Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

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

Bad Boy From Rosebud (35 page)

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the company. By the late summer of 1991, Melissa left Circle K and joined Aaron as a Quik Pak employee.
²⁰

The young couple lived in a small residence in Hewitt, a small town outside of Waco. Quik Pak had hired Melissa as a $4.50 per hour cashier. Her duties, however, were not limited to working the cash register. Attendants like Melissa were expected to clean inside the store, sweep or hose down the driveway around the pumps, and perform other janitorial duties, like take trash to an outside bin. Quik Pak Stores required their $4.50 per hour employees to buy their own smocks. She paid for hers through two payroll deductions of $12.60. Company rules also called for the smock to be worn zipped at all times.
²¹

From the beginning, Melissa had concerns about the security of the Quik Pak she had been assigned to. While she was completely responsible for the cash register and the contents of the store, she had to go outside to go to the bathroom and had no key to lock the front door. Years later, Brenda Solomon shared an incident Melissa talked to her about involving a meeting of Quik Pak employees. At the meeting, she voiced a concern about stocking what was called the "vault," which referred to the upright refrigerators in the store. "When I'm in the vault stocking, if someone comes into the store I can't hear them."

Melissa indicated to her mother that the response to her concern was, "Well maybe you need a hearing aid."
²²

After a little more than a year, Aaron and Melissa's marriage ran into hard times. Their problems were many and complicated. According to Aaron, they separated in late August 1991 because Melissa felt he was ignoring her. On Labor Day, Melissa and her two children moved back into the Solomon home, and the extended family was reunited.
²³

At that point in her life, it occurred to Melissa that being a cashier at a Quik Pak was about all she was qualified to do. She hated that job, and only a few days after her hiring, she received a reprimand from the Quik Pak Stores for unsatisfactory performance. On July 27, 1991, her receipts were $41.23 short. "Melissa was verbally reprimanded and understands that this type of problem will not be tolerated," the Quik Pak report stated. She accepted the disciplinary action, signed the report, and court records never indicated evidence of any other similar reprimands.

Because she worked the graveyard shift, Melissa's shift ended at 7
A.M.
Routinely, on her way to work, Brenda brought Melissa's daughter

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to the store. Melissa then brought the baby to day care and would go home to sleep. Normally she slept until about 2:30
P.M.
or until Brenda called from work to wake her. Brenda's calls were Melissa's alarm clock. Late afternoon and early evening were quality times for Melissa and her children. They played until about 8:30 or 9
P.M.
Each evening she lay with the children in bed until they fell asleep. Sometimes she dozed off as well, and Brenda would wake her up to be at the Quik Pak by 11
P.M.
, wearing her red smock with blue trimming and a badge that said "Quik Pak."
²⁴

III

Kenneth McDuff continued to take advantage of a laudable program designed to help parolees. And yet, he wanted more. On February 7, 1991, he applied for and got food stamps. Later in the year, he reported to the JTPA office that he had only twenty-five cents left, but on the same day he made purchases at a Wal-Mart in Belmead. On May 27, he failed to show up for work, but two days later he reported to his parole officer that he was working six days a week. On June 10, he reported that he quit his job because work and school were just too much for him to handle, when in fact he quit to drink beer with friends at a lake. On July 22, he requested more financial aid from the JTPA office, and on August 19, he requested funds for food during the semester break. Most of those requests were denied. He continued to live in Sabine Hall, and as each day passed the other residents saw more and more of his dangerous and bizarre behavior. He seemed to get more immature. TSTI students, and some of McDuff's own family saw him, while in his mid-forties, taking the cars they gave him and doing "donuts" in vacant lots and parking areas. One of his own family members described his behavior as "asinine."

TSTI dorms apparently had little or no supervision, or if they did, it was totally ineffective. In tens of thousands of pages of investigative reports, court documents, and primary sources only one document pertains to supervision or an inspection of any type during his matriculation at TSTI. On February 11, 1992, someone inspected his room; the word "fair" had been handwritten above the word "great," which had been scratched out.
²⁵

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He made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of excursions from his Sabine Hall home base. On some of those occasions, weak-willed, slow-witted followers tagged along, and of course, Kenneth regaled them with stories of his brutality and murder. Even if only a small portion of his many stories were true, he preyed upon hundreds and murdered dozens of people in Central Texas. But with Kenneth McDuff, truth was always a mystery, and in his mind, it consisted of whatever he wanted to say at a given moment.

One excursion was a trip to Austin, which included a man named Harrison. Harrison lived in Temple with his grandmother, who had allegedly snatched him, while still an infant, from a day-care center. Others in the subculture called him "Indian." (There were a number of "Indians"; it was one of the more popular names.) In any case, Harrison met Mac during the summer of 1990 in the Bell County Jail while Mac awaited his parole revocation hearing for making a terroristic threat in Rosebud.

During the spring of 1991, Harrison, Mac, and Alva Hank Worley left Temple for Austin to look for drugs. The trio traversed the northern sections of Austin and its adjoining suburbs. After several unsuccessful stops, they decided to go back to Temple. In statements and testimony, Harrison indicated that Mac started the trip with a vivid description of a young woman. Harrison thought, at first, that Mac was describing a girlfriend. Near the Bruceville-Eddy exit on I-35, Mac admitted that he did not know the girl, and that he was just going to "take" her. He said that she worked in a convenience store during the graveyard shift. Harrison eventually concluded that Mac was really talking about kidnapping and murder. He told Mac that he wanted no part of such a scheme.
²⁶

Only weeks later Mac learned that Larry, the man who had murdered his brother Lonnie, had been released from prison. Larry was the only person that Mac ever admitted he wanted to kill; all his other threats were general in nature. Mac was incensed that his brother's murderer had been paroledquite an irony. He made sure all of his acquaintances knew that he intended to kill Larry, and his search for a firearm appears to have intensified. That search took him to the home of one of his sisters, where he violated federal law by taking a revolver. Mac probably thought that Larry would become frightened, as had all others he sought to intimidate. Precisely the opposite happened. Larry, though a much smaller man than either Kenneth or Lonnie McDuff, refused to run. He

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let it be known that, not only was he not afraid of Kenneth McDuff, but that killing another McDuff would be no big deal to him. "If they were going to cross one another [Larry] was going to win that gun battleno question about that," said Bell County Investigator Tim Steglich. And so, Kenneth McDuff was the one who backed off.
²⁷

Years later, McDuff claimed that he searched for Larry but could not locate him because no one was willing to help.
²⁸The assertion is patently ludicrous; Larry had been paroled to the little town of Holland. Holland was even smaller than Rosebud, and with the criminal network McDuff was familiar with to assist his search, and given the amount of time he spent traveling throughout the Blackland Prairie, if he really wanted to find Larry he could have done so easily McDuff had no intention of facing Larry. The incident supports the conclusion that Kenneth McDuff was, in fact, cowardly. When Tommy Sammons "beat the snot" out of him in high school, Kenneth dropped out; when Brady Pamplin fired a shotgun at him, McDuff forever feared not only Brady, but his son Larry Pamplin, who never arrested or confronted him. He boasted of planning to kill his brother's murderer, only to claim that he was unable to find himin Holland, Texas.

Kenneth McDuff seemed to be getting away with everything. His lifelong tendency to feel invulnerable must have been reinforced by his ability to cavort with ex-convicts, to rent whores, to abuse hard drugs, to fight, and to carry weapons, while subsisting on food stamps and living in a dorm supplied by the state and paid for with federal funds. The audacity of his behavior was matched only by the inability of the criminal justice system to recognize the danger he was to the public.

On the night of September 1, 1991, at 10:55
P.M.
, Temple Police Officer Bruce Smith observed a pickup truck run a red light and swerve across traffic lanes in a reckless manner on 43
^rdStreet. Smith stopped the truck and discovered Mac and Hank Worley. Mac got out of the truck and walked unsteadily towards the officer. His eyes were glassy, and his speech was slurred. He also smelled like a run-down beer joint. When the officer asked him how much he had to drink, Mac answered that he had one beer about three hours earlier. At the site, Mac failed a

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number of sobriety tests and was immediately arrested for driving while intoxicated. Worley was not found to be drunk, and so the truck, its floorboard covered with empty Old Milwaukee cans, was left in his custody.

According to Officer Smith's report, on the way to the jail, Mac begged not to be charged and to be set free. At the jail, however, he became belligerent and refused to take a breath test or cooperate in any way.
²⁹

Two days later, on September 3, Mac reported the DWI arrest to his parole officer. He also admitted to smoking marijuana. Each of the offenses was a violation of his parole, which could have sent him back to prison. But at the time, the combination of federal Judge Justice's rulings and the dependence of the state on parole to meet those demands, made it unlikely that McDuff would be sent back to prison, and indeed, he was not.
³⁰

Even more farcical was his court appearance. On January 3, 1992, he pleaded guilty to Operating a Motor Vehicle in a Public Place While Intoxicated. Allegedly, his attorney was able to successfully negotiate an astonishingly light sentence. Punishment was assessed as a $500 fine plus court costs of $202, and ninety days confinement in the county jail. The court order, however, continued: "However, it appeared to the Court that the Defendant has made a sworn motion for probation and that the ends of Justice and the best interest of the public as well as the Defendant will be served if the imposition of the sentence in this case is suspended and the Defendant is placed on probation under the supervision of the Court."
³¹

His probation was for twenty-four months, and the conditions of his probation included: