Kenneth McDuff

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Kenneth McDuff

Background information
Birth name:	Kenneth Allen McDuff
Alias(es):	Broomstick Murderer
Born:	March 21, 1946 Rosebud, Texas
Died:	November 17, 1998 (aged 52)
Cause of death:	Lethal injection
Penalty:	Death
Killings
Number of victims:	14+
Span of killings:	August 6, 1966 through March 1, 1992
Country:	U.S.
State(s):	Texas
Date apprehended:	for the final time on May 2, 1992

Kenneth Allen McDuff (March 21, 1946 – November 17, 1998) was an American serial killer suspected of at least fourteen murders. He had previously been on Death Row from 1968 to 1972.

1 Crimes
2 Effect on the Texas penal system
3 See also
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Crimes

McDuff was convicted for raping and murdering three teenagers—Robert Brand, Mark Dunman, and Edna Louis Sullivan—a crime that became popularly known as the Broomstick Murders. His partner, 17-year-old Roy Dale Green, was sentenced to four months house arrest and five years probation. Although McDuff was sentenced to death, the sentence was overturned when the U.S. Supreme Court abolished capital punishment in 1972. He served life with the possibility of parole.

Due to extremely crowded Texas prisons,^{[citation needed]} McDuff was paroled in 1989. Upon release McDuff was arrested on a series of parole violations, but he was never locked up for any substantial length of time until he was arrested for the murder of a 22-year-old Texan woman, Melissa Ann Northrup, in 1992. He was implicated in at least three other murders. After being released, he got a job at a gas station making $4 an hour and took a class, at Texas State Technical College in Waco.^[1] One year after he left his job at a gas station and dropped out of TSTC, he began killing again.

As a wanted fugitive he fled to Kansas City, but was eventually captured due to a tip from a profile on the television show America's Most Wanted. McDuff was eventually sent to death row and executed on November 17, 1998 at Huntsville Unit. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice deathrow section McDuff's final words were: "I’m ready to be released. Release me".^[2] McDuff's body was never claimed by his family. He is buried in the cemetery of the prison where he was executed. His grave marker is adorned only with his death row number: X999055.

[edit] Effect on the Texas penal system

After McDuff's second arrest for murder in 1992, Texas launched a massive overhaul of its prison system to prevent violent criminals from winning early parole. The tightened parole rules, extensive prison building projects and improved monitoring of violent parolees are collectively known in Texas as the McDuff Laws.