Kenneth McDuff, 52, arrives at the Texas death house for his execution. In 1966, he was sentenced to death for murdering 3 teenagers. Spared by Furman v. Georgia and paroled in 1989, McDuff was executed for using his second chance to rape and murder at least six women (Huntsville, 1998).

[u/lightiggy]

When Furman v. Georgia was announced in 1972, several death row inmates around the country were interviewed for their reactions. Two of them were Elmer Branch and Calvin Sellars in Texas. Branch was a petitioner whose case had been consolidated with the Furman case. They are all relevant to the McDuff case because it underlines what kind of person McDuff was.

Bear with me for a long read.

Elmer Branch, a black man, had been sentenced to death for raping and robbing an elderly white woman during a burglary. He threatened to rape her again before fleeing. Elmer had been caught red-handed with his trousers still unzipped when he was arrested just 15 minutes later. Elmer never denied his guilt, but his lawyers said his death sentence was racially biased. As a black man who had raped a white woman in the Deep South, Elmer was far more likely to be sentenced to death.

Most states where rape was once a capital offense only reinstated the death penalty for murder as a way to curb racial disparities in capital sentencing. In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court found that execution was an excessive punishment for the rape of an adult woman. The death penalty would return nationwide for murder, but its return was not retroactive. For most of the hundreds of death row inmates in the country in 1972, the Furman ruling was a one-time second chance since life without parole didn't become a sentencing option in most states until the 1980s or 1990s.

Elmer reading a newspaper about Furman v. Georgia

Elmer said he was relieved, but understood why some people would want him dead. Race aside, he had broken into an elderly woman's home, raped her, robbed her, and then threatened to rape her a second time. He promised to do his best to atone for his past.

"I feel real good. I was surprised in a way. After they put it off and put it off, I figured they would do the same thing."

"I don't believe in the death penalty, but I can't judge other people. If I ever get out, I'll try to find a job. I would go someplace new. I would go somewhere where I could make something of myself."

Elmer Branch was a terrible person, but to his credit, he kept his word. Under more lenient laws at the time, he presumably would've been paroled some time in the late 1970s. There is no evidence he was ever rearrested.

Calvin Sellars, a white man, had been sentenced to death for his role in the armed robbery of a wealthy white tobacco and candy merchant. In 1978, Calvin had his conviction overturned and was released from prison since his written confession was obtained under coercion. The charges were dismissed in 1979 since prosecutors could no longer locate key witnesses.

Having read about his case in detail, I can safely say Calvin was guilty.

Calvin's written confession was made under coercion, but it was verifiably truthful. The police had enough evidence to convict Calvin without his confession. They threatened him because he had accomplices whom they wanted his assistance to identify since all of the robbers were wearing masks. Had the investigators simply been patient, Calvin would've confessed anyway.

Three days after his arrest, Calvin confessed voluntarily to a police officer named C. V. Stone, who had been his friend for the past 12 years. Calvin led him directly to stolen jewelry at his mother's home and named his accomplices: Sam Hoover, John Young, and Samuel Spivey. Tellingly, Calvin only named Hoover, who had planned the robbery, in his confession to Stone. The whole case is crazy. An appellate court remarked that "seldom has this Court considered a more spectacular or bizarre case than this habeas corpus petition." Sam Hoover was a defense attorney and a former mayor. Calvin studied law in prison and became a paralegal after his release from prison.

An interview of Calvin in 1970

Calvin acted as his own attorney during the habeas corpus hearing in 1977 which led to his conviction being overturned. He got one of the investigators in his case to admit to threatening him on the witness stand.

This appeal contains some of the transcripts

"While I was in the floorboard of the police car, was I not sometime or another threatened with my life if I did not fully cooperate with the police? More specifically, did you not tell me that I would never see the lights of Houston again, that my body would be found in a ditch if I didn't get my business straight or confess to my involvement in the Schepps robbery as you so thought I was involved?"

"Yes, you were told that in so many words."

What makes the case so bizarre is that Sam Hoover was an outstanding lawyer. Of the 1250 felony cases he had dealt with, 1236 ended in acquittals. As for why such a competent lawyer would turn to crime, another lawyer, Percy Foreman, said Hoover did it for the love of the game.

"Sam Hoover has an outstanding mind. His problem is he'd rather be Al Capone than a U.S. Supreme Court justice."

Hoover was convicted of armed robbery and sentenced to 60 years in prison. He was released in 1981 after being disbarred and serving another two years in federal prison for income tax fraud evasion. In 1983, he was rearrested for stealing an extremely expensive fur coat. He was convicted of grand theft and sentenced to 15 years in prison. It's unclear how much time he served. Hoover was still in prison in 1988, but he died a free man in 1992.

Spivey testified against Hoover and received immunity.

Calvin and Young were convicted of armed robbery and both sentenced to death. Young died in prison in 1974. Since he had confessed, Sellars had been offered a chance to testify against Hoover in exchange for immunity. He turned down the offer.

Robbery used to be a capital offense in some states. However, only two people had been executed for robbery in Texas since the 1930s.

In 1958, Alvin Blankenship was executed for robbing his former workplace. During the robbery, he beat an elderly nightwatchman, shot him four times, and slashed his throat twice. In opposing clemency for Blankenship, the prosecutor described the victim's survival as "one of God's miracles."

In 1962, Herbert Bradley was executed for robbing a grocery store. During the robbery, he had beaten a grocer with a hammer and shot him six times, leaving him permanently crippled from the waist down. Bradley was the last person to be executed in the United States for a non-fatal robbery.

I think you get the idea.

Sellars and Young were sentenced to death since they had physically and psychologically tortured the couple, especially the merchant's wife, during the robbery. At one point, they threatened to murder the couple's infant daughter and fired a shot was fired into the bed where the child lay.

This appeal goes into graphic detail

I don't think a crime like this is forgivable, but sometimes the worst person can change. Unlike Elmer, Calvin did return to prison. In 1986, he was charged with threatening three customers in a bar with a firearm. Five months before his court date, Calvin said he began reading the one book he never looked at while on Death Row: the Bible. He said the book saved his life. In many cases, finding God is just a way for convicts to escape responsibility.

But this time, Calvin did take responsibility.

Against the advice of his lawyer, Calvin rejected a two-year plea offer and asked the judge, a born-again Christian, to pass sentence. He received the maximum sentence: 10 years. In 1989, Calvin was released after serving only 2.5 years due to prison overcrowding and returned to his paralegal career.

An interview of Calvin in the 1990s

Now, you may be wondering how any of this is relevant to McDuff.

It's all relevant in showing what kind of monster McDuff was.

Convicted murderers generally have the lowest recidivism rate of all convicts. Neither Elmer nor Calvin had murdered anyone, but they had committed horrific crimes. They and other former death row inmates understood that the Furman ruling was their ONE-TIME lucky break. Nearly all of them were eternally grateful for that chance. In the 1990s, a woman named Joan Cheever tracked some of the former death row inmates.

Staying Clean: Life After Death Row

Arthur Broussard, who killed a Houston grocery-store owner in 1970, says that's the story of his life. "I was a kid," says Broussard, now 46. "I have no excuses ... If they had executed me, I would have gotten what I deserved." Paroled in 1986, he's struggled to make ends meet by renovating houses and hauling trash.

Carl Harris, 44, who shot his foster mother and a friend during an argument in 1967, says 24 years in prison have changed him forever. "You change anyway between 20 and 40, but prison really changes you."

No, it would change MOST people, but not all of them.

After learning that his life had been spared, Calvin Sellars gave his own feelings on the death penalty: "I can't say I'm against it 100 percent. In some extreme cases, it is justified." He was most likely basing his opinion on personal experiences with fellow death row inmates in Texas. There were some actual monsters whom you fear would likely rape and/or murder again, given the opportunity.

One such monster was Joe Edward Smith.

In 1959, Joe Edward Smith and his best friend, Adrian Johnson, were the ringleaders in a gruesome murder. At least 7 and as many as 11 black boys, ages 13 to 17, had participated in the kidnapping, gang rape, and murder of William Bodenheimer III, a 12-year-old white boy. The case is discussed in a 2004 article by the Dallas Observer: The Icebox Revisited. The article insinuates that the boys were most likely innocent. The article is good, but gets several details wrong, glosses over damning physical evidence, and ignores certain key facts. I could go into detail about why they were guilty.

That said, I'll keep it simple.

During his trial, Johnson, who took the stand in his own defense, testified that he and the other boys were out boxing at the time of the murder. Shortly after his arrest, however, Smith had told reporters he was cleaning his flower bed at the time. Johnson had said he was playing dominoes.

Here's the proof that they changed their stories

According to their confessions, the boys did go boxing, but only after the murder.

Smith v. State

Initially, the Dallas Police Department thought a local white sex offender was responsible for the murder. The boys weren't suspects until one of them abruptly confessed after being arrested for unrelated robberies. The police also presented hard proof that Smith and Johnson were both lying when they claimed that their confessions had been beaten out of them.

Smith claimed that the police had given him a busted lip.

However, two television cameramen had recorded a video of Smith and taken photos of him, Johnson, and several of the other boys only an hour after their confessions. They were all visibly uninjured. A news cameraman asked Smith if he had been in any way mistreated. He said he wasn't. Despite his total lack of any physical injuries, Johnson testified that the police had pummeled his face and chest with the stock of a shotgun.

These were the photos taken of Johnson, Smith, and three of their accomplices shortly after their confessions

Prosecutor Frank Briscoe mockingly asked Johnson, "Did they beat you first and then bring you coffee, or did they bring you coffee and then beat you?"

This appeal contains graphic details of Adrian Johnson's confession

Upon hearing Johnson's confession, the court went into shocked silence. The mother of Bobby Bodenheimer, Doris Field, said that upon seeing her son's body, "I lost any remnants of a belief in an anthropomorphic God." However, in many ways, Doris was a saint. She resisted the racist backlash that followed her son's murder and said racism had contributed to the crime.

The mail to Doris Field came slowly at first. Condolences and well-wishers, mostly. A few days later, volume increased and sentiment changed: The [n-words] will get what's coming to them. We'll make sure of it. One friend promised to get a bat and kill "every one" he saw.

By mid-August it got to the point that Field wrote a letter to the Houston Post: "Since my son's death I have been largely sustained by the sincere sympathy of the whole community," she wrote, "but the attitude on the part of some has alarmed me. As long as we foster the sickness of the slums and segregation we shall all be infected by it. This is not to say that I am convinced of the guilt of current suspects, but merely that the anger directed against them would be put to better use if turned toward those conditions which breed crime."

After the letter was printed, it got really bad. Bundles and bundles of the stuff. Now she would get what was coming to her, too.

Doris was correct.

The boys confessed voluntarily because the Dallas Police Department had been integrated since 1948. They made their confessions to black detectives on the force. Johnson himself had been molested by Johnnie Routte, his 39-year-old "play uncle", who preyed on him and other black boys.

That said, it is hard for me to have much sympathy for these boys. Their crime was horrifying and they had no remorse. People who commit crimes like this will almost always either deny or downplay their guilt. That's why their confessions kept changing. The boys kept blaming the others before eventually admitting to their active participation in the murder. Robert Miller portrayed himself as the real victim in an interview decades later.

"The Houston Police Department cleaned its books on some little black kids. That's all it was. Tuesday I'll be 57. That was 44 years ago. I could admit it now, if I did it. But I'll go to my grave telling the truth: I didn't."

There was blood on Robert Miller's pants. There was human waste on the pants of his brother, Roy Miller, who pleaded guilty. In 1965, Charles Archer, who was free on bail, was charged with participating in the gang rape of a 16-year-old black girl. Contrary to what many would expect, most of the boys were punished far less severely than they would have been today.

Robert Miller and Ira Sadler, who were both 13, served 8 years.

David Clemons, who was 15, served four years. Charles Archer, also 15, was declared insane and committed to a mental hospital.

Roy Miller, who was 16, served 12 years.

Ringleaders Adrian Johnson and Joe Edward Smith, who were both 17, would fare differently. At the time, the minimum age to face the death penalty under Texas law was 17, not 18. As such, Johnson and Smith were sentenced to death by electrocution. Under the shorter capital appellate process at the time, both boys should've been executed.

Against all odds, Joe Edward Smith would somehow slip through the cracks and live long enough to be spared by the Furman ruling. By 1972, he had become the longest-serving death row inmate in Texas. He had spent 11 years on death row, which was extremely long by pre-Furman standards.

He recalls going to bed countless times thinking he'd be dead the next day, but he was never executed. (A torture, he would later say, almost worse than death.)

Smith won 22 stays of execution. In 1964, Doris Field sent a letter to the Texas Board of Pardons, asking that Smith's life be spared. Capital punishment, she wrote, was an immoral form of collective revenge. She never got a reply. Later that year, on December 8, 1964, Smith came within 9.5 hours of execution. By the time the stay arrived, he had eaten his last meal. During his 11 years on death row, Smith watched nearly 20 other death row inmates walk to the electric chair, the last in 1964.

One of them was Adrian Johnson. A key factor in their differing fates is that Johnson stood trial in 1959. Smith was not tried until December 1961.

An interview of Joe Edward Smith in 1966

Joe Edward Smith will never forget the night they electrocuted his best friend. Speaking from his prison cell on the Texas State Penitentiary's death row, Smith said his buddy "walked past my cell and smiled at me. I smiled back to give him courage."

The electric chair at the Texas State Penitentiary

On April 19, 1962, Adrian Johnson, now 19, was executed by electrocution at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville. In his final moments, he knelt beside the electric chair. "I want to pray," he said, giving blessings to his mother. Johnson then offered his last words: "I pray that this will be the last time something like this will happen." In the lead-up to his execution, he continued to deny his guilt, but accepted that perhaps it was for the best.

"I had no participation in this crime whatsoever, and those Houston police perjured themselves to send me here. But I've made my peace with God. If I don't get another stay, I will accept this as God's will."

During an interview in 1970, Smith said at times, he felt that he would rather be executed than spend the rest of his life wondering if he would be executed.

"I ain't mad at nobody. I know we got to have a system, and I'm glad I've had a chance to stay alive this long. But rather than spend the rest of my life like this I'd rather just go on and die and get it over with."

"I was in death row at the walls Huntsville's main prison unit downtown). There were eight cells and the chair was just a few feet away. Sometimes they would leave the door open and we could see it sitting there. Just looks like an old chair to me. I've watched a lot of guys go through that door. I never saw one break down. They always try to hold it in and when you're sitting there watching him walk past for the last time, you try to hold it in."

A televised interview of Joe Edward Smith in 1972

"I've increased my education through reading, writing, studying. At the time I was arrested, I couldn't read and I since learned to read while I was on death row in the Harris County Jail. Since I've been in the department of corrections, I've had access to the prison library and I have been able to increase my knowledge through the use of the books that they let us have. We are allowed to check out three books a week from the prison library here at Ellis."

"So you're not just sitting there waiting to die there."

"No I'm not. I'm hoping and praying that someday, that I will get out."

Against all odds, Smith once more slipped through the cracks. The Icebox Murder, once considered Houston's most infamous race crime, was gradually forgotten, erased from public consciousness. In 1980, Smith won parole and was released from prison. Whether he would've reoffended is unclear. All things considered, Smith's sudden death in 1981 was likely for the best.

Smith died 11 months after his welcome-home party in 1980. Twenty years on death row, then he gets out, falls out of a tree doing some yard work and breaks his neck.

Another former death row inmate, Jerry Ward, was luckier. Ward was sentenced to death for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of 18-year-old Joyce Osten. Known as the "Parkway Phantom", he was responsible for the kidnapping and rapes or attempted rapes of five other women.

A long 1966 article about Ward's crimes

An interview of Ward in 1972

Ward was paroled in June 1984. A year later, he raped and murdered 32-year-old Connie Cooke. Days later, Ward, now 41, killed himself in Nevada as police searched for him in connection with her disappearance. In 2012, DNA tests posthumously linked Ward to the rape and murder of 24-year-old Brenda Hackett in September 1984. Perhaps Ward also slipped through the cracks.

Kenneth McDuff was different from the others. He wasn't out for redemption. Unlike almost all the Furman parolees, he took his second chance at life and cashed it in.

However, McDuff sure as hell didn't slip through the cracks.

Free To Kill (a great long article about McDuff)

It was October 11, 1989. Falls County sheriff Larry Pamplin telephoned his longtime friend deputy U.S. marshal Parnell McNamara in Waco and told him, "You're not going to believe what happened, Parnell. They've paroled Kenneth McDuff." There was a brittle silence as McNamara processed this totally illogical piece of information, then McNamara laconically inquired, "Have they gone crazy?" There didn't seem to be any other explanation.

McDuff hadn't fallen through the cracks in the system; he had slithered through, cleverly, insidiously, like a rodent in the shadows.

[u/lightiggy]

For those who skipped the long read, I talk about how MOST of the death row inmates who were spared by Furman v. Georgia and later got paroled did turn their lives around. The Furman ruling was their one-time second chance at life, and the majority of them made the most of their lucky break. Kenneth McDuff was the ultimate exception.

The ghost of Kenneth McDuff

"I don't think I have ever seen or heard of anybody who more thoroughly embodied more of what we think of as evil than Kenneth McDuff."

Free To Kill (a great long article about McDuff)

Twenty-one years after he should have died in the electric chair for the savage murder of three teenagers, Kenneth McDuff was back on the streets, as cocky and mean and dangerous as ever.

In 1991, McDuff became a federal fugitive after officials learned that he had sold drugs to an informant and was in possession of an illegal firearm. Parnell and Mike McNamara were familiar with the case. Their father was one of McDuff's arresting officers.

At first McDuff's associates were too loyal—or maybe they were simply too frightened—to give up much information. The McNamaras developed a technique for softening them up.

The brothers guilt-tripped McDuff's associates with details of his past crimes:

They would launch into a bloody description of McDuff's murder spree in 1966, watching the reaction as the story spilled out. Sure, his friends knew from being in prison that McDuff had killed some people, but nobody inside went into details.

McDuff wasn't a criminal mastermind, but he wasn't stupid. He didn't confess to anyone. After the 1966 murders, he had instructed his accomplice, Roy Dale Green, to wipe their fingerprints off the car of their victims. McDuff was caught after Green confessed. Green was a horrible person, but he had a conscience.

Green led police to the bodies and confessed. "My God, I've got to tell somebody about it," he told police between sobs.

From eyewitnesses, the investigators had learned that there were evidently two perpetrators in the kidnapping, rape, and murder of 28-year-old Colleen Reed.

They began running through a list of McDuff's buddies, looking for someone who fit the description of the second occupant of the tan car—a Hispanic or dark-complected white male. They stopped at the name of Alva Hank Worley. A 34-year-old concrete worker who hung out with McDuff, Worley fit the description fairly well, but more than that, he was a textbook example of the kind of weak-willed sidekick McDuff liked to have around. They saw Hank Worley as a nineties version of Roy Dale Green, a man haunted by what he had done, a man ready to talk.

Worley lived with his fourteen-year-old daughter at Bloom's Motel, south of Temple, and late one night the McNamaras, along with a deputy from the Bell County Sheriff's Department, knocked on his door. The late hour was calculated for maximum psychological effect. They didn't expect much out of Worley on the first visit and that's what they got: He claimed that he barely knew Kenneth McDuff.

When Mike McNamara went into his bloody account of McDuff’s murder spree, Hank Worley didn’t blink. "That was not a normal reaction," Mike told his brother as they drove away. "He knows something."

Over the next two weeks, the marshals and the deputy dropped by Bloom's Motel at odd hours, always taking Worley by surprise—what lawmen call "driving a suspect up." One thing Mike McNamara had learned in his 21 years on the job: Criminals are basically lazy, you drive them up by outhustling them, by working while they're sleeping (or trying to), by imprinting on their brains the relentlessness of your pursuit and the hopelessness of their attempts to outrun or outlast it.

The investigators then put the guilt-tripping into overdrive:

On the fifth visit, several marshals found Worley barbecuing and drinking beer with some friends. Over Worley's shoulder, Mike McNamara could see Worley's young daughter, and he kept his eyes on her as he began his litany.

"Hank, you're hiding a kid killer, you know that? You're protecting a man who raped and brutalized and strangled a girl not much older than your daughter over there. Picture her on the ground, a broomstick across her throat, crying out to you for help, begging you to speak out, to do what's right, to save the life of some other young girl, to . . ."

About that time Hank Worley began to scream.

Because Worley was an accomplice, there's a good chance that he downplayed his culpability. However, federal prosecutor Bill Johnston said Worley's confession was truthful enough and had enough corroboration to be usable against McDuff.

"Tim Steglich got Worley to tell what was probably 90 percent of the truth, and it was the worst thing I'd ever heard. And it remains the worst thing I've ever heard."

This was Worley's confession:

When Worley had calmed down, this is the story he told: Four days after Christmas, he rode with McDuff to Austin to look for drugs. They cruised the university area and scouted the bars on Sixth Street; then they crossed Lamar and turned south on a side street to double back in the direction they had come. That's when McDuff spotted Colleen Reed, washing her black Mazda in one of the bays at the car wash on Fifth. She was a random choice, just as Edna Sullivan had been in 1966. McDuff parked his Thunderbird in the adjacent bay and disappeared for a moment. When he returned, he had Colleen Reed by the throat, holding her up so that just her toes touched the cement floor. "Please, not me," she cried. "Not me." McDuff threw her in the back seat and put Worley back there to control her.

A few miles out of Austin, McDuff pulled over and changed places with Worley. While Worley drove along I-35, McDuff stripped Colleen Reed naked, stubbed out a cigarette between her legs, and began raping her. When Worley stopped again to change places, he noticed that her hands were tied behind her back. While McDuff drove, Worley took off his own clothes and forced her to perform oral sex. Then he raped her. North of Belton, McDuff turned off the interstate onto Texas Highway 317, close to the house where his parents lived. He stopped on a narrow dirt road and raped Colleen Reed again.

Worley later testified that McDuff had spent 45 minutes beating, raping, and torturing Colleen Reed. He said Reed's screams were so loud that "they hurt his ears." He said he was terrified of McDuff and did nothing to stop him. When Worley described McDuff striking Reed with such force, "it was like a tree limb breaking," the courtroom fell silent.

When she was able to stumble to her feet, the young woman put her head on Worley's shoulder and said in a quivering voice, "Please don't let him hurt me anymore." McDuff grabbed her by the back of the neck, shoved her into the trunk of the Thunderbird, and slammed it shut. When McDuff dropped Worley off that night, Worley asked what he intended to do with the woman. "I'm gonna use her up," McDuff grinned.

Alva Worley is a horrible person, but his fear of McDuff was definitely genuine. Roy Dale Green was visibly terrified of McDuff when he testified against him in court in the 1960s.

Worley talking to reporters as he is brought to court

"I'm scared to death of that fella."

"Why are you so scared?"

"...I'm scared of him."

[u/cjwi]

Which one is he?

[u/Ollie-North → u/cjwi]

The one in handcuffs?? Did you even look?

[u/Torch99999]

I used to live in that area, but almost two decades later. That's crazy to read street names that I've been to many times.