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Corruption in Texas’ legal system helped a death row inmate convicted of killing three teens be released from prison, only to kill again and again.
Kenneth McDuff escalated to serial killer-status after his 1989 release from prison, where he once served as a death row inmate until a landmark Supreme Court case had his sentence commuted to life and made parole possible. But the 1991 and 1992 vanishings of two Texas women would put the killer back on the map, and hopefully, back behind bars, as featured in Season 2, Episode 8 of Prosecuting Evil with Kelly Siegler.
“The way he killed people, the way he tortured them, the pleasure he took in it is on a whole different level,” said the veteran Texas prosecutor.
The 1992 disappearance of Melissa Northrup
McDuff’s post-release crimes didn’t come to light until March 1, 1992, when Melissa Northrup disappeared while working the night shift at the Quik-Pak convenience store in Waco, Texas. Her husband feared for the pregnant mother-of-two when she failed to answer the phone, prompting him to visit the store — only to learn she wasn’t there.
McLennan County Sheriff’s Office officials arrived in the early morning hours. Someone had taken money from the register, which initially led them to believe Northrup was kidnapped as part of a robbery, until a troubling find on March 3, not far from the store, according to true crime reporter Robert Riggs.
“Investigators found a tan, two-door Thunderbird abandoned on the parking lot of a motel located just a few hundred feet from the convenience store where Melissa Northrup has disappeared,” Riggs told Prosecuting Evil. “The police that runs the registration finds that it’s registered to Kenneth Allen McDuff.”
Who was Kenneth Allen McDuff?
Kenneth McDuff was a convicted killer and former death row inmate who was “surprisingly” paroled two and a half years before Northrup’s disappearance, according to Siegler. He and an accomplice, Roy Dale Green, had been convicted of the 1966 slayings of teenage girl Edna Sullivan and teen cousins Robert Brand and Mark Dunnam.
The youngsters had been hanging around their car at a local high school’s baseball field when McDuff and Green — armed with a revolver and a broken broomstick handle, respectively — approached the vehicle.
“McDuff forced the two boys into the trunk of his car,” said Riggs. “He then took Edna Sullivan in Robert Brand’s car and drove it down these country roads with Roy Dale Green following in McDuff’s car.”
They parked in a desolate area, McDuff shot both boys in the trunk, telling his accomplice they could have too easily identified them.
McDuff then dragged Sullivan from the car and sexually assaulted the victim before using the broomstick to crush her larynx and kill her. The act would help McDuff earn the moniker “The Broomstick Killer,” according to Riggs.
Green, stricken with guilt, later went to authorities and confessed to the crimes, which ultimately led to McDuff’s arrest. Green turned state’s witness and pleaded guilty to Sullivan’s murder in exchange for a 25-year sentence.
McDuff was found guilty of all three teens’ murders and sentenced to death. However, the landmark 1972 supreme court case Furman v. Georgia (which ruled that execution violated constitutional rights for being cruel and unusual) had McDuff commuted to life in prison. But, due to overcrowding, he was paroled after serving 23 years.
“Everyone in the criminal justice system was wondering, ‘How can this happen?’” Siegler said.
Flash forward to March 8, 1992, one week after Melissa Northrup’s disappearance, and the missing mother’s car was found abandoned near a gravel pit south of Dallas, as described by Deputy U.S. Marshal Parnell McNamara.
“No fingerprints were found in Melissa’s car, but the seat was pushed all the way back,” said McNamara, adding that expanding their search got them no closer to finding Northrup.
Initially, there was not enough evidence to merit a warrant on McDuff until federal prosecutor Bill Johnston stepped in. He asked around, and after learning that McDuff had sold a tab of L.S.D. to another, it was enough to issue a federal warrant and pursue a nationwide manhunt.
Investigators look back at the 1991 abduction of Colleen Reed
With the frantic search for McDuff underway, investigators discovered another woman’s disappearance with “eerily similar” circumstances to Northrup’s, according to Siegler. Colleen Reed, 28, was brazenly abducted on December 29, 1991 — about two months before Northrup’s disappearance — while washing her car at an Austin carwash. Witnesses reported seeing two men, one of whom forced the woman into a tan, two-door Thunderbird before driving off in the broad-daylight abduction.
“I was surprised, and obviously worried,” Reed’s then-boyfriend, Oliver Guerra, told Prosecuting Evil. “Colleen Reed was a gift from God; she was a blessing to me … We talked about getting married and having children and having a life together. She was very beautiful, inside and out.”
Investigators hoped to glean more about McDuff’s whereabouts, looking to McDuff’s friend and paroled ex-con Hank Worley for help. Worley spoke with authorities at the Bell County Sheriff’s Office and appeared “extremely nervous, trying not to make eye contact,” said Deputy Sheriff Tim Steglich.
Worley offered no new information about Reed and Northrup’s disappearances until he called officials and asked to meet at the seedy motel where he lived. He confessed to being with McDuff when taking Reed from the Austin carwash.
“Tim Steglich got Worley to tell what was probably 90 percent of the truth, and it was the worst thing I’d ever heard,” Johnston told Prosecuting Evil. “And it remains the worst thing I’ve ever heard.”
The statements of ex-con Hank Worley
One month after Northrup’s disappearance, and several months after Reed’s, Worley confessed that he and McDuff went to Austin to “get bent” (as in abusing drugs) before spotting Reed at the carwash, according to Steglich. Worley said McDuff pulled his car beside her before getting out, grabbing her throat, and forcing her into the backseat of the Thunderbird — which matched witnesses’ later statements.
Worley admitted to driving aimlessly for a couple of hours while McDuff tortured Reed in the backseat, binding her wrists with shoelaces and repeatedly burning her with cigarettes. They then drove the woman to a Bell County field, where the torture continued.
“McDuff drug her out of the car and reared back and hit her so hard in the face that Worley described it like a tree limb breaking,” McNamara told Prosecuting Evil. “Then he drags her over and threw her in the trunk.”
McDuff then dropped Worley off at his residence before disappearing with Reed.
The Central Texas Task Force, consisting of Bell and McLennan County officials, the A.T.F., and the U.S. Marshals Service, used every resource available to track down McDuff. Meanwhile, on April 26, 1992 — nearly two months after Northrup vanished from a Waco convenience store — a fisherman found Northrup’s body about 100 miles north of where she disappeared.
Her remains were found in a water-filled gravel pit, just a quarter mile from where her car had been abandoned.
Authorities arrest Kenneth McDuff in Missouri
Not long after the discovery of Northrup’s body, McDuff’s case was featured in an episode of the popular TV series America’s Most Wanted. The broadcast reached viewers in Kansas City, Missouri — more than 600 miles north of Waco — where employees in the sanitation industry recognized a new co-worker, they believed to be McDuff.
Prior to the airing of the episode, the individual believed to be McDuff had been detained in Missouri for soliciting sex. Law enforcement officials were able to match his fingerprints to those of McDuff, confirming his identity.
Following this identification, McDuff was charged with the capital murders of Melissa Northrup and Colleen Reed and was extradited to Texas. However, prosecutors faced a significant challenge: Reed’s body had still not been found.
Prosecutors decided to try McDuff first for Northrup’s homicide, and the trial was granted a change of venue. It began February 2, 1993, in Houston, where defense attorney Walter Reeves argued that prosecutors relied too much on McDuff’s past when trying to pin him to the post-release murder of Northrup.
They also relied on the circumstances revolving around Colleen Reed’s disappearance, even though that wasn’t the case being tried.
“It’s only in limited situations they’re allowed to go into facts of another case, and this was one of them,” Reeves explained on Prosecuting Evil. “It was basically two murder cases wrapped into one.”
Hank Worley testified as a key witness, claiming he was too afraid of McDuff to stop him from torturing Colleen Reed in the backseat of the Thunderbird. McDuff, against the advice of his attorneys, took the stand and denied having a role in either murder, claiming to be nowhere near Waco when Northrup vanished from her job.
On February 12, 1993, after also hearing about the 1966 triple-murder for which McDuff was previously convicted, a jury found McDuff guilty of murdering Melissa Northrup. He was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
“Kenneth Allen McDuff is the only person that’s been on death row twice in Texas,” said Chief Investigator John Moriarty of the Texas Department of Corrections.
One year later, in February 1994, McDuff was found guilty of murdering Colleen Reed, despite the investigation yielding no body. Hank Worley, for his role in the crime, was sentenced to 40 years in prison.
Corruption in Texas prison system exposed
The convictions of Kenneth McDuff sparked discussions over why a death row inmate was free to leave in 1989, despite his role in the killing of three innocent teens. Due to overcrowding, higher-ups in the prison system agreed to release 150 inmates daily, according to reporter Riggs.
“It started off with the hot-check writers and property crimes, but before long, they were at the bottom of the barrel,” he said.
James Granberry was the parole board chairman at the time, and his administration was accused of accepting payments from prisoners and their families to see convicted criminals — including McDuff — be released. In McDuff’s case, his mother told reporters the family paid about $2,200 in 1988 (nearly $6,000 today) to see her son be free.
“Texas is supposed to be this tough place with all these death penalties, well heck. They were letting everybody out,” prosecutor Johnston told Prosecuting Evil. “It was a travesty, and it was an embarrassment, and it was wrong, and people were dying in the streets because of it.”
Investigators feared never finding Colleen Reed’s body, and as McDuff’s execution date inched closer, they pressed him hard. In his final days — seven years after Reed’s disappearance — he agreed to take investigators to her body in exchange for being first in line to see a dentist.
On October 6, 1998, investigators found Reed’s remains in a shallow grave of rural Falls County.
McDuff’s crimes led to a massive change in Texas’s legal system, exposing the parole scams, and led to the state’s largest expenditure for prison construction, according to Johnston.
“There was the first overhaul of the criminal justice code in over a quarter of a century,” Riggs said. “Now we have what’s called a series of the McDuff laws. He became the poster boy for change in the criminal justice system.”
Kenneth McDuff was executed on November 17, 1998. He remains a suspect in more than a dozen unsolved homicides, according to the Dallas Observer.
Learn more by watching Prosecuting Evil with Kelly Siegler, airing Saturdays at 8/7c on Oxygen.
