365 Days of Texas True Crime: Broomstick Killer

Tawny the Rock Chick here, your resident true crime aficionado.  As interesting as I find true crime from all over to be, it’s the local stuff that I can really dig into.  You could say I’m a bit obsessed with researching stories of murder and missing persons from this area.  I’ve spent countless hours reading old newspapers articles, requesting files on cases and sifting through data cases online regarding homicide cases that you probably didn’t even know existed.  This area holds more sordid secrets than you may know and I’m going to tell you about all of them, one day at a time.  It’s 365 Days of Texas True Crime and todays story goes like this…..

Kenneth Allen McDuff should’ve never have been released from prison after being convicted and sentenced to death for the rape and murder of three teens.  Robert Brand 17, Edna Louise Sullivan 16, and Brand’s cousin Mark Dunman 14, were all kidnapped from a baseball field in Everman in August 1966.

They had all just finished a movie at the drive-in.  Twenty year-old Kenneth Allen McDuff and a friend he was with, Roy Green 18, had been drinking and driving around Fort Worth in McDuff’s new Dodge Coronet. Kenneth had been talking about abducting and raping girls,  but apparently Roy didn’t think he was serious.

A little after 10 p.m. McDuff spied the car full of teens at the baseball field and parked about 150 yards away in the dark.  He walked up to the car with the pistol he had with him and ordered all three of them out and into the trunk.  Roy Green followed in McDuff’s car as he drove in the teenagers car, with all three of them crammed in the trunk,  to a secluded area. Once he stopped he pulled the girl out of the trunk and shot the boys as they begged for their lives.

He couldn’t get the trunk closed so with the trunk still open and the boys lying dead inside, he backed the vehicle up to a fence and left it.  Now with Louise locked in the trunk of McDuff’s car, he and Green drove around looking for just the right spot for what he had been talking about earlier in the evening.  When he found an acceptable location he stopped the car, took the young girl out of the trunk and he and Green (Green would claim that he was forced against his will for fear of McDuff) took turns raping her. McDuff however took the assault to another level when he then raped the girl with an old broomstick that was lying in the back of his car.

When he was done as Louise lay on her back, he took the broomstick, sat on her chest and held it over her neck until she took her last gasp of air.  Afterwards he and his accomplice dumped her body in some tall grass nearby. The bodies of the two young boys were found the next day. Searchers scoured the area for the missing third party to the teenage trio.

As the story hit the radio Roy Dale Green broke down and told the parents of a friend who had let he and McDuff wash the car at his house, about what had happened the night before. Those parents then told Green’s parents who in turn convinced their son to turn himself in.  Upon his willful surrender he led authorities to the body of Edna Louise Sullivan.

In November of 1966 he went on trial with his partner in crime, Roy Dale Green, taking the stand as the prosecution’s star witness.

Green told the story of what happened that night sobbing ever so often as he did and remained careful not to look in the direction of his former drinking buddy, who, as witnesses observed, never took his hateful glare off Green.  He was convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair for the three murders and became known as “The Broomstick Killer”.

After winning two stays of execution McDuff lucked out when in 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court deemed the death penalty unconstitutional and his sentence was reduced to life in prison.  In 1987 a federal court ruled that Texas prisons were so over crowded that they violated the civil rights of inmates.  Texas Governor at the time, Bill Clements, made a deal with the parole board to lessen the population of inmates by 150 per day until the numbers were at a more humane level.  They ran through the low level crimes, came up through the car thieves and drug dealers and then in another stroke of misplaced luck landed on Kenneth Allen McDuff, a man convicted of rape and the murder of three innocent teenagers. 

Some say (and when I say that some say, what I mean is that this next bit of information is highly likely, but not 100% proven) that Kenneth’s “Pistol Pack’n Momma”, as she was called, Addie McDuff, paid the parole board 10K to get her beloved son out of prison.  I’ve read and listened to enough information on the subject of this event to agree that there is an astronomically high probability that it did indeed happen.  Either way in October of 1989 Kenneth Allen McDuff, The Broomstick Killer, was paroled……

Look for Part II tomorrow.