Kenneth McDuff was sentenced to death for brutally murdering three teens in 1966. But then, he was paroled on a technicality — leaving him free to kill again.
Texas Department of Criminal JusticeSerial killer Kenneth McDuff.
Kenneth McDuff was set up for success. He was born into a wealthy family who supported him unconditionally and without question. But that didn’t stop him from developing a taste for violence that would eventually shake the state of Texas to its core.
In 1966, McDuff brutally murdered three teens in what would become known as the “Broomstick Murders.” But while he was quickly arrested and sentenced to death for these crimes, he was shockingly paroled about 20 years later after the laws around the death penalty changed.
For three years, he embarked on a new murder spree, raping and killing about a dozen women across Texas, most of them sex workers. And it wasn’t until a civilian recognized him on America’s Most Wanted in 1992 that he was finally brought to justice.
The Spoiled Early Life Of Kenneth McDuff
Kenneth McDuff was raised in the central Texas town of Rosebud by his father, J.A. McDuff, and mother, Addie McDuff.
J.A. McDuff ran a successful concrete business, ensuring his children never wanted for anything. Addie ran a laundromat and had a reputation around town for being tough and domineering. She was fiercely protective of her children, especially troubled young Kenneth McDuff, and was known to bring a pistol to school to defend him if he got in trouble with a teacher.
Kenneth performed poorly at school, and was later found to have an IQ of just 92. He also gained a reputation for being a bully, particularly toward kids who were weaker than him. For Kenneth, who would eventually grow to over six feet tall and 200 pounds, that was most of his peers.
When he was in the eighth grade, however, he finally lost a fight to a popular kid who was smaller than him. Humiliated, McDuff dropped out of school to work with his father.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram CollectionKenneth McDuff was sentenced to death a total of three times throughout his lifetime.
With more free time on his hands, McDuff turned to robbing homes around Rosebud. It was around this time, in 1964, that McDuff reportedly committed his first attempted murder when he broke into a woman’s home, raped her, slit her throat, and abandoned her in a ditch. Miraculously, this woman would survive — and went on to have McDuff’s baby.
A court eventually convicted McDuff of a series of burglaries, and in 1965, he was sentenced to 12 four-year prison terms to be served concurrently.
He made parole less than a year into his sentence.
The Broomstick Killer Is Born
Back on the streets, Kenneth McDuff soon befriended Roy Dale Green, an 18-year-old who worked for McDuff’s father — and who was enthralled by McDuff’s tales of violent sex.
According to Green, McDuff regularly boasted that he had raped and strangled several women.
“Killing a woman’s like killing a chicken,” McDuff reportedly told Green, according to a 1992 Texas Monthly article. “They both squawk.” Green initially doubted that McDuff was telling the truth. But on Aug. 6, 1966, he would get a front row seat into McDuff’s disturbing crimes.
That night, the duo cruised around the town of Everman, Texas, looking for a girl. They eventually spotted 16-year-old Edna Sullivan with her boyfriend, 17-year-old Robert Brand, and Brand’s 15-year-old cousin, Mark Dunman. They were hanging out together in an old Ford near a baseball field.
Fort Worth Star-Telegram CollectionRoy Dale Green on the stand during Kenneth McDuff’s trial.
McDuff approached them, drew a gun on the terrified teens, and forced all three to get in the trunk of the Ford.
“They got a good look at my face,” he reportedly told Green. “I’ll have to kill them.”
McDuff then drove the Ford to an empty field while Green followed behind in McDuff’s car. There, McDuff shot Brand and Dunman in the face, brutally killing them both as they begged for mercy.
Afterward, McDuff repeatedly raped Sullivan and ordered Green to do the same. When McDuff had finished with Sullivan, he forced the teenage girl to kneel on the ground — then strangled her to death with a broomstick.
Traumatized by the whole ordeal, Green confessed everything to the police soon after, leading to McDuff’s swift arrest. The people of central Texas were horrified by the brutal nature of McDuff’s crimes. But while the Broomstick Killer was initially sentenced to die via electric chair, his reign of terror was far from over.
A Paroled Serial Killer Returns To Killing
With the 1972 Supreme Court Case Furman v. Georgia, certain uses of the death penalty were declared cruel and unusual punishment and therefore unconstitutional. As a result, capital convictions were overturned across the country in the wake of the ruling — including that of Kenneth McDuff. His sentence was commuted to a life sentence.
McDuff frequently applied for parole throughout his time in prison. And in 1989, it finally paid off. By then, the Texas prison system was working to prevent overcrowding by paroling some 750 inmates a week, sometimes skipping interviews with parole applicants as a way to move through the process more efficiently. As a result, Kenneth McDuff was set free about 20 years after he was originally sentenced to death.
It didn’t take long for McDuff to start killing again.
Public DomainA 1990 mugshot of Kenneth McDuff.
On Oct. 14, 1989, just three days after McDuff’s release, a 29-year-old sex worker named Sarafia Parker was found dead in Temple, Texas. She had been beaten and strangled. It was the first in a string of disturbing rapes and murders that would take place across Texas over the next three years, as nearly a dozen women vanished and turned up in shallow graves.
Police nearly caught McDuff on Oct. 10, 1991. That day, he kidnapped a sex worker named Brenda Thompson in Waco, Texas but was stopped at a roadblock. Thompson started screaming and kicking so hard that she cracked McDuff’s windshield. McDuff managed to evade the authorities by speeding away in his car, turning off his lights, and going the wrong way down one-way streets.
Police discovered Thompson’s remains seven years later.
McDuff’s final known victim was Melissa Northrup, a 22-year-old convenience store employee whom the serial killer abducted from her Waco workplace in March 1992. Her brutalized body was found by a fisherman in a gravel pit weeks later, 90 miles away. She was pregnant with her third child at the time of her death.
Family PhotoMelissa Northrup, the mother of three who was murdered by McDuff.
But despite McDuff’s violent history, police initially failed to connect him to these crimes. In the end, they issued a warrant for his arrest on drug and firearms charges in 1992.
But before the police could arrest him on these charges, he fled.
The hunt was on.
Kenneth McDuff Finally Faces The Heavy Hand Of Justice
Nick DiFonzo / Wikimedia CommonsThe Huntsville Unit, where Kenneth McDuff was executed.
Texas police launched a fervent manhunt for Kenneth McDuff, telling the public he was wanted for questioning in a series of murders that had taken place across Texas in recent years. Meanwhile, McDuff was hundreds of miles away, living in Kansas City, Missouri under the false name Richard Fowler and working for a waste management company.
On May 1, 1992, someone finally recognized “Fowler” after seeing his photo on an episode of America’s Most Wanted. Three days later, they phoned the police.
The Kansas City police discovered they had previously arrested a Richard Fowler for soliciting sex workers. They contacted police departments in Texas and compared Fowler’s fingerprints with those of Kenneth McDuff. They were a match.
On May 4, 1992, the police finally apprehended McDuff on his route to the dump and arrested him.
“This time, God willing, the system will do the right thing,” journalist Gary Cartwright wrote in 1992. “If there has ever been a good argument for the death penalty, it’s Kenneth McDuff.”
On Feb. 18, 1993, a jury sentenced McDuff to death for the murder of Melissa Northrup. He received a second death sentence in 1994 for the murder of a 28-year-old woman named Colleen Reed in 1991.
Finally, on Nov. 17, 1998, some 30 years after he was first sentenced to death, Kenneth McDuff received an injection that ended his life.
Find A GraveThe grave of Kenneth McDuff at Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery.
His final words? “I’m ready to be released. Release me.”
In response to his death, Brenda Solomon, mother of Melissa Northrup, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “I feel wonderful. I know where he was released to.”
The McDuff family did not claim his body, so prison officials buried his remains in the Captain Joe Byrd Cemetery. There, his headstone is inconspicuous among the thousands of others in the graveyard, reading only the date of his execution and his death row number.
After reading about Kenneth McDuff, the Broomstick Killer, dive into the chilling stories of some of history’s worst serial killers. Then, read about the haunting mystery of the Texas Killing Fields.
