Read Bad Boy From Rosebud Online

Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

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

Bad Boy From Rosebud (44 page)

 
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records, she was transaction number 7967. The black and white pictures gave police officers, and her friends, a last look at Colleen Reed. She had her gold-rimmed glasses on and was wearing a white windbreaker. Her earrings sparkled in the fluorescent lighting of the bank's floodlights. In the first picture, she is looking down at her purse, probably readying the deposit envelope. In the second, she is looking ahead, having completed her deposit. Then she put her Miata in gear and headed for a popular Austin grocery storeWhole Foods.
16
At Whole Foods Colleen bought a gallon of milk and a bottle of vitamins. Protective of her checking account, she paid the $31.12 bill in cash and left the store at 8:59
P.M.
At the time, Whole Foods was located at 914 North Lamar. She missed being at the corner of Sixth and Lamar at the same time as Stephen, Bill, and Mike by only a few minutes. After leaving Whole Foods, Colleen had one more errandto wash her car.
17
She knew of a self-serve car wash on West Fifth Street. The stalls were of various shades of brown brick, blue metal, and cinder block white walls. It appeared to be made of every kind of building material. The concrete driveway was of different shades, and on the periphery stood large, majestic oak trees. The stalls there had brushes to scrub the car and high-powered wands spewing soapy or clear water. She wanted to scrub down her car with the brush, so from Whole Foods she turned right on Sixth, then left on West Lynn, and left on Fifth. She entered the third stall from the west. As she sat in her car in the stall of the car wash, directly ahead of her to the north was a blue wooden building with white trim. It housed the offices of the Travis County Democratic Party. To the west, across the street from West Lynn was Don's Depot, a piano bar and saloon with an outside porch and two railroad cars in the back. Nearby was El Arroyo, the restaurant where Mike and Kari planned to eat. And less than one hundred yards to her right, across a vacant lot, was Powell Street.
18
When Colleen stepped out of her car to wash it, she caught the attention of Kenneth Allen McDuff. He and Hank had been cruising Austin long enough to have traversed Congress Avenue, where they stopped for a hamburger at a Dairy Queen, and Sixth Street, the center of Austin's entertainment district. Sixth Street is a congested one-way street going west. As Mac and Worley drove down it, they reached an area where older houses had been remodeled into small offices. Just behind those offices were homes, certainly not an area where Mac thought he could find any whores or drugs. Suddenly, he parked his Thunderbird and walked
 
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towards a well-known restaurant called the Z-Tejas Grill. Hank later remembered the grill because it had a patio with large umbrellas hovering over the tables. McDuff asked someone where the whores were and the man answered, "South Congress."
McDuff and Hank then returned to the Thunderbird and headed further west on Sixth. McDuff probably turned south on West Lynn (the wrong way) and then turned east on Fifth. That was when he noticed Colleen washing her car. Somehow, he got back to Sixth Street and turned south on Powell; that was when Stephen Marks had to "move" him along. After making the U-turn at the office building parking garage and heading north on Powell (the wrong way), he reached Sixth again, where he encountered Mike and Bill Goins. The brothers remembered that the Thunderbird turned west on Sixth. Big Mac and Hank turned south again on West Lynn (the wrong way) and entered the car wash from the north.
19
McDuff navigated the Thunderbird into the stall farthest east of Colleen's location. In his numerous statements, Hank insists he did not know why Mac got out of the car. According to Hank, Mac just got out, did not say anything, walked around the front of the car and over to another stall. Maybe, Hank claims to have thought, Mac was interested in getting change from the woman he saw when they drove into the car wash. Hank steadfastly asserted that when they stopped, he began to gather the many beer bottles and cans that littered the Thunderbird to throw them in garbage cans. "The next thing I know he comes back with a woman." She was kicking and screaming. McDuff had walked over to Colleen's stall, grabbed her by the throat with one of his massive hands and lifted her off her feet. He held her arms still with his other hand.
20
Alva Hank Worley is almost certainly telling the truth about Kenneth McDuff; and he is almost certainly lying about himself. The many inconsistencies in his numerous statements and courtroom testimony nearly all involve his own actions, but his account of what
McDuff
did throughout the evening never significantly wavered. But, Worley's assertion that he was caught by surprise by what McDuff did at the car wash is simply not credible. By his own admission, they spent most of the evening talking about violent crimes; and they had circled the car wash twice.
21
Stephen Marks saw McDuff and Worley make a U-turn for the specific purpose of going the wrong way down a narrow one-way street; and the Goins brothers remember that Mac and Hank
both
looked as if they were lost. They could only have been trying to figure out how to get
 
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back to the car wash. If Hank did not know McDuff was stalking Colleen, what did he think McDuff was determined to do? Wash his car?
The major investigators of the case, including Chuck Meyer and J. W. Thompson, are convinced, however, that Kenneth McDuff alone carried out the actual abduction. "This wasn't his first rodeo," Chuck Meyer said. McDuff knew exactly what he was doing and how to do it. He might have been able to walk right up to her and take her. Hank's problem, they believe, was a combination of cowardice and stupidity. "This was Hank's first opportunity to do something other than what he did. He could have just ran from there," J. W. said in utter disgust.
22
While still in her stall, Colleen let out a loud, sustained scream, and began "kicking like hell," according to Hank. She gurgled and struggled to get words out of her mouth as McDuff clutched her neck. Within seconds McDuff had her over to his car.
"Not me, not me," Colleen cried.
"You're going with me," McDuff replied.
"Please let me go, please don't let this happen to me."
"Get your ass in the car," McDuff barked at Hank.
Hank, in a tragedy chillingly identical to what Roy Dale Green had enacted a little over twenty-five years earlier, did as he was told. After having some trouble forcing Colleen into the back seat, McDuff ordered Hank to hold her down. Hank climbed into the back seat and held her wrists against the back driver's side window as McDuff got into the driver's seat. In testimony, Hank candidly asserts that as he held her down she quit screaming because no one was holding her by the throat; he remembered that at that point she began to cry. And yet, on another occasion, Hank spews the unbelievable: "I am not sure if I helped him put her into the back seat, but I might have."
23
Standing on the front porch of 505 Powell Street, Mike and Bill Goins, Stephen Marks, and Kari engaged in small talk. Stephen remembered that Mike and Bill might have mentioned being slowed down by a couple of idiots going the wrong way on Powell. Stephen and Kari talked about the Christmas holidays, and Stephen offered to serve everyone dinner at his home. His wife, Denise, was cooking spaghetti and there was plenty for everyone. Mike and Kari gracefully declined; they were looking forward to eating alone at El Arroyo. That was when they all heard Colleen's long, loud scream. It lasted long enough for the four of them to look towards the car wash and then at one another. Because of their position,
 
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they could not see what was happening inside the stalls, but they could see the area directly in front adjoining Fifth Street.
Stephen remembered what he heard as "an all-out serious scream." Bill, who thought life in his adopted hometown somehow uniquely qualified him to better evaluate screams, later stated, "I'm from New York; I know what a real scream sounds like."
24
The screams were followed by the sounds of slamming doors. Mike remembers two slamming doors, which means that Hank was almost certainly standing outside of the car when McDuff abducted Colleen. As the foursome on the porch watched the car wash, they saw a light colored Ford Thunderbird head out of the stalls towards Fifth Street. The car then headed west (the wrong way). Immediately, the three men recognized the car. The tan Thunderbird moved in the same slow, indecisive manner as when they saw it on Powell only minutes earlier. McDuff had to drive in such an erratic way that the witnesses on the porch noticed how often the break lights kept going on and off. It went down the right lane with cars coming at it in the opposite direction. It came dangerously close to running into at least two other vehicles going the right way on Fifth.
Bill asked if that happened in Austin all the time; he knew something was seriously wrong. He made the comment that it was the same car he and Mike had seen going the wrong way on Powell. Stephen immediately realized that it was the same car he saw make the U-turn to go the wrong way. Bill and Stephen agreed to rush to the car wash. They took Stephen's car and headed there.
25
Stephen drove through an alley across the block connecting West Lynn and Powell and reached the car wash in seconds. Colleen's car had thick suds all over it; she had been using the brush to scrub down her Mazda. Mike and Stephen could not see inside the car without wiping the suds off the windows. They could see Colleen's purse and keys on the front seat, and her small bag of groceries on the floor. It was pretty clear to them that the owner of the car had not left the scene voluntarily. Bill decided to stay with the car and told Stephen to race back to Kari's and tell her to call the police. Kari and Mike were already inside her apartment when Stephen stuck his head inside and told her to dial 911.
26
 
Page 151
Image not available.
Only minutes before McDuff abducted her from a car wash on December 29,
1991, Colleen Reed deposited a $200 Christmas present from her father at an
ATM in downtown Austin.
Courtesy Austin Police Department.
 
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Image not available.
505 Powell Street, where Stephen Marks, Mike Goins, 
Bill Goins and Kari heard Colleen's screams.
Courtesy Travis County District Attorney's office.
Image not available.
Colleen Reed's car as it was found at the Fifth Street 
car wash on December 29, 1991.
Courtesy Travis County District Attorney's Office.
 
Page 153
Image not available.
The area around the Fifth Street car wash.
1. Corner of Powell and Sixth Streets.
2. 505 Powell Street.
3. Office building where Kenneth McDuff turned around to
head north on Powell (the wrong way).
4. Vacant lot.
5. Car wash stall used by Colleen Reed.
6. Car wash stall McDuff pulled into.
7. Don's Depot.
 
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V
27
Inside the tan Thunderbird Alva Hank Worley pressed Colleen's wrists against the side of the back seating area to keep her still as Kenneth McDuff dodged cars on Fifth Street. In the midst of the horror, Colleen probably noticed that McDuff was driving the wrong way. She blurted out that he should go on to the Mopac Expressway. Hank thought that was unusual because no one had asked her where to go. Eventually, McDuff crossed a median separating Fifth and Sixth streets near Mopac and headed south on the freeway. Only slightly more than three miles from the car wash, McDuff exited Mopac near the Capitol of Texas Highway. At the exit, he ordered Worley to drive, but he did not let Worley out of the car. He ordered him to crawl over the seat to get to the driver's seat. Then, McDuff went to the back seat with Colleen. McDuff placed a fairly large stereo on the back dashboard to get it out of his way. It also provided some cover from other drivers who might look at what was about to happen in the back seat. According to Worley, McDuff told her, ''If you'll just fuck you'll be all right." She had no choice but to say she would cooperate. Then he instructed her to take off her clothes. After she placed her clothes on the back floor, McDuff began to rape her.
Worley made a U-turn around some tall, rocky cliffs (which he mistook for large piles of dirt) and headed north on Mopac. By the time he reached the Fifth Street exit where they had first entered Mopac, McDuff had ordered Colleen to have anal sex. Worley remembers Colleen's cries of pain and pleas for mercy as McDuff made jokes, taunted, and humiliated her.
As Worley continued north on Mopac he could feel the car rock as McDuff continued to sexually assault Colleen. He turned north on US Highway 183 intending to go to Round Rock, and from there, on to Belton. In his statements, he claims that by this time, all he wanted to do was get back to his sister's trailer. A little more than twenty-three miles from the car wash, Worley turned right on to Ranch Road 620.
On Ranch Road 620 Colleen's horror continued. McDuff sat back and ordered her to give him oral sex. Worley remembers him grabbing her head and forcing her down, making her gag. The area is sparsely populated and dominated by remnants of ranches slowly being consumed by deed-restricted, master-planned neighborhoods. By the time they reached the site of the historic Chisholm Trail in Round Rock, Colleen

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