside of the courthouse. McDuff embraced the media and professed his innocence to the mob of cameras outside, often claiming that his trial was unfair.
Prosecutors had their strongest evidence against him for the abduction and murder of Melissa Northrup, so they decided to try that case first and worry about the rest later.
Addie McDuff, who was now seventy-seven years old, was called as a hostile witness to testify against her son. She confirmed that her son used her credit card near the Quik-Pak store on the night of the abduction, putting him near the scene of the crime when it happened.
McDuff was livid that his own mother was being used by the prosecution to testify against him, but there was more to come. The prosecution called two of his friends to testify that he had tried to enlist them in his plans to rob the Quik-Pak store.
At one point McDuff directed his anger at his own attorneys when he screamed at them, “Why don’t you get up and go sit on the prosecution's side! You’re helping them more than you are me!”
The murder of Colleen Reed had not been tried yet, and the prosecution called Hank Worley to testify to show that there was a signature to McDuff’s killings. Worley was brought to the courthouse in handcuffs. From his visible shaking, it was clear that just being in the presence of McDuff again terrified him.
The ultimate nail in the coffin for McDuff was when he insisted on testifying on his own behalf despite his defense team’s wishes. They explained to him that under the rules of evidence, his past 1966 murders couldn’t be mentioned in court if he wasn’t on the stand, but if he took the stand, the prosecution could use that against him. McDuff wouldn’t listen.
McDuff took the stand for two hours rambling a nonsensical story of his whereabouts on the night of the murder. Meanwhile, the prosecution took advantage of their opportunity and the jury heard the complete story of his brutal killings of the teenagers in 1966.
The jury took four hours to return their guilty verdict on February 16, 1993. His defense team requested leniency and asked for a life sentence, but the jury only took one hour to decide that Kenneth McDuff should die by lethal injection.
McDuff’s trial for the murder of Colleen Reed started in 1994. Although the body had still not been found, he was given a second death sentence.
In television interviews from prison awaiting his death sentence, McDuff continued to profess his innocence, even for the 1966 killings.
In the months before his execution, investigators enlisted the help of a jailhouse informant to try to get McDuff to give up the locations of the bodies. Their plan worked.
In September 1998, the body of Regina DeAnne Moore was found beneath a bridge on the side of a highway. McDuff had buried her in a shallow grave. Her hands were still tied behind her back with shoelaces, and her ankles were bound with stockings.
The body of Brenda Thompson, who kicked McDuff’s windshield as he crashed through the roadblock, was found in a grouping of trees outside of Waco. She had been tied up, raped, and tortured.
McDuff only had two weeks before his execution, but he wasn’t giving up the location of Colleen Reed. He told the informant that he didn’t want to tell the cops because it was the last body and if he gave them everything they needed they would “take away my commissary rights, and won’t treat me right.” With only two weeks to live, McDuff’s only concern was his own diminished rights and had no regard for the closure of his victim’s families.
Police met with prison officials and arranged to take none of his prison rights away. Presented with the assurance, McDuff finally gave them directions to where he had buried Colleen Reed’s body.
Despite digging for hours exactly where he told them, they were unable to locate her body. That afternoon, in a covert arrangement, McDuff was brought to the dig site. The body of Colleen Reed was found on October 6, 1998.
In McDuff’s final days investigator John Moriarty spent over forty hours interviewing him, trying to gain a deeper understanding of the psychopath’s mind. In the time he spent with him, though he showed no remorse at all, McDuff admitted to all eight murders and alluded that there may have been many more.
Kenneth McDuff was executed on November 17, 1998. His family didn’t claim his body, and he was buried in the Huntsville prison graveyard with a tombstone that displayed only his death row number X999055 and the day of execution.
As a result of the mayhem that McDuff caused and an outcry from the public, the Texas parole system was completely overhauled and the state spent $2 billion building more prisons.
