Broomstick Killer Kenneth McDuff: Parole, Spree, and Execution

Kenneth Allen McDuff, known as the Broomstick Killer, was a Texas serial murderer who killed three teenagers in 1966, had his death sentence commuted after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down existing capital statutes, and was then paroled three separate times by a Texas system buckling under overcrowding and corruption. After his third release in 1991, he abducted and murdered young women across Central Texas before a tip to America’s Most Wanted led to his capture. He was executed by lethal injection on November 17, 1998.

The 1966 Murders in Everman

In 1966, McDuff and an accomplice kidnapped three teenagers in Everman, Texas: 17-year-old Robert Brand, his 16-year-old girlfriend Edna Louise Sullivan, and Brand’s 15-year-old cousin Mark Dunnam. McDuff shot both boys. He then strangled Sullivan using a broomstick, the method that gave him his nickname.¹

A jury sentenced him to death. He would have been executed if not for the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, which effectively struck down every death penalty statute in the country and spared hundreds of inmates on death row.² McDuff’s sentence was commuted to life. He spent seventeen years in prison before the parole system let him out.

How Texas Paroled Him Three Times

By the late 1980s, Texas prisons were dangerously overcrowded. A 1972 federal court ruling had required the state to either build more facilities or reduce its inmate population, and successive governors had largely avoided the cost of construction. In 1987, Governor Bill Clements set a policy requiring the parole board to release roughly 750 inmates per week.³

When the state ran short of eligible inmates to meet the quota, the parole board loosened its standards and began releasing about eight of every ten parole-eligible inmates regardless of the severity of their crimes. The board also worked from the assumption that long prison terms “burned out” the violent tendencies of murderers. Twenty former death row inmates were released during this stretch. McDuff was one of them.³

Pressure alone did not account for his release. His family paid cash bribes to a parole commissioner.¹ His first parole came in 1989. Investigators later suspected him in the killing of 29-year-old Sarafia Parker, found dead in Temple, but he was never charged. He was returned to prison after threatening a teenager and then paroled a second time in 1990. He violated parole again and was still released a third time in 1991.

The 1991–1992 Killing Spree

After his third release, young women began disappearing across Central Texas. The known and suspected victims include:

Brenda Thompson, abducted in Waco in 1991; her remains were recovered years later.
Regenia DeAnne Moore, 21, last seen at a Waco motel in the fall of 1991.
Cynthia Gonzalez, 23, found dead in an Arlington creek bed in September 1991.
Colleen Reed, 28, kidnapped from an Austin car wash on December 29, 1991.
Valencia Joshua, who disappeared in February 1992; her body was found at a golf course.
Melissa Northrup, 22 and pregnant, a convenience store clerk abducted during her late shift in Waco on March 1, 1992. A fisherman found her body about a month later.¹

McDuff is suspected in more than a dozen additional unsolved homicides.⁴

Colleen Reed was washing her new Mazda Miata near downtown Austin when McDuff grabbed her.⁵ His accomplice, Alva “Hank” Worley, later testified that he drove while McDuff attacked Reed in the back seat, striking her so hard it sounded like “a tree limb breaking.” McDuff grabbed her by the throat and tied her hands with shoelaces.¹ Her body was later recovered near a Brazos River bridge in Falls County.⁶ The Northrup abduction drew national attention and helped trigger a nationwide manhunt.

Capture in Kansas City

McDuff fled to Kansas City, Missouri, where he worked as a garbage collector under the alias “Richard Fowler.” He had been arrested there on unrelated charges about two weeks earlier and released before anyone connected him to Texas. On May 4, 1992, a co-worker recognized him from a broadcast of America’s Most Wanted and called authorities. U.S. marshals and Kansas City police officers converged on his garbage truck. He at first thought the stop was routine; when he realized what was happening, he tried to jump from the truck. Officers stopped him.⁷ When he was taken into custody, he was carrying the business card of a former parole board member who had helped secure his release.⁸

Two Trials, Two Death Sentences

McDuff was tried separately for the murders of Colleen Reed and Melissa Northrup. The Reed case was indicted in Travis County and moved to Guadalupe County on a change of venue. The indictment charged capital murder committed in the course of aggravated sexual assault and aggravated kidnapping. Hank Worley was the prosecution’s key witness. Forensic evidence included human blood found in McDuff’s car and five hairs matching Reed’s.⁹ McDuff testified for nearly two hours, rambling and appearing evasive and mocking toward jurors. His own daughter testified against him, telling the court she was “sick to be a part of this man.”¹

Juries convicted him in both cases and sentenced him to death for both. Combined with his 1966 sentence, that made him the only convicted killer in American history to receive death sentences from three separate juries.¹⁰ On appeal in the Reed case, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed the capital murder conviction and death sentence. The aggravated kidnapping count was affirmed, but the aggravated sexual assault count was reversed for insufficient corroboration of Worley’s testimony.⁹

Execution

McDuff was executed by lethal injection at the Walls Unit in Huntsville on November 17, 1998, and pronounced dead at 6:26 p.m. His last words: “I’m ready to be released. Release me.”¹¹

Brenda Solomon, Melissa Northrup’s mother, said afterward, “I think my daughter will be at rest.” McLennan County Sheriff P. McNamara was blunter: “Thank God he’s gone. This man is more evil than the devil himself.”¹

Corruption on the Parole Board

McDuff’s crimes opened an investigation into the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. An Austin grand jury was convened to look at whether McDuff and other violent inmates had bought their way out of state prisons.³

James Granberry, a former chairman of the parole board, had been a board member when he voted to parole McDuff. After leaving the board in May 1991, he set up as a private parole consultant, marketing his influence to help prisoners win release. In April 1994, he pleaded guilty to federal perjury for lying to a federal magistrate about the scope of his consulting work. Prosecutors said he had consulted on 22 cases but had testified under oath to only six or eight. He also admitted that while still on the board, he had helped the son of a Dallas car dealer win parole in exchange for reduced lease payments on two cars. In cooperation with prosecutors, he testified that sitting board member Frank Eickenburg had routinely provided him with confidential prisoner files; Eickenburg was indicted. Granberry received six months in a halfway house and no fine, a sentence victims’ advocates called “absolutely appalling.”⁸

The McDuff Rules

The political fallout forced Texas to rewrite how it handled parole and incarceration. The changes are sometimes called the “McDuff Rules.”¹² The Legislature required inmates convicted of capital murder to serve a minimum of 35 years before becoming eligible for parole. It also authorized construction of drug and alcohol rehabilitation centers to house 12,000 inmates by 1995, freeing prison beds for violent offenders so the state would not have to release dangerous people simply to manage overcrowding.³ The governor also weighed legislation to reestablish the Board of Pardons and Paroles as an independent agency, outside the budgetary control of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Former parole employees were barred from acting as consultants for two years after leaving the board, a restriction later extended to ten years.¹³ The case also drove one of the largest prison construction waves in Texas history.

1
WFAA. Kenneth McDuff: How Texas Freed a Killer Three Times
2
Death Penalty Information Center. Who Was William Henry Furman
3
Texas Monthly. A System Gone Bad
4
Oxygen. Serial Killer Kenneth McDuff Victims: What to Know
5
UPI. Colleen Reed Case Details
6
Texas Monthly. The End
7
UPI. Texas Fugitive Arrested While Working as Garbage Collector
8
Prison Legal News. Former TX Parole Board Chairman Sentenced
9
Findlaw. McDuff v. State, Court of Appeals of Texas
10
Gary M. Lavergne. The Bad Boy From Rosebud
11
Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Kenneth Allen McDuff Last Statement
12
Texas A&M University Press. Bad Boy from Rosebud
13
Prison Legal News. Texas Parole System Sick From Top to Bottom