“Freed To Kill” Bodies Start Turning Up Episode 4 – Season 1

Waco convenience-store clerk Mellisa Northrup was not the first woman to go missing along the Interstate 35 corridor.

Women started disappearing and bodies started showing up three days after convicted triple killer Kenneth Allen McDuff walked out of prison on parole.

Local police either missed or ignored clues that could have tied McDuff to their unsolved cases.

Now a U.S. Marshals Service posse running at a full gallop finds more of McDuff’s victims.

A law enforcement source tipped me that the U.S. Marshals suspected Kenneth McDuff had kidnapped Mellisa Northrup from a Waco convenience store on March 1, 1992.

McDuff’s name was no stranger to me, just as he wasn’t to the Marshals.

As you may recall from earlier episodes, I broke a story about the parole of former death-row inmates, including McDuff, in April 1991.

I broadcast that TV report eight months before Melissa Northrup, the pregnant mother of two children, vanished.

No one in the parole system took note or seemed to care.

Two days after walking out of prison in October 1989, women’s bodies started showing up, just as Sheriff Larry Pamplin had predicted.

McDuff was still the same cold-blooded, sexually deranged killer described by prosecutors in his 1966 murder trial.

Ted Lyon, chairman of the Criminal Justice Committee, called hearings in the wake of my news report in 1991.

Lyon was outraged about the release of Leonardo Lopez, who had executed three sheriff’s deputies in Dallas.

Little did we know at the time that, as Lyon was raking parole board members over the coals, McDuff’s killing spree was in full swing.

Senator Ted Lyon: McDuff got out on parole, and then he committed more serial murders. He was in for committing murder of women, and he would take them, as you know, out in the country or wherever he could and rape them and then murder them.

Senator Ted Lyon: And so I began this investigation, and we found out that the parole system—not only were they putting them in the front and letting them out the back. But the parole board, there were some corrupt people on that board, and they were taking money for getting people out. It was just a bad system.

It was a very bad system indeed for 21-year-old Regina Moore and countless other women.

After I reported that McDuff was now the suspect in Melissa Northrup’s abduction, Moore’s mother called me.

She blurted out, “I saw the man who murdered my daughter in your TV story last night.”

I hightailed it to Waco with my camera crew. We found Ms. Moore’s mother, Barbara Carpenter, waiting tables at a truck stop.

Carpenter sadly told me that her missing daughter supported her drug habit as a sex worker.

She was last seen alive in a red pickup truck driven by paroled triple killer Kenneth McDuff.

A few days earlier, McDuff ran a Waco police roadblock with Brenda Thompson, another sex worker, inside.

She was seen screaming and kicking the windshield.

Waco police have never explained why they did not give chase and apprehend McDuff.

Carpenter says the police brushed her off. So she and her husband went to McDuff’s dormitory at Texas State Technical College in Waco.

McDuff was supposedly attending a state-funded machinist course there for ex-cons.

I accompanied Ms. Carpenter and her husband back to the dormitory where McDuff lived.

In the parking lot, they pointed to where they had seen McDuff’s red pickup truck, parked with a broken windshield.

Students were too afraid to talk to me on camera about McDuff. One student nervously told me that McDuff was always trying to get him to help rob the convenience store where Melissa Northrup worked.

The Carpenters confronted McDuff in his dorm room. He jumped back and threw up his hands, saying, “Don’t try to pin this on me.”

Ms. Carpenter said McDuff’s guilt washed over her at that moment. She knew in her heart that Kenneth McDuff had murdered her daughter.

That confrontation occurred five months before McDuff kidnapped Melissa Northrup.

Ms. Carpenter, the young mother would still be alive if the police had only taken her daughter’s disappearance seriously.

Dan Stoltz, the marshal who led the nationwide manhunt for McDuff, told me he ran into similar indifference.

Robert Riggs: Barbara Carpenter. And I did a story with her. But you know what she told me? She said, “I’ve been to the Waco Police and I’ve been everywhere. The only people who listened to me are the Marshals.”

Dan Stoltz: Yup.

Robert Riggs: Yeah.

Dan Stoltz: Yup. I heard that time and time again.

Robert Riggs: She told me that.

Dan Stoltz: When I left after the—my first initial visit there at the Waco office, I was there three days. I went back to my office in Houston. My report read that these guys need help. They were on to something big. They know what they are doing. And nobody is listening.

Robert Riggs: Why don’t you think the local police did not listen? Did not pursue this? Was it because they just thought these were prostitutes and…?

Dan Stoltz: I sure hope not, because I don’t care what line of work you’re in, you’re still a human being and you deserve the protection. I consider us sheep dogs, and we got to protect our flock. And I don’t care what type of work they were in. We can’t let the ugly prey on the weak. And I take that very personal. I don’t know why the other law enforcement didn’t listen to them when the bell was rung. I sure did. I listened and I gave them all the resources that we needed to lead the charge and get this done.

McDuff picked up Regina Moore and Brenda Thompson in an area of Waco called “The Cut.”

It was an open-air market for drugs and sex near Baylor University, in the heart of the Bible Belt.

The Cut was the first place Marshal Parnell McNamara went to look for McDuff.

Parnell McNamara: It was a place called “The Cut.” There were two or three streets, the two main streets with Faulkner and Seeley. And you could go over there any time of day, but mainly at night—girls walking the street. You’ve heard the term “streetwalker”; well, that is a perfect prime example of a streetwalker walking up and down these dark streets. Young girls, middle-aged girls, most of them high on crack or meth and just looking for their next hit, and men driving up…

Robert Riggs: Yeah.

Parnell McNamara: …getting, you know.

Robert Riggs: But very easy prey for McDuff as a serial killer.

Parnell McNamara: They would get in the car with McDuff. A lot of them never came back. Some of them are still missing to this day, that have never been found—never a trace of them, never a call back to their friends. They just vanished, last seen with McDuff. And so it was—they were so easy prey because, you know, they were looking for somebody like McDuff, not to kill them, but looking for a John, and they would get in the car with him. A lot of times it was their last ride.

McDuff didn’t care about his victims’ occupation.

He preferred petite females.

McDuff drove hundreds of miles searching for them.

During December 1991, McDuff cruised around the state capital.

Just a few blocks from where Senator Lyon had held his hearings about McDuff’s release on parole eight months earlier, McDuff and his accomplice, Alva “Hank” Worley, kidnapped 28-year-old Colleen Reed in plain sight shortly after Christmas 1991.

Parnell McNamara: She was an accountant. She was a beautiful, sweet person. She had been to church that night and had stopped to wash her new sports car. This guy, who turned out to be McDuff, came into the wash bay, grabbed her by the throat, dragged her all through in his car, and he and a guy named Alva Hank Worley took her off into the dark and just terrorized her and brutalized her and eventually killed her.

McDuff and Worley drove a two-door tan 1985 Thunderbird, just like the one that would be found two months later near the site of Melissa Northrup’s kidnapping.

Parnell McNamara: They were cruising up and down the I-35 corridor from Austin to Temple to Waco, up to Dallas. I think you have described it in a past broadcast as like a shark circling its prey. And I never will forget how you described that. I thought that is the most perfect analogy of McDuff, just like he did Melissa Northrup and just like he did Colleen Reed.

Robert Riggs: I always thought he had eyes like a shark—cold, and that sort of calculating predator just looking for an opportunity to kill.

Parnell McNamara: Absolutely. And if you look down on one-on-one, there was nothing behind them. They would glare at you. It was like this S.O.B. had no soul, plain and simple. And…

Robert Riggs: I used to say that he struck me as pure Old Testament evil.

Parnell McNamara: Absolutely. He was the…

Robert Riggs: A lot of people can’t understand that.

Parnell McNamara: No. He was the devil himself. I mean, he was—he was the epitome of a cold-hearted, heartless, evil, dirty son of a bitch.

McDuff kidnapped Colleen Reed in Austin. Then he kidnapped Melissa Northrup in Waco.

One hundred miles separates the two cities on Interstate 35.

But it was as if the two crimes occurred in different countries.

Months passed before the different police jurisdictions realized that the same person committed both kidnappings.

The three-man posse of the McNamara brothers and Bill Johnston made the connection.

Bill Johnston: Well, we had a break and that there was a guy that ran with McDuff. He was a federal fugitive or he was a federal parole, and…

Robert Riggs: Is this Worley?

Bill Johnston: No. This is one-eyed Jackie Pierce, One-Eyed Jack. And we talked to a girl about midnight one night in Harker Heights, Texas. She told us that McDuff had—in fact, the first—strangely, the first thing she said when she realized who we were was, “This is about the girl in Austin, isn’t it?” Which it was, out of the blue. We never had a person act like there was a connection in our minds based on the thin evidence we had.

Robert Riggs: And you knew about Austin at this time.

Bill Johnston: We knew about Austin.

Robert Riggs: Did you suspect him in it, or…?

Bill Johnston: Right. Well, as Mike and I—at this point, I was lying back sleeping in Big Foot late one night. Mike and I had a logic test, which was I said to him, “So, how many serial killers do you think there might be in Texas? And it may have been in Texas last year. Okay. Let’s say, for fun, let’s say ten. It’s probably not ten. But let’s say ten. Okay. How many were in Austin, happened to be in Austin in December, the same timeframe where Colleen Reed was—okay? Let’s just say three of them. How many were driving a tan Thunderbird?” And that’s silly. That’s a silly logic play, but it kind of works.

So when you know—and McDuff’s car was very unique. It was a very unpopular, ugly Thunderbird. And we knew that it was the same exact model in an area where we had him located in Austin or knew who he was. So anyhow, we believe that McDuff was responsible for Colleen Reed’s case, and we wonder if he was responsible for the yogurt shop case, even just because it was so horrific. But certainly Colleen’s.

Robert Riggs: So the first thing this woman blurts out is, “This is—you must be here about the…”

Bill Johnston: She said, “The girl in Austin.”

Robert Riggs: And your reaction is…?

Bill Johnston: “May we talk to you for a while?” And she invited us to her house, Sandy Santos. She invited us to her house, and we spent a couple of hours ultimately learning that One-Eyed Jack Pierce, who was a multi-convicted person, had been running with McDuff, had been in Austin with McDuff, and was in Austin with McDuff in December of that year. Sandy was spooked about McDuff enough, and drawing conclusions from what Jackie Pierce told her that McDuff may have done something in Austin regarding the girl. That led to us identifying Jackie Pierce as having been with McDuff. I asked—Pierce had failed to appear for his probation officer or parole office. I asked him to please get a warrant if that was a violation. They did.

Armed with an arrest warrant, Johnston, the U.S. Marshals, and the Dallas SWAT team raided the place where the ex-con known as One-Eyed Jack, aka Jackie Pierce, was staying.

Bill Johnston: He was a nasty, crazy-looking guy, but strangely, he had a spark of a conscience. And when we started carrying him back from Dallas in Big Foot, he said to Parnell, “Parnell, I know you didn’t come all this way and do all this just because I walked off from that halfway house.” And we said, “No, it’s about Austin.” So he began telling the stories of McDuff in Austin and pointedly put us in the place and in the timeframe of Colleen Reed’s abduction.

Pierce told Johnston that he was with McDuff in Austin a few days before Colleen Reed was kidnapped from the car wash.

Pierce said McDuff was on the hunt for young girls.

Bill Johnston: McDuff liked to get—to grab, to assault, kill younger women. And his pattern was generally dark-haired women, let’s say under 25, diminutive for most part. That was sort of his pattern. And there were two teenage girls, young teenage girls on the roller skates in Austin that McDuff trailed like a shark after a herring or something, and trailed them and told Pierce, “Let’s get them and go.” And Pierce, because he was really tough, he wasn’t a patsy. McDuff needed a stooge, not a standup person. And although Pierce was a horrible criminal, he had some sense of something. And he told McDuff, “I’m not doing that.” And so another opportunity that McDuff was going to get a girl from the payphone and Pierce said, “We are getting out of here. Let’s go.”

But McDuff expressed that, and Pierce thankfully did not go with it. McDuff found a stooge, Alva Hank Worley, later.

Based on Pierce’s information, Austin homicide detectives obtained a search warrant for McDuff’s distinctive two-door tan 1985 Thunderbird.

As you may recall from the second episode, McDuff’s car was found abandoned near the convenience store where Melissa Northrup was kidnapped.

Her kidnapping occurred two months after Colleen Reed’s kidnapping in Austin.

Detectives found forensic evidence in the trunk that linked McDuff to Colleen Reed.

McDuff’s ugly-looking Thunderbird connected him to both kidnappings.

And, as Sheriff Larry Pamplin had predicted, more bodies turned up.

This time, it was Valencia Joshua, who was missing from Fort Worth.

Her body was discovered a stone’s throw from where McDuff was enrolled in state trade-school courses for ex-cons.

Bill Johnston: That leads to Austin P.D. getting enough information that I believe they did a search, maybe. Someone did a search of McDuff’s trunk for forensic evidence. They did a sweep and found some evidence associating one of the murders to McDuff. So that sort of evidence work being done. During this timeframe, there was other victim found near the Technical School campus, Valencia Joshua from Fort Worth. She was found. We were out there for that. That’s where I found a grave that McDuff had predug near where Valencia Joshua was buried.

While they were unearthing her, I was wandering around in the little sort of scrub mesquite trees in the area, and I came across a—let’s say about a foot and a half to two feet deep, five or six feet long, a couple of feet wide—dig that looks like a grave. And I hollered at Mike and Parnell. They came to see it. And within a day or two of that, an informant who had run with McDuff, a weird guy that McDuff told all the stories to, the guy that didn’t know if it was true or not, said McDuff told him that sometimes he would pre-dig a grave so he had a place to take the victim when he needed to get there.

But anyway, so that was—that happened. And then other things like that. In other words, there are evidence being gathered, and we were just beginning to just look for him.

Robert Riggs: And you were hearing that he was always asking people about—or commenting that it would be a good place to bury a body?

Bill Johnston: Right. It was as if, in his mind, when he looked over—driving down the road, looked out at the scenery—he was seeing it as a gravedigger, more like some predatory animals. They will kill something and they will drag it someplace, find a tree or something, or they will bury—partially bury it to save it for themselves. That was the way he saw geography.

---