The Broomstick Killer

On an August night in 1966, three teenagers were parked near a baseball field in Everman, Texas, when Kenneth McDuff and a younger accomplice forced them into the trunk of a car at gunpoint. Robert Brand and Mark Dunham were shot. Sixteen-year-old Edna Louise Sullivan was driven away and murdered.

McDuff was sentenced to death. In 1972 the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as it was then being applied, and his sentence became life in prison. By the late 1980s Texas prisons were badly overcrowded, parole was being granted at a remarkable rate, and in 1989 McDuff walked free.

It took less than three years for the pattern to repeat. Women began disappearing around Waco and Austin, among them Colleen Reed, abducted from an Austin car wash in December 1991, and Melissa Northrup, a pregnant convenience store clerk taken in March 1992. McDuff became one of the most wanted men in the country. A viewer who recognized him on America’s Most Wanted led police to Kansas City, where he was working on a garbage truck under another name. He was returned to death row and executed in November 1998, and his case changed how Texas handled parole.