Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

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

Bad Boy From Rosebud (79 page)

Page 297

26 APD Files:
Incident Report,
by J. W. Thompson, May 7 and June 3, 1992; Charles Meyer; APD Files:
Sworn Statement of [Francis],
May 6, 1992.

27 APD Files:
Incident Report,
by Donald O. Martin, May 7, 1992;
Austin American-Statesman,
May 6, 1992.

28
State of Texas v Kenneth Allen McDuff,
SOF in Cause #93-2139, Volume 4, pg. 30.

29
Austin American-Statesman,
May 7, 1992;
Waco Tribune-Herald,
May 7, 1992.

30
Austin American-Statesman,
May 7 and 8, 1992.

31 APD Files:
Incident Report,
by Scott James Cary, July 4, 1992;
State of Texas v Kenneth Allen McDuff,
SOF in Cause #93-2139, Volume 4, pgs. 25459.

32
State of Texas v Kenneth Allen McDuff,
SOF in Cause #93-2139, Volume 4, pgs. 10108, 25659, and in Volume 22, pgs. 23741; APD Files: County of Travis,
Sworn Statement of Michael Goins,
June 5, 1992,
Incident Reports,
by Sonya Urubek, June 27, 1992, and Scott James Cary, July 4, 1992.

Page 298

19
The Northrup Trial

"This was a monster that needed taking care of."
Mike Freeman, McLennan County Assistant District Attorney

On May 18, 1992, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) Internal Affairs Investigator named John Moriarty called APD Detective Sonya Urubek at her office. Moriarty told her that he was compiling a timeline of Kenneth McDuff's known whereabouts from the time he first entered prison in 1965 to the present. Other than informal meetings among officers, this was the first serious attempt to compile data from several law enforcement jurisdictions into a central location. The synopsis Moriarty compiled became a godsend for the dozens of detectives investigating McDuff, allowing them to safely eliminate McDuff as a suspect in a number of pending murders, rapes, and abductions.
¹

John Moriarty and TDCJ had been brought into the case because McDuff was an ex-con on parole. John was originally from the South Bronx in New York, but he fit in very well with the Texas posse informally assembled to track down McDuff. John Aycock, a quintessential Texas lawman, called Moriarty "a cop's cop." The information he supplied the posse about McDuff's prison career greatly assisted in efforts to understand and profile the fugitive. He also had vast experience dealing with the families of ex-cons, and conducted masterful interviews with Addie and J. A. McDuff.

On May 15, 1993, J. A. McDuff died at Scott and White Hospital in Temple at 2:15
P.M.
The hospital refused to release his cause of death, but

Page 299

Kenneth later said that the old man had been outside cutting grass and he got overheated. While in his house he had a heart attacked and died.

As information and misinformation leaked out about the circumstances surrounding McDuff's previous releases, possible corruption on the parole board, former board members acting as "consultants" working towards the early release of prisoners, and the fact that McDuff had been released at all, political and public pressure began to mount to get to the bottom of the whole sordid mess. Moriarty had been placed in a very delicate positioninvestigating his own agency. Other officers began to call him the "Dancing Bear," because they were reminded of a circus bear standing on a large ballany wrong move and the bear falls off. For the next six years, John Moriarty became more and more of a central figure in the slow process of bringing the Kenneth McDuff episode to a close.

Dwight Goains, representing McDuff, had owned a medical supply company in the Houston area before becoming an attorney. At the time he represented McDuff, ninety-five percent of his practice involved criminal law, and about seventy-five percent of that came from being a public defender. He had the reputation for liking difficult trial cases. "What everyone has to understand in my case is that I do not defend crimes, I defend a person's constitutional rights, and from that standpoint, it is easy. It doesn't matter if they jaywalked or murdered twenty people. This is still the United States of America."
²

After advising McDuff not to speak to any law enforcement officials, he made a brief statement for his client: "He has authorized me to say that he is not guilty, and he looks forward to his day in court. My client's general feelings were that with all the media attention, they'd pressure them into indicting him. The state should not be prosecuting him in the media; that is what the courtroom is for." Goains went on to say that the federal charges were "trumped up" to allow the Marshal's Service to join the manhunt.
³

The federal charges were not "trumped up." Dealing drugs and felony possession of a firearm are serious crimes, and McDuff did much of both. Clearly, however, the size of the manhunt and the resources expended by the federal government to apprehend him had everything to do with McDuff being a serial killer. It would have been foolish to ignore his violent past and the evidence of his involvement in homicides. McDuff once stated in an interview that, "once they found my car, it was 'Get McDuff.' "
⁴He was right; they wanted him very badly.

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