Authors: Gary M. Lavergne

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

Bad Boy From Rosebud (90 page)

Page 342

''You dumb son-of-a-bitch, that's a two-year-old tree," Chuck laughed.

"Well, that makes a difference," McDuff answered nonchalantly.

"What were you watching for? You didn't want anybody to see you," Chuck said, trying to get him to remember.

"It was real dark and I could see that fence line. I didn't worry about that river cause I could see it and it was roaring," McDuff remembered. He also remembered Colleen's exact position; she would be found lying partially on her right side, facing the river, and her head would be higher than her feet.

The river could not be seen where they were. Someone also figured out that there were two low-water marks that McDuff could have seen that night. The other one was much closer to the bridge. John drove him there and from the car, McDuff helped to direct officers with poles. They marked off a rectangular area. J. W. had his doubts because McDuff directed them to an area that had nothing around it for at least fifty feet.

A huge front-end loader had been brought to the scene. The men directed the earthmover into place, and in less than a half hour, Bill Johnston looked down between the bucket and the tracks and saw something that caught his eye.

"Now, that looks like a bone," he said. But he wanted a homicide detective to take a look. "J. W., you need to come look at this." Bill very carefully took his shovel and moved sand and dirt out of the way. He exposed teeth. Of course, McDuff was right, her head was higher than the rest of her, and she was found exactly as he had said.

"Those are human teeth, Bill. That's her. That's it," said J. W., before he instructed the driver of the tractor not to mix the dirt in the bucket with other piles.

Bill got on a cellular phone and called Lori, who had been prepared for just such a phone call. She knew to be patient and wait for a positive identification. J. W. tried to get in touch with Buddy Meyer at the Travis County D.A.'s Office, but he never got through. Chuck looked at the bridge and saw the dozens of reporters rustling about. It was near deadline time, and since all of the lawmen had gathered in one spot, the reporters knew something had been discovered. "This family has been through enough already. Let's position the front-end loader between the grave and the press," he said.

"Did they find it?" McDuff asked. John Moriarty instructed TDCJ investigators to get McDuff out of there and back to death row. Again, they drove right past all unsuspecting press.

Page 343

The crime scene now belonged to J. W., and after some legal wrangling, he became an authorized agent for the Travis County Medical Examiner's Office and made the call to excavate her immediately and take her to Austin. As they placed her on a sheet, Chuck noticed something in the hole. It was a white shoestring tied in a very small loop. Chuck remembered Hank's statement about how Colleen complained that her hands hurt because McDuff had tied them too tight.

They had been looking for her for so long, it seemed appropriate for Chuck and J. W. to take Colleen back to Austin. Mike McNamara does not remember any other body being treated with such reverence. When some of the other officers offered to help Chuck clear out an area of his trunk to put the body bag, he thought to himself that there was no way in hell Colleen Reed would be placed in the trunk of any car. Instead, they cleared out the back seat and very carefully put her there. The two exhausted men drove right past the press and headed home.

It was the beginning of a journey that eventually took Colleen Reed back home to Ville Platte, Louisiana.

Image not available.

John Moriarty (standing, second from left) of the Texas Department of Criminal
Justice, played a crucial role in securing information leading to the recovery of
McDuff's missing victims. He also interrogated a much more candid McDuff
shortly before McDuff's execution on November 17, 1998.
Author's Collection.

Page 344

Image not available.

Colleen Reed.
Courtesy Austin Police Department.

Image not available.

These knotted strings were found beneath the remains of Colleen Reed. They
were almost certainly taken off her tennis shoes by McDuff and used to bind her hands.
Courtesy Austin Police Department.

Page 345

It is hard to understand what fault could possibly be found against three men who worked so diligently to find three murdered women who had been missing for seven years. But wild rumors circulated about McDuff being released from prison for days. Others were convinced that only an accomplice could have led The Boys to the gravesa surreptitious deal had to have been made, the logic went. Rumormongers convinced themselves that surely McDuff had to have profited from the events of late September and early October. After all, he had been scheduled to be executed on October 21 but a stay had been granted. (The stay was routine and in no way related to the recoveries.) Others complained that McDuff was not a federal casewhy were Bill, Mike and Parnell such pivotal figures?

Central Texas newspapers carried headline stories of a sealed motion Bill filed to reduce the sentence of one of McDuff's nephews, who had been given fifteen years in prison for drug charges unrelated to any crime involving McDuff. (The sentence was reduced by five years.) Undoubtedly, these same newspapers would have carried even larger, more scathing headlines if their reporters had found out that The Boys had an opportunity to find Regenia Moore, Brenda Thompson, and Colleen Reed, and had done nothing. These same newspapers even carried quotes from other law officers who complained about not having enough information to carry on an investigation into the Thompson and Moore murders. Inexplicably, they ignored the fact that
bodies
, the best evidence, were found. It was yet one more example of how The Boys put themselves in a Rooseveltian arena.

Whatever doubts anyone might have harbored about whether McDuff would benefit from the information he gave to the CI must have been settled on October 15, only nine days after Colleen had been found. A federal judge in Waco lifted all stays delaying McDuff's execution and rescheduled it for November 17, 1998.

Throughout late October and early November John Moriarty spent about forty hours interviewing McDuff. He found out what many knew: if you

Page 346

spent time with McDuff for the purpose of getting information, you had to pay your dues by listening to long, drawn-out stories about cars, fast driving and fights. He murdered, he said, because he wanted to stay out of the pen, but he refused to explain how killing Colleen Reed and Melissa Northrup supported that objective.

"My reality is like a video game. I wouldn't pay attention to the consequences of what I do. I would just go out and get what I wanted," McDuff said, accurately describing his murderous life.

He did not like to talk about Melissa and Colleen. Maybe he harbored a small hope that he would escape the death chamberagain. He spoke candidly about Regenia and Brenda. "The first one I killed after I got out was Brenda Thompson," he said. According to McDuff, he picked her up for a date and insisted on "going around the world," which meant having all three kinds of sex. He did so, he claimed, for three hours, and by the time he brought her back to the Cut, she was fighting mad. That was why she screamed and tried to kick out the windshield when they approached the infamous roadblock on Faulkner Lane. In true McDuff fashion, he went into detail about how he outsmarted and outran Waco police officers. He took her to a field of weeds where he told her, "Bitch, you fucked up." He alleges that he had sex with her for another six hours. He said he killed her with his bare hands, put her in the back of his truck, drove to Gholson Road, and buried her.

McDuff believed that when Waco police officers visited his room he would be arrested and sent back to prison. He also told Moriarty that he checked with his mother to see if the police had been looking for him. When he found out that they had not, he decided not to skip town because "everything was O.K."

His account of his murder of Regenia Moore was much simpler. He picked her up on the Cut, smoked some rocks along the creek, and killed her there. Then he said something that sent a chill through John Moriarty. "It was just like in the movies. Did you ever see where they run off, and they fall down, and they don't get up, and they just stay there? That happened to me twice." He was talking about Regenia and Brenda. "You know, if they had just kept on running they would have just gotten away."

McDuff also spoke of how he diagnosed himself as having ADD, or Attention Deficit Disorder. But when he was a little boy, he asserted, teachers did not know about such disorders and they could not help him.

Page 347

Colleen, he claimed, was the only victim he specifically targeted. He had wanted to make a statementto get back at Austin for revoking his parole.

He also finally admitted to killing Louise Sullivan in 1966, but he claimed that Roy Dale Green was the one who shot the boys in the face. He strangled her with his hands because he did not like gore or the smell of blood.

While talking about his childhood, he admitted that his first attempt to "take" a woman was at age twelve when he and another local boy tried to rape a woman. They failed and tried again, this time wearing a mask, and the woman just laughed at him.

Incredibly, he had ill feelings towards the one person who stood by him through all of his troubleshis mother, Addie. He had no attachment to his mother or father, he said. "They turned me out like a dog," he said, apparently completely forgetting the fortune J. A. and Addie had spent on him and how they supported him until he was returned to death row.

"This life has not been good to me. I'm ready to close the door on this part of my life and ready to open the next door." One can only wonder what Kenneth Allen McDuff really expected out of this life, or the next.

On November 16, Chuck and J. W. made one last trip to the Ellis Unit to visit McDuff. At first, he was extremely cocky. "I don't know why you are here. I got nothing to say to you."

"Well, we just wanted to come by and talk to you before your big day tomorrow," J. W. replied.

McDuff talked almost continuously for the next three hours. He was convinced that he was going to get a stay, that the appeals court never executed anybody. J. W. replied, "But Mac, you're special."

Much of what he told the two lawmen from Austin he had shared with John Moriarty, but he did admit that he was "pissed" at Regenia over a dope deal or a "clipping." During this interview, he added to the dialogue he had with Brenda Thompson. This version went like: "You're in big trouble, Bitch. I'm gonna kill you."

To which Brenda allegedly replied: "Yea. I know."

"I'll give this to her, she handled it well," McDuff concluded.

In the short time they had with him, Chuck and J. W. masterfully exposed some of his most important lies. They were able to establish that

Page 348

the "statement" that he wanted to make to Austin by abducting Colleen was absurd. When Chuck suggested that the car wash was "just around the block" from the Austin Police Department, McDuff responded with, "Yea." The APD is nowhere near that car wash. They also slipped him erroneous information about the Yogurt Shop. He ate it up. The next day, he fed all of the wrong information back to John Moriarty; he even got the number of girls wrong. He was willing to confess to murdering five girls when there were only four.

"God damn, they gonna kill me tomorrow!" McDuff suddenly blurted out.

"Kenneth, that is what we have been telling you all along," Chuck said.

"You know, Mac, if this thing is gonna happen tomorrow, you should prepare yourself to meet your maker," suggested J. W.

"I don't believe in God," McDuff insisted.

"Mac, you ought to think about it and hedge your bets," J. W. counseled.

"I can't see myself floating on a cloud, playing a harp," McDuff said.

"We can't either!" J. W. said, as everyone, including McDuff, started laughing.

VII

On November 17, 1998, a large group of reporters stood outside the Walls Prison in Huntsville, Texas, in an area reserved for the press. The Walls is the oldest of all of Texas's prison units. It also houses the death chamber. Unbelievably, a single, heavy, dark blue cloud hovered over the prison. Near the concrete picnic table a jungle of tripods looked like a flock of ostriches. Mercifully, the sun began to go down, and a gentle breeze flapped the yellow, "Do not cross" police tapes. No one in the press saw a single anti-death penalty protester. (They later discovered that one woman was seen with a T-shirt supporting an end to capital punishment.)

Earlier in the day, Kenneth Allen McDuff had been transported from death row to a holding cell in the Walls. Reportedly, Addie had arrived too late to see him on his last day. At 5:58
P.M.
, the warden received word that the Supreme Court had turned down McDuff's final request for a

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