Read Bad Boy From Rosebud Online

Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

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

Bad Boy From Rosebud (65 page)

 
Page 238
changed her phone number and kept it listed in the phone book. Periodically, she visited APD Headquarters to deliver whatever leads she had received. She forwarded all of them, even those from the kooks.
Both Don and Sonya worked carefully with the Goins Brothers, Stephen Marks, and Kari (Mike Goins' girlfriend). Stephen Marks, for example, readily agreed to be hypnotized in an attempt to remember more about what happened at the car wash. Don Martin took Stephen to the Police Academy Building where a DPS agent worked with him. Stephen remembered that the car used to kidnap Colleen had very long doors. Don also coordinated his efforts with Hector Polanco of the Homicide Task Force. APD made copies of all the papers in Colleen's purse, including her calendar and address book. In anticipation of needing Colleen's DNA, APD secured her latest PAP Smear from her gynecologist.
On the night of March 24, during the filming of an
Unsolved Mysteries
episode at the carwash, Sonya met with Mike Goins at Kari's house. She asked him to look at a photo lineup with McDuff's picture in it. Mike Goins was able to eliminate all of the photos except McDuff. Pointing at McDuff's picture, he said he could not eliminate the picture, but he could not make a positive ID either. The photo lineup went into the APD Files as a tentative ID of Kenneth Allen McDuff.
12
The investigation shifted into high gear when Don and Sonya returned from the ATF search of McDuff's car. They had two names to check out: a woman named Beverly from Del Valle and a parole consultant from Austin named Helen Copitka.
The day after the ATF search, Don did a background check on Beverly and found that she had been a known associate of a few men with criminal records. One of them had an outstanding warrant for theft in Travis County. With two other sergeants, Don went to the address found in McDuff's car and located Beverly's brother. He said that Beverly no longer lived there, but that she worked at a south Austin restaurant and might be at work. They went to the restaurant, but she was not there either. The manager gave them a phone number where she could be reached. When they called, they found out that it was the number to the residence they had just visited. Don asked Beverly's brother to tell her to call him the next time he saw her.
The next day Beverly paged Don. When he returned the call, she indicated that she could meet with him between 6:30 and 7:00
P.M.
Don told her that he was assisting a sheriff in locating Kenneth McDuff be-
 
Page 239
cause his car had been found abandoned and he had been reported missing. She easily recalled McDuff when Don showed her a picture. When he showed her the map taken out of the Thunderbird, she readily recognized her own handwriting. She remembered seeing McDuff only once during the summer of 1991. Her cousin, Morris, brought him to her Del Valle home to score speed. She drew the map for McDuff to return, but he never did.
13
This was the first confirmation that McDuff made trips to the Austin area.
The second confirmation that McDuff had cruised Austin came from Jackie. Chuck Meyer called Sonya and let her know that Jackie had been arrested in Dallas and was in jail in Waco. Quoting Bill Johnston, Chuck told her that McDuff had been in Austin on Christmas Day, that he stole gas, talked about taking girls, and most significantly, constantly drove the wrong way on one-way streets.
14
When Parnell called APD after he had interviewed Jackie on March 23, he told J. W. that Jackie was in a Waco jail. Very soon, J. W. called back to say that he and Don were headed for Waco to talk to One-eyed Jack.
15
Jackie had taken Mike's advice; he had thought long and hard over the weekend about what he would say about McDuff. He had decided to tell all.
Image not available.
McDuff, from the photo lineup where
Mike Goins made a tentative identification.
Courtesy Travis County District Attorney's Office.
 
Page 240
IV
"I'm the meanest son-of-a-bitch in the jungle, but I ain't no kid killer. Mike, I been a thief, and I used a little dope from time to time, but I ain't never done anything like that to a woman. I got too many girlfriends for that kind of stuff and you can ask any of 'em. if I ever done anything like that. And I sure as hell ain't no kid killer, either, you know that." Mike and Parnell believed Jackie. "He's a thief but not a liar. Now that's rare," smiled Parnell.
Throughout the interview, Jackie begged to be given truth serum or strapped to a polygraph. He wanted badly to be cleared of any involvement in murder. When asked why he never went to the police with his information, Jackie replied that he was on the run himself. He told Mike and Parnell that he heard about the abduction at the Austin carwash on a Crime Stoppers Show on January 10 or 11. He said it sounded exactly like "Max," especially the part about going the wrong way on Fifth Street. Jackie said that on Christmas Day, Max went down the wrong one-way street at least three times in three hours.
16
For Wayne Appelt of the ATF, Jackie's information meant that Kenneth Allen McDuff abducted and killed Colleen Reed. He told Don Martin, "I guarantee you that McDuff killed Colleen Reed."
17
Toward the end of the day on Monday, March 23, the day Mike and Parnell retrieved such rich information from Jackie, a determined and courageous woman entered the Marshal's Office in Waco. She had called earlier in the day and wanted to talk to the McNamara brothers. She was Barbara Carpenter, Regenia Moore's mother. She had never given up looking for her daughter, and she wondered why others had. She told Mike and Parnell about a man named William, who had befriended Regenia and many other girls on The Cut. Barbara told the McNamaras that, according to William, someone named Chester saw Regenia in McDuff's pickup by the Chicken Shack on the Old Dallas Highway.
18
That was the last time Regenia was seen in public.
The search for the monster was now taking The Boys to the Cut. They were always heavily armed, but after the raid in Dallas, they carried an impressive arsenal. During the Dallas raid, Mike poked the back of Jackie's head with a hybrid called the "Annihilator." It was a Remington 870 12-gauge 8-shot, mounted below a fully automatic M-16 with a 90-round clip. With the Annihilator, when a user was done with one part, he
 
Page 241
could go to the other. There was also "Shorty," a double barrel shotgun pistol Parnell wore in a shoulder harness. There was the 10-gauge Magnum Bill used to capture his prisoner, two 45-caliber rifles that could fire twenty rounds per second, and a 1928 model of a Thompson Machine gun. The guns usually sat on a console in between the front seats of Bigfoot.
19
McDuff was not going to get away.
V
On March 25, a young Waco man named Terry who worked at an auto parts store decided to take his lunch in the seclusion of the heavily wooded area behind the TSTI campus. In a statement to the McLennan County Sheriff's Office, Terry wrote, "I came out here at about 12:10
P.M.
[and] got me a few beers for lunch." As he walked through the woods, he came upon a mesquite patch. He heard the humming noise of hundreds of flies and something suspicious attracted him to a certain spot in the heavy brush. He came upon a pile of boards over loose dirt, looked down, and saw the eye sockets of a skull looking back at him. Spooked, Terry hurriedly left the scene and returned to the store.
At first, his friends did not believe him, but they went to the scene, saw that it was a body, and called the Bellmead Police Department. They, in turn, called the McLennan County Sheriff's Department.
20
Soon, police officers swarmed the area. Truman Simons, Richard Stroup, Larry Abner, and Larry Abraham were among those from the Sheriff's Office. Mike, Parnell, and Bill arrived to watch the recovery. The body was a young adult woman who appeared to be white. For a while, the officers thought they might have discovered Melissa Northrup. But her hair was clearly negroid. Except for the head, which had been exposed to the air, the body was fairly well preserved. The dark, thick soil of the area wrapped the body into a nearly airtight cocoon. The skull had been damaged, probably by the hoofs of cows grazing the area. The air smelled of death as the officers used spoons to unearth the body, later identified by fingerprints as Valencia Kay Joshua. She was found naked, and lying in a semi-fetal position. In the dirt beneath her head, the officers found a hair comb.
Near the burial site, Larry Abner found a plastic coated wire that appeared to have dark hairs embedded on one end of it. It matched what
 
Page 242
McDuff's one-time friend, Chester, called a "plastic covered rope" he had seen in McDuff's pickup truck. The find, however, never amounted to much. There was a lot of illegally-dumped trash in that area, and Chester could hardly be depended on to give credible information.
Far more valuable than the plastic coated wire was what was found on Joshua's body. Forensic scientists in Dallas discovered hair not belonging to the deceased. The hair would be found to match samples later retrieved from Kenneth Allen McDuff. Her immediate cause of death could not be determined, but because of the condition and location of her body, and the fact that she was nude, the coroner ruled that she died as a result of homicidal violence.
21
At the scene of Valencia Joshua's makeshift grave, Bill Johnston wondered if McDuff could have prepared other sites for other victims. As he roamed the area, Bill came across a freshly dug hole. He tried not to let his imagination run away with him, but he thought that it sure looked like a grave.
22
<><><><><><><><><><><><>
1
State of Texas v Kenneth Allen McDuff,
SOF in Cause #93-2139, Volume 29, pg. 50.
2
Austin American-Statesman,
May 7, 1992.
3 Charles Meyer; Wayne Appelt.
4 Hank later testified that Mike, Parnell and Bill showed him pictures of dead bodies, presumably pictures of the teenagers McDuff killed as a result of the Broomstick Murders, but The Boys deny ever doing that; Wayne Appelt; Tim Steglich; Mike McNamara; Parnell McNamara; Bill Johnston; Confidential Documents; BCSO Files:
Supplement Report,
by Tim Steglich, dated March 3, 1992.
5 Wayne Appelt; Mike McNamara; Parnell McNamara; Bill Johnston; Confidential Documents.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Mike McNamara; Parnell McNamara; Bill Johnston; Tim Steglich; Confidential Documents; BCSO Files:
Supplement Report,
by Tim Steglich, dated March 3, 1992.
9 Ibid.
10 Wayne Appelt; Mike McNamara; Parnell McNamara; Bill Johnston; Confidential Documents.
11 Mike McNamara; Parnell McNamara; Confidential Documents.
12 APD Files:
Incident Report,
by Sonya Urubek, April 4, 1992.

Other books

Alligator Playground by Alan Sillitoe
Bag Limit by Steven F. Havill
Stolen Heart by Bennett, Sawyer
The Whipping Club by Henry, Deborah
Oathbreaker by Amy Sumida
Reckless (Blue Collar Boyfriends Book 1) by Jessi Gage
Flight From Honour by Gavin Lyall
Caged in Bone (The Ascension Series) by Reine, SM
The Highlander's Warrior Bride by Eliza Knight
Rising Fears by Michaelbrent Collings


readsbookonline.com Copyright 2016 - 2024