Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #General, #Law, #True Crime, #Murder, #test

Bad Boy From Rosebud (24 page)

20 APD Files: unidentified document prepared by Andrew Kahan, u.d.; WFAA-TV News.

21 Bettie Wells quoted in
Austin American-Statesman,
September 19, 1992;
Texas Monthly,
August, 1992; APD Files: unidentified document prepared by Andrew Kahan, u.d.

22 TDCJ Pardons and Paroles Division:
Interoffice Memorandum,
December 19, 1990.

Page 79

6
An Absence of Beauty

"You look out the window and wonder and say, 'Somebody ought to neuter all these people.' "
J. W. Thompson, Austin Police Department

Interstate Highway 35, the major artery for Central Texas, connects San Antonio, Austin, Belton, Temple, and Waco. Around Austin, the highway runs along the Balcones Fault, separating alluvial bottoms and agricultural lands to the east, from the rocky sediments of the Hill Country ranches to the west. In his biography of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro called the Hill Country "The Trap," which accurately contrasts its mesmerizing beauty with the hardiness it took to tame the area.

San Antonio and Austin are splendid examples of the power of multiculturalism, and monuments to cooperation among diverse populations. Further north, the hamlets of the Blackland Prairie surround the larger cities of Belton, Temple, and Waco. Baylor University in Waco, the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton, Southwestern University in nearby Georgetown, and other colleges and technical schools in the area provide splendid educational opportunities to the people who live here. The hard-working, conservative, largely religious people help contribute to and take pride in their neighborhoods and schools. Throughout the area, man-made lakes provide water, recreation, and breathtaking scenery. Central Texas is a beautiful place to live.

Central Texas also holds beauty in the quality of its people. Families dressed in their Sunday best visit places of worship in the belief that their faith in God makes them better people. Proud homeowners mow their lawns and wipe their brows in the unrelenting Texas heat. Mothers

Page 80

and fathers walk with children they love more than life itself. These parents ease the pain of a bruised knee, cheer their children at concerts and football games, encourage them, and instill in them an appreciation for the beauty in their lives. Friendly strangers smile and welcome one another. In Temple, Belton, and Waco, indeed, in all of Central Texas, the prevalent culture is one of honor, morality, and scholarship. In all such things, there is beauty.

For visitors and for many residents, it is hard to imagine the existence of anything in Central Texas but this beauty. But there is another side to the regiona subculture with an absence of beautythe side of Central Texas in which Kenneth Allen McDuff chose to spend his time.

Those who populate this subculture live in a world of their ownlargely unknown to the rest of Central Texans. At first glance, the major difference between the two cultures appears to be monetary; a closer look reveals more than poverty. It reveals an absence of pride of any type and the complete lack of social graces and any moral base upon which to gauge appropriate behavior. Hope, requiring an investment in deferred gratification, cannot be found. For some, beauty is a twelve-pack of beer and a carton of cigarettes. Others find fleeting satisfaction in harder, more dangerous highs.

Some of the inhabitants of this beauty-less culture live in trailer homes like those found in the S&S Mobile Home Park outside of Belton. The S&S Trailer Park shows no evidence of a lawn mower. Many of the "homes" straddle rough gravel pathways. Some trailers are empty shells, abandoned by former inhabitants fleeing a bill collector, parole officer, or creditor/drug dealer. Other rotted single or doublewides only
look
empty; in time, dwellers emerge with children following because they have no where else to goand nothing else to do. Too many of these children are growing up believing that what they see is normal. Parked outside some of these dreary shacks are Harley-Davidson motorcycles or shiny, spotless pickup trucksworth a block of those mobile homes.

Sometimes, members of this subculture become "friends" for years without ever knowing each other's names. During the early nineties, Alva Hank Worley knew Kenneth McDuff for well over a year without ever knowing that his name was either Kenneth or McDuff. He was "Big Mac." Area prostitutes lose their real names, and with them any sense of humanity. Diana was "Little Bit," Jean was ''Duckie," and Donice was "Little

Page 81

Run." There was a "Black Jennifer" and a "White Jennifer," and not even the police ever knew White Jennifer's real name. Two men named Harrison and Frankie, and maybe a few others, were called "Indian."
¹

Buddy, a resident of the S&S Mobile Home Park in 1992 and a sad example of its subculture there, astounded local, state and federal investigators with the totality of his alcoholism. "He is drunk when he is awake," marveled Bell County Investigator Tim Steglich. "How he is still alive I have no idea. He drinks anything with alcohol in it." When he finished whatever beverage he was able to buy, Buddy was known to resort to drinking Aqua Velva and other toiletries. During very short periods of sobriety, he was dry-mouthed and nervous. He shook, chain smoked, and cursed constantly. Detectives later concluded, however, that while he may have been a brain-damaged old drunk, at least he was harmless.
²

Living outside of the trailer park, another product of the subculture, Billy, had watched his father brutally murder his carousing mother by shooting her in the face with a shotgun. Before being arrested, Billy's father "tiretooled" Billy as well. Incredibly, after the father had been released from prison, Billy chose to live with his father. He explained to investigators that after the beating, he and his dad got along pretty well. When reminded that his father had murdered his mother by blowing her face off, Billy replied, "Well, my uncles live next door and they seem to like him, so maybe she needed it."
³

This subculture that McDuff joined after his release from prison in 1989 extended well beyond the S&S Mobile Home Park and some of its residents. Its symbols included drugs in cheap motels, whorehouses, whore rows, and crack houses inhabited by ex-cons, perverts, degenerates, and people living in a world with an utter absence of beauty. To them, truth was whatever got you out of trouble, sex was a way to make a living, relationships lasted minutes, the reward for work was drugs, and there was no such thing as stealing.

In Waco, the subculture centered around a stretch of Faulkner Lane McDuff called "The Corner." It was better known as "The Cut." At night, drug dealers and prostitutes lined Faulkner Lane at Miller Street and at the corner of South Loop, also called the Old Dallas Highway, to service customers. With few houses and no businesses on Faulkner, such activities generated few, if any, complaints to the Waco Police Department. Customers drove down Faulkner and slowed down so that prostitutes

Page 82

and drug dealers could come to the vehicle proposing services and offering products.

Michael, a frequent visitor to the Cut, first met McDuff there. He remembers that McDuff was into "rock" or crack cocaine, and occasionally, other illicit drugs. "Rock is the most terrible thing in the whole world," Kenneth would say. "It makes you get on edge after the first time you smoke it." His rock habit fueled an already vicious personality. One evening, McDuff drove through and said that he had a prime "lick,'' which meant that he intended to go to a crack house and rob it. If someone could just lend him a gun, he promised, he would return from the lick with $50 for the gun owner. According to Michael's statement, McDuff spoke constantly of robbing drug dealers and killing people. Specifically, McDuff used to say he could kill a person in a heartbeat; it "wasn't nothing" to him.

After McDuff asked for a gun, an onlooker named Chester reached into some bushes along Faulkner and handed McDuff a 12-gauge, single-shot shotgun, and asked for $40.
⁴McDuff called him "Chester the Molester." He thought Chester was a likable guy, but he was a shyster, too.
⁵Law enforcement officers thought he was a "little scumbag opportunist." At the Cut, Chester was ubiquitous, to say the least. The only job officers ever knew Chester to have held was at a barbeque shack in Waco.

The gun Chester pulled out of the bushes for McDuff had been placed there the night before. According to Michael's statement to McLennan County deputies, Chester had used the gun to attempt to rob the trick of a prostitute named Jennifer. Jennifer, apparently in an attempt to defend a paying customer, kicked Chester in the face. As Chester hastily retreated towards some bushes, the gun went off. Everyone at the Cut laughed at his clumsiness. No one seemed concerned about an attempted aggravated armed robbery. McDuff soon discovered that the cheap gun did not work because the shell fired by Chester was stuck in the barrel.
⁶Such was a night on the Cut. (No evidence exists that McDuff ever actually used the gun to rob a crack dealer.)

For some time, Chester hung around McDuff. He fit the profile of the kind of person McDuff felt superior to: a small, black man. In an interview in 1996, McDuff described himself as an ambassador of sorts. He went down to the black sections of Waco to get drugs from blacks for whites who were afraid to get attacked. According to McDuff, dealing with black drug dealers at night was particularly frightening espe-

Other books

Ever After by Karen Kingsbury

Always a Witch by Carolyn Maccullough

Lambrusco by Ellen Cooney

Frey by Wright, Melissa

The Feathery by Bill Flynn

Beerspit Night and Cursing by Charles Bukowski and Sheri Martinelli

Rescued Hearts (Hero Series) by Austin, Gina

Sylvia Andrew by Francesca

Retribution by Sherrilyn Kenyon

Deliberate Deceptions: Hauberk Protection, Book 3 by Leah Braemel