Read Bad Boy From Rosebud Online

Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

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

Bad Boy From Rosebud (36 page)

 
Page 118
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Alva Hank Worley, May 1991.
Courtesy Austin Police Department.
V
Alva Hank Worley does not remember if he dropped out of Belton High School during the ninth or tenth grade. At age eighteen, he was convicted of larceny for breaking into a car and given probation, only to have it revoked after getting caught during the unauthorized use of another vehicle. He received a two-year sentence. His record indicated that when he went to jail he was only 5'6" tall and weighed 130 pounds.
33
Hank believed his parents did a good job of raising him and his siblings. His father worked for the Texas Highway Department and was a firm disciplinarian; he never shied away from using a belt to punish his children. His mother worked at a garment factory. Neither of the parents drank to excess or had other vices, but they were not particularly close either. Hank was close to his older brother, who was a foreman of one of the construction crews Hank worked on.
34
 
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Hank's first marriage lasted only one year. He attributed the failure to two reasons. First, "We just ran off and we thought we was in love. It was just a heat stroke, I guess," he said. And second, he was only sixteen years old.
He worked at menial jobs on construction sites, and one of his early employers was Lonnie McDuff. At the time, Kenneth was in prison and Hank did not get to know him until years later. He was a splendid example of a weak-willed member of Mac's audiences. It was Roy Dale Green all over again. Hank Worley was "a big time loser in a small time place" said Tim Steglich, about a man who delighted in drinking beer and smoking weed with friends while engaging in horrid conversations. While living at Bloom's Motel in Belton, Hank and a few other residents pondered, "Can you imagine being in a room with body parts?"
35
As Hank grew older, he became pudgier, mostly because of his eating habits and love for beer. "He carries a twelve-pack everywhere he goes," his sister said in sworn testimony. He could drink a six-pack in minutes. But Hank Worley was content with himself. He worked, drank beer, took drugs, and ate. In 1992, a psychologist asked him if he had ever tried to hurt himself. "Oh, no," Hank laughed. ''I love myself too much."
36
Hank's second marriage lasted longer than his first. He wed an attractive woman named Janice, and their union lasted seven years and produced two children, an older daughter and a younger son. After divorcing Hank, Janice married again, divorced again, and then married Billy, the ex-con and acquaintance of Kenneth McDuff. During the summer of 1991, at his former brother-in-law's trailer at the S&S Mobile Home Park, Billy introduced Hank to Mac. Frequently, the threesome met at Buddy's trailer and partied.
37
Directly across the road from Buddy's trailer in the S&S Mobile Home Park lived Hank's sister, Diane. She had been living there for over ten years in one of the nicer, better-kept mobile homes. The inside of her home was spotless; she cared for herself, her family, and even her brother Hank. She and her husband let Hank move in with them after his divorce from Janice. But the arrangement got complicated when Hank's daughter and his ex-wife, Janice, found it impossible to live with one another. That, plus other complicated reasons, motivated Hank to look for another place to stay. He had no choice; Diane's trailer could not accommodate another Worley.
Diane remembers her first encounter with Big Mac. "He came by the
 
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house one day, several times, and the only time I met him is [when] he came up on the porch one day. I had the door open and I was mopping the floor. He came up and knocked on the door and asked if Hank was there and I told him 'No,' Hank was not there. Hank was at work. And he turned around and walked off, and I told him, I said if you leave your name, I'll tell Hank you stopped by. And he said just tell him Big Mac stopped by." Most other times, however, Mac just drove up, stuck his head out of the car, and asked if Hank was there.
38
Hank described his conversations with Mac as "talking shit." Mac spoke of the tire-tool beatings he inflicted on others and leaving them for dead. And, of course, he also spoke of getting guns and taking and using up women, including very specific references to a good-looking girl in a convenience store in Waco, where Mac used to work. They drank a lot of beer, and when not riding around the Belton and Temple area, they usually stopped in smelly beer joints like Poor Boys, The He Ain't Here, and Dundee's Club. Sometimes they went to Waco, to the Cut, to score dope from the whores.
Psychologist Matt Ferrara, in an interview with Hank, later suggested that Mac was really planting a seedhe wanted to see how Hank would react to such bizarre conversations and even more bizarre behavior. Hank's other sister, Bess, saw clearly that Big Mac had an overpowering effect on Hank. In reality, Mac was preparing his next accomplice. He was setting up Hank Worley to be a 1990s version of Roy Dale Green, and Hank was not smart enough to see it until it had become a
fait accompli
.
39
On November 24, 1991, during one of their trips to Waco, Mac's car broke down near a convenience store south of Waco. It was not the convenience store where the good looking girl Mac wanted to "take" worked, though. Stranded, Mac and Hank called Billy and Janice to come by and pick them up. Janice noticed that Mac was no longer driving a pickup. Mac had returned the pickup to his father and was now driving another vehicle, a cream-colored, 1985 Ford Thunderbird. The next day, Janice secured a new water pump for Billy to fix the car. The incident was significant only because there was no doubt that on November 25, 1991, the day Janice bought the water pump, Kenneth was in possession of a light-colored 1985 Thunderbird.
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VI
Kenneth McDuff began the day on which he appeared in court for the pronouncement of his two-year suspended sentence for driving while intoxicated by going to his friend, Linda, and asking her to go to court with him. They drove to Addie and J. A.'s house to kill time. On the way, Mac told Linda that he would steal Valium and Darvoset from his mother. When they arrived at the McDuff home, according to Linda's statement, Mac took a shower while Addie made coffee, toast, and hamburgers. While sitting at the table eating, Mac talked openly about the Justice for McDuff, Inc. movie proposal. Linda noticed a strange look on Addie's face and concluded that Addie would have much preferred that Mac stop talking about movie deals to a stranger. Once Addie left the kitchen, Mac jumped up and walked over to a cupboard, and asked Linda to be on the lookout for Addie's return. He searched in vain for his mother's medicine, only to look at Linda and say, "Damn, the bitch done caught onto me and hid 'em somewhere else where I can't find 'em."
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While Linda sat in the living room, J. A. McDuff, now a frail old man, entered. At first, he did not even notice her. When he did see her, he looked surprised, waved, and kept moving out of the room. Linda and Mac left the McDuff home and went to a nearby dam where Mac said there was a scenic overlook. Mac decided that since he needed to be in court that day he would not have anything to drink. Linda, though, had a beer as she and Mac looked over the area. "This would be a good place to dump a body, because the water's so high, the body would just wash away," she remembered him saying. He just sat there looking over the water.
42
After McDuff's court appearance, he and Linda went to a house to buy and smoke crack, violating both his parole and probation only minutes after his appearance. Several old men sat outside the house when they arrived. McDuff pointed to Linda and asked, "Don't she have a nice ass?"
"Yeah, I'll give you a screwdriver, a pair of pliers and something else if I can take her in the house for a while," one of the old men said.
"Not in this lifetime," replied Linda.
Mac and Linda joined Jimmy and Billy and all four smoked rocks of crack. After they left the house, they headed back to Addie's place and smoked more crack on the way. Mac entered the home, and according to
 
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Linda, returned to the car with money in three pockets; it looked like several hundred dollars. When she asked him where he got all that money, he laughed and told her not to worry about it.
43
They left Addie's house and went to Waco to get more dope. Then they went back to Temple and rejoined Billy and the others. They smoked so much crack that "McDuff got so fucked up that he insisted that [Linda] drive." She did not want to drive because she was pretty high herself and, as she said, "it was raining like a son-of-a-bitch." Finally, they made it to her trailer. Incredibly, Mac pulled out two more rocks he had been saving and they smoked those as well.
The saturation of drugs in Mac's system probably produced what Linda described as a fit of paranoia. He accused her of setting him up, grabbed her by the hair, and walked her out to his car. While standing next to the passenger side door, Linda watched Mac get into his car and take off, spraying mud in all directions.
44
It was the end of an extraordinary day in the life of Kenneth Allen McDuff.
On that day, January 3, 1992, McDuff thoroughly beat the system. He walked into court having violated his parole in several ways only to walk out having to pay a few hundred dollars in fines and court costs, which in all probability, he did not pay himself. He returned to the streets of Central Texas on parole and on probation, and within
minutes,
shamelessly violated the conditions of both. His complete lack of a moral compass on January 3, 1992, was more remarkable when placed in the context of what he had done less than one week earlier. On December 29, 1991, Kenneth McDuff had reached a level of cruelty and depravity seldom seen in the annals of crime, and on that day he was not drunk or high on speed or crack. He knew precisely what he was doing when he became what J. W. Thompson said was "every woman's nightmare."
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
1 Interview of Lori Bible, July 14, 1998.
2 Ibid.;
Austin American-Statesman,
January 1, 1992.
3 Ibid.
4
Austin American-Statesman,
January 1, 1992; Ibid.
5 Lori Bible.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.; APD Files:
Incident Report,
by Donald O. Martin, December 30, 1991;
State of Texas v Kenneth Allen McDuff,
SOF in Cause #93-2139, Volume 30, pg. 74.

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