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In the FW-Star Telegram:

It's the stuff of modern teen-age slasher movies, but there was nothing fictitious about the horror inflicted across Tarrant County 32 years by Kenneth Allen McDuff.

The serial killer, whose brutal legacy began 41 years ago in Tarrant County, was executed on this date in 1998.

But he didn't die for the "Broomstick Murders," the 1966 execution-style slayings near Burleson. Two teenage boys were shot point-blank and a girl who was with them was raped; then she was strangled with a broomstick.

His death sentence was commuted in 1972 when the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty, and then he was paroled in1989 at the height of prison overcrowding in Texas.

But he went on to rape and kill again.

Returning McDuff to society alarmed a lot of people, including Bob Schieffer, left, chief Washington correspondent for CBS News, who covered the Broomstick Murders as a cop beat reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

"I was shocked when I heard about it; just absolutely stunned," Schieffer said in a recent interview. "I thought, 'How could they ever let this guy out on the streets?'" The investigation would reveal that on a sweltering Saturday night in August 1966, 20-year-old McDuff and accomplice Roy Green, 18, both of Marlin, drove up to Tarrant County , intent on finding a girl to abduct and rape.

Their victims were three unsuspecting teenagers who were parked at a ball field north of Burleson: cousins Robert Brand, 17, top right, and Marcus Dunnam, 16 ; middle right, and and their 16-year-old friend, Edna Louise Sullivan, below right.

The bodies of the two boys were found Sunday morning in a pasture off of McAlister Road north of Burleson.

Schieffer recalled getting a call from Sheriff Lon Evans, who told him, "You better get down here. We got something."

Schieffer was 29 in 1966, but he was already a veteran of the cop beat who covered the assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas. He had also just returned from Vietnam where he was on assignment for the Star-Telegram.

"You see a lot of stuff on the cop beat," he said, "but this was one of those crimes you never forget. It was just breathtaking -- just the brutality of it."

The boys had been shot multiple times in the head and stuffed into the trunk of their car.

Sullivan's body was found later after an extensive search. Evans and his investigators tracked McDuff and Green to Franklin, and McDuff was arrested after a brief chase.

And then, in a situation unheard of in modern journalism, Schieffer sat in on the interrogation of Green, and rode with the prisoner back to Tarrant County in the sheriff's squad car.

Green, Schieffer recalled, gave an anguished and tearful confession.

"McDuff was the lead dog," he said, "and this kid was afraid to go along with it. But he did go along with it."

History records that McDuff resumed killing and raping soon after he was paroled. No one knows the exact body count, but some law enforcement officials have estimated at least a dozen.

Investigators eventually linked him to the 1991 murder of Colleen Reed, a 28-year-old Austin accountant, and the slaying in 1992 of Melissa Northrup, a 22-year-old Waco mother of two.

His 1998 execution was followed by burial at the Capt. Joe Byrd Cemetery in Huntsville, commonly known as "Peckerwood Hill." McDuff is shown in a photo at left in prison shortly before his execution.

"I think he'll go down in the annals of Texas crime as one of the worst of the worst," Schieffer said. "Even in the Tarrant County Jail, the other prisoners saw him as something different."

-- Bill Miller
 
Posts: 7860 | Location: Georgetown, Texas | Registered: January 25, 2001Reply With QuoteReport This Post
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