True Crime Reporter®

Best of True Crime Reporter® 2021 – Serial Killer Kenneth McDuff

By Robert Riggs

What You Will Learn

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:23 — 37.6MB)

In this “Best Of True Crime Reporter®”, we take you back to the first episode in our series about serial killer Kenneth Allen McDuff.

It was a Webby Award Honoree for Best True Crime Podcast in 2021.

McDuff is the only criminal in Texas history to have received three death sentences.

Serial Killer Kenneth Allen McDuff being escorted to a holding cell in the Texas Death Chamber. McDuff, was believed to be the only condemned inmate in the nation ever paroled and then returned to death row for two more murders. He was sentenced to die in the electric chair in 1966 for killing Robert Brand, one of three teenagers he was charged with randomly killing. But McDuff was later paroled after the death penalty was overturned. He was sentenced in two different cases to die by lethal injection for the murders of Melissa Northrup and Colleen Reed. McDuff was executed shortly after this photograph was taking on November 17, 1998.
Serial Killer Kenneth Allen McDuff is being escorted to a holding cell in the Texas Death Chamber. McDuff was believed to be the only condemned inmate in the nation ever paroled and then returned to death row for two more murders. He was sentenced to die in the electric chair in 1966 for killing Robert Brand, one of three teenagers he was charged with randomly killing. But McDuff was later paroled after the death penalty was overturned. He was sentenced in two different cases to die by lethal injection for the murders of Melissa Northrup and Colleen Reed. McDuff was executed shortly after this photograph was taken on November 17, 1998.

Yet he got out of prison under a cloud of corruption after murdering three teenagers.

An FBI profiler, the late Roy Hazelwood, described McDuff to me as the Great White Shark of serial killers.

Yet most people have never heard of McDuff.

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