Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

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

Bad Boy From Rosebud (61 page)

Page 222

roads leading to a destination near the corner of Anderson Lane and the MoPac Expressway. J. A. said the maps were not his, so they must be Kenneth's. He gave the maps to Mike.

Before Addie could regain control over J. A., the old man, as if to issue an invitation, said, "If Kenneth done what you said he done, if you find him, you ought to just go ahead and shoot him."
¹³

The house seemed empty of love and tenderness common among families. Mike marveled at how a thorough search of the entire house revealed no family pictures. The men left the McDuff home at about 3:30
P.M.
They regrouped at Tim's office at the Bell County Sheriff's Department.

Image not available.

ATF Special Agent Wayne
Appelt. Besides being an
expert investigator, Appelt
kept up the spirits of lawmen
with his sharp sense of
humor. He was part of the
team that visited the McDuff
residence in March, 1992.
Courtesy Wayne
Appelt.

Page 223

Image not available.

Don "Mad Dog" Owens of the
Temple Police Department (left)
and Deputy U. S. Marshal Mike
McNamara (right), part of the
March 1992 team that visited the
McDuff residence.
Author's collection.

Shortly before the search of the McDuff house, Bill, Mike and Parnell had contacted Texas Ranger John Aycock and requested more information on McDuff. They also asked Mad Dog Owens of Temple PD for whatever information he had. After the search, Tim received information that McDuff had been arrested in Temple on February 25 for public intoxication. The arrest records showed that two men, Buddy and Billy, were arrested with him. A quick background check showed Billy to have a long criminal record from 1972 to the present. Additionally, Ranger John Aycock discovered that Billy was on a probated sentence for DWI and was supposed to be doing work on the weekends, but he had not

Page 224

shown up for a period of two months. A young boy, believed to be Billy's son, had been delivering medical excuses showing Billy to be in the care of a physician in Galveston. This led to an outstanding warrant for his arrest for failing to appear on a misdemeanor charge. With a ready-made warrant in hand, the lawmen were able to immediately track down Billy.
¹⁴Surely, seldom has a "failure to appear" warrant attracted such a large number of high-powered lawmen.

It did not take Tim long to locate an address for Billy; he lived on the 400 block of Boyles Street in Belton, only a few blocks from Tim's office. In minutes, Tim, Mike, Parnell, Bill, Wayne Appelt, and Jeff Brzozowski drove up to the small, white, wooden house. The neighborhood was not overrun with drugs, but it was poor and unkempt. The ditches were nearly filled with trash, and front yards looked like salvage dumps.

Bill and Mike decided to wait outside in Bigfoot while the others went into the house. Billy was not home. His wife Janice answered the door. She had been married before, and one of her husbands was Alva Hank Worley. She invited the officers into her home and was very cooperative, even after they told her that there was a warrant for Billy's arrest. She said that Billy was probably drinking at Poor Boy's Lounge, but he might be at the home of a friend named Benton. Benton's house on Eleventh Street was very near Poor Boy's. Billy, she said, would be driving her white pickup truck. (At the time, Janice was not very happy with Billy, who had the annoying habit of taking her truck from her place of employment while she was at work so he could go drinking. This often left her stranded. The habit was all the more selfish since Billy never seriously searched for a job.)

During the interview, Janice volunteered that she thought McDuff was crazy and she did not like him. When they asked her if she had ever seen McDuff with anyone else, Janice replied that Mac often ran with her ex-husband, Alva Hank Worley. She told the officers that Hank was living at Bloom's Motel, on Interstate 35 just south of Belton. She added that their fourteen-year-old daughter lived with him. When asked if Hank could be counted on to cooperate, Janice said that Hank was not mean, but that he could be counted on to lie; Hank had been taught to lie all of his life, she said. The interview ended with Janice saying that she feared for her and her children's safety. The men replied that she had a right to be scared, and consequently if she ever found out where McDuff might be, she should call the police immediately.
¹⁵

Page 225

As eventful as the interview inside of the house was the "show" outsidea display of the subculture the men would deal with for the next few weeks. Inside Bigfoot, Mike and Bill passed the time by observing the neighborhood. They saw two women in a car filled with children slowly drive by. As the driver neared her house, a young boy, about eight years old, hopped on the back of her car, intent to get a "ride." Instead of slowing down and being more careful, the mother jerked the car forward, spewing dirt and gravel behind her car and sending the little boy flying off the back. She laughed uncontrollably when she saw the boy tumbling down the gravel road. The boy staggered around the road for a few seconds, brushed himself off and wandered away. "The kid kind of limped off like you would kick a dog," remembered Parnell. The two women continued to laugh as they parked their car. As one of the children inside the car, a six- or seven-year-old girl, tried to get out, one of the women intentionally slammed the door on her head, sending her reeling back into the back seat. The woman thought that was funny too. Eventually, the little girl got out of the car and followed the others into the house. She walked through the door holding her head with both hands.
¹⁶

Only moments later, Bill leaned forward and said, "What
is
that?" From the front porch of Janice's house Wayne Appelt saw the same thing.

After straining to see, Mike said, "That's a chicken."

On the front porch of the house directly across the street, a chicken sat on a perch. "You could see this motion. It looked like a bowling ball on a pendulum," remembered Bill. The chicken swayed and flared, but the really interesting show was the boy directly in front of the chicken doing exactly the same thing. The twosome looked like Groucho and Harpo Marx's famous "mirror" skit. Wayne thought that the boy was worshipping the chicken. Right about that time a cute little girl, about eight years old, walked up to Bigfoot as if to marvel at the size of the vehicle. "Hi, Honey, how are you doing?" asked Mike.

"Fine," said the little girl.

"Is that a chicken on that swing?"

"Uh, huh."

"Tell me, did the boy teach the chicken to do that, or did the chicken teach the boy to do that?" asked Mike.

"Well, the chicken must have taught him cause the chicken was doing it first."
¹⁷

Page 226

After leaving Janice, the men agreed to meet at Bobby's Hamburgers near Interstate 35 in Belton. While eating and discussing what to do next, the group agreed that Billy was a worthless louse because he made no attempts to support his family. They could not understand how anyone could be so selfish. What particularly galled the men was how Billy would take Janice's truck and leave her stranded at work so he could go out drinking while she supported him. All of a sudden Wayne Appelt broke the tension. "Billy couldn't live on Boyles Street and have a job or his friends would make fun of him." The men began to laugh. Then Wayne started talking like a teasing little girl. "Billy's got a job! Billy's got a job!" They laughed harder, providing much-needed therapy. They were heading for Benton's house and the Poor Boy's Lounge in search of Billy, and they knew no one would be laughing over there.
¹⁸

Quite a posse had assembled. There were two Deputy U.S. Marshals, an Assistant U.S. Attorney, the head of Bell County's Criminal Investigations and one of his investigators, and two ATF agents. Soon, Mad Dog Don Owens of the Temple Police Department arrived. The group split up; one watched Poor Boy's Lounge, and the other watched Benton's house. The men could see Janice's white pickup truck parked in front of the white house, but that did not mean Billy was inside. They waited for quite a while until, finally, Billy walked past the front porch and started his truck. Just like Janice had promised, he headed for Poor Boy's only a couple of blocks away.

At the parking lot of Poor Boy's, Tim waved Billy over. Before Mike could bring Bigfoot to a complete stop, Parnell hopped out and ran for the white truck. He had a pistol in his right hand, and with his left he opened the door and grabbed Billy. Parnell then whirled Billy around the door and slammed him onto the hood of the truck. Billy did not fight, but he was not compliant either. Parnell screwed the barrel of his pistol into Billy's left ear. Moving from the right, like a cat, Mad Dog Owens removed his gun from a shoulder holster and screwed his pistol into Billy's right ear. In a tone known throughout the Temple underworld, Mad Dog admonished Billy. "If you fuck up, you gonna die in stereo!" Billy became compliant.
¹⁹

Don, Parnell, and some of the other officers tried to talk to Billy using the native language of the subculture. It did not appear to be work-

Page 227

ing; Billy seemed to relish being called foul things. It might have even enhanced his stature with the bar patrons watching the drama. In a move wholly uncharacteristic of him, Bill Johnston, a man who never curses and is always a gentleman, put his large face nose-to-nose with Billy. ''You're a jerk! And your family's nothing but a bunch of scumbags, and I'm gonna put you in prison!" (Not even Billy and a hunt for Kenneth Allen McDuff could get Bill to curse.) Bill surprised his fellow officers as much as he did Billy. "Bill never talks like that," thought Tim Steglich. Anyway, Bill reminded Billy of outstanding cases involving sawed-off shotguns in which Billy was a suspect. "I am the one who is working that case!" Bill said. Parnell and Mad Dog got Billy to be compliant, but Bill got his attention.
²⁰

As Mike searched and handcuffed Billy, patrons in Poor Boy's began congregating inside near the door. Many of them recognized that the "feds" were arresting Billy, and wondered what could he have done to get this much attention. Surely, it was not because he had missed a work detail. One of the men asked Parnell what was going on. Several eyebrows moved upward when Parnell answered, "child support."
²¹

A Bell County deputy came over and took Billy to the jail where he was booked on outstanding warrants. At Poor Boy's, the officers remembered Janice. It dawned on them that if her white pickup was towed she might not have the money to retrieve it to go to work. They called her to pick up her truck.
²²

Near Tim's office, in the Criminal Investigations Division of the Bell County Sheriff's Office, most of the posse awaited Billy, who at first claimed to know nothing about McDuff. He was quickly told he was lying. Then the officers educated him about the Broomstick Murders of 1966. As Billy listened to the gruesome details, he slowly lowered his head and said he knew McDuff in prison, but had no idea that he had been there for killing kids. The officers reminded him that he had a wife and kids and that McDuff probably knew Billy would be in jail for the foreseeable future. Knowing they were on to something, the officers repeated the story. The Broomstick Murders seemed to matter to Billy.
²³

He insisted that he did not even like McDuff, that he was crazy and always wanted to fight someone and rob them. McDuff spoke constantly of robbing crack dealers. Billy told them how McDuff got the cut under his eye, and how he and McDuff nearly got into a fight over McDuff's treatment of Debbie. He also told them about how McDuff took an old

Page 228

man's bottle of whiskey, and nearly got into a fight with Jimmy. The officers wanted to know the names of everyone McDuff knew and hung around with. The first name Billy gave them was the ex-husband of his wife JaniceAlva Hank Worley.
²⁴

Billy admitted that he and Janice had gone to a convenience store (not the Quik Pak) to pick up Hank and McDuff and tow a Thunderbird. Billy admitted fixing McDuff's car and that Janice should still have the receipt for the parts. He did not know it, but he provided officers with proof that McDuff was in possession of a Thunderbird during the Thanksgiving holidays of 1991.

Billy also told them that Hank lived at Bloom's Motel with his and Janice's fourteen-year-old daughter. According to Billy, he had thrown his step-daughter out of his house because she kept cussing out her mother.
²⁵

The Boys wanted to talk to Hankbadly. After finishing with Billy, Mike, Parnell, Bill, Wayne, and Jeff hit the road. Bill had always believed that "if you work harder than a criminal, eventually you are going to catch him."

Each of the men had families going to sleep at that very moment. They thought about their wives and children and how they had been left alone. But there was also a sense of urgency For the next few weeks, every time darkness fell over Central Texas, they wondered if McDuff was killing another young woman. They left the Bell County Sheriff's Office looking for Alva Hank Worley

Even for men who never wear watches and have no reverence for time, they had no idea that their evening was just beginning.

<><><><><><><><><><><><>

1
State of Texas v Kenneth Allen McDuff,
SOF in Cause #93-2139, Volume 20, pg. 172, and Volume 22, pgs. 189, 201, 252; APD Files:
Incident Reports,
by Eleuterio Lean, January 8, by Donald O. Martin, January 7, 10, 23, and February 29, 1992.

2 Charles Meyer; TDCJ Files:
Kenneth Allen McDuff, Synopsis,
compiled by John Moriarty, u.d.

3 TDCJ Files:
Kenneth Allen McDuff, Synopsis,
compiled by John Moriarty, u.d.;
State of Texas v Kenneth Allen McDuff,
SOF in Cause #93-2139, Volume 26, pgs. 7980, 89, 97, and 99102, and in Cause #643820, pgs. 3033, and 37; ATF Files:
Report of Interview,
by Robert Stumpenhaus, May 20, 1992;
Austin American-Statesman,
May 6, 1992; MCDA Files: Letter from Aubrey German to George Foster, December 17, 1992.

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